This Beautiful, Needful Thing: On the Poetics of Home in the African American Diaspora

It is two days after the presidential election as I sit at my desk and turn my attention to this essay. Which is to say, I, much like the country at large, am waiting. I am waiting for word as to who will be elected to the executive branch for the next four years as well as who will serve in Congress. In the deep dark of night, I am watching the electoral map take on weightier shades of blue and red.
I am waiting on the results of the Coronavirus test I took on campus less than 36 hours ago. I am waiting, as we have begun trying, to find out if my wife is pregnant, and if so, how that might be affected by word of who will be elected to the executive branch for the next four years. I am waiting with held breath. Which is to say afraid, uncertain.
It is during times of uncertainty and fear that one, such as myself, might turn to poetry, which Robert Frost has famous described as “a momentary stay against confusion.” Poems reveal the world to us, or reveal ourselves in the world; they guide us toward surprise, discovery, and in the best cases, wisdom, delight. They help us make sense of the world and how to emotionally orient and navigate ourselves within. And there is so much to make sense of—with the nation reeling from the impact of a global pandemic, our national death toll rising, a dearth of responsible federal leadership or direction, and a country divided over the legacy of its own brutal past.
Here I am, ruminating on the poetics of home in the African American Diaspora, and there are those who, across the country, have been unemployed for months, whose homes are in jeopardy, who need—are waiting for—relief, though hardly the kind of relief a reader experiences after the final lines of a poem. I am waiting for water to boil to steep a sachet of tea. Waiting for a student to return an email. Waiting for the semester to end.
“The past is for most Americans, unfortunately, rather meaningless,” the poet Robert Hayden said in 1976. “But some of us are aware of it as a long, tortuous, and often bloody process of becoming.” Hayden’s 1947 poem “Frederick Douglass,” like so much of his work, is haunted by the ghosts of said “bloody process,” Fredrick Douglass himself among them. It is a poem that, through Hayden’s careful and deliberate craft decisions, enacts another waiting, the poem about much more than Douglass the individual. Hayden’s concern is the course of history itself—what our country has promised, and how those promises have yet to be fully realized.
From its very title and onward, “Fredrick Douglass” establishes and subverts its reader’s expectations. The title initially suggests that perhaps “Fredrick Douglass” is a persona poem, which could certainly be reinforced by the poem’s opening line: “When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty…” However, reading on, we discover at line seven that, “this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro,” this speaker is, in fact, not Douglass but some other contemporary, quite likely Hayden himself.
Hayden’s decision to delay the release of that information—the identification of the poem’s speaker—as well as his deployment of the conditional sentence as the poem opens, allows the poem, temporally, to be positioned in the past, present, and future at once. “When it is finally ours” gestures toward a thing yet to be realized, something ahead, in the future, whereas Douglass, as a subject or speaker, gestures toward the past before the poem reveals a contemporary, present-day speaker. Lest we forget, this poem, in which the speaker was still awaiting the realization of “this freedom,” was published in 1947, which would be injustice enough. What’s worse is that it isn’t difficult, as a Black poet, to read this poem from our current cultural moment, within our own “long, tortuous” march toward the freedom by which Douglass and Hayden were so captured, that “beautiful, needful thing.”
Hayden’s poem sets and subverts expectations in other ways as well—at the level of fixed or received form and the level of the sentence. For one, “Fredrick Douglass” is a sonnet, which presents specific expectations. The sonnet’s movement is often rhetorical, argumentative—we expect that any problem or confusion posed in the octave will be resolved or synthesized in the sestet. We expect the sonnet to volta, to turn. Only two sentences, Hayden’s sonnet, however, turns as its first sentence turns, on the elided “then” that begins line seven: “[then] this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro.” We have been taught to expect a sonnet to turn at the close of its octave, at line nine, or to shift at its final couplet—that this sonnet does not, that Hayden essentially inverts the form, is significant. The sestet, where a sonnet would normally find its resolution, instead, opens the poem, enacting its very concern—for Douglass and Hayden, the “problem” is in fact the absence of resolution or realization of “this freedom.” And though the poem’s form resolves, this dilemma, at least according to Hayden, persists, is yet unsatisfied, remains “needful to man as air.”
Hayden reinforces this argument at the level of the sentence as well. Not only does its opening sentence extend for nine and a half (of fourteen) lines, filled with interruptive syntax, clause after modifying clause, it’s also a periodic sentence, delaying its fundament (or independent clause) until the end of the sentence, its length leaving one nearly breathless. As the freedom to which the poem refers has been delayed, so has this independent clause, which can only be reached after halts, interruptions, an accumulation of all the poem’s materials, which is the course of history itself—Nat Turner, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, George Floyd…
