performance, longing, and desire. Other poems
present a more studied and quietly intimate vision
of Harlem and the women who survive there. In
“Nude Young Dancer,” Hughes wonders, “What
jungle tree have you slept under, / Night-dark girl
of the swaying hips? What star-white moon has
been your mother? / To what clean boy have you
offered your lips?” In “Young Prostitute,” the
speaker shares a more matter-of-fact and depress-
ing conclusion about the woman he sees. “Her
dark brown face / Is like a withered flower / On a
broken stem,” he notes. Yet, the last two lines of
the short poem offer a challenge or potential ac-
ceptance of that image of depressed womanhood:
“Those kind come cheap in Harlem / So they say.”
Additional sections reflect Hughes’s penchant
for observation. The poems in “Shadows in the
Sun” include “Beggar Boy,” a work in which a
speaker wonders “[w]hat is there within this beg-
gar lad / That I can neither hear nor feel nor see, /
That I can neither know nor understand / And still
it calls to me?” The lone figure in “Troubled
Woman” seems untouched by the speaker’s gaze.
She “stands / In the quiet darkness... / Bowed by
/ Weariness and pain, / Like an / Autumn flower /
In the frozen rain. / Like a / Wind-blown autumn
flower / That never lifts it head / Again.”
“Our Land,” the very last section of the vol-
ume, includes some of Hughes’s most often an-
thologized works, including the poignant “Mother
to Son.” The penultimate work is “Epilogue,” the
inspired manifesto that challenges American
racism and disregard for its citizens of color. “I,
too, sing America,” declares the resolute speaker,
the “darker brother” who is banished “to eat in
the kitchen / When company comes.” The poem
ends with the speaker’s rejection of the flawed
“logic” of segregation. “They’ll see how beautiful I
am / And be ashamed,—” he predicts, “I too, am
America.”
In 1926, Hughes met his friend WARING
CUNEYfor the first time, and their contact was fa-
cilitated by the publication of The Weary Blues.As
Hughes would recall later in his autobiography THE
BIGSEA(1940), he met Cuney on a “street car in
Washington.... He had a CHICAGODEFENDER,
oldest American Negro paper, in his hand, and my
picture was in the Defenderwith the announce-
ment of the forthcoming publication of The Weary
Blues.Cuney looked from the picture to me, then
asked if I were one and the same. I said yes. Then
he said he wrote poetry, too. I said I’d like to see it,
so later he brought some of his poems to show me”
(173–174).
Blanche Knopf, a central figure at the publish-
ing house with which Hughes would have a long
and productive relationship, assured him that the
book contained “delightful verse” and that “we
want to publish it” (Rampersad, 1109). The vol-
ume is especially powerful for its colorful and stud-
ied portraits of HARLEMand its delicately phrased
perspectives on the multifaceted and contempla-
tive residents of that diverse community.Bibliography
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography.1940;
reprint, edited by Joseph McLaren. Columbia: Uni-
versity of Missouri Press, 2002.
———. The Weary Blues.New York: Knopf, 1926.
Berry, Faith, ed. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond
Harlem.Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Com-
pany, 1983.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too,
Sing America.Vol. 1, 1902–1941.New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986.“Wedding Day”Gwendolyn Bennett(1926)
The short story that GWENDOLYNBENNETTcon-
tributed to FIRE!!,the short-lived avant-garde lit-
erary magazine. The protagonist, Paul Watson, is a
talented musician, former prizefighter, and Ameri-
can expatriate living in Paris. Watson, known well
to musicians and residents in the Montmartre dis-
trict of Paris, despises white Americans. He does
not hesitate to lash out violently at individuals
who use racial epithets in their conversations with
or about him. Eventually, Watson is imprisoned for
shooting two white American sailors who disre-
spect him. He is released in time to join the French
army during World War I. Eventually, Watson suc-
cumbs to the tears and plaintive request for atten-
tion from a white woman named Mary. Despite his
hatred of white Americans, he falls in love with
her, and the two decide to marry. On the morning
of his wedding day, Paul gets a terse note from
Mary in which she confesses that her race and low
class status prevent her from marrying him. The556 “Wedding Day”