Cora Unashamed This Short Story by Langston

Cora Unashamed

This short story by Langston Hughes weaves a number of tragic and regrettable stories -- and themes -- within the tapestry of the central story line. But Hughes also gives the reader a reason to believe that an African-American maid and cook can tower over white folks in tough times by the sheer will of her personality. The iconic poet and author creates a setting in which the images of black and white are distinct and psychologically, socially, and culturally juxtaposed in an interesting way that is also full of racial and social tensions. When you write a story in which the protagonist is a member of the only African-American family in a small nondescript Mid-western town, who is employed as a maid and cook by an upper class white family, there are endless opportunities for conflict, irony, and even tragedy.

Approaching this story critically one has to also take into consideration the impact of abortion (in the early part of the 20th century abortion was very controversial and medically not very safe), on giving birth out of wedlock (especially for an African-American women), and the positive aspect of Cora standing up strong notwithstanding all the racial bias, death, and the impact of the dysfunctional white family on Cora's life.

Hughes is brilliant in his narrative as he builds Cora's competencies and steadiness up to be something worthy of praise -- given that Cora is just a black cook beholding to the machinations and narrow racial / social view of the upper class white family named Studevant -- and in fact the story positions and evaluates white families based not on white contrasted to black, but the other way around.

In the bi-racial family research found in the literature in the 1930s, which was the era of the Great Depression, so-called "depression-era experts typically assumed a naturalized white subject position" and hence, those experts "evaluated black families by their approximation to white" (Gillette, 2007, p. 127). However, Hughes turned that around, Gillette writes; indeed "Cora Unashamed' assumes a markedly black subject position" and as a result the short story "evaluates white families by their approximation to black" (Gillette, 127). In this story Hughes sets the reader up to believe that it will be yet another depiction of a dysfunctional black family -- the racist stereotype that unfortunately is attached to too many media depictions and too much of American literature with reference to the black family in America -- because Cora's father is "a drunkard" who tended to spend "…what little money he made from closet-cleaning, ash-hauling, and junk-dealing […] on the stuff that makes you forget you have eight kids" (Hughes).

But notwithstanding Cora's father's alcohol problems and other misdeeds, she is the rock of Gibraltar in this family. When her dad's horse died, it was Cora -- the steady protagonist -- that had the money in hand to buy her dad a new horse. When the mortgage came due and her family didn't have the cash to make that payment on time, it was Cora's employment for a biased white family that was the saving grace because she was tidy with her savings and usually had the money to bail the family out. And when her dad was tossed in jail, Cora's solid relationship with the Studevant family came in handy because Mrs. Studevant loaned her ten dollars to get her dad out of jail.