LANGSTON HUGHES
"Cultural Exchange"
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In the Quarter of the Negroes

Where the doors are doors of paper

Dust of dingy atoms

Blows a scratchy sound.

Amorphous jack-o'-Lanterns caper

And the wind won't wait for midnight

For fun to blow doors down.

By the river and the railroad

With fluid far-off going

Boundaries bind unbinding

A whirl of whistles blowing.

No trains or steamboats going—

Yet Leontyne's unpacking.

In the Quarter of the Negroes

Where the doorknob lets in Lieder

More than German ever bore,

Her yesterday past grandpa—

Not of her own doing—

In a pot of collard greens

Is gently stewing.

Pushcarts fold and unfold

In a supermarket sea.

And we better find out, mama,

Where is the colored laundromat

Since we move dup to Mount Vernon.

In the pot behind the paper doors

on the old iron stove what's cooking?

What's smelling, Leontyne?

Lieder, lovely Lieder

And a leaf of collard green.

Lovely Lieder, Leontyne.

You know, right at Christmas

They asked me if my blackness,

Would it rub off?

I said, Ask your mama.

Dreams and nightmares!

Nightmares, dreams, oh!

Dreaming that the Negroes

Of the South have taken over—

Voted all the Dixiecrats

Right out of power—

Comes the COLORED HOUR:

Martin Luther King is Governor of Georgia,

Dr. Rufus Clement his Chief Adviser,

A. Philip Randolph the High Grand Worthy.

In white pillared mansions

Sitting on their wide verandas,

Wealthy Negroes have white servants,

White sharecroppers work the black plantations,

And colored children have white mammies:

Mammy Faubus

Mammy Eastland

Mammy Wallace

Dear, dear darling old white mammies—

Sometimes even buried with our family.

Dear old

Mammy Faubus!

Culture, they say, is a two-way street:

Hand me my mint julep, mammy.

Hurry up!

Make haste!