Langston Hughes: to sit at the table

On reading "I, Too", by Langston Hughes

I, Too

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.

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. (1)

The poem “I, Too”, written by the American poet, writer and social activist Langston Hughes (1902-1967), was published for the first time in March 1925, in a special edition of Survey Graphic magazine, called “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” (2). Hughes had a few other poems in the magazine and, in the next year, he established himself as a reputed poet when he published his first volume of verse, “The Weary Blues”. In that moment,

he already had fused into his poetry its key technical commitment: the music of black Americans as the prime source and expression of their cultural truths. In these blues and jazz poems, Hughes wrote a fundamentally new kind of verse — one that told of the joys and sorrows, the trials and triumphs, of ordinary black folk, in the language of their typical speech and composed out of a genuine love of these people. (RAMPERSAD, ROESSEL, 1995, p. 4)

Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes spent his youth in several cities of the American Midwest. Despite some difficulties and the divorce of his parents, he did not live in extreme poverty. Supported by his father, he attended Columbia University in New York, in 1921, but dropped out after a year (RAMPERSAD, ROESSEL, 1995, p. 7). At Columbia, he suffered with racism and with the realization that he was the only black student around, but in Harlem, where the campus is located, he found immense inspiration for his future works. After that, Hughes lived and worked in Paris and Italy, and then in Washington, D.C., before returning to New York, where he was “discovered” by the poet Wachel Lindsay, who advised him “to devote himself to literature and to ‘Hide and write and study and think’” (MC MICHAEL, 1974, p. 1514). In New York, he became “the leader of the generation of Harlem writers who created the Black Literary Renaissance of the 1920s” and he was “one of the dominant voices of black America in the first half of the twentieth century and one of the first to gain serious attention for realistic portrayals of the lives of Negroes in white America” (MC MICHAEL, 1974, p. 1514-1515).

Devoted to write for the black Americans and about the black Americans, his poetry was political, social and “he believed that the full range of his poetry should reach print as soon as possible; poetry is a form of social action” (RAMPERSAD, ROESSEL, 1995, p. 5). Hughes also sought to reproduce the rhythm and feeling of blues and jazz in his compositions. As his stated,

“jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul — the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” (YOUNG, 2006, p. 17)

“I, too”, an eighteen-verse poem of irregular metric, divided in five stanzas, tells in first person an apparent simple story of a boy of dark skin (“darker brother”). He says that “they send me to eat in the kitchen / when company comes,”. So we understand that “shame” is a factor involved. We don’t know who that “they” are, but they are able to give him orders and they do not want their company, some fancy visitors, to see him. The reason is not explicit, but, by context, we can assume that the color of his skin is somehow involved. But that humiliation did not affect the lyrical voice: “But I laugh, / And eat well, / And grow strong”. He is preparing himself for the future with confidence. To go to the kitchen does not destroy him. That, we can say, is the first part of the poem.

The second part contrasts present and future, putting in perspective something that has happened and happens recurrently, and something that the subject dreams and wishes. “Tomorrow”, he says, “I’ll be at the table / When company comes”. His situation, therefore, will be different. Something between present and “Tomorrow” will change drastically and, in that same house, same kitchen, the game of power will be different, because “I’ll be at the table / When company comes” and “Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, / ‘Eat in the kitchen’”. He is reassuring that spot. The subject completes his thoughts with an addendum: “Besides, / They’ll see how beautiful I am” and that “they” also will be “ashamed”. In that change of power, he is guaranteeing that “they” will come to some sort of realization, they will have their eyes opened, because, suddenly, they will be able to see, for the first time, his beauty; and, along with that new view, they will realize something really terrible, because they will be ashamed of their own actions. If the subject goes through a transformative process — because he will “eat well” and “grow strong”; also, he will inspire force and intimidation, because nobody will “dare” to repeat those things from the past — so do they, because they confront their own past and actions, their own morality, and even the way they see the world around.

The first and last verses are important in meaning, hiding explanations in symbols such as “sing” and “America”. When the lyrical voice opens his statement saying “I, too, sing, America”, he is saying that singing means “to tell”, “to praise”, “to honor”. He, too, is able to tell the history of America, the ups and downs of the country, and the stories of its people. That first single-verse stanza is an introduction functioning almost as a claim to grab the audience's attention, revealing that the show is about to start. The stress of “too” is crucial: if he, too, can sing America, so there are also other people that sing America, and maybe those people tell him otherwise, that he is not able to do it. The last verse, also a single-verse stanza, resumes the poem and creates a parallel sound with the first verse, almost repeating it. Instead of “I, too, sing America”, “I, too, am America”. So he is telling the audience: he is able to talk about America and to tell the story, and, also, he is part of it. He is claiming two rights: the right to speak and the right to belong. Again, the importance of “too”: there are others who can say they are America. Now, he is stating that he has a space under the sun, too. “America” is a synecdoche: he, a black American, is the country, and the country is the black people.

