High to Low

Content Warning: This section of the guide features discussions of racism.

The poem links to three genres. It’s a lyric poem, which is relatively short and represents the personal feelings of the poet. Additionally, the poem works as satire. Through his speaker, Hughes exaggerates the socioeconomic class antagonism within the Black community to spotlight the ridiculousness of blaming the problems of Black people in the United States on less-affluent Black people. The hyperbole produces humor, but the humor comes with a message. The moral of the poem makes it a didactic poem. Through his flabbergasted speaker, Hughes dictates a lesson: Black people from a “high” socioeconomic class often blame Black people from a “low” socioeconomic for their many “troubles” (Line 2), but they shouldn’t. Less economically privileged Black people are not the reason why Black people as a whole face so many “problems” (Line 24). 

The title indicates the identity of the speaker and addressee. The speaker is a Black person with an affluent socioeconomic status; thus, they come from the “high” class. They believe that they act decently, so they set a good example for Black people. The addressee is a Black person from a less wealthy socioeconomic group, so they represent the “low” class. The speaker harangues the addressee. They don’t give the addressee a chance to respond. The conversation is one-sided (like a monologue), with the speaker serving as the actor and the addressee playing the role of the audience. The audience is also the general listener. Hughes wants the listener to observe the interaction between the speaker and the addressee and understand that the speaker’s beliefs are distorted: The conduct of Black people with less money is not the reason for the virulent racism in the United States. 

Hughes makes his point by turning the speaker into a caricature. An inflated stereotype of an elite Black person, the speaker’s hyperbolic tone is immediately evident. They state, “God knows / We have our troubles, too— / One trouble is you” (Lines 1-3). The “God knows” reinforces their exasperation, and their singular focus on “you”—the Black person from a lower socioeconomic class—reveals their immoderation. The excess continues with the repetition of “too.” The speaker says, “You talk too loud / cuss too loud / look too black” (Lines 4-6). The lack of nuance persists when the speaker claims that Black people without much money “don’t get anywhere” (Line 7). However, the speaker adopts a hint of subtlety when they say, “[A]nd sometimes it seems / you don’t even care” (Lines 8-9). The diction—the word “sometimes”—indicates that “sometimes” (Line 8) the addressee does “care” (Line 9), so they’re not as hapless as the speaker makes them out to be. Yet the sentence structure keeps the tone within the sweeping, overdramatized realm. The sentence ends with “care” (Line 9), so the speaker doesn’t bother to detail what the addressee doesn’t “care” about, making it seem like the Black person without money doesn’t care about anything: They don’t care about themselves or how their lives impact Black people as a whole. 

The shrill tone develops through the literary devices of juxtaposition and allusion. The “high”-class Black person compares their way of life to the “low”-class Black person, citing specific places without fully explaining the references. In The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1995), the Hughes scholar Arnold Rampersad explains their meanings in the endnotes. “Ethical Culture” (Line 12) is the name of a prestigious prep school in midtown Manhattan; “St. Phillips” (Line 14) is a major Episcopal church in Harlem; and “409” (Line 17) represents 409 Edgecombe Avenue—the address of a Harlem apartment building where illustrious Black people lived. The speaker lists the proper nouns in parenthesis, creating a condescending tone. The places become an aside. The addressee doesn’t need to know much about them. Since the addressee doesn’t dress their kids properly, doesn’t act gracefully during church, and idles “on doorsteps” (Line 15), the addressee can’t access the elite areas, making the spaces an afterthought for them. 

The final eight lines double down on the speaker’s thesis and cement the main themes. The speaker calls the addressee a “clown” (Line 18). They tell them, “[Y]ou let me down” (Line 20). The sharp disappointment produces the themes of class antagonism within the Black community and the pressure of representation. The divergent socioeconomic spheres create conflict, and the Black person with money, feeling the burden of representing all Black people, lambasts the Black person without money for not mimicking their laudatory model. The conduct of the speaker and the addressee is a result of wealth disparity, so the poem produces a third major theme, how behavior links to money. Using affluence and prestige, the speaker is “trying to uphold the race” (Line 21) and set a good example. They contrast themselves with the addressee, dismissively declaring, “[A]nd you” (Line 22). 

The speaker’s tone becomes conversational, so the poem ends with a series of informal phrases, “[W]ell, you can see / we have our problems, / too, with you” (Lines 23-25). Yet the simple diction belies the ever-present hyperbole. The speaker’s singular focus remains on the Black person from the “low” socioeconomic class. Acting as a representative of prominent Black people, the speaker uses the plural pronoun “we” (Line 24), concluding that they have “problems” (Line 24) with the less-opulent Black people. The speaker implicitly aligns themselves with white people (even, arguably, racists). Restating their argument, the speaker says that the main reason for the tarnished image of Black people isn’t systemic racism in the United States but the behavior and attitudes of Black people not from the “high” class.