Chapter-II

Langston Hughes: A People’s Poet

I’ve no body to talk for me

So I’ll talk for myself

-Langston Hughes (Scottsboro Limited 45).

 
A chief figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes gravitated

towards the nostalgic memory of his land. He gives expression to the present

grim reality about the Blacks in America and the glorious past the Blacks

enjoyed in their homeland, Africa. Langston Hughes himself declares elsewhere

“The major aims of my work have been to interpret and comment upon Negro

life, and its relations to the problems of Democracy’’ (“Some Practical

Observations: A Colloquy’’ 307).

Langston Hughes invariably expressed his love for Black identity in his

poems – glorious dreams of the Blacks, their nostalgic memories of their land of

copper sun, their utter helplessness in a hostile political climate, their grim

struggle for freedom and equality; and this he does by making use of their own

forms of expression, their language, their music, and folk verse. Hughes has

ever been acutely conscious of the agonising experiences of his people in the

hostile White world, and during his fairly long poetic career, he has done his

best to awaken the slumbering conscience of his people through his works.

38 
 
 This chapter is devoted to his happy reminiscences of his mother land,

the racial pride of his people and their color and the heartbreaking experiences

of humiliation and harassment they underwent and their helplessness in the

unfriendly political atmosphere in America. Onwuchekwa states: “Hughes has

always stressed the social responsibility of the Black artist, and no doubt saw

his own career as fulfilling that socially responsible role’’ (Langston Hughes:

An Introduction to the Poetry 15).

Hughes has ever been conscious of the bitter experiences of his people

in the unfriendly White world, and during his poetic career, he has done his best

to bring about an awakening among his people through his works. The fact that

the Blacks have been second-rate citizens in America, the inequality before law,

and the callousness of the Whites who have always treated the Blacks with

contempt, make Hughes fret and fume and hence in some of his poems he goes

to the extent of inciting his people to meet violence with violence if need be

(The Panther and the Lash 39).

Carl Sandburg wrote: “I am with nigger. / Singer of Songs, / Dancer,’’

(qtd in Arnold Rampersad 44). Langston Hughes, while glorifying their free life

in the past, now bemoans their lot at present in White America. In a profound

historical vision, Hughes juxtaposes a contrary picture of the Blacks’ of the

ancient days and the Blacks’ of the modern days in the poem “Negro:’’

39 
 
 I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black.
Black like the depths of my Africa.
-----------------------------------------------------------

I’ve been a worker:

Under my hand the Pyramids arose.
I made mortar for the Woolworth building

- ( The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 24).

The history of the Blacks can be summed up in one word “Suffering’’

down the ages—from ancient times of slavery to the contemporary Negro now

caught in the grip of American materialism and civilization. There is no

difference to the unmitigated sufferings undergone by the Blacks. Through the

ages they are a suppressed a lot – either the case of an ancient slave dragging

stones to build Pyramids or the case of a modern Negro carrying mortar for the

construction of Woolworth Building. It has been the same old story of endless

torture and ineffable cruelty. But they never sag but they stay in their feet

because of the essential musical culture bred in their bones. Though the ill-

treatment meted out to the Blacks continues even in the modern times to the

extent of their hands being cut-off in the Congo or his being lynched, he never

lies down resigning himself to his lot.

Langston Hughes is far from being happy in the mist of material

civilization of America and in the poem “Our Land’’ he recalls his sweet

homeland Africa -- a land of unspoilt nature.  Theirs is the land of joy. They are

given to gay abandon, making love, drinking wine and singing song. This is in

40 
 
contrast to America where they happen to live amidst taboos, inhibitions and

restrictions. Langston Hughes longs for his homeland-- a land of joy, song, love

and dance:

We should have a land of sun,

Of gorgeous sun,
And a land of fragrant water
Where the twilight
Is a soft bandanna handkerchief
Of rose and gold,
And not this land where life is cold.
-------------------------------------------
Ah, we should have a land of joy.
Of love and joy and wine and song,
And not this land where joy is wrong

- (The Weary Blues 99).

Hughes confesses that all the menial jobs were done by the Black people in

America. Hughes referred to his people as “Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands

of fate.” It expressed a sense he would voice again, most notably in Not

Without Laughter, where the protagonist, Sandy, ponders the question of Negro

poverty. Were Negroes “poor, because they were dancers, jazzers, clowns?…

The other way round would be better: dancers because of their poverty; singers

because they suffered; laughing all the time because they must forget’’ (qtd in

Faith Berry 91). He describes the nature and fate of the Black masses in his

poem “Laughers:”

41 
 
 Dream- singers all,
Story- tellers
Dancers,
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate –
My People.

Dish-washers,
Elevator-boys,
Ladies’ maids,
Crap-shooters,
Cooks,
Waiters,
Jazzers,
Nurses of babies,
Loaders of ships,
Rounders,
Number writers,
Comedians in vaudeville
And band-men in circuses-
Dream-singers all,-
My people.

Story-tellers all,-
My people.
Dancers-
God! What dancers!
Singers-
God! What singers!
Singers and Dancers
Dancers and laughers.
Laughers?

Yes, laughers…laughers…laughers-
Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands
Of Fate
-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 27-28).

Hughes’s people are the lower classes, the urban folk: porters, bell-boys,

elevator-boys, shoe shine boys, cooks, waiters, nurse maids, rounders,

42 
 
gamblers, drunks, piano players, cabaret singers, chorus girls, prostitutes,

pimps, and ordinary, descent, hard- working- men and women. These are the

“low-down folks, the so-called common element, the ones who crowd the street

corners, stoops, bars, beauty shops and barber shops and churches, hot rented

rooms and stuffy apartments all over the Black sections of cities. They are the

dwellers on Beale Street, State street and Seventh Street, Central Avenue and

Lenox Avenue. They are the ones who made Chicago’s South Side and New

York’s Harlem both famous and infamous. His treatment of them is stark and

unsentimental, capturing at once the wretchedness and beauty of their lives. As

Charles S.Johnson has pointed out, there is in Hughes’s depiction of them “ no

pleading for a sympathy, or moralizing; there is moments blinding perception of

a life being lived fiercely beneath the drunken blare of the trombones, or in

blank weariness of the Georgia roads” (qtd in Onwuchekwa Jemie 26).

The racial pride of Hughes is registered in the poem “My People”.

Langston Hughes is proud of the land, though to others, it is a dark continent

and he is always proud of the people, though to others, they are black.  The stars

are beautiful in the dark night. The eyes of the Blacks are beautiful in their

Black bodies. Above all the souls of his people are beautiful.

The night is beautiful,

So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,

So the eyes of my people.

43 
 
 Beautiful, also, is the sun
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 36).

Elizabeth P.Myers writes:

Hughes, unlike Cullen and Toomer, the fellow- Black poets of Harlem
Renaissance, has always been proud of his color and race, a pride he has
inherited from his grandmother

(Langston Hughes : Poet of His People 16).

