The spirituals represent the most celebrated tradition of coded speech in African American culture, where "Canaan," "the promised land," and "crossing the Jordan" encoded messages about escape north to freedom that slaveholders either missed or chose not to acknowledge; A poet working with coded speech might write a contemporary poem whose surface meaning is entirely innocuous while its second layer, accessible to readers familiar with African American vernacular culture, carries a sharp political critique invisible to outsiders; Langston Hughes's use of blues form is itself a kind of coded speech, embedding protest and critique within a musical form that white audiences often heard as mere entertainment while Black readers received its full political and emotional content; Amiri Baraka's more avant-garde poems use a kind of coded speech shaped by Black musical reference, where the names of jazz musicians, the vocabulary of bebop, and the rhythms of Black oral tradition create a second text readable only to those with the cultural knowledge to decode it; In the context of slavery, the tradition of saying "yes sir" while executing tasks with deliberate slowness, breakage, or misunderstanding constitutes a form of coded speech that poets have recovered and celebrated as a sophisticated form of resistance; A classroom exercise might ask students to write a poem that reads as a nature poem to an uninformed reader while carrying a specific political message visible only to readers with the relevant cultural knowledge