Langston Hughes

Of Langston Hughes’ poetry, I like “Young Gal’s Blues” the best. The rhythm was steady, the rhymes familiar and easy. You could almost hear a piano or blues guitar in the background. The poem says things that a young girl thinks about- she goes to the graveyard because when she’s dead she wants someone to go there for her; she goes to visit her aunt, because when she’s “old and ugly” she wants someone to go and visit her. She thinks it would be better to be dead than to be old and ugly, and she doesn’t want to be blue (without love), so she begs her “daddy” to keep “a-lovin’ her”.

“On the Road” by Langston Hughes was a very dark and depressing story. I suppose it has lots of meanings, on lots of different levels, but I confess to not getting most of them. The story appears to be about a homeless black man as he searches for shelter and food. He is cold, wet, and hungry, seemingly oblivious to the snow, even though it pelts down on him. He is a black man in the cold, dark night surrounded by white snow. It’s almost as if the snow is all white people, crushing his spirit, keeping him in the cold. He didn’t seem to notice the very thing that was controlling his world, or maybe he was ignoring it. After the altercation with the police, he lost consciousness, and he envisioned he was walking with Jesus. Perhaps his vision of Jesus was a manifestation of a real desire for salvation, or merely just one of the last images he saw before losing awareness. He felt real satisfaction at his “rescue” of Jesus, and probably felt like he had really accomplished quite a feat by pulling down the “white” church, the one that would not help him. I liked the description of the sound of his steps in the snow. Before, the snow covered him, made him cold and wet; after he “pulled the church down” he “crunched” the snow with his steps. He dominated it; he left marks in it wherever he went. When he awoke in his cell, cold and wet once again, he realized that he did not, after all, pull down the church. He threatened to break down the door, and then wondered aloud where Jesus might be, because he wasn’t there with him now.