Cross by Langston Hughes

This poem is not difficult to understand at all. He pretty much says exactly what he means. He is a child of multiracial decent. Like many other blacks in his time, he battled with identity, blaming his parents. When he matured, he realized he was wrong to blame others, because he was truly proud of his heritage, regardless of the difficulties it caused him. He expressed the difference between the death of a white man and the death of a black woman, one of privilege, one of poverty. This may not actually be how his parents died, but in those times, many rich men had children with African American women, yet they kept separate lives, and often kept it a secret. This poem is representative of the mindset and segregation of races during Hughes’s adolescence and even adulthood.