Summary
The speaker continues to walk down the street, where the white house’s glass door remains shut against him. The speaker must look within himself every single hour, despite his pain and anger, for the wisdom and ability to follow the white supremacist society’s rules. He vows to keep his heart pure, moral, and proud, despite the infectious poison of hatred generated by racism.
Analysis
In Line 8, the speaker elaborates on the poem’s central metaphor of a white house, revealing that the door is made of glass that “boldly shines” at the speaker as it continues to be shut against him. The glass symbolizes how segregation and legal exclusion functioned at this time in American history: like seeing through a sheet of clear but solid glass, Black people could clearly see how white people received preferential treatment and access to better places (from better schools to the voting booth), but were separated from this privileged reality by a solid wall of exclusion. Furthermore, this shut door “boldly shines,” indicating that the racism the speaker faces is blatant and even proud.
This latter half of the poem primarily functions as a pledge that the speaker makes to himself to summon his “power” and “wisdom” in order to survive in a racist society (Lines 12 and 9). At the same time, the speaker continues to emphasize the extreme efforts that are demanded of Black people to simply operate within such a society. The poem uses repetition—repeating the phrase “Oh, I must” in lines 9 and 13—to reinforce the idea that the speaker must again and again confront the indignities of exclusion and summon the courage to go on. The speaker’s bosom, representative of his emotions, is “sore and raw”—given the constant and pervasive discrimination that he faces, he never has time to heal from the psychic wounds that he confronts, so these wounds are constantly becoming reopened. Exposing the irony of the white society’s characterization of him as a “savage,” the speaker reveals that he must use “superhuman power” to withstand the discrimination that he endures. Contrary to their dehumanization, Black people in fact had to act as “superhumans” to simply obey the laws of this society.
The speaker continues to expose the hypocrisy of this system in line 13, when he highlights that he must obey the “letter of the law.” The “letter” of the law refers to law in a formal, technical sense—a code of written conduct—rather than the “spirit of the law,” a phrase that is used to refer to law’s higher purpose and moral aims. In the unjust society that the speaker describes, segregation and racist laws were legal in the formal sense and enacted on the books, but were contrary to true justice. This distinction between unjust but formally-enacted laws and truly just, moral laws became a central tenet of the Civil Rights Movement and civil disobedience. Martin Luther King, Jr., would later pen essays elaborating on the distinction between just laws that uplift humanity and unjust laws that degrade humanity. Writing in the 1920s, McKay worked toward political resistance again unjust laws as well. Here, however, the speaker summons the ”superhuman” power to “obey the letter of your law!” This is a herculean effort, as the poem’s sole use of an exclamation point indicates.
The poem concludes with a final affirmation of the speaker’s grace in the face of exclusion by the white house. Here, McKay uses a symbol to reinforce this central theme of resilience. Racism and hate are described as a “potent poison” (Line 14). Using alliteration to create emphasis, this phrase captures the infectious and degrading nature of racism. The speaker pledges to keep their heart “inviolate”—free of injury—from this poison.
