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Hughes, Langston

The tall, black busboy timidly approached the celebrated poet Vachel Lindsay in the dining room of Washington's Wardman Park Hotel. Lindsay was going to read from his poems that night at the hotel, and the busboy wanted to show him some of his own poems. The closer the young man got to the table where Lindsay sat eating his dinner, the more nervous he became. When he was only a few inches away from the great man he blurted out that he admired his poetry and then dropped three of his own poems beside Lindsay's dinner plate. Before the surprised poet could reply, the busboy had fled from the room in embarrassment.

Hughes, Langston

The young black man felt he had made a fool of himself, but the next morning he awoke and read the morning paper in amazement. According to the paper, Lindsay had included in his poetry reading the

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previous evening several poems by a "Negro busboy poet."

When the young man came to work he had a second surprise. A mob of reporters and photographers were waiting to interview him and take his picture. That afternoon the Washington papers carried a photograph of the "busboy poet," Langston Hughes, dressed in his uniform and carrying a tray of dishes. The unexpected publicity both delighted and terrified the young poet. Shortly after, Hughes quit his job and moved back to New York City. Far greater fame awaited him there.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was known in his lifetime as the "Dean of Negro Writers," and for good reason. With a career that spanned four decades, he is arguably the most popular and prolific black writer of the 20th century. Known today primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, short stories, novels, children's books, history, essays, satirical sketches, and two volumes of autobiography. The busboy who approached Vachel Lindsay in awe would himself inspire awe in several generations of black writers. More importantly, he inspired their affection, for Langston Hughes was a man who loved all people—regardless of race or color—and knew how to make them laugh, cry, and think.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His maternal grandmother's first husband was one of the five blacks who were with radical white abolitionist John Brown when he attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Her second husband, Hughes's grandfather, Charles Harold Langston, was no less a committed abolitionist and Virginia's first black congressman. Hughes's mother attended college for a year and wrote poetry. His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, wanted to be a lawyer, but was denied the opportunity to take the bar exam by an all- white examination board. The elder Hughes decided to leave the racism of the United States behind and moved to Mexico, where he became a successful cattle rancher.

Hughes's mother didn't want to live in Mexico, and his parents separated. He spent his childhood living at various times with his grandmother, family friends, and finally his mother, who moved from one Midwestern city to another. Wandering from place to place would become the pattern of his life. The idea of a permanent home was alien to Hughes. "Six months in one place is long enough to make one's life complicated," he once told his friend, the novelist Richard Wright.

Hughes's first experience with white people came when his grandmother enrolled him in the Harrison Street School in Lawrence, Kansas. The experience taught him, he later said, "not to hate all white people." When his grandmother died, he lived with family friends for a while, and at age 13 moved back with his mother and her second husband who were living in Lincoln, Illinois. Two years later the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where his stepfather found work in the steel mills.

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Sandburg, Carl

Hughes attended Central High School, where he was an honor roll student and participated in sports and student politics. He also discovered the poetry of Carl Sandburg, the "people's poet," who wrote unrhymed free verse in language the ordinary person could understand and appreciate. Hughes wanted to write poetry as Sandburg did so he could reach ordinary black people who may never in their lives have read poetry. It was not only Sandburg's poetry that Hughes admired; it was also his liberal politics and his youthful, footloose lifestyle.

In the summer of 1919, Hughes visited his father in Mexico. The two did not get along. The older Hughes was materialistic, selfish, and had little sympathy for black people who, unlike himself, were unable to escape the tyranny of racism in the United States. But Langston wanted to get along with his father, despite their differences, and returned to Mexico the following summer. It was on the train making that return trip that he wrote a poem on the back of envelopes that has become one of his most famous—"The Negro Speaks of Rivers." The poem took the long view of black heritage and linked the lives of contemporary African Americans with those of previous African civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians. The poem was published the following year in the pioneering black periodical Crisis.

James Hughes was not pleased with his son's poetry. He tried to persuade him to study engineering, but Langston insisted he wanted to study literature at Columbia University in New York City. His father

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finally relented and gave him the money to attend the Ivy League college.

College, however, was not the exciting adventure Hughes thought it would be. He was bored with most of his courses, and often skipped classes to go to Broadway shows and hear lectures by the passionate American socialist, Norman Thomas. At the end of his first year, Hughes left Columbia and took a job on a farm on Staten Island. He went on to a series of odd jobs to support himself while he continued to write poetry. He got a job as cabin boy on a freighter and traveled to the west coast of Africa. Seeing Africa, the home of his ancestors, was a deeply moving experience for Hughes, despite the fact that the Africans he met took one look at his light brown skin and insisted he was white. The almost mystical connection Hughes felt with these Africans, as well as with all black people, runs through much of his poetry. He expressed it eloquently in a later poem, "American Heartbreak."

