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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!
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After reading all of Langston Hughes poems I felt that this one was one of the hardest to make sense of because I couldn’t
really understand the first part of the poem. But I believe that Hughes wrote this poem describing the exchanges of cultural
experiences between blacks and white. So the first part of the poem I believe is about the exchange of the white culture giving
Leontyne Price a chance to become a famous American operatic soprano and enriching the black culture. Then in the second part
of the poem it describes the exchange of the blacks returning the favorite by allowing the whites to experience the cultural
life of what the blacks had to endure.
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