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.