The sense of being divided in two was not just the root of the problem not just for the African-American, but for the United States. “One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”ĭuBois makes the body of the African-American-the body that endured so much work and which is beautifully rendered in Hughes’ second stanza “I am the darker brother”-as the vessel for the divided consciousness of his people.ĭuBois writes of the continual desire to end this suffering in the merging of this “double self into a better and truer self.” Yet in doing so, DuBois argued, paradoxically, that neither “of the older selves to be lost.” The African-American, according to DuBois in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folks, existed always in two ‘places” at once: DuBois whose speeches and essays about the dividedness of African-American identity and consciousness would rivet audiences and motivate and compel the determined activism that empowered the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. Hughes’ pays homage to his contemporary, the intellectual leader and founder of the NAACP, W.E.B. The other reference if you hear that “too” as “two” is not subservience, but dividedness. Enduring the unendurable, their spirit lives now in these galleries and among the scores of relic artifacts in the museum’s underground history galleries and in the soaring arts and culture galleries at the top of the bronze corona-shaped building.
Even excluded, the presence of African-Americans was made palpable by the smooth running of the house, the appearance of meals on the table, and the continuity of material life.
He honors those who lived below stairs or in the cabins. Hughes’ sly wink is to the African-Americans who worked in the plantation houses as slaves and servants. The house, of course, is the United States and the owners of the house and the kitchen are never specified or seen because they cannot be embodied. Intriguingly, Langston doesn’t amplify on who owns the kitchen. DuBois in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folks, existed always in two ‘places” at once.
The African-American, according to W.E.B. The full-throated drama of the poem portrays African-Americans moving from out of sight, eating in the kitchen, and taking their place at the dining room table co-equal with the “company” that is dining. Hughes powerfully speaks for the second-class, those excluded. If you hear the word as the number two, it suddenly shifts the terrain to someone who is secondary, subordinate, even, inferior. There is a multi-dimensional pun in the title, “I, too” in the lines that open and close the poem.
#Soul gone home by langston hughes series#
Its mere 18 lines capture a series of intertwined themes about the relationship of African-Americans to the majority culture and society, themes that show Hughes’ recognition of the painful complexity of that relationship. It embodies that history at a particular point in the early 20 th century when Jim Crow laws throughout the South enforced racial segregation and argues against those who would deny that importance-and that presence. The poem is a singularly significant affirmation of the museum’s mission to tell the history of United States through the lens of the African-American experience. By permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated
From THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES. The line comes from the Hughes’s poem “I, too,” first published in 1926. In large graven letters on the wall of the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall is a quote from poet Langston Hughes: “I, too, am America.”
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