Langston Hughes expressed his determination to write fearlessly, shamelessly, and unrepentantly about working class black life  in spite of opposition.  He also exercised much freedom in experimenting with blues as well as jazz.

With his espousal of such thoughts defending the freedom of the black writer Hughes became a beacon of light to younger writers who also wished to assert their right to explore and exploit allegedly degraded aspects of black people. In 1926 Hughes returned to historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he continued publishing poetry, short stories, and essays in mainstream and black-oriented periodicals.  In 1927 together with Zora Neale Hurston and other writers he founded Fire a literary journal devoted to African -American culture and aimed at destroying the older forms of black literature. The venture itself was short-lived. It was engulfed in fire along with its editorial offices.

Then Charlotte Osgood Mason, a 70-year-old wealthy white patron, entered his life and started directing virtually every  aspect of Hughes’ life and art. Her passionate belief in parapsychology, intuition, and folk culture was brought into supervising the writing of Hughes' novel  Not Without Laughter, in which his boyhood in Kansas is drawn to depict the life of a black child, Sandy, growing up in a  representative, middle-class African-American home. Hughes' relationship with Mason came to an explosive end in 1930. Hurt and baffled by Mason's rejection, Hughes used money from a prize to spend several weeks recovering in Haiti.

Back in the U.S., Hughes made a sharp turn to the political left.  His verses and essays were now being published in New Masses, a journal controlled by the Communist Party. Later that year he began touring the South and West, taking poetry to the people. He read his poems in churches and in schools.  He then sailed from New York for the Soviet Union. He was amongst a band of young African-Americans invited to take part in a film about American race relations.

This filmmaking venture, though unsuccessful, proved instrumental to enhancing his short story writing. For whilst in Moscow he was struck by the similarities between D. H. Lawrence's character in a title story from his collection The Lovely Lady and Mrs.Osgood Mason. Overwhelmed by the power of Lawrence's stories, Hughes began writing short fiction of his own.  On his return to the U.S. by 1933 he had sold three stories and had begun compiling his first collection.

The Harlem Renaissance which was long over was replaced for Hughes by a sense of the need for political struggle and for an art that reflected this radical approach. But his career, unlike others then, easily survived the end of that movement. He kept on producing his art in keeping with his sense of himself as a thoroughly professional writer. He then published his first collections, the often acerbic and even embittered  The Ways of White Folks .

Hughes' main concern was now the theatre. Mulatto, his drama of race-mixing and the South, was the longest running play by an African American on Broadway until Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun appeared in the 1960s. His comedies and dramas of domestic black American life, largely were also popular with black audiences. Using such innovations as theatre-in-the-round and invoking audience participation, Hughes anticipated the work of later avant-garde dramatists like Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez.  In his drama Hughes combines urban dialogue, folk idioms, and a thematic emphasis on the dignity and strength of black Americans.

With the start of World War II, Hughes returned to the political centre. The Big Sea, his first autobiographical work with its memorable portrait of the Harlem Renaissance and his African voyages appeared. In poetry, he revived his interest in some of his old themes and forms, as in Shakespeare in Harlem (1942).

One of the freshest, most fascinating and enduring Negro characters in American fiction introduced in his weekly column for the Chicaqo Defender was Jesse B Simple, a Harlem Everyman, whose comic manner hardly obscured some of the serious themes raised by Hughes in relating Simple's exploits in the quintessential "wise-fool’ whose experience and uneducated insights capture the frustrations of being black in America. His honest and unsophisticated eye sees through the shallowness, hypocrisy and phoniness of white and black Americans alike. From his stool at Paddy's Bar, in a delightful brand of English, Simple comments both wisely and hilariously on many things but principally on race and women

We could have a first and revealing glimpse of the man himself through the following extracts from "Feet live Their Own Life".

Replying to Hughes’ persona who claims inability to see his feet through his shoes Simple continues:

Simple comes out most starkly through Hughes’ effective use of contrast in viewpoint between Simple's segment of society and his own. Simple is made the very articulate spokesman of the untrained worker group and himself the voice of the educated Negro liberal. The two attitudes tend to complement each other with Simple generally exemplifying the directness and single-mindedness of the untrained Negro and Hughes the sophisticated tolerance and broadmindedness of the black intellectual. The clash and interplay of these altitudes provide much of the humour in Simple, but they also at a deeper level point up and accentuate the two-level type of thinking which segregation tends to produce in all Negroes.

