The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

2017 Composition Contest Winnners 15 By encouraging and indicating a necessitating of racially inspired works and way of life, he inhibited integration and promoted a culturally-based segregation. Looking then on Hughes’ life and works, we see a reality—a worldview—that is fraught with inconsistencies and obstinacies. In rejecting the Biblical model that provides the framework for an upstanding individual, he substitutes it with his own. In effect, he promotes a black supremacy, curiously portrayed through his famous character “Simple,” who professes if “colored people” had been in the Garden where Adam and Eve were tempted, they wouldn’t have been tempted (Hughes 25). Langston Hughes was a man motivated to love those same people he felt, like himself, went so unloved. The tragedy of it all then is that Hughes never really had or could love, because “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn. 4:16 ESV). In rejecting God, he had rejected love, and all he could offer was a counterfeit. Yet, Hughes’ has no way of truly harmonizing—and thus realizing and appreciating— diversity; however, for the Christian we know, “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function” (Rom. 12:4). He has no way of promoting equality, yet for the Christian, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). He, instead, is floundering and drowning, drawing on only what little experience of life he has to go on with nothing so much as empirical or authoritative to show. Langston Hughes was an amazing writer, a compassionate individual, and remarkable figure, but perhaps in more than one way that great criticism is true, “Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them” (qtd. in Whalan). Works Cited Dace, Tish. “On Langston Hughes: Pioneering Poet.” American Poetry Review 24.6 (1995): 35-38. Literary Reference Center. Web. 1 Dec. 2015. Anderson, Michael. “Langston Hughes’s Two Faces.” New Criterion 33.8 (2015): 30-34. Literary Reference Center. Web. 2 Dec. 2015.