….Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
These are the final lines of this sonnet. The poem is a celebration and memorial to the iconic American figure, but one that seeks specifically to bring him out of the history books and off memorial displays and make him a kind of living breathing entity in the sense of living on through the lives he inspired. Everything that comes before builds to the imagery of this concluding verse in which the speaker confronts the limitations of conventional historical remembrance.
We find it paradoxical indeed
that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty
are rooted in the labor of your slaves
should suffer the august John Quincy Adams
to speak with so much passion of the right
of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters
and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero’s
garland for Cinquez.
“Middle Passage” tells in verse what had been a relatively unknown piece of American history until it was dramatized in a film directed by Steven Spielberg. The story is that of the slave rebellion aboard of slave trading ship Amistad and the subsequent court proceedings in which John Quincy Adams defended the actions of the slaves over the white crew members. Each of section of the poem is narrated by a different member of the crew and here the crew member questions this decision by Adams to take the side of the black slaves against the white crew. What is notable about the poem, however, is that the hero is not Adams and it certainly is not the Amistad crew, but rather Cinquez, the leader of the rebellion. He is the hero, he is the central character of interest and yet neither he nor any of the slaves who took part in the rebellion are given a voice.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Probably Hayden’s famous lines of verse are found in this oft-anthologized and much-assigned poem. It is an excellent choice for study because of its use of the split narrative in which the speaker recalls the long-ago Sundays both from the perspective of the child he was at the time and the grown man looking back. This is the middle stanza and one of the most tricky for analysis because the “the chronic angers of that house” which he feared as a child are never addressed elsewhere either directly or allusively which allows for a nice bit of ambiguity worth pursuing analytically. At the same time, this section of the poem is also the most direct implication of what is actually going on during those winter Sundays that forces the speaker into a reflective mode.
Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General
alias Moses Stealer of Slaves
In league with Garrison Alcott Emerson
Garrett Douglas Thoreau John Brown
Armed and known to be Dangerous
Wanted Reward Dead or Alive
“Runagate Runagate” is a poem with a familiar theme found running throughout much of Hayden’s works: the desperation to escape the hellish inevitability of slavery. That slavery is inevitable is unspoken in these poems as it represents the view of the slaveholder and slave trader. The very fact that it remains muted and off to the side in most of the poetry in which Hayden deals with is purposeful; its very absence is a symbol of its negation by those characters who are determined to choose their own fate. “Runagate Runagate” is specific to the Underground Railroad as a means of escaping this inevitability and the poem takes the form of two separate sections. In the first, the sense of inevitability that would be forced upon slaves is exploded in a scene of an unidentified slave making his escape while pursued by hunters. Part II of the poem leaves behind the generic quality of the ambiguity of the identity of the escapee and his hunters to turn its attention to heroic woman at the center of the entire enterprise: Harriet Tubman. The lines quoted above represent a poster designed by the slave hunters situating not just Tubman as a wanted criminal, but merely the ringleader in a vast conspiracy of like-minded Northerners who would fester Southern sovereignty over their “property” with dreams of abolition. Among those alluded to as conspirators against the South is zealous abolitionist John Brown, the author of Little Woman, Louisa May Alcott, fellow writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and other noted supporters of the Underground Railroad. As with the much of the rest of the poem, the unusual punctuation with large spaces between words and phrases is intended to convey the sense of movement as if one were making their escape along the trail of the Underground Railroad.