It’s difficult to read “When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful / and terrible thing, needful to man as air, / usable as earth” and not think of the many who have been lost, “the lives grown out of his life,” on this march. The many who wait, with held breath, or could not breathe. And the repetition of “needful,” as Hayden’s poem opens and closes, now causes my mind to leap to another more contemporary poem—“A Small Needful Fact,” by Ross Gay. I am thoroughly convinced Gay held those many, as well as Fredrick Douglass and Robert Hayden, in mind when he wrote the poem, particularly in his choice to signal “needful” in his poem’s title. Indeed, this poem also consists of fifteen lines and a single complex sentence.
By now, I imagine many people, and certainly most poets and writers, have probably read “A Small Needful Fact” at least once via some form of social media. It is shared again after nearly every instance of a young Black life snuffed out by police. The poem is small and quiet and anecdotal, nearly the decibel of a whisper, sharing perhaps some little known and beautiful fact about the life of Eric Garner. We are all too well-acquainted with his death, his final words echoed years later in the mouths of Elijah McClain, George Floyd, Manuel Ellis, Derrick Scott… I don’t want to add any other names. I am waiting for them to stop.
At fifteen lines, Gay’s poem is technically not a sonnet, though I might argue it possesses the same rhetorical propulsion, its argumentative winding toward some resolution. Similar to Hayden’s sonnet, as the title leads into the first line, “A Small Needful Fact” releases its information dramatically, guiding our eye down the single stanza, which is filled with hesitation, clarification, and re-vision. Similar to Hayden’s sonnet, Gay’s poem makes incredible use of repetition of diction and an anaphoric structure to build and sustain the poem’s momentum and tension. This sentence, like Hayden’s, also deploys interruptive syntax to create a lengthy delay as we hurtle toward the poem’s final word—“breathe.” And one is mindful of breath, as the sentence offers little to no such grammatical or syntactical relief until we reach its end, its final punctuation.
What is perhaps most significant about Gay’s poem is how its sentence itself modulates, shifting from the simple declarative to the conditional. The literal small, needful fact is the first two and half lines, “Is that Eric Garner worked / for some time for the Parks and Rec. / Horticultural Department.” That’s it. The poem then veers largely into conjecture for its final twelve lines, reinforced by the repetition of “perhaps” at the beginning of lines four and five. Conjecture, like image (i.e., simile, metaphor), often betrays the poem’s speaker—the mind revealing its preoccupations and concerns. In this case, Gay himself is a gardener. He, too, knows what it means to “with his very large hands… / put gently into the earth / some plants.” Gay, in aligning himself, through conjecture, with Garner, also acknowledges how easily this tragedy could befall any Black person—that this could have just as well been me.
If this country is indeed my home, should I not be able to work and move and breathe in it freely? Without concern? Without having some recording function queued up on my phone or a hope that someone—anyone—is watching out for me? When might our country collectively recognize the value, what one life means to the rest of us “small and necessary creatures”? That even the smallest of our gestures might “continue to grow” and nourish “the lives grown out of [Douglass’] life, the lives / fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing”? When will it belong to us all at last?
In considering Eric Garner’s work in the Horticulture Department, my mind leaps back to Eden, to tending the original garden, and from Eden to Zion, the Promised Land. I think of African American spirituals sung under the unforgiving heat of the sun as the enslaved tilled the unfamiliar soil of the newly formed colonies. Songs such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”… “Coming for to carry me home”—this “home” a theme that sustained enslaved people for generations. Sustains us still. I think of that song’s resurgence during the Civil Rights Movement. I think of the Underground Railroad. I softly sing, “Carry me home.”
There is an argument, I’m sure, for a certain double consciousness of these poems together. A call to arms, yes, but also a longing for a better place. I know that longing; I, too, am certainly waiting for a better place. But I don’t want to settle for that better place being elsewhere, some heaven for which I must be spirited away. In this life, I want to believe we can be the manifestation of the dream of freedom, the fulfillment of America’s past promises. I absolutely recognize, as Hayden also remarked in 1976, “that freedom is always endangered, always threatened,” but I am also convinced it must be, it has to be, so well worth the long wait.

ξ

Appendix A:
”Frederick Douglass” by Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
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. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Appendix B:
”A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

ξ

Nathan McClain is the author of Previously Owned (2022) and Scale (2017), both from Four Way Books, a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Zocalo Public Square, The Critical Flame, and The Common. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.

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