Mulatto by Langston Hughes

First published: 1926; collected in Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927

Type of poem: Narrative

The Poem

Langston Hughes’s eleven-stanza narrative poem “Mulatto” explores the impact of a sexual union between unmarried people of different races. The offspring of such a union is a mixed-race or biracial child, sometimes referred to as a mulatto. Biracial people in the twenty-first century are less likely to experience the sense of displacement and rejection Hughes’s poem describes. However, the poem has unquestionable historical as well as aesthetic value.

“Mulatto,” set in the state of Georgia, relies on the stereotyped situation of sexual exploitation of southern black women by southern white men. The poem has an omniscient narrator who speaks between statements made by a son, a father, and a brother; the opening line is a declaration by a young man who says he is the son of a “white man.” After the opening line, the narrative voice changes to that of an omniscient speaker, who explains that as evening approached the pine forests of Georgia, one of the “pillars of the temple fell,” a reference to the two pillars that stood outside Solomon’s temple (2 Chronicles 3:15-17). The young man’s father speaks, saying emphatically that the young man is not his son. In the fourth stanza, the omniscient narrator reminds the poem’s readers that the stars that accompany a “Southern night” are yellow, then asks rhetorically, “What’s a body but a toy?” In response to the rhetorical question, the poet improvises the rhythm of the stanza so that it contains a six-line reply in blues form about how the bodies of women are indeed toys for entertaining men.

After the blues riff, and within the same stanza, the narrative voice switches to that of the father, who asks his son, “What’s the body of your mother?” The omniscient narrator, not the son, responds, saying that “Silver moonlight” is “everywhere.” The father asks the same question again, and again the reader sees that only the omniscient narrator replies, telling the father that there is a “Sharp pine scent in the evening air.” The fifth stanza is spoken by the father’s other son, the biracial child’s half brother, who, in response to the opening line of the poem, says “Naw, you ain’t my brother.”

The poem’s omniscient narrator responds to the brother’s statement in another rhythmically improvised stanza, where the poet uses a three-line blues form instead of the six-line form to explain that “Dusk dark bodies/ Give sweet birth.” The father orders his biracial son to “Git on back there in the night” because he is not white. The son seems to have the last word, declaring again that he is the white man’s son; however, the omniscient narrator is the final voice, describing the son in the same way the stars have been described, as “yellow.” The final line reminds the reader that the mixed-race child is born of parents who are not married to each other. The child is a “bastard boy.”

Forms and Devices

“Mulatto” combines the African American blues form Hughes pioneered with the free-verse form made popular by the modernist American poet Ezra Pound. Originally, musician W. C. Handy identified the blues form as song lyrics sung in three-line rhyme. The first two lines of the rhyme were the same or similar; the third line rhymed with the second line. Hughes adapted the musical form to his poems by extending the three-line rhyme to six lines, meant to be spoken rather than sung.

“Mulatto” contains two blues stanzas set inside two free-verse stanzas. The first blues stanza follows Hughes’s six-line structure, beginning with the line “Juicy bodies” and ending with the line “What’s a body but a toy?” The second blues stanza, similar to the original design of three-line blues songs, reads: “O, sweet as earth,/ Dusk dark bodies/ Give sweet birth.” The poet uses end rhyme irregularly, except in the first blues section, where the rhyme scheme is abcbdd, and the second blues section, where the rhyme scheme is aba. Hughes alternates trochaic (a stressed syllable followed by a slack syllable) and iambic (a slack syllable followed by a stressed one) feet in lines that vary from dimeter to pentameter to achieve the effect of conversational speech. The poet uses several refrains or repeated lines throughout the poem, such as “I am your son, white man,” “What’s a body but a toy?,” “What’s the body of your mother?” and “Great big yellow stars.”

The poet uses slang and informal language with the formal apostrophe (an address or exclamation to an unseen person or a thing). The biracial boy is addressed by Hughes’s omniscient narrator who says, “O, you little bastard boy.” Later in the poem, the narrator uses an apostrophe to exclaim “O, sweet as earth.” This line is also a simile that compares fertile female bodies to the fertile earth.

Aside from the remarkable structure of a stanza form within a stanza form, Hughes’s style relies on several voices to narrate the story of a young, biracial man’s conception. The voices of the father and the half brothers are italicized, while the omniscient narrator’s voice is not. Each voice offers a different perspective. The father and the omniscient narrator imply that the biracial child was conceived in an unholy sexual union, that is, when a married white man turned to a black woman for sexual pleasure. The half brother hints at the bleak future the biracial child will have without his father’s heritage when he says “you ain’t my brother// Not ever.” Yet, the mulatto or biracial child insists on his patrimony. Except for the biracial child’s, each voice speaks nonstandard English and uses racial slurs, demonstrating a lack of formal education as well as rampant ignorance.

The poet uses two very strong allusions. The first allusion, found in the fourth line of the poem, is to Solomon’s temple. The second allusion is to the abilities of the common solvent turpentine, made from pine trees common to the southern United States. Turpentine is able to dilute color as well as strip the surface color off an object, revealing its essence. The sexual activity that takes place in the “turpentine woods” produces “yellow…boys” or boys whose color is diluted, that is, not assessed as black or white.

Bibliography

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Hokanson, Robert O’Brien. “Jazzing It Up: The Be-bop Modernism of Langston Hughes.” Mosaic 31 (December, 1998): 61-82.

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