Opening Lines
The book’s opening lines create a visual metaphor of what the author has determined will be a turning point in his life. He is on board the S.S. Malone at the tender age of twenty-one and has just tossed all the books he had collected while studying at Columbia University—as well as all the books he’s bought just to pass the time on the voyage—overboard:
“Melodramatic maybe, it seems to me now. But then it was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books in the books into the water.”
The “N” Word
Hughes brilliantly summarizes the effect upon people of color when they hear the “N” word (which he writes out in full, something that will be avoided here in this instance.) The metaphorical dimension of that vile term is introduced prosaically, almost in a way designed to make it mundane, as he compares the consequence of hearing the word to that of a “red rag to a bull.” This low-key, unimaginative simile turns out to be a judicious use of understatement that leaves the reader’s defenses down and unprepared for the metaphorical flight of fancy which quickly follows as he explains how the “N” word:
“sums up for us who are colored all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America: the slaving beatings of yesterday, the lynchings of today, the Jim Crow cars, the only movie show show in town with its sign up FOR WHITES ONLY, the restaurants where you may not eat, the jobs you may not have, the unions you cannot join.”
A Picturesque House
Toward the end of the volume, Hughes lands in New Orleans. More specifically, he shows up at a majestic house he calculates had been built at least a century before he showed up. He describes as “picturesque” and immediately thereupon undermines that quaint imagery with a reminder that most old things are best enjoyed from a distance:
“Cockroaches as large as mice came out of the cracks of the walls after dark and scraped their rasping feet over the stone floors. The patio was airless and the heat lay like a blanket and everybody left their doors wide open at night, and some of the roomers snored like frogs.”
One Night in Texas
Hughes grew up across the Midwest before hitting New York to attend college. As a result, he was already a young man by the time he got his first taste of the peculiar brand of racism practiced below the Mason-Dixon line. One of his first experiences comes aboard a train steaming across the vast wasteland of Texas before the omnipresence of oil-burning cars. As he sits alone at a table in the dining car, he notices a white man staring at him in a way he’s never quite been stared at before. Suddenly, the Texas jumps up and almost manically loudly identifies him using the “N” word before he:
“rushed out of the car as if pursued by a plague.”
Two Views of Dad
Metaphorical imagery is used by two different people to present two different views of the father of Hughes. His father was away in Mexico and so he was forced to imagine him in symbolic terms through the comparison afforded by simile:
“I pictured my father as a kind of strong, bronze cowboy, in a big Mexican hat, going back and orth from his business in the city to his ranch in the mountains.”
Hughes’ mother, however, presents a quite different image of the same man, presented as concrete metaphor with none of the shading of interpretation offered by the mechanics of the simile's "like or as" construction:
“Your father is a devil on wheels!”
