Langston Hughes' Poem Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Langston Hughes' Poem - Essay Example In "Rivers, " Hughes claimed this legacy-vocabulary of place encompassing "downriver, " the term for all the dreaded places in the lower South to which slaves were sold off, "the riverside, " one of the relative safe havens and sites of resistance within the domain of the plantation itself, and "over Jordan, " the beckoning frontier of freedom visible from inside the bounds of enslavement and exile as it was elaborated and interpreted in the nineteenth century in the traditional Negro spirituals and in such classic fugitive slave narratives as Frederick Douglass's and Harriet Jacobs's as sites of meditation, rebellion, and recuperation. (R. Baxter Miller, 2005). By placing that inherited vocabulary of place within a wider geographic perspective, however, Hughes proposed a reconstituted imagery of place for the twentieth century, one associated with a progression across continents in a historic and prophetic language of belonging and entitlement, beyond enslavement.