Wright’s articulates the African American struggle to attain self-conscious personhood while traversing a landscape littered with the remnants of chattel slavery and darkened by the shadow of prejudice and injustice echoes deeply in the natural imagery of “Between the World and Me.” While pondering the skull and the remnants of that tragic night, the speaker is transported back to that awful moment. Though the speaker comes upon the site in the morning, just as "the sun poured yellow surprise into the eye sockets of a stony skull", he feels the ground grip his feet and his heart being "circled by icy walls of fear-". Wright climatically juxtaposes images of violence, religion, and childhood innocence, are brilliantly contrasted by the understated ending in which speaker and skeleton quietly become one. In his dark reverie he imaginatively becomes the unfortunate victim: shivering in the cold of the night wind, hearing the yelps of the pursuing hounds, surrounded by the crowd of cruel faces, bloodied and tortured by callous and inhumane hands. The ignominies he vicariously suffers-beating, sexual humiliation, tarring-and-feathering, and incineration-drive home the horrors of the actual African-American experience in a shockingly immediate
Wright’s articulates the African American struggle to attain self-conscious personhood while traversing a landscape littered with the remnants of chattel slavery and darkened by the shadow of prejudice and injustice echoes deeply in the natural imagery of “Between the World and Me.” While pondering the skull and the remnants of that tragic night, the speaker is transported back to that awful moment. Though the speaker comes upon the site in the morning, just as "the sun poured yellow surprise into the eye sockets of a stony skull", he feels the ground grip his feet and his heart being "circled by icy walls of fear-". Wright climatically juxtaposes images of violence, religion, and childhood innocence, are brilliantly contrasted by the understated ending in which speaker and skeleton quietly become one. In his dark reverie he imaginatively becomes the unfortunate victim: shivering in the cold of the night wind, hearing the yelps of the pursuing hounds, surrounded by the crowd of cruel faces, bloodied and tortured by callous and inhumane hands. The ignominies he vicariously suffers-beating, sexual humiliation, tarring-and-feathering, and incineration-drive home the horrors of the actual African-American experience in a shockingly immediate