Langston Hughes stands as a literary and cultural translation of the political resistance and campaign of black consciousness leaders such as Martin Luther King to restore the possession of the black citizenry thus fulfilling the ethos of the American dream, which is famed universally every year around February to April.
Hughes' overriding sense of a communal and cultural purpose tied to his sense of the past, the gift and the hereafter of black America commends his life and works as having much to learn from to inspire us to move transmit and to notify and guide our steps as we move transmit to create a great future.
Hughes is also valuable since he seems to have comfortably spanned the genres: poetry, drama, novel and comment leaving an indelible stamp on each. At 21 years of age he had published in all four (4) areas. For he always thought about himself an artist in words who would speculation into every singular area of literary creativity, because there were readers for whom a story meant more than a poem or a song lyric meant more than a story and Hughes wanted to reach that individual and his kind.
But first and foremost, he thought about himself a poet. He wanted to be a poet who could address himself to the concerns of his habitancy in poems that could be read with no formal training or full, literary background. In spite of this Hughes wrote and staged dozens of short stories, about a dozen books for children, a history of the National relationship for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples (Naacp), two volumes of autobiography, opera libretti, song lyrics and so on. Hughes was driven by a sheer belief in his versatility and in the power of his craft.
Hughes" commitment to Africa was real and concretized in both words and deeds. The fact of his Negro-ness (though light-complexioned) has aroused in him a desire to challenge those from the other side of the color line that reject it:
My old man's a white old man
And my old mother's black
My old ma died in a fine big house
My mad died in a shack
I wonder where I'm gonna die
Being neither white nor black?
His search for his roots was given impetus when in 1923 Hughes met and heard Marcus Garvey exhort Negroes to go back to Africa to flee the wrath of the white man. Hughes then became one of the poets who idea they felt the beating of the jungle tom-toms in the Negroes' pulse. Their verse took on a nostalgic mood, and some even imagined that they were infusing the rhythms of African dancing and music into their verse like we could sense in the reading of this poem: 'Danse Africaine':
The low beating of the tom toms,
The slow beating of the tom toms,
Low ...slow
Slow ...low -
Stirs your blood.
Dance!
A night-veiled girl
Whirls softly into a
Circle of light.
Whirls softly ...slowly,
Born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas and Lincoln, Illinois, before going to high school in Cleveland, Ohio in of which places, he was part of a small society of blacks to whom he was nevertheless profoundly attached from early in his life. Though descending from a suited family his infancy was disrupted by the disjunction of his parents not long after his birth. His father then emigrated to Mexico where he hoped to gain the success that had eluded him in America. The color of his skin, he had hoped, would be less of a notice in determining his hereafter in Mexico. There, he broke new ground. He gained success in business and lived the rest of his life there as a prosperous attorney and landowner.
In contrast, Hughes' mom lived the transitory life common for black mothers often leaving her son in the care of her mom while searching for a job.
His maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry as a member of John Brown's band, and whose second husband (Hughes's grandfather) had also been a militant abolitionist. Instilled in Hughes a sense of dedication most of all. Hughes lived successively with family friends, then discrete relatives in Kansas.
Another leading family form was John Mercer Langston, a brother of Hughes's grandfather who was one of the best-known black Americans of the nineteenth century.
Hughes later joined his mom even though she was now with his new stepfather in Cleveland, Ohio. At the same time, Hughes struggled with a sense of desolation fostered by parental neglect. He himself recalled being driven early by his loneliness 'to books, and the spectacular, world in books.' He became disillusioned with his father's materialistic values and contemptuous belief that blacks, Mexicans and Indians were lazy and ignorant.
At Central High School Hughes excelled academically and in sports. He wrote poetry and short fiction for the school's literary magazine and edited the school year book. He returned to Mexico where he taught English briefly and wrote poems and prose pieces for publication in The accident the magazine of the Naacp.
Aided by his father, he arrived in New York in 1921 ostensibly to attend Columbia University but indeed it was to see Harlem. One of his most poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" had just been published in The Crisis. His talent was immediately spotted though he only lasted one year at Columbia where he did well but never felt comfortable.
On campus, he was subjected to bigotry. He was assigned the worst dormitory room because of his color. Classes in English literature were all he could endure. Instead of attending classes which he found boring he would frequent shows, lectures and readings sponsored by the American Socialist Society. It was then that he was first introduced to the laughter and pain, hunger and heartache of blues music. It was the night life and culture that lured him out of college. Those sweet sad blues songs captured for him the intense pain and yearning that he saw around him, and that he incorporated into such poems as "The Weary Blues".
To keep himself going as a poet and reserve his mother, Hughes served in turn as: a delivery boy for a florist; a vegetable farmer and a mess boy on a ship up the Hudson River. As part of a merchant steamer crew he sailed to Africa. He then traveled the same way to Europe, where he jumped Ship in Paris only to spend some months working in a night-club kitchen and then wandering off to Italy.
