Sterling Brown's "Southern Cop" portrays a complex drama of anger, authority, rage and racism; the speaker of this poem is more important than the characters in the poem.
Irony Expresses Anger
Sterling A. Brown’s poem “Southern Cop,” dramatizes the following scene: Ty Kendricks, a rookie cop, shot a Negro who was running out of an alley. The poem does not indicate the reason that a cop was at the scene, nor does it report the reason the Negro was running. It does suggest that the Negro’s reason for running was not because of any guilt.
The speaker of the poem is an angry citizen, whose emotion is so strong that he feels he must resort to verbal irony to express that rage. His assumes his Black audience feels exactly as he does. But he also recognizes that a racist audience will identity with him literally, even though to take him literally shows how bankrupt the exhortations would be: Because Ty Kendricks was a rookie who needed to prove himself, we should decorate him for shooting an innocent man. This is ludicrous, yet the speaker does not really make clear just what Ty Kendricks does deserve.
His emotion builds with each stanza from the first line of the first stanza that would seem not to be ironic at all to the first line of the last stanza that is obviously ironic. The actual irony of the poem is not apparent until halfway through the second stanza.
“Let us forgive Ty Kendricks”
In the opening stanza, the speaker seems quite controlled as he exhorts, “Let us forgive Ty Kendricks.” This request seems to simply offer a Christian value: of course, we should forgive him. We must always forgive those who trespass against us. But at this point we have no idea what it is we are being asked to forgive. Then we learn that a rookie cop has shot a Negro who was running out of an alley. We do not know why the man was running, and neither did Ty Kendricks. Nevertheless, the speaker is asking us to forgive the cop for shooting the Negro.
“Let us understand Ty Kendricks”
In the second stanza, the speaker asks us to understand the cop, and again, this is perfectly literal we feel, as we forgive we understand and vice versa. But then we are told more specifically what we are to understand about Ty Kendricks: The Negro he shot “must have been dangerous” because he was running plus as a rookie, Ty had the opportunity to “prove himself a man.”
It is at this point that we realize that we are being led astray. Surely, there has to be more to it than that. The cop could not have simply thought the Negro was dangerous because he ran. That does not make sense. And we are not apt to feel kindly toward a cop who thinks he is proving his manhood by shooting an innocent suspect.
Now we know the speaker is asking the opposite of what he seems to be asking. He does not really want us to forgive or understand Ty Kendricks; therefore, we can predict that the remaining two stanzas will be spoken with the same kind of irony for the same reason: to blast Ty Kendricks, to brand him a racist, and garner sympathy for the man he shot.
“Let us condone Ty Kendricks”
In stanza three, we are asked to condone Ty Kendricks. Even though we cannot give him a metal, we can at least condone him. But what are we condoning: shooting a man who committed the crime of running? Apparently, whatever the reason for the Negro’s running, it was not, in fact, because of guilt.
But by the time the cop found out the real reason, the Negro was shot and “It was unfortunate.” Of course, it was unfortunate, but is condoning and decorating a cop for a bad shoot really the right thing to do? Of course not, but then the speaker is not really asking that. He is spitting in the face of all racists who might think it good idea to give a racist cop a metal for killing an innocent Negro.
“Let us pity Ty Kendricks”
In the last stanza, the speaker asks us to pity the poor cop; he shot a man for no reason, and then had to stand there and hear the Negro’s family crying and man “moan” while he was dying. But of course, it is not the cop for whom the speaker asks pity; it is the Negro and his family.
The Speaker’s Anger
The speaker of “Southern Cop” wants to impress upon white racists that the Black man will no longer tolerate racism under guise of law enforcement. The fact that the speaker uses irony to describe an unfortunate situation demonstrates the complex nature of forgiving, understanding, condoning, and pitying. The speaker asks these things for Ty Kendricks, but through irony suggests that is it the victim of Kendricks action who better deserves them.
In fact, both the shooting victim and the cop deserve our understanding and pity. We do not know if that young southern cop, Ty Kendricks, was a blatant racist, and from the poem we can infer only that his bad shot was a mistake, and even though the speaker assigns at least some partial motive to Kendricks, we cannot really know the accuracy of the speaker’s implications, especially since the speaker is responding from a position of rage, which is perhaps even tinged with his own racism.
