The image of the black soul: From the hut near the Congo to the banks of Mississippi

Abstract

The paper examines the poems of Langston Hughes, especially ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ and ‘Dream Deferred’. In a manner that can best be described as rhetorical, Hughes exhumes the spirit of the black race and portrays it in simple poetic language, uncluttered by the linguistic jargon of the German Idealists, yet sending the message of community of souls among the black people.

Hughes uses the river as a metaphor to depict the source of life and the unending flow of its currents. From Africa flowed the currents of the black soul; finding abode in the new world. ‘My soul has grown deep like the rivers ’, which appears at the end of the poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, suggests that he, and by extension, the black soul is no longer the same man who ‘bathed in the Euphrates and built his hut near the Congo’.

The paper accounts for the deepening of the black soul. The ‘innocent’ African who was forced to leave his hut in the Congo and transverse the length of the Mississippi became a new black man. The black man, argues the paper, has drunk from life-giving essences, and thereby borrowed from immortality. The black soul is capable of moving up and down the hierarchy of life or being. It is therefore part of the essence of the black soul to move from slaves to freemen.

The paper concludes that as the rivers deepen with time, so does the black man’s soul; as their waters ceaselessly flow, so will the black soul endure. The black man has seen the rise and fall of civilizations from the earliest times, seen the beauty and death-changes of the world over the thousands of years, and will survive whatever tribulations, at home or in the Diaspora.