Night, Death, Mississippi

I found this poem incredibly scary.  I thought the the first part of the poem seemed like it was the voice of a white person aware that a lynching is taking place.  Hayden uses phrase such as "Screech-owl?/ Or one of them?" to identify to the reader that the speaker does not identify with whatever is making the noise he hears.  The section continue to tell how the listeners stay as if entertained by what they hear, and that could they, they would be there to witness it.  Along with the clue that this is  a KKK lynching "White robes like moonlight/ In the sweetgum dark," we are also given an incredibly gruesome depiction of what happened and the reward, a bottle of beer, for the boy who participated.  The second section is told from the point of view of the boy who participated in the lynch.  He is much more descriptive as a speaker because he was actually in the action or the lynch.  I think it is really creepy how this poem shows how accepted and even encouraged lynching was as a practice. The only kind of redeeming feature of the poem are the lines in italics which seem to know how immoral lynching is.