The New Negro/ The Warmth of Other Suns

Claude McKay's poem "Baptism" and the The Warmth of Other Suns" story "The River that keeps running" both articulate and illuminate how struggle comes as a necessary means to overcome when attempting to migrate or transform.  The poem deals with the struggle of an individual going into a furnace while the story tells the accounts of two individuals fleeing the south and migrating into the north. 
The story accounts the struggle that both Arrington High and Henry "Box" Brown endured while migrating into the north.  Both in one way/shape or form were confined into shaped wood body cells on a rain route for a little over a day. When the poem reads, the "terror of heat" in reference to the furnace, I believe that it illuminates the route and journey of torment that both when through just as one would go through when entering a furnace.  The "terror of heat" I believe is a metaphor for the horrible conditions that Blacks of the south faced in attempting to flee into the north.
In another line, the poem reads "into the weird depths of the hottest zone" and in relating this line to the story I took it as it being symbolic of the dangerous conditions that where unknown.  In 1857 Henry "Box" Brown spent 16 hours upside down looked in a box, while Arrington High rode the train in a coffin, the conditions were weird and extremely dangerous if caught.
The line of the poem that i believe really illuminated "The river that keeps running" was "my heart shall tremble not its fate to meet, nor mouth give utterance to any moan."  Like in the story, it was "a ritual of last resort," nothing else mattered than being free and seeking better conditions and in the end like in the poem, "I will come out, back to your world of tears, a stronger soul within a finer frame."  This speaks to both body, mind, spirit, matrix, and apparatus transformation and physical migration that both pieces illuminated and reflected when mirrored together.