Singing Nigger
Singing Nigger - meaning Summary
Songs of Marginalized Labor
The speaker listens to a Black dockworker’s songs and everyday talk, hearing their music in work, play and hardship. He identifies the source of communal song—resilience, humor and defiance amid labor and poverty—and treats those voices as both ordinary and sacred. The poem honors collective singing as testimony to survival and identity, and ends with the speaker pondering origins and belonging after witnessing that life and sound.
Read Complete AnalysesYOUR bony head, Jazbo, O dock walloper, Those grappling hooks, those wheelbarrow handlers, The dome and the wings of you, nigger, The red roof and the door of you, I know where your songs came from. I know why God listens to your, “Walk All Over God’s Heaven.” I heard you shooting craps, “My baby’s going to have a new dress.” I heard you in the cinders, “I’m going to live anyhow until I die.” I saw five of you with a can of beer on a summer night and I listened to the five of you harmonizing six ways to sing, “Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield.” I went away asking where I come from.
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