By 1924 his poetry which he had all along been working on showed the suited influence of the blues and jazz. His poem "The Weary Blues" which best exemplifies this influence helped activate his vocation when it won first prize in the poetry section of the 1925 literary contest of opportunity magazine and also won an additional one literary prize in Crisis.
This landmark poem, the first of any poet to make use of that basic blues form is part of a volume of that same title whose entire collection reflects the frenzied atmosphere of Harlem nightlife. Most of its selections just as "The Weary Blues" approximate the phrasing and meter of blues music, a genre popularized in the early 1920s by rural and urban blacks. In it and such other pieces as "Jazzonia" Hughes evoked the frenzied hedonistic and glittering atmosphere of Harlem's famed night-clubs. Poetry of communal comment such as "Mother to Son" show how hardened the blacks have to be to face the innumerable hurdles that they have to battle through in life.
Hughes' earliest influences as a mature poet came interestingly from white poets. We have Walt Whitman the man who through his artistic violations of old conventions of poetry opened the boundaries of poetry to new forms like free verse. There is also the extremely populist white German Émigré Carl Sandburg, who as Hughes' " guiding star," was decisive in leading him toward free verse and a radically democratic modernist aesthetic
But black poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, a expert of both dialect and accepted verse, and Claude McKay, the black radical socialist an emigre from Jamaica who also wrote done lyric poetry, stood for him as the embodiment of the cosmopolitan and yet racially inescapable and committed black poet Hughes hoped to be. He was also indebted to older black literary figures such as W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson who admired his work and aided him. W.E.B. Dubois' collection of Pan-Africanist essays Souls of Black Folks has markedly influenced many black writers like Hughes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin.
Such colour-affirmative images and sentiments as that in "people": The night is beautiful,/So the faces of my habitancy and in 'Dream Variations: Night coming tenderly,/ Black like me. Endeared his work to a wide range of African Americans, for whom he delighted in writing,.
Hughes had always shown his measurement to experiment as a poet and not slavishly succeed the tyranny of tight stanzaic forms and exact rhyme. He seemed, like Watt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, to prefer to write verse which captured the realities of American speech rather than "poetic diction", and with his ear especially attuned to the varieties of black American speech.
"Weary Blues" combines these discrete elements the common speech of lowly people, jazz and blues music and the former forms of poetry adapted to the African American and American subjects. In his adaptation of former poetic forms first to jazz then to blues sometimes using dialect but in a way radically distinct from earlier writers, Hughes was well served by his early experimentation with a loose form of rhyme that oftentimes gave way to an inventively rhythmic free verse:
Ma an ma baby
Got two mo' ways,
Two mo' ways to do de buck!
Even more radical experimentation with the blues form led to his next collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew. Maybe his finest singular book of verse, along with some ballads, Fine Clothes was also his least favourably welcomed.
Several reviewers in black newspapers and magazines were distressed by Hughes' fearless and, 'tasteless' evocation of elements of lower-class black culture, along with its sometimes raw eroticism, never before treated in serious poetry.
Hughes expressing his measurement to write about such habitancy and to experiment with blues and jazz wrote in his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Published in the Nation in 1926
'We younger artists...intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves Without fear or shame. If white habitancy are pleased we are glad. If they Are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful, And ugly too.'
Hughes expressed his measurement to write fearlessly, shamelessly and unrepentantly about low-class black life and habitancy inspite of opposition to that. He also exercised much relaxation in experimenting with blues as well as jazz.
The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If coloured habitancy 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 mountains, free within ourselves.
With his espousal of such thoughts defending the relaxation of the black writer Hughes became a beacon of light to younger writers who also wished to enunciate their right to discover and exploit assertedly degraded aspects of black people. He thus provided the movement with a manifesto by so skillfully arguing the need for both race pride and artistic independence in this his most memorable essay,
In 1926 Hughes returned to school in the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he prolonged publishing poetry, short stories and essays in mainstream and black-oriented periodicals
In 1927 together with Zora Neal 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 speculation itself was short-lived. It was engulfed in fire along with its editorial offices.
Then a 70 - year old wealthy white patron entered his life. Charlotte Osgood Mason, who 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 Lauqhter in which his boyhood in Kansas is drawn to depict the life of a sensitive black child, Sandy, growing up in a representative, middle-class.mid-western 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 some weeks recovering in Haiti. From the intense personal unhappiness and depression into which the break had sunk him.
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 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, indeed survived the end of that movement. He kept on producing his art in holding with his sense of himself as a wholly 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 1960's. His dramas - comedies and ramas of domestic black American life, largely - were also favorite with black audiences. Using such innovations as theatre-in-the-round and invoking audience participation, Hughes incredible 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 force of black Americans.