Hughes portrays the soul beauty of the Black Peoples’ in the poem “My

Beloved’’. Music is the inborn trait of Black people. In their writings, they will

“make a record of the beauty” of the White people. They write words about the

White people. They write poems about the White people that will live a

thousand years and it will show the love and affection towards the beloved

White people:

Shall I make a record of your beauty?

Shall I write words about you?
Shall I make a poem that will live a thousand
years and paint you in the poem?

-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 36).

The Black people never hate or envy the White people because their faces

are beautiful like a whirling light of loveliness and brightness. The Blacks

always show affection towards them and they even admire their beauty.

Hughes wonders why the white people hate and torture the Blacks.
44 
 
 I do not hate you,
For your faces are beautiful, too.
I do not hate you,
Your faces are whirling lights of loveliness and splendour, too.
Yet why do you torture me.
O, white strong ones,
Why do you torture me?

- (“The White Ones” The Collected Poems of

Langston Hughes 37).

The emotional emphasis in this poem is brought out by the use of rhetorical

device called quaesitio a string of question uttered in rapid succession.

Langston Hughes explores the modern civilization as a circus of

civilization: “And as lions, tigers, and elephants, nature’s majestic creatures

created to live free, are trapped and harnessed for entertainment and profit, so

have the non-white peoples of the world been converted from human beings

into natural resources in the western “circus of civilization” (Langston Hughes :

An Introduction to the Poetry 98).

Now they’ve caged me

In the circus of civilization.
Now I herd with the many-
Caged in the circus of civilization

- (“Lament for Dark People’’ The Collected

Poems of Langston Hughes 39).

The poet emphasis of the Blacks having been trapped in modern

civilization is revealed by the use of the rhetorical device called Epistrophy

which means repeating words at the end of every successive clause.

45 
 
 Hughes portrays the daunted picture of the people in the civilized Africa:

“Uprooted from a natural environment of palms and forests and silver moons,

Blacks in America suffocate in a prison of skyscrapers and industrial smog” 

(Langston Hughes : An Introduction to the Poetry 98).

We cry among the skyscrapers

As our ancestors
Cried among the palms in Africa
Because we are alone,
It is night,
And we are afraid
-(“Afraid’’ The Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes 41).

The Blacks’ ancestors cried among the palms in Africa. They felt

alienated in their land and they were cried in the midst of the skyscrapers.

Hughes urges the Blacks to overcome these emotional obstacles, pains,

sufferings, emptiness and vagueness towards their life. He wants his people, not

to depend on someone for something. Like the rest of his brethren trapped in

this circus, he tosses weary and sleepless, his soul “empty as the silence”.

Instead of lounging in sorrow and despair, the Black must boldly seek ways and

means to face the present situation and emerge successful:

My soul
Empty as the silence,
Empty with a vague,
Aching emptiness,
Desiring,
Needing someone,
Something

46 
 
 -(“Summer Night’’  The Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes 59).

The White people do not understand the inner cry of the Black people because

“my mouth/ is wider with laughter’’ and “my feet are gay with dancing’’.

Physically, they are pretending, they are singing, dancing and merry-making but

their heart is aching and dying:

 Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry?
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing.
You do not know
I die?
- (“Minstrel Man’’  The Collected Poems
of Langston Hughes 61).

Hughes “Star Seeker’’ compares the White people with the ‘flaming star’.

Stars are beautiful in the midst of the dark sky but if the Black touches them, it

burns their hands. Likewise, White people are beautiful in the midst of the

Blacks. If Black people touch them, then they will turn like flaming stars.

I have been a seeker

Seeking a flaming star.
And the flame white star
Has burned my hands
Even from a far

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 64).

47 
 
 Here is a veiled suggestion of untouchability practised by the Whites. In

Visions of Dusk (1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916) Fenton Johnson depicts

civilization. Instead of glorifying white high culture, Fenton Johnson spurns it,

as Pound would do in writing of Europe as “an old bitch gone in the teeth,” and

“a botched civilization.” Unlike Pound, however, Fenton Johnson does so from

an unmistakably racial perspective:

I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody else’s

Civilization.
Let us take a rest, M’Lissy Jane.
I will go down to the Last chance Saloon, drink a gallon or
two of gin, shoot game or two of dice and asleep the
rest of the night on one of Mike’s barrels.
You will let the old shanty go to rot, the white people’s
clothes turn to dust, and the cavalry Bapist Church
sink to the bottomless pit….
Throw the children into the river; civilization has given us
too many. It is better to die than it is to grow up and
find out that you are colored.
Pluck the stars out of the heavens. The stars mark our
Destiny. The stars marked my destiny.
I am tired of civilization.

-(“Langston Hughes and Approaches to Modernism

in the Harlem Renaissance”306).

Anne Borden examines Hughes’ discovery of gender and race relations in his

works:

Gender and race converge for Hughes’s female characters, who confront
gender racial myths in their exploration of identity. 

48 
 
 (“Heroic ‘Hussies’and ‘Brilliant Queers’:
Genderracial Renaissance in the works of
Langston Hughes” 325).

Hughes presents the centuries of the history of the Blacks in a capsule since

they were brought in chains from the shores of their mother Africa. In

“History”:

The past has been a mint

Of blood and sorrow
That must not be
True of tomorrow

- (The Panther and the Lash 69).

The Blacks have been groaning under the burden of life with sorrow as their

sole companion. It is as though Black meant sorrow, pain and segregation. Their

blood has been shed by the white masters for their slightest mistake. The past as

a mint had produced only blood and sorrow for them. To Hughes blood and

sorrow are a thing of the past. Hughes ends the poem by urging the Backs to get

ready for a prolonged struggle to achieve their goal and so he says, "that must

not be true of tomorrow”. They should resist the forces and try to end social

injustice and inequality they have suffered so far. Hughes in optimistic tone

awakens the Blacks for a better tomorrow.

Wine-maiden
Of the jazz-tuned night,
Lips
49 
 
 Sweet as purple dew
Breasts
Like the pillows of all sweet dreams,
Who crushed
The grapes of joy
And dripped their juice
On you?

- (The Weary Blues 35).

“To a Black Dancer in ‘The Little Savoy’” successfully captures the cabaret hall

atmosphere giving rise to a very pleasing illusion to the Blacks. This is a song

on a beautiful Black girl, a dancer in a night club. The night is rich because it is

jazz tuned night, and the Black girl, a breath-taking beauty whirls in front of the

Black audience who have had a few sips of wine. So the whole atmosphere is

heady as wine and helps the audience forget the weariness of their long day’s

work and other problems for the moment. The dancer with her inexpressible

beauty and graceful movements holds the audience in a thrall. “Lips / sweet as

purple dew” besides attesting to her freshness bears close resemblance to

Keats’s “Purple-stained mouth,” Her ample bosoms like the pillows can. Usher

the Black into a world of sweet dreams. Perhaps, she, being shapely and

statuesque, brings with her an aura of youthful joy and happiness and her very

presence is an antidote to the pain and sorrows of the Blacks and a balm to their

hurt soul. Hence the poet in great excitement asks. “Who crushed / The grapes

of joy / And dripped their juice /on you?” thus the girl is very essence of

happiness and she is able to infect the Black audience with happiness. No
50 
 
wonder the poet calls her wine-maiden for she is as life-giving and as

transforming as wine.

