Chosen

“A Black Man Talks of Reaping” by Arna Bontemps

In this poem, written in quatrains in three stanzas, a Black man narrates his experience of spending years farming and tilling soil whose fruits he and his sons will never harvest. The narrator is likely a sharecropper, due to his statement that the only evidence of his reaping is “what the hand / can hold at once” (Lines 7-8), meaning that his profits or share of the harvest are small. While the poem takes a tone of resignation, unlike “Chosen,” and narrates Southern Black life in the postbellum world, it relates a similar understanding of how racism impacts generational legacies. 

“I, Too” by Langston Hughes

One of Hughes’s best-known poems, “I, Too,” like the Bontemps poem, uses a first-person narrator. This time, the voice is strong, assertive, and not willing to shirk its claim to a nation that he knows is his, too. In the latter regard, Hughes’s narrator is like Diverne: He, however, is better equipped to articulate his claim. While Diverne knows Pomp is a part of her and the white man’s “share of the future” (Line 13), she cannot envision his place within it.