Week 4: Nathan McQuarrie

In Langston Hughes’ poem “Cross,” the speaker talks about how his family is divided by race and the conflict that comes upon him at their deaths. The first two lines of the first stanza, "My old man’s a white old man / And my old mother’s black," set up the parallelism that is to continue throughout the poem. For the rest of the poem, the speaker continues this contrast of race while he asks forgiveness from his parents in the lines

If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.

If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I’m sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well.

It is interesting that he does not ask for forgiveness from both his parents together; instead, he addresses them separately. This parallelism becomes even more blatant in the final stanza, where he describes how both of his parents died:

My old man died in a fine big house,
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?

The parallelism is an important reminder of the time that Langston Hughes lived in. He wrote the poem “Cross” in 1925, which in the United States was in the middle of the Roaring Twenties and at the height of the Jim Crow South. In this time period, the Ku Klux Klan was rampant throughout the Deep South, and anyone who was white (like the speaker’s father) segregated the people who had darker skin (like the speaker’s mother). The parallelism within the poem reflects the racial segregation within that time period.

The most important aspect of this poem, however, lies in the final stanza.

The irony of the poem finally becomes obvious with the contrast of how the parents died. To understand the irony in this stanza, one must look at the context of the poem. Again, this poem was written when blacks were viciously segregated. This last stanza reveals that the speaker is not white or black, but of mixed race which at the time was called “Mulatto.” This term denoted a distinction of the mixed race people born of a white and a black parent; therefore, because they were viewed as not white, they were treated the same as blacks by white Americans. With this in mind, while the speaker states that he doesn’t know where he’ll die, it is clear that he knows perfectly well that because he is of a mixed race, it is almost certain that he will die poor like his mother.