I Too Sing America

The poem “I, Too, Sing America” by Langston Hughes is an argument for racial equality that describes the struggle of an African American individual being included in American patriotism. In the poem, the speaker describes that he is sent to eat in the kitchen when guests arrive; he eats well, though, so that tomorrow he may join the others at the table. In the last few lines Hughes describes that “they” in the poem will eventually see the speaker’s beauty and feel embarrassed, because he, “too, is America.” My initial problem in analyzing the poem was that I assumed that the images in the work had to represent something else metaphorically, specifically when considering the second and third stanzas of the poem, which contain a juxtaposition

In reading the work initially, I began the process of attempting to identify who “company” was, and first assumed that that the idea of “company” had implications of someone who is not usually at the table or a visitor, meaning that if, in the grand scale of this poem, the table referenced is a representation of America, the “company” is referencing outsiders. I thought that perhaps “company” was a metaphor for what other countries saw when they looked in or visited America, that our society hid away the “darker brother.” In paraphrasing and reevaluating the literal meaning of the poem, I began to recognize that the image of “company” is a tool by the poet to paint the setting in the work. The evidence of the banishment of the speaker by “they” in the work “when company comes” supports that the poem is set in a white household with African American servants, a scene that would have been common at the time that this work was written. With that context in mind, it is easy to imagine that the homeowners would send the servants to eat in the kitchen “when company comes.” In the third stanza, then, Hughes paints a setting where equality brings everyone of different races and classes “at the table”