James Mercer Langston Hughes

Elevator Boy

I got a job now
Runnin' an elevator

Dennison Hotel

Hughes worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. in the early 1920s—this poem draws directly from that experience of Black service work.

In the Dennison Hotel in Jersey,
Job aint no good though.
No money around.
Jobs are just chances
Like everything else.
Maybe a little luck now,
Maybe not.
Maybe a good job sometimes:
Step out o' the barrel, boy.

Step out o' the barrel

Slang meaning to get lucky, to escape poverty. The phrase captures the gambler's mentality required to survive on service wages.

Two new suits an'
A woman to sleep with.
Maybe no luck for a long time.
Only the elevators
Goin' up an' down,

Up an' down

The repetition mirrors the physical monotony—but also the economic trap. No matter how many times the elevator goes up, the operator stays at the bottom.

Up an' down,
Or somebody else's shoes
To shine,
Or greasy pots in a dirty kitchen.
I been runnin' this

I been runnin' this

The shift to present perfect tense marks the moment of realization: what felt temporary has become his life.

I been runnin' this

The shift to present perfect tense marks the moment of realization: what felt temporary has become his life.

Elevator too long.
Guess I'll quit now.
Langston Hughes.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Great Migration's Service Economy

CONTEXT Between 1916-1970, six million Black Americans left the South in the Great Migration, seeking economic opportunity in Northern and Western cities. What they often found were service jobs—elevator operators, porters, kitchen workers, shoe shiners—the exact roster Hughes lists here.

Hughes wrote this in the 1920s, when being an elevator operator was one of the few semi-respectable jobs available to Black men in Northern hotels. It required a uniform, interaction with white guests, and came with the pretense of upward mobility. The poem systematically dismantles that pretense.

Notice the economic vocabulary: "No money around," "Jobs are just chances," "Maybe a little luck." This isn't a worker describing his labor—it's a gambler describing odds. Hughes shows how service work under Jim Crow required treating employment like a lottery: maybe you get tips, maybe you get fired, maybe you "step out o' the barrel" into something better. The system offers no security, only chances.

The catalog of jobs (elevator, shoe shining, kitchen work) isn't random—these are the jobs Hughes himself worked. In 1925, poet Vachel Lindsay "discovered" Hughes when Hughes left three poems beside Lindsay's dinner plate while working as a busboy. The "greasy pots in a dirty kitchen" is autobiography, not imagination.

What Quitting Means

The poem's final line—"Guess I'll quit now"—is deliberately ambiguous. Quit the elevator job? Quit hoping for better? Quit trying to survive in this system? Hughes doesn't specify, and that ambiguity is the point.

Notice the shift in verb tenses throughout. The poem starts in present tense ("I got a job"), moves through conditional futures ("Maybe a little luck," "Maybe not"), then shifts to present perfect ("I been runnin'") before ending in future tense ("I'll quit"). This grammatical journey mirrors the psychological one: from the hope of a new job, through the realization of its futility, to the decision to leave.

The "up an' down" repetition is the poem's hinge. Elevators go up—but the operator doesn't. He sends wealthy (white) guests to their floors while he returns to the lobby. The vertical motion is constant; the social position is fixed. When Hughes repeats the phrase, the mechanical rhythm becomes hypnotic, trap-like. The line break after the second "down" creates a pause—a moment where the speaker seems to hear himself, to recognize the absurdity.

Compare this to Hughes's "The Weary Blues" (1925) or "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921). Those poems find dignity and depth in Black experience. This one finds exhaustion. The speaker isn't weary in a romantic sense—he's done. "Guess I'll quit now" is spoken with the flat affect of someone who's already emotionally left. The casualness ("Guess") makes it more devastating, not less.