Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was popular during the Harlem Renaissance period(spanned the 1920s). He was an American poet, a social activist, columnist, and novelist. He is best known for being a leader during the Harlem Renaissance period. As discussed in the Literary Periods document, the Harlem Renaissance was a time of cultural movement and is also known as the "New Negro Movement." It was centered in Harlem, New York. He was famous for writing about this time period. I found the majority of the poems I read of his to be very entertaining. I chose the specific poem "Culture Exchange" because I thought it related very well with the Harlem Renaissance period. This poem, written in 1926, is basically about the black culture, black history, and the differences among the cultures that existed during this specific time period. This poem relates well to the Harlem Renaissance period because this period was a time where Harlem culture included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas of the northeast and midwest.

Cultural Exchange

In the Quarter of the Negroes
Where the doors are doors of paper
Dust of dingy atoms
Blows a scratchy sound.
Amorphous jack-o'-Lanterns caper
And the wind won't wait for midnight
For fun to blow doors down.
By the river and the railroad
With fluid far-off goind
Boundaries bind unbinding
A whirl of whisteles blowing.
No trains or steamboats going--
Yet Leontyne's unpacking.

In the Quarter of the Negroes
Where the doorknob lets in Lieder
More than German ever bore,
Her yesterday past grandpa--
Not of her own doing--
In a pot of collard greens
Is gently stewing.

Pushcarts fold and unfold
In a supermarket sea.
And we better find out, mama,
Where is the colored laundromat
Since we move dup to Mount Vernon.

In the pot begind the paper doors
on the old iron stove what's cooking?
What's smelling, Leontyne?
Lieder, lovely Lieder
And a leaf of collard green.
Lovely Lieder, Leontyne.

You know, right at Christmas
They asked me if my blackness,
Would it rub off?
I said, Ask your mama.

Dreams and nightmares!
Nightmares, dreams, oh!
Dreaming that the Negroes
Of the South have taken over--
Voted all the Dixiecrats
Right out of power--

Comes the COLORED HOUR:
Martin Luther King is Governor of Georgia,
Dr. Rufus Clement his Chief Adviser,
A. Philip Randolph the High Grand Worthy.
In white pillared mansions
Sitting on their wide verandas,
Wealthy Negroes have white servants,
White sharecroppers work the black plantations,
And colored children have white mammies:
Mammy Faubus
Mammy Eastland
Mammy Wallace
Dear, dear darling old white mammies--
Sometimes even buried with our family.
Dear old
Mammy Faubus!

Culture, they say, is a two-way street:
Hand me my mint julep, mammny.
Hurry up!
Make haste! 

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/cultural-exchange/