Tour 5 (1962). Detailed description

“Tour 5” is placed directly after the title poem, “A Ballad of Remembrance,” which is set in New Orleans during Mardi Gras and recounts Hayden’s earliest confrontations with race in the complicated social structure of that southern city. In “Tour 5,” however, a seemingly simple incident, stopping at a small town gas station to fill up the tank, becomes another occasion for confronting racial hatred. The man who serves them is “a rawboned man / whose eyes revile us as the enemy.”

This hatred is underscored by the beauty of the day on a drive that “winds down through autumn hills / in blazonry of farewell scarlet / and recessional gold.” The physical beauties aside, though, the landscape already reveals past violence; the villages he and his companion pass with names like Choctaw and Chickasaw “are all that’s left” of these cultures. Readers are forced to contemplate the reasons for the disappearance of these Native Americans. They must also ask who occupies this beautiful land now.

One answer appears in the next verse, images of both the “rawboned man” and “Confederate sentinels” who guard these towns. But whom are they guarding against? What are the guardians protecting or preventing? Hayden never directly addresses these questions. Instead he turns the reader’s attention to the speaker’s reaction as the journey continues.

Shrill gorgon silence breathes behind
his taut civility
and in the ever-tautening air,
dark for us despite its Indian summer glow.
We drive on, following the route of highwaymen and phantoms.

Hayden articulates the growing sense of dread as well as his sense of shock at being hated so impersonally yet so immediately. The very air seems poisoned by this hatred; violence seems barely restrained. The line “dark for us despite its Indian summer glow” also suggests a certain sadness that such ugliness exists to mar what should be a simple loveliness.

So the poem drives on to its conclusion—invoking slavery and the bloody Civil War. Hayden also calls our attention to the continued marks of that racism—the poverty of “the kindling porches” despite the children who wave to him and his companion from that vantage point. The whole incident has left a bad taste in the speaker’s mouth, recalling as it does the blood and anguish ironically underscored by the lushness of the landscape—“its brightness harsh as bloodstained swords.”

Ultimately, it is not a protest poem, rather one marked by bewilderment and sadness. It contrasts the gloriousness of the natural world with the ways humans disfigure that loveliness through their hatreds. It is a poem that leaves the reader, like the poet, wondering, “Why?”

For Discussion or Writing
1. Locate the route Hayden traces in “Tour 5.” He begins in the South (Georgia). What towns might he have traveled through? Explore the history of the Choctaw and Chickasaw relative to this trail. How does this information help you understand the poem?

2. Hayden paints a picture of his physical surroundings using specific words. Think about the following ones carefully. Why blazonry? Why recessional? Why gorgon? Why flayed? Find out the definitions of these words and discuss their connotations as well. Notice where they are used in the poem.