on the road langston hughes essay

“On the Road” by Langston Hughes Essay

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Introduction

First of all, it is necessary to mention, that the poem “On the Road” by Langston Hughes is the narration of the periods of the Great Depression. The protagonist of this play ‑ Sargeant, an African American vagabond, seeks food and shelter. He arrived in Reno, Nevada during the serious snowstorm, however, he does not feel the snowflakes, burning his face. He is too hungry, sleepy, and looking for shelter.

Langston Hughes’s story deals with a commentary on situations befalling African Americans during the Depression Era. This situation appears to be rather difficult, as the position of those who are different from the others (by race, religion, or class). From the feminist point of view, the poem does not touch upon the issues of sexual discrimination during the Great Depression. Originally, the author aimed to explore, what happens, when a weakened person acts only based on his conditions.

The short story reveals the distraction and consequent violent actions of one human’s homeless dilemma on a snowy winter evening. From the feminist point of view, this idea is not worth attention, and the fact, that the desperation may cause the appearance of the additional powers is not essential from the feminist point of view, as the feminist movement was not based on desperation, but only with strong determination.

The theme of the poem deals with the conditions that the African American community challenges during the Great Depression. From the feminist criticism point of view, this discrimination of the African American population worsened the situation for the African American women, who were discriminated against for two reasons: they were African American, and they were women. As for the plot, that is aims to reveal the destiny of the African American man, searching for shelter. There was no way to search for shelter, while lots of women suffered from hunger. The character should search not shelter, but all the efforts should be directed for the help of the starving women.

The main character of the poem is the African American man, named Sargeant. The feminist activists would not bear the fact, that only men can achieve success and overcome all the difficulties and challenges that life offers for them. Langston Hughes should not devote the whole poem to the main protagonist. He should also point out, that women are also powerful enough to overcome all the challenges.

Motiff, that made the author write this poem was to show all the challenges, that American citizens (mostly African Americans) challenged during the Great Depression period. The fact is that these matters were described by lots of other poets and novelists, however, few devoted their creations to the challenges of women and the consequences of the feminist movements during the Great Depression Era.

In conclusion, it is necessary to mention, that the feminist point of view, that may be applied to this poem can not fit the plot and the theme. As the poem touches upon the issues of the Great Depression, there is no sense in criticizing it from the feminist viewpoint. However, the protagonist is led not only by his hunger but also by his ideas. That would be appreciated by the feminists, who are always firm.

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Bibliography

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On the Road by Langston Hughes, Essay Example

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The story “On the Road” by Langston Hughes provides an exciting perspective on a vagabond’s life. Sargeant is the focus of the narration and provides insight into a vagabond’s life in society. Each character and location of events offer valuable insight into the viewpoint the audience should contemplate through the reading. An analysis of each aspect and character reveals more details about the nature of the vagabond’s life. Sargeant, the Reverend Mr. Dorset, the Christ from the cross, and the Church prove useful through their ironical nature. The contrast each character, event, and location provide is also helpful in illustrating various elements of the life Sargeant experienced. Another characteristic that ties in with the theme of the literature piece is the title, which provides a form of oversight into the writing’s purpose. The paper analyzes each component and explores the contributions they provide in comprehending the experiences of a vagabond in the streets.

The first character that catches the reader’s attention is Sargeant. Sargeant is a vagabond who seems to be depressed. The author points out the apparent lack of response to conditions that would otherwise catch any other healthy person’s attention. He seems oblivious to the chilly conditions prevailing outside, as seen in the first paragraph. The writer records that Sargeant seemed not to feel the snow’s cold and wetness either on his neck or in his shoes (Hughes 1). Even his eyes failed to catch the sight of snow falling through the air in the bright light. Confusion and disorientation also point to the lack of calmness in Sargeant’s mind. The fifth paragraph of page one indicates his feelings of hunger and conflicting thoughts of being lost while not feeling lost. His circumstances and reflections point to the prolonged period in which the vagabond lived in a poor mental state. The weather also paints the picture of his bleak and hopeless outlook on life. Snowy conditions offer a gloomy view of the environment (Hughes 1), reflecting the hopeless perspective Sargeant had about his life. The economic conditions of the time also reinforce the observation. The narration points to a period of economic depression in the first paragraph of page one. His economic life experienced the same problem. Additionally, even the weather and economic environment seemed to reinforce the hardship the man experienced.