Inconsistency is Simple's trademark. But he is thoroughly consistent in just being first, last and always a "race man"—a fourteen carat, one hundred percent, dyed in the wool race man. No professional Negro leader, no Harlem orator, no follower of Marcus Garvey is more concerned about the fate and well being of the black brother than Simple. Morning, noon and night and seven days a week—Simple thinks and talks and gripes about being coloured.

Whatever bad thing happens to him, Simple traces to some remote origin in race relations. No matter what a man does, sick or well something is always liable to happen especially if you are coloured," he says. For he constantly keeps reminding us "a dark man shall see dark days". And he can always point with certainty to the cause of all his troubles as he does in this statement: "I have been caught in some kind of riffle ever since I been black, " And explaining his obsession with the race question he tells Hughes that a black man does not have to bring up the race question, it is always present, for as he dramatically points out: 'I look in the mirror in the morning to shave—and what do I see? Me."

Simple's abode is the black ghetto. His love for it shines through every comment he makes. "Harlem" he boasts, "has got everything from A to Z. In Harlem he found his true love. He likes Harlem because, as he says, it is "so full of Negroes." There, he feels the protection that black faces give from a predominantly white and often hostile world.

Simple works downtown, but he plays uptown. Harlem therefore means for him release from harsh and unpleasant duties and a chance to climb a bar stool or to ring a doorbell and say, “Baby, here I am."

Hughes loves Harlem because there are no time clocks or bosses to think about—just joy, relaxation and his girl friend. In reality, Simple's love for Harlem is because he sees it as the only place in New York where a black man can find sanctuary. Seeing this black city as a source of refuge, he emphasizes: "I will take Harlem for mine," "At least if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from." On being reminded by Hughes that most of the houses in Harlem are owned by whites, Simple is not the least disturbed as seen in his retort: "I might not own 'em; but I live in 'em! It would take an atom bomb to get me out."

Simple cannot even dream of staying away from Harlem. Indulging his fancy one evening at Paddy's he imagines himself a bird (black bird of course) flying away in the wild blue yonder. But as Simple envisioned himself flying over New York he found that the pull of Harlem was too strong for him. "I fell in on Lenox Avenue like a fish falls back in the pool when it gets off the hook." In short, even in his dream world of escape he can conceive of no place better than Harlem.

Actually, Simple is a displaced person. Hence his love for Harlem and for the fierce protective instincts that makes the Simples of Harlem such tragic characters deep down. Simple in spite of his good nature and ebullience, in fact leads a very narrow and lonely existence. From Monday to Saturday he works downtown in an alien world. His real life uptown lies between his drab Third-Floor-Rear room and Paddy's Bar, with trips to see Joyce, his girl friend. This is his whole limited life.

He has no friends, only bar-room acquaintances, he confesses. When he asks Hughes to be his best man at his wedding, he confesses the real loneliness of his existence "I like to be rowdy myself, but don't like to run with rowdies. Why is that? I like to drink, but I don't like drunks. I don't have the education to mingle myself with educated folks. . . . So who are my buddies? You—and a couple of bartenders."

Beneath all Simple's gaiety and humour there is to be found the basic tragedy of the urban Negro and his circumscribed life. As such Simple becomes a symbol of all the limited and proscribed figures of all the black ghettos in America. The Simples talk gaily and laugh loudly but they are really laughing to keep themselves from. Crying.  So because they reflect their woes so eloquently these simple sketches became very popular among black readers of Hughes' day.

His bebop-shaped poem "Montage of a Dream Deferred" (1991) projects a changing Harlem, fertile with humanity but in decline. In it, the drastically deteriorated state of Harlem in the 1950s is contrasted to the Harlem of the 20s. The exuberance of night-club life and the vitality of cultural renaissance has now gone. An urban ghetto plagued by poverty and crime has taken its place. A change in rhythm parallels the change in tone.

The smooth patterns and gentle melancholy of blues music are replaced by the abrupt, fragmented structure of post-war jazz and bebop. Hughes was alert to what was happening in the African-American world and what was coming. This is why this volume of verse reflected so much the new and relatively new be-bop jazz rhythms that emphasized dissonance They thus reflected the new pressures that were straining the black communities in the cities of the North. The best known poem there is probably "Harlem."

