Hughes' Poetry

Hughes, Langston. "Langston Hughes." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 256-70. Print.

I’m not sure if these poems are presented in the order in which they were written, but if I had to guess I would think it so. They start off in a kind of faraway voice that is longing for equality and acceptance but without any fiery passion. By the final two poems, however, Hughes is so sarcastic and violent that he seems to be seriously advising people to riot outside of a hotel. Unfortunately for Hughes, I don’t feel that the in-your-face extremism of his final two essays match the careful hopefulness of the first several.

Of the poems presented here, the one that speaks the loudest is “I, Too”. Although it is short, the meaning is very deep. It says that, although the voice of the poem is black and sent to the kitchen to eat (a coy way of saying “brushed to the side”), he is still eating and growing strong. One day he plans on remaining in the dining room with the rest of the company and refuse to be sent to the kitchen. Of course, Hughes isn’t talking literally about being sent to the kitchen to eat, but rather the attitudes of whites towards black in general. Rather than allow them to join society as equals, whites push blacks to the side (a side which is, generally, less glorious (the kitchen versus the dining room)). This is evident in Jim Crowe segregation laws of the time. Hughes, however, believes that so long as the blacks in America continue to work “in the kitchen” to become a strong, unified force, they will (someday) be able to turn around on the whites and refuse to be bullied into submission.

I’m particularly fond of the last bit of this poem, where Hughes, almost as an afterthought, says “Besides, they’ll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed”. (258) It catches the reader off guard; the poem, until this point, is about strength and steadfastness, not perception. However, Hughes turns it into a poem about societal perception and, perhaps, is making a statement about the beauty of strength. When the whites are forced to see that their black fellows are strong enough to be their equals, they will suddenly realize that the blacks are beautiful. Because the perception is that blacks are inferior and, therefore, sent to the wayside, whites have never had a chance to view blacks with anything other than pompous superiority. As I said, it’s a cautiously hopeful little poem, and speaks highly of Hughes’ (probably early) self-control.