I suggest that teachers begin with McKay's love poems. This approach allows students to relate to McKay on a purely human level and prepares them for the discomforting racial themes that dominate some of the other poems. Students respond to the persistent racism in American society. Some non-black students want to know why they have to read such poems.
Some students object to the eroticism of the love poems.
This finely wrought poem, which expresses the poet's deep longing for Jamaica, his beloved homeland, highlights McKay's interest in nonracial themes. Identify the metaphor in the first and last stanzas of the poem. Describe the poem's central metaphor and explain the reference to the South. Explain the poem's central theme and describe the prophecy the speaker relates in the final quatrain. It is essential that students get a sense of what it was like to be black in America during the early decades of this century.