My Guilt
My Guilt - meaning Summary
Inherited, Private Guilt
The poem voices a speaker’s layered guilt and shame tied to Black history and survival. It links slavery’s legacy, the deaths of past rebels and leaders, and public lynching to a personal sense of indebtedness and inherited responsibility. The speaker admits surviving while others suffered, mourning both loss and the quiet pride that suppresses protest. Silence itself becomes a contested moral burden.
Read Complete AnalysesMy guilt is “slavery's chains,” too long the clang of iron falls down the years. This brother's sold, this sister's gone, is bitter wax, lining my ears. My guilt made music with the tears. My crime is “heroes, dead and gone,” dead Vesey, Turner, Gabriel, dead Malcolm, Marcus, Martin King. They fought too hard, they loved too well. My crime is I'm alive to tell. My sin is “hanging from a tree,” I do not scream, it makes me proud. I take to dying like a man. I do it to impress the crowd. My sin lies in not screaming loud.
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