All this the poet had endured only to find himself once again embraced by black America as well as called upon by the government to serve as a cultural ambassador around the world. The contradiction and irony, the illogic of it all perhaps accounted for the expression that read “white folks, black folks, there’s no understanding them” that came over his face at times.
Among my mementos of the tour is a photograph in Paris Match of Mr. Hughes and myself at a lecture toward the end of our initial stay in Paris. (By then Bill Kelley was no longer with us. Early in the tour, he received word from the States of an adjunct teaching job, and as a recently married man with a baby on the way, he immediately flew home. It would be just Mr. Hughes and me from then on.) In the Paris Match photograph I can be seen inveighing as usual against Washington, while Mr. Hughes sits silent nearby, his aging face propped on his fist, his cigarette pasted to his lips, and what might well have been his own considerable outrage and anger kept carefully under wraps. The Weary Blues, published 1922. In the Paris Match photo Mr. Hughes seems to epitomize the title of his very first published book of poems.
Discussion at Centre du Dragon reported in Paris Match.
Not that the poet didn’t give way to anger at times. This occurred at Africa House in London, the second city on our itinerary. The lecture at Africa House followed the pattern established in Paris, in that our talk on African American literature was largely supplanted by a discussion of the Movement. Only this time the discussion took an ugly turn as a number of the young British-born blacks in the audience began personally attacking Mr. Hughes. They ignored me—I was an unknown after all—and leveled their criticism at him alone. Essentially they accused him of a lack of militancy. Why wasn’t he to be seen in the front line of the marches taking place in the South? Why wasn’t he speaking out in the same manner as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael et al.? Seems that he was as conservative and as much of an accommodationist as Roy Wilkens, Ralph Ellison and their ilk. . . .
The Weary Blues look on the poet’s face again. It lasted only briefly, though, this time. Instead, seated beside me at our table on stage, Mr. Hughes put aside his cigarette, drew the microphone close, and for the first time there was an unmistakable edge of outrage in his voice as he began speaking. Going on at some length, he informed his young critics that the revolution—Mr. Hughes used the word “revolution”—underway at present in black America had not begun yesterday nor would it end tomorrow. He and his generation had done their part: marching, demonstrating, picketing; they had protested the horrendous lynchings and burnings of the 1920s and ’30s; had defended the innocent—the Scottsboro Boys, 1931. Nine young black men their age falsely accused of raping a white woman and railroaded for life. The fight to free them, in which he had been deeply involved, had gone on for years. All of this happening long before any of them in the audience had been born. . . .
Mr. Hughes subjected the young black Brits to a crash course in twentieth-century African American history.
There was monumental work still to be done, he concluded. So that rather than passing judgment or making comparisons, instead of taking a superficial view of people and events, it was for them to educate themselves and to understand the complexity of a Struggle that fundamentally involved people of color around the world.
A shamefaced silence in Africa House.
There was yet another problem on the tour that, while completely different from the confrontation at Africa House, increasingly annoyed and then finally angered Mr. Hughes. This had to do with our meals. My benefactor loved to eat and drink well, and to do so on a regular basis—meaning three meals a day, with each meal, especially dinner, to be eaten in a leisurely way over good wine and nonacademic, nonintellectual, non-political conversation. He apparently had had his fill of those conversations over the years and had grown weary. However, the schedule in London, which also included a nonstop round of meetings and talks in the city as well as visits to Leeds and Manchester, kept us as busy as we had been in Paris. We often found ourselves eating dinner so late in the evening that we would be too exhausted and talked out to enjoy it. Mr. Hughes was not pleased. “Paul-e . . .” (He insisted on calling me Paul-e, although the “e” on my name is silent. But who was I to correct him?) “Paul-e, these State Department folks in Paris are messing with us. Here, they got us singing for our supper morning, noon and night only to come up short every time on the supper, the main meal of the day.”
Matters came to a head one evening on a trip from London to Oxford, where Mr. Hughes had been invited to read by the university’s Poetry Society. Earlier in the day, we had again been kept on the go without a proper meal, so that by the time we boarded the train to Oxford late that afternoon, a thoroughly exasperated Mr. Hughes, with me in tow, headed straight for the first-class dining car—hungry. We were going to treat ourselves, he declared, to a steak dinner and the best wine to be had on the train. To our dismay there was a long English queue outside the first-class dining car. Worse, by the time we were finally seated, then finally served, and had tucked into our steak dinners and wine, there came the announcement that Oxford was only minutes away. That did it. A still hungry and now thoroughly angry Mr. Hughes ordered the waiter to recork our bottle of wine, he instructed me to take charge of the food, and we alighted into the Oxford Poetry Society’s distinguished welcoming committee with the wine hidden amid the books for sale in Mr. Hughes’s satchel and with me carrying—as discreetly as possible—two doggie bags of half-eaten steaks.