Langston Hughes explores the convergence of race and gender in Black

men’s and women’s lives, questioning binary constructions of identity and

exploring sensuality in social change. In “Ruby Brown” Black domestic work is

contrasted with the work of Black female prostitutes. A young woman, sitting

on the back porch of her White employer, polishing the silver, is struck by two

questions:

What can a colored girl do

On the money from a white woman’s kitchen?
And ain’t there any joy in this town?

-( The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 73).

The economic realities of sex work are reflected in Ruby Brown’s decision to

work in prostitution. She searches for joy among her sisters and brothers in “the

sinister shuttered houses of the bottoms.” Her motives for becoming a prostitute

reflect tragic economic need, not “looseness” or moral corruption on her part.

Hughes writes:

…the white men,

Habitues of the high shuttered houses,
Pay more money to her now
Than they ever did before,
When she worked in their
Kitchens

-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 73).

51 
 
As Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar have suggested in their analysis of

women writers, Hughes lends a subversive quality to his “mad women.”

Imagery of nakedness is heavy in Hughes’s discussion of women’s identity

struggles, suggesting an awareness of women’s sexuality as a site of resistance

(qtd in Anne Borden 330).The sharp and mysterious “Strange Hurt,” describes a

female who seeks out storms from shelter, “fiery sunshine” from shade. Hughes

concludes:

In months of snowy winter

When cozy houses hold,
She’d break down doors
To wander naked
In the cold

-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 63).

In “March Moon,” Hughes uses irony to break down constructions of female

sexuality, while connecting it with broad issues of power and inequality. The

social construction of female shame is addressed through an ironic examination

of the bright bare moon:

The moon is naked.

The wind has undressed the moon.
The wind has blown all the cloud –garments
Off the body of the moon
And now she’s naked.
Stark naked.

But why don’t you blush,

52 
 
 O shameless moon?
Don’t you know
It isn’t nice to be naked?

-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 93).

As a poem about women, “March Moon” unveils the construction of

female shame which represses female expression -- sexually, spiritually, and

intellectually. “March Moon” exposes the fallacy of “niceness” that clenches

our desires, prefiguring Audre Lorde’s comment that, “as women, we have to

distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational thought. We

have been warned against all our lives by the male world… the fear of our

desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful” (“Heroic

‘Hussies’and ‘Brilliant Queers’: Genderracial Renaissance in the works of

Langston Hughes” 330).

The poem “When Sue Wears Red’’ draws on the ecstatic cries of the

Black church to express a tribute to the historic beauty of Black women

unprecedented in the literature of the race. Again, hurt is transcended so

perfectly that virtually no trace of it is left for the casual reader. Only Black

readers, painfully aware of their despised color and features and the denial of

their history by the Anglo-Saxon world, would feel in the poem both the impact

of a wound and the balm of poetic healing:

When Susanna Jones wears red

Her face is like an ancient cameo
53 
 
 Turned brown by the ages.

Come with a blast of trumpets,

Jesus!

- (Selected Poems 68).

Hughes says that the pitiable sight of the dangling body of the dead Black

would certainly stir feelings of revenge in the Blacks and one day it would

explode and the Whites would be the victims then. The wind itself seems to cry

and cry endlessly because it has been a helpless witness to such cowardly acts

as lynching perpetrated on the Blacks. The dusk itself is stained with blood, the

bloodshed by the Blacks who happen to be the innocent victims of White

cruelty. Hughes hastens that the Whites cannot flutter at it because it could be

everyone’s blood. This warning is exhaust by a poet whose concern goes

beyond the barriers of colour. In “Georgia Dusk’’:

Sometimes there’s a wind in the Georgia dusk

That cries and cries and cries
Its lonely pity through the Georgia dusk
Veiling what the darkness hides

- (Selected poems 279).

This is one of the finest poems of Hughes in which the darkness in the

life of the Blacks, the bloodshed he undergoes are symbolically correlated with

the engraving of a landscape that appear over Georgia. Hughes has not spared

his own people when they failed to honour the great- hearted Blacks who laid

54 
 
down their lives fighting for their cause (Montage of a Dream Deferred 50-51).

The people recall the services and sacrifices of those who lost their lives in the

war only in holidays and forget them all about them the very next day. To keep

alive the memory of John Brown is the duty of every Black, to remember him

otherwise is a shame to the Black community. The poet attacks the mind set of

both the Black and the White.

A young Black girl laments the loss of her lover who has been hanged to

death in public because of racial animosity. The poet visualizes the bruised

body of her lover hanging on the tree. Her lover had been stripped naked. He

is no more than a naked shadow and no better than a gnarled naked tree on

which he has been hanged. The Whites are allergic to the love blossoming

between a Black boy and Black girl. Segregation has not spared even lovers.

This is well brought out in this poem “Song for a Dark Girl” :

Way Down South in Dixie

(Break the heart of me)
They hungry my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.

Way Down South in Dixie

(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the White Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 104) .

55 
 
 A young girl for a moment is prone to believe that Jesus too must be

White and so concludes that it is the reason why her prayer has not been

answered. It is an indirect allegation against Jesus who according to her has

taken sides with the Whites. So her prayer has been futile.  Even the birds that

live in the wide field of nature are happier than the Black love- pair. Hughes in

this poem successfully evokes the pity of the readers for the helpless young

Black girl. He also makes the readers feel uneasy over the things done to the

Blacks in the White America.

The Black boy runs away because of fear that the whites are close on his

feet. A well-wisher advises him to hurry up and leave no trace behind. The boy

sweating from top to toe and panting for breath pleads innocence. He is urged to

flee and waste no time. Otherwise he will be captured, tortured, and butchered.

The poem “Flight’’ gives a pen picture of the Blacks’ being pursued by the

angry Whites. In no time he will be caught and lynched and hanged to death by

the White mob:

Plant your toes in the cool swamp mud.

Step and leave no track.
Hurry, sweating runner!
The hounds are at your back

No I didn’t touch her

White flesh ain’t for me

- (One Way Ticket 127).

56 
 
 The Blacks are urged to flee and waste no time failing which he would be

caught, lynched, and hanged by the angry White mob. Like Claude Mc Kay,

Hughes calls the pursuing Whites, hounds. Hughes, being far sighted, in some

of his poems on this subject, sounds a note of warning when he says that the

Blacks alone would not be the victims of lynching for long.

