Cora Unashamed

“Cora Unashamed,” by Langston Hughes, was first published in his 1934 short story collection The Ways of White Folks. Like the collection as a whole, “Cora Unashamed“ explores racial consciousness and the relationships between Black and white individuals and communities. Known for his literary contributions to the Harlem Renaissance movement, a revival of African American culture in the 1920s and 1930s, Hughes wrote about Black identity and the experiences of African Americans in a segregated society. Hughes was a respected and popular writer during his lifetime. Since 1978, City College of New York has awarded the Langston Hughes Medal to African American diaspora writers in celebration of Hughes’s memory.

“Cora Unashamed” is about a Black woman in a rural Midwestern town who feels trapped by her dependence on her white employers. Through the loss of her own child and the eventual death of the white child she has helped raise, Cora confronts cultural expectations of humility and shame. The unconditional love and support she gives her employers’ child emphasize, by contrast, their hypocrisy and superficiality. Hughes’s application of narrative voice, euphemism,

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