The following version of the poem was used to create this guide: McKay, Claude. "A Midnight Woman to the Bobby." Songs of Jamaica, digital edition. https://scalar.lehigh.edu/mckay/a-midnight-woman-to-the-bobby

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Claude McKay was born Festus Claudius McKay in a village in Jamaica in 1890. He was one of eight children and his parents were both farmers. His father, a very religious man of Ashanti descent, was known for being strict, while his mother, whose family roots were in Madagascar, was a nurturing figure. Early on, while living with his elder brother, he fell in love with literature, particularly English poetry and Shakespeare. By age 10, he was writing poems of his own. He had a brief apprenticeship as a woodworker, but soon met a writer named Walter Jekyll, who encouraged him to pursue the publication of his own work. McKay was soon awarded a fellowship from the Jamaican Institute, which allowed him to write Songs of Jamaica, the first poems published in Jamaican Patois.

With his fellowship stipend, he traveled to the United States, where he was shocked by the racism he encountered. In Harlem, a historic Black neighborhood of New York City, however, he found a circle of other Black intellectuals who became collaborators, lovers, and lifelong friends. In Harlem, McKay's politics coalesced (he would become a prominent advocate for socialism) and his poetry grew, with his later works containing his most potent critiques of racism. McKay travelled the world, but eventually became a citizen of the United States, where he died in 1948. This poem, like many of his works, shows a realistic character presented with the idiosyncratic speech of dialect verse: an experienced prostitute confronting a young police officer.