BOOKS BY Langston Hughes
POETRY
THE PANTHER AND THE LASH (1967)
ASK YOUR MAMA (1961)
SELECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES (1958)
MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERRED (1951)
ONE-WAY TICKET (1949)
FIELDS OF WONDER (1947)
SHAKESPEARE IN HARLEM (1942)
THE DREAM-KEEPER (1932)
FINE CLOTHES TO THE JEW (1927)
THE WEARY BLUES (1926)
FICTION
FIVE PLAYS BY LANGSTON HUGHES (1963)
SOMETHING IN COMMON AND OTHER STORIES (1963)
THE SWEET FLYPAPER OF LIFE (1955)
LAUGHING TO KEEP FROM CRYING (1952)
THE WAYS OF WHITE FOLKS (1934)
NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER (1930)
HUMOR
SIMPLE’S UNCLE SAM (1965)
BEST OF SIMPLE (1961)
SIMPLE STAKES A CLAIM (1957)
SIMPLE TAKES A WIFE (1953)
SIMPLE SPEAKS HIS MIND (1950)
FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
FIRST BOOK OF AFRICA (1964)
THE FIRST BOOK OF THE WEST INDIES (1956)
THE FIRST BOOK OF RHYTHMS (1954)
THE FIRST BOOK OF JAZZ (1954)
THE FIRST BOOK OF THE NEGROES (1952)
—with Arna Bontemps
POPO AND FIFINA (1932)
BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
FAMOUS NEGRO HEROES OF AMERICA (1958)
I WONDER AS I WANDER (1956)
FAMOUS NEGRO MUSIC-MAKERS (1955)
FAMOUS AMERICAN NEGROES (1954)
THE BIG SEA (1940)
ANTHOLOGY
THE LANGSTON HUGHES READER (1958)
HISTORY
—with Milton Meltzer
BLACK MAGIC: A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT (1967)
FIGHT FOR FREEDOM: THE STORY OF THE NAACP (1962)
—with Milton Meltzer
A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA (1956)
Copyright © 1967 by Arna Bontemps and George Houston Bass, Executors of the Estate of Langston Hughes.
Copyright 1932, 1934, 1942, 1947, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1955, 1956, © 1958, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1942, 1948 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Copyright renewed 1970, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1991 by Arna Bontemps and George Houston Bass.
Copyright renewed 1960, 1962 by Langston Hughes.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This edition first published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1967.
Certain poems in this collection were previously published in the following books by Langston Hughes:
Ask Your Mama (1961): “Cultural Exchange”
Fields of Wonder (1947): “Words Like Freedom,” “Oppression,” “Dream Dust”
The Langston Hughes Reader (1958): “Elderly Leaders” under the title “Elderly Politicians”
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951): “Corner Meeting,” “Motto,” “Children’s Rhymes”
One-Way Ticket (1949): “Harlem” under the title “Puzzled,” “Who But the Lord?,” “Third Degree,” “October 16: The Raid,” “Still Here,” “Florida Road Workers,” “Freedom” under the title “Democracy?,” “Warning” under the title “Roland Hayes Beaten,” “Daybreak in Alabama”
Scottsboro Limited (1932): “Christ in Alabama,” “Justice”
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1959): “Dream Deferred” under the title “Harlem,” “American Heartbreak” “Georgia Dusk,” “Jim Crow Car” under the title “Lunch in a Jim Crow Car”
Shakespeare in Harlem (1942): “Ku Klux,” “Merry-Go-Round”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hughes, Langston, 1902–1967.
