Bily teaches English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In this essay, Bily examines Hughes's novel and an earlier poem through a Marxist lens.

Essie Belle Johnson, one of the main characters of Langston Hughes's novel Tambourines to Glory, is numb. Her only goal since she arrived in the North has been to get enough money for a two- or three-room apartment so she can bring her daughter to live with her. After more than a dozen years, however, she has only a one-room kitchenette in the Rabbit Warren, a building of tiny one-room units housing as many as three or four people each. The view out her window is of "a courtyard full of beer cans and sacks of garbage." There is no child care for these crowded families; children coming home from school entertain themselves until their parents come home from work. But paying rent...