The speaker in this poem is a black man walking through the woods who stumbles across horrifying evidence of a recent abomination against God. Despite the unnatural violence that will soon be revealed in all its grotesque detail, however, the poet very subtly implies a sense of normalcy is at play here with the use of a conjunction as the opening word. Remember the lyrics to “Conjunction Junction” from Schoolhouse Rock when it defines the function of on conjunctions: “Hooking up words and phrases and clauses.” Thus, beginning with the “And” implies that something exists prior to which the rest of the line connects to.
“And one morning while in the woods” creates the sensation of having caught the speaker in the middle of conversation. Metaphorically speaking, that is exactly what is going on. The conversation taking place is a social one comprised mostly of unspoken or half-spoken dialogue which the poem also conveys with its somewhat offbeat opening lines. “Between the World and Me” is a title which is highly suggestive of the mechanics at work behind the poet’s construction of the poet as it carries a connotation related to conversation. This is conversation it taking place between the world and the speaker and we have entered the conversation in the middle while some have been with him since the beginning and others still have yet to make it.
The speaker is clearly intent on reaching out, finally, to at least some of those who have yet to join the ongoing conversation about lynching in America. The poem was published in 1935. After more than half a decade of being mired in the Great Depression, probably not the ideal time to try bringing attention to a problem that most of white America simply didn’t have near the top of their list of priorities. Between 1933 and 1935 almost sixty black Americans were lynched and those were just ones which were discovered or reported. Interestingly—whether by coincidence or the result of the poem’s success in drawing attention to the topic—those numbers dropped permanently into the single digits starting the very next.
If Wright’s poem did, indeed, have anything to do with this reversal of half a century of double-digit lynching cases per year, it would not be surprising. The poem works powerfully as anti-lynching propaganda by revealing that ultimately this inhumane act of retribution has little to do with revenge, nothing to do justice and everything to do with pure racist hatred. The text of the poem is dominated by description of the evidence left behind those who carried out the act. Imagery ranges clothing stripped from the victim to his bleached bones charred from being set on fire to the tar and feathers which was the coup de grace of dehumanization and humiliation.
Any suggestion that lynching is merely retributive justice taken to an extreme beyond all measure is exposed as a fallacy. The evidence is clear enough and the conclusion it leads to make the action not just more extreme, but almost unspeakably evil: a public lynching is entertainment. It is this revelation of the scale of malevolence that is associated with lynching that guides a reader toward the shame of sharing the guilt of complicity. The act of reading a poem about lynching as a form of entertainment connects the intuitive reader—if only subconsciously—to the those attending a lynching for the purpose of being entertained. The connection is inevitable even if barely understood and never consciously admitted.