Reverend Mr. Doset provides useful insight into the difficult natureof the life Sargeant experienced. The interaction between the two men enables the reader to understand the quality of social interactions the vagabond experienced in society. Sargent had a poor social life. Mr. Doset appears as an authority figure that would be in a position to help Sargeant. He is a church leader, has access to resources the man needs, and should be able to tend to the vagabond based on his job description. As a representative of the church, the pastor should be able to assist the needy in society. He does the opposite in this case, contrary to the reader’s expectation. When Sargeant comes for help, the Reverend shuns him and sends him away, as we see in the second and third paragraphs (Hughes 1). He refers the vagabond to a shelter down the street, where the man has already faced rejection. The occurrence is ironic since the pastor would be in the best position to get the man whatever he needs. The scenario serves to reinforce the reader’s understanding of the hopelessness and desperation Sargeant experiences. It is evident that the vagabond has to be on the road because he has nowhere to go. Nobody is willing to aid him yet the authority figures and institutions available have the capacity to help him. Such a circumstance may help to explain why the man suffers depression. One would expect that the shelters would have their door open to anyone in need yet Sargeant fails to find assistance. The situation seems to reflect the failure the vagabond has experienced to acquire and utilize opportunities available to him. He may have been unaware of the opportunities or failed to qualify to get them.

The church is also symbolic of the life of Sargeant. The place correlates to the representation of the Reverend and the shelters. Sargeant fails to find assistance when he decides to go to the building (Hughes 2). He had hoped to find solace at the church but instead, the building collapsed. The incident seems to point to the dashed hopes that the vagabond has experienced whenever he sought help. Our understanding of the church is as a place of sanctuary. Church members tend to promote the location as an area for finding solutions. The opposite is true as the church seems to generate more problems for the vagabond. Sargeant ends up demolishing the building and gets into trouble with the police and other bystanders, who mistake him for a criminal. It is ironic that the church fails to serve its purpose. His efforts end up sending him to a prison cell (Hughes 4). The incident points out once more to the hopelessness and desperation in Sargeant’s life. Nothing seems to offer solutions to the hardship he faces.

The character of the Christ Sargeant sees is useful in understanding the nature of the society. The church tends to serve as an emblem of freedom. It is ironical that the church becomes a prison for their source of freedom-the Christ. The observation is evident through the conversation Sargeant seems to have with Christ in the second and third pages (Hughes 3). Christ seems relieved that he got an opportunity to be free from the cross, where the church had pinned him. Such a representation contradicts the freedom through resurrection that the church upholds. Christ was supposed to be free from death after the resurrection yet the church had still nailed him to the cross. The scenario demonstrates the lack of freedom the congregation, and perhaps the community, experienced. The beliefs the people have embraced seem to fail to produce the results they expect to receive. Sargeant has the same problem, which contributes to his depressive state.

The paper has provided an analysis of the state of Sargeant’s life perspective. The characters, locations, and activities in the story have enabled the comprehension of the life the vagabond lives. It is evident through the weather, the economic period, the Reverend, and the church and its ideals that the life of a vagabond is hopeless, desperate and depressive. Whatever opportunities and channels available to the individual for help fail to serve their purpose. The vagabond therefore remains on the road, wandering about in life.

Hughes, Langston. On the Road. (1902-1967)

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Langston Hughes: Poems

Intimacy through point of view in "on the road" alex nichamin.

