19 pages • 38 minutes read
Robert HaydenFrederick Douglass
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Air & Earth
The poem argues with a resilient optimism that Black Americans will one day be free. They will enjoy that “beautiful / terrible thing” (Lines 1-2). Someday, the poem argues, freedom will belong “at last to all” (Line 3). The poem uses air and the earth to symbolize freedom’s necessity and how wonderful it will be when Americans all enjoy freedom so readily, so easily that they do not even think about it. Because freedom itself is an abstract, the poem seeks to make immediate, concrete, and real the idea of being free.
Freedom is not a right. It’s not a privilege granted by some overarching authority or protected by some law. Freedom is no second-hand confirmation of a person’s cultural status or personal identity. Freedom is who, what, and how a person is. In Lines 2 and 3, the speaker says simply that freedom should be as immediate, as omnipresent, as assumed as the air and the earth itself. Within the spacious vision of Douglass himself, freedom someday will be as unremarkable as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on. After all, few stop and acknowledge the wonder of oxygen or the reliability and stability of the ground. Written in 1947, with the bloody history of civil rights still a decade away, “Frederick Douglass” envisions a radiant future where the world has at last evolved beyond hate.
The “Mumbo Jumbo” of Politicians
Robert Hayden does not use the term “mumbo jumbo” (Line 6) carelessly. He wrote the poem on the threshold of the civil rights movement. The movement itself contained different viewpoints. There were activists who believed Black freedom would come only through the patient cooperation with white political superstructures already in place, while others argued the only way to racial equality was to level those superstructures and rebuild a new American experiment from the rubble. Hayden was no incendiary radical; he had no interest in the latter. Yet in Line 6, Hayden curtly dismisses the efforts of white politicians to maintain the racist status quo by dismissing their fluffy rhetoric. He refers to their rhetoric as “mumbo jumbo” (Line 6), which is a West African word that refers to a vaguely menacing but ultimately harmless fake-shaman who would use elaborate incantations and gaudy performance spectacles to mask the reality of their powerlessness, ineffectiveness, and uselessness.
Invoking an African folk-figure that symbolizes misplaced faith and hypocrisy to characterize white politicians, the poem provokes at once a stirring sense of pride in African culture and heritage and a scathing indictment of white politicians who mouth platitudes about freedom while working to ensure that real freedom for Black America—economic, social, educational, political—stays a fetching chimera.
Art For Art’s Sake
In Lines 11 and 12, the speaker looks forward to a time when art need no longer give voice to the downtrodden and the oppressed, the disenfranchised and the enslaved. The poem also, however, wonders when poetry about racial inequality will itself be irrelevant. Hayden’s concerns here anticipate by a decade what would become a movement among the younger generation of writers unwilling to unquestioningly follow guidelines and templates for writing and fascinated by turning writing on itself as a way to investigate the anatomy of literature. This literature-about-literature (termed metafiction) assumed writers were in the best position to assess the power of fiction.
Few social movements of the 20th century better reflect the tension between rhetoric and action as the long struggle by Black America for political, social, and economic equality. Against and amid a renaissance of bold and uncompromising writings by prominent Black activists, poets, journalists, playwrights, and novelists were traumatic actions in the streets of American cities. Hayden, at the cusp of the civil rights movement, centers on that tension. His poem envisions an era of cooperation, racial harmony, and respect that will finally render poetry about hate, intolerance, and bigotry irrelevant, when America at last transitions from a racist culture to a nation of generous spirit and compassionate acceptance. Then, Hayden sees with some satisfaction, Black poetry will become an end to itself rather than a means.
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By Robert Hayden
