Literature overview and key concepts

Langston Hughes method of exposing racism and gender racism in Five Plays is to simply tell it like it is, to show all aspects of black life, good, bad, beautiful, ugly, and everything in between. He depicts forms of racism such as oppression, miscegenation, violence, dishonesty in the name of religion, illegal profiteering playing upon the hopes and dreams of the poor, at the same time he glorifies the love, beauty, uplifting music, true faith and laughter of his black brothers and sisters. He doesn't try to hide what is unsavory about blacks. He doesn't need to put a lot of whites in his plays to demonstrate racism. Langston Hughes presents the black people as they are, showing how racism and gender racism has continues to affect their lives.

The Voices and Visions video on Langston Hughes reveals how the artistry of Hughes has contributed to our understanding of racism. In June of 1926 what was called Hughes's "Manifesto" appeared in the Nation Magazine. In this piece, titled: "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes, who was fast becoming both the voice of Negro people, and the voice of the Negro artist expressed the philosophy we see in his works: "We are beautiful and ugly too. We stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves" (Voices and Visions video). Hughes wrote about everyday ordinary blacks, about their beauty and their ugliness. He focused on common working people. His role as writer was to transform the ordinary and commonplace through his poetic imagination into art. This art conveyed the role of racism in their lives in order to help them see themselves and their relationships with whites better.

Hughes is described as "a seer who gives illumination to the significance of black experience." In the video, James Baldwin says: Hughes "helps blacks to see what's already in front of their eyes." As an "unrelenting" publicist for black art and black people Hughes injected the black experience with significance. Using black speech patterns and music he underscored his main theme that black is beautiful. (Voices and Visions video).

In the anthology, Five Plays, the editor, Webster Smalley presents plays by Hughes that bring to the stage the tragedy and comedy and everything in between that makes up the black story in the deep South and in Harlem. The five plays are Mulatto, Soul Gone Home, Little Ham, Simply Heavenly, and Tambourines to Glory.

Mulatto is a tragedy that takes place in the deep South where racism is most deeply entrenched. "In Mulatto," says editor Smalley, "the injustices suffered by Bert, by Cora, and by all the Negroes in the rural South are clearly and forcefully presented" (Smalley xi). Colonel Thomas Norwood has lived with a black woman, Cora, for many years ever since his wife died. He has had 5 children by her. The four still living are now adults or nearly so. The father doesn't publicly acknowledge his children, though he pays for their schooling. He finds it outrageous for the boy Bert, to call him father in public, and beats him for doing so. This is a critical turning point in the boy's life. He desperately wants to be acknowledged as white. That there is no hope of that in this southern society is the saddest element of the horrible racism seen in this play. Children who are half white, cannot use their father's name and do not dare to claim their white blood. The price for Bert, now a young man facing the realities of his situation, is death. He rebels against his fate and ends up killing his father in a rage. He flees for his life, symbolizing the eternal need of the blacks to run for their lives. Then, knowing the fate in store for him at the hands of the white mob, he takes his own life.

In discussing this play, at least one critic makes much of what she calls "intracaste prejudice" (Bienvenu 341) which might otherwise be called racism of a mulatto against his own black half. Bert is obsessed with his white father and with "being recognized as Norwood's true heir" (Bienvenu 342). He doesn't want to be a "black buck" or be identified in any way by his black blood. As his brother William says, "Bert thinks he's a real white man hisself now" (Mulatto 14). He wants to use the front door and shake hands with his father. This does seem to be an ironic form of racism in which a young man who shares the blood of two races, chooses his white blood over his black blood and is doomed to die for his choice because whites believe that his portion of black blood makes him inferior to them. Whether or not we consider Bert's disowning of his black side as intracaste racism, it is obvious that racism has a strong effect on mixed blood children. As one critic puts it, "the psychological impact of miscegenation" will often be overwhelming in "children born of forced interracial liaisons."

Mulatto children often develop "identity problems" which, in turn, "adversely affect their social behavior and their personal self-esteem" (Barksdale, 193). In Mulatto Hughes shows the varying effects of mixed blood and racists feeling toward miscegenation on the children of Cora and the Colonel.

Another aspect of racism that comes across loud and clear in Mulatto is the violence that racial hatred provokes in the South. The threat and fear of violence must always be present for blacks where racial relations are concerned. For Hughes, as one critic puts it, "The South's penchant for racial violence" is another "important area of concern" (Barksdale, 193). As the editor of Five Plays points out, Mulatto is the only play in the book in which a white character is "more than peripheral" (Smalley xi), and none of the white characters are the least bit appealing. To emphasize the threat of racial violence, Hughes method is obvious, "continually":

grotesque white characters come in and out of the play like ogres, ready to pounce upon nonwhite victims at the slightest provocation (Bienvenu 341).

Thus we see that among the themes Hughes embodies in Mulatto that reveal the extreme racism of the deep South are "white racists who defend their notion of supremacy" (Bienvenu 341) and "interracial amours and Negro education." All these aspects of racism are concerned with firmly held attitudes of whites that actually "largely concern actions of whites" (Gates 193).

Three of the plays in Five Plays are comedies. Hughes is a master at conveying his message about racism even in comedy. As Smalley puts it in his introduction to the plays: "The triple specters of poverty, ignorance, and repression can be seen not far beneath the surface of the comedy" (Smalley xii). The editor of Five Plays accounts for Hughes's characters obsessions with the numbers racket, dream books and the hot goods man in Little Ham, Simple's comic bit about no Negro having seen a flying saucer, and attitudes toward the religion business in Tambourines to Glory by describing them as comic presentations showing the "the poverty, the ignorance and the superstition that prevail in the world of which Hughes writes" (Smalley xii). Under the comedy there is always the serious purpose of exposing the fruits of racism. As one reviewer said: "underlying all that laughter...there is the terrifying and tragic thread of life where there is no hope" (Rampersad 326).