Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [66]
“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay on the situation of the Negro artist in America sets up some interesting issues that are as relevant today as they were in Hughes’s time. Interestingly, the final sentence of the essay (“We build our temples…”) will be echoed some four decades later by the Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, but with a different spin on the idea of freedom. Hughes writes “we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” King says, “Free at last, free at last, my God almighty, we’re free at last.” King asserts an opening out into the world—a freeing of black people, finally, from slavery and then another century of oppression.
Hughes speaks of blacks in a more isolated position—”on top of the mountain” and “within ourselves.” Although the mountain may stand for a height from which the artist can speak, it is hard to be heard from the top of mountains. It is one thing to be free. It is another to be free within oneself. What does this phrase mean? If I am free within myself I am at least less vulnerable to those who would restrict me from without. I can live with their restrictions. Mine is an inner freedom. Does inner freedom empower artists? Perhaps it does. It may allow them to say what they want and not worry about what others say or think. This is one thing that Hughes seems to be calling for. But he is also worried about lack of recognition of Negro artists, not only by whites but by blacks. His use of the repeated phrase, tom-tom, is interesting in this respect. It, like the word “mountain,” becomes a kind of refrain in the essay—announcing both a desire to rise above the world and its difficulties (mountain) and a desire to be heard (tom-tom and mountain as pulpit).
The idea of revolt, outright rebellion, is present but subdued in the essay. The tom-tom is a “revolt against weariness” and also an instrument for expressing “joy and laughter.” The tom-tom also suggests a link with a past African and probably Native American culture—communicating by drum and music and dance. White culture in the essay stands for a joyless world of “work work work.” This is something I would like to think about more, as the essay seems to link the loss of soul with the middle and upper classes, both black and white.
And so the essay seeks to claim another space among those he calls “the low down folks, the so-called common element.” Of these he says “… they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance!” In these lines Hughes the poet clearly appears. Does he say then that the Negro artist needs to draw from those of his own people who are the most removed from middle class American life? If I had more time, I would start thinking here about Hughes’s use of the words “race” and “racial”….
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Try This 4.1: Do a Passage-based Focused Freewrite
Select a passage from any of the material you are reading and copy it at the top of the page. Remember to choose the passage in response to the question, “What is the single sentence that I think it is most important for us to discuss and why?” Then do a twenty-minute focused freewrite, applying the steps offered above. Discover what you think by seeing what you say.
It is often productive to take the focused freewrite and type it, revising and further freewriting until you have filled the inevitable gaps in your thinking that the time limit has created. (One colleague of ours has students revise and expand in a different font, so both can see how the thinking is evolving.) Eventually,