In his poem "Theme for English B," Langston Hughes dramatizes a black college student's assignment to write a theme that is true.
To read “Theme for English B”
The only description of the assignment given by the instructor is, “Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you” and then the instructor claims that if the students let it come out of them, it would be true.
But the speaker/student is not sure “it’s that simple.” Then he begins to list all the reasons that such an assignment might not be so simple: he is twenty-two, older than most students in his class probably, colored (which we now call “African American”); he was born in North Carolina, went to school in Durham, NC, then came to college in Harlem. Furthermore, he is the only African American in his class, which might seem strange for Harlem in 1951, when the poem was published.
Writing the Assignment
Then the student gives the route he takes to get from the college to his apartment, where he sits down to write his assignment. He studies the difficulty of writing something that is “true” or would be judged as true by a presumably white instructor or what is even true for him, a twenty-two year old black man. But then he surmises that he is what he feels, sees, and hears. And he says he hears Harlem, and he does a little ditty with his words: “hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page. / (I hear New York too.) Me—who?”
Next, he starts to list what he likes: “Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. / I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. / I like a pipe for a Christmas present, / or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.” Then he supposes that being African American does not make him all that different in the things he likes as other races. So the question occurs to him: “So will my page be colored that I write?” He wonders if his race will make a difference in what he writes, and he wonders whether he will be able to communicate with a white instructor, because he is black.
Black Student, White Instructor
He, then, asserts that what he writes will “not be white,” but it will be part of the instructor. Even though he is black and the instructor is white, they are still part of each other: “That's American.” But he admits that he is aware that at times whites do not want to be part of blacks, and also the reverse is true. But regardless of those racial feelings of separation, the speaker believes that they are still part of each other, whether they like it or not.
Finally, the speaker concludes with a very important insight: that as the black student learns from the white instructor, the white instructor also learns from the black student, even though the instructor is older, white, and “somewhat more free” than the black student is. He ends by saying “This is my page for English B.” He apparently feels that he has exhausted the truth of this particular subject.
