A Black Man Talks of Reaping

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and death. 

The poem alludes to the US’s history of slavery and racism. The exact terms never appear in the poem, but the poem is an allegory, so the meaning is implicit. After the Civil War ended in 1865, slavery was abolished. Before then, white enslavers forced millions of enslaved Black people to work in fields. Like the speaker, the enslaved Black people didn’t benefit from their labor, and neither did their children. Post-slavery, Black people faced unjust labor conditions, as the South, where Bontemps was born, developed racist laws, like the Black Codes or Jim Crow, to maintain the inequality that existed during slavery. Only nominally free, the racist policies compelled Black people to sign contracts with white farmers that gave them little money or freedom. They worked as sharecroppers, living off the land of a white enslaver, buying all their supplies from them, and giving them a sizable portion of their crops. In the words of the poem, Black farmers and sharecroppers continued to consume “bitter fruit” (Line 12). 

In the early 20th century, Bontemps’s family regularly read reports about white people lynching or attacking Black people. Bontemps’s father experienced this threatening prejudice in Louisiana when Bontemps was a child. According to scholar Kirkland C. Jones, Bontemps’s father was out shopping for his family one night when two unfamiliar white men threatened to run him over. As an adult, Bontemps witnessed further racism. While teaching in Alabama, he became drawn to the Scottsboro Boys: In 1931, two white women accused nine Black teenagers of sexually assaulting them on a train. The accusations were false, but people wanted to lynch the teenagers. The Scottsboro Boys revealed how little progress America had made since the prohibition of slavery. As the speaker puts it, for all the work Black people have done, they still don’t have much they “can show” (Line 8).