"A Small Needful Fact" can be placed in conversation with other poems; for example, Robert Hayden's sonnet "Frederick Douglass." Hayden was the first African American poet to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1976 to 1978), a role known today as US Poet Laureate. Published in The Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966), "Frederick Douglass" contemplates freedom, liberty, and the legacy of Frederick Douglass. Hayden writes that liberty is a "beautiful / and terrible thing, needful to man as air" (Lines 1-2). Gay's "A Small Needful Fact," read in the context of Hayden's poem, thus takes on added significance. The word "needful" appears in both, as does the focus on air.
Gay's own poem Be Holding includes a line about objectified Black pain and the ethics of witnessing. Just as there is a collective "us" in "A Small Needful Fact," Gay considers how he, too, might be "a docent / in the museum of black pain" (Be Holding). This is part of the reason for the flat language and tone conveyed in "A Small Needful Fact." Gay is aware of the all-too-common practice of objectifying Black pain or only conveying Black experiences through the lens of violence. Without sanctifying Garner and turning him into a symbol, Gay humanizes him by portraying him as an ordinary worker.
