In high school, the only negative reinforcement you get is a trip to the principal's office, which just makes your act seem edgier. And that's the thing -- this act only plays in that setting, because the school has to put up with it, and everybody knows it.n high school, the only negative reinforcement you get is a trip to the principal's office, which just makes your act seem edgier. And that's the thing -- this act only plays in that setting, because the school has to put up with it, and everybody knows it.
âThe Negro Speaks of Riversâ is Langston Hughesâs first mature poem. He wrote it in 1920 at the age of seventeen, while traveling by train to visit his father in Mexico. The young Hughes was inspired to pen this verse when his train crossed over the Mississippi River.
The Negro Speaks of Rivers is perhaps the most profound of these poems of heritage and strength. Composed when Hughes was a mere 17 years old, and dedicated to W. E. B. DuBois, it is a sonorous evocation of transcendent essences so ancient as to appear timeless, predating human existence, longer than human memory.