A History of American Literature

490 Making It New: 1900–1945

against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains and work, work, work” –

or of blues – suggesting “pain swallowed in a smile,” resistance to the apparently

irresistible – jazz for Hughes constituted an act of rebellion. Hughes’s exploitation of

black music takes many forms. Sometimes he uses the classic, three-line blues form

(“Seven Moments in Love”); sometimes, as in “Still Here,” he employs fragments of

blues themes and vocabulary; sometimes, as in “The Weary Blues,” he mixes classic

with other forms. Elsewhere, as in a poem titled “The Cat and the Saxophone,” he

tries to imitate the energy, the frenetic excitement of instrumental jazz. And in one

of his most impressive works, Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hughes employs the

free associations and abrupt rhythms of boogie-woogie and “street poetry,” rapping

and jive-talk (“Oop-pop-a-da! / Skee! Daddle-de-do! / Be-bop!”), to create a verbal

portrait of Harlem. His use of black religious music is less frequent and pervasive,

but a poem like “Fire” shows how he could turn to it to dramatize the spiritual side

of his culture. “Fire, / Fire, Lord! / Fire gonna burn my soul!” the poems begins. “I

ain’t been good, / I ain’t been clean – / I been stinkin’ low-down, mean.” Spirituals or

street poetry, be-bop or blues: whatever form Hughes utilizes, he demonstrates an

intimate knowledge of its intricacies – “The rhythms of life,” he said, “ / Is a jazz

rhythm” and this, in turn, is the rhythm of his poetry.

While emphasizing his commitment to black community and culture, though,

Hughes was always willing to acknowledge his debt to certain white writers and, in

particular, the author of Leaves of Grass. He saw no contradiction here, because what

Whitman offered him above all was the example of self-emancipation and self-

discovery. As Claude McKay observed of poets like Whitman: “I could feel their race,

their class, their roots in the soil, growing into plants, spreading and forming the

backgrounds against which they were silhouetted.” “I could not feel their reality

without that,” McKay added. “So likewise I could not realize myself writing without

conviction.” The ways Hughes plays his variations on this American theme, singing

his own “Song of Myself,” is suggested by two of his finest poems, “I, Too” and “The

Negro Speaks of Rivers.” “I, Too” involves a fairly clear echo of Whitman. “I, too, sing

America,” it begins:

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen ...

I, too, am America.

The poem plays beautifully on two themes. The first is the ancient, legendary theme

of dispossession: the “darker brother” is banished from the table of communion for

a while but, growing strong, proud, confident of his beauty, he prepares to reclaim

his rightful inheritance. And the second is the more recent American theme of the

poet as democratic hero, the representative of his culture – not, however, in this case

as it is but as it might and should be. Even more firmly and fiercely than Whitman,

Hughes seems to declare, “I project the history of the future.”

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is more concerned with the past than the future, the

heritage that is the black American’s special privilege and strength. “I’ve known

GGray_c04.indd 490ray_c 04 .indd 490 8 8/1/2011 7:54:04 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 04 AM