Langston Hughes’ “On the Road” takes place during the depression and chronicles a homeless black man’s search for a place to stay the night. This man, Sargeant, first attempts to stay at a parsonage, but is turned down by the Reverend. He then sees the church next to the parsonage and decides he will sleep inside of it. The door is locked and no one answers his knocks, so he pushes against the door and he is able to break the door open. As the door breaks open two cops arrive and try to pull him away from the door, but Sargeant grabs onto a stone pillar at the front of the church and refuses to let go. Gradually, the front of the church falls down, and then the whole thing falls onto the cops and onto Sargeant, who is knocked unconscious by the debris. While unconscious, Sargeant has a dream that he is talking to Christ and at the end of the dream, when Sargeant tries to get on a train, he wakes up and realizes that he is in jail. The intimacy of the second person point of view evokes from the reader a sympathy for Sargeant. This is done through the narrator’s use of language, the narrator’s omniscience, and the narrator’s seeming firsthand knowledge of being in a situation similar to Sargeant’s.

The narrator uses simple,...

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Langston Hughes — Church’s Controversy in The Story “On The Road” by Langston Hughes

Church's Controversy in The Story "On The Road" by Langston Hughes

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Published: Jun 29, 2018

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Poems & Poets

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance , the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes. As he wrote in his essay “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain ,” “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

This approach was not without its critics. Much of Hughes’s early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life. In his autobiographical  The Big Sea,  Hughes commented:

Fine Clothes to the Jew [Hughes’s second book] was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES’ BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as ‘the poet low- rate of Harlem.’ Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. … The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot.

In fact, the title  Fine Clothes to the Jew,  which was misunderstood and disliked by many people, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; most of the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people. Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes’s assistant, believed that Hughes was

critically, the most abused poet in America. …  Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes’ poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes … was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll.

Nevertheless, Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations. In Hughes’s own words, his poetry is about "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

Hoyt W. Fuller commented that Hughes "chose to identify with plain black people … precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet’s reaction to his father’s flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor.” (Langston Hughes’s parents separated shortly after his birth and his father moved to Mexico. The elder Hughes came to feel a deep dislike and revulsion for other African-Americans.)

Although Hughes had trouble with both black and white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was the phenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewer for  Black World  noted in 1970: "Those whose prerogative it is to determine the rank of writers have never rated him highly, but if the weight of public response is any gauge then Langston Hughes stands at the apex of literary relevance among Black  people. The poet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because he recognized that ‘we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength,’ and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people." Hughes brought a varied and colorful background to his writing. Before he was 12 years old he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy. As David Littlejohn observed in his  Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes:  "On the whole, Hughes’ creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso’s, a joyful, honest  monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex  artists, if ‘different views engage’ us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it’s over. … Hughes’ [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He  seems  to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do. Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B. Semple (shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no-good, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil in the stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. “White folks,” Simple once commented, “is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life.” Simple’s musings first appeared in 1942 in “From Here to Yonder,” a column Hughes wrote for the  Chicago Defender  and later for the  New York Post.  According to a reviewer for  Kirkus Reviews,  their original intent was “to convince black Americans to support the U.S. war effort.” They were later published in several volumes. A more recent collection, 1994’s  The Return of Simple,  contains previously unpublished material but remains current in its themes, according to a  Publishers Weekly  critic who noted Simple’s addressing of such issues as political correctness, children’s rights, and the racist undercurrent behind contraception and sterilization proposals. Donald C. Dickinson wrote in his  Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes  that "[the] charm of Simple lies in his uninhibited pursuit of those two universal goals, understanding and security. As with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimes once achieved they disappoint him. … Simple has a tough resilience, however, that won’t allow him to brood over a failure very long. … Simple is a well-developed character, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so true to life everyone may enter the fun."

 A reviewer for  Black World commented on the popularity of Simple: “The people responded. Simple lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears—and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives.” Hoyt W. Fuller believed that, like Simple, "the key to Langston Hughes … was the poet’s deceptive and  profound  simplicity. Profound because it was both  willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning of his adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existed undiminished in all shapes, sizes, colors and conditions. Violations of that humanity offended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God." It was Hughes’s belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that “ most  people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.” Reviewing  The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times  in  Poetry,  Laurence Lieberman recognized that Hughes’s “sensibility [had] kept pace with the times,” but he criticized his lack of a personal political stance. “Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starkly antithetical politics of race,” Lieberman commented. “A reader can appreciate his catholicity, his tolerance of all the rival—and mutually hostile—views of his outspoken compatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask, what are Hughes’ politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically.” Hughes’s position in the American literary scene seems to be secure. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is "the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. … His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson’s or Robinson Jeffers’. … By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."

