Rest at pale evening. A tall, slim tree. Night coming tenderly Black like me. Do not drown me now. Hughes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro music.
Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private.
The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience. But he has not forced them into of the realm of art where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming. Hughes is an American Negro poet and has no choice but to be acutely aware of it. He is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable.