Like the nation he described, Hughes wondered when he would touch bottom. The success he had enjoyed in his 20s as a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance had flickered. Selling a poem or a story every few months, he had since become a "literary sharecropper." Fate, he said, "never intended for me to have a full pocket of anything but manuscripts." That spring, his father had died in Mexico drawing him there with hope of an inheritance. But he loathed his father, who had left the family, and the feeling was mutual. He got nothing.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

Back from Mexico, he had gone to Los Angeles. Holed up in a dollar-a-night motel, he wrote a children's book -- rejected, then failed to get a screenwriting job in Hollywood. By late August he was headed home to his mother's in Oberlin, Ohio. But he and his mother quarreled and he soon left for Manhattan on word that his play, "Mulatto" was headed for Broadway. The play, gutted by the director, got terrible opening night reviews. The next evening, Hughes boarded the train for Cleveland, burdened now by word that his mother had breast cancer.

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Like many writers during the Depression, Hughes was curious about communism. His flirtation with the Communist Party, which he never joined, got him banned from speaking engagements and labeled "officially a communist." But there on the train, he gave his dreams another chance.

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

And finding only the same old stupid plan