The Block  and  The Sweet and Sour Animal Book  are posthumously published collections of Hughes’s poetry for children that position his words against a backdrop of visual art.  The Block  pairs Hughes’s poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bear the book’s title.  The Sweet and Sour Animal Book  contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s. Here, the editors have combined it with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. The results, noted Veronica Chambers in the  New York Times Book Review,  “reflect Hughes’s childlike wonder as well as his sense of humor.” Chambers also commented on the rhythms of Hughes’s words, noting that “children love a good rhyme” and that Hughes gave them “just a simple but seductive taste of the blues.” Hughes’s poems have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of them have been set to music. Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to  Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays  that Hughes

has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than  Walt Whitman , Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. …  Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

Hughes died on May 22, 1967, due to complications from prostate cancer.

• Harlem Renaissance

ARTS & CULTURE

A lost work by langston hughes examines the harsh life on the chain gang.

In 1933, the Harlem Renaissance star wrote a powerful essay about race. It has never been published in English—until now

Steven Hoelscher

It’s not every day that you come across an extraordinary unknown work by one of the nation’s greatest writers. But buried in an unrelated archive I recently discovered a searing essay condemning racism in America by Langston Hughes—the moving account, published in its original form here for the first time, of an escaped prisoner he met while traveling with Zora Neale Hurston.

In the summer of 1927, Hughes lit out for the American South to learn more about the region that loomed large in his literary imagination. After giving a poetry reading at Fisk University in Nashville, Hughes journeyed by train through Louisiana and Mississippi before disembarking in Mobile, Alabama. There, to his surprise, he ran into Hurston, his friend and fellow author. Described by Yuval Taylor in his new book Zora and Langston as “one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history,” the encounter brought together two leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. On the spot, the pair decided to drive back to New York City together in Hurston’s small Nash coupe.

The terrain along the back roads of the rural South was new to Hughes, who grew up in the Midwest; by contrast, Hurston’s Southern roots and training as a folklorist made her a knowledgeable guide. In his journal Hughes described the black people they met in their travels: educators, sharecropping families, blues singers and conjurers. Hughes also mentioned the chain gang prisoners forced to build the roads they traveled on.

A Literary Road Trip

Three years later, Hughes gave the poor, young and mostly black men of the chain gangs a voice in his satirical poem “Road Workers”—but we now know that the images of these men in gray-and-black-striped uniforms continued to linger in the mind of the writer. In this newly discovered manuscript, Hughes revisited the route he traveled with Hurston, telling the story of their encounter with one young man picked up for fighting and sentenced to hard labor on the chain gang.

I first stumbled upon this Hughes essay in the papers of John L. Spivak, a white investigative journalist in the 1920s and 1930s, at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Not even Hughes’ authoritative biographer Arnold Rampersad could identify the manuscript. Eventually, I learned that Hughes had written it as an introduction to a novel Spivak published in 1932, Georgia Nigger . The book was a blistering exposé of the atrocious conditions that African-Americans suffered on chain gangs, and Spivak gave it a deliberately provocative title to reflect the brutality he saw. Scholars today consider the forced labor system a form of slavery by another name. On the final page of the manuscript (not reproduced here), Hughes wrote that by “blazing the way to truth,” Spivak had written a volume “of great importance to the Negro peoples.”

Hughes titled these three typewritten pages “Foreword From Life.” And in them he also laid bare his fears of driving through Jim Crow America. “We knew that it was dangerous for Northern Negroes to appear too interested in the affairs of the rural South,” he wrote. (Hurston packed a chrome-plated pistol for protection during their road trip.)

But a question remained: Why wasn’t Hughes’ essay included in any copy of Spivak’s book I had ever seen? Buried in Spivak’s papers, I found the answer. Hughes’ essay was written a year after the book was published, commissioned to serve as the foreword of the 1933 Soviet edition and published only in Russian.

