Life Upon These Shores

This autumn in New York, in a composition course on New York City history, I taught E. B. White’s essay “Here is New York” and encountered, once again, his wonderful definition of poetry: “a poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.” In “Middle Passage,” one of Robert Hayden’s best known and most anthologized poems, Hayden lyrically compressed the complex history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade into a compelling narrative. Into this poem he compressed the theological justifications behind slavery, the global capitalist economy it created, the political system that codified it, the complicity of African slave traders in it, the sexual violence against enslaved women, and the constant threats of revolt. And into this poem Hayden also added the will to freedom—“the deep immortal human wish / the timeless will.” 

“Middle Passage” was first published in 1945 in Phylon, the journal founded and edited by W.E.B. Du Bois at Atlanta University. It’s a complex, allusive text that draws on the history and archives of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, incorporates the 1839 Amistad rebellion and court case, and ends with Joseph Cinquez, the leader of the rebellion, presented as a transcendent, messianic, world-historical figure. The poem’s stark images of the cruel, calculating, violent, and exploitative nature of the slave trade, articulated in a lyrical, ironic multi-vocal form, makes it among the most provocative representations of slavery in African-American poetry. It’s one of several poems in Hayden’s oeuvre in which he uses the breadth of his language, experience, and historical research to reckon with the peculiar institution, to make sense of the staggering human atrocity of the thing, and to examine slavery’s legacy in contemporary American life.

But Hayden wasn’t always appreciated. The biographies and criticism on him are full of statements about his critical neglect, his disappointments, and his political differences with other black artists and intellectuals. The mannered quality of his poems, the way he portrayed black history through “high” modernist poetry, made him less interesting to some black poets and scholars in the 1960s and ’70s, and maybe even diminishes his profile now. My students in the African-American poetry class I taught last year appreciated the content of his writing, but they were less convinced about his politics and aesthetics. It’s hard to make a case for picking through the intricately baroque lyrics and allusions of “Middle Passage” when placed next to, say, the passionate urgency of Amiri Baraka’s poem/manifesto “Black Art.” My class listened to Baraka’s work in recorded form—a fiery performance, brimming with defiant negritude, in which Baraka shouts the poem, backed by a band including jazz notables Sonny Murray, Don Cherry, and Albert Ayler.

Hayden had a fraught relationship with the evolving identity politics of his time, as the Black Arts Movement picked up steam in the 1960s and “Negroes” began calling themselves “Afro-American” and “black.” He found himself on the wrong side of it by declaring himself a “poet” first and not a “black poet.” John Hatcher’s biography of Hayden, From the Auroral Darkness, has a chapter simply titled “The Controversy,” which focuses on the argument between Hayden and Black Arts Movement devotees at a 1966 literary conference at Fisk University, and how the fallout from that period resonated through the remaining years of Hayden’s life. He was suspicious of political poetry (which he dabbled in earlier in his career by writing strident leftist poems) and remained skeptical about the poetry of “self-expression.” At the same time, the essays in Hayden’s Collected Prose show that he kept up with new trends in American poetry, reading and writing about Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and the Beats such as Corso and Allen Ginsberg.

Still, he remained a devoted formalist. In multiple interviews he stated that he was influenced by W.H. Auden, with whom he took classes as an M.A. student at the University of Michigan in the 1940s. From Auden he got the idea that a great poem is like algebra, in which the reader must “solve for x,” rather than the simple arithmetic of 1 + 1 = 2.

When it comes to describing Hayden’s aesthetics, it’s hard to improve upon Gwendolyn Brooks’s description of him in a 1966 Negro Digest review of Hayden’s Selected Poems:

We need the poet who “lives in life,” mixes with mud, rolls in rot, claws the scoundrels, bleeds and bloodies, and gasping in the field, writes right there, his wounds like faucets above his page, at once besmutching and ennobling it. We need, also, the poet who finds life always interesting, sometimes appalling, sometimes appealing, but consistently amenable to a clarifying enchantment via the powers of Art. His reverence for the word Art is what chiefly distinguishes him from Poet I. Poet II, moreover, may postpone composition until he is off the field, rid of the fray’s insignia, and has a bath.

Poet II is Robert Hayden, one of a growing group of Negro poets believing that matter is not enough, believing that there should be a marriage between matter and manner. 