Hughes wrote other plays, along with comedies such as exiguous Ham (1936) and a historical drama, Emperor of Haiti (1936) most of which were only moderate successes. In 1937 he spent some months in Europe, along with a long stay in besieged Madrid. In 1938 he returned home to found the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which staged his agitprop drama Don't You Want to Be Free? employing some of his poems, vigorously blended black nationalism, the blues, and socialist exhortation. The same year, a socialist club published a pamphlet of his radical verse, "A New Song."
With the start of World War Ii, Hughes returned to the political centre. The Big Sea, his first volume of his autobiography work with its memorable portrait of the renaissance and his African voyages written in an episodic, lightly comic style with virtually no mention of his leftist sympathies appeared.
In his book of verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) he once again sang the blues. On the other hand, this collection, as well as another, his Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943), strongly attacked racial segregation.
In poetry, he revived his interest in some of his old themes and forms, as in Shakespeare in Harlem (1942).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 surrounded by 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 improving his short story writing. For whilst in Moscow he was struck by the similarities in the middle of 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. On his return to the U. S.. By 1933 he had sold three stories and had begun compiling his first collection.
Perhaps his finest literary achievement during the war came in writing a weekly column in the Chicago Defender from 1942 to 1952. The feature of which was an offbeat Harlem character called Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, and his exchanges with a staid narrator in a neighborhood bar, where simple commented on a collection of matters but generally about race and racism. simple became Hughes's most famed and favorite fictional creation. And one of the freshest, most sharp and enduring Negro characters in American fiction Jesse B Simple, is 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.
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 convert in rhythm parallels the convert in tone. The level patterns and gentle melancholy of blues music are replaced by the abrupt, fragmented buildings 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.
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 communal as he kept sharp figuratively through the basements of the world where his life is thickest and where common habitancy 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 rigorous light on what he saw.
Hughes' short stories reflect his entire purpose as a writer. For his art was aimed at interpreting "the attractiveness of his own people," which he felt they were taught whether not to see or not to take pride in. In all his stories, his humanity, his rigorous and artistic presentations of both racial and national truth - his prosperous mediation in the middle of the beauties and the terrors of life around him all shine out. inescapable themes, technical excellencies or communal insights loom out.
"Slave in the Block" for example, a simple but vivid tale reveals the lack of respect and even human communication, in the middle of Negroes and those patronizing and cosmetic whites.
Hughes also took time to write for children producing the prosperous Popo and Fifina (1932), a tale set in Haiti with Arna Bontemps. He ultimately published a dozen children's books, on subjects such as jazz, Africa, and the West Indies. Proud of his versatility, he also wrote a commissioned history of the Naacp and the text of a much praised pictorial history of black America The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), where he explicated photographs of Harlem by Roy DeCarava, which was judged masterful by reviewers, and confirmed Hughes's reputation for an unrivaled command of the nuances of black urban culture.
Hughes's suffered constant harassment about his ties to the Left. In vain he protested he had never been a Communist having severed all such links. In 1953 he was subjected to communal humiliation at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy, when he was forced to appear in Washington, D.C., and testify officially about his politics. Hughes denied that he had ever been a communist but conceded that some of his radical verse had been ill-advised.
Hughes's vocation hardly suffered from this. Within a short time McCarthy himself was discredited. Hughes now wrote at length in I Wonder as I ramble (1956), his much-admired second volume of autobiography. About his years in the Soviet Union. He became prosperous, although he always had to work hard for his quantum of prosperity. In the 1950s he turned to the musical stage for success, as he sought to repeat his major success of the 1940s, when Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice had chosen him as the lyricist for their street Scene (1947). This output was hailed as a breakthrough in the development of American opera; for Hughes, the apparently endless cycle of poverty into which he had been locked came to an end. He bought a home in Harlem.
By the end of his life Hughes was practically universally recognized as the most representative writer in the history of African American literature and also as probably the most former 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:
Much of his work famed the attractiveness and dignity and Humanity of black Americans. Unlike other writers Hughes basked in the glow of the obviously high regard of his former audience, African Americans. His poetry, with its former jazz and blues influence and its suited democratic commitment, is practically indeed the most influential written by any someone of African descent in this century. inescapable of his poems; "Mother to Son" are virtual anthems of black American life and aspiration. His plays alone... Could accumulate him a place in AfroAmerican literary history. His character simple is the most memorable singular form to emerge from black journalism. 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' is timeless, "it seems as a statement of constant dilemma facing the young black artist, caught in the middle of the contending military of black and white culture'
Liberated by the examples of Carl Sandburg's free verse Hughes' poetry has always aimed for utter directness and simplicity. In this regard, is the idea that he practically never revised his work seeming like romantic poets who believe and demonstrate that poetry is a 'spontaneous overflow of emotions".
