While Langston Hughes’s 1927 volume Fine Clothes to the Jew has been widely admired as one of his best works, there have been no sustained efforts to read it as a cohesive whole. This essay shows how the work coheres through the central importance of its central poem, “Angels Wings.” A careful reading shows that the poem reveals a blues theology that runs throughout the volume. By establishing the significance of blues theology to the book, this study shows how Fine Clothes to the Jew speaks to and includes the larger African-American community through a holistic theology that encompasses the profane as well as the sacred. Such a theology also signifies on and overturns a sycophantic version of double consciousness by elevating the “low-down” people of the black community. In that elevation, Hughes refuses the role of the poet as an isolated artist but writes from a communitarian aesthetic. While the blues poetry of Hughes has received considerable attention, the connection of those blues to African-American theology has been neglected and adds a new perspective to the understanding of Hughes’s poetry. That connection also suggests a parallel with Korean minjung theology and literature as an amalgamation of originary belief systems and Christianity.
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