Langston Hughes helped advance black literature in the United States more than any other writer. As a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Hughes also wrote fiction, plays, and a newspaper column-anything that would express the status of blacks in American society.
His story “Cross” describes a person that is a son to a white father and a black mother. He compares the two in ways that put the white male above the black mother drastically. He says, “If ever I cursed my white old man, I take the curses back. If ever I cursed my black old mother and wished she were in hell, I’m sorry for that evil wish and now I wish her well.” To me this means that discipline was coming to the son if he did not repent of cursing his old man. Yet if he was to do it to his mother, the only bad thing that would happen
These two authors described blacks almost as living under the white’s supervision. This created blacks feeling of fear and I’m sure nervousness in some occasions. They were powerless in anything they tried to do. But as Langston Hughes put it that we are all brothers under the skin and I think that even though blacks were going through this hard time, they had this thinking in the back of their mind and in time we would all be equal.
to the son was his own conscience making him feel bad for doing so. The son also describes his old man dieing in a fine big house, and the mother dieing in a shack. This obviously means that the white people were far better off when it came to wealth at this time in society. The last two lines are also a cause for thought. He says, “I wonder where I’m gonna die, being neither white nor black?” If this happened
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