just such a person once, and his initial poetic
documentation of the encounter exhibits little
curiosity and less compassion. As Hayden’s
speaker in that first version reductively dismisses
the logic that makes ‘‘confederates’’ of freaks and
racial stereotypes, he turns away, ‘‘weary of this
stale American joke.’’ In subsequent versions,
however, Aunt Jemima emerges as a prototype
of resilient endurance, a sarcastic, self-aware sur-
vivor, rather than either a contemptible con artist
or pitiful victim. The ‘‘new’’ narrator’s final image
contrasts sharply with that former ‘‘joke’’; the
‘‘new’’ Jemima is imaged as ‘‘‘Sable Venus’ naked
on / a baroque Cellini shell—voluptuous / imago
floating in the wake / of slave ships on fantastic
seas’’ (Collected Poems). While this brief grouping
does not exhaust Hayden’s ‘‘baroque’’ character
studies in verse, it does represent his interest in and
portraiture of fictionalized ‘‘outsiders,’’ whether
they be drawn from his biography, his observa-
tions, or his intense imagination.
The poet’s catalogue of historical outsiders is
no less striking for the range of its inventory or
the individuality of its members. In one of his
favorite (and most anthologized) poems, Hayden
captures the significance of Frederick Douglass in
terms of what the poet deems the legacy of this
black hero. Because the inspiring example of
Douglass began a progress of the race toward
freedom, Hayden in a masterful sonnet asserts
that subsequent lives lived inrealfreedom will
be Douglass’s ultimate memorial. And he sum-
marizes this notion through the contrast between
exclusion and inclusion, as he claims that when
freedom is ‘‘finally won,’’
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this
Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a
world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. (Collected Poems)
Harriet Tubman is similarly recalled and por-
trayed as a solitary figure fighting against over-
whelming odds to establish personal and group
liberty. Hayden also emphasizes her status as an
outcast, as a criminal with a price on her head but
also as an almost mythic liberator to her fellow
abolitionists and ‘‘runagates.’’ In the poem which
he called ‘‘Runagate Runagate,’’ Hayden thus
symbolically ‘‘recaptures’’ Tubman and her role
in self-emancipation, as she
Rises from their anguish and their power,
Harriett Tubman,woman of earth, whipscarred,...
Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General
alias Moses Stealer of Slaves
in league with Garrison Alcott Emerson
Garret Douglass Thoreau John Brown
Armed and known to be Dangerous
Wanted Reward Dead or Alive
Collected Poems
Significantly, although Hayden puts his her-
oine in the company of several prominent aboli-
tionists when listing those ‘‘in league,’’ in the
narrative/dramatic segments of the poem he locates
Tubman either alone or at the front of group of
escaping slaves. She stands out because Hayden
perceives her in those solitary terms: as an outsider
determined to bring her ‘‘flock’’ safely through on
that ‘‘ghoststory train’’ with its ‘‘first stop Mercy
and the last Hallelujah.’’
In the Tubman poem, Hayden posited a por-
trait within a dramatically active poem, where the
crafted rhythms of repetition and line lengths echo
the pace of running cadences. In another virtuoso
correlation of form and function, he briefly
sketches a hero obscured by time and historical
neglect. Indeed, the very brevity of the poem sub-
liminally suggests that omission. Crispus Attucks,
among the first to fall in the American Revolution
(in the Boston Massacre), is explicitly tagged no
more than a ‘‘Name in a footnote. Faceless name.’’
Hayden’s Attucks is a ‘‘Moot hero shrouded in
Betsy Ross / and Garvey flags—propped up / by
bayonets, forever falling (Collected Poems). In
these four brief lines the poet manages through
allusion and symbolism to speak volumes about
patriotism, sacrifice, liberty, and racial freedom.
If Hayden’s Attucks has dropped from the
pages of history to mere footnote status, his Mal-
com X, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, has
plunged outside of history. Hayden presents this
controversial figure in terms of a spiritual quest
for identity, and while the poem’s title appropri-
ately renames Malcolm with his self-chosen Sunni
Muslim name (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), the
subtitle more clearly indicates the nature of this
identity quest. That line, ‘‘O masks and metamor-
phoses of Ahab, Native Son,’’ clearly designates
Malcolm both the culprit and the victim of a
racist society similar to his fictional counterpart,
Bigger Thomas, the original ‘‘Native Son’’ (Col-
lected Poems). But the reference to Ahab also
indicates the obsessive nature of Malcolm’s fight
for justice, his war against the evil he perceived in
the white majority rule of American society.Runagate Runagate