Upon returning to our base in Paris for a second round of activities there, Mr. Hughes took the State Department people “on the ground” to task, and the schedule was changed to provide us with definite mealtimes as well as a few evenings to ourselves. Ever the guide and mentor, Mr. Hughes used those free evenings to introduce me—a little provincial from Brooklyn—to the city’s fabled nightlife of bars, cabarets, boîtes, cafés, caves (underground jazz spots), nightclubs, brasseries and more bars. Mr. Hughes had his favorites and saw to it that I sampled any number of them in his company.
Also, a literary agent I had contacted during our initial stay in Paris had promising news on our return about a possible French edition of my novel.
More cause for celebration.
During our evenings on the town, my “tour guide” proved to be indefatigable. In fact, as soon as dusk fell, Mr. Hughes seemed to promptly slough off, like so much dead skin, The Weary Blues that overcame him at times during the day, and to metamorphose into “a man open to people and parties,” as his fellow poet and Paris habitué, Ted Joans, once described him. A postcard Mr. Hughes sent me sometime after our time together in Europe ended attests to his party-going prowess. He was back in his second home again, this time to celebrate the opening in Paris of James Baldwin’s play, The Amen Corner.
“Paris again,” the card read. “Loved finding your letter on my return from a week in the Tunisian sun. Jimmy Baldwin threw a BIG spare-ribs party for the Amen Corner cast last night all night. (I were there). Fate and deadlines are catching up with me, so guess I better come home. Oh, Gawd! L. H.”
Truth is, Mr. Hughes was Night People, that odd and perhaps lonely breed of humankind who are most vividly alive and at their best creatively during the hours between midnight and dawn. Aware that I was not of the breed and needed my sleep, most evenings my tour guide would faithfully escort me back to the Hotel California at a reasonable hour. Ever the gentleman, he would see me safely up the unreliable elevator, after which the poet “open to people and parties” would then once again vanish into the Parisian night, not to reappear until morning and his breakfast of coffee and croissant in the California’s lobby.
“Paris,” he once wrote. “There you can be whatever you want to be. Totally yourself.”
Copenhagen was next on the itinerary with another full schedule of readings and talks. Copenhagen was no gay Paree. After the City of Light, the Danish capital appeared somber and stone-gray, a heavily medieval a
rchitectural gray. What distinguished it, of course, were its white nights, the sky above the city remaining the clear translucent blue of a freshwater lake from sunset until sunrise and then all through the day.
Mr. Hughes took advantage of those pale-blue Scandinavian nights to indulge another of his pastimes: reminiscing, reliving his youth. Once the official day was over and we had had our leisurely dinner with wine, part of the night was then spent in his suite at the hotel, with Mr. Hughes, a brilliant raconteur, re-creating for me the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance: the writers, musicians, painters, philosophers et al. who were among his circle of friends; the small magazines in which he first started to publish—one called Fire that lasted all of one issue, and The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, which is still in existence today. He told riotous stories about the Harlem literati and “niggerati” (those pretentious black folk who loved to put on the dog). “The poet open to people and parties” described for me the rent parties he attended during the Great Depression. (A quarter or fifty cents at the door helped your host pay the rent.)
Moreover, Mr. Hughes clarified for me the ideological war during that period between the politically radical but aristocratic W. E. B. Du Bois and the flamboyant populist Marcus Garvey—with Du Bois calling for the creation of a “Talented Tenth” of intellectuals to lead the struggle for full citizenship, and Garvey placing the working class, the masses in the vanguard. “Rise up, you mighty race!” he exhorted them.
My benefactor often spent the better part of the night educating the fledgling about a period of our history that had been all but omitted in the standard textbooks of my day.
Then there were the stories from his travels around the world. The poet had been “a travelin’ man” ever since he dropped out of Columbia University at age nineteen and signed on as a mess boy on a freighter bound for Africa. And, yes, he did actually throw his textbooks overboard as he set sail.
The Big Sea.
I Wonder as I Wander.
Those were his two travel memoirs. I had read The Big Sea as a teenager and had privately vowed, even back then, to follow the example of its author. Not only would I become a writer, but a travelin’ woman as well.
During those Copenhagen nights, Mr. Hughes became a kind of West African griot, a tribal elder passing down black American culture and history in an endless wreath of cigarette smoke while nursing a shot glass of gin at his side, taken straight, no chaser.
Berlin, along with any number of other cities in Germany, was next on the itinerary; then it would be back to Paris again. I would not, though, be accompanying Mr. Hughes on this leg of the tour. It was time for me to return home. There was my son’s increasingly unhappy six-year-old voice over the phone. (He was being taken care of by my sister.) There was, as well, the increasingly nagging thought of the novel I had put aside. Also, I had heard from friends that massive demonstrations were being planned to once again pressure Congress and the president to pass the voting rights bill before the year ended. I definitely wanted to be home for that also.
Mr. Hughes understood. His generation had done its part, as he had pointed out at Africa House in London. The ongoing Struggle was continuing with mine. “La lutta continua!” The poet understood as much and would complete the State Department tour on his own. Keeping to the schedule, he flew to Germany at dawn one morning, hours before my flight back to the States was due to depart. Ever thoughtful, ever the gentleman, Mr. Hughes left not one, but two parting gifts for me at the hotel’s reception desk. The note that accompanied them, written in his large hand, in his signature green ink, on the hotel’s stationery, is another precious memento.
