The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

2017 Composition Contest Winnners 11 three years passed at Lincoln University, with its virtually all-black student body, before he felt comfortable facing black strangers” (xiv). Realizing that his affiliation with the culture left his own heritage lacking, he immersed himself—opting out of an otherwise Ivy League education. He even accomplished to set sail and travel to Africa, no doubt thinking he would be able to experience the authenticity of his ancestry and connect with what was essentially alien to him. Hughes, unlike Moses, did not experience this “exile” for quite the sum of forty years, but it evidentially shaped his writings of the late 1920s . Enter in the rest of Langston Hughes’ life and career—an emboldened, youthful figure with the audacity as a waiter to drop “of f a few sheets of his poetry” upon seeing prominent poet Vachel Lindsay “dining in the restaurant one night” (Zieger). Resultantly, this launched a career that permeated the next four decades as one of the forefront representatives of the Harlem Renaissance and arguably one of the most proliferate African-American writers of the century. Like the biblical figure Moses, he transformed himself from a “prince” raised amongst the oppressors and embraced his heritage to become the liberator, prophet, and law-giver through his prose, playwrights, and poetry. If this then was the blaze of his life, then the kindling came from the quieter, more tragic moments of his younger years. Nothing gives better testimony to this than a chapter from his first autobiography titled “Salvation,” demonstrating that much of who Hughes was began when he was fairly young—notably, his antagonism toward Christianity, his love toward people, and his dysfunctional home-life. First, “Salvation,” in its essence, is a recounting of child- Hughes and his rejection of Christianity. “And I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn’t come to help me” (Diyanni 264). Just as Jesus seemingly spurned Hughes, Hughes would spurn Christianity. Sadly, Hughes’ disinterest and sometimes outright antagonistic view of Christianity persisted throughout his career, and he remained ever secular with his written works.