Answering the question of who one is may be one of the most difficult aspects of the human experience. Identity is one of the great problems, as each person is led to determine who one is and how to lead one’s life, with the aid of others. Usually, most people believe that they know who they are, yet this really turns out to be a conglomeration of different decisions and influences from life events.
Some of the most important and influential people that one has during one’s childhood are one’s parents and other adult figures. Nevertheless, they do not always influence the person in the way that they intend to, leading them to do just the opposite through their insistence. This was true for me as a child, as my parents wanted me to always be good, something that I learnt as a teenager was not actually good.
One of the greatest artists to have explored this is Langston Hughes in his brief story “Salvation”. In it, he shows how religious people influenced him when he was a child with regards to his belief in a superior deity. However, he shows that this change was very strange and peculiar, even though it had a lasting impression through his life.
There are many elements in Hughes’ “Salvation” that point towards the way he constructed his identity through this event. Concretely, it shows how Hughes stops believing in the existence of Jesus because of the social pressure that he felt, which compelled him to publicly say that he believed in him.
This is present in the text when he says, “I didn’t believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn’t come to help me” (Hughes 237). The author proposes a strange and somewhat paradoxical solution to receiving pressure from adults to believe in God: completely denying His existence.
He constantly describes this pressure, mainly by showing the time that goes by and that they are surrounded. The latter connotes that they had no chance of escaping instead of saying that they were saved. Furthermore, it has overtones of being inferior and weak, much like the lambs that the adults were saying they were.
The time that goes by is trickier to see, yet almost the whole text rests on the fact that they are waiting for the young Langston to say that he has been saved. Furthermore, a whole paragraph is dedicated to this permanence of time: “Still I kept waiting to see Jesus” (Hughes 236). Hughes uses his great literary skills to demonstrate how the adults pressured the manifestation of the change that would really be profoundly personal.
In fact, Hughes confesses to the readers that he did not see anything that day, even though he raised himself from the mourners’ bench. In this sense, the aforementioned one-sentence paragraph that shows how nothing happened is paralleled by another one that demonstrates the change: “So I got up” (Hughes 237). Nevertheless, he then clarifies that “I hadn’t seen Jesus” (Hughes 237). Therefore, his salvation was not a true one, and he was only responding to social pressures, as stated before.
As for me, I also reacted in the opposite direction to some parental mandates that they attempted to impose on me. Concretely, they told me that I should always be good, something that I tried to comply with at all times. Nevertheless, in my teenage years I saw that this was not desirable, and that it was sometimes adequate and convenient to be malevolent as well, if for a good cause.
As a child, my parents constantly told me that I should always be good. Being a nice person is, obviously, something desirable; nevertheless, it was the constant imperative to be good towards others that bothered me. They told me that I should do it at all times, and to everybody, something that I completely believed, even though it was a nuisance sometimes.
When I was young, people logically bothered me sometimes, and I felt the impulse to make them feel bad or at least not treat them kindly. Nevertheless, my parents constantly compelled me to do good unto them, something that I completely refused against, but that I finally ended up attempting to do throughout my entire life.
Nevertheless, a series of events led me to rebel against this, as I saw that it was not convenient to always be good towards others. In particular, teenage girls constantly wanted to borrow my homework to copy it, something that I readily acquiesced to because of my parents’ mandates. However, the teacher quickly caught on to this and she scolded me both in private and in front of the school director. This was a big deal for me, as I constantly strived to be good in both academics and behavior in the classroom. I got into a lot of trouble for them, and felt really bad, just for striving to be good towards them.
Furthermore, I also caught a close friend taking advantage of me, which finally led me to realize that I could not be nice to everybody, as my parents had wanted me to do. One of my best friends as a teenager, Peter, constantly went to my house, sleeping over and being very close to my family as a whole.
Nevertheless, I started being suspicious when I saw that there were different things that ceased to be found in my house after he came over. I finally saw that he was taking some of them, leading me to not only have a huge fight with him, but stop being his friend as well. Here, I also saw that it was not always convenient to be nice to others.
Both of these experiences, along with my parents’ mandates, strongly sculpted who I am to this day. Even though the latter wanted the best for me, leading me to try to be the best that I could be, they led me to believe that I should always be good to other people, something that is neither convenient, nor really possible. Through different life experiences, I saw that it was important to sometimes not be nice at all, but scathingly mean.
The girls copying my homework and Peter stealing my things both brought me back to reality, realizing that I could not always be good to other people, as my parents wanted. As with Hughes’ salvation story, reality sharply contrasted with what the adult figures wanted from me, leading me to abandon that way of thinking.
Even though it was not as drastic as his anti-conversion, I also learned a very important lesson by escaping what my parents wanted from me. As a whole, I firmly believe that this was one of the most important steps in my becoming an adult, as it helped me do away with the personality goals that my parents had imposed on me as a child.
In conclusion, as Langston Hughes shows in “Salvation”, parents and adult figures in one’s life often end up having a lasting impression that is contrary to their initial intents. In his case, the pressure that they applied on him in church led him to never believe in Jesus Christ again, for having abandoned him in that key moment.
As for me, my parents’ insistence on my always being good led me to realize that it was also sometimes adequate and necessary to be mischievous as well, as long it was for a good cause. There were a few incidents of people taking advantage of my benevolence that led me to realize the importance of being bad sometimes.
It is important to see how the ideals that adults attempt to impose on children are not only unrealistic, but may end up hurting them as well. Obviously, nobody can be good to other people all the time, and asking little boys and girls to do it does not allow them to flourish themselves appropriately. Therefore, it may end up influencing their identity in a counterproductive way, leading them to paradoxically be just the opposite of what the adult figures are attempting to accomplish.
However, it is interesting to see how this is implied in the process of becoming an adult: being able to separate one’s self from the ideals that authority figures attempt to impose on one’s personality. Therefore, adults end up influencing the children in the subject that they want to, yet in the opposite direction that they intend. Reality and social relationships end up determining the way that people act, regardless of the unreal postulates that adults may attempt to impose on them.
Works Cited
Hughes, Langston. “Salvation”. 236-237. PDF.
