Being a child is when you have no worries, you can play all day and sleep all night and you don t have to pay bills. Being a friend is when you care for someone, but not in that way. Misery is fun. One of the challenges of teaching in an after-school program is getting the students involved after a long school day. Hughes makes it fun.
Misery is universal.
Because the text deals so openly with racism, this assignment provides a much-needed opportunity to talk about what really happens and the troubles people have, to tell the stories that are not always welcome in regular conversation. There is room for everyone and every experience of pain. It offers a safe haven for all of us to discuss our experiences, not only as victims of racial discrimination, but also as perpetrators, blinded by our own prejudices. Hughes s captions show how we use someone s skin color to decide who and how he or she is, before a word is exchanged. Misery is when you first realize so many things bad have black in them, like black cats, black arts, blackball.