Journal # 11

After reading Hopkin's As the Lord Lives, He is One of our Mother's Children, and Mckay's poems I decided to focus my question of perplexity on how African Americans truly felt about America and what their views were on living here.

In Mckay's If We Must Die poem, it states that African Americans are "hunted" and "penned" by angry dogs (white men). He refers to white men as a "cowardly pack" and states Africans accomplished a difficult task by fighting back even though they were outnumbered. This poem conveys that African Americans were treated unjustly and extremely cruel; they wished to be treated nobly and with respect but America did not give offer them any of those qualities.

In the poem America Mckay gives mixed emotions about how African Americans felt about America. In the beginning he explains how America "feeds me bread of bitterness," "sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth," and steals people's breath of life. This negative connotation describing America definitely shows that blacks did not enjoy living in America. But later in the poem Mckay changes his view and talks about how he loved "this cultured hell," and that people stand within America's walls with no fear.

In Outcast Mckay describes how African Americans were born far away from their home and wish that they could experience living in their native land. He says that "his soul would sing forgotten jungle songs," but how he was never able to hear those native songs and how something within him was lost.  He uses strong diction to describe how awful it was to live in America; he says he'll never hope for full release, and how he is "under the white man's menace." He also states how the "western world holds me in a fee."

These three different poems portray that, overall, African Americans probably hated living in America where they didn't have their own rights and freedom and because it made them grow a part from their native origins. But a part of them may have liked it according to the poem Ameirca because it gave them protection or some sense of opportunity to learn about new cultures and ideas.