Another Poignant Excerpt from The Big Sea

I won't rehash my current literary crush on Langston Hughes.  I was reading a little more of his autobiography last night and I was left with a beautifully bittersweet feeling right after I read this.  Just a little context, Langston gets a new job as a sailor and the ship sails to Africa.  There, he meets a young man and his mother:

The boy's name was Edward.  He spoke very good English, and he liked to come down to the boat often to talk with us during the week we were there.  He took me one day to his house, a very modest house, much like the other African huts, and I was introduced to his mother, who did not speak English.  She was young and not unbeautiful, in African clothing, a flowered cloth wrapped about her body.  She offered me coconut juice to drink and the only chair. 

Edward's father was an Englishman, I learned, who had been in charge of the bank at this far-flung post of the British Empire.  He had lived inside a kind of compound, where the bank and the various government officials' homes were located.  Four years ago, Edward had lived inside that compound, too, for a while with his mother, the house servant.  But his father had retired and gone back to England.  And now Edward and his mother lived outside the compound.  His father had left a small allowance for them and occasionally wrote them a letter from London.  But he would not permit the boy or his mother to come to England. 

Edward said that it was very lonely for them there.  The whites inside the compound naturally would have nothing to do with them, nor would they give him a job, and the Negroes did not like his mother, because she had lived for years with a white man, so Edward had no friends in the village and almost nobody to talk to.  Was our boat going to England?  Could we take him away with us?  Was it true that in America the black people were friendly to the mulatto people?  But the white people were bad to them all?  Were the white people generally bad to colored people everywhere?  Edward said his own father was not bad, but now his father had gone away to England and left him there alone with his mother.  What could he do? 

Poor kid!  He looked very lonely, as he stood on the dock the day our ship hauled anchor.  He had taken my address to write me in America, and once, a year later, I had a letter from him, but only one, because I have a way of not answering letters when I don't know what to say.