The panther & the lash : poems of our times / Langston Hughes. —
1st Vintage classics ed.
p. cm. — (Vintage classics)
eISBN: 978-0-307-94939-4
1. Afro-Americans—Poetry. I. Title. II. Title: Panther and the lash. III. Series.
PS3515.U274P3 1992
811′.52—dc20 91-50087
B9876
v3.1
To Rosa Parks of Montgomery
who started it all when, on being ordered to get up and stand at the back of the bus where there were no seats left, she said simply, “My feet are tired,” and did not move, thus setting off in 1955 the boycotts, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the petitions, the marches, the voter registration drives, and I Shall Not Be Moved.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1 WORDS ON FIRE
Corner Meeting
Harlem
Prime
Crowns and Garlands
Elderly Leaders
The Backlash Blues
Lenox Avenue Bar
Motto
Junior Addict
Dream Deferred
Death In Yorkville
Who But The Lord?
Third Degree
Black Panther
Final Call
2 AMERICAN HEARTBREAK
American Heartbreak
Ghosts of 1619
October 16: The Raid
Long View: Negro
Frederick Douglass: 1817–1895
Still Here
Words Like Freedom
3 THE BIBLE BELT
Christ in Alabama
Bible Belt
Militant
Office Building: Evening
Florida Road Workers
Special Bulletin
Mississippi
Ku Klux
Justice
Birmingham Sunday
Bombings in Dixie
Children’s Rhymes
Down Where I Am
4 THE FACE OF WAR
Mother in Wartime
Without Benefit of Declaration
Official Notice
Peace
Last Prince of the East
The Dove
War
5 AFRICAN QUESTION MARK
Oppression
Angola Question Mark
Lumumba’s Grave
Color
Question and Answer
History
6 DINNER GUEST: ME
Dinner Guest: Me
Northern Liberal
Sweet Words on Race
Un-American Investigators
Slave
Undertow
Little Song on Housing
Cultural Exchange
Frosting
Impasse
7 DAYBREAK IN ALABAMA
Freedom
Go Slow
Merry-Go-Round
Dream Dust
Stokely Malcolm Me
Slum Dreams
Georgia Dusk
Where? When? Which?
Vari-Colored Song
Jim Crow Car
Warning
Daybreak in Alabama
About The Author
Permissions Acknowledgments
1
WORDS ON FIRE
CORNER MEETING
Ladder, flag, and amplifier
now are what the soap box
used to be.
The speaker catches fire,
looking at listeners’ faces.
His words jump down
to stand
in their
places.
HARLEM
Here on the edge of hell
Stands Harlem—
Remembering the old lies,
The old kicks in the back,
The old “Be patient”
They told us before.
Sure, we remember.
Now when the man at the corner store
Says sugar’s gone up another two cents,
And bread one,
And there’s a new tax on cigarettes—
We remember the job we never had,
Never could get,
And can’t have now
Because we’re colored.
So we stand here
On the edge of hell
In Harlem
And look out on the world
And wonder
What we’re gonna do
In the face of what
We remember.
PRIME
Uptown on Lenox Avenue
Where a nickel costs a dime,
In these lush and thieving days
When million-dollar thieves
Glorify their million-dollar ways
In the press and on the radio and TV—
But won’t let me
Skim even a dime—
I, black, come to my prime
In the section of the niggers
Where a nickel costs a dime.
CROWNS AND GARLANDS
Make a garland of Leontynes and Lenas
And hang it about your neck
Like a lei.
Make a crown of Sammys, Sidneys, Harrys,
Plus Cassius Mohammed Ali Clay.
Put their laurels on your brow
Today—
Then before you can walk
To the neighborhood corner,
Watch them droop, wilt, fade
Away.
Though worn in glory on my head,
They do not last a day—
Not one—
Nor take the place of meat or bread
Or rent that I must pay.
Great names for crowns and garlands!
Yeah!
I love Ralph Bunche—
But I can’t eat him for lunch.
ELDERLY LEADERS
The old, the cautious, the over-wise—
Wisdom reduced to the personal equation:
Life is a system of half-truths and lies,
Opportunistic, convenient evasion.
Elderly,
Famous,
Very well paid,
They clutch at the egg
Their master’s
Goose laid:
$$$$$
$$$$
$$$
$$
$
•
THE BACKLASH BLUES
Mister Backlash, Mister Backlash,
Just who do you think I am?
