jasper texas 1998

Clifton opens her poem with a dedication to the murdered man. The brutality of his murder enraged Clifton and she uses the poetic medium to give the man his voice back while commenting on the racial tension in America, emphasizing how this murder became an emblematic moment for the media and society at large.

Clifton does not allow the reader to avoid the reality of the crime—she opens her poem opens with the bold declaration that the speaker is “a man’s head hunched in the road” (Line 1). In other words, we are hearing directly from the victim of the lynching, getting access to a voice that racist violence typically silences. The line’s full end stop contributes to the starkness of this unexpected claim. Clifton plays with the head’s status as the remains of a human being. In life, the man would have been capable of acting as the poem’s speaker; in death, the head straddles the divide between human being and object—its agency in the poem is either an example of the supernatural, or of personification, when a nonhuman object or creature is endowed with human abilities.

The first stanza dwells on the stark reality of the brutalized body. The repetition of the initial consonant /h/—a poetic device called alliteration—emphasizes the posture of the speaker. The head is “hunched in the road” (Line 1)—a description that is impossible, since the head has been separated from the neck and shoulders. We imagine a crumpled corpse, lying not in the dignified position dictated by funeral rites, but still bent over as a result of his murderers’ violence. This slouching position has been forced onto the man, in a sordid echo of white people expecting Black humility and subservience throughout US history.

The next four lines of the stanza reframe the destruction of Byrd’s body. Clifton empowers by giving his body parts agency: The arm actively “pulled away” (Line 3) and “pointed” (Line 4) and the hand “opened” (Line 4). These engaged “members” (Line 2) of Byrd’s bodily community come together as an electorate—their gestures and movements are a vote, through which the head “was chosen to speak” (Line 2), becoming their representative.

The second stanza, which consists of three poignant philosophical questions, opens with another bold line. The line repeats the word “why” three times (Line 6). The repetition is a wail of pain and frustration, emphatically stressing the unanswerable question of the murdered man and of the poet: Why did this lynching happen? The lack of end-line punctuation connects this series of whys into the next line, formulating a new question: “why / should i call a white man brother?” (Lines 6-7). This question redirects the head’s keening anger specifically against those responsible for the crime, ruefully rejecting the commonplace platitude that people of different races are part of a larger family.

The speaker’s next question, also broken across two the poem’s lines, is especially profound for its extensive wordplay. The head asks the reader to consider “who is the human in this place” (Line 8). The ambiguously vague “this place” is both the actual location in Jasper, Texas, and America at large. In a moment of extreme vulnerability, the speaker is asking several things at once: Can the head of a dead man still be seen as human or has it become an object? Was Byrd’s Black body ever seen as human, even in life, in the cultural context of white supremacy? Should the speaker himself no longer regard himself as human, as the crime he fell victim to was so barbaric that it is hard to imagine it being done to a human being? The second part of the question, which differentiates between “the thing that is dragged” and “the dragger” (Line 9) adds specifics that compound the multiple meanings of the words. Here, the speaker labels himself “a thing”—the no longer living body that is being pulled through the street. The literal “dragger”—actually a nonhuman truck—takes on the agency and qualities of its human operator. Yet the brutality of the crime suggests a capacity for cruelty and evil that makes the dragger inhuman. The speaker argues that society’s insistence on seeing the perpetrator as a human denies the humanity of the victim. Byrd has been fully dehumanized by the crime and having the head ask this question rehumanizes him.

Each of the speaker’s three questions is anchored in a specific time frame. The first carries the past, asking why the situation has unfolded as it did; the second considers the present, addressing philosophical conundrums in the lynching’s aftermath. The third question, “what does my daughter say?” (Line 10), moves into the future. The speaker asks to hear his daughter’s voice—something the dead body no longer has access to, though in life, Byrd was known for his deep devotion to his children. The question is deeply open-ended, addressing the legacy of the event for future generations of Black Americans. Most pressingly, the head of the dead man worries about the effect his slaying will have on his daughter, who is old enough to formulate her own opinion on what happened, but who now cannot measure that opinion against her father’s wisdom—only her words remain. On a broader level, the speaker is asking what future generations will make of the racist violence that led to his death. Will they be able to resolve the thorny questions of humanity and brotherhood in a satisfactory way at last.

The poem’s third stanza returns to the physical reality of the situation, reminding us that this event happened in a real place. The head of the dead body is still lying on the ground under the Texas sun, which burns like “a blister overhead” (Line 11). Its slumped position contrasts with the way people typically lay out their dead, putting them in positions of comfort and peace. The speaker states that “if i were alive i could not bear it” (Line 12). The pronoun is ambiguous, referring literally to the sun’s heat, which would oppress a living man, and to the horror of being alive in such a toxic situation.

The poem quickly undercuts the hopeful image of “the townsfolk sing[ing] we shall overcome” (Line 13). Just like the empty promise of calling “a white man brother” (Line 6), this well-meaning recitation of a song made popular during the civil rights movement does little to counteract what Byrd’s lynching reveals about the US. While people sing nearby, “hope bleeds slowly” (Line 14) from the head’s mouth. In this way, Clifton criticizes Black Americans’ peaceful wait for the possibility of change. Even if the same “dirt that covers us all” (Line 15) acts as an equalizer in death, only a Black man’s body is on the dirt now.

The final line of the poem is a surrender and a release, yet the meaning is ambiguous. In one sense, the phrase “i am done with this dust” (Line 16) echoes the words of Christian burial rites, which include the biblical concept of human bodies as created from and returning to dust: Deprived of a traditional burial, the head conducts its own service and clarifies that he is leaving his body. In another sense, the repetition of the phrase “i am done” (Line 16), an example of anaphora, is an expression of frustration. The speaker has had it with the euphemisms of supposed brotherhood, with unrelenting racial violence, and with the acceptance of racism as a US status quo.