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Books by Langston Hughes
Weary Blues (1926) /
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
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The Ways of White Folks (Stories) /
The Big Sea: An Autobiography
Best of Simple /
I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey /
New Negro Poets U.S.A.
Not Without Laughter /Five Plays by Langston Hughes /
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz /
Fine Clothes to the Jew /
The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Poems 1921-1940)
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Langston Hughes and
Africa
By Harold R.
Isaacs
Of all the poets in Harlem who sang
of Africa in the 1920’s, Langston Hughes was the only
one who had been there. Perhaps this was why he
sometimes sang of Africa in a key different from the
rest:
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We cry among the skyscrapers
As our ancestors
Cried among the palms in Africa
Because we are alone,
It is night,
And we’re afraid. |
Or, in a different mood:
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We should have a land of trees
Bowed down with chattering parrots
Brilliant as the day
And not this land where birds are grey. |
It was more common
to sing about happy Africans long dead, or imaginary
Africans who never lived, but Langston Hughes saw
himself trying to shake hands with live Africans, now:
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We are related—you
and I.
You from the West Indies,
I from Kentucky.
We are related—you
and I.
You from Africa,
I from these States.
We are brothers—you
and I. |
As he tells it, the
young poet’s trip to Africa happened to him like an odd
chance, as unpremeditated as a line of poetry coming
unbidden into his head. He had wanted simply to get
away, to break from his young life up to then, and like
a lot of young people who had this urge, he tried to do
it by going to sea and to any far place he could reach.
On the first try he got a job on a freighter tied up
among the war-weary discards of the Hudson; going
nowhere. He stayed aboard her for a long season;
excursioning to Bear Mountain and only a few times back
to Harlem. Come spring, he tried again; took the first
job offered and only afterward learned that the ship was
sailing for Africa. In telling this story in his
autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes does not even
add an exclamation point to this discovery of his
unplanned destination. The exclamations came later. At
the moment what mattered was not where he was going but
what he was leaving.
That night, sailing
out of New York, in a scene that can stand forever as an
image of youth declaring its manhood,
twenty-one-year-old Hughes dumped all his books into the
bay and felt that it was like dropping all his burdens,
everything unpleasant and miserable out of my past . . .
like throwing a million bricks out of my heart.”
Langston Hughes
tried to take Africa as he tried to school himself to
take most things: casually, on the surface, and
wherever possible, with a laugh, even a sad laugh. With
Hughes this was more than a device or a literary style;
it was a way of functioning, of coping with life. There
was so much on the Negro surface, after all, hardly
noted by anyone until he came along. Langston Hughes
achieved a real uniqueness as a poet by describing the
life and people of the Negro ghetto, catching them by
their sights and sounds, by some of their sorrows and
some of their angers, but mostly by their sardonic
humors.
He achieved his
effect mostly by peeling off a layer of the surface,
hardly ever more than a single layer, and then usually
leaving what he found there undescribed, for the reader
to see and hear if he could. He molded his emotional
patterns on the blues who rhythms he adopted. This mood
as he explained in a prefatory note to an early volume
of his poems, “is almost always despondency, but when
they are sung people laugh.”
In addition to
this, Hughes set out to do what few, regardless of race,
creed, or color, have succeeded in doing, a body of work
that has given us a rich, varied, and often vivid
picture of the tops of a lot of things about Negroes and
Negro life in America; rather little at depth about any
one person, especially about himself.
Still, even under
that single layer, and even to his Africa so briefly
glimpsed through young eyes bright with adventure, we do
learn something about Hughes if we look hard enough at
what he has shown us. The exclamation points about
Africa came on that first voyage when Hughes, fresh (he
said) from a gay night in a love palace in Las Palmas,
kept watching for the first sight of the African coast:
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And when finally I saw
the dust-green hills in the sunlight,
something took hold of me inside. My
Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples!
