Slave on the Block

“Slave on the Block” is a short story by Langston Hughes that originally appeared in the September 1933 issue of Scribner's Magazine. The story was later published in The Ways of White Folks, a 1934 collection of Hughes’s short stories.

This study guide, based on the 1990 Vintage Classics print edition, quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Anne and Michael Carraway are affluent white bohemians who live in Greenwich Village—and often visit Harlem—during the 1920s, a time when that quarter of the city was the center of the Harlem Renaissance. The Carraways meet a Black man named Luther, the nephew of Emma, their deceased cook, when he comes to their house to claim his aunt’s belongings. When he boldly asks for a job, they hire him on a whim as their gardener. However, both Anne and Michael, who see Black people and culture as exotic, are more interested in painting Luther and using him as a source of material for their art. Luther, a recent migrant from the South, is unemployed and glad to have a comfortable place to live.

Luther quickly takes up with Mattie, a Black woman who works as a domestic servant in the Carraway household. She is 40 to his 19. The sophisticated older woman takes him to Harlem clubs, where he learns to dance. The two become lovers, much to the displeasure of Anne, who is increasingly fascinated with Luther as an object. Anne begins a painting called The Boy on the Block, a work that she intends to use to capture the great sorrow she thinks is bound up in the hearts of Black people. The Carraways are intrusive and tone deaf; they barge into Luther’s room at one o’ clock one morning to ask him to sing traditional Black music to a visitor but discover him entangled with Mattie in her bedroom. The constant boundary violations wear on both Luther and Mattie, who find the Carraways strange and patronizing.

Matters come to a head when Michael’s old-fashioned mother from Kansas comes to visit. Luther enters the room where the elder Mrs. Carraway is sitting. He is bare-chested. This sight—and Luther’s question about how soon she will be leaving—shock Mrs. Carraway, who screams and calls Luther a racial slur. Michael dismisses Luther at once. Mattie also leaves, but only after demanding pay and denouncing the Carraways for their many instances of patronizing racism.