“Cross” by Langston Hughes is an apparently simple, very powerful poem. I actually witnessed it change a man’s life one night. One of my students, a twenty-something in a two-year college freshman English class back in the late ‘70's, was a very white Southern mountain boy who did not want to be in the class at all and wasn’t shy about letting me know it. I read this poem to the class, and during the discussion afterward, he said, in a gently stunned voice, “I never understood before.” He didn’t want to elaborate, and I didn’t press him, but he was different after that night. He no longer resisted learning, and showed himself as likable. I taught him again some time later in a sophomore lit class, and the transformation had held. Honestly, I do not know what about the poem affected him so, but I rejoice that it did. And while I’m being honest here, let me add I do not know why I chose to teach that poem that night. Excessively afraid of conflict at the time, I had always avoided presenting lit with racial issues whenever possible, and in an anthology course where the instructor picks and chooses, it was almost always possible. Two people were changed that night: my student–and me.