Silhouette Langston Hughes

loves her. Toomer writes that, “the full moon… [was] an evil thing, an omen, soft showering the homes of the folks she knew” (Toomer 657). The moon is personified, or given human characteristics, because it becomes a malevolent all-seeing eye that keeps watch over Louisa and her black society. In this way, the moon symbolizes white people or the power that white people assert over the colored. The control that the moon holds over the night, by shinning light to cancel the darkness, closely reflects the authority that whites have over their black slaves or former slaves. Moreover, white people are represented through the moon by an aesthetic perspective. Toomer describes the young plantation owner, Bob Stone, by emphasizing the “clear

white of his skin paled, and the flush of his cheeks turned purple. As if to balance this outer change, his mind became consciously a white man’s” (Toomer 654). The paleness of the moon directly ties to the whiteness of the slave owners’ skin. Even surrounded by the darkness of night, Bob is still clearly white physically, as seen in his skin tone, and mentally, referring to his dominative mentality over Louisa and the land.
The moon controls and eliminates the darkness, just as white people subjugated and killed the African Americans, both mentally and physically.

Hughes also writes in his poem, “Silhouette,” about how a black man was lynched by white men in what they viewed as a measure to protecting a Southern white lady. Essentially, these white men desired to keep a clear distinction of whites and blacks, just as there is a clear contrast of the white moon and ebony night. Hughes states, “They’ve just hung a black man / In the dark of the moon” (Hughes 879). Here the moon is present in the lynching because it expresses how whites stand as a constant threat to black people because of their mentality of segregation and white superiority. In this way, the two forces, darkness and light, are not only opposites but they are enemies that live for the other’s destruction. However, without literary devices, the reader would not be able to pick up these comparisons and metaphors and therefore would miss a crucial element of the story. Jonathan Culler writes in his book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, that, “Rhetoricians formerly attempted to distinguish specific ‘tropes’ which ‘turn’ or alter the meaning of a word (as in a metaphor) from more miscellaneous ‘figures’ of indirection which arrange words to achieve special effects” (Culler 71). By organizing their writing in a certain way, writers of African American literature can portray the seemingly innate and natural way whites

and blacks attract and repel on another through use of rhetorical devices.
However, there is not such a clear distinction between white and blacks because of the individual bright stars that shine in the darkness, cast aside from the moon, which represent the mulattos.

Hughes’s night scene in his poem, “Mulatto,” when the mixed boy confronts his white father, is depicted by “The moon over the turpentine woods. / The Southern night / Full of stars, / Great big yellow stars” (Mulatto - Hughes 873). Hughes uses a natural scene of the night sky, lit up by a large ivory moon, but also glittered by countless singular stars to not only show separation of the races but also to account for the ones that are not completely black or white. The author describes the stars as yellow and also portrays the white man’s mix son as “a little yellow / bastard boy” (Hughes 874). The use of a completely different color, yellow, is to illustrate how different mulatto people are when compared to their black and white ancestors. In one man’s interpretation of Hughes’s poem in his essay, “‘A Little Yellow Bastard Boy’: Paternal Rejection, Filial Insistence, And The Triumph Of African American Cultural Aesthetics In Langston Hughes's ‘Mulatto,’” Robert Paul Lamb analyses the contents of several African American works

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