Summary
Suddenly, the poem switches into a kind of third-person voice, and begins to list images and events in isolated fragments. The seventh stanza lists a police whistle and bell, and then the simple word "arrest." The following stanza lists two settings: first the local police station, and then a jail cell. It concludes with the line "Headlines in press," letting readers know that they are about to see a list of newspaper headlines. These headlines make up the poem's final stanza. The first headline describes a tenant threatening his landlord. The next says that the tenant is being held in jail without bail. The final headline, and the final line of the poem, says that the judge has given the tenant—identified only by his race as "Negro"—a sentence of 90 days in jail.
Analysis
Here, the poem takes an abrupt turn away from the ballad form. It loses everything but the most minimal, skeletal elements of language, listing images independently of any syntactical structure. In fact, the original speaker has been more or less robbed of his voice. In the first five stanzas, he conveyed his feelings in an artful (if ironic) form. In the sixth, his landlord made use of that form. The landlord's weaponization of the tenant's voice, though cruel in a sense, in another sense helped preserve and perpetuate the speaker's style and creativity. Even while being harmed, the speaker continued to literally set the tone (and rhythm, and line length) of the altercation. Now, that style and creativity have been stamped out. The tenant is silenced, and his fate is driven by a kind of voiceless, automatic machinery of the justice system. The punctuation with which Hughes ends his lines demonstrates the slow extinguishing of the tenant's agency and even his emotional reactions. Therefore, the lines "Copper's whistle" and "Patrol bell" both end with exclamation points, as if reflecting the emotional tenor of the scene and the tenant's anger, fear, and anticipation. But as these two stanzas continue, Hughes ditches the exclamation point and opts for periods, creating a sense of emotional numbness. The final line of the eighth stanza ends with a colon, which we can interpret as a particularly dark choice on Hughes's part. The colon literally leads us into the final stanza, but it is also a punctuation mark that inherently introduces a consequence or the completion of an idea. This colon draws attention to the inevitable nature of the tenant's fate. Once a sentence introduces a colon, the author has no choice but to complete the thought and end the sentence. Similarly, once the tenant gets wrapped up in a conflict with his landlord, he has no choice but to bear the disproportionate consequences of that conflict.
In the final stanza, the poem's voice shifts again one final time. This time, our speaker is a journalist, or, more precisely, a kind of disembodied journalistic apparatus. From a chilling distance that deprives the tenant of his perspective or humanity, newspaper headlines tell us that he has been sentenced to ninety days in jail. By employing a detached voice, Hughes shows readers that, to an outsider who hasn't heard his side of the story, the tenant is considered unimportant and even dangerous. Thus, the detached voice acts as an indictment of punitive justice and inequality, showing how these forces dehumanize and unfairly malign their victims. This social critique is made even more explicit because the tenant's race is explicitly mentioned in the poem's final lines. The newspapers refer to him, not by name, but simply as "Negro." Thus, Hughes makes sure that readers understand the role that racism has played in the tenant's unfair lot.
While stanzas seven and eight break the poem from its established form, they never entirely dispense with rhyme. Both of the middle lines of these three-line stanzas end with the sound "ell," using the words "bell" and cell." Both of their final lines end with the sound "ess," using the words "arrest" and "press." The final stanza takes on a rhyme scheme of its own, with the final two lines, which end with the words "bail" and "jail," rhyming with one another. Furthermore, that final stanza uses a regular trochaic meter. All of this is to say that, while the poem flits away from its musical-sounding tendencies for a while, it never entirely loses them, and the final stanza actually returns to a deeply musical, rhythmic style. By now, though, this catchy, singsong tendency appears even more deeply ironic. The newspaper headlines jauntily describe the tenant's story, boiling a complex narrative down to a few reductive, rhythmically consistent points. In other words, here the song form, completely disconnected from the tenant's narration, isn't a reflection of his feelings at all. Instead, it displays just how little the outside world cares about the tenant—the newspaper's writers aren't even concerned enough about him to break their stylistic rules.
