“In so many ways and to so many people, Hughes was 'the Negro,' or at least 'Negro literature,' its public face, its spoken voice and cocktail-party embodiment as well as the source of its printed texts.”
“Black culture doesn’t lack for modernist and postmodernist artists, just their critical equivalents. And now that, like Spielberg’s Poltergeist, they’re here, might as well face up to the fact that there’s no avoiding the recondite little suckers”