In early 1933, Hughes was living in Moscow, where he was heralded as a “revolutionary writer.” He had originally traveled there a year earlier along with 21 other influential African-Americans to participate in a film about American racism. The film had been a bust (no one could agree on the script), but escaping white supremacy in the United States—at least temporarily—was immensely appealing. The Soviet Union, at that time, promoted an ideal of racial equality that Hughes longed for. He also found that he could earn a living entirely from his writing.

For this Russian audience, Hughes reflected on a topic as relevant today as it was in 1933: the injustice of black incarceration. And he captured the story of a man that—like the stories of so many other young black men—would otherwise be lost. We may even know his name: Hughes’ journal mentions one Ed Pinkney, a young escapee whom Hughes and Hurston met near Savannah. We don’t know what happened to him after their interaction. But by telling his story, Hughes forces us to wonder.

Foreword From Life

By Langston Hughes

I had once a short but memorable experience with a fugitive from a chain gang in this very same Georgia of which [John L.] Spivak writes. I had been lecturing on my poetry at some of the Negro universities of the South and, with a friend, I was driving North again in a small automobile. All day since sunrise we had been bumping over the hard red clay roads characteristic of the backward sections of the South. We had passed two chain gangs that day This sight was common. By 1930 in Georgia alone, more than 8,000 prisoners, mostly black men, toiled on chain gangs in 116 counties. The punishment was used in Georgia from the 1860s through the 1940s. , one in the morning grading a country road, and the other about noon, a group of Negroes in gray and black stripped [sic] suits, bending and rising under the hot sun, digging a drainage ditch at the side of the highway. Adopting the voice of a chain gang laborer in the poem “Road Workers,” published in the New York Herald Tribune in 1930, Hughes wrote, “Sure, / A road helps all of us! / White folks ride — /And I get to see ’em ride.” We wanted to stop and talk to the men, but we were afraid. The white guards on horseback glared at us as we slowed down our machine, so we went on. On our automobile there was a New York license, and we knew it was dangerous for Northern Negroes to appear too interested in the affairs of the rural South. Even peaceable Negro salesmen had been beaten and mobbed by whites who objected to seeing a neatly dressed colored person speaking decent English and driving his own automobile. The NAACP collected reports of violence against blacks in this era, including a similar incident in Mississippi in 1925. Dr. Charles Smith and Myrtle Wilson were dragged from a car, beaten and shot. The only cause recorded: “jealousy among local whites of the doctor’s new car and new home.” So we did not stop to talk to the chain gangs as we went by.

But that night a strange thing happened. After sundown, in the evening dusk, as we were nearing the city of Savannah, we noticed a dark figure waving at us frantically from the swamps at the side of the road. We saw that it was a black boy.

“Can I go with you to town?” the boy stuttered. His words were hurried, as though he were frightened, and his eyes glanced nervously up and down the road.

“Get in,” I said. He sat between us on the single seat.

“Do you live in Savannah?” we asked.

“No, sir,” the boy said. “I live in Atlanta.” We noticed that he put his head down nervously when other automobiles passed ours, and seemed afraid.

“And where have you been?” we asked apprehensively.

“On the chain gang,” he said simply.

We were startled. “They let you go today?” In his journal, Hughes wrote about meeting an escaped convict named Ed Pinkney near Savannah. Hughes noted that Pinkney was 15 years old when he was sentenced to the chain gang for striking his wife.

“No, sir. I ran away. In his journal, Hughes wrote about meeting an escaped convict named Ed Pinkney near Savannah. Hughes noted that Pinkney was 15 years old when he was sentenced to the chain gang for striking his wife. That’s why I was afraid to walk in the town. I saw you-all was colored and I waved to you. I thought maybe you would help me.”

