Incident & Night, Death, Mississippi

Both Incident by Countee Cullen and Night, Death, Mississippi by Robert Hayden are poems written about African-Americans in the United States that experienced racism. Incident is a strong poem about an 8-year old child who was in Baltimore from May through December and all he could remember from his time there was an "incident" where a "Baltimorean" called him a "Nigger." I thought the word "keep" was a great word choice for Cullen to use because if he had said "I saw a Baltimorean looking straight at me" would mean that there was a person looking at him and that is all. But when he says, " I saw a Baltimorean keep looking straight at me" implies that the man was staring at him intently. This evokes an emotion of disgust or confussion or maybe some combination of the two, and after you find out what he say's to this young, innocent 8 year old child, you find out that he was probably staring at him with a look of disgust.



If that poem is not sad enough, the next one, Night, Death, Mississippi is even worse. This poem is about a man telling a boy about a black man being hung, assumably by the Klu Klux Klan. The first part of the poem (I) describes the scene of the hanging, but the 2nd part (II) begins with a terribly graphic sentence, "Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red." That shows the true hate these people had for the African Americans. the poet also includes that the men felt it was better than beating a bear because a bear does not know why the hunter would want him dead, where as the black person would know. The saddest part in this poem is when a mother says to the children who would have been watching this event take place, "go fetch paw some water now so's he can wash that blood off him." That shows that at the time, this was accepted in Mississippi and that there was no remorse from anyone including the wives and children. The last line, which is italisized like 3 other lines in the poem which I do not understand why they are in italics, but it says, "O night betrayed by darkness not its own," and I am not sure what that means but I think it means that the African Americans may have been American, as night is darkness, however, the whites that were also Americans were not the same. Therefore, the blacks were betrayed by someone that was not themselves, meaning the whites. They make references to Jesus in this so I guess you could also say that Jesus was killed by people who were not his own because he was divine.