==U.S.A.==

Like an echo in the reigns, there was at once a prophet. "I am of the tribe," the prophet mused, "yet I must be a bearer of the light within the tribe." Thus he appointed himself God's minister, a noble ideal for a stout-hearted man, a wearied sort of man, a solitary man.
He looked at once upon his tribe, his scrutiny answered with an unfathomable pride, an invulnerable shame. For his people, his beautiful tribe, were blunted and pas- sionless, fettered and humbled by those who were strange to grace, those who "slip up hot rivers, guided by strange stars." He watched his people raise the pyramids over the Nile, under the oppression of the exonerated "white day," and he began to sing the blues.
Now "bear in mind, that death is a drum... beating forever, till the last words come." The prophet sang the blues, his voice resounding from the sweat forged palaces of his people's oppressors, to the rivers of the indifferent Nile, "the rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins." His commitment to the masses deepened as his voice continued to echo the hunger of his people's depraved spirits, "the bell tolls for each of us," he cried. The drum continued to drawl, and the people began to listen.
"We know we are beautiful, and ugly too, yet freedom is ours, for we have been chosen! We have too long toiled beneath our rage, too long now internalized a shame we do not own, too long kept silent beneath death's bold blare!" The prophet sang the blues and the people professed to listen.
Soon the people threw off their fetters, yet found themselves held back, for they had not yet learned to sing. Some of them attempted to mimic the song of the prophet, and others professed to hear. Alas, they were far too proficient in shame, their place long established by the standards of others, so their cracked and faded voices assimilated into a cautious murmur.

The people grew cautious and the prophet grew angry. He warned the people of the fate of those who deny the evolution of the chosen race, the evil of a dream deferred. Ten times he spoke to them of disaster. Within this prophecy lay blood, "running deep into the channels of revolution," pestilence, to tirelessly feed, and plagues of stricken life, leaving the stink of rotten meat in their wake. Within this prophecy lay the boils of the spirit which fester and run unchallenged, and the promise of a lineage which would "dry up like a raisin in the sun." The drum drawled in the background, while the people cleared their throats, preparing to climb the mountain.
Gradually, the people stepped out of their rage, leaving the red behind the dusk, as better means, for those mellifluous. As they became familiar to the blues, they began to reap the bounty of freedom; the manna from heaven, water from the rock, the white folks flooded The Cotton Club.
But the people soon grew scared, for freedom is an acid sweet, when it sits upon too strange a tongue. They began to lose faith in their dream, the words of the prophet rang hollow upon deaf ears. "We were having too good a time being sinners, and we didn't want to be saved--not yet, anyway." Thus, the people melded a golden calf, to worship this relic until it consumed them, vain idolaters, sacrificed and laid in unmarked graves, beneath an epitaph which reads . . . . . . . . . . . Here Lies Heroine.

Those who survived looked back toward the blues. Their voices oozed over the land and the prophet reigned them in. "They came from miles around to bathe their souls in a sea of song." The survivors kept singing the blues, and in this letting they found honesty, pride, and resolve, for "Working all days of their lives for white folks, they had to believe there was a hallelulian side."
Soon enough, the prophet led them to the edge of their vision, a vision not to be actualized in his lifetime. There he looked back at his beautiful people and td the tears cut tracks in his firm jaw, "We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves." Such is the way to the promised land, the land of freedom, the dream deferred.
. . . . . . . . . . "Such, is the Canaan, we call Harlem."

Works Cited Hughes, Langston, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Drum, The English, Dream Variations, Harlem, Free- dom Train, Big Meeting." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed Paul Later. D.C. Heath and Company, 1994. pp. 1612-1644.