James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902. He was one of the most prolific writers in American literary history. His plays, poems, and anthologies have found a permanent place in this nation's literary canon, and his work continues to inform Afro-American literature and theater. For several generations of Afro-American artists, his work has vividly illustrated the creative possibilities of the culture and consciousness of black culture.

Hughes came from a separated family; and by the time he was 13, the young boy had lived in Buffalo, Cleveland, Lawrence (Kansas), Mexico City, Topeka (Kansas), Colorado Springs, and Kansas City, before returning to Cleveland for high school. He started writing verses there, and fortunately, his creative talents were encouraged by a perceptive teacher. Then in 1921 he went to live with his father in Mexico, where Langston taught English in two Mexican schools. His first prose piece was published while he was still in Mexico. Called “Mexican Games,” it appeared in the Brownies Book, the innovative children's series edited by the distinguished black scholar-activist W. E. B. DuBois.

1921 was an important year in the young poet's life; for it was the year in which Langston Hughes's classic poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” was published in the Crisis magazine, the official organ of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The poem was dedicated to DuBois:

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
          flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
          went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
          bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.(1)

The poem was enthusiastically received by a broad cross-section of the poetry-reading public. Its young writer became famous, and a major literary career was launched. Along with Claude McKay's defiant sonnet “If We Must Die,” it is still the most widely recited poem in Afro-American literature. Specifically what is it about the poem that has engaged so many diverse audiences? And what is its special meaning in the context of the Afro-American cultural matrix?

Well, for one thing, the poem is not complex. Its lyricism is direct and honest, without being simplistic in the pejorative sense. Langston makes a mythic unity between the souls of black people and the timeless rivers of life. The first three lines meditate upon the order of the world as perceived through the image of the river. Thus, the speaker declares that his spirit is godlike and antecedent to the birth of the human race. Hughes's concept of the soul is decidedly Platonistic. The “I” of the first three lines exists in some strange, prehistoric, metaphysical dawn.

But with the line “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young,” he introduces the reader to actual history. He evokes the image of a universal and ancient black humanity that actively contributes to the building of civilizations. The poem celebrates the American Negro's African origins as the poet identifies with the myriad of workers who labored to build the pyramids.

Then abruptly the images leap forward into modern history where the poet hears the “singing” of the Mississippi and associates it with the Union conquest of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery in the United States. Now all of the rivers of the poem converge in the speaker's evocation of the Mississippi, which has a special place in the American ethos. The Mississippi, called by the Indians the “Father of Rivers,” is the mightiest and most legendary river on the North American continent. Throughout the poem, the speaker is a witness to history. The poet asserts the oneness of his soul with that of the river. Thus, in the tradition of Afro-American spirituals, he has been baptized in the river: and this baptism has conferred upon him a knowledge of his universality and ancestral continuity—a continuity which extends backward into the cosmic past where the rivers were “older than the flow of human blood in human veins.”

What we have here is a compressed epic rendered in highly lyrical terms. Despite the obvious universality of the poem, it must not be forgotten that its speaker is a representative of the Negro race.

The “I” of the poem is not the modern, severely alienated “I” of T. S. Eliot's love-song for Prufrock. The comparison may seem somewhat invidious; but the contrast is nonetheless interesting. In Eliot the weight of the years is burdensome for the speaker while Langston's speaker, who is as old as time itself, attempts to occupy a meaningful place at the center of the human universe. The voice in Langston's poem is not simply speaking for himself alone. Rather, his is the collective voice of a people striving to define themselves against a background of political and social oppression. The lyric gestures towards the epic form in that it attempts to express the collective ethos of a profoundly spiritual people. Langston's career, like James Joyce's, especially centers around his attempt to interpret the “soul” of his race.

