Slave on the Block | Four Short Fiction Writers of the Harlem Renaissance—Their Legacy of Achievement
Turpin was an American novelist, dramatist, and editor. In the excerpt below, he presents ‘‘Slave on the Block’’ as an example of Hughes’s successful use of satire.
Langston Hughes's ‘‘Slave on the Block’’ is a penetrating, satirical portraiture of arty, "liberal" whites, represented by Michael and Anne Carraway in this short story. Ostensibly it is the story of a young Negro migrated to New Jersey from the deep South, who has come to retrieve the belongings of his Aunt Emma, lately deceased in the employ of the Carraways, residents of Greenwich Village. However, the story becomes a vehicle for the author to reveal certain absurdities in the behavior of white employers toward their Negro domestics, and at the same time pungently scathe the...
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