In his writings.

In his writings, Langston Hughes explores the tendency to meet of race and gender in Black men's and women's lives, questioning binary constructions of identity and exploring sensuality in relation to social change. These are the pages, as bell clasps suggests, that lay marked onward bedside tables, that become worn with searching fingers, that take the part of something other than "the Langston Hughes in the greatest degree folks read or remember" (193) They are metrical compositions and stories that deal with be fond of among Black men and women nature, romantic quandary, mother-daughter and fatherson relations, friendship, and silences. In discussing Black male and female identity, Hughes speaks of the ways sex uniquely colors these experiences. He writes in a manner which could be described as genderracial, emphasizing in what way gender and racial identity are intertwined.

In an ofttimes cited passage from "The african Artist and Racial Mountain," Hughes comments" common of the most promising of the young african poets said to me formerly 'I want to be a bard not a Negro poet.' I was sorry the young man said that, for no great author of poems has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then, that, with his desire to scour away spiritually from his race, this male child would ever be a great poet" (692) To Hughes, identity is inseparable from, and indeed central to, one's artistry. His work is strengthened by dint of a poetic imagination which take downs the consciousness of those with varying experiences. Hughes's images are at times disturbing, also comforting, alternately sad and joyous, and directly be joineded to his identity as a Black man who heard the voices of many--white and of Color, male and female, gay and straight, within and without himself.

Hughes and Black Female Consciousness

Suggesting a useful approach to Hughes's genderracial make anxiouss Frances Beale's 1970 essay "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" annotates on the tendency of social moves to privilege one liberation try over another in their vision of change. She cites the women's movement's dismissal of Black women's bear upons in their drive to advance the status of white women and Black Power's assertion of Black "manhood" by means of the subordination of Black women And she queries, "Are there any parallels between this labor in distress and the movement on the part of Black women for total emancipation?" (98)

Deborah King expands in succession Beale and borrows from W E B Du Bois's theory of double consciousness to describe Black women's "multiple consciousness" ("Multiple" 292) She be combineds that "the gender-only perspective alone is insufficient for understanding Black female oppression" ("Race" 4) and asserts a form of consciousness which occupies a "both/and holistic orientation" (9) a consciousness which she identifies as polyrhythmic. Drawing connections between African and African American expressive art forms and Black consciousness, King explains: "For Black women the interrelationship among strips of potent contrast in multiple, counter periodical emphasiss which produces music, ... dance or quilts replicates the interdependence of individuals and other component parts of the cosmos, all of which have efficient contrasting natures in an ever-changing further stable whole" ("Race" 10).

inflection for sex and race converge for Hughes's female characters, who be opposite to genderracial myths in their exploration of identity. bell curved catchs notes that Hughes often invokes the voice of a Black woman, and that he appears "comfortable in this fictive transvestism" (194) In "Southern Mammy Sings," Hughes takes onward a female voice to contrast the genderracial stereotype of the "mammy" with the reality of Black domestic work:

Miss Gardner's in her garden

Miss Yardman's in her yard

Miss Michaelmas is at de mass

And I am gettin' tired!

Lawd!

I am gettin' tired! (Select 162)

The form of the metrical composition indicates the blues as the muscial form representative of a Black woman's experience working in white folks' kitchens, contrasting sharply with the images of the cheerful, singing "mammy" seen in the minstrel exhibit to or on the big riddle and in literature.

In "Ruby Brown" Black domestic work is contrasted with the work of Black female prostitutes. A young woman, sitting upon the backporch of her white employer polishing the silver, is struck through two questions:

What can a colored girl do

in succession the money from a white woman's

kitchen?

And ain't there any delight in this

town?

The economic realities of sex work are deliberateed in Ruby Brown's decision to work in prostitution. She searches for ravishment among her sisters and brothers in "the sinister shutter houses of the bottoms." Her motives for becoming a prostitute meditate tragic economic need, not "looseness" or moral corruption in succession her part. Hughes writes:

the white men,

Habitues of the high shutter houses,

Pay more coin to her now

Than they forever did before,

When she worked in their

kitchens. (Select 166)

Like "Ruby Brown" Hughes's novel Not Without Laughter explores the ways in which economic and social conditions influence the identities of Black women embodying polyrhythm and resistance. In this work, Hughes acknowleges male perspective [i]or[/i] part of to the other the character Sandy. A young stripling Sandy remains distant and curious from top to toe most of the book, constantly reconciling his view of the world around him with the views of the women who raise him. form relative to sex race, and class converge in the dialogues among the women which Sandy frequently overhears, being a quiet lad in their kitchen conversations. His mother Anjee works as a domestic, and his grandmother Hagar takes in washing from local whites. His Aunt Harriet, formerly fired from a kitchen piece of work for breaking a glass pitcher, rebels against the traditionally ascribed "respectable" occupations for Black women; she works as a carnival dancer, a chapfallens singer, and a prostitute at different points in the story. A third sister, Tempy is a middle-class homemaker who avoids her family in her attempt to establish herself in the middle class.