I HAVE SEEN BLACK HANDS

By: Richard Wright
August 5, 2026

A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.

Douglass Crockwell’s *Paper Workers* (1934)

I am black and I have seen black hands,
     millions and millions of them —
Out of millions of bundles of wool and
     flannel tiny black fingers have reached
     restlessly and hungrily for life.
Reached out for the black nipples at the
     black breasts of black mothers,
And they’ve held red, green, blue, yellow,
     orange, white, and purple toys in the
     childish grips of possession.
And chocolate drops, peppermint sticks,
     lollypops, wineballs, ice cream cones,
     and sugared cookies in fingers sticky
     and gummy,
And they’ve held balls and bats and gloves
     and marbles and jack-knives and
     sling-shots and spinning tops in the thrill
     of sport and play,
And pennies and nickels and dimes and
     quarters and sometimes on New Year’s,
     Easter, Lincoln’s Birthday, May Day, a
     brand new green dollar bill,
They’ve held pens and rulers and maps and
     tablets and books in palms spotted and
     smeared with ink,
And they’ve held dice and cards and
     half-pint flasks and cue sticks and cigars
     and cigarettes in the pride of new
     maturity…

I am black and I have seen black hands,
     millions and millions of them —
They were tired and awkward and c
     alloused and grimy and covered with
     hangnails,
And they were caught in the fast-moving
     belts of machines and snagged and
     smashed and crushed,
And they jerked up and down at the
     throbbing machines massing taller and
     taller the heaps of gold in the banks of
     bosses,
And they piled higher and higher the steel,
     iron, the lumber, wheat, rye, the oats,
     corn, the cotton, the wool, the oil, the
     coal, the meat, the fruit, the glass, and
     the stone until there was too much to be
     used,
And they grabbed guns and slung them on
     their shoulders and marched and
     groped in trenches and fought and killed
     and conquered nations who were
     customers for the goods black hands
     had made.
And again black hands stacked goods
     higher and higher until there was too
     much to be used,
And then the black hands held trembling at
     the factory gates the dreaded lay-off
     slip,
And the black hands hung idle and swung
     empty and grew soft and got weak and
     bony from unemployment and
     starvation,
And they grew nervous and sweaty, and
     opened and shut in anguish and doubt
     and hesitation and irresolution…

IIII

I am black and I have seen black hands,
     millions and millions of them —
Reaching hesitantly out of days of slow
     death for the goods they had made, but
     the bosses warned that the goods were
     private and did not belong to them,
And the black hands struck desperately out
     in defence of life and there was blood,
     but the enraged bosses decreed that
     this too was wrong,
And the black hands felt the cold steel bars
     of the prison they had made, in despair
     tested their strength and found that
     they could neither bend nor break them,
And the black hands lifted palms in mute
     and futile supplication to the sodden
     faces of mobs wild in the revelries of
     sadism,
And the black hands strained and clawed
     and struggled in vain at the noose that
     tightened about the black throat,
And the black hands waved and beat
     fearfully at the tall flames that cooked
     and charred the black flesh…

I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with
     the white fists of white workers,
And some day — and it is only this which
     sustains me —
Some day there shall be millions and
      millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a
     new horizon!

— First published in the June 26, 1934, issue of New Masses (Vol. 11), a prominent American Marxist literary magazine closely associated with the Communist Party.

From Mark Steven’s Red Modernism (2017):

This poem presents a single black subject’s vision of the world and his imagination of a utopian future. It relates the revolutionary blackness of its speaker to the revolutionary class of white workers. Their common “revolt” brings them “side by side,” thus projecting a future of interracial harmony but also a future contingent upon the kind of solidarity promised only by communism. So it is that the shared destiny of black and white is necessarily “red,” with which the metonym of “hands” becomes that of “fists.” It was a vision that did not last. When the USSR abandoned its progressive policies on race and agreed to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the probability implied by “some day” and “some red day” became an apparent impossibility. Wright, along with Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes, would later abandon this enthusiasm for the USSR.

***

I HAVE SEEN BLACK HANDS

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