Cooking with Langston Hughes

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. 

Langston Hughes’s 1931 classic  recently rereleased as a Penguin Classic, tells the coming-of-age story of Sandy, a light-skinned black youth in a small, mixed-race Kansas town in the 1910s. Sandy wants great things for himself but can’t see how to achieve them in a world rife with racism. Late in the novel, he muses that “being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred—and the white folks live upstairs.” Out of context, this may seem simplistic, but it follows Hughes’s devastating explication of how the adult black role models in Sandy’s life have tried, and failed, to thrive. Sandy’s mother is a cook for a white family. She feeds her own family on scraps from her employer’s