Epigraph
The book commences with an epigraph which is a poet or quote placed before the text begins. The poem used as the epigraph is a metaphor which explains the title of the book:
“Life is a big sea
full of many fish.
I let down my nets
and pull.”
Opening Paragraph
The novel commences with a recollection by the author of a rather striking bit of imagery: throwing all his books over the side of a boat into the water. The shocking aspect of this imagery of a famous writer recalling this act is put into immediately perspective through a metaphorical comparison:
“Melodramatic maybe, it seems to me now. But then it was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read.”
A Word Guy Explains Math
Langston Hughes is a word guy. That should be obvious; he is arguably the most famous black writer in American history. His explanation for his unhappiness while a student at Columbia is related to disillusionment with the academic process. Anyone who is a “word person” and not a “math person” will instantly relate to his metaphorical encapsulation of what it is like to try learning math from a bad teacher:
“Higher mathematics were like a Chinese puzzle.”
Prosetry
Langston Hughes is such a naturally gifted poet that he almost can’t help himself from crafting prose that feels like it is out of place. Out of place in the sense that it is so perfectly constructed for verse that it seems almost a waste that it is not actually reserved for use in a poem. Such is the sentence which opens the section titled “Burutu Moon” and which is such a combination of prose and poetry that it really should be called something like prosetry:
“Sometimes life is a ripe fruit too delicious for the taste of man”
Harlem
Hughes is obviously one of the central, essential—definitive—figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He also recognized that Harlem Renaissance was primarily a movement that was beneficial to people everywhere but Harlem. The vast majority of those living there not only felt no benefit of the artistic movement bearing the name of their section of New York City, they were not even aware of its existence:
“Non-theatrical, non-intellectual Harlem was an unwilling victim of its own vogue.”
The Old Hat
The section of the book is a strangely ironic humorous account of Hughes trading a brand new straw hat for an old hat worn by an old black man who worked on the plantation where writer Jean Toomer had lived. The hat made the old man look like the incarnation of Uncle Remus, but Hughes desperately covets it for reasons he situates in metaphorical form. The old patchwork hat of felt, leather, wool, and other materials
“seemed to me like the quaint soul of labor in the Old South, `caroling softly souls of slavery.’ It seemed to me like early dawn on the Georgia plum trees and sunlight in the cotton fields.”