And me a Negro! The real thing, to be
touched and seen, not merely read about in a
book. |
Dakar was too French and too
Mohammedan, but:
|
… farther down the coast
it was more like the Africa I had dreamed
about—wild
and lovely, the people dark and beautiful,
the palm trees tall, the sun bright, and the
rivers deep. The great Africa of my dreams! |
But here, in the
Africa of his dreams, the young Hughes almost
immediately finds again the heaviest of the burdens that
for a heady moment he had imagined dropping with his
books into New York Bay. Here in Africa, where
everything was dark and beautiful, we come upon Hughes
touching—lightly as
always—on one of the
central themes of his life:
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There was one thing that
hurt me a lot when I talked with the
people. The Africans looked at me and would
not believe I was a Negro. You see,
unfortunately, I am not black.1 |
And this is where
Hughes goes back to tell the story of his life, of his
family with all its mixtures of bloods and colors, of
white great-grandparents, of strains of poets and
statesmen and Indian chiefs, Cherokee, Jewish, Scotch,
French, and Negro forefather, whom he saw once when he
was six and not again until he was seventeen. He tells
of his wandering life, with his mother, migrated to
Mexico to make his way because there was no color line
or Jim Crow there. His father hated “niggers” and
“hated himself too, for being a Negro”; he had great
contempt for all poor people and valued only money made
to keep.
It was while he was
bound for Mexico to see his father that Hughes, just out
of high school, wrote one of the best known of all his
poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” This act of
creation came out of a fusing of thoughts about his
father, Negroes, himself, slavery, and his ancestors in
dim and distant Africa. He was on the train out of St.
Louis, he relates, and was feeling, badly over his
parting from his mother (“my best poems,” he adds in a
parenthesis, “were all written when I felt the worst!
When I was happy, I didn’t write anything.”) He goes
on:
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It came about in this
way. All day on the train I had been
thinking about my father, and his strange
dislike of his own people. I didn’t
understand it, because I was a Negro, and I
liked Negroes very much. . . . Now it was
just sunset, and we crossed the Mississippi,
slowly, over a long bridge. I looked out of
the window of the Pullman at the great muddy
river flowing down toward the heart of the
South, and I began to think what that river,
the old Mississippi , had meant to Negroes
in the past . . . how Abraham Lincoln had
made a trip down the Mississippi on a raft
to New Orleans, and how he had seen slavery
at its worst, and had decided within himself
that it should be removed from American
life.
Then I began to think
about other rivers in our past—the Congo,
and the Niger, and the Nile in Africa—and
the thought came to me: “I’ve known
rivers,” and I put it down on the back of an
envelope I had in my pocket, and within the
space of ten or fifteen minutes, as the
train gathered speed in the dusk, I had
written this poem, which I called “The Negro
Speaks of River.”2 |
Much of what made
up the inner life of Langston Hughes stares out at us
from the telling of this story of how he made a poem.
He has told us here and elsewhere of some of its
separate parts. It is of their inner connections that
he has never written.
In Mexico he
experienced a great crisis in his hatred for his
father. The teen-age boy fell into a deep illness that
no doctor could diagnose, much less cure, because Hughes
preferred to lie in his expensive hospital bed—his
father was paying the bills—and not to tell them what
was the matter with him. It was two years after this,
following a try at student life at Columbia, a series of
odd jobs, and his winter the dead fleet in the Hudson,
that he crossed the sea and saw Africa he said he had
dreamed of it:
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A long sandy coastline,
gleaming in the sun. Palm trees sky-tall.
Rivers darkening the sea’s edge with the
loam of their deltas. People black and
beautiful as the night. The bare, pointed
breasts of women in the market places. The
rippling muscles of men loading palm oil and
cocoa beans and mahogany on the ships of the
white man’s world … |
It was 1923, and
the Africans Hughes met had heard of Marcus Garvey and
they “hoped that what they had heard about him was
true—that he really would come and unify the black world
and free and exalt Africa.”
|
“Our problems in America very much like
yours,” I told the Africans, “especially in
the South, I am a Negro, too.”
But they only laughed at me and shook their
heads and said: “You, white man!”
