I, Too, Sing America by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America. In A Nutshell Patriotism’s a pretty complicated concept. It can mean standing up for your country or criticizing it. If you want to sum up patriotism, you can simply call it “love for one’s country.” But how does one love a country? Unconditionally? Langston Hughes certainly doesn’t think so. And “I, Too, Sing America” is, in fact, a patriotic poem. Just in some very unexpected ways. Hughes was often considered the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural explosion that took place in New York City during the 1920s and ’30s, giving rise to popular jazz, all kinds of African-American art, and a whole slew of seminal (that means first, and really important) works of African-American literature and poetry. You probably already know some of Hughes’s other poetry, like “Harlem” (also called “Dream Deferred”) and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Hughes published “I, Too, Sing America” in 1945, a good ten years or so before the start of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Racism and prejudice were rampant in the US at the beginning of the 20th century – much more than they are now – and so Hughes’s poem envisions a day in which whites and blacks will eat “at the table” together, in which black citizens will be truly classified as equal Americans. Why Should I Care?   We started this party talking about patriotism. Let’s talk about it a little more; specifically, why you should care about patriotism in terms of this poem. Get your American flags out and prepare to examine the heck out of them. Metaphorically speaking, of course (hey, we’re poets here too). Patriotism’s all about loving your country and being proud to be its citizen, right? Well, yes and no. If you love your country, you want what’s best for it, and sometimes what’s best for it isn’t always what it’s doing at that time. So sometimes patriotism can take the form of “tough love,” in which you have to criticize your government and/or society in order to get it to wake up and improve itself – be the best that it can be. In Langston Hughes‘s case, he knows that by birth he’s an American citizen. But as a black man in the pre-Civil Rights United States, he sure isn’t being treated like one. So something’s got to change. “I, Too, Sing America” hearkens back quite literally to the days of slavery, when African Americans were supposed to be barely-visible labor, not actual human beings. The implication of this poem is that, in practice, not a whole lot has changed since then. So Hughes pens this poem, in which he envisions a greater America, a more inclusive America. He claims with force that he is in fact part of America – a country that’s all about equality and freedom. Freedom and equality. Now those are two concepts that we can get behind, right? Those are two concepts that good citizens of the United States should champion, right? Right. So in very few words, and with some startling imagery, Hughes is really teaching us how to assert ourselves, and how to be true Americans – Americans who aren’t afraid to try and improve their country, and who aren’t afraid to claim its citizenship, no matter what. In this short poem, the speaker begins by claiming that he, too, “sing[s] America” (1). He goes on to note that he is “the darker brother” (2), referring to his skin color, and then makes reference to the fact that he is sent “to eat in the kitchen / when company comes” (3-4), as if he were a black slave in a white household. The oppression, however, doesn’t stop him from laughing and growing strong. Then the speaker envisions a future in which he is no longer sent to the kitchen, in which no one would dare to call him unequal. They (presumably, the white majority) will see him as beautiful and “be ashamed” (17) at their previous prejudice. The poem concludes with the speaker asserting, again, that he (and, therefore, his race) is indeed American. How does this poem make you think about what it means to be an American? How is “America” presented in this poem, and how does it make you feel about America? What effect does the intensely domestic imagery of the poem – the house, the kitchen, the eating, the table – have on the themes of this piece as a whole? What kind of character is the speaker? How do you feel about him as a spokesperson for American citizenry? There are many different ways in which the speaker of this poem relates to “the other” (i.e., the white Americans) here. It’s more than just “these people don’t like these other people” – can you identify the whole range of emotions? How do these emotions make the piece more complicated? What relationship does the historical setting of this poem have to Hughes’s contemporary setting? That is, how does the poem manage to work on two levels – America in the time of slavery and America in the first half of the 20th century? How are those two time periods similar? How are they different?