Chapter 13, Not Without Laughter Summary

At the end of his sophomore year, Fisk College paid Hughes a sizable fee to read his poems at their college. He spent his earnings touring the American south for the entirety of that summer, first heading to Memphis and then to Baton Rouge, where a flood had left 750,000 people homeless. While in Baton Rouge, He visited a camp for refugees, but soon became depressed by the racism he witnesses, even in the midst of disaster. Hughes traveled to New Orleans.

In New Orleans, Hughes took a job as a mess boy on a freighter that traveled to Havana. When he returned, he spent a few weeks exploring the French Quarter, and then headed back toward Lincoln for his junior year of college. Langston stayed on Lincoln's campus the following summer in order to complete his first...