I Too

I Too

"I, too, am America.

- Langston Hughes

"I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes.

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong."

          Langston Hughes work "I Too" stood out to me after reading Isabel Wilkerson's work The Warmth of Other Suns, the section labeled The Stirrings of Discontent. Langston Hughes work, in my opinion, encompasses the attitude and spirit if the "new negro" that I've come to understand through the various works we've looked at. In "The Stirrings of Discontent" Wilkerson goes into detail of the what life was like for negroes in the south following the civil war. Things such as lynchings, defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1869, which guaranteed all men the right to vote,  and southern state legislatures that devised precision laws that would regulate every aspect of black people's lives (40), flies in the face of blacks who built up their nation, specifically the south. Wilkerson goes to show that legislation that once gave blacks privileges like voting and riding on trains was stripped away over night (42), which reminds me of the line "They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes". Now from Hughes, who speaks of being the darker brother, uses his solitude to grow strong, characteristic what began happening when blacks began migrating to the north. 

"To-morrow

I'll sit at the table

When company comes

Nobody "ll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen"

Then. 

Besides , they'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed, - 

I, too, am America. "

In my eyes, Hughes work plainly illuminates the injustices towards blacks, yet at the same time shows the irony of those injustices. By allowing the darker brother to grow strong in his oppression and solitude, he eventually grows strong and powerful, so that he is no longer confined to the kitchen, and in reality, the south, any longer. I find this poem so important when looking at the oppression experienced by blacks in the south. The irony of Jim Crow and all the hatred shown to blacks is always astonishing to me, given without the labor of these people, the US would not exist the way it did. My favorite part of the poem is " Besides, they'll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed". Although it doesn't really correlate with the passage from Wilkerson, but it illustrates what will later come in American history with the emergence of the "new negro".