Mississippi—1955

Mississippi—1955  

Langston Hughes 

(To the Memory of Emmett Till) (Emmett Till was 14 when he was kidnapped, tortured, and lynched after wishing the white owner of a store to have a great day. His murder was acquitted. His family decided to have an open casket funeral to show people the physical damage done to his body.)

Oh what sorrow! (The capitalization of Oh shows the genuine hurt of his family)

oh, what pity! (The lower case oh shows how the people who attacked him felt no pity)

Oh, what pain (The capitalization shows the pain and how really it is)

That tears and blood (You cry because of fear and you bleed because of pain)

Should mix like rain (They mix because Emmet was tortured before his death)

And terror come again 

To Mississippi. (Sets up the next stanza)

Come again? (It never left, it was merely hidden under false pretenses)

Where has terror been? (Only in Black communities)

On vacation? Up North? (Hidden far away in segregated communities)

In some other section 

Of the nation, (It couldn’t have been my family, it must be a mistake)

Lying low, unpublicized? (Newspapers didn’t widely cover the lynching)

Masked—with only 

Jaundiced eyes (Dying eyes)

Showing through the mask? (Mask of safety the Black community shows to Whites)

Oh, what sorrow, 

Pity, pain, 

That tears and blood 

Should mix like rain 

In Mississippi! (Repetition, ties the beginning to end showing the neverending cycle) 

And terror, fetid hot, (Imagery, juxtaposition, cold sweats as his body swelled from the beatings)

Yet clammy cold 

Remain. (No hope or love, only the extremes of hot and cold)

Hughes employs word choice to illustrate the theme of power imbalance within his poem “Mississippi-1995”. In the second stanza, he uses the word “jaundiced” to describe eyes. Jaundice is a liver disease that brings a yellow color to both the skin of a person and their eyes.  People who have this condition look incredibly sickly and as though they are dying. The people with the dying eyes are the Black community, not the White one. Only the Black community is slowly being picked off one by one. In the last stanza, the words “fetid” and “clammy” are used to describe Emmett’s body. Emmett's body was found three days after he had been drowned in a river. In the photos of his funeral, he barely looks human. By describing Emmett's body like this the reader gets the smallest amount of understanding of the pain and it went through before he died. It allows the reader to more deeply understand the amount of terror Emmett felt as his 14-year-old body was beaten to death by grown White men. It allows the reader, for one second, to be in the moment as he suffers.