The Blues I Am Playing Analysis

Langston Hughes’s “The Blues I’m Playing”, placed in a time of turbulent race relations, exhibits the relationship between Dora Ellsworth and Oceola Jones. The narrator introduces Dora Ellsworth, most commonly referred to as Mrs. Ellsworth, as a middle-aged, widowed, wealthy white woman. We see Oceola Jones as a talented African American pianist working tirelessly to pay the bills. Mrs. Ellsworth and Oceola are introduced by the critic Ormand Hunter. Mrs. Ellsworth becomes interested in Oceola for her talent; she then pursues Oceola in hopes that she will become her new protégée. As the plot unfolds, Oceola lives and studies the arts in Greenwich Village in New York City, New York, then Paris, France. She concludes her artistic education …show more content…
In the twenties and thirties, homosexuality remained a taboo topic to most circles in the American culture. However, throughout “The Blues I’m Playing”, we can derive from the text an underlying obsession Mrs. Ellsworth seems to possess for Oceola. At the very beginning of the short story, the narrator states, “Mrs. Ellsworth began to think in bed about what gowns would look best on Oceola” (Hughes, 1318). And as Mrs. Ellsworth begins to pry into Oceola’s the personal life, she learns of Pete— Oceola’s tenant. Mrs. Ellsworth asks Mr. Hunter to inquire with his maid about Oceola and Pete’s relationship. When she discovers that he lives with her for free, she become even more determined to remove Oceola from her flat. Continuously throughout the story Mrs. Ellsworth speaks negatively of love and men; she insists that art trumps love in all circumstances. Some time later, after Mrs. Ellsworth convinced Oceola to move away from Harlem, she would occasionally schedule trips for them to venture up state to a lodge. The narrator says, “If there were a lot of guests at the lodge, as there sometimes were, Mrs. Ellsworth might share the bed with Oceola. Then she would read aloud Tennyson or Browning before turning out the light, aware all the time of the electric strength of that brown-black body beside her, and of the deep drowsy voice asking what the poems were about” (Hughes, 1320). At the end of the short story, we see Mrs. Ellsworth’s severe disappointment in Oceola for choosing the blues and to marry Pete. There is a sense of betrayal expressed when she says to Oceola, “Is this what I spent thousands of dollars to teach you” (Hughes, 1325)? Interestingly enough, there is speculation that Langston Hughes himself was closeted homosexual man. In Tish Dace’s "Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964”, Dace states, “. . .Van Nechten was gay and Hughes is