578 Hughes, Langston
she experiences her most profound moment of
independence when she witnesses her parents grow
closer after the news of their grandson’s birth. Hous-
ton describes how she felt oddly separated from her
parents and recognized them as not just her parents
but as human beings.
By 1945, when the camp closes its gates, Hous-
ton is 10 years old and is afraid of the hatred she
anticipates from the outside world. She fears that
people will humiliate her because of her ethnic-
ity. Her family moves to a housing project in Los
Angeles and she attends public school. She goes
through the normal stages of adolescence—mak-
ing friends, fitting in, dating—but with the added
pressure of racial discrimination. She is barred from
joining the Girl Scouts, her friends never invite
her to their homes, and teachers almost prevent
her from being carnival queen even though the
students vote for her. Her father disapproves of
the American styles and values that she adopts in
order to be accepted by her peers. However, when
she turns 17, she becomes mature enough to know
that social acceptance is not as fulfilling as it seems.
She enters college and eventually has a family of
her own.
Houston’s childhood experience of camp life
with its emphasis on exploration is tempered by her
description of Papa’s bitterness and depression. At
least two times in the book, Houston states that the
camp was her “birthplace” and was his deathbed.
We learn about his years as a young man in Japan
and his immigration to the United States. He and
Mama struggled to raise nine children through
the Great Depression and despite laws that pre-
vented them from owning land. Houston recalls
how internment accelerated Papa’s demise as he
went through the stages of his life, moving from a
self-sufficient family patriarch to a dependent and
emotionally and physically damaged man. He had
aged 10 years in the nine months he spent in North
Dakota. When internment ended, his attempts to
start a business and resume his role as breadwinner
fail. He now depends on Woody whose citizenship
status allows him to get a fishing license. The roles
are reversed: The father must now rely on the son
for financial support.
Belinda Linn Rincon
HugHES, LangSTon poems
(1902–1967)
Following the Civil War (1861–65), African Ameri-
cans began migrating to large, industrialized cities
in the North (such as Chicago, Detroit, and New
York), with the hope that life would improve not
only for them, but also for their children. Unfortu-
nately, what they found was the same sort of racism,
discrimination, and marginalization that they had
experienced in the South. While they were no lon-
ger slaves in the physical sense, African Americans
continued to be oppressed, as Jim Crow laws (which
reinforced black/white segregation) cast a shadow
on their initial constitutional victories of freedom,
suffrage, and citizenship.
Starting in the 1920s, African-American writ-
ers, musicians, and scholars began an active backlash
against white domination, especially in the realm
of culture. Dispensing with the influences of white
America, a group of visionaries from Harlem in
New York City—including Zora Neale Hurston,
Countee Cullen, Billie Holliday, and Louis Arm-
strong—began to create artistic and literary expres-
sions that chronicled the black experience. Langston
Hughes (1902–67) was, arguably, the most influ-
ential of all the Harlem Renaissance literati. The
author of countless novels, including Not Without
Laughter (1930), plays (e.g., Mule Bone, coauthored
with Zora Neale Hurston in 1931), and short stories
(many of them featured in the 1934 anthology The
Ways of White Folks), he is best known for his poems,
which explore themes such as the meaning of the
American dream for African Americans, the role
of race in America and the definition of freedom,
especially for the disenfranchised.
Tanfer Emin TuncThe american dream in the poetry of
Langston Hughes
Hughes lived in an America that was torn apart
by racism and segregation. Despite the so-called
“opportunities” for blacks in the North of the 1920s
and 1930s, African Americans lived in a differential
relationship to the nation. Their experiences with
the myth of the American dream did not escape
Hughes’s perspicacious gaze, and is thus a constant
thread in his literary work.