These days I’m with Brooks. I’ve learned to appreciate that the black poetic tradition is large enough to encompass Poets I, and II, and III and IV, and whoever else wants to join The Negro Caravan, even as we engage in productive debates about the aesthetic choices that black artists and intellectuals make. The writer Julius Lester also made a salient point about Hayden’s poetry from the experience of having studied with him as a student at Fisk University. “In creative writing classes he tried to teach us that words were our principal tool, and, no matter how important our ‘message’ to be, it was words that expressed it.” In those terms I believe “Middle Passage” is one of Hayden’s most important achievements of form and message.

 

Hayden was particularly inspired by Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body (1927), from which he borrowed the title for his first (unfinished) poetry book The Black Spear: “Oh black skinned epic, epic with the black spear / I cannot sing you, having too white a heart.” In an interview Hayden expressed that in his youth he wanted to be the poet to fulfill Benet’s lament, and wanted “Middle Passage” to be the black-skinned epic that Benét anticipated.

“Middle Passage” first appeared in 1945, but Hayden revised and updated the poem into its final form in his 1966 collection Selected Poems. The poem is structured in three parts, and its outline is best described by Hayden himself:

In the opening section I describe the dreadful conditions aboard the slave ships, the brutal and inhuman treatment of the slaves. The scenes and incidents here are adapted from ships’ logs, eyewitness accounts by traders, depositions…In the second part, we are listening to the reminiscences of an old slave trader…The third section is climactic, the first two move toward it. It’s based on the accounts of the Amistad mutiny in 1839. It’s meant to recapitulate all the themes introduced earlier and focuses on the heroic resistance to slavery introduced at the very beginning. (Collected Prose)

Hayden’s account of the Amistad case was inspired by Muriel Rukeyser’s Willard Gibbs (1942), a biography of Josiah Willard Gibbs, the scientist who assisted in the defense of the Amistad mutineers. Rukeyser’s book contained one of the most thorough narratives of the Amistad case at the time, before historians took it up and studied it more closely.

“Middle Passage” has been celebrated by critics for its biting irony, brilliantly expressed in the hymns sung by the slave traders praying for safe passage (for themselves), and justifying the terrible business with a twisted theology of conversion and deliverance:

Jesus    Savior     Pilot       Me
Over     Life's       Tempestuous   Sea

We pray that thou wilt grant, O Lord,
safe passage to our vessels bringing
heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

Jesus       Savior

And Hayden didn’t shy away from the difficult ethical challenges in his narrative of the slave trade. Despite the fact that chattel slavery was unprecedented in its racialized, legal, hereditary form, there was complicity among Africans in the dreadful business, a complicity alluded to in the European slave trader’s condescending recollections:

Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;
have watched the artful mongos baiting traps
of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.
Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

These transactions, turning black bodies into currency, were the makings of a new global capitalist economy. In one passage of the poem, Hayden uses a metaphor of weaving to describe chattel slavery’s role in the creation of the “New World,” the ships as implements in a new fabric woven by their movements back and forth across the Atlantic:

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,
the dark ships move, the dark ships move,
their bright ironical names
like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth;
plough through thrashing glister toward
fata morgana's lucent melting shore,
weave toward New World littorals that are
mirage and myth and actual shore.

These lines remind me of a recent data visualization by Slate’s Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie, a map of the Atlantic, with dots moving across the waters and landing at various points in South, Central and North Americas, representing 20,528 slave ship voyages over 315 years. 

Lately, I have been thinking about “Middle Passage” in terms of Christina Sharpe’s book Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2009), and her framing of a post-slavery subjectivity in which the violence and racialized subjugation of chattel slavery, particularly carried out in intimate sexual and social relations between enslaver and enslaved, have continued to shape our ideas about blackness and whiteness into the present. As she writes, “I mean Monstrous Intimacies to intervene in and to position us to see and think anew what it means to be a (black) post-slavery subject positioned within everyday intimate brutalities who is said to have survived or to be surviving the past of slavery, that is not yet past, bearing something like freedom” In Hayden’s poem those monstrous intimacies manifest in the hold of the ship, told by a slave trader in a court deposition:

"Deponent further sayeth The Bella J
left the Guinea Coast
with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd
for the barracoons of Florida:

