Night, Death, Mississippi

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1966

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Poem Analysis

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Related Poems

“Gabriel” by Robert Hayden (1940)

An early Hayden poem that exposes the brutality of lynching and reflects his interest in the history of slavery, “Gabriel” relates the story of an African who leads a desperate and doomed revolt among slaves on a ship bound for America. Gabriel is hanged. Like “Night, Death, Mississippi,” Hayden uses a tight and conventional metrics to relay the horror that cannot be stopped. The poem, however, unlike “Night, Death, Mississippi,” focuses on the corpse itself, “black-gold in the sun,” compelling the reader to witness the implications of racism: a very dead body.

“Afterimages” by Audre Lorde (1997)

Written by a prolific poet known for strident works of social and political activism on behalf of minorities and women, the poem examines the lynching of Emmet Till in Mississippi in 1955, “a black boy hacked into a million lessons.” Like Hayden influenced by the formal experiments of Modernism, Lorde approaches the killing of the teenager from a variety of perspectives that capture the horror of the killing, detailed in appalling vividness, and the complicity of the white Southern townsfolk who never stopped the Klan, a situation very similar to Hayden’s.

“The Lynching” by Claude McKay (1922)

An early poem by a Black poet from the Harlem Renaissance who influenced Hayden, the poem juxtaposes the mutilated body against the night sky and suggests both the brutality of the killing and the inevitability that it will never be prosecuted. In the morning, crowds of the curious gather to gawk but without pity, without outrage, “never a one / Showed sorrow in their eyes.” Like Hayden, the poem closes with the unnerving suggestion that the white Southern children delight in the lynching, assuring that hate and racism are passed like some virus from one generation to the next.

Further Literary Resources

“Beyond the Veil: Indeterminacy and Iconoclasm in the Art of Robert Hayden, Janet Kozachek, and Tom Feelings" by Sara Wyman (2012)

Hayden rejected much of the angrier rhetoric of the African American quest for identity and its assertion of pride of the mid-century, so Hayden’s poetry was marginalized for most of the fin-de-millennium. With the resurgence of interest generated by the Black Lives Matter movement, academic America has begun to reexamine Hayden’s arguments. An indispensable contemporary reading of Hayden, the essay argues that in poems such as “Night, Death, Mississippi” Hayden uses language itself, in this case the conversations between the bigoted and racist family members, to represent racism so pernicious, its logic and its effects so beyond the reach of language and that can only be suggested, as this poem does, with the screams and the bloody shirt.

“On ‘Night, Death, Mississippi’” by Jamie Brunton (2007)

A far-reaching and thorough examination into the structure of the poem, the essay argues that the poem exposes traditional units of reassuring morality—family and community—as the very agents of the evil of racism, embodied in the beatings and presumably the killings of the Black men. The essay closes by suggesting that Hayden, in setting aside himself as a presence in the poem, points to the “ubiquitous and deep” psychological attachment between the Southern white community and racism in the Jim Crow era.

“Answering ‘The Waste Land’: Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence” by Brian Coniff (1999)

A look into how Hayden’s historical poems on slavery reflect the experimental poetics of Modernism, the essay looks at a sequence of Hayden’s slavery poems to suggest that he follows the lead of Eliot in The Waste Land by allowing different perspectives to control the poems without authorial interference. Thus, like Eliot’s stinging critique of Western civilization that expresses that criticism ironically through a variety of toxic characters, Hayden’s slavery poems invite the reader to provide the moral outrage as he also allows his toxic characters, for instance the family in this poem, to speak for themselves.

Listen to the Poem

Madison McMakin reads “Night, Death, Mississippi” on YouTube

Surprisingly, given the tense, decades-long cultural conversation about race in America, there are few recordings available of “Night, Death, Mississippi.” One of the more effective renderings, available on YouTube, is the work of an AP literature student, Madison McMakin, enrolled at Booker T. Washington School for the Performing Arts in Dallas and posted in 2018. The reading is dramatic and effective with just the right nuances of a Deep Southern accent (particularly in the line “Time was. Time was,” making both words into two syllables). Against the recitation are shown clips showing current examples of showdowns between Black people and white police forces.