With few exceptions, the poem is built with short verses, from 3 to 6 syllables. The cuts are fast and direct: “But I laugh, / And eat well, / And grow strong.” (all three-syllables verses), creating a clear rhythm and also a sense of decisiveness and confidence. The short verses, also, creates a didactic rhythm, as if the lyrical voice would explain with simplicity his thoughts. Those short verses, building this “step by step”, points out to a discourse that isn’t very elaborated, by choice or because it cannot be more elaborated. As if a child is telling us the story, or a person with few educational resources. This stanza exemplifies perfectly how the cuts and pauses of each verse creates a prosody of someone simple, with no difficult vocabulary, but confident, someone who thinks calmly before each word: “Tomorrow, / I'll be at the table / When company comes. / Nobody'll dare / Say to me, / ‘Eat in the kitchen,’ / Then”.

As a whole, the syntactic construction of each verse is very simple and there is no complex vocabulary: “But I laugh”, “And eat well”, “And grow strong”, “I, too, sing”, “I, too, am”. Some critics contemporary of Hughes pointed out that aspect of Hughes’s poetry as something negative, something to lament. Rampersad and Roessel explains:

There is, however, another and less flattering aspect to Hughes's reputation. To a substantial number of readers and, especially, scholar-critics, Hughes's approach to poetry was far too simple and unlearned. To them, his verse fails lamentably to satisfy their desire for a modernist literature attuned to the complexities of modern life. (1995, p. 3)

About that “simplicity”, Ford writes:

From his first book, The Weary Blues (1926), to his last one, The Panther and the Lash (1967), the reviews invoke a litany of faults: the poems are superficial, infantile, silly, small, unpoetic, common, jejune, iterative, and, of course, simple. Even his admirers reluctantly conclude that Hughes’s poetics failed. (2008, p. 42)

But it is obvious that the choice to construct his poems with such “simplicity” is completely intentional. As in “I, Too”, the simple vocabulary and syntactic constructions emulates a way of speaking and thinking, a discourse of a very specific character: a black child. Also, is the way Hughes finds to address all the black Americans, without elitism. An accessible poetry of social and critical content, but never simplistic or plain. “For a poet who equates simplicity with truth, cultivating a thematics and aesthetics of simplicity is essential — poetically and politically”, writes Ford (2008, p. 45).

The opposition between “I” and “they” is another crucial aspect of the poem, stressing the social problem of segregation and creating, subtly, the radical aspect of it. From Hughes world of the 1920s (the decade of “I, too”) to the social clashes of the 1960s, with the political action of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Medgar Evers, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and so many others, the sense of urgency and the call for action could not be ignored. There is no time for poems about flowers:

São figuras muito importantes do novo movimento [de poesia negra norte-americana], James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown e Langston Hughes. Com poucas exceções são quase todos aventureiros que desprezam a burguesia e os preconceitos e adotam uma atitude feroz diante da sociedade. (SOUZA, 2010, p. 196)

In “I, Too”, the reader is always confronted with those two sides, the poem always reminds us of those two main characters, the “I” (the black people), and the “they” (the white people, and any other that take advantage of the social and racial inequality). If “I am the darker brother” (verse 2; and he is comparing “brothers”: “darker”), so “They send me to eat in the kitchen” (verse 3). Also, “They'll see how beautiful I am” (verse 16). In that verse, the confrontation is direct. As if, for the first time, “they” are looking at “I”. It is a situation that cannot be ignored anymore. The very fact that, “suddenly”, the millions of black Americans could not be ignored “anymore” by the whites created violent reactions, from laws to militia groups (KKK), and the context for the rising of a social poetry of black poets:

Mas o negro, que se prepara para lançar à América a sua mensagem, teve de esperar um momento oportuno. Este se apresentou, quando a grande migração do Sul para o Norte, onde as fábricas o atraíam, chamou a atenção sobre ele e obrigou o branco a encará-lo como um agente livre que procurava melhores oportunidades, como uma força social e econômica de extrema importância. (SOUZA, 2010, p. 196)

