Having almost no relationship with his father growing up, Hughes was slightly nervous to be seeing his father again after all these years. In The Big Sea, Hughes wrote “My father hated Negros. He had a strange dislike for his own people. I didn’t understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negros very much.” (The Big Sea) His father had disproved of his dream to be a writer and had urged him to study engineering. They initially set up a compromise that if his father would pay for tuition, Hughes would study engineering. Hughes already being exposed to poetry took a different approach on college. It was when he attended Columbia that he really discovered Harlem and all it had to offer