On Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”

In the U.S., “red summer” refers to the summer of 1919, just after the end of World War I, when soldiers returned to the U.S.A. feeling, perhaps, the thrill of a battle deemed, in certain corners, victorious, despite the over sixteen million military and civilian deaths that were a direct result of the war’s battles. That summer marked the mid-way point of the deadly influenza pandemic (1918-1920) which came at the end of WW1, and which lead to the deaths of possibly as many as 100,000,000 people worldwide.

“Red summer” marked a particular period in U.S. life, history, and in the national zeitgeist. A mere fifty-four years after the end of the U.S.’s bloody Civil War, the summer made clear how claims to the rights of citizenship and honor by Black citizens were (and, to some extent, still are) met with racist anti-Black violence. The adjectival red signals the passion behind that violence, the red of spilled blood, of heat, of the racial hatred of those whose skin might turn red at the vision of Black persons demanding their personhood be respected. This red met many of the returning Black soldiers who, as they attempted to settle into life after war, also continued struggles for freedom at home. In response to the soldiers’ honorable uniformed service and return, over the course of 1919 there were more than twenty-five white-supremacist attacks on Black citizenry in major cities like Houston, Chicago, D.C, East St. Louis, and in minor cities throughout the nation.

In the context of this mass white-supremacist violence against Black communities, Jamaican-born poet and novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948) wrote the sonnet “If We Must Die.” The poem was first published in the July 1919 issue of The Liberator, a monthly socialist magazine, when McKay was nearly thirty years old. The poem struck such a chord with Black workers, activists, intellectuals, and broader audiences that it was published again twice later that year, appearing in The Messenger, a magazine cofounded by A. Philip Randolph, who was also the founder and first president of the Brotherhood of Sleeeping Car Porters, the first African-American labor union, and who was also, almost forty years later, the head of the 1963 March on Washington. Randolph’s cofounder at The Messenger was Chandler Owen, a member of the Socialist Party of America, and later the head of a public relations firm. The Messenger’s explicit mission was to make appeals to reason and justice with a greater emphasis on economics and politics than on music and art. Drawing the economic and political plight of those who might be hunted and mocked in heroic terms, McKay’s poem spoke to The Messenger’s mission in complex ways. The poem also appeared that year in Workers’ Dreadnought, a London-based newspaper run by various political parties that were led by suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. The poem’s political implications and its call to arms for workers were immediately apparent in the poem’s early reception and circulation.

Grappling with death and white supremacist assaults on Black life and on Black peoples’ autonomies, McKay’s “If We Must Die” is a clarion call to protest and unity. He insists that If we must die, then we will establish the terms of our deaths. The we of McKay’s poem is at once both speaker and listener who while recognizing that he may not counter the inevitability of death, must is an imperative that points to the nature of this situation, he (and the central figures are male) will/can assert and claim dignity and integrity against dehumanizing efforts. The poem’s we is expansive enough that though it points to the particular situation of Black peoples in the U.S. and celebrates notions of bravery and bravado that are characteristic of the ideal solder, the we also points to any group of we—joined under the sign of broadly-determined-kinship, who is potentially hunted and penned. It is a we that might be slaughtered (and dehumanized) as hogs by “monsters we defy.”

Interestingly, the poem makes no obvious racial claims, in that it leaves the violence and the resistance to the violence racially unmarked, though the “bark of mad and hungry dogs” was a regular feature of anti-Black violence. The unmarked or unremarked in American poetry, has, in the past, been largely understood as a signifier of whiteness, of the whiteness of the speaker, of the whiteness of the universal human figure and condition. In this poem, McKay situates Black resistance and protest at the center of a racially unmarked call to unity and human dignity. He drafts a particular non-White subject position that signifies a potentially universal human condition. It’s useful to attend to how the poem’s reception and circulation are necessary parts of understanding the subject position of the we McKay articulates.

