The Lynching

“The Lynching” begins at the climax of the conflict it portrays. The sonnet tells the story of a Black man unjustly hanged by a white mob, but the poem begins at the moment of his death. The first line informs the audience that the man’s spirit has ascended in the “smoke” (Line 1) created from his own burned body up to “high heaven” (Line 1), beginning the poem at the moment he perishes. McKay continues the progression of the man’s spirit as it is “bidden” (Line 3) to the father’s “bosom once again” (Line 3). Upon his death, the man’s spirit or soul leaves for heaven and is reunited with God for all eternity.

However, McKay deliberately complicates any attempt to find comfort in the man’s death by assuming his soul is in eternity. When describing how the man’s spirit departed his body, he writes, “His father, by the cruelest way of pain, / Had bidden him to his bosom” (Lines 2-3). While the language is deliberately evocative of Christian doctrine (see Symbols & Motifs section) and the word “father” is biblically associated with God, McKay does not capitalize the word “father” in the poem, which would clarify if the father referred to was God. Instead, McKay leaves the character of the man’s father unknown. If the “father” is not God but the man’s biological father he “once again” (Line 3) joins upon death, the murdered man’s ultimate fate is unclear. He may not rest in peace for all eternity at God’s side but might simply be as dead as his father is.

This troubling ambiguity persists at the end of the first quatrain. McKay asserts that the “awful sin remained still unforgiven” (Line 4) after the man’s death. There are two possible interpretations for this statement. The first and less likely explanation is that the sin is the perceived evil and sinfulness of Black skin. The racist mob will not forgive or accept the man’s race and punish him accordingly. While that is potentially McKay’s meaning, the more likely explanation is that the line continues the juxtaposition McKay draws between the lynching of the Black man and the crucifixion of Christ (See: Symbols & Motifs and Themes). Where Christ’s death atoned for the world’s sins, this man’s death does no such thing. His murderers are unforgiven, and their sin of hanging an innocent man will remain so as well. There is no greater purpose for his death, and the violent act remains unjust and senseless. This emphatic yet unclear statement about “awful sin” prolongs the poem’s sense of uncertainty about the lynching. First, McKay disturbs the idea of the man’s reunion with God, and now he suggests the death had no spiritual purpose or greater significance; it only satisfied an angry mob’s bloodlust.

In the second quatrain, McKay further explores the sense of purposelessness. After trying to understand the man’s death in Christian terms, he shifts to other beliefs for some kind of explanation. He observes the “bright and solitary star” (Line 5) that watched over the man’s execution “all night” (Line 5) and wonders if “perchance” (Line 6) it was the guiding star under which the man was born. The link between the man and the star is furthered by the description of how the star “hung pitifully o’er the swinging char” (Line 8). Both the man and his guiding star are “hung,” and both are alone or “solitary” (Line 5) in their suffering. Once McKay makes the connection between the star and the lynched man, he suggests the star may have given the man “up at last to Fate’s wild whim” (Line 7). This reference to the whims of Fate completely contradicts the previous attempts to reconcile an unthinkable murder with a Christian worldview and challenges the first quatrain’s faint sense of hope for eternity even more.

While not adhering to any one sonnet tradition, “The Lynching” incorporates elements of both the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet traditions (See: Literary Devices). Traditionally, the ninth line of a Petrarchan sonnet contains the volta or turning point, in which the speaker finds some resolution to the problem or conflict of the sonnet. In “The Lynching,” the opposite occurs. After trying to understand this senseless murder from two different worldviews, McKay gives up speculating about the meaning and reason behind the murder in the ninth line and shifts focus toward describing the physical aftermath of the body and the crowd’s reaction to it. The rest of the poem shifts from the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of the man’s death and emphasizes the actual situation at hand. Thus, the subverted volta in “The Lynching” does not lead to some clearer understanding; it instead demonstrates McKay’s distress and his inability to find some resolution to this unconscionable event.

After the volta, McKay finally describes the reality of the man’s death. Previously, he had spoken euphemistically about the man’s spirit leaving his body and substituted the image of the hanging star for his body. Now, he describes the man as the “swinging char” (Line 8), the “ghastly body” (Line 10), and the “dreadful thing” (Line 14). In each description, the man is described as an object. The brutality inflicted against him reduces him to nothing more than a mutilated object of spectacle. The next morning, as soon as day dawns (Line 9), “mixed crowds” flock “to view” (Line 9) the destroyed body left hanging the entire night that now hangs “in the sun” (Line 10). The women feel and show no “sorrow” (Line 12), and even the children find “glee” (Line 14) in the sight. McKay contrasts the horrific language of the man’s corpse with the eerie acceptance and joy of the onlookers, condemning the unfeeling white crowds who are complicit in the man’s death.

During the third quatrain and the final rhyming couplet, McKay fully condemns the crowds and insinuates that white people are willingly complicit in violent racism. While the women may not participate in the lynching itself, they eagerly “throng” (Line 11) to see the body, and their “steely” (Line 12) eyes and feelings are unmoved. They are so desensitized to such violence they have no reaction. Even worse, however, are the children. They are not as unfeeling as their mothers; instead, they see the hanging as a cause for excitement and joy. McKay describes the children as “little lads, lynchers that were to be” (Line 13), implying that white children will grow up to be like their parents and will perpetuate violence against Black people. They have no potential except to become murderers. The almost childlike lyricism of the alliteration in “little lads, lynchers” unnervingly juxtaposes the expected innocence of children with the almost demonic, “fiendish” (Line 14) monsters McKay portrays. The sonnet concludes with the disturbing image of white children gleefully dancing around the “dreadful thing” (Line 14) that was once a Black man.