“Street Song”: Double Jeopardy

Pictured: Emmett Till in the 1956 newspaper headlines
Judging from poems such as “Street Song,” Plath seemed to view herself as very blessed, coming from madness intact and in love, but never forgetting her past. This is the most obvious interpretation of “Street Song.” A closer look at the poem, written on October 4, 1956, shows that something is seriously wrong with the world and that this person should not be let out free. The miracle of freedom is a “mad” one, and this freed person walks among the “common rout,” “rout” meaning a disorderly mob or assembly intent on committing an illegal act. The poem’s subject “reeks of the butcher’s cleaver,” and has no “heart and guts” any longer, “bloodied” and suggesting that the person is a killer.
When Plath wrote “Street Song,” the trial had recently finished over the murder of the 14-year-old African-American boy, Emmett Till. Till allegedly flirted with a married 21-year-old woman. The woman told her husband, and he and his brother kidnapped Till, beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, and then shot him in the head. They dumped the boy’s body in the Tallahatchie River, weighed down with a 70-pound cotton gin fan and barbed wire. Law enforcement and media initially decried the violence against Till, but when the state of Mississippi was nationally criticized, the Mississippians eventually began to defend the killers and their state’s reputation. Plath’s “white-jacketed assassins” detail suggests the Ku Klux Klan.
The September 1955 trial attracted worldwide press attention. After five days, the killers were acquitted of kidnapping and murder, and the world was appalled with headlines of shock as far away as France and Portugal. On January 24, 1956, in a LOOK magazine interview, the killers Bryant and Milam admitted to killing him but were protected against conviction by double jeopardy.
In the literary world, Langston Hughes dedicated a poem known as “Mississippi—1955” to Emmett Till in October of 1955 which was reprinted across the country. William Faulkner wrote two essays on Till, one published in Harper’s in June 1956 challenging segregation. The event would inspire many other artistic works and became a pivotal moment in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Later in 1958, Plath expressed sympathy toward the African-American’s plight, and disgust toward bigotry after the news story that a Black man named Jimmy Wilson got the death sentence for stealing $1.95 (UJ, 419).
Some of the interpretation of “Street Song” has been excerpted from a presentation given in February 2014 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, for the Racial Formation/Racial Awareness Graduate Conference.
ACQUITTAL, AFRICAN-AMERICAN, AFRICAN-AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, ASSASSINS, BLACK, DOUBLE JEOPARDY, EARLY POEM, EMMETT TILL, EMMETT TILL TRIAL, INJUSTICE, JIMMY WILSON, KU KLUX KLAN, LANGSTON HUGHES, MISSISSIPPI, PLATH POEM, RACISM, SEGREGATION, STATE OF MISSISSIPPI, STREET SONG, SYLVIA PLATH, WILLIAM FAULKNER