On a hot-dog stand along South State Street, Frank Marshall Davis places Joe, a man whose face is described with the strange precision of a portrait. The opening sentence slows the eye: “A great oak brown face, a strange face with inch and a half eyes placed three inches above two mustache guarded lips has Joe.” The main verb “has” arrives late, as if the speaker is measuring Joe feature by feature before naming him. “Oak” gives the face weight and endurance, yet the measurements and the word “strange” make him seem both seen and not fully known. The poem’s central interest is exactly that gap: Joe’s hands sell hot dogs while his mind lives elsewhere.
The form is free verse with long, almost prose-like lines. No rhyme scheme governs it; instead, ellipses create a halting rhythm, the pauses of a man drifting between present labor and past loss. The phrase “his eyes seldom see what they gaze upon” introduces the split that structures the poem. Joe’s “seventy year old voice” belongs to a man of fifty, a detail that makes grief itself seem to have aged him. He “swims in a sea of yesterdays,” and the metaphor turns memory into an element that can drown. The simile that follows is even harsher: memories of better times “beat against his mind like a lash.” Here the past is not a comfort; it punishes.
Joe’s own speech is the poem’s emotional center. Davis lets the vendor’s voice arrive in its own idiom: “Way back down home,” he says, “I used to didn’t know no trouble . . . but the Wah came and I lost two sons and my wife died and I came up No’th . . .” The spellings “Wah” and “No’th” preserve the sounds of his speech rather than correcting them, and the poem does not translate his grief into standard diction. He speaks while his “brown hands paint red frankfurters a thick yellow with French’s mustard.” The verb “paint” gives the ordinary task a small artistry, and the bright colors—red, yellow, brown—keep the scene concrete. Yet the sentence also shows a man whose lips tell one story while his hands tell another: work is automatic, speech is memory.
That contrast returns in the closing lines. “He sells another and still he sees dreamed-of things with his eyes while his hands make a living.” The word “still” carries the poem’s weight. The sale changes nothing; the dreamed-of things remain. Repeating “his hands make a living” frames survival as routine labor while the inner life stays fixed on loss. The profile form matters too: a profile is a side view, incomplete, but by giving Joe direct speech, the poem moves from external observation toward something more intimate.
The significance of “South State Street Profile” lies in its refusal to treat a street-corner worker as scenery. It records the speech, the brand names, the colors, and the grief that pass unnoticed in a quick transaction. Joe is not a symbol; he is a particular man whose body works in the North while his mind drowns in the South and in the war-years he left behind. That split—between selling and remembering, between present survival and past loss—is the poem’s real subject, and it makes a hot-dog seller’s profile feel like a portrait of endurance.