The instructor said,
    Go home and write
    a page tonight.
    And let that page come out of you—
    Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it’s that simple?

These lines (lines 1–6) open the poem. Significantly, the poem begins not with the speaker’s words, but with the words of his teacher. The fact that the teacher speaks first points to an implicit power dynamic. As the only student of color in an English class being taught by an older white man, the speaker has comparatively less power and privilege. That said, in the final line of the passage quoted here, the speaker subtly undermines his teacher’s power by questioning the assignment’s apparently straightforward logic: “I wonder if it’s that simple?” Taking his own question as a new point of departure, the speaker claims ownership over his own thinking and asserts his own voice within an otherwise complex power dynamic.

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?

These lines (lines 16–20) open the second stanza, and they implicitly respond to the question the speaker posed immediately after quoting his teacher’s writing prompt: “I wonder if it’s that simple?” (line 6). Here, the speaker confirms that what his teacher has asked for is, in fact, rather challenging. After explicitly acknowledging this challenge in the opening line, the speaker attempts to gather his thoughts. He begins to work out what he thinks in response to the prompt by accounting for “what / I feel and see and hear.” But as he tries to develop this line of thinking, he gets tangled up in his own thoughts. Hughes underscores this confusion by using long em dashes to indicate sudden shifts in the speaker’s thought. He also uses repeating vowel sounds linked to the long E sound of the word “me” and the long U sound of the word “you.” The contrast between these two vowel sounds accumulates throughout the passage until the final line, where the speaker seems to have lost his sense of self: “Me—who?”

I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?

The speaker closes the second stanza with these lines (lines 25–27), which come immediately after he’s attempted to describe who he is in more concrete terms. As he lists some of the things he likes, he realizes that his preferences aren’t dictated by his racial identity. For instance, he likes different styles of music, including “Bessie, bop, [and] Bach” (line 24). “Bessie” refers to a Black blues singer named Bessie Smith, and “bop” refers to a style of jazz developed in the 1940s. Whereas both of these refer to historically significant forms of Black music, “Bach” refers to the eighteenth-century German composer named Johann Sebastian Bach. The fact that the speaker can enjoy Bach as much as Bessie Smith and bebop leads the speaker recognize that he and many others share the same musical taste, regardless of race. With this recognition in mind, the speaker returns to the task at hand: his English essay. If it’s true that his race doesn’t dictate his taste, then he wants to know if the same logic holds for his writing. That is, he wants to know whether there’s a straightforward relationship between his racial identity and whatever it is he might write for his essay.

You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!

These lines (lines 31–36), which come from the third stanza, are addressed to the speaker’s white English teacher. The speaker reflects on the fact that, in America, it’s inevitable that people from different racial backgrounds will have some influence on each other. As much as racist laws in the United States might attempt to legislate segregation, absolute separation is clearly impossible, not to mention undesirable. Indeed, the mutual influence of people from different races is what makes America America. Even as the speaker reflects on this idea of mutual influence, he acknowledges the concurrent reality of mutual antagonism. The speaker admits to feeling in conflict with his teacher, just as his teacher must sometimes feel in conflict with him. But in the end, the speaker affirms that, antagonistic or not, a relationship of mutual influence is inescapable. On some level, then, both he and his teacher must embrace each other across the divide of difference and unequal power.

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