And for Langston, the soul of his race was best illuminated and manifested in the folklore and musical culture of Black America. For as Professor George Kent notes in an essay on Langston Hughes and the Afro-American folk and cultural tradition: “The folk forms and cultural expressions were themselves definitions of black life created by Blacks on the bloody and pine-scented Southern soil and upon the blackboard jungles of urban streets, tenement buildings, store-front churches, and dim-lit bars. …”²

Thus, it was this particular vision that led Langston Hughes to attempt a poetic translation of the entire universe of black music. In his poetry and prose one hears the cadences of working-class black people. Langston became a poet who was intimately familiar with the possibilities of “ordinary” black speech and its attendant rhythms. He became interested in the folk tales with their wry humor and wisdom. As for the musical form called the blues, he understood that the bittersweet songs popularized by artists like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and innumerable others expressed compelling attitudes towards life. These songs, built upon the complex vagaries of the human condition—the mysteries of love, hate, chaos, and economic dislocations—were the stuff of great literature. In his first autobiography, The Big Sea, he put it this way:

I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street (in Washington, D. C.)—gay songs, because you had to be gay or die; sad songs because you couldn't help being sad sometimes. But gay or sad, you kept on living and you kept on going. Their songs—those on Seventh Street—had the pulse beat of the people. …³

So it is that in Langston's poetry we discover a special kind of attitude towards Afro-American music. And at the core of his poetic strategy is an attempt to reveal the ethos of black America as symbolized in black music. Thus, he was not merely concerned with the aesthetic surface of the music. He was not a musicologist. It appears that Langston's intention was to look behind or beneath that surface to the lives of its creators: Langston knows that the musician is not merely an entertainer and that the music does not spring from the same ground as European classical music. Rather, the music stands as a metaphor for the actual conditions of black people in America. In a poem entitled the “Trumpet Player” he gives us this vision:

The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
Where the smoldering memory
Of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
About his thighs.

Like the blues singer, Langston is urged to keep alive the painful memories of the ancestral past. He probes beneath the vibrant music to the memory of the slaves' “middle passage” from Africa with its well-known horrors. In the next stanza the Negro musician is seen having altered his African identity by taming down his head of “vibrant hair.” Ever aware of irony and what Ralph Ellison called the “American joke,” the poet describes the slicked down hair as glowing like a “crown.” The music is a kind of contradiction:

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

We learn that these old desires are essentially a longing for a transcendent freedom.

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 poet always sees life in Harlem with a double consciousness. In one context, Langston is the romantic in love with the glorious beauty of his people. And whenever possible, he celebrates the intrinsic spiritual values which give the culture its tone and texture. But he rarely eschews the tough-mindedness of the folk sensibility with its acid-like cynicism. This essential toughnesss of spirit leads him to remind us of the terrible price black people have paid in quest of the urban El Dorados. There is a terror lurking beneath the music:

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—

At what point in the musician's encounter with the mystery and the elegance of his art does he become addicted like a common junkie? And at what point does the artist risk the loss of his identity by giving into the rigorous demands of his craft? How does one maintain balance and grace in the ritual journey through the river's fire? In the last stanza the poet gives the answer:

But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note.

Yes, pain is transformed into art. The troubles, the “bad air,” are distilled into a compelling and transcendent art form. As in the blues, the troubles are syncopated into a dance beat.

Ralph Ellison's now famous eloquent definition of the blues is pertinent here. Ellison writes that the “blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” And this is the attitude which informs most of Hughes's blues-oriented poems.

There is a decidedly religious side to Langston's sensibility. This sense of religious ecstasy occurs when the poet tries to express the sensual energy of the music. We especially note this tendency in such pieces as, “Jazzonia,” “Song for a Banjo Dance,” “When Sue Wears Red,” “Spirituals,” and “Tambourines.” In “Jazzonia,” for example, the images of the Harlem cabaret with its dancing girl are juxtaposed against images of the Biblical Eve and the Cleopatra of classical literature:

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.
Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
Were Eve's eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?
O, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!
In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.(4)

This poetic sensibility is clearly not in a strict Puritan mode. Here, there is a kind of agreement between the sacred and profane—a merger, so to speak, between the sensual and the spiritual. We can also perceive this kind of linkage in the poem, “When Sue Wears Red”:

When Susanna Jones wears red
Her face is like an ancient cameo
Turned brown by the ages.
Some with a blast of trumpets,
          