Like Walt Whitman, Hughes's great poetic forefather in America's poetry..., Hughes did believe in the poetry of Emotion, in the power of ideas and feelings that went beyond matters of technical crafts. Hughes never wanted to be a writer who thought about sculpted rhyme and stanzas and in so doing lost the emotional heart of what he had set out to say.
His poems imbued with the distinctive diction and cadences of Negro idioms in simple stanza patterns and correct 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
exploring the boundaries in the middle of black and white America. Thus contributing 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 "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" the simple direct and free verse makes clear that Africa's dusky rivers run concurrently with the poet's soul as he draws spiritual force as well as individual identity from the communal experience of his ancestors. The poem is agreeing to Rampersad "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 best known for is his treatment of the possibilities of African-American experiences and identities. 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:
I, too, sing America
I am the darker brother.
I, too, am America.
The "darker brother" celebrating America is inescapable of a best hereafter 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 attractiveness while simultaneously demanding respect and acceptance from others as especially when: Nobody '/I dare Say to me, Eat in the kitchen.
This dogged resistance and optimism in facing adversity is what Hughes' life centred on.thus enabling him to survive and achieve in spite of the obstacles facing him. As Rampersad affirms:.
'Toughness was a major characteristic of Hughes' life. For his life was hard. He indeed knew poverty and humiliation at the hands of habitancy with far more power and money than he had and exiguous respect for writers, especially poets. through all his poverty and hurt, Hughes kept on a steady keel. He was a gentleman, a soft man in many ways, who was sympathetic and affectionate, but was tough to the core.
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 everybody 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:
The night is beautiful,
so the faces of my people,
the stars are beautiful,
so the eyes of my people
Beautiful, also, is the sun
Beautiful also, are the souls of my people
Arnold Rampersad's last word on Hughes's humanity, is anchored on three valuable attributes: his tenderness; generosity and his sense of humour.
Hughes was also tender. He was a man who lovse other habitancy and was beloved. It was very hard to find anything who had known him who would say a harsh thing about him. habitancy who knew him could remember exiguous that wasn't pleasant of him. Evidently, he radiated joy and humanity and this was how he was remembered after his death.
He loved the business of people. He needed to have habitancy around him. He needed them Maybe to counter the valuable loneliness instilled in his soul from early in his life and out of which he made his literary art.
Hughes was a man of great generosity. He was kind to the young and the poor, the needy; he was kind even to his rivals. He was kind to a fault, giving to those who did not always deserve his kindness. But he was ready to risk ingratitude in order to help younger artists in singular and young habitancy in general.
Hughes was a man of laughter, although his laughter practically always came in the nearnessy of tears or the threat of the surge of tears. The titles of his first novel Not Without Laughter and a collection of stories Laughing to Keep from Crying. Indicate this. This was essentially how he believed life must be faced - with the knowledge of its inescapable loneliness and pain but with an awareness, too, of the therapy of laughter by which we enunciate the human in the face of circumstances. We must reach out to people, and one should not only have an spectacular, tolerance of life's sufferings but should also exuberantly unblemished the happy aspect of life.
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.
Here is a man with a boundless zest for life... He has an irrepressible sense of humour, and to meet him is to come face to face with the essence of human goodness. In spite of his literary success, he has earned himself the respect of young Negro writers, who never find him unwilling to help them along. And yet he is not condescending. Unlike most Negroes who become famed or prosperous and move to high-class residential areas, he has prolonged to live in Harlem, which is in sense a Negro ghetto, in a house which he purchased with money earned as lyricist for the Broadway musical street Scene.
In explaining and illustrating the Negro health 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 done this in poems suited not only for their directness and simplicity but for their economy, purity and wit. whether he was writing poems of racial protest like "Harlem" and "Ballad of the Landlord" or poems of racial affirmation like' mom 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 spectacular, vitality.
Further Reading:
Gates, Henry, Louis and Mc Kay Nellie, Y. (Gen. Ed) The Norton
Anthology of African American Literature, N.W. Norton & Co; New York & London 1997
Hughes, Langston, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" 1926. Rpt
in Nathan Huggins ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance Oxford
University Press, New York, 1976
Mphahlele, Ezekiel, "Langston Hughes," in Introduction to African
Literature (ed) Ulli Beier, Longman, London 1967
Rampersad, Arnold, The life of Langston Hughes Vol. 1 & 11 Oxford
University Press, N. York, 1986
Trotman, James, (ed), Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art and His
Continuing influence Garland Publishing Inc. N.
York & London 1995
Black Literature Criticism
The Oxford Companion to African American Literature., Oxford University Press,.1997
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