He had not forgotten our aborted steak dinner on the train to Oxford.
I never had the opportunity to travel with Mr. Hughes again. He nonetheless continued to befriend me and to support my work. Along with the notes and postcards he sent from his travels, he also telephoned from time to time whenever he was in New York. My phone would ring around 11 P.M., and right away I’d know: Mr. Hughes, Night People. Ostensibly, he was calling simply to chat before settling down to work for the night. Actually, the calls had more to do with checking on my output for the day. “How did it go today, Paul-e?” (Still insisting on the feminizing “e” to my name.) “How many pages did you get done?” He was not pleased when all I might have to report for the day was a short paragraph or two that in all likelihood had ended up in the wastepaper basket after being revised to death. A highly prolific, seemingly effortless writer such as Mr. Hughes could not understand a slowpoke like myself who could spend hours laboring over a single sentence. Moreover, as someone who thoroughly enjoyed being famous, he was concerned about the effect of my snail’s pace on my career. Publish or perish wasn’t only true of the academy. The literary establishment could be equally cruel. My benefactor tried warning me in so many words of the obscurity I might be courting in taking so long to produce so little.
He once lost patience with me. “Paul-e,” he cried over the phone. “Do you realize that I have a book out for every year that you’ve been alive?”(I was in my mid-thirties at the time.) “You better get busy.”
He certainly kept busy. It’s said—and this might well be apocryphal—that up to the moment of his death in the PolyClinic Hospital in New York he had been at work on a new poem. It must not have been going well, because with the last of his strength Mr. Hughes is supposed to have flung his writing pad and pencil across the room.
James Mercer Langston Hughes. Mr. Hughes. For me, he was a loving taskmaster, mentor, teacher, griot, literary sponsor and treasured elder friend. I miss him. Decades have passed since his death in 1967 and I still miss him. A poem of his speaks to that continuing sense of loss.
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began
I loved my friend.
I’ve KNOWN Rivers: The JAMES River
. . . where the water falleth so rudely and with such violence, as not any boat can pass.
—CAPTAIN JOHN Smith, MAY 1607
Richmond, Virginia. Labor Day, 1998. It’s a near ninety-degree September morning, summer still very much in force, but without the dog-day heat and humidity that descends like judgment on this capital city of 200,000 during July and August.
A friend and I have decided to spend part of the holiday on the north bank of the James River, close to where it flows through the heart of Richmond—or River City, as the Virginian capital is called due to the importance of the James in its creation. Spawned in the Allegheny Mountains to the west, “the ri-vah,” as the local folk call the James in an affectionate drawl, courses east some three hundred miles across the state until it reaches Jamestown, the museum of a town that was the first permanent English settlement in America. And after Jamestown, the Atlantic Ocean.
The James. It’s America’s most historic river.
This is the first time my friend and I have visited this particular stretch of the north bank. To reach the water, we find we will have to negotiate a riverbank that at first glance looks as high and steep and thickly forested as the side of a mountain. There’s a crude pathway of log steps to help facilitate the descent. Yet even with the logs, I’m finding the going difficult. Not so my friend, whose name happens to be Virginia, in keeping with the part of her family history that is linked to the Old Dominion. An energetic octogenarian, Virginia is managing the treacherous climb down with all the aplomb of a seasoned outdoorsman. Small-built and sinewy, my friend seems blessed with a constitution that will permit her to reach the age of a hundred and beyond still fit in body, clear in mind and undaunted in spirit.
Taking heart from her confidence, I follow her down.
The old-growth forest of trees is so thick we can neither glimpse nor hear the river, and only intermittently make out the sky. Then, perhaps ten minutes into our descent, a pair of railroad tracks abruptly brings the log stairway t
o an end. This section of the riverbank had long been leveled and graded to accommodate yet another branch of the southland’s vast CSX Railway System that had once had its hub in Richmond.
During its ascendancy the capital city had been both a river and a railroad town.
A raised and enclosed metal platform takes us safely over the CSX tracks to the lower portion of the riverbank. Here, there’s no log pathway, only the narrowest of trails that seems to drop straight as a plumb line down through the trees and thick underbrush. We’re willing to risk it, though, because now, suddenly, we hear the river. Slowly, Virginia in the lead, we inch our way down the trail until it finally, unceremoniously, deposits us on a hot, deserted little sandspit of a beach with the James River at its feet.
First thing is to find someplace to sit that’s out of the sun. A quick search turns up a large, somewhat flat stone that calls to mind the oversized ottoman to an easy chair. Best of all, the ottoman stone is lodged near the water’s edge under a tall, canopy-wide willow oak tree that with each breeze seems to transform itself into a huge East Indian punkah fan over our heads.
An ideal spot. And, it turns out, we will have it all to ourselves for the entire morning. The rest of Richmond has chosen to spend the holiday elsewhere.
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