In poignant terms the poet portrays the pangs of hunger of the people

and registers his protest against the profiteering Capitalists. The White

Capitalists earning the money, without doing any field work. Negroes work

hard to produce the crops. But the rich land lords, sells the crops and make a lot

of money. In “Share Croppers’’ Hughes exposes the ruthless exploitation of

the Black workers who are driven to the field as though they were a herd of

cattle to do all “ploughing, planting, hoeing / to make the cotton yield:’’

 Just
a herd of Negroes
Driven to the field,
Ploughing, Planting, hoeing
To make the cotton yield.

When the cotton’s picked

And the work is done
Boss man takes the money
And we get none...

-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 185).

The Blacks resign themselves to the lot in life consoling themselves that

they are “Nothing more / than a herd of Negroes / Driven to the field’’. The

57 
 
Blacks produce the cotton meant for the spinning and weaving of the cloth but

the irony is their bodies becomes thread bare. Hughes is pained to see that the

Blacks have been treated as though they were lesser than men because they

happen to be Blacks.

The poet cannot help harping on the pathetic life of the Blacks. The work

is mean. The wages are meagre but they have to live in smoke and dust and

soot. It’s a pittance hardly enough to keep their body and soul together. The

earnings they earn are too meagre to buy shoes for the baby, pay rent for the

house, to buy gin to forget his worries and go to church in the best possible

clothes. They have to be contented with doing all kinds of menial jobs like

cleaning the spittoons for sheer existence in the poem “Brass Spittoons’’:

Hey, boy!
A nickel
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day.
Buy shoes for the baby
House rent to pay.
Gin on Saturday.
Church on Sunday

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 86).

Langston Hughes is always concerned with the down-trodden homeless Black

masses living in the boarding houses, shanty towns and park benches. The sad

plight of those who cannot afford comfortable apartment- in fact Hughes could

58 
 
not afford a comfortable room for his mother till late in her life- has always

disturbed Hughes and it is depicted in his poem “Boarding House,’’

The graveyard is the

Cheapest boarding house:
Some of these days
We’ll all board there.
Rich and poor
Alike will share.
The graveyard is the
Cheapest boarding house

- (One Way Ticket 119).

Langston Hughes focuses on the misery and penury of the Blacks in White

America. The Black boy returns home extremely hungry and ransacks the whole

kitchen in the fond hope of getting something to eat but there is nothing to eat or

drink, not even a piece of cloth for a change of dress and not even a log of wood

to prepare tea :

 Ilook in the kettle, the kettle is dry.

Look in the bread box, nothing but a fly.
Turn on the light and look real good!
I would make a fire but there ain’t no wood.
Look at that water dripping in the sink.
Listen at my footprints walking on the floor.
That place where you trunk was, ain’t no
trunk no more.
Place where your clothes hung’s empty and bare.
Stay away if you want, and see if I care!
If I had a fire I’d make me some tea
And set down and drink myself and me.
Lawd! I got to find me a woman for the WPA
Cause if I don’t they’ll cut down my pay

59 
 
 - (“Supper Time” Shakespeare in Harlem 4).

Hughes “The Ballad of Roosevelt’’ portrays a conversation between the parents

and the son in a poverty stricken Black family. The father reposes his faith in

Roosevelt and repeats the president’s name countless times as if it were a word

magically powerful enough to simply rocket them into an age of plenty and

prosperity. Long they have been waiting, hoping against hope that Roosevelt

one day will redeem them from the slough of misery; when they feel those

“Cold winds and have no place to go’’ they decide not to have faith in the words

of Roosevelt.

The pot was empty,

The cupboard was bare.
I said, papa,
What’s the matter here?
I’m waitin’ on Roosevelt, son,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Waitin’ on Roosevelt, son.

The rent was due

And the lights was out.
I said, Tell me, Mama,
What’s it all about?
We’re waitin’on Roosevelt, son,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt,
Just waitin’ on Roosevelt.

Sister got sick

And the doctor wouldn’t come
Cause we couldn’t pay him

60 
 
 The proper sum-
A-waitin’ on Roosevelt.
Then one day
They put us out o’ the house.
Ma and Pa was
Meek as a mouse
Still waitin’ on Roosevelt,
Roosevelt, Roosevelt

-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 178).

Icy cold winds, pangs of hunger and continued unemployment bring

about a bitter realization that they waited too long and they decide not to believe

in the words of Roosevelt any longer. Readers can visualize the poor Black

rapping aloud at the door of Roosevelt and posing the question Mr.Roosevelt,

“Listen: What’s the matter here?”. With the eyes rolling, the nether lip bitten

and with the teeth gnashing. Langston Hughes sounds a note of warning to the

higher- ups that the common man will no longer to be kept in suppression.

There are signs of the common man asserting himself.

In “Afro-American Fragment’’ Hughes links nihilism to cultural loss, to

passage of historically induced sorrow when, with the drums of Africa now all

subdued and time-lost:

There comes this song I do not understand,

This song of atavistic land,
Of bitter yearnings lost
Without a place-
So long
So far away

61 
 
 Is Africa’s
Dark face

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 129).

Hughes’s “report” includes a picture of America as a cage, a zoo, a

circus, a gory monster cannibal and a syphilitic whore, and the Black man as
deracinated, alienated, exiled, and groping for reconnection with his African
past. Africa is “time lost,” surviving only in fragments and in dim racial
memories felt, like the music that is its chief surrogate, in the blood and bones,
in received culture not fully understood (Langston Hughes: An Introduction to
the Poetry 98).

The beauty of the poem, which reads like a hymn or spiritual, is

unmistakable and permanent. Elsewhere, Hughes experiments with Blues

rhythms and Jazz improvisations, as in “The Weary Blues”: In his young age,

he entered into the church and he heard the Blues song :

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan-
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more-
“ I got de weary blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got de weary blues
And can’t be satisfied.
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish I had died”…
- (Selected Poems 33).

62 
 
 The Blues touch upon Black sorrow, but the music of the Blues makes its

listeners feel better. Some of Hughes’s characters, as found in the “Madam to

You” sequence, are not blue, or troubled, or even angry. Rather, they are secure

and pleased with themselves. In “Madam’s Calling Cards,” Alberta K. Johnson

tells the printer: “There’s nothing foreign / To my pedigree: / Alberta K.

Johnson — / American that’s me” (Identities and Issues in Literature 1997).

The Blues, Hughes would come to realize, embodied the classical Black

response to African experience in modern America. Here the masses articulated

their philosophy of life in song – “gat songs, because you had to be gay or die;

sad songs, because you couldn’t help being sad sometimes. But gay or sad, you

kept on living and you kept on going’’(qtd in Helen Vendler 358).

The Blues most often sings of misfortune, but, as Hughes himself wrote

of the songs, “When they are sung people laugh’’. The Blues speak to us

simultaneously of the tragic and the comic aspects of the human condition.

Samuel Charters asserts in his Legacy of the Blues: “a rich, vital, expressive

language that stripped away the misconception that the Black society in the

United States was simply a poor, discouraged version of the White. It was

impossible not to hear the differences. No one could listen to the Blues without

realizing that there were two Americas” ( qtd in Arnold Rampersad 310).