Gradually, before the lights of Savannah came in sight, in answer to our many questions, he told us his story. Picked up for fighting, prison, the chain gang. But not a bad chain gang, he said. They didn’t beat you much in this one. Guard-on-convict violence was pervasive on Jim Crow-era chain gangs. Inmates begged for transfers to less violent camps but requests were rarely granted. “I remembered the many, many such letters of abuse and torture from ‘those who owed Georgia a debt,’” Spivak wrote. Only once the guard had knocked two teeth out. That was all. But he couldn’t stand it any longer. He wanted to see his wife in Atlanta. He had been married only two weeks when they sent him away, and she needed him. He needed her. So he had made it to the swamp. A colored preacher gave him clothes. Now, for two days, he hadn’t eaten, only running. He had to get to Atlanta.

“But aren’t you afraid,” [w]e asked, “they might arrest you in Atlanta, and send you back to the same gang for running away? Atlanta is still in the state of Georgia. Come up North with us,” we pleaded, “to New York where there are no chain gangs, and Negroes are not treated so badly. Then you’ll be safe.”

He thought a while. When we assured him that he could travel with us, that we would hide him in the back of the car where the baggage was, and that he could work in the North and send for his wife, he agreed slowly to come.

“But ain’t it cold up there?” he said.

“Yes,” we answered.

In Savannah, we found a place for him to sleep and gave him half a dollar for food. “We will come for you at dawn,” we said. But when, in the morning we passed the house where he had stayed, we were told that he had already gone before daybreak. We did not see him again. Perhaps the desire to go home had been greater than the wish to go North to freedom. Or perhaps he had been afraid to travel with us by daylight. Or suspicious of our offer. Or maybe [...] In the English manuscript, the end of Hughes’ story about the convict trails off with an incomplete thought—“Or maybe”—but the Russian translation continues: “Or maybe he got scared of the cold? But most importantly, his wife was nearby!”

Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates. Copyright 1933 by the Langston Hughes Estate

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Steven Hoelscher | READ MORE

Steven Hoelscher is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

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On the Road

Jack kerouac.

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Jack Kerouac's On the Road . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

On the Road: Introduction

On the road: plot summary, on the road: detailed summary & analysis, on the road: themes, on the road: quotes, on the road: characters, on the road: symbols, on the road: literary devices, on the road: theme wheel, brief biography of jack kerouac.

Historical Context of On the Road

Other books related to on the road.

• Full Title: On The Road
• When Written: Late 1940s to 1951
• Where Written: New York City
• When Published: 1957
• Literary Period: The Beat Movement
• Genre: Novel
• Setting: Various locations across the United States (especially New York, Denver, San Francisco, Chicago, Virginia, New Orleans, Los Angeles), Mexico.
• Climax: In Part Four, Sal travels with Dean to Mexico on one last crazy trip. Dean abandons Sal while Sal he is sick with a fever.
• Antagonist: There is no one antagonist throughout the entire novel. At times, the police are the antagonists for Sal, Dean, and their friends.

Extra Credit for On the Road

On The Scroll. While Kerouac spent much time brainstorming and planning ideas for On The Road , when he finally sat down to write the novel, he wrote the whole thing in three weeks on one long, continuous scroll he made by attaching sheets of typewriter paper. The long, unpunctuated, unedited scroll survives to this day, and a transcribed version of this original draft of the novel was even published in 2007.

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

A WORDTheatre Tribute to Langston Hughes: Stories, Poems, Jazz & the Blues

Sep 13 • 5:30 pm PDT

Guests are encouraged to arrive at 5:30pm for food trucks, a cash bar, the literature of Langston Hughes for sale courtesy of Small World Books , tunes spun by A-Man the DJ & voter registration and engagement opportunities. Our 100-Minute performance will begin inside the Moss Theater promptly at 7:30pm.

The writings of the remarkable Langston Hughes will be brought to life in a galvanizing curated performance by the talents of Ryan Michelle Bathe , Eugene Byrd, Spencer Garrett, Marla Gibbs , Marianne Jean-Baptiste , Jan Munroe , Dohn Norwood , James Pickens Jr , L. Scott Caldwell & Tracie Thoms and Jazz All-Stars Bernie Dresel (Drums), Chris Gray (Trumpet), Logan Richardson (Saxophone), Nedra Wheeler (Bass), & Amy Keys (Vocals), led by musical director Starr Parodi (Piano). With permission from the Estate of Langston Hughes.

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