And the name on the books was dead,
like the life my mother fled,
like the life I—might have known.
You don’t exist—at least
not legally, the lawyer said.
As ghost, double, alter ego then?
(Collected Poems)
Indeed, with both his foster parents dead by
then, he had to have his natural mother sign an
affidavit affirming that Asa Bundy was in fact
Robert Hayden (or vice versa). In that same era,
while living and teaching in Memphis (another
displacement, since he had great difficulty in
adjusting to the racist, Jim Crow atmosphere or
that Southern city in the 1940s), he read a news-
paper article about a lost child who either could
not or would not reveal his identity. Hayden
immediately and emotionally responded to this
all-too-familiar plight; a few months later he
objectively responded with the account which
allegorically tracks his own dilemma. The poem,
entitled ‘‘‘Mystery Boy’ Looks for Kin in Nash-
ville,’’ after the news story caption, concludes,
And when he gets to where the voices were—
Don’t cry, his dollbaby wife implores;
I know where they are, don’t cry.
We’ll go and find them, we’ll go
and ask them for your name again.
(Collected Poems)
Little wonder, then, that Robert Hayden
took special interest in the loners and loners of
life. Perhaps originally without conscious intent,
he eventually evolved into a deliberate spokes-
man for those dropped out or left out of social
intercourse. As the portraits of such individuals
increase in number, diversity, and subtlety, a
reader of Hayden’s works can discern recurring
traits common to these ‘‘outsiders,’’ traits which
at once suggest the poet’s moral priorities and
society’s questionable values.
All of these characters are intrinsically inter-
esting as fictional creations and psychological
profiles, but they also can be seen as either victims
or survivors of social evil. One such victim in a
poem called ‘‘Incense of the Lucky Virgin’’ has
lost her man and her hope; all she has left is the
overwhelming demand of caring for three chil-
dren with absolutely no ways or means to do so
(Collected Poems). After unsuccessfully turning
to cultural conjure in the forms of ‘‘High John
the Conqueror’’ and ‘‘[Incense] of the Lucky Vir-
gin’’ (brand names for potions supposed to bring
good luck and fortune), and after trying orthodox
Christian religion (lighting candles in the church)
to no avail, the woman despairs, loses her sanity
along with her hope, and murders two of her three
children so that they will not go hungry (the
young son, like the father before him, runs away
too quickly for her). Hayden does not moralize
beyond the implicit circumstances of this modern
rendition of the Medea myth; he simply presents
the story in the dramatic monologue of her ram-
bling discourse, letting the victim tell her own
story with no self-conscious acknowledgment of
effect,muchlesscause....
Other outsiders in Hayden’s pantheon seem to
need neither our sympathy nor understanding—
they perhaps tell us more about ourselves than we
wish to know. ‘‘The Rag Man’’ is an interesting
case in point. The speaker therein encounters what
we would now call a ‘‘street person,’’ a picker of
rags who parades his poverty with inordinate
pride. In the eye of the beholder the rag man
appears both disdainful and mysterious; he cares
not a whit for creature comfort or the approval of
his supposed superiors. That seeming indifference
unsettles the observer-speaker. As an exercise in
psychological projection, the poem saw much
about our social and moral values. As the speaker
notes, the rag man has ‘‘rejected all / that we risk
chillsandfeverandcold/heartstokeep’’(Col-
lected Poems). And he asks, ‘‘Who is he really, the
Rag Man?’’ Hayden’s poem makes that inquiry
literally a rhetorical question; as he makes artisti-
cally evident, the rag man is his version of King
Lear’s ‘‘unaccommodated man,’’ ‘‘the thing itself’’
which reveals the truth we need to face about
human charity. As the poet’s analysis of alienation
so vividly shows, we value the wrong things.
Because our compassion is only ‘‘our brief con-
cern,’’ we cling to our own rags of materialism and
avoid looking too closely at the rag men among us.
If we can’t bribe our consciousness with a used
coat or a bowl of soup, ‘‘we’d like to get shut of the
sight of him.’’ He may be the outsider, but we are
just as alienated, if not more so, from each other,
from our true selves.
Another profile of earlier origin yet similar ilk
demonstrates an intriguing progression in Hay-
den’s personal attitude and artistic development.
‘‘Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves’’ depicts a
carnival sideshow character, a sterotyped black
‘‘mammy’’ who frolics among other more blatant
freaks of nature, such as the snake-skinned man
and spider girl. Hayden reported that he observedRunagate Runagate