We cannot assume that the lyrical voice in first person is Langston Hughes speaking directly, or that the anecdote is a memory and is autobiographical. Hughes tells a particular story that could be his memory but also a memory of any other black American. What appears to be very personal, it is, instead, completely universal. The “I” is not Hughes, but all the black Americans. So, it could be him, too, in that kitchen. The scene described in the poem, realistic and focused on actions of the day to day life, very particular and personal, as we comprehend what social aspects Hughes is criticizing, grows into a broad metaphor, into something much bigger than the kitchen table. That house, that kitchen, is, in fact, the whole America, the America so much emphasized with the first and the last verses. Hughes transforms that prosaic scene into a fable, a symbol that tells us the American history and the crucial chapter of slavery and everything that is generated from it, from segregation to racism, from inequality to social violence and social injustice. To tell that story, Hughes puts, of course, a black voice as the protagonist and talks from his point of view. The segregation of the black American is epitomized in “I, too”. But the lyrical voice explains: segregation can be a reality now, but soon it will be over, and “they” will be ashamed of all.

In that way, the social aspect of the poem is crucial and it is the base of Hughes's poetry over the decades of his career. The scene in that house, described by that child, isn’t innocent, but reveals, from the detail to the big picture, the social context of segregation and racism. And the lyrical voice states from the title to the last verse: “I, too, am America”. As Hughes explained,

one of my earliest poems were social poems in that they were about people's problems - whole groups of people's problems- rather than my own personal difficulties. Sometimes, though, certain aspects of my personal problems happened to be also common to many other people. And certainly, racially speaking, my own problems of adjustment to American life were the same as those of millions of other segregated Negroes. (HUGHES, 1947, p. 205)

The “tomorrow” of the poem (verse 8) is the next day of renewed winds blowing, of hope. But, more than hope, the black boy feels something more important: he feels pride. Pride of himself, of his color, of his people. That pride is a matter of identity: to fight to stop the killing and erasing of such identity. That pride, that identity, is marked by the “I” that stands out in the poem, a brief and powerful sound that claims an existence: in the title and in verses 1, 2, 9, and 18, in the beginning, and 5 and 15, in the middle. “They”, the white people, the rich people, those in positions of power, would love to have an America of whiteness. They dream of a country where the black folk wander only in the shadows and do not, with their dark faces, represent their nation as much as their light faces. More than that, they wish the black faces did not exist.

In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, text from 1926 (3), Hughes analyzes the matter of pride and criticizes those black authors who try to avoid the “racial mountain”:

But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America — this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible. (...) So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,” as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world.

To Hughes, pride is intrinsic to the “Negro artist”: “And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself”. By writing about one who is not afraid to claim his space at the table, Hughes has reaffirmed his commitment to show his pride, to show the pride of his brothers and to encourage it for those who need it. Because he

aimed to create a body of work that epitomized the beauty and variety of the African American and the American experiences, as well as the diversity of emotions, thoughts, and dreams that he saw common to all human beings. (RAMPERSAD, ROESSEL, 1995, p. 3)

NOTES

1. HUGHES, L. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Classics, 1995, p. 46

2. Page 61: https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll336:2133

3. Published originally in 1926; Republished by Poetry Foundation. Available in:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69395/the-negro-artist-and-the-racial-mountain

REFERENCES

FORD, K. J. “Do Right to Write Right: Langston Hughes’s Aesthetics of Simplicity”. In: BLOOM, H. (ed.). Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Langston Hughes — New Edition. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008, pp. 41-60.

HUGHES, L. “My Adventures as a Social Poet”. Phylon, Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, v. 8, n. 3, pp. 205-212, 3rd Qtr. 1947.

HUGHES, L. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Classics, 1995.

HUGHES, L. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”. Published originally in 1926; Republished by Poetry Foundation. Available in:

<https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69395/the-negro-artist-and-the-racial-mountain>. Accessed on 1/6/21.

MC MICHAEL, G. L. (ed.). Anthology of American Literature - II. Realism to the Present. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1974.

RAMPERSAD, A., ROESSEL, D. “Introduction/A Chronology of the Life of Langston Hughes”. In: HUGHES, L. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Classics, 1995, pp. 3-20.

SOUZA, G. M. “Poesia negra norte-americana”. Via Atlântica - Publicação da Área de Estudos Comparados de Literaturas de Língua Portuguesa, São Paulo, n. 18, pp. 195-200, dez. 2010.

YOUNG, K. (ed.). “Foreword”. In: Jazz Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, pp. 11-18.

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Citation: DEARO, Guilherme. "Langston Hughes: to sit at the table". São Paulo: FFLCH/USP, December 2021.