In 1920, at the tender age of 17, Langston Hughes set out on a train journey from Cleveland, Ohio to visit his estranged father in Mexico City. As the train crossed the Mississippi River, Hughes felt the urge to write. He pulled out an envelope, and on the back of it he penned the poem we know as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” When the poem appeared in print the following year in The Crisis, the publication marked not just the beginning of Hughes’s own career, but also the advent of the Harlem Renaissance. Like other figures associated with this “rebirth” of Black cultural life, Hughes was invested in exploring new forms that would better accommodate the specifics of the Black experience. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in particular, he experiments with variable line lengths and different forms of repetition to powerful effect, creating a river-like flow of language that eddies and pools at one moment and rushes headlong the next. Across the poem’s 10 lines, the speaker discusses various rivers with significant historical links to Black cultures and migration patterns. What results is a profound meditation on the continuity of Black history and the coherence of the collective Black “soul.”

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