e to its radical content, or the speaker possibly thought that the problem is better attacked in this fashion. The speaker has the same feelings towards the idea of racism as the speaker in Power, but he is presenting his feeling in a different way, through satirical methods and a joke.In Slim in Hell, we have images of the white man gambling, getting drunk, and terrorizing blacks. Lots of folks fightin/At de roulette wheel (57,58). Showed him giant stills/Going everywhere/Wid a passel of devils,/Stretched dead drunk there (73-76). White devils wid pitchforks/Threw black devils on (81,82). Through the images conjured up in these passages, we can see the gambling, drinking, and antagonizing of blacks by the white man. There are various passages that allude to the thought that the whites are devils, or the oppressors, if you take a deeper look at the passages. The passel of devils does not say that the whites are the devils, but the people being alluded to are the whites. A passage that directly says that the whites are the devils is Den de devil gave Slim/De big Ha-Ha;/An turned into a cracker (89-91). The word cracker here is significant of a white person. If we put together this mix of imagery, we get images of anger in a satirical sense. The imagery in Power, on the other hand, shows the speakers anger, powerlessness, and other images. The powerlessness is conveyed through the following passage, ...until she let go the first the first real power she ever had/and lined her own womb with cement/to make a graveyard for our children (37-39). This is the lack of power of the black woman in the jury, of her not being able to make her own choice in the face of eleven white males. One of the more revolting images in the poem is the image of the child a dead child dragging his shattered black/face of the edge of my sleep/blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders (7-9). This disturbing image uses some very strong words to con...
