18 pages • 36 minutes read
Langston HughesI, Too
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1926A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Food
Food signifies two things in “I, Too.” First, food represents power. Food requires work to harvest and produce, and it requires a lot of money to buy and to serve to other people. People who rule over a table of food and who control who gets food and who doesn’t are powerful. They are economically powerful, but as the providers of sustenance, they also wield a power of life and death over those they provide for.
In “I, Too,” the people who control the food at the beginning are the oppressors. They control where and when the speaker eats, and Hughes suggests they provide the speaker with food. However, Hughes never actually says that these people own anything. In that sense, he implies that the ownership they’ve embodied is not actually theirs to take.
Food also means something specific to the speaker. To him, food is what he fuels his body with. It is what he consumes to give him the power to ultimately claim his freedom and equality. This means the food could be many things: actual food, education, money, land, opportunity. While the oppressors worry only about themselves and overlook the oppressed, the speaker betters himself with the knowledge that the future will be kinder to him.
America
Hughes is creating a contrast between his America—the true America—and Whitman’s. Whitman’s America represents harmony, commonality, and community; Hughes’s America represents inequity and hope. Whereas Whitman concerns himself mainly with blue collar workers in his present time, Hughes focuses on the gap between races in history and in the future. Both poems share the motif of hope, though they do this in different ways. Whitman feels hope for unity at the onset of the Civil War. Hughes sees hope for a time period in which America has defeated oppression.
Ultimately, Whitman’s poem works more as patriotic rhetoric while Hughes’s poem directly critiques the country.
On another level, the table in “I, Too” is America. The speaker represents Black Americans, and the “they” at the table represent white Americans. The food at the table represents the opportunity America provides.
Time
In “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr., explains how time is neutral, and change only happens when people make it happen. “I, Too” embodies this concept. While there is a shift in how the speaker is treated from the past to the future, this shift does not happen because of time alone. It happens because the speaker makes the change happen. He takes advantage of his resources, and he forces his oppressors to recognize his humanity.
For Hughes, like for King, time is neutral. It is up to the oppressed to fight for what they deserve since the oppressors will never voluntarily give up their power. This is both a racial and an economic message. Hughes, like King, was sympathetic to socialist policies that he believed would bring about more equity in society. Hughes uses food in “I, Too” to represent opportunity and equity. It is the most important commodity in a society, the driver of economies.
Related Titles
By Langston Hughes
