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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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The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain
By Langston
Hughes
One of the most promising of the
young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet—not
a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like
a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to
be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to
be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for
no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And
I doubted then that, with his desire to run away
spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a
great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way
of any true Negro art in America—this
urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to
pour racial individuality into the mold of American
standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much
American as possible.
But let us look at the immediate
background of this young poet. His family is of what I
suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people
who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor
hungry—smug,
contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist
church. The father goes to work every morning. He is a
chief steward at a large white club. The mother
sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for
the rich families of the town. The children go to a
mixed school. In the home they read white papers and
magazines. And the mother often says "Don't be like
niggers" when the children are bad.
A frequent phrase from the father is,
"Look how well a white man does things." And so the word
white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues.
It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money.
The whisper of "I want to be white" runs silently
through their minds. This young poet's home is, I
believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle
class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be
for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in
interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never
taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to
see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is
not according to Caucasian patterns.
For racial culture the home of a
self-styled "high-class" Negro has nothing better to
offer. Instead there will perhaps be more aping of
things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy
home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner,
or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a
teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father
is often dark but he has usually married the lightest
woman he could find.
The family attend a fashionable
church where few really colored faces are to be found.
And they themselves draw a color line. In the North they
go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South
they have at least two cars and house "like white
folks." Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair,
Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very
high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to
climb in order to discover himself and his people.
But then there are the low-down
folks, the so-called common element, and they are the
majority—may
the Lord be praised! The people who have their hip of
gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to
themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too
learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on
Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago
and they do not particularly care whether they are like
white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into
ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a
little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing
awhile. 0, let's dance!
These common people are not afraid of
spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual
brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a
wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist
because they still hold their own individuality in the
face of American standardizations. And perhaps these
common people will give to the world its truly great
Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.
Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist
what to do, the people at least let him alone when he
does appear. And they are not ashamed of him—if
they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty
is their own without question.
Certainly there is, for the American
Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the
more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a
great field of unused material ready for his art.
Without going outside his race, and even among the
better classes with their "white" culture and conscious
American manners, but still Negro enough to be
different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black
artist with a lifetime of creative work.
And when he chooses to touch on the
relations between Negroes and whites in this country,
with their innumerable overtones and undertones surely,
and especially for literature and the drama, there is an
inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the
Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his
heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor
that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter
mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.
A prominent Negro clubwoman in
Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller
sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few
weeks before she would not think of going to hear "that
woman," Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro
folksongs. And many an upper -class Negro church, even
now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its
services. The drab melodies in white folks' hymnbooks
are much to be preferred. "We want to worship the Lord
correctly and quietly. We don't believe in 'shouting.'
Let's be dull like the Nordics," they say, in effect.
The road for the serious black
artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most
certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently
he received almost no encouragement for his work from
either white or colored people. The fine novels of
Chesnutt' go out of print with neither race noticing
their passing. The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar's'
dialect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the
same kind of encouragement one would give a sideshow
freak (A colored man writing
poetry! How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!).
The present vogue in things Negro,
although it may do as much harm as good for the budding
artist, has at least done this: it has brought him
forcibly to the attention of his own people among whom
for so long, unless the other race had noticed him
beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor.
The Negro artist works against an
undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from
his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites.
"Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how
good we are," say the Negroes. "Be stereotyped, don't go
too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't
amuse us too seriously. We will pay you," say the
whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write
Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The
white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people
who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it.
Although the critics gave it good reviews the public
remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du
Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a
Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is
truly racial.
But in spite of the Nordicized Negro
intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we
have an honest American Negro literature already with
us. Now I await the rise of the Negro theater. Our folk
music, having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to
the genius of the great individual American composer who
is to come. And within the next decade I expect to see
the work of a growing school of colored artists who
paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with
new technique the expressions of their own soul-world.
And the Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the
singers who will continue to carry our songs to all who
listen-they will be with us in even greater numbers
tomorrow.
Most of my own poems are racial in
theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In
many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the
meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am as sincere as I know
how to be in these poems and yet after every reading I
answer questions like these from my own people: Do you
think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I wish
you wouldn't read some of your poems to white folks. How
do you find anything interesting in a place like a
cabaret? Why do you write about black people? You aren't
black. What makes you do so many jazz poems?
But jazz to me is one of the inherent
expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal
tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the
tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a
world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the
tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a
smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say
that her race created it and she does not like me to
write about it, The old subconscious "white is best"
runs through her mind. Years of study under white
teachers, a lifetime of white books, pictures, and
papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards
made her dislike the spirituals.
And now she turns up her nose at jazz
and all its manifestations—likewise
almost everything else distinctly racial. She doesn't
care for the Winold Reiss' portraits of Negroes because
they are "too Negro." She does not want a true picture
of herself from anybody. She wants the artist to flatter
her, to make the white world believe that all negroes
are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants to
be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro
artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders,
to change through the force of his art that old
whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the
aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be
white? I am a Negro—and
beautiful"?
So I am ashamed for the black poet
who says, "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," as
though his own racial world were not as interesting as
any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored
artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the
painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians
because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own
features. An artist must be free to choose what he does,
certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what
he must choose.
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and
the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues
penetrate the closed ears of the colored near
intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.
Let Paul Robeson singing "Water Boy," and Rudolph Fisher
writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer
holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron
Douglas's drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug
Negro middle class to turn from their white,
respectable, ordinary books and papers to
catch a glimmer of their own beauty.
We younger Negro artists who create
now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves
without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we
are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we
are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the
tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter
either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we
know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free
within ourselves.
Source:
The Nation, 1926
posted 8 March 2011
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The Intersection of Beauty and Crime
Poems by
Jawanza Phoenix
Promise:
Inspirational
Fantasies
By
Jeannette
Drake
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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