At the time that McKay wrote “If We Must Die,” he was working on the railroad as a waiter, as one of the hard-working “Pullman porters” as these waiters and attendants were known, a naming practice which picked up on a tradition of naming black enslaved laborers after plantation owners. One part of the waiter’s service entailed a white socially-accepted misrecognition. The male railroad waiters and workers, no matter their names, were often called George by white customers as though the workers could not be distinguished one from another. The poem’s we is the we to whom white social mores would deny individual recognition, respect, and dignity.

McKay, who had been a constable in Jamaica, was well-acquainted with notions of respect, dignity, honor, and duty. In A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion, Winston James recounts a story that McKay himself revisited often. It is the story of McKay’s father’s insistence on integrity and respect in his dealings with the white missionary pastor of the parish who lied to and embezzled monies from the parish members. McKay’s father led a sustained collective action that lasted over five years, but that eventually led to the removal of the minister as head of the parish. His father’s insistence on dignity and the parishioners’ collective actions achieved results (22). This was an important lesson for McKay.

Certainly, in his role as a railroad waiter and dock worker, McKay was aware of and was expected to adhere to racialized mores of social interaction. However, he was simultaneously aware of the possibilities for collective resistance to those social mores that might kill and are expressly meant to dehumanize.

A relationship between the social, the political, and the aesthetic is articulated in much of McKay’s work. In his preface to one of his first books, Constab Ballads (1912), McKay “confesses” that he is “so constituted that imagination outruns discretion, and it is [his] misfortune to have a most improper sympathy with wrong-doers” (7). Here, McKay recognizes and rejects conventional etiquettes. It is not incidental that many of the “wrong-doers” he would have encountered as a Kingston constable were black. McKay goes on to say that he is “by temperament, unadaptive; by which I mean that it is not in me to conform cheerfully to congenial usages. We blacks are all somewhat impatient of discipline…” (7). His poetry and prose, which he presents as mechanisms to “relieve [his] feelings,” interrogate how those he identifies as “wrong-doers” and who are “impatient of discipline” may present aesthetic-ethical modes of being.

In this remarkable Shakespearean sonnet McKay draws on language and codes of honor. What are the codes of honor that the “wrong-doers” adhere to? “If we must die” is the repeated conditional statement that animates the poem’s dynamic psycho-social consciousness. Composed of three quatrains with an ababcdcdefef rhyme scheme and a concluding perfectly rhymed (gg) couplet, the poem’s first eight lines are structured as two conditional if/then statements that center the inevitable death of the poem’s expansive “we,” which, as I’ve noted, may be understood as both the speaker and the listener broadly addressed. If McKay’s work is to be read on a continuum, the we in this poem may well be comprised of wrong-doers according to social codes that mark some as always improper.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot

In this first if/then statement, McKay draws our attention to negation—If x, then not y. “Then,” though absent, is implicit and insistent. If the necessity of death is true, then there is a rejection of terms that dehumanize, that render one more animal than human. The we are hunted and penned, mocked and accursèd.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead

This second if/then statement has a dramatic poetic apostrophe that addresses an idealized we. O! There is an exclamatory plea—if x, then O y! This is a plea that our (again the we) death not be in vain, death without purpose is ignoble. Nobility constrains even the “monsters” from denying us honor because our overarching nobility remains even in the face of death. This nobility, in fact, reveals them who attack as monsters to be defied. McKay emphasizes which denial matters.

 

The next four lines level a dramatic call to unity and for action among kinsmen.

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?

What else is there to do in the face of such an inhuman assault? What dies here? What is the nature of the death? The concluding couplet turns to answering that question:

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

There is a definition of manhood as defined by collective resistance and emboldened by rhythmic, iambic marching. The murderous attackers are revealed to be both monsters and an animalistic “pack” that has dehumanized itself. The poem ends, not in death or dying but in the fighting back that is imagined as evidence of the manly and the human in McKay’s undisciplining configurations. It’s this “fighting back” by the wrong-doers which survives the grave and which lays claim to heroic dignity.