Hanging punctuation or exdentation is a way of typesetting punctuation marks and bullet points, most commonly quotation marks and hyphens, so that they do not disrupt the 'flow' of a body of text or 'break' the margin of alignment.
send me a better picture and I might be able to do something. I write stuff all the time.
The first use of the phrase is matter-of-fact. In the second stanza, the statement is followed by a period, which shows resignation. However, at the end of the poem, Dunbar almost shouts the phrase defiantly. The mask seems to become something he wears proudly. Through this gradual emphasis on the phrase, Dunbar could be implying that African Americans used the "mask" to hide their suffering and gain a kind of victory against society.
