Summary
”Daybreak in Alabama” opens with a speaker describing his desire to become a “colored composer.” This speaker goes on to describe how the subject of the music will be “Daybreak in Alabama,” and how the music itself will align with the aesthetics of nature. This is conveyed in a voice that uses African American Vernacular English, a colloquial American dialect spoken by Black people that originated from the southern United States. The speaker continues to describe his music through simile, comparing it to “swamp mist” and “soft dew.” These images evoke a sense of the natural scenery in Alabama while expressing the softness of the music. The speaker’s description of the rising and falling motion of the music also gives a sense of the song’s fluidity. These descriptions are followed by several lines of anaphora in which the speaker mixes natural imagery with human features. Along with flowers and trees, the speaker describes “colored faces” and “brown arms” mixed into his music as well. The introduction of imagery of humans in the poem marks a shift, in which the composer’s music begins to reflect not only nature, but also the human world. The climax of the poem is when the speaker uses the word “people,” thus explicitly connecting the composer’s music with a “black and white,” racialized society. The unity of “black hands and brown and yellow hands” alludes to a social harmony that is in contrast to the reality of early-20th-century Alabama. The speaker ends the poem by repeating the same sentiments as those with which he began. This time, the speaker writes about composing a song about daybreak in Alabama that not only has natural significance, but significance in people’s lives.
Analysis
The poem “Daybreak in Alabama” begins with the speaker expressing his desire to become a “colored composer” in the first person. In this context, the phrase “colored composer” means African American composer or Black composer. (At the time of the poem's composition, "colored" was not an offensive term for African Americans.) However, this phrase will come to have a double meaning by the end of the poem. The speaker goes on to describe what he will include in his music about daybreak in Alabama, beginning in the fourth line: “And I’m going to put the purtiest songs in it.” Here the speaker uses the colloquial dialect of African American Vernacular English to spell the word “prettiest.” This reference to the colloquial speech of African Americans at this time alludes to the beauty that the speaker finds in Black voices and dialects, which otherwise are often ridiculed in places such as Alabama. Using simile, the speaker describes these songs “[r]ising out of the ground like a swamp mist.” The music that the speaker wants to create is compared to the beauty of nature in an unconventional way. Swamps have reputations for being dangerous, unsightly, and unpleasant places, yet this speaker finds the mist from swamps such as those in Alabama beautiful enough to be worthy of song. Like Black people, during Hughes’s time swamps had an unfavorable reputation, but the speaker wants to show their beauty.
The speaker uses more natural imagery to describe the content of his songs, describing likening his music to “soft dew,” “tall tall trees,” “pine needles,” “red clay,” “long red necks,” “poppy colored faces,” and “field daisy eyes.” The repetition of the word “tall” in line seven both emphasizes the trees' impressive stature (and that of his music) and works to maintain the rhythm of the three previous lines. In this way, the speaker embodies the music of the “colored composer” he wants to become in his verse.
The term "colored composer” has a double meaning, because the natural imagery used to describe his music has many colors (red, brown, yellow, etc.) and the composer himself is African American. In addition to color, the lines filled with natural imagery contain anaphora, or the repeated beginning of a line, to give an added layer of musicality to the verse. These lines also contain synesthesia, or the experience of one sense through another. For example, the speaker says the song will be filled with the “scent of pine needles” and “the smell of red clay after rain” (lines 8 and 9). A song is an auditory experience, but the speaker describes it using the sense of smell. The music that the composer aspires to create will transcend the single sense of hearing and evoke all senses. The natural imagery used to describe the music draws parallels to human features as well. The “poppy colored faces / And big brown arms / And the field daisy eyes” resemble human beings in a way that makes the composer’s music about nature and humanity at the same time (lines 11-13).
The climax of the poem is the fourteenth line where the speaker writes that his songs are “Of black and white black white black people.” With this repetitive syntax the speaker introduces the idea that the colors in his music do not just represent nature, but also people of all races. The speaker describes putting white, black, brown, yellow, and “red clay earth hands” in his song, emphasizing the diversity of colors in nature and the diversity of skin color among people. He describes the people in his song as “Touching each other natural as dew” (line 19). This is another simile that illustrates how the connection among humanity should be natural and free rather than artificial and restricted, as it was when the poem was written, during the era of legally enforced segregation in the American South (known as Jim Crow). The speaker ends the poem by describing the “dawn of music” when he “[g]et[s] to be a colored composer “And write about daybreak / In Alabama.” In these final lines, daybreak not only signifies dawn or the shift from night to day. Here, daybreak also signifies a major social change where people of all races live in harmony. This harmony is especially rare in a place such as Alabama because of its history of slavery, segregation, and racial violence. Daybreak in Alabama is a symbol of an ideal future where nature and humanity are at peace.
