Answering "The Waste Land": Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Brian Conniff

"Middle Passage"

For all "Schizophrenia's" shortcomings - Hayden would never include it in any of his published collections - the poem's half-hearted experiment in Eliotic voices soon developed into a more pointed and far more powerful response. In "Middle Passage," Hayden once again explored the theme of cultural "schizophrenia," but this time within the historical context provided by his research on the slave trade. This historical material gave him the means by which he could abandon the kind of psychological posturing - the inevitable blending of dreams and consciousness, self and other, world war and private neurosis - Eliot's poetry had helped make fashionable.

"Middle Passage's" most significant element of "social reality," as Harper would put it, was provided primarily by Rukeyser's account of the strange series of events set in motion by the Amistad mutiny. When the mutiny occurred, the Amistad held fifty-three Africans who had been part of a much larger group, probably captured in one of the local wars fought, in those days, primarily for the acquisition of slaves. They had already been dealt by traders in Sierra Leone, sent under a Portuguese flag to the thriving market in Havana, bought by two Spaniards named Ruiz and Montez, placed in irons, and shipped off once again, this time to Guanaja, the main port of Principe. Their capture and transportation violated the decree of Spain of 1817 - and, for that matter, "all the treaties then in existence" among European countries and the United States (Rukeyser 16).

Until the fourth night after the Amistad's departure from Havana, their crossing was much like countless others on the middle passage. Hayden makes this point by constructing the poem's main narrative so that it emerges in the midst of fragments drawn from assorted accounts of earlier journeys. In this way, he is able to tell the story of the Amistad against a background of sickness, madness, fire, rape, and other cruelties:

"Deponeth further sayeth The Bella J

left the Guinea Coast

with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd

for the barracoons of Florida:

"That there was hardly room 'tween-decks for half

the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashioned there;

that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh

and sucked the blood:

"That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest

of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins." (49-50)

On that fourth night, however, the Amistad's journey took an unusual turn. After just about all of the ship's crew had gone to sleep, having spent much of the day battling a storm, the slaves managed to get hold of machetes being sent along to cut sugar cane in the New World. Led by a man named Cinquez - "a powerful young rice planter, a powerful leader" (Rukeyser 18) - they quickly seized control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook, who had threatened them throughout their journey. Then, because they believed they would need experienced sailors to navigate back home, they decided to spare the lives of Montez, Ruiz, and a cabin boy who had helped them as a translator.