Sound and Silence: The Politics of Reading Early Twentieth-Century Lynching Poetry

Reading five late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lynching poems chronologically, this article argues that pre-1920 lynching poetry focuses on the white audience, and after 1920, it focuses on the black body. (A curious concomitance, the 1920s was the first decade in which the number of African Americans executed exceeded the number lynched.) In Paul Laurence Dunbar's “The Haunted Oak,” Leslie Pinckney Hill's “So Quietly,” and Claude McKay's “The Lynching,” the victim is silent, and instead critique of the lynch mob is privileged. Using Hortense Spillers's distinction between body and flesh, this article argues that these poems objectify black bodies to represent violent white racism. None unleash the terrors of miscegenation on the Southern psyche or discuss the sexual humiliation of the lynched to preserve virginal whiteness. After the historical shift from lynching to execution, Jean Toomer's “Portrait in Georgia” and Langston Hughes's “Three Songs about Lynching” create corporeal tension between sound and silence. Instead of wordless black bodies, the bodies of these poems either speak or choose silence, becoming flesh. Symbiotic race relations lead to problematic definitions of self when the power and relative position of whiteness determines the autonomy of the lynched corpse.