An Invitation to Madison County by Jay Wright
"An Invitation to Madison County" is a poem by Jay Wright, featured in his second poetry collection, *The Homecoming Singer*. The work explores themes of identity and belonging through the poet's experiences in rural Mississippi during the 1960s. Initially, the poet feels a deep sense of alienation as he navigates a landscape starkly different from New York City. His apprehensions are heightened by the historical context of southern racism, though he encounters no direct hostility during his visit. As the poem progresses, the speaker’s interactions with a rural black family gradually shift his perspective. A pivotal moment occurs when he connects with a young woman who welcomes him without judgment, inviting him deeper into her world. By the end of the poem, Wright reflects on the shared human experience of tension and community, leading to an understanding of cultural connections that transcend his initial discomfort. Overall, the poem serves as a meditation on the search for identity and the significance of cultural traditions within the African American experience.
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An Invitation to Madison County by Jay Wright
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1971 (collected in The Homecoming Singer, 1971)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“An Invitation to Madison County” comes from The Homecoming Singer, Wright’s second book of poetry. In many poems in this work, he portrays places he has lived or visited. He uses these autobiographical materials as springboards from which to launch his search for identity. “An Invitation to Madison County” relates his experiences in rural Mississippi when he toured the South on a fellowship in the 1960’s.
When he first arrives, the poet feels alienated. At the end of the poem, however, he visualizes a common tradition as he begins to communicate with a rural black family. The first three stanzas express the tension the poet feels in Mississippi, far away from the familiar environment of New York City. He is anxious, trying to write in his “southern journal,” but “can’t get down the apprehension,/ the strangeness, the uncertainty” that he feels in the small town. He envisions southern white racism, but nothing happens: “No one has asked me to move over/ for a small parade of pale women,/ or called me nigger, or asked me where I’m from.”
His host picks him up at the airport, and they drive silently through the quiet streets. The speaker is still apprehensive as they approach the small college campus, that, like the poet, seems alien to the environment. Even the conversations of young students and instructors do not break the invisible wall surrounding him; he still feels “not totally out of Harlem.” He wonders how he will let his hosts know that he does not want to listen to pleasantries but rather wants them to teach him something about what it means to be black.
His anxiety begins to dissipate in the next three stanzas, after he meets a young woman who “knows that I can read” and who simply accepts him for what he is. Chatting naturally about the land and her life, she takes him to her home, “a shack dominated by an old stove.” He meets her mother, who treats him as she would any stranger, politely but warily. Despite her dismissal, he stays. After watching him sniff the food and observe her nine-year-old son, the woman senses that he is searching for something. She is right. He is fantasizing about how she is preparing her son to go to the big city and perhaps meet someone like him, a poet “who will tell him all about the city,” and who will understand the boy because he understands his background. The poet, though, does not yet understand these people and their cultural link to himself, so he is “still not here,/ still can’t ask an easy question.” He cannot tell the family why he is here or speak of his preconceived notions about the South.
In the last three stanzas, the poet begins to get beyond his own feelings. He places himself “in Madison County,/ where you buy your clothes, your bread,/ your very life, from hardline politicians.” He sees the road, the escape route to the city, where uncertainty lies. He puts himself in the southern blacks’ place, “listening for your apprehension,/ standing at the window in different shadows,” and finally perceives some of their feelings.
Seeing the similarity of their tensions and fears to his own prepares him to understand what happens when the father comes home from work in the field to have a meal. With only a nod, the man surveys his home and everyone in it and performs the daily ritual: “His wife goes in, comes out with a spoon,/ hands it to you with a gracious little nod,/ and says, ’Such as . . . ’” With this phrase, the poet realizes the sense of community for which he has come. He recalls hearing the phrase from his own mother when she invited anyone in to eat, from black waitresses in the Southwest, and from people in the Harlem ghetto, “when people, who have only themselves to give,/ offer you their meal.”
Throughout his poetic career, Wright returns many times to such places as Mississippi to record the experiences that have given him clues to his identity as an African American. Yet his alienation not only from white society but also from the more conventionally rebellious posture of black artists pushes him to explore cultural traditions other than African, that eventually will provide spiritual and intellectual answers to his questions.
Bibliography
Callaloo 6 (Fall, 1983). Special issue on Jay Wright.
Doreski, C. K. “Decolonizing the Spirits: History and Storytelling in Jay Wright’s Soothsayers and Omens.” In Reading Race in American Poetry: An Area of Act, edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Harris, Wilson. The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.
Kutzinski, Vera M. Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolás Guillén. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Okpewho, Isidore. “From a Goat Path in Africa: An Approach to the Poetry of Jay Wright.” Callaloo: A Journal of the African American and African Arts and Letters 14 (Summer, 1991): 692-726.
Stepto, Robert. “After Modernism, After Hibernation: Michael Harper, Robert Hayden, and Jay Wright.” In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Arts, and Scholarship, edited by Michael S. Harper and Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Stepto, Robert. Introduction to Selected Poems of Jay Wright. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Welburn, Ron. “Jay Wright’s Poetics: An Appreciation.” MELUS 18 (Fall, 1993): 51-70.