It is necessary to consider this schizoid view in detail. The opposite of love is hate. While the black may love, they also have a dark side of hate close by. This is why he accentuates the love of blackness and asserted it so strongly, particularly at a time when it was not politically correct to do so. He is particularly pained by the fact that black men are not loving black women (or light skinned, if not white women). No wonder this type of mother is saying "don't be like niggers." While she loves her son, she hates herself and her people and this self-loathing does not help her son's impressions at all.
In "Sweet Brown Harlem Girl," David Jarraway remarks that in this and his other Harlem poems Hughes is looking at this love theme as part of a variety of dream postponements. Due to the general disappointment and the stifling nature of black life in America (even in Harlem), love as in anything else in the black experience is usually postponed to a later more appropriate time (Jarraway 69). Extending upon Hughes' radical assertion that black is beautiful, love takes a back seat to respect for his identity and his ethnicity. He is willing to wait for love because he wants it on equal terms. The love he sees is unpatronizing, uncompromising, beautiful and proud. This is the vision of love he has for the black woman.
This type of theme is further explored in "Love Song for Linda." In this poem, Hughes has obviously climbed the "racial mountain" on his own terms as a black poet. The terms of climb are spelled out in the poem itself when he remarks "Love is a high mountain, stark in a windy sky…Do not climb too high (Hughes "Love Song for Linda")." Unlike the mother he pities in his Nation article, he wants Linda to be proud of and to love her blackness. For Hughes, there is no love to be found when one starts with self-hatred....
Rather, the black person needs to look in the mirror and be comfortable with themselves. It is this mountain that he sees a contemporary of his having to climb:
One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet -- not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America -- this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible (Hughes "The Negro Artist…").
If one compromises on the way to the top of this Mt. Everest, they will never make it. Only by not selling out can one both come to love themselves and the black people as well.
Happily for Hughes, we can see that the author's assertion that Hughes' conflict with his biracial identity as well as in the relationship and with both parents and was worked out eventually successfully later on in life in his poetry. Unlike his younger contemporary, he climbed the mountain of racial identity without selling himself short.
Works Cited
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Modern American
Poetry. Modern American Poetry, 1926. Web. 9 Jul 2010. .
Jarraway, David R. Going the distance: dissident subjectivity in modernist American literature. New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.
Works Cited