Twelve irreverent poems commenting on the political turbulence of the early 1960s constitute his collection, Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz. Intended to be read aloud with jazz musical accompaniment; it offers acerbic solutions to segregation and the plight of Southern Blacks. He also created an imaginary South where civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. is elected governor of Georgia and Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who defied federal court orders to desegregate public schools, becomes a mammy in charge of rearing black children. Negroes sit on comfortable verandahs, of pillared mansions, served by whites, their plantations being worked by white sharecroppers) their coloured children being cared for by white mammies.

The poet admonishes the mammy to make haste. The jazz mood then turns international bringing in African nationalist leaders of that era like (Gamel Abdel Nasser, Fidel Castro, Sekou Toure, Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. In one mood, a Negro moves out to Long Island, where he is the only coloured man and becomes famous the hard way— known down town and across the world.

Hughes' living much of his life in basements and attics brought much realism and humanity to his writing especially his short stories. He thus remained close to his vast public as he kept moving figuratively through the basements of the world where his life is thickest and where common people struggle to make their way. At the same time, writing in attics, he rose to the long perspective that enabled him to radiate a humanizing, beautifying, but still truthful light on what he saw.

Hughes' short stories reflect his entire purpose as a writer. For his art was aimed at interpreting "the beauty of his own people," which he felt they were taught either not to see or not to take pride in. In all his stories, his humanity, his faithful and artistic presentations of both racial and national truth - his successful mediation between the beauty and the terrors of life around him  all shine out. Certain themes, technical excellence or social insights loom out.

"Slave in the Block" for example, a simple but vivid tale reveals the lack of respect and even human communication, between Negroes and those patronising and cosmetic whites.

"Poor Little Black Fellow" satirizes religious cant in race relations treating corrosive varieties of self-deceit with a subtle complexity—though pointing out consistently that Negroes want only to be treated like everyone else.

Two among Hughes's best stories: "On the Road' and "Big Meeting" perfectly conceived as both fantasy and reality and poetically executed, using intense patterns of writing images joins Christ and a black hobo in a brief adventure against systemized, prejudiced religion. "Big Meeting" pursues the theme of Negro identification with Christ more emotionally and picturesquely, using a green-coated, big revival preacher with masterful timing and histrionic. "Home's" violent ending tends to obscure the profound interplay between life and art which thematically deepens the action.

The sensitive, gifted little Negro violinist who finds the world too "rotten" for his survival, is a doomed purveyor of beauty in the midst of European decay and hometown American racism. In "Father and Son," Hughes works at a number of themes (psychopathic southern violence, sexual exploitation of Negro women, Negro mis-education, and religious abuses) using effective symbols and striking arrays of atmospheric images; but the title itself underscore his strongest theme: the climactic encounters of steel will and frustrated love between a white father and his mulatto son.

One of Hughes' best stories, "The Blues I'm Playing" addresses itself not only to the Harlem "cult" of the Negro but to the exploration of Hughes' concept of American Negritude. Although it must be stated that this story, like "Home," closely pictures the conflict between life and art, and the blues-playing heroine represents life more so than art precisely because she is so much of a Negro, so close to the roots of art-the-blues in her own racial community experience. The last few chart-like clarity of the pages of the story support Negritude as an insistence upon the black artist's preservation of personal and racial integrity.

Two other good stories cross the colour line on the wings of interracial love. In the fast-moving and very popular "A Good Job Gone" a "sugar-brown" girl with a suppressed hatred of bigots drives a promiscuous rich white man insane. "Little Dog" is distinguished by Hughes's adept characterization of a lonely white spinster who falls in love with a "big and brown and kind-looking" Negro janitor. Hughes with admirable adroitness presents a wasted life without minimizing its integrity or ridiculing its belated humanity.

"Cora Unashamed" which with "On the Way Home" are rated among Hughes's best narratives shows the ignoble defeat of both parental and carnal love. Its tragedy is moderated only by the earthy strength of a Negro maid whose simple thoughts ("And there ain't no reason why you can’t marry neither—you both white") free her of all but natural impulses. "On the Way Home" suggestively employing various images of wine and water understandingly describes a young man's ambivalent responses to his mother's death. Trapped in both guilty exhilarations and anguish the dutiful but radically  unidentified son struggles to be reborn.

