The White House

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1919

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Glass Door with Shutters

To suggest the delicate balance in racist America between genuine opportunity and the hopelessness and frustration inevitable in the realization of the entrenched reality of segregation, the poem uses the image of a “shuttered door of glass” (Line 8). Within the poem’s metaphor, the poet walks down the street, perhaps protesting, perhaps just going to work, and can see inside an imposing white building but is forever denied access to that building. Even the glass door, which provides that access, is shuttered. It is fitted with wooden slats that make seeing inside that much more difficult. Everything about a glass door invites; after all, unlike more conventional wooden doors, a glass door reveals what is inside, completely eliminates any surprise, and in turn makes implicit the welcome-in. The poet uses that sort of invitational dynamic ironically to suggest the hypocrisy of white America.

Certainly, Black people were technically free in a segregated America—slavery had been abolished more than a half century earlier—free to do anything, certainly, but permitted to do very little. That is where the glass door becomes a critical symbol. If the glass door reveals the culture to which Black people are part, the glass door also suggests a formidable barrier to that same culture. Black people in a segregated society see everything that a free society, a functioning democracy, a market-driven economy promises its citizens, everything that Black people are denied. Thus, the shuttered effect suggests at once the promise and the denial of that promise. The poem suggests in turn that Black people be content to metaphorically walk past the white house and accept as inevitable the “superhuman” power not to give in to anger, not to shatter that glass door.

The Burning Pavement

The pavement in McKay’s city is burning. As the poet impatiently, angrily walks past the white house with its beckoning but shuttered glass door, the poet notes that beneath his feet the “pavement slabs burn loose” (Line 5), that is, burn to the point of coming apart. It is a surreal image with levels of allegorical suggestion within a Christian vision. Fire suggests perdition, a place of intemperate suffering; for the poet, hell is the endless cycle of racial repression and segregation. But fire is more than a brutal space of relentless punishment. Within the Christian vision, fire also suggests the hope in eventual (perhaps approaching?) apocalyptic cleansing. With burning slabs of pavement, the poet symbolizes how the wrath of frustrated and bitter Black people will ultimately be felt in very streets of the city where they are so casually, so routinely denied.

In the image of burning pavement, the poet suggests perhaps the quiet anger of peaceful protests, an emerging element of life in New York City in the 1920s. Refusing to batter down the shuttered glass door, that is, refusing to give in to violence, Black people sought to use protest—their signs, their slogans, their speeches—symbolically to make the pavement hot. The city itself feels the heat of their anger, absorbs their discontent, and in turn, radiates that heat.

The suggestion here is that white people’s treatment of disenfranchised Black people has rendered the city a kind of Hell. The pavement, the otherwise “decent” (Line 7) streets, are themselves aflame. It is as if the world itself understands the danger, the threat of Black frustration. But fire suggests as well the fast-approaching cleansing wrath associated with the apocalypse itself, the Biblical much-promised fire next time that will mark, at last, the emergence of righteous Black pride and the genuine hope of ending segregation. Until fire consumes the city symbolically, until the place of Black people in white America is secured, the poet cautions as he walks the streets, denied hope, refused a place, that he can feel the heat of his anger beginning to rise in the very pavement of the city.

Poison

The poem closes comparing segregation itself to a poison. That poison, the poet argues, has already infected white America, destroyed its moral capacity to see that what it is doing to Black people is opposed by every argument in a democratic society. The logic behind the symbol of poison gives the poem what little optimism it can share: If white America has elected to administer this poison to itself, then surely it can elect not to.

Until that time, however, the poet closes with a careful promise not to let the poison of such hate infect his own heart. In this the poet suggests that Black people cannot abdicate their own moral sensibility, cannot answer the indignities and brutalities of racism with hate of their own. Poison is poison—and the poet cautions that, against such time as white America will come to see the obscenity of racism, until that time, “I must keep my heart inviolate / Against the potent poison of your hate” (Lines 13-14).

In this, the poet flips the argument against white America by suggesting that it has already succumbed to the poison of hate and that, in turn, Black Americans have the moral high ground by refusing to respond with hate, with anger. Rather, Black people will bide their time, will keep their wrath in their heart, “sore and raw” (Line 1), will hold to the “letter of the law” (Line 12) and allow white America itself the chance to recognize its own grievous moral failure. Poison cannot be cured with more poison. Despicable behavior cannot be remedied by despicable behavior; hate cannot be eliminated by more hate; anger cannot be overcome by anger.