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa. I've been a slave: Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean. I brushed the boots of Washington.

I've been a worker: Under my hand the pyramids arose. I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.

I've been a singer: All the way from Africa to Georgia I carried my sorrow songs. I made ragtime.

I've been a victim: The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo. They lynch me still in Mississippi.

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

I am the American heartbreak— Rock on which Freedom Stumps its toe— The great mistake

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That Jamestown Made long ago.

The short staccato lines, the repeated words, the colloquial use of language, the occasional but effective use of rhyme-all would become hallmarks of Hughes's poetry.

Hughes drifted through Europe, spending time in Paris where he worked as a doorman and a bouncer at a nightclub. It was there that he first heard black American musicians playing a new kind of popular music-jazz. The syncopated, improvisational nature of this exciting music, derived from African tribal music, excited Hughes. He wanted to capture the sound and feel of jazz in his poetry. Here he describes the transforming power of jazz and how it expresses the soul of black people in the poem "Trumpet Player."

The music From the trumpet at his lips Is honey Mixed with liquid fire. The rhythm From the trumpet at his lips Is ecstasy Distilled from old desire—

Desire That is longing for the moon Where the moonlight's but a spotlight In his eyes, desire That is longing for the sea Where the sea's a bar-glass Sucker size.

The Negro With the trumpet at his lips Whose jacket Has a fine one-button roll, Does not know Upon what riff the music slips Its hypodermic needle To his soul—

But softly As the tune comes from his throat

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Trouble Mellows to a golden note.

Hughes arrived back in New York nearly penniless but with his suitcase filled with poems and his head filled with dreams. It was the perfect time to be a young black writer in Harlem, the predominantly black section of New York City's Manhattan. Harlem was experiencing an explosion in the arts that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes, Langston

"Renaissance" means a rebirth. But what happened in Harlem in the 1920s was not so much a rebirth, as a birth of African-American culture. Writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Charles Chesnutt had worked in isolation and had not been part of a community of black writers. Racism made the development of such a community impossible in the South, even in the early 20th century. But as thousands of blacks migrated north during and after World War I looking for new opportunities, Harlem attracted gifted black writers, artists, and musicians. This new generation of blacks was inspired by Harlem life and its members' own experiences. Their work drew the attention of sophisticated, urban whites who found the music, art, and literature of "the new Negro" fascinating, vibrant, and alive.

White patronage helped make the Harlem Renaissance flourish, but for black writers like Langston Hughes, it was not a necessity. "We young Negro artists who create," he wrote in the periodical the

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Nation, "now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If whites are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too."

In Harlem, Hughes met other black writers who shared his vision—the poet Countee Cullen, and fiction writers Arna Bontemps and Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom would later collaborate with him on books and plays. He also met older, influential writers such as James Weldon Johnson and white literary critic Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten was impressed by Hughes's poetry and submitted his manuscript of poems, The Weary Blues, to his own publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Hughes returned to Washington, where his mother now lived, and took a job as busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel. After his celebrated brush with Vachel Lindsay, Hughes returned to New York to find Knopf ready to publish his first book of poetry.

Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps

The Weary Blues was seen as a landmark in African-American literature that captured the hopes, joys, and fears of contemporary black Americans in language that every person—black or white—could understand and appreciate. But not all blacks looked favorably on Hughes's poetry. When his second book, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), appeared, black critics were turned off by Hughes's radical politics and his continued emphasis on the poor and oppressed of black society. They felt it reflected a negative image of black Americans, one that would alienate white people. Their disdain was summed up in a

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headline in the New York black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, which read: "Langston Hughes, the Sewer Dweller."

But his white patrons found his poetry innovative and exciting and were anxious to help the struggling young writer. A wealthy white woman, Charlotte Mason, supported Hughes financially while he wrote his first novel, Not Without Laughter, and a play, Mule Bone, the first black folk comedy written by blacks, with Zora Neale Hurston. Mason, who liked to be called "Godmother" by the black artists she helped, broke with her prodigy in 1930 when Hughes refused to soften his radical politics.

Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes

It was his interest in socialism and communism that took Hughes to the Soviet Union in 1932. He traveled there to write the English dialogue for a film script about black American workers, but the project fell apart after his arrival. He stayed on for six months in Russia and became romantically involved with an Oriental ballerina. When the romance ended, Hughes headed for Japan and China. His relationships with women did not last long, and he would never marry.

He returned to the United States and wrote a volume of stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934), at the home of a friend in Carmel, California. Over the next decade he turned out an extraordinary stream of poetry, plays, fiction, and radio and movie scripts. Some of his poems were even set to music and sung by the great black singer and actor Paul Robeson.

Humor had always been an important part of Hughes's writing and personality. It was his sense of humor that helped him hold off despair and bitterness when the promise of the Harlem Renaissance gave way to reinforced prejudice and fewer economic opportunities for black Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. Hughes managed to find ironic humor even in segregation itself. Here, in the poem "Merry-Go-

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Round," he uses humor to point out the absurdity of segregation that forced black Americans to sit apart from whites in public transportation:

Where is the Jim Crow section On this merry-go-round, Mister, cause I want to ride? Down South on the train White and colored Can't sit side by side. Down South on the train There's a Jim Crow car. On the bus we're put in the back— But there ain't no back To a merry-go-round! Where's the horse For a kid that's black?

In 1942, Hughes's comic side led him to create a character that represented "Everyman," or more accurately "Every black man." Jesse B. Semple, also known as "Simple," first appeared in a satirical column Hughes wrote for the Chicago black newspaper, the Defender. Through his alter ego, Simple, Hughes commented wryly on everything from racist Southern politicians to everyday life in Harlem. Simple's column would continue to appear in this paper for the next 23 years, and his columns were collected in five books.

In the last Simple collection, Simple's Uncle Sam (1965), Simple talks about the perseverance that helped him, like many black people, to survive:

In my time, I have been cut, stabbed, run over, hit by a car, tromped by a horse, robbed, fooled, deceived, double-crossed, dealt seconds, and mighty near blackmailed—but I am still here! I have been laid off, fired and not rehired, Jim Crowed, segregated, insulted, eliminated, lock in, lock out, locked up, left holding the bag, and denied relief. I have been caught in the rain, caught in jails, caught short with my rent, and caught with the wrong woman—but I am still here!

My mama should have named me Job [A holy man in the Bible who suffers greatly at the hands of the Devil.] instead of Jesse B. Semple. I have been underfed, underpaid, undernourished, and everything but undertaken—yet I am still here. The only thing I am afraid of now—is that I will die before my time.

Just like Simple, Langston Hughes was "still here" to see the dawn of a new era for black Americans with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike so many other writers and artists who fall out of step with their times as they grow older, Hughes remained as vital and as "with it" in his sixties as he had ever been. In 1961 he published Ask Your Mama, a book of satirical verse on contemporary race

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relations that showed the old master had lost none of his bite. One critic called it "a half angry and half derisive retort to the bigoted, smug, stupid, selfish, and blind." His last collection of poems, The Panther and the Lash, appeared in 1967. He died the same year, on May 22, in a New York hospital after a brief illness.

Even in death, Langston Hughes had the last laugh. Before he died, he requested that at the end of the funeral service, a jazz trio play the old song, "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me."

Hughes, Langston

Langston Hughes's reputation as a writer is secure today. No other black poet is as widely read and appreciated. Although his many plays, popular in his lifetime, have been seldom performed in recent years, the wit of his nonpoetical works, particularly the Simple books, holds up well and is hardly dated. A wanderer who was most at home at his typewriter and among his friends, Langston Hughes never forgot who he was. He saw beyond the injustices that had been visited upon black people to the human condition that we all share. It was this that made him laugh and cry, not just for black people, but for all humanity. Further Information

By Langston Hughes

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Citation Information

The Best of Simple. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961; paper.

The Langston Hughes Reader. New York: Braziller, 1981.

Not Without Laughter. New York: Macmillan, 1986; paper, first published 1930.

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Random House, 1974; paper.

About Langston Hughes

Meltzer, Milton. Langston Hughes: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1988.

Myers, Elizabeth P. Langston Hughes: Poet of His People. Champaign, IL: Garrard, 1970.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume 1: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1914-1967, I Dream a World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Walker, Alice. Langston Hughes, American Poet. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1974.

Otfinoski, Steven, and Tom Verde. “Hughes, Langston.” Langston Hughes, Facts On File, 2014. Bloomʼs Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=100535&itemid=WE54&articleId=158358.

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