It was the only place in the world where
I’ve ever been called a white man. They
looked at my copper-brown skin and straight
black hair—like my grandmother’s Indian
hair, except a little curly—and they said:
“You—white man.” |
One of the laborers aboard, a Kru
from Liberia who knew about these things, explained to
Hughes that most nonwhites who came to Africa from
abroad came to help the white man, whether as missionary
or as clerk or helper in colonial governments, “so the
Africans call them all white men.”
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“But I am not white,” I said.
“You are not black either,” the Kru man said
simply. “There is a man of my color,” and
he pointed to George, the pantryman, who
protested loudly.
“Don’t point at me,” George said. “I’m from
Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A. And no African
blood nowhere.”
“You black,” said the Kru man.
“I can part my hair,” said George, “and it
ain’t nappy.”
But to tell the truth, George shaved a part
in his hair every other week, since the comb
wouldn’t work. The Kru man knew this, so
they both laughed loudly, for George’s face
was as African as Africa. |
And then Langston Hughes adds
this astonishing parenthesis:
|
(Yet dark as he was
George always referred to himself as
brown-skin and it was not until years later,
when a dark-skinned minister in New Jersey
denounced me to his congregation for using
the word black to describe him in a
newspaper article, that I realized that most
dark Negroes in America do not like the word
black at all. They prefer to be
referred to as brownskin, or at the
most as dark-brownskin—no matter how
dark they really are.)3 |
In this
remarkable statement Langston Hughes, the poet whose
appeal and repute was based on his sensitive awareness
of the common mores of Negroes, ask his readers to
believe that until the late 1920’s he had no idea that
Negroes had any special feelings about the word black.
We are asked to imagine a youthful Hughes—the same one
who wrote Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the
Jew—equipped with a selective soundproofing device
which kept out all Negro talk of blackness but let in
all the other words and sounds and feelings out of which
he made his poems. Whether this is what Hughes really
remembered about himself when he wrote these words (in
1945), or whether he was deliberately “misremembering,”
the effect is much the same: it reveals a block so deep
and so important that one’s first impulse is to step
away from it.
But his statement
is so extravagantly absurd that it becomes a revelation
in itself; Hughes the writer is violently signaling that
Hughes the man had some superspecial feelings himself on
this subject of blackness. This becomes even clearer as
we go on, because this curious little parenthesis is
sandwiched in between the story of how Africans had
called him a “white man” and the story of golden-skinned
boy who came aboard at one port looking for reading
matter in English. He was the son, he told Hughes, of
an African woman and an Englishman who had gone back to
England. Now he and his mother were ignored by the
whites and shunned by the blacks.
“Was it true,”
the boy wanted to know, “that in America the black
people were friendly to the mulatto people?” Hughes
later had a letter from the boy but never answered it
“because I have a way of not answering letters when I
don’t know what to say.” Instead Hughes wrote of the
encounter in a short story called “African Morning.” He
says he had always been “intrigued” with this problem he
also wrote “several other short stories”: a poem called
“Mulatto” about which he says, “I worked harder on that
poem than on any other that I have ever written”; and a
play called Mulatto, which ran successfully on
Broadway.
Langston Hughes never did write a
poem about Africans calling him “a white man. “Instead
he wrote many poems about being black, black, black.
|
I am a Negro:
Black as the night is black,
Black like the depths of my Africa.
|
In “Dream Variation”:
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To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening …
A tall slim tree …
Night coming tenderly
Black like me. |
Again in “Me and My Song,” a poem
80 words long, the world black appears nine times. A
sample:
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Black
As the gentle night,
Black as the kind and quiet night,
Black as the deep and productive earth,
Body
Out of Africa,
Strong and black …
Kind
As the black night
My song
From the dark lips
Of Africa …
Beautiful
As the black night …
Black
Out of Africa,
Me and my song. |
Hughes had also joined in the
popular poetic pastime of beating the tom-toms:
|
The low beating of the tomtoms
The slow beating of the tomtoms,
Low … slow
Slow … low
Stirs your blood … |
But in the end he
was badly tripped himself by the vogue for primitivism
and the noble-savage idea. When the bright
“Renaissance” was fading into the grey depression,
Hughes had got himself a patron, a rich old lady who
lived on Park Avenue. She fed him well, sent him around
town in her chauffeured limousine, and generally made
his life comfortable and pleasant so that he could write
“beautiful things.” But one day he wrote a crude and
angry poem contrasting the lushness of the newly opened
Waldorf Astoria with the toil and growing deprivation
outside. His benefactor did not like it at all. She
wanted him to write out of his simple primitive soul,
and poor Hughes did not know how.
