by Yuval Taylor
His mother, Carolyn Langston, was born into one of the most prominent African American families of her era. Her paternal grandfather was a Revolutionary War captain and Virginia planter who sired several children with his slave Lucy; he soon freed Lucy and her children and, in his will, funded their education. Charles Langston, Lucy’s son and Carolyn’s father, was secretary of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society and worked as an abolitionist for three decades; Charles’s brother, John Mercer Langston, was the first dean of the law school at Howard University, the first president of the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University), and the first black Virginian to be elected to the US House of Representatives. Carolyn’s mother, Mary, had been previously married to Sheridan Leary, a member of John Brown’s army who had been killed during the raid on Harper’s Ferry. She wed Charles after she was widowed. Langston’s ambitiousness came, in part, from his mother’s and grandmother’s pride in such a heritage.
Langston always believed that he was born on February 1, 1902. But in 2018, convincing evidence appeared that he was alive and well the previous May. It seems likely that his mother made him a year younger than he actually was.
Langston’s father, James Nathaniel Hughes, had become embittered by the American racism that wouldn’t allow him to go to law school nor, after studying law through correspondence courses, to take the bar exam. So, in October 1903, when Langston was only two years old, James left the United States for Mexico. Thereafter, Langston seldom lived with either parent. When he was in the second grade, Mary Langston, his septuagenarian maternal grandmother who lived in Lawrence, Kansas, took care of him: “My grandmother never took in washing or worked in service or went much to church. She had lived in Oberlin and spoke perfect English, without a trace of dialect. She looked like an Indian.” It was hardly a typical African American household. But Langston would travel a great deal to other cities to spend months with his mother, months during which he would become familiar with urban African American culture.
When he first arrived in Lawrence, he was sad and lonely, being away from his mother and friends. As he later wrote, “Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books.” It was a hardscrabble existence, often with nothing to eat but “salt pork and wild dandelions.” It was also a childhood without much familial tenderness. When he was thirteen, his grandmother died, and he went to live with some friends, the Reeds, also in Lawrence, where he was better fed and looked after. (Today, unfortunately, neither Langston’s grandmother’s house nor that of the Reeds still stands.)
It’s hard to imagine a more bucolic setting for an American childhood than Lawrence, with its high hills, the wooded campus of the University of Kansas, and its thriving downtown full of small businesses. But the town, which had been founded by abolitionists, was, by the time of Langston’s childhood, largely segregated. While schools had both black and white pupils, black patrons had to sit in the balconies at the theaters and were excluded from some restaurants and nightspots.
Langston left Kansas in 1915 to join his mother, her new husband, and a two-year-old stepbrother. After a year in Lincoln, Illinois, the family moved to Cleveland, where Langston attended all four years of Central High School, and was one of only ten black students to graduate. He read widely, attended left-wing political events, and wrote poetry. A popular student, he was on the track team and the honor roll, was a lieutenant in the military training corps, was elected to the student council, became class poet, and served as secretary, treasurer, and president of various clubs. In short, he was a success—despite the fact that during most of his sophomore and junior years he lived alone, his mother and stepfather having temporarily relocated to Chicago.
While in high school, Langston fell in love with Carl Sandburg’s poetry; its influence on his work cannot be overstated. Compare, for example, two of their most famous poems, Sandburg’s 1918 “Grass,” about dead soldiers, and Langston’s 1922 “The Negro” (named “Proem” in The Weary Blues), which tries to encapsulate pan-African history. Both use conversational prose and line breaks, both end in an echo of their beginning, both treat history as a list, both use repetition at the beginnings of lines, both eschew metaphor, both rely on extreme simplicity for their effect, both are concerned with generalities rather than specifics, with history in headline form rather than observation. Over and over again, Langston followed Sandburg’s lead: the narrator will exemplify a character at different historical points; the poet champions the people—“the people will live on,” Sandburg wrote—avoiding anything too high-class or intellectual, socialist to the core. Sandburg’s 1919 “Jazz Fantasia” was one of the first American poems about African American music and undoubtedly influenced Langston’s many poems on the subject. Indeed, at the age of fifteen, Langston wrote a poem that ran,
Carl Sandburg’s poems
Fall on the white pages of his books
Like blood-clots of song
From the wounds of humanity.
I know a lover of life sings.
I know a lover of all the living
Sings then.
Langston’s poetry, like Sandburg’s, was powerful, expressive, direct, and extremely effective. But it was only when he wrote “The Weary Blues” in early 1925 that he found a truly original voice, one that echoed not Sandburg but the song-poetry of black people.
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After his junior year in high school, Langston spent a summer with his father in Toluca, Mexico. He was unutterably miserable. His father felt only contempt for “the people,” particularly Mexican and black; his sole concern seemed to be money. “My father hated Negroes,” Langston wrote. “I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes. . . . My father had a great contempt for all poor people. He thought it was their own fault that they were poor.” He often left Langston alone on his ranch with nothing to do but practice bookkeeping, typing, and Spanish. Langston turned suicidal, then came down with an illness he would later diagnose as psychosomatic; in a Mexico City hospital, he found some relief from his misery.
