James Mercer Langston Hughes

Railroad Avenue

Dusk dark
On Railroad Avenue.

fish joints

Working-class restaurants serving cheap fried fish, common in Black neighborhoods during the Great Migration. Not metaphor—these were real businesses on streets like this.

Lights in the fish joints,
Lights in the pool rooms.
A box car some train
Has forgotten
In the middle of the block.
A player piano,
A victrola.
 Was the number.
A boy
Lounging on the corner.
A passing girl
With purple powdered skin.

purple powdered skin

Face powder in the 1920s-30s often had a purple or violet tint, especially cheaper brands. The color shows both her effort to look good and her economic reality.

 Laughter
 Suddenly
 Like a taut drum.
 Laughter
 Suddenly

Neither truth nor lie

The laughter isn't genuine joy or fake performance—it's survival, the sound of getting through. Hughes captures something more complicated than either honesty or pretense.

 Neither truth nor lie.
 Laughter
Hardening the dusk dark evening.
 Laughter
Shaking the lights in the fish joints,

fish joints

Working-class restaurants serving cheap fried fish, common in Black neighborhoods during the Great Migration. Not metaphor—these were real businesses on streets like this.

Rolling white balls in the pool rooms,

leaving untouched the box car

Everything else moves—the laughter shakes, rolls, hardens—but the abandoned boxcar stays still. It's the poem's only thing that won't respond to human sound.

And leaving untouched the box car
Some train has forgotten.
Langston Hughes.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Geography of Abandonment

Railroad Avenue isn't a specific street—it's a type of street. During the Great Migration (1916-1970), Black Americans moving north settled near railroad tracks because that's where cheap housing was. The railroad companies owned the land, the neighborhoods were industrial, and white residents had already moved away. Hughes published this poem in 1926, right in the middle of the first wave of migration.

The boxcar in the middle of the block is the poem's anchor. Trains were how people got north—the Illinois Central, the Pennsylvania Railroad, routes that Hughes himself traveled. But this boxcar isn't going anywhere. "Some train has forgotten" appears twice, framing the whole poem. It's been left behind the same way the neighborhood has been left behind, stuck between the industrial promise that brought people here and the reality of where they ended up.

Notice what Hughes doesn't do: he doesn't explain, doesn't editorialize, doesn't tell you this is sad. He just shows you the boxcar twice, sitting there while everything else in the poem moves or makes noise. The repetition makes you feel the stuckness.

How Laughter Hardens

The poem's structure breaks in half. First half: catalog of images (fish joints, pool rooms, boxcar, piano, victrola, boy, girl). Second half: laughter takes over. The word "Laughter" appears six times in nine lines, always at the start, like a drumbeat or a chant. Hughes is using anaphora—repetition at the beginning of lines—to make the laughter feel relentless.

But watch what the laughter does. It's "Like a taut drum"—tight, stretched, about to break. It "hardens" the evening, "shakes" the lights, "rolls" the pool balls. These are violent verbs. The laughter isn't joyful; it's percussive, a force acting on the physical world. "Neither truth nor lie" is the key line: this is laughter as armor, as social performance, as the sound you make when you're trying not to feel what you're feeling.

The player piano and victrola in the first half matter here. Both are mechanical music—music without musicians, entertainment without human presence. The laughter in the second half is almost mechanical too, a practiced response. Hughes is showing you a community making sound to fill silence, making life in a place that's been forgotten like that boxcar.