Free The Panther and the Lash by Langston Hughes

Copyright © 1967 by Arna Bontemps and George Houston Bass, Executors of the Estate of Langston Hughes.
    Copyright 1932, 1934, 1942, 1947, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1955, 1956, © 1958, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1942, 1948 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
    Copyright renewed 1970, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1991 by Arna Bontemps and George Houston Bass.
    Copyright renewed 1960, 1962 by Langston Hughes.
    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
    Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This edition first published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1967.
    Certain poems in this collection were previously published in the following books by Langston Hughes:
    Ask Your Mama (1961): “Cultural Exchange”
    Fields of Wonder
(1947): “Words Like Freedom,” “Oppression,” “Dream Dust”
    The Langston Hughes
Reader
(1958): “Elderly Leaders” under the title “Elderly Politicians”
    Montage of a
Dream Deferred
(1951): “Corner Meeting,” “Motto,” “Children’s Rhymes”
    One-Way
Ticket
(1949): “Harlem” under the title “Puzzled,” “Who But the Lord?,” “Third Degree,” “October 16: The Raid,” “Still Here,” “Florida Road Workers,” “Freedom” under the title “Democracy?,” “Warning” under the title “Roland Hayes Beaten,” “Daybreak in Alabama”
    Scottsboro
Limited
(1932): “Christ in Alabama,” “Justice”
    Selected Poems of Langston
Hughes (1959): “Dream Deferred” under the title “Harlem,” “American Heartbreak” “Georgia Dusk,” “Jim Crow Car” under the title “Lunch in a Jim Crow Car”
    Shakespeare in
Harlem
(1942): “Ku Klux,” “Merry-Go-Round”
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hughes, Langston, 1902–1967.
The panther & the lash : poems of our times / Langston Hughes. —
1st Vintage classics ed.
p.    cm. — (Vintage classics)
eISBN: 978-0-307-94939-4
1. Afro-Americans—Poetry. I. Title. II. Title: Panther and the lash. III. Series.
PS3515.U274P3    1992
811′.52—dc20            91-50087
    B9876
    v3.1

To Rosa Parks of Montgomery
    who started it all when, on being ordered to get up and stand at the back of the bus where there were no seats left, she said simply, “My feet are tired,” and did not move, thus setting off in 1955 the boycotts, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the petitions, the marches, the voter registration drives, and
I Shall Not Be Moved
.

1
WORDS ON FIRE
CORNER MEETING
    Ladder, flag, and amplifier
    now are what the soap box
    used to be.
    The speaker catches fire,
    looking at listeners’ faces.
    His words jump down
    to stand
    in their
    places.
HARLEM
    Here on the edge of hell
    Stands Harlem—
    Remembering the old lies,
    The old kicks in the back,
    The old “Be patient”
    They told us before.
    Sure, we remember.
    Now when the man at the corner store
    Says sugar’s gone up another two cents,
    And bread one,
    And there’s a new tax on cigarettes—
    We remember the job we never had,
    Never could get,
    And can’t have now
    Because we’re colored.
    So we stand here
    On the edge of hell
    In Harlem
    And look out on the world
    And wonder
    What we’re gonna do
    In the face of what
    We remember.
PRIME
    Uptown on Lenox Avenue
    Where a nickel costs a dime,
    In these lush and thieving days
    When million-dollar thieves
    Glorify their million-dollar ways
    In the press and on the radio and TV—
          But won’t let me
          Skim even a dime—
    I, black, come to my prime
    In the section of the niggers
    Where a nickel costs a dime.
CROWNS AND GARLANDS
    Make a garland of Leontynes and Lenas
    And hang it about your neck
          Like a lei.
    Make a crown of Sammys, Sidneys, Harrys,
    Plus Cassius Mohammed Ali Clay.
    Put their