The White House

Voiced within the lines of Claude McKay’s 1919 sonnet “The White House” is the smoldering rage and bitter discontent of a generation of Black Americans compelled to live and work in an America that excluded them. Black Americans were routinely denied even the most basic civil rights through a coordinated system of harsh and discriminatory local, state, and federal laws known collectively as Jim Crow legislation. Black citizens were at once Americans and not Americans based on these laws and their societal ramifications. Born in Jamaica, McKay learned when he emigrated to America in his late teens the reality of this discrimination.

Using the image of a shuttered glass door against which the faces of Black Americans are pressed, entrance to this magnificent white house denied them, the speaker refuses to advocate armed resistance, refuses to demand rebellion, and denies hatred as valid response; rather, the poem advocates patience and captures the sullen discontent of Black Americans compelled to bide their time in the long-shot hope that white Americans will come to see their rights as Americans. The poem found an immediate audience in the neighborhoods of New York, where a gathering of influential Black artists—writers, journalists, painters, and composers—had joined together to promote their work (a revolution in cultural advocacy that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance), and for most of the early 1920s McKay’s poetry and essays would be essential in that movement’s growth and influence.

Poet Biography

Claude McKay’s life reflects his struggle to define a clear identity. As a writer with a diverse racial background (although Caribbean, both parents traced their roots to Africa) and who was bisexual at a time when American culture was not tuned to the complexities of sexual orientation, McKay spent most of his adult life moving about the flourishing arts communities of his time, first in New York and then London and Paris, and finally Chicago. As much a writer as a political activist, he tested a number of philosophies to affect real change in America’s entrenched racist culture, including Black activism, Socialist and Communist affiliations, and ultimately Catholicism.

Festus Claudius McKay was born in 1889 in the village of Sunny Ville along the windswept southern coast of Jamaica. McKay was born into comparative prosperity. His father was a successful farmer and parttime carpenter, widely respected in the community. Although his father assumed his son would work the sprawling family farm, the young McKay was more drawn to the books his older brother, an English teacher, loaned him to read. With the encouragement of his mother, McKay dreamed of being a poet. To support himself early on, McKay joined the local police department where, according to his biographers, he first came to terms with his sexual orientation.

Because of his aspirations to write, McKay departed Jamaica in 1912 following the publication of his first collection of poems, Songs of Jamaica, a collection of poems that caught the rhythms and the dialect of the island. He would never return to the island. After starting but not completing college study in agriculture, first in Alabama and then Kansas, McKay arrived in New York City in 1914. He married and worked briefly as a restauranteur in Brooklyn. When the business failed, McKay, determined now to be a poet, abandoned his young family and immersed himself in the energy and freedoms of the burgeoning movement that would come to be called the Harlem Renaissance. His poems, many reflecting his angry observations about white supremacy and Jim Crow racism, began to appear in magazines and newspapers, among them “The White House,” which first appeared in The Liberator, among the most influential publications in Harlem. After a stay in Europe, McKay returned to New York.

Over the next decade, McKay became involved in numerous social and political organizations designed to promote Black identity and Black empowerment as well as workers’ rights and the problematic nature of capitalism (he flirted briefly with Communism). McKay traveled tirelessly around the world as a powerful advocate for American Black rights, exposing the immorality of segregation. During this time, McKay focused on fiction, publishing several well-received novels that exposed racism in America, and later turned to autobiography, publishing in 1937 the landmark A Long Way from Home.

Even as his health began to decline in the early 1940s, McKay, a lifelong atheist but ever intellectually restless, embraced Catholicism, specifically its interest in advancing social and economic reforms as a reflection of Christ’s teaching. In 1946, he moved to Chicago’s South Side to be part of that city’s burgeoning Black Renaissance Movement. He died there two years later, at the age of 58, of complications from heart disease. He was buried in the spacious Calvary Cemetery back in Queens under a simple tablet with the inscription “Peace, O My Rebel Heart,” a line taken from his sonnet “The Tired Worker,” which celebrates the dignity and staying power of the working class.

Poem Text

Your door is shut against my tightened face,  

And I am sharp as steel with discontent;    

But I possess the courage and the grace    

To bear my anger proudly and unbent.   

The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,  

And passion rends my vitals as I pass,  

A chafing savage, down the decent street;  

Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass. 

Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,  

Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,  

And find in it the superhuman power  

To hold me to the letter of your law!  

Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate  

Against the potent poison of your hate.

McKay, Claude. “The White House.” 1919. Poetry.org.

Summary

McKay’s sonnet begins by setting up a tense dialogue between the speaker, who is speaking on behalf of Black America, and “You,” which is white America itself. The metaphor the speaker uses, as the title states, is a white house. The door to the white house is shut against the speaker’s “tightened” face (Line 1). Because of this denied entry, the speaker’s face is “sharp as steel” (Line 2).

Any threat, however, is immediately tempered by the following two lines when the speaker assures a recalcitrant white America that he possesses the “courage and the grace” (Line 3) to bear these indignities with pride and not rebellion. But this stoicism should not be mistaken for a lack of passion. The speaker assures white America as well that “passion rends [his] vitals” (Line 6), even as he appears to walk down the “decent street” (Line 7) while seeing what has been denied through the “glass” (Line 8).

“I must search for wisdom every hour” (Line 9), the speaker maintains, to not fight back. The speaker reminds white America, however, that his “wrathful bosom” (Line 10) is “sore and raw” (Line 10). Indeed, the speaker compares the willingness to abide injustice to a “superhuman power” (Line 11). Expecting anger to be forever deferred is unrealistic and dangerously arrogant. How long, the speaker asks in the face of such injustice, can white America expect the speaker’s people to “hold” (Line 12) to the “letter of your law” (Line 12).

The speaker closes the poem with a couplet, stating, “I must keep my heart inviolate / Against the potent poison of your hate” (Lines 13-14). For the speaker, the systematic discrimination and oppression of Black America is toxic, a deep and abiding social poison that, unaddressed, will eventually poison him.