In "Tableau," Cullen takes interracial love as his central subject, celebrating the pride a beautiful couple takes in their relationship, even in the face of social disapproval. He depicts this subject matter in a relatively positive context. The two men seem to draw strength from one another, appearing impervious to these indignant observers. But other poems about the same experience show the more difficult side of things, revealing how being caught between two worlds can put people in challenging circumstances.
In "Cross," Langston Hughes depicts the speaker's struggle with his parents' marriage:
My old man’s a white old man
And my old mother’s black.
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
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m going to die,
Being neither white nor black?
The poem shows the speaker's regrets over the things he said to his parents, while still wrestling with their legacy. He takes back his "curses" but still notes that his father "died in a fine big house" while his mother "died in a shack." Their union did not bridge the societal gap between them. In the last two lines, the speaker expresses uncertainty about his own future, as he sees himself as "neither white nor black." Taken together, these moments depict the way this relationship only left the speaker feeling alienated from two social spheres, without any sense of resolution.
In her poem "Miscegenation," poet Natasha Trethewey describes the lengthy journey her parents took to get married:
In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.
They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong—mis in Mississippi.
A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.
Trethewey is referencing the real story of how her parents were forced to travel to Ohio to get married, as their interracial union was illegal in Mississippi at the time. In alluding to the historical route of escaped slaves, she underscores how these racist policies echo the era of slavery, highlighting how prejudice persists in the South. Trethewey captures how these laws sought to cleave apart couples like her parents. She shows the length of their multi-part journey to demonstrate the many difficulties inherent to being an interracial couple. Both Hughes and Trethewey explore the struggles encountered by individuals in interracial relationships, zooming in on the social disapproval mentioned in Cullen's work.
