Ways of White Folks, The
Langston Hughes (1933)
LANGSTON HUGHES begins his first collection of
short fiction, released during the Great Depres-
sion, by quoting Millberry Jones: “The ways of
white folks, I mean some white folks.. .” The
collection’s title, a nod to W. E. B. DUBOIS’s The
SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, reflects Hughes’s intent to
continue the exploration of racism in American
nearly 70 years after emancipation. Many of the
stories included in the collection were previously
published in Esquire, Abbot’s Monthly, and other
magazines. Hughes’s characters struggle to coexist
in a racially charged atmosphere where the white
characters often become confused, frustrated, and
sometimes violent when the black characters re-
fuse to fit into their prescribed subservient roles.
Hughes begins with a powerful story, “Cora Un-
ashamed,” in which Cora, a servant for a white
family, speaks bluntly and honestly at a funeral for
the family’s 19-year-old daughter, whose death was
the result of an abortion forced upon the daughter
by a mother trying to save face. From there, the
collection gives readers a black author’s view of the
various relationships between the races, a perspec-
tive unique at the time.
“Slave on the Block” encapsulates a white cou-
ple’s infatuation with their black “boy” whom they
want to turn into a piece of art. In “Home,” a jazz
musician comes home from Paris to see his mother,
only to be lynched for speaking to a white music
teacher in public, as his time in Europe made him
forget the “way things were” in the South. Hughes
also deals with art in “The Blues I’m Playing,”
where a white patron cannot understand why her
young black female protégé insists on keeping ties
with her black culture, culminating in a wonder-
ful description of the BLUES from Oceola: “This is
mine.... Listen!... How sad and gay it is. Blue
and happy—laughing and crying.... How white
like you and black like me.... How much like a
man.... And how like a woman” (119). Oceola’s
description could easily be applied to Hughes’s en-
tire collection.
Hughes deals with interracial relationships in
“Passing,” “Red-Headed Baby,” “Poor Little Black
Fellow,” “Little Dog” (cited by many reviewers at
the time of publication as the best story), “Mother
and Child,” and “Father and Son”—a 48-page no-
vella that Hughes eventually rewrote into the play
Mulatto (Tracy, 45). Within each story, Hughes
finds a different perspective from which to ex-
plore the realities of interracial identities in early
20th-century America, some invariably ending in
lynching. In “A Good Job Done,” “Berry,” and “One
Christmas Eve,” Hughes explores the implications
of blacks finding themselves in the employment
of whites and the subsequent tenuous nature of
their position.
Hughes’s collection stands apart from his con-
temporary Richard Wright’s portraits of race re-
lations after Reconstruction, in that he presents
“numerous black and white women characters,
demonstrating the integral role white women play
in propagating social and moral racial codes that
affect the lives of both black women and men”
(Joyce, 100). Women are the protagonists of 11 of
14 stories, leading Joyce Ann Joyce to note: “The
Ways of White Folks reveals a profound mind ar-
tistically capable of identifying with the intricacies
of female consciousness and of censuring female
participation in the cultural behavioral patterns
that stifle their humanity” (101). Hughes does the
same with his male characters; in fact, the sheer
breadth of the work led David Michael Nifong to
note, “the collection offers a unique opportunity
for the study of numerous different points of view
in a single volume” (93).
Initial reaction to The Ways of White Folks var-
ied in 1934. Mason Roberson wrote, “It will make
you think, although what you think will not always
be pleasant” (187). Lewis Gannet noted, “these sto-
ries cut deep” (189). The Pasadena Star-News con-
cluded, “If Langston Hughes never wrote another
short story, he would have to be reckoned with for
what this volume contains” (189). However, some
reviewers could not get past Hughes’s portrayal
of his white characters. George Schuyler believed
that Hughes “twisted his material to fit the pattern
of Negro propaganda” (201), and H. Bond Bliss
wrote of the “pathetic and tragic bitterness which
characterizes most of these... tales” (220). Today,Ways of White Folks, The 535