A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,
and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
lingering smell of gasoline.
Up to this point, the speaker has been describing coming upon the site hidden in the woods where a lynching took place. Such a narrative would be bad enough, of course; an abomination against God. But there is a pivot here and the horror of the fundamental situation is intensified and expanded as the reader understands that this was not just any casual stringing up of a black man by slack-jawed yokels taking the phrase ignorant backwoods hicks to the standard level of idiocy. This is a lynching somehow made even worse: the victim was not hanging from a tree limb, but tarred and feather and set on fire. This is not just humiliation, this is sadistic pleasure dragged out for as long as possible.
The Christmas season:
a whore is painting her lips
larger than they are
Wright pretty much gave up writing poetry in the 1940’s and would not seriously return to the form until the end of the fifties, choosing to specialize in the short form haiku. He produces thousands of these precisely regulated poems over a shockingly short period of time and the subject ranges across the entirety of the human conditions. One of the most striking images—and a haiku is all about the image—is this perspective on the holiday season which reveals that even with limited and constrained by rules that cannot be broken, he could still his social conscience to work.
“Pavement’s hard on my feet. I’m
Tired o’this concrete street.
Pavement’s hard on my feet. I’m
Tired o’this concrete street.
Goin’ back to Georgia where
That red clay can’t be beat.”
The repetition of the musical styling of the blues is co-opted by Wright for more than one poem. The effect of repetition and the rhythmic structure which can be read in a bluesy beat contribute to the stimulating emotions of frustration and impatience in the speakers. This speaker has left his life in rural George to head to the city—almost certainly north of the Mason-Dixon line—but reveals a strong connection to his home soil despite—perhaps even in spite of—the negative historical connotations of that soil.
And they've held red, green, blue, yellow, orange, white, and purple toys in the childish grips of possession.
And chocolate drops, peppermint sticks, lollypops, wineballs, ice cream cones, and sugared cookies in fingers sticky and gummy,
And they've held balls and bats and gloves and marbles and jack-knives and sling-shots and spinning tops in the thrill of sport and play.
And pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters and sometimes on New Year's, Easter, Lincoln's Birthday, May Day, a brand new green dollar bill
Another technique that shows up more than just once in Wright’s poetry are lists. This feature of cataloguing a collection of like-items is not just a Wright thing, it can be found throughout the African-American poetry of the era. This technique did not go unnoticed by white writers and those poets of the Beat Generation—being great admirers of more than jazz when it came to the art of black America—co-opted the concept. As a result, such repetitious cataloguing became more predominantly associated with the white Beat poets, but that is hardly a new or old story. In this particular case, the technique is essentially everything; the entire poem is a continuation of listing various things that the speaker has seen in the hands of his fellow African-Americans. The list leads inexorably to a climax bringing things to a close on a note of optimism that the more negative imagery he has portrayed will one day be far outweighed by the positive model of white and black hands sharing equally.
