Langston Hughes's "Mississippi—1955": a note on revisions and an appeal for reconsideration

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Christopher Metress

The next version, which appeared in the 1967 collection The Panther and The Lash: Poems of Our Times, raises even more problems and at once makes "Mississippi" both more and less a poem of its time. To begin with, the copyright acknowledgments suggest that Hughes has taken this version of "Mississippi" from the Negro Digest, where, according to this same acknowledgment (but not according to fact), the poem was "first printed."

Surprisingly, however, the Panther and Lash version contains some striking differences. Several of the revisions made between 1955 and 1965 have been reversed. The poem is once again broken into three stanzas, and several of the 1965 punctuation decisions have been rescinded. The most significant revisions, however, appear in the radical alterations of the final stanza:

"Mississippi"

Oh, what sorrow!
Oh, what pity!
Oh, what pain
That tears and blood
Should mix like rain
And terror come again
To Mississippi.

Again?
Where has terror been?
On vacation? Up North?
In some other section
Of the Nation,
Lying low, unpublicized?
Masked--with only
Jaundiced eyes showing
Through the mask?

Oh, what sorrow, pity, pain,
That tears and blood
Still mix like rain
In Mississippi.

The Panther and the Lash version returns the first stanza to its original 1955 form. The second stanza receives only minor revisions. "Come" is omitted from the first line, leaving "again" to carry all the weight. The dash is returned to its position after "Masked," but then "showing" is moved from the beginning of the final line of the stanza to the end of the previous line. These two decisions--to return the dash Hughes removed in 1965 and shifting the position of a word--show once again that Hughes is aware of the awkwardness of these lines (an awkwardness which he was never really able to work out). However, none of these revisions is as revealing as the ones that occur in the final stanza. If Hughes asks in the second stanza of the poem "Where has terror been?" we may now feel compelled to ask Hughes, Where did terror go? The new final stanza omits any reference to "terror." Moreover, the "clammy cold / Remain" of the original poem is now gone. In Hughes's defense, this omission makes sense, and he was m oving toward this in his Negro Digest version when he deemphasized "remain" by removing it from its privileged position at the end of the poem. With each revision of the poem, Hughes rewrote it further out of its historical situation. First, he removed the marker "1955" and the dedication to Till. Then, he tucked "remain" within, rather than keeping it positioned at the end, of the poem. Finally, in this 1967 version, he takes the logical step of effacing any trace of Till's remains from the poem.

The most recent appearance of "Mississippi" is in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. This 1994 version mirrors, with only two minor exceptions, the version from The Panther and the Lash. The second stanza is no longer italicized and the last line gets an exclamation point. Neither change is significant, and the poem is otherwise a faithful transcription: