Robert Hayden offers a fascinating instance of the singularity of artistic lives and legacies. Most commonly known to a general poetry reading public for a single, regularly anthologized poem of undeniable craft and emotional power, “Those Winter Sundays,” he led a far more expansive poetic life of notable accomplishment. In 1976, the first Black faculty member in English at the University of Michigan served also as the first Black Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the equivalent of today’s Poet Laureate.
When I cover with students the capacity of poetry to represent and express historical experience and regional life, Hayden is one of the poets I employ. In this, too, he pursued his poetic mission with notable individualism, for while the African American experience lay at the core of his creations, he would not align himself with the separatist rejectionism of the 1960’s Black Arts Movement.
“Night, Death, Mississippi,” delivers both historical and regional representation with unsurpassed power. It’s a soul punch. It’s technique wows, too, as speaker and point of view shift several times in the poem. A reader is unlikely to note them all or feel centered on a first reading or even a second.
Night, Death, Mississippi by Robert Hayden I. A quavering cry. Screech-owl? Or one of them? The old man in his reek and gauntness laughs – One of them, I bet – and turns out the kitchen lamp, limping to the porch to listen in the windowless night. Be there with Boy and the rest if I was well again. Time was. Time was. White robes like moonlight In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then He hawks and spits, fevered as by groinfire. Time was. A cry? A cry all right. Have us a bottle, Boy and me – he’s earned him a bottle – when he gets home. II. Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red. O Jesus burning on the lily cross Christ, it was better than hunting bear which don’t know why you want him dead. O night, rawhead and bloodybones night You kids fetch Paw some water now so’s he can wash that blood off him, she said. O night betrayed by darkness not its own
An objective I am always sure to pursue in discussing the poem is to focus student understanding on the achievement of a Black man, a Black poet, having entered into the perspective and voices of racist, murderous white people, including that of a white child in the process of being shaped by his environment. That, and not facile political outrage and condemnation, shows us the imaginative reach and force of the true artist.
When I teach the poem, I accompany it with this excerpt from Alan Parker’s 1988 film, Mississippi Burning. It delivers extra impact when I’m teaching at Queens College, CUNY, as I did this past July. Though the characters in the film are fictionalized, the three young men in this excerpt are meant to represent James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three young activists with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) during the Freedom Summer campaign of the Civil Rights Movement who were murdered in Mississippi in June 1964. Cheney was Black, Goodman and Schwerner both Jewish, and Goodman was a Queens College student.
I ask the students if they know the name of the clocktower atop Queens College’s Rosenthal Library. None ever has known. I tell them it is named the Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner Clocktower and why. I want them to know of this connection of the college they are attending to history. I want them to know that they, too, live in history, and they can choose how they do it. This has seemed especially important during the years Donald Trump has darkened the American day and night.
Some critical commentary on the Hayden poem at the Modern American Poetry Site (MAPS)
More on Robert Hayden at the very interesting Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation.
More, too, with poems, at the Poetry Foundation.
And this interesting article on the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan granting historical status to Hayden’s home and on Hayden’s very accomplished wife and family.
AJA
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“Fevered as by groinfire,” “better than hunting bear.” Yes, a soul punch. Thank you for the introduction to Hayden.
"Those Winter Sundays" -- one of my all time favorite poems. I like is so much that I rely on it here: https://marytabor.substack.com/p/meter-in-poetry-part-three-of-lesson Not that you need to read this but perhaps useful to others ... xx