Night, Death, Mississippi

It is certainly a considerable risk: to expose the brutality and hypocrisy of rural Southern racism by allowing to speak the very people who relish such brutality unapologetically and who embody that hypocrisy proudly. The poem provides no moral framework that would suggest a higher authority condemning as vile and evil that brutality. That risk is exponentially increased when the author of the poem is a Black American male who, coming of age in Depression America and then working within the white network of academic America, understood first-hand the implications of the bigotry and racism at the dark heart of mid-20th-century America.

The poem, then, given its subject matter, would seem to call for the rhetoric of moral righteousness. What the family has done is to give license to unspeakable violence and racist horrors. How can a Black man allow this backwoods Southern farm family to speak with such relish about torturing and killing Black people without intruding with moral commentary, without demanding moral corrective. Surely, read without the stinging irony of simply allowing violent and mean-hearted people to reveal themselves by allowing them to speak without intrusive critical commentary, can make the conversation between these family members seem to elevate racist violence, even share the family’s unseemly relish of what the Klan has done that night.