Night, Death, Mississippi by Robert Hayden

Night, Death, Mississippi
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
and him squealing bloody Jesus
as we cut it off.

Time was. A cry?
A cry all right.
He hawks and spits,
fevered as by groinfire.

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

SELECTED BY JENNIFER CHANG

Any number of Robert Hayden’s poems could stand as a favorite—he is one of my favorite poets, but “Night, Death, Mississippi” resonates with me these days for the challenges it places on me, as a reader, to enter into a perspective I find abhorrent.

What must it have been like for Hayden to place himself in the voice of a violently racist person, to describe that violence, and then to make of that an empathetic music? The poem is a lamentation for our country’s legacy of racism: a family recounts and participates in a lynching.

What’s so deft and daring about Hayden is how sentence by sentence and line by line, he permits us to embody these voices, which shift from the racist family members to the auratic voice of the poet to the voice of history. That many voices make up the poem, that there are at times gentle confusions about who is speaking, is one of the ways the poem asks you to imagine with Hayden, to become other, and to sit in that profound comfort.

There is pain in this music and there are silences that surround the poem, inviting the reader to think about their own role in history and in history’s potential unmaking. “Time was” is a refrain in the poem’s first section, haunting us with the past and, more troublingly, with the danger of history, nostalgia, and language.

ABOUT JENNIFER CHANG

Jennifer Chang’s most recent book An Authentic Life was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches at the University of Texas in Austin and is the poetry editor of New England Review.