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In this article, I discuss how and in what ways Hughes re-defines the image of African Americans. At the heart of his literary career is a ceaseless effort to re-define the image of African Americans in accordance with their ‘soul.’ ‘Soul’ is the essence of a human being in Hughes’s view. And it is the realm of African American existence where African Americans discover, analyze, celebrate, valuate, corroborate, and transform the meaning of their lives in society. Hughes’s poetry on women displays the dynamic power of African American people that turns sorrow into joy, crying into laughter, defeat into victory. Particularly, the black woman embodied in Hughes’s poems such as “Mother to Son,” “The Negro Mother,” and so called “Madam” poems is an archetype of the soul of Afro-Americans. Hughes’s description of the women in his poems confirms that he is “the first black male feminist writer of African American letters.”