The Harlem of The Weary Blues became therefore for him "Jazzonia," a

new world of escape and release, an exciting never land in which "sleek black

63 
 
boys" blew their hearts out on silver trumpets in a "whirling cabaret." It was a

place where the bold eyes of white girls called to black men, and "dark brown

girls" were found "in blond men's arms." It was a city where "shameless gals"

strutted and wiggled, and the "night dark girl of the swaying hips" danced

beneath a papier-mâché jungle moon.

There is no daytime in Jazzonia, no getting up and going to work. It is

wholly a sundown city, illuminated by soft lights, spotlights, jewel-eyed

sparklers, and synthetic stars in the scenery. Daylight is the one great enemy

here, and when "the new dawn / Wan and pale / Descends like a white mist," it

brings only an "aching emptiness," and out of this emptiness there often comes

in the clear cool light of morning the disturbing thought that the jazz band may

not be an escape, it may not be gay after all:

Does a jazz-band ever sob?

They say a jazz-band's gay...
One said she heard the jazz-band sob
When the little dawn was gray

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 34).

Hughes “Mother to Son’’ represents the social inequality and injustice

and incalculable suffering and misery. In the form of an exhortation, a Black

mother instils hope and encouragement into her son’s mind not to feel dejected

or disheartened because he cannot withstand the hard realities of life made

harder by the White world:

64 
 
 Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair
It’s had tacks in it.
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor-
Bare

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 30).

Her life has been an endless struggle but at no time did she give up her

determined efforts to fight her way through and is still going ahead with no halt

or rest. Things do not happen the way he desires. He should not give up things

for lost. With redoubled vigour he must relentlessly fight those things that try to

pull him or bog him down. This poem assumes universal overtones. This is not

an advice given by an individual mother to an individual son but an advice

given to all the young Blacks in America.

Hughes narrates in the poem “The Negro Mother’’ the historical sense of

the past and how their ancestors were uprooted from their native land Africa

and brought three hundred years ago to America. The mother urges her son to

march ever forward, breaking down bars:

Lift high my banner out of the dust.

Stand like free men supporting my trust.
Believe in the right, let none push you back.
Remember the whip and the slaver’s track.
Remember how the strong in struggle and strife
Still bar you the way, and deny your life –

65 
 
 But march ever forward, breaking down bars

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 155).

The mother exhorts her children to remember the flogging and beating

they suffered the hands of the White masters and preserve and cherish the

dream of achieving freedom, march forward smashing into smithereens all the

obstacles that block their way and bog them down and lift aloft the banner

freedom.

After emancipation, when the cruel pangs of racism and poverty pressed

her life on all sides, the Black mother had to helplessly resort to abortion to save

her children from the insults and indignities awaiting them in the White world f

rejection and hatred. Fenton Johnson’s poem “Tired” is a desperate cry of one

Black mother:

Throw the children into the river

Civilization has given us too many.
It is better to die than it is to grow
Up and find out that you are colored

- (qtd.in Wagner 182).

Hughes expresses the equality and justice denied to the white people. All

over the world, the children are brought up in an atmosphere of amity and

understanding. They are taught to love each other and enjoy other’s company.

But in the American society a White child and a Black child meet. With the

66 
 
curse of segregation instilled into the mind of White children, the White child

in this poem not only hates the Black child but goes to the extent of spitting at

him:

Go home, stupid,
And wash your dirty face.
Go home, stupid,
This is not your place.
Go home, stupid,

You don’t belong here

If you don’t go,
I will pull your ear

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 439).

Even the White child threatens to raise a hue and cry. Such an outcry

from the White child is sure to bring the neighbouring White community on the

scene and they will even lynch the Black child.

A Black child feels like having a joy ride on the Merry-Go- Round. The

child is from the South where the White and the Colored cannot sit side by side.

Even at the bus the Blacks are put in the rear. The child from the South is in

search of Jim Crow section. In all innocence it goes about enquiring “Where’s

the horse for a kid that’s Black?’’ Merry-Go-Rounds are meant for children’s

entertainment and excitement. Normally, a child rushes blindly to take a seat but

because it is a Black child, it goes about searching for a horse meant for a Black

child.

67 
 
 The color consciousness kills all the enthusiasms and the excitement of

Black children. The evil effects of segregation have not spared even the Black

children. This state of affairs is better expressed in the poem:

Down south on the train

There’s a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we’re put in the back-
But there ain’t no back
To a merry-go-round! 

- (“ Merry-Go-Round’’  The Collected Poems of

Langston Hughes 59).

Hughes exposes the hypocrisy and spiritual degradation found among the men

of the church. Day after day they are telling lies. Unfortunately, these lies pass

for truth. Therefore the poet calls them truthful lies. They have been telling lies

all along that God would bless them and take them into His fold and that God

loves the Blacks as He loves the White capitalists. This myth has been exploded

by the endless sufferings of the Blacks. Hughes calls the men of religion

hypocrites. They pretend to welcome the poor workers into the Christian fold

with a show of affection. It proves to be only a mock welcome. Beneath the out-

stretched Christian hands lies dirt and ugly:  You sicken me with lies.

With truthful lies.

And with your pious faces
your wide, out-stretched,
Mock-welcome, Christian hands

- (“To Certain Brothers’’ The Collected Poems of Langston

Hughes 55).

68 
 
The Blacks faith in God is shaken. God’s indifference to their prayer makes

them doubt for a moment whether He is, after all, the White God turning a deaf

ear to their cry for help. The utter poverty he is in makes him powerless to react.

“Being poor and Black/ I’ve no weapon to strike back.’’ Once again being

weapon less, they turn to God as a last resort because it is their faith that none

but God can protect them. But there lurks a nagging doubt in the Blacks that

God might not come to their rescue. The poem “Who but the Lord?’’

graphically portrays the Blacks shivering and trembling in fear at the sight of

the White Policeman :

I do not understand
Why God don’t protect a man
From police brutality.
Being poor and black,
I’ve no weapon to strike back
So who but the Lord
Can protect me?

-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 322).

In his autobiography The Big Sea, Langston Hughes describes his conversion at

the age of thirteen. Hughes’ belief on Jesus Christ is as follows:

That night, for the last time in my life, but one…I cried. I cried, in bed
alone, and couldn’t stop. I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt
heard me…. She… told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost
had come into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. But I was really
crying because I couldn’t bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had
deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I

69 
 
 didn’t believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn’t come to help
me
(“Religion in the Poetry of Langston Hughes” 296).

Harlem is celebrated as “Jazzonia,” the land, the communal space of Jazz

culture. Jazz gives voice to a rhythm of life that offers a subversive (“rebel”)

alternative to the standardization of white urbanized, industrialized America

(“Negro Artist”). It is a vision of Black culture and community that affirms the

creative potential of life in the metropolis, a vision of the “jazz people” that

includes all Black Harlemlites. It is a vision ever yet to be realized, as he later

put it in his essay “Jazz as Communication”: “To me jazz is a montage of a

dream deferred. A great big dream –yet to come- and always yet to become

ultimately finally true (The Langston Hughes Reader 494). In “Jazzonia”:

Oh, silve tree!

Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.
Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
Were Eve’s eyes
In the garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?
Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

70 
 
 In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 34).

“Oh silver tree! / Oh shinning rivers of the soul” form an effective refrain of the

poem. As in the Blues, the key changing is effected by Hughes’s use of a

number of words to describe the tree, as silver tree, singing tree etc. That subtly

alters the sensuousness from one stanza to another. The poem describes the

impact of this atmosphere on the Blacks. It recovers the minds of the Blacks for

a while to a world of beauty, harmony and happiness. Allusions to Eve and

Cleopatra “add depth to the theme of allurement; and several interchanges of

adjectives before “tree” and “rivers” fuse the readers’ perceptions in apt

anticipation of the concluding lines…”

Onwuchekwa says:

the artificial tree, now garlanded with song and dance and light, is
metamorphosed from something sacred. The girl in the gaudy costume
becomes a pagan love deity. And in this holy place the ritual
reaffirmation of life is enacted…it is the power of black musical art that
transfigures
(Langston Hughes : An Introduction to the Poetry 34).

The wild laughter of Harlem’s nights, if it is an escape, is but a temporary

escape: behind the bright mask of jazz waits the sombre sadness of the blues. It

is therefore fitting that Hughes chose to introduce the boisterous opening

71 
 
section of The Weary Blues with the sombre title poem. The poem is

masterpieces of the blues mood. The Pianist’s feelings are reflected in the

objects around him: an old gas lamp giving out a pale dull light; an old piano

with a rickety stool.

A little Southern colored child

Comes to a Northern school
And is afraid to play
With the white children.

At first they are nice to him.

But finally they taunt him
And call him “nigger”

The colored children

Hate him, too,
After awhile.

He is a little dark boy

With a round black face
And a white embroidered collar.
Concerning this
Little frightened child
One might make a story
Charting tomorrow

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 36).

Hughes represents the sufferings of the southerner in his poem “Migration”. A

colored child joined in the Northern School but the child afraid to play with the

White child. But they are call as a “nigger”. “He is a little dark boy / with a

round black face/ And a White embroidered collar. The weariness of a

frightened child make a story for a recording tomorrow. Young Black boys

started leading a sort of aimless, goal less and restless life of idling, dreaming,
72 
 
revolting, rebelling, rioting, robbing and raping. A Black man raping a White

lady or even just making a sexual advance towards her was the most hideous

crime in the White society. Lynching was the common punishment inflicted

upon a Black offender because lynching was much easier than holding a legal

trial.

Cabaret, cabaret!
That’s where ma man an’me go.
Cabaret, cabaret!
That’s where we go-
Leaves de snow outside
An’our troubles at de door.

-(“Minnie Sings Her Blues’’ The Collected

Poems of Langston Hughes  68). 

Hughes depicts how the Blacks escape from all their worries and sufferings in

this poem. Cabaret is the relief for all their injustice, exploitation and life’s

boredoms. Cabaret is the only place where ‘ma man an’me go.” The troubles

and sorrows blacks leave at the door and they starts enjoying the music and

dance:

Sleek black boys in a cabaret.

Jazz-band, jazz-band,-
Play , play, Play!
Tomorrow…. Who knows?
Dance today!
……………………………
White ones , brown ones,
What do you know
About tomorrow

73 
 
 Where are paths go?
Jazz-boys, jazz-boys,-
Play,pLAY, PLAY!
Tomorrow …. is darkness
Joy today!

-(The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 90).

“Harlem Night Club” seemed suddenly to bridge the gulf between the Whites

and Blacks. The White girls were after the Black and the Black girls were in the

arms of the blonde men. Hughes was realistic and knowing that things might not

change much for the Blacks, says “Tomorrow… who knows? / Dance today!”

To remind us that Jazz is performed music which takes into account audience’s

interest and appeal, Hughes has made references to the audience’s response. In

the same poem, a Jazz band is heard in the background. And the dancer cries

out, “Play, play, PLAY!” the poet concludes the poem tomorrow… is darkness/

joy today.

The girl in the gaudy costume becomes a pagan love deity. And in this

holy place the ritual reaffirmation of life is enacted. Of Harlem nightclubs and

dance halls generally, Hughes will write in a later poem that they start out drab

and ordinary, until the band begins to play and the dancers begin to dance –

then, “Suddenly the earth was there, / And flowers, / Tree, / And like a wave the

floor- / That had no dignity before.”

74 
 
 The music celebrates the body, and the soul through the body. Jazz is

conventionally thought of as a music of escape from life. However, in this

cabaret poems Hughes hold Jazz as a reproduction and interpretation of the

complexities of life, its boredoms, loneliness, and death as well as its

excitement and joy. It is in the brilliance with which it captures life that the

music achieves transcendence. That is what Hughes means when he says that

the rhythms of life and of Jazz are one (Langston Hughes : An Introduction to

the Poetry 36).

Jemie Onwuchekwa says: “ it is arresting in movement and color in

presenting a cabaret dancer. The poet “conveys the impression of a speechless

wonder with the exclamatory, estatic fragments” (Langston Hughes : An

Introduction to the Poetry 34).

Hughes expresses the hopes and expectations of the Black People in

“Walkers with the Dawn’’: There is no fear of night and its darkness, the Blacks

walks strong of will and sure of foot, towards dawn and light. Hence they call

themselves walkers with the sun and morning. The thrice repeated “Being

walkers with the sun and morning’’ brings out the Blacks’ confidence and

courage to walk ahead, unmind full of gloomy days and darkening sky.

Being walkers with the dawn and morning,

Walkers with the sun and morning,
We are not afraid of night,
Nor days of gloom,
75 
 
 Nor darkness-
Being walkers with the sun and morning

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 45).

Racial pride is the inborn trait inherent in Hughes. Hughes in a

commanding tone asks the people to be proud of their color with no sense of

shame. To Langston Hughes, Black is a symbol of beauty and strength. The

poem “Color’’ breathes the air of his racial pride. The poem has been written to

boost the morale of the Blacks because they suffer from inferiority complex

indirectly accepting the White’s priority. To others Black is a stigma. But to

Hughes Black is no disgrace. The word doesn’t smack of ugliness or

awkwardness :

Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud-
Not like a shroud.

Wear it
Like a song
Soaring high-
Not moon or cry

- (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 290).

Hughes has ever been proud of his colour, a pride that he inherited from his

grandmother’s stories. Hughes insists that:

76 
 
 Colour had nothing to do with writing as such. So I would say, in your
mind don’t be a colored writer even dealing in racial material. Be a writer
first, Like an egg: egg; than an Easter egg, the color applied
(Langston Hughes Writers: Black and White 619).