By the end of his life Hughes was almost universally recognized as the most representative writer in the history of African American literature and also as probably the most original of all black American poets. He thus became the widely acknowledged "Poet Laureate" of the Negro Race!

According to Arnold Rampersad, an authority on Hughes:

Liberated by the examples of Carl Sandburg's free verse Hughes' poetry has always aimed for utter directness and simplicity. In this regard, according to Rampersad, a thought widely held and often encouraged by Hughes himself is the notion that he almost never revised his work. He could thus be said to be like many romantic poets who believe and demonstrate that poetry is a "spontaneous overflow of emotions."

His poems imbued with the distinctive diction and cadences of Negro idioms in simple stanza patterns and strict rhyme schemes derived from blues songs enabled him to capture the ambience of the setting as well as the rhythms of jazz music.

He wrote mostly in two modes/directions:

(i) lyrics about black life using rhythms and refrains from jazz and  blues.

(ii) Poems of racial protest

They explore the boundaries between black and white America. Through such development of racial themes Hughes contributed to the strengthening of black consciousness and racial pride than even the Harlem Renaissance's legacy for its most militant decades. While never militantly repudiating co-operation with the white community, the poems which protest against white racism are boldly direct.

In this poem, the simple direct and free verse makes clear that Africa's dusky rivers run concurrently with the poet's soul as he draws spiritual strength as well as individual identity from the collective experience of his ancestors. This point Rampersad amplifies in stating that the poem is: "reminding us that the syncopated beat which the captive Africans brought with them "that found its first expression here in "the hand clapping, feet stamping, drum-beating rhythms of the human heart (4  - 5), is as 'ancient as the world."

But what Hughes is better known for is his treatment of the possibilities of African-American experiences and identities, not his personal life. Like Walt Whitman, he created a persona that speaks for more than himself. His voice in "I, Too," for instance, absorbs the depiction of a whole race into his central consciousness as he laments:

The "darker brother" celebrating America is certain of a better future when he will no longer be shunted aside by "company." The poem is characteristic of Hughes's faith in the racial consciousness of African Americans, a consciousness that reflects their integrity and beauty while simultaneously demanding respect and acceptance from others as demonstrated in these lines:

                                                 Nobody'll dare / Say to me, / "Eat in the kitchen"

This dogged resistance and optimism in facing adversity is what Hughes' life centered on, thus enabling him to survive and achieve in spite of the obstacles facing him. Rampersad's testimony again proves supportive here.

Hughes's poetry reveals his hearty appetite for all humanity, his insistence on justice for all, and his faith in the transcendent possibilities of joy and hope that make room as he aspires in "I, Too, " for everyone at America's table.

This deep love for all humanity is echoed in one of his poems: "My People" some lines of which were earlier referred to:

Arnold Rampersad’s last word on Hughes's humanity, is anchored on three essential attributes: his tenderness; generosity and his sense of humour.

His sense of humour is again credited by a writer from Africa who was like Hughes also faced with fighting racial discrimination and deprivation, Ezekiel Mphahlele.

In explaining and illustrating the Negro condition in America as was his stated vocation, Hughes captured their joys, and the veiled weariness of their lives, the monotony of their jobs, and the veiled weariness of their songs. He accomplished this in poems remarkable not only for their directness and simplicity but for their economy, lucidity and wit.  Whether he was writing poems of racial protest like "Harlem" and "Ballad of the Landlord" or poems of racial affirmation like "Mother to Son" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," Hughes was able to find language and forms to express not only the pain of urban life but also its splendid vitality.

Bibliography

Gates, Henry, Louis and Mc Kay, Nellie, Y. (gen. eds.). The Norton  Anthology of African American Literature. New York & London: N.W. Norton & Co, 1997.

Hughes, Langston. Not Without Laughter. New York: Cother Books Edition, 1969.

Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926). In Nathan Huggins, ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Mphahlele, Ezekiel. "Langston Hughes." In Introduction to African Literature, Ulli Beier (ed). London: Longman, 1967.

Rampersad, Arnold, The Art and Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1 & 11. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Trotman, James, (ed), Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art and His Continuing Influence. New York & London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1995.

Walker, Marshall, The Literature of the United States of America. New York: Macmillan, 1983.

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posted 10 December 2008