It was the “red summer” of 1919, a tense season of race riots in many major US cities, and when Langston returned, the hostility toward his fellow Negroes was particularly acute. But this hardly affected him. He threw himself back into his high school studies in Cleveland, becoming editor of the yearbook and class poet. His mother was pushing him to get a job upon graduating so that he could help take care of her; his father was pushing him to go to college, which was far closer to his inclinations. He threw his lot in with the latter and went back to Mexico, writing one of his most famous poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” on the train ride down. He had a somewhat better summer there than the previous one, being more proficient in Spanish now, and enjoying the companionship of his father’s German housekeeper and her daughter. And he firmed up his resolve to go to college at Columbia, where he could learn about literature and be close to Harlem, which was already legendary among African Americans nationwide. “I was in love with Harlem long before I got there,” Langston would later admit.
Unfortunately, his father did not support Langston’s plan. He wanted Langston to study mining engineering—that’s where the money was. So Langston stayed in Mexico—for fifteen months in all—teaching English, writing, and waiting for his father to give in. He finally did, agreeing to pay for Langston’s education at Columbia.
Near the end of Langston’s stay in Mexico, he was almost murdered. A German brewer had fallen in love with his own German servant girl and suspected her of having an affair with Langston. He went to Langston’s father’s house, shot the girl three times (she miraculously survived), and would have killed Langston if he had been there. Luckily, he wasn’t, and the would-be killer gave himself up to the police. Langston, who barely knew the girl, evinced no emotion.
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In the summer of 1921, Langston
sailed from Veracruz to New York City. “At last!” he wrote in The Big Sea. “The thrill of those towers of Manhattan with their million golden eyes, growing slowly taller and taller above the green water, until they looked as if they could almost touch the sky! Then Brooklyn Bridge, gigantic in the dusk! . . . All this made me feel it was better to come to New York than to any other city in the world.”
Four years after his arrival, he would write, Whitmanesque,
Manhattan takes me, is glad, holds me tightly. Like a vampire sucking my blood from my body, sucking my very breath from my lungs, she holds me. Broadway and its million lights. Harlem and its love-nights, its cabarets and casinos, its dark, warm bodies. The thundering subways, the arch of the bridges, the mighty rivers hold me. . . . I cannot tell the city how much I love it. I have not enough kisses in my mouth for the avid lips of the city. I become dizzy dancing to the jazz-tuned nights, ecstasy-wearied in the towered days. . . . The fascination of this city is upon me, burning like a fire in the blood.
When a white southerner named Josephine Cogdell visited Harlem in 1927, she listed the sights there in her journal. Langston would have probably seen them all: “The octoroon choruses at the Lafayette, the black sheiks at Small’s, the expert amateur dancing to be seen at the Savoy, the Curb Market along the 8th Avenue ‘L,’ with its strange West Indian roots and flare of tropical fruits.” Cogdell described the chitterlings and pigsnouts on display in the windows of restaurants, how the black upper crust lived in “stately houses behind stately trees” on Strivers Row, the panoply of skin colors on display among the children in the tenements of 142nd Street, and the babel of European languages spoken in their African and Caribbean permutations by black immigrants. In short, Harlem was not a black ghetto but a cosmopolitan delight—one of the reasons Langston was so in love with the place.
If Langston had any lifelong passion, it was for Harlem. That passion was born when he arrived in September 1921. He wasted no time becoming acquainted with the place. Getting off the subway at 135th and Lenox, he went straight to the Harlem YMCA, then to the Harlem Branch Library, and that evening to the Lincoln Theater to hear a blues singer. “Everybody seemed to make me welcome,” he later wrote. “The sheer dark size of Harlem intrigued me. And the fact that at the time poets and writers like James Weldon Johnson and Jessie Fauset lived there, and [comedian] Bert Williams, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, and Walter White too, fascinated me.”
Columbia was unpleasant, with its haphazard racism. Langston far preferred the lectures he attended at the socialist Rand School of Social Science in Lower Manhattan. Instead of studying, he spent his time reading and going to talks and shows. He would withdraw from Columbia after his freshman year and spend as much time in Harlem as he possibly could. After all, by mid-decade Harlem would be billed as the “Nightclub Capital of the World,” with over a hundred different places to hear music and to dance. But he had another good reason to be there—his mother, now separated from her second husband, had moved to Harlem for a few months, and Langston was funneling some of his father’s money her way.
He was also making a name for himself in Harlem. By the end of 1922, fifteen of his poems had been published in The Crisis. These poems included some of his most famous—“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Negro,” and “My People”—poems that attempted in their own way to redefine the history and identity of the American Negro, quite in keeping with the editorial stance of The Crisis, which was in essence that what was most American was the African American. It was around this time that Langston was first introduced to the Harlem literati, whom he had thus far avoided due to his fear of “learned people.” Jessie Fauset had managed to track him down and persuade him to lunch with her at the Civic Club; Langston was so shy he brought his mother along.