Langston Hughes is a stout champion of liberty, equality, fraternity. Whatever

be the country they belong to – be it Africa or the USA or Kentucky or the West

Indies they are all brothers. This fraternal feeling runs through this poem:

We ‘related-you and I,
You from the West Indies,
I from Kentucky.

Kinsmen-you and I
You from Africa,

I from the U.S.A,

Brothers-you and I

- (“Brothers’’  The Collected Poems of Langston

Hughes 424).

Onwuchekwa discussing this attitude of Hughes states:

 ...theblack artist is turning his back on his identity, to cast aspersions on

his heritage, to wish to be the other, to wish he were White. It is
tantamount to accepting the White world’s definition of his people as
ugly, inferior, unworthy of serious exploration in art

(Langston Hughes : An Introduction to the Poetry 9).

77 
 
 To Langston Hughes, White laws are unequal. The White police, being a

savage race, are unfeeling. The Blacks, subjected to torture in the hands of the

White police. Shockingly the Blacks, beaten by the police for no fault of theirs,

cannot seek legal redress in a world ruled by the whites.  

Hughes has a lot of self-reliance in the tremendous tenacity of his people.

He is aware of the fact that his people are of a robust constitution and so they

would continue to bear the tortures of the White masters till they have achieved

their end, despite intense suffering both on the physical and emotional levels.

He, therefore, presents in “Still Here,’’

I’ve been scared and battered.

My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me, sun has baked me.
Looks like between ‘em
They done tired to make me
Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’-
But I don’t care!
I’m still here!

- (The Panther and The Lash 15).

 
Hughes, as an inspired Messiah, is aware of the pristine power and glory

of the Black- before he entered into this restraint white society. Once he was

wise, but today in the mixed ethos of the Blacks and the Whites, his life is a

strange combination of tragic intensities on one hand and comic existence on

the other. The poem “Jester’’ expresses:

78 
 
 You would laugh!
Weep with me
You would weep!
Tears are my laughter.
Laughter is my pain.
Cry at my grinning mouth,
If you will.
Laugh at my sorrow’s reign.
I am the Black Jester,
The dumb clown of the World,
The booted, booted fool of silly men.
Once I was wise.
Shall I be wise again?

- (The Weary Blues 53).

Hughes depicts the Black as a Jester who leads their life as an unreal and

indifferent one. Negroes are the “dumb clown of the world, / The booted,

booted fool of silly men.’’ The laughter and the sense of humour on the part of

the Blacks are a mask that conceals the agony and tears. The last line: “Shall I

be wise again?’’ shows the expectations of the Black people in the dominated

White society.

Lynching of the Blacks in America should have greatly disturbed Hughes

whose heart must have gone out in sympathy for those Black brethren lynched.

Such an inhuman act should have been rankling in his mind and hence he

“never stopped returning from time to time to the theme of lynching’’ (Black

Poets of the United States 457).

In the poem “Lynching Song’’ Langston Hughes sounds a note of caution

that the Blacks alone would not be the sufferers of lynching for long. Hughes is

79 
 
sure that if the Black boy dies today the day is not far off when the white boy

would die. Hughes joins hands with Mc Kay the latter’s outbursts:

O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

- (“If We Must Die” 373).

This is a warning sounded by Hughes in the interest of everyone and

irrespective of color. The gruesome sight of the dangling body of the dead

Black would awaken feelings of revenge in the minds of the Blacks. Such

inhuman acts endanger everybody’s life leaving it insecure:

Pull it, boys

With a bloody cry.
Let the black boy spin
While the white folks die

- (One Way Ticket 58).

Wagner while discussing “Lynching Song”, says that “the poem implies

that such crimes endanger all our lives and quite particularly all our liberties’’

(Black Poets of the United States 458).

80 
 
Hughes says:

There are millions of Blacks “who never murder anyone, or rape or get
raped or want to rape, who never lust after White bodies, or cringe before
white stupidity, or Uncle Tom, or go crazy with race, or off- balance with
frustration
(qtd in Arnold Rampersad 119).
Hughes’s anti-lynching writing contrasts White- created images of piety with

the reality of racist brutality against Black people. In “Silhouette” Hughes

contrasts the gender racial myth of gentle, swooning white ladies with the

reality of their role in the barbarous act of lynching:

Southern gentle lady

Do not swoon
They’ve hung a black man
In the dark of the moon.
They’ve hung a black man

To a road side tree

In the dark of the moon
For the world to see
How Dixie protects
Its white womanhood

- (qtd in Anne Borden 328).

Hughes “Ballad of the Man Who’s Gone’’ quotes the condition of the Blacks

dead is no better than that of those alive who cannot afford a descent life. For

the poor Black family, funeral is also a great hurdle. The money, the relief

gives, is quite inadequate and hence the wife of the dead Black has to collect the

81 
 
fund for her husband’s funeral. The funeral instead of doing honour to the dead

person is gone through, perhaps, a painful ritual. The last line confesses the

economic condition of the Blacks in America.

No money to bury him.

The relief gave Forty-Four.
The undertaker told’em,
You’ll need Sixty more
------------------------------
I wonder what makes
A funeral so high?
A poor man ain’t got
No business to die

-(Shakespeare in Harlem 97-98).

Langston Hughes in all boldness calls himself the darker of the Whites. But he

can’t hide the fact that the White does not consider the Black his brother. It’s an

accepted fact that the Blacks toil and moil for the Whites doing odd jobs but it’s

an irony during the visit of White visitors, Black that he is asked, to eat in the

kitchen. Hughes is of fervent hope that the day is not far off that the Black

would be treated on par with the Whites. In the poem, “I Too’’ Hughes looks

forward a bright future in store for the Black race:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

82 
 
 Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,’’
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed –

I, too, am America
- (Selected Poems 275).

Hughes says in a tone of optimism, what goes in the mind of the Black boy

“The Black boy I’ll be at the table / when company comes / nobody’ll dare/ say

to me/ eat in the kitchen.’’ Readers can see Hughes seethe in anger at the plight

of the uncompassionate attitude of the unjust government towards the suffering

starving poor. He bides his time, eats well and grows strong, confident in his

own beauty, and confident that “tomorrow” he will share the table (of

communion) with the others. The domestic content lends mythic depth of the

poem; for what we are witnessing is the career of the young prince dispossessed

and suppressed by his wicked relatives.

The poem seems in particular response to Walt Whitman’s insistent singing of

his American soil and geneology:

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this

Soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same,

83 
 
 And their parents the same…

-(“Song of myself” Leaves of Grass and

Selected Prose 23).

The Black man’s roots in American soil are deep, indeed deeper than the roots

of most whites. Therefore Hughes, too, celebrates America, but unlike

Whitman, not the America that is but the America that is to come. The

democratic vistas which Whitman saw all about him are, to Hughes, still

distant on the horizon, yet to be.

