Race Relations in the Poetry of Langston Hughes - Essay Example

Everybody’s Got a Right: Race Relations in the Poetry of Langston Hughes Langston Hughes was a poet who wrote with warmth, humor, and intelligence about sensitive subjects such as poverty, racism, and revolution. One of the famous writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, his poems ring with the rhythm of the jazz music that grew up around him as he and other artists compiled pride and culture in the form of the arts, and used their art to express new political and social ideas. His blackness lies at the core of much of his work, and he is not shy about pointing fingers when he sees a guilty party, although he is just as likely to joke as to get angry. Race was a prominent theme in his work, but even more obvious in his earlier writing is the hopeful optimism of the idealist, who believes that tolerance will trump all and that ultimately, Americans can learn to love one another regardless of ethnic heritage. It is not entirely race, he supposes, that keep people apart. In the poetry of Langston Hughes, rampant greed and cold-hearted capitalism stand out as the major obstacles to tolerance and brotherly love. An early poem, “I, Too,” expresses the inequality that Hughes witnessed in his own homeland, but tempers it with an inherent optimism. He expresses segregation with the phrase, “They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes,” but the voice in this poem accepts this low starting point as a place from which the speaker can rise. This acceptance is seen in the following lines, “I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.” He seems to be saying that he will make the most of an unfair situation, that although it is clearly wrong for him to be sent to the kitchen, if he keeps his spirits up and gathers his strength, he will gain recognition as worthy to sit at the table. Then, he surmises, he will be so strong that “Nobody’ll dare Say to me, ‘Eat in the kitchen.” But he does not want to depend on intimidation. He hopes instead that white Americans will spontaneously embrace blacks once they open their eyes, lose their prejudices, and “see how beautiful I am.” Essentially, the opening and closing lines, along with the title, express Hughes’s hope that equality for black people in America will follow an easy, natural, and logical course because “I, too, am America.” Here, he says that we are all Americans, and therefore the color of a person’s skin should not affect their place in society. Later work, written during the Depression, takes a darker tone, and begins to express sympathy for armed violence and revolutionary ideas. In “The Same,” Hughes laments the treatment of black people everywhere: “On the docks at Sierra Leone, In the cotton fields of Alabama, In the diamond mines of Kimberly, On the coffee hills of Haiti.” Gone is the hope for simple, peaceful love seen in “I, Too.” Now he cannot be content to eat in the kitchen, because to be black anywhere is to be “Exploited, beaten, and robbed.” The suffering of black people increases “the wealth of the explorers.” He draws a literal line from blood that is stolen from men like him to cash that none of them will ever see and he suggests that it is “Better that my blood Runs into the deep channels of Revolution.” He has been impressed by Marxist philosophy. In this poem, the terror comes from “the greed that does not care” and Hughes identifies with “all the struggling workers in the world.” He does not speak only of Americans or black people, but of “the Red Armies of the International Proletariat Their faces black, white, olive, yellow, brown.” The very tongue-in-cheek “Come to the Waldorf-Astoria” expresses the same sort of universal discontent and financial divide. Taking up the voice of the exuberant adman, he highlights the gap between rich and poor in America with a scathing social criticism of the newly opened luxury hotel. While thousands of people are homeless and starving at the height of the depression, a twenty-eight million dollar hotel has opened in New York, and Hughes helpfully suggests, “So when you’ve got no place else to go, homeless and hungry ones, choose the Waldorf-Astoria as a background for your rags— (Or do you still consider the subway after midnight good enough?)” The reader can almost hear Hughes laughing at the thought of New York’s “down-and-outers—sleepers in charity flophouses,” “families put out in the street,” and “colored folks, hungry a long time” converging upon “A thousand miles of carpet and a million bath rooms.” While this poem segregates black and white with a separate section entitled “Negroes,” the thickest line is clearly between rich and poor, and the call to arms is still clear in the final section, where he awaits “The new Christ child of the Revolution,” the “red baby, in the bitter womb of the mob.” Clearly, Hughes looked up the Waldorf-Astoria and saw in it a focal point for an angry uprising, a symbol that might bring poor black and white people together in taking a stand against heartless capitalism and the privileged few who benefited from it. In 1947, Hughes wrote “Freedom Train,” which takes a simpler, but more realistic view than the previous poems. The author, now in his forties, has the perspective of time and maturity when he looks over the history of America. The voice here is one of age and experience, a weary soul who has seen it all. He has “read in the papers,” “heard on the radio,” and “seen folks talkin’ about the Freedom Train,” and now he asks where this mythical train might be, because he’s “been a-waitin’” his whole life. Here, Hughes laments the racial divide, particularly the two hallmarks of southern segregation, the Jim Crow car, and the separate facilities “FOR COLORED” and for “WHITE FOLKS ONLY.” When he says, “What shall I tell my children? ... You tell me— ‘Cause freedom ain’t freedom when a man ain’t free,” it seems that he is pointing his finger at an America that gives lip service to equality without acting upon it. He still hopes for his dream to come true, but he is not as certain as he was in “I, Too,” that the world will accept his way of thinking, and he doesn’t seem to have the same faith in a proletariat uprising as expressed in “The Same” or “Come to the Waldorf-Astoria.” Instead, he cautiously says “maybe” as he draws a picture of soldiers who fought and died together, and he shows them speaking together and willingly sharing the nation they sacrificed their lives for: “Black men and white will say, Ain’t it fine? At home they got a train that’s yours and mine!” When Hughes wrote “Harlem” in 1951, his disappointment is apparent. He has been dreaming about equality for decades. His original optimism has faded, his revolutionary fires have dimmed, and even his ability to joke has become twisted with bitterness. All his life, he’s has a dream, but it has become, “a dream deferred,” one based on promises that wealthy America has no intention of fulfilling. In this poem, he suggests various forms of death and decay for his vision, but he still sees a flicker of life in the people of Harlem, and he asks, ominously, “does it explode?” Throughout his life and his poetry, Hughes kept this dream of a unified world as a central focus, and he maintained both his sense of humor and his faith in the spirit of radical change in the face of reality. Throughout his life, his work expressed the idea that communication, in one form or another, was possible among people of all colors. He maintained his belief that everyone could work together, for mutual benefit, if only they were less selfish, but he came to accept that sometime it takes little forcible persuasion to explain this concept in an unfair world. Works Cited Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature Third Edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1998. 1366-1367, 1614-1616, 1618-1621. Read More