American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin ["I lock you in..."]

As its common title states, the sonnet is addressed to the speaker’s past and future assassin. The term “past and future assassin” is puzzling and interesting, since it evokes the idea that the speaker-self will be killed over and over again. The cycle of killing-rebirth-killing becomes not just plausible but certain, when it becomes clear that the “you” also stands for the Black self and the myth of an egalitarian America. Racial injustice did not end with the ending of the Jim Crow laws; instead, it morphed into many different forms and exists in these forms as everyday reality. The poet uses the ubiquitous all-American image of the “gym” to cleverly trace a line between contemporary reality and the historic oppression of the Jim Crow laws. The sort of racial injustice which is the theme of Hayes’s sonnet cycle is not merely prejudice and bias but outright violence against Black Americans. The irony is that such violence stares people in the face in the form of police brutality, murders by white supremacists, and other monstrous acts, yet the myth of race-blind America persists. Many white people still do not question their own role in perpetuating racial injustice.