Tell me, Mister Backlash,
Who do you think I am?
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages,
Send my son to Vietnam.
You give me second-class houses,
Give me second-class schools,
Second-class houses
And second-class schools.
You must think us colored folks
Are second-class fools.
When I try to find a job
To earn a little cash,
Try to find myself a job
To earn a little cash,
All you got to offer
Is a white backlash.
But the world is big,
The world is big and round,
Great big world, Mister Backlash,
Big and bright and round—
And it’s full of folks like me who are
Black, Yellow, Beige, and Brown.
Mister Backlash, Mister Backlash,
What do you think I got to lose?
Tell me, Mister Backlash,
What you think I got to lose?
I’m gonna leave you, Mister Backlash,
Singing your mean old backlash blues.
You’re the one,
Yes, you’re the one
Will have the blues.
LENOX AVENUE BAR
Weaving
between assorted terrors
is the Jew
who owns the place—
one Jew,
fifty Negroes:
embroideries
(heirloomed
from ancient evenings)
tattered
in this neon
place.
MOTTO
I play it cool
And dig all jive—
That’s the reason
I stay alive.
My motto,
As I live and learn
Is
Dig and be dug
In return.
JUNIOR ADDICT
The little boy
who sticks a needle in his arm
and seeks an out in other worldly dreams,
who seeks an out in eyes that droop
and ears that close to Harlem screams,
cannot know, of course,
(and has no way to understand)
a sunrise that he cannot see
beginning in some other land—
but destined sure to flood—and soon—
the very room in which he leaves
his needle and his spoon,
the very room in which today the air
is heavy with the drug
of his despair.
(Yet little can
tomorrow’s sunshine give
to one who will not live.)
Quick, sunrise, come—
Before the mushroom bomb
Pollutes his stinking air
With better death
Than is his living here,
With viler drugs
Than bring today’s release
In poison from the fallout
Of our peace.
“It’s easier to get dope
than it is to get a job.”
Yes, easier to get dope
than to get a job—
daytime or nightime job,
teen-age, pre-draft,
pre-lifetime job.
Quick, sunrise, come!
Sunrise out of Africa,
Quick, come!
Sunrise, please come!
Come! Come!
DREAM DEFERRED
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
DEATH IN YORKVILLE
(Jamas Powell, Summer, 1964)
How many bullets does it take
To kill a fifteen-year-old kid?
How many bullets does it take
To kill me?
How many centuries does it take
To bind my mind—chain my feet—
Rope my neck—lynch me—
Unfree?
From the slave chain to the lyn
ch rope
To the bullets of Yorkville,
Jamestown, 1619 to 1963:
Emancipation Centennial—
100 years NOT free.
Civil War Centennial: 1965.
How many Centennials does it take
To kill me,
Still alive?
When the long hot summers come
Death ain’t
No jive.
WHO BUT THE LORD?
I looked and I saw
That man they call the Law.
He was coming
Down the street at me!
I had visions in my head
Of being laid out cold and dead,
Or else murdered
By the third degree.
I said, O, Lord, if you can,
Save me from that man!
Don’t let him make a pulp out of me!
But the Lord he was not quick.
The Law raised up his stick
And beat the living hell
Out of me!
Now I do not understand
Why God don’t protect a man
From police brutality.
Being poor and black,
I’ve no weapon to strike back
So who but the Lord
Can protect me?
We’ll see.
THIRD DEGREE
Hit me! Jab me!
Make me say I did it.
Blood on my sport shirt
And my tan suede shoes.
Faces like jack-o’-lanterns
In gray slouch hats.
Slug me! Beat me!
Scream jumps out
Like blowtorch.
Three kicks between the legs
That kill the kids
I’d make tomorrow.
Bars and floor skyrocket
And burst like Roman candles.
When you throw
Cold water on me,
I’ll sign the
Paper…
The Panther and the Lash Page 1