I Believe in the Blues

            Through the use of verisimilitude in the image of an old black street performer moaning a blues melody in the poem “The Weary Blues,” Langston Hughes establishes the theme that though the blues are oddly comforting and cathartic, African Americans can never truly escape the struggles they convey. Because the sound devices, imagery, and language make the described scene so obviously realistic, and because they are juxtaposed so inherently with the man’s inescapable sorrow and poverty, Hughes powerfully establishes that African Americans’ sorrows are permanently intertwined with their reality. The fact that the entire poem involves syncopated rhythms and alliteration like “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune” makes it seem like the whole poem is a blues song, showing that black people’s whole lives are a manifestation of the sorrows they sing about in the blues. Hughes uses the realistic image of the man’s “ebony hands on each ivory key” to establish that whites considering themselves racially superior to blacks was a ubiquitous conflict at the time and the main one causing blacks to belt “the tune o’ those Weary Blues.” Other imagery, like that of the “rickety stool” and “pale dull pallor of an old gas light,” creates a mood of poverty. The fact that the speaker sees these along “Lenox Avenue” (a major street in Harlem, New York City’s black district), shows that poverty is an inherent part of African American life. Further than imagery, Hughes uses language and sound devices to achieve verisimilitude. The phonetic representation of the black dialect in the man’s song with “I can’t be satisfied…I ain’t happy no mo’…” shows that he is not trying to fool anyone with a dialect fancier than his natural one; the sorrows conveyed are truly his own. Also, the speaker seems very removed from black people’s situation; he says, “I heard a Negro play” as if this “Negro” is some sort of an outsider. The fact that even a narrator who isn’t a part of black people’s sorrows can see that the blues stem “from a black man’s soul” and can shout “Sweet blues!” because he feels their powerfully sad yet comforting emotions shows that they are very real.  The believable narrator says that though the singer tries to proclaim the blues “far into the night,” and the end of the day he is nothing more than the dead man he describes in his song. Though we are made to believe the blues are at once powerful and comforting, the suffering and weariness that are too large of a part of African Americans’ lives to be overcome with song.