But making a name for himself was no way to make a living. Jobs for African Americans were scarce in New York City, and after stints growing vegetables on a Staten Island farm and as a delivery boy for the House of Flowers in Manhattan, he landed a job as a mess boy on an old ship (a “mother ship,” it was called) moored at Jones Point, twenty miles north of Harlem, that served as quarters for a crew of immigrants who took care of a fleet of decommissioned freighters.
Langston’s job wasn’t very demanding, and he had plenty of time for writing (it was at Jones Point that he started work on “The Weary Blues”), reading, and conversing with his shipmates about distant lands. These talks increased his wanderlust, so in May 1923 he found a similar job on the SS Malone and was on his way to Africa.
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Langston described his many adventures on “the big sea” in his 1940 memoir of that name. It begins,
Melodramatic, maybe, it seems to me now. . . . I leaned over the rail of the S.S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read.
The books went down into the moving water in the dark off Sandy Hook. Then I straightened up, turned my face to the wind, and took a deep breath. . . . And I felt that nothing would ever happen to me again that I didn’t want to happen.
Langston was, perhaps unconsciously, staging a precise reversal of the trope of the talking book, which Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called the “ur-trope” of the Anglo-African tradition. A number of black-authored texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries repeat a story told in the first English-language slave narrative in which a slave on board a ship coming from Africa to the New World sees a white man reading a book and thinks that the book is talking to him; the book, however, refuses to speak to the slave, which inspires a desire to make it speak in a black voice. Here Langston is also on a ship, but going to Africa, the continent of some of his ancestors, and he throws all his talking books, all his instruction, overboard. As he would write to his patron Charlotte Osgood Mason in 1929, “All my childhood, lonely, I spent reading, up until the time I went to sea. Then . . . suddenly, the very sight of books made me ill.” (In fact, he kept one book: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
That he would choose to begin his memoir with this symbolic act makes it even more weighty. Langston was declaring his allegiance to the preliterate—or, as his contemporaries put it, the “primitive”—and turning his back definitively on the Enlightenment idea of liberation through literacy. Liberation, for Langston, would arrive through the abandonment of literacy. Of all the great writers of the time, he was the one who went the farthest in eschewing literary references and conventions: his poems were meant to be declaimed, not read in silence—they were oral first and foremost.
Shortly after his return to New York in November 1923, Langston sailed across the Atlantic again, this time to Europe. He spent a good part of 1924 in Paris, penniless in Montmartre, where he had a brief love affair with an Anglo-African woman, Anne Coussey. He worked as a dishwasher at a nightclub and kept company primarily with other African Americans, so he didn’t bother to visit the famous English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, hobnob with the white American expatriate set, or pay a call upon Gertrude Stein. In fact, he found Montparnasse more pretentious than Greenwich Village. Nor did he attend the Olympics, which were being held just outside Paris, in Colombes. He did meet with art collector Albert Barnes, who bored him; Paul Guillaume, a collector of African art; Kojo Tovalou Houénou, a Dahomey-born intellectual and self-proclaimed prince; and the bestselling Caribbean-born novelist René Maran. Otherwise he showed no interest in the radical literary and artistic culture fomenting in Paris. His best American friend in the city was likely Ada Smith, an African American blues singer who would later become famous as Bricktop. In keeping with the beginning of his autobiography, he shunned “literary” culture.
The poems he was producing hewed to his maxim “that poetry should be direct, comprehensible and the epitome of simplicity.” “I, Too” (renamed “Epilogue” in The Weary Blues)—the most powerful and famous poem he wrote in Europe that year—begins with a nod to Walt Whitman’s “I
Hear America Singing.” But while Whitman used archaisms and positioned himself as experimental, Langston’s language was purely of the moment; while Whitman stretched his lines to the breaking point, Langston’s were short, like those of his contemporaries William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and H.D. While the line breaks of those poets often called attention to themselves by their unconventionality, Langston’s seemed natural, as if he were simply speaking; while most of his contemporaries used “poetic” diction, Langston stuck to words familiar to five-year-olds:
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
Few if any of the great American poets have written so plainly yet so effectively, and with such an utter lack of pretense.
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Alain Locke had a complicated relationship with Langston Hughes. Early in 1923, when Langston was only twenty, Countee Cullen, then a close friend of both, decided that, since Langston seemed impervious to Cullen’s charms (Cullen had serenaded him with the sensuous poem “To a Brown Boy,” to no avail), and since Cullen had reservations about embracing his own homosexual proclivities, he would try to arrange for Locke to seduce Langston in his stead. “Write to him,” he urged Locke, “and arrange to meet him. You will like him; I love him; his is such a charming childishness that I feel years older in his presence.” He described Langston as “looking like a virile brown god.”