Voices of Ordinary African American People in Langston Hughes's Early First-person Poems

As shown in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, Langston Hughes wrote 125 first-person poems between the years 1921 and 1930, where in the first person singular form "I" is used to create a range of persona. In those poems, the young poet makes up the various voices of the ordinary black American folks from a variety of perspectives via "I" as the personality of man, woman, worker, slave, mother, love, intellectual, etc, with young or old age. Superficially, these voices utter shallow feelings of love, hope, dream, anguish, resentment, sadness, despair, and helplessness; in reality, these voices are really deep appeals by the ordinary black American people for a more urgent and necessary change of their miserable and intolerable living conditions. Given an equal opportunity, the black American people can also achieve as well as any other American citizens can. Those poems also show us the humor and wisdom of ordinary black Americans through a panorama of their everyday lives and thoughts and feelings. This paper argues that Hughes's early first-person poems expose a full view of the process of the author's original prophecy that his soul "has grown deep like the rivers", and how his soul or artistic imagination will have a say on behalf of the ordinary black American people. In the center of the voices lies explicitly the very idea that all the ordinary black American people should consider their living status seriously as a foundation to strive for something new, not just as a reason to lament their miserable living conditions, both mental and material.