"That there was hardly room 'tween-decks for half
the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;
that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh
and sucked the blood:

"That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest
of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins;
that there was one they called The Guinea Rose
and they cast lots and fought to lie with her:

"That when the Bo's'n piped all hands, the flames
spreading from starboard already were beyond
control, the negroes howling and their chains
entangled with the flames:

"That the burning blacks could not be reached,
that the Crew abandoned ship,
leaving their shrieking negresses behind,
that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:

With the refrain of “voyage through death/to life upon these shores,” Hayden challenges the reader to imagine how life on the yonder shore is underwritten by the violence and carnage of this passage, to think about that past, which is not yet past, and how its brutalities linger in the structure and ideology of the present.

That brutality is rooted in the business of slave trading, in the commodification of human bodies. (“Twenty years a trader, twenty years, / for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested / from those black fields, and I'd be trading still / but for the fevers melting down my bones.”) In Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Walter Johnson argues that the slave traders were critical of the paternalism of the enslavers. His book focuses on the domestic slave market in the US, but he articulates an important principle of chattel slavery as a whole. For slaveholders to see themselves as the ones who cared for their slaves and who assimilated them into Christianity, they took great pains to maintain an ideological separation of “slavery” from the “market,” making sure to “trace an imaginary line of self-justification between ‘slavery,’ where slaves were sold only by happenstance, and the ‘market’ where every slave was always for sale.” Traders did the gruesome work of transporting and selling human beings, carrying them through a tedious journey that often required killing a few to save the many, and then bartering them on the auction block. It was their job to do the dirty, violent, unspeakable labor in the underbelly of capital, and, like Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in Scarface, they were the “bad guys” that the slaveocracy needed to preserve the veneer of gentility and respectability.

For all its righteous indignation about the abject horrors of the slave trade, and despite the poem’s ending with a celebration of Cinquez and the Amistad mutineers, Hayden’s poem centers on, and is mostly told through, the voices of the enslavers. In a critical essay on “Middle Passage” and the poetry of slavery, literary scholar Jon Woodson gives the poem one of its most rigorous and skeptical readings, paying attention to the literary influences on Hayden’s Modernist form in the poem, including Eliot, Pound, and Crane, and picking apart its allusions to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But Woodson notes that the enslaved do not have voices in the poem, not even Cinquez, and that “since the poem restricts itself to only the middle passage, it cannot evaluate the theme of ‘life upon these shores’ even while evoking the themes of futurity and transcendence in the poem’s concluding lines.” Nevertheless, the poem continues to have a profound influence, and perhaps the “life upon these shores” in its last line is embodied in its many readers.

In 1976, Hayden became the first African American to be appointed the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. Here on the Poetry Foundation website, you can listen to a recording of Hayden reading from “Middle Passage” during his appointment. I listened to the recording while reading the text of the poem and noticed Hayden’s restless poetic mind at work, making subtle editorial changes in his reading: hardly changes to scarcely, baiting to setting, named to called, deft to skilled, moonless to noiseless, wounding to blinding. Hayden was a meticulous editor of his own poems, constantly working toward linguistic precision.

That care with words, seeking out the best words in the best order, is indicative of Hayden’s belief in poetry as a specialized language. That kind of poetry fell out of fashion in the latter part of the 20th century as people turned to the directness and clarity of free verse (think Charles Bukowski and his popularity). But that sense of poetry as other than direct speech was also recovered by rappers and their obsessions with puns, wordplay, and rhyme and meter. In hip-hop terms, Hayden had “bars” (though he may not have cared for the genre’s lurid content), and he applied that literary talent to tell a poignant story about slavery and freedom.

“Middle Passage” hearkens back to the voyages that set these complex narratives of American life in motion, using the ironic voices of the slave traders, allowing them to implicate themselves in the appalling business. In the foreground of “Middle Passage” are the voices of those slave traders, pondering the “misfortune” that befell them on their journeys across the Atlantic, the sensational incidents in which voyages were interrupted by sickness, fire, or rebellion, their testimonies justifying themselves in courts of law. In the background is perhaps a more unsettling image: a sailing ship, successfully loaded with human cargo, piloted by the pious Christian captain, embarking from the west coast of Africa, crossing the Atlantic with somewhere to get to, sailing calmly on.