Hughes feels that to the Blacks in America, the dawn does not bring hope

or joy as his day begins on a dismal note that leaves him depressed throughout

the day. Hughes pities morning time of the Blacks in “Day Break’’:

Big Ben, I’m gonna bust you hang up side the wall!
Gonna hit you in the face and let you fall!
Alarm clock here ringing so damn loud
You must think you got to wake up a crowd!
You ain’t got to wake up nobody but me

(Shakespeare in Harlem 6).

Hughes in his essay The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain focuses on the

individuality and the color complex of the dark skinned people: “It spoke of

Black writers and poets, who would surrender racial pride in the name of false

integration’’, where a talented Black writer would prefer to be considered a

poet, not a Black poet, which to Hughes meant he subconsciously wanted to

write like a white poet. Hughes argued “no great poet has ever been afraid of

84 
 
being himself’’. He wrote in this essay, “We younger Negro artists now intend

to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If White

people are pleased we are glad, if they aren’t, it doesn’t matter. We know we are

beautiful and ugly too…if colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are

not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,

as strong as we know how and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within

ourselves’’ (qtd in Onwuchekwa Jemie 10).

Loften Mitchell who discovered Hughes as a hero of Black people writes:

Langston Hughes set a tone, standard of brotherhood and

friendship and cooperation, for all of us to follow. You never got
from him, I am the Negro writer, “ but only ‘I am a Negro writer.’
He never stopped thinking about the rest of us’’
(qtd in Arnold Rampersad 409).

More than 60 years later, Hughes is one of the most anthologized Black

writers of our time. Many of his poems, short stories, and essays are a

commentary on the 40-plus years he experienced being a writer and a Black

man in the United States. Through his poetry, plays, short stories, children's

books (fiction and nonfiction), essays, and autobiographies Hughes was one of

the first Black writers to earn a living at writing. He is known as one of the

Harlem Renaissance writers and, for many, this setting is where the fame of

Hughes begins and ends (The Lion and the Unicorn 161).

85 
 
 This chapter is discusses to the concern of Hughes for his people in

White America, their trials and tribulations, their hopes and fears, their joy and

silence, which his poems unfold. Poems, which expose his rugged optimism and

prophecy that his people could not for long be treated as lower men, are also

examined. The poems taken up for study discuss the Blacks’ glorious past and

cultural tradition and of their massive strength as the builders of Pyramids and

of their singular responsibility as the promoters of civilizations coming up near

river banks. They also give expression to the present grim reality about

Blacks—the cruelty and the pain they have endured the marginalization they

have been subjected to the economic backwardness and the racial discrimination

they have suffered.

Arna Bontemps wrote to Langston Hughes in a 1939 letter, "[S]eems like

we're going to be the models for future generations of writers for children and

students of that literature" (The Lion and the Unicorn 35).

Tracy writes that Hughes was able to "refocus the lens of history and

culture on significant African American contributors to American and world

history"(2). Hughes realized that there was a need to build up a better self-

concept for the Black child reader, so he began creating literature that included

the accomplishments of Blacks throughout America. Hughes brings simplicity

86 
 
and humour to present life experiences while holding on to the idea and the

seriousness of his message.

By telling these life stories of Black Americans, Hughes has been able to

convey his own cultural experiences in America, experiences that are not

distorted or morally suspect. The writing of Langston Hughes reflects the

beauty of a culture that has the ability to show endurance and which triumphs

through struggles; these life stories tell of love and support of community,

family, and self. He is a poet endowed with a rich imagination and at the same

time a poet of the masses. Arthur P.Davies writes:

From these ‘common people’ who lived close to the soil and close to the
streets of sprawling cities, Hughes extracted the essence of Poetry of the
folk, the Black heritage of which he was so poignantly conscious
(“Langston Hughes : cool Poet,”
Langston Hughes: Black Genius 42).

Blackness was no shame for him but a pride. He explored the Blacks

condition in a variety of depths. He stressed racial consciousness and cultural

nationalism devoid of self-hate that united people of African descent and

Africans across the globe and encouraged. He championed Black folk culture

and Black aesthetic.

The piece was “The Need for Heroes,” and he wrote it especially for The

Crisis, in observance of his twentieth year as contributor to the NAACP

magazine. His words embodied the spirit and the tone of the writer who, during

87 
 
the next two decades, would become known increasingly as “the poet laureate

of his race:”

The written word is the only record we will have of this our present, or
our past, to leave behind for future generations…. We have a need for
heroes. We have a need for books and plays that will encourage and
inspire our youth, set for them patterns of conduct, move and stir them to
be forthright, strong, clear- thinking and afraid…. It is the social duty of
Negro writers to reveal to the people the deep reservoirs of heroism
within the race…. We need in literature the kind of black men and
women all of us know exist in life; who are not afraid to claim our rights
as human beings and as Americans…
(qtd in Faith Berry 299).

In the primitive world, where people live closer to the earth and much

nearer to the stars, every inner and outer act combines to form the single

harmony, life. Not just the tribal lore then, but every moment of life becomes a

part of their education. They do not, as many civilized people do, neglect the

truth of the physical for sake of the mind. Nor do they teach with speech alone,

but rather with all the facts of life. There are no books, so the barrier between

words and reality is not so great as with us, the earth is right under their feet.

The stars are never far away. The strength of the surest dream is the strength of

the primitive world (qtd in Faith Berry 98).

Hughes’s poetry is an exploration of Black identity, portraying not only

the trials and tribulations faced by Black Americans but also the warmth and

humour of his people. Hughes writes his poetry to serve not only as a podium

88 
 
for anger against the unfeeling White peoples but also as a representative of the

Blacks drawing his readers into a near understanding of Black identity.

As a crusader for social and political justice, Langston Hughes celebrated

the yearnings and longings and aspirations of the Blacks and their culture.

Langston Hughes identifies himself one with his people and refuses to stand

apart as an individual. His poetry reflects collective states of mind as if they

were his own, merging the poet’s personality with his racial group. He assumes

various personae- sometimes he is the spirit of his race, at other times he is a

spittoon polisher, a Black without job or money – but there is a commonality

among the various experiences presented in his poems which give them a kind

of consistent persona (Black Poets of the United States 293).

Hughes’s protest against color prejudice is another reason for his work’s

popularity. Today’s youth has an acute sense of justice and becomes outraged at

the irrational prejudice exemplified in his works. While communicating his

views on prejudice, Hughes also dispels the common belief that “being colored

is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and

barred’’ (Not Without Laughter 262).

As a People’s Poet, Langston Hughes is proud of the fact that the Blacks

had retained their distinct Black identity, despite their mixing with the Whites

made him really happy. Indeed it would be a wrench for Hughes if he were not

to be considered a Black poet. Langston Hughes was thus a People’s Poet, and

89 
 
wrote with a missionary zeal to make their back stiff and to make them realize

their own strength so that they would go the whole hog to better their position

socially and economically. Some of his poems present stark realities about his

people -- their poverty, their fear, their sufferings at the hands of the police, and

the deplorable plight of their women who had taken to selling their flesh.

90