The Poetry of Langston Hughes 399conditions in which modern African American poetry emerged. In the
postbellum South slavery was replaced by other forms of racial subjection:
indentured servitude, black codes, the contract system, vagrancy statutes, and
lynching.^11 Between 1900 and 1930 massive numbers of African Americans
fled the rural South and traveled to northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and
New York. During the time that Hughes wrote, many of his contemporaries
started the long process of coming to grips with his lyric’s main subject,
namely, the violent causes of this exodus, now known as the “Great
Migration.”^12 “Flight” documents how, for many southern freedmen,
migration had become more than a necessary socioeconomic resource; it was
a way of life, a means of preserving their safety, sanity, and dignity.
In “Flight,” however, realist verisimilitude coexists with modernist
formal innovation. In this respect Hughes’s style fits an essential criterion
that Hugo Friedrich proposes for the modernist lyric.^13 The preoccupation
with expressive freedom makes sense inasmuch as the plight of the lynched
man described in “Flight” forces us to question a fundamental tenet of
nineteenth-century realism: that a realist work should depict a form of social
life in which the individual can act with “autonomous motivation”
(Preminger and Brogan, 1016).
The guiding metaphor in the poem’s title also works to correct popular
misconceptions of the causes of the Great Migration, misconceptions
exacerbated by the constant use of the trope in journalistic analyses by
Hughes’s black contemporaries. In Opportunity,the same journal in which
Hughes’s poem appeared, Charles S. Johnson asked, “How much is
migration a flight from persecution?”^14 Black public intellectuals such as
Alain Locke, portraying the social formation of the “New Negro” in 1925,
tried to play down the violent causes of migration by using the image of
“deliberate flight” to suggest that African Americans were engaged in a
mythic, quintessentially American quest for opportunity.^15
Lynching was, in certain respects, similar to the experience that the
Great War offered transatlantic modernists, since its moral horrors spurred
Hughes and other African American poets to discover formalist freedoms that
were wholly new. But although Hughes’s passion for freedom resembles that
of the avant-garde, his practices as a modern lyricist are distinctive insofar as
they dramatize his effort to bridge a cultural divide between a folkloric
African American tradition that is largely oral and the privileged arena of
“literature.” Thus the lyric’s opening line may be read as an apt allegory of
Hughes’s predicament as a modern African American poet. It compares his
effort to fashion enduring metrical feet that fit the rhythms of an oral
tradition with a fleeing man’s attempt to “plant” his “toes” in the mud.