|
She wanted me to be
primitive, and know and feel the intuitions
of the primitive. But unfortunately, I did
not feel the rhythms and write of the
primitive surging through me, and so I could
not live and write as though I did. I was
only an American Negro—who had loved the
surface of Africa and the rhythms of
Africa—but I was not Africa. I was Chicago
and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem.
And I was not what she wanted me to be.4 |
His parting from
his patron threw Hughes into the second great emotional
crisis of his life. As he had in Mexico in the crisis
of his hatred for his father, he now again, fell
violently ill. It was a complicated shame and anger he
felt, and an even more complicated loss. What he did
was to go home to Cleveland, to his own mother, who had
always demanded much of him and given him little. In
Cleveland he took to the bed which his mother and
stepfather vacated for him and stayed sick until he had
spent what was left of his Park Avenue money, mostly on
doctors who did not know what was wrong and could do
nothing for him.
Hughes was, in
truth, “not Africa” at all. Africa had become another
one of the world’s places he had liked and left. During
the next ten years he circled the world and saw much of
its busy surface—Russia, China, Japan, Spain. In a
second volume of his autobiography, chronicling these
travel up to 1938,5 nowhere in all the pages
filled with the sights he had seen and the names
endlessly dropping does he again revert to the subject
of Africa except in one or two incidental mentions. His
notions about Africa remained mostly locked away among
his old poems and old thoughts and he did not bring them
out and dust them off until recent years when new Negro
and world interest in Africa rose so sharply. Then he
revived them all, full of their drumbeats and ancestral
memories and sad yearning, and wrote some new ones in
the new mood and made them all part of “The Poetry of
Jazz,” a sequence of reading that he performs for large
audiences, reciting to the accompaniment of beating
drums. His new tone on Africa sounds like this:
|
Africa
Sleepy giant,
You’ve been resting awhile.
Now I see the thunder
And the lightning
In your smile.
Now I see
The storms clouds
In your waking eyes:
The thunder,
The wonder
And the new
Surprise.
Your every step towards
The new stride
In your thighs. |
“Big roll,” says the direction to
the accompanying drummer, as this poem ends.
End Notes
1.
The Big Sea (New York, 1945), pp.
10–11.
2. Ibid., pp. 54–55. The poem, his first
to be published outside of his high-school paper,
appeared in Du Bois’ Crisis in June, 1921:
I’ve known rivers.
I’ve known rivers as ancient as the world
and older than the
flow of human blood
in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were
young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled
me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the
Pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when
Abe Lincoln went down to
New Orleans, and I’ve seen it
muddy bosom turn all golden
in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers;
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
3. Ibid., pp. 102–104.
4. Ibid., p. 325.
5.
I Wonder as I Wander (New York, 1956).
Source: Isaacs, Harold R.
The New
World of Negro Americans. The John Day Co., NY 1963.
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Scholarly Books on
Langston Hughes
Martha Cobb.
Harlem, Haiti, and Havana: A comparative critical study of
Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén. 1979.
Faith Berry.
Before & Beyond Harlem: Biography of Langston Hughes.
1995.
Onwuchekwa Jemie
Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the
Poetry
(1985)
Edward J. Mullen.
Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti (1971)
Arnold Rampersad.
The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too,
Sing America (Life of Langston Hughes, 1902-1941). 2002
Arnold Rampersad.
The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1914-1967, I Dream a
World (Life of Langston Hughes, 1941-1967). 2002
Steven C. Tracy.
Langston Hughes and the Blues. 2001
R. Baxter Miller.
The Art And Imagination of Langston Hughes. 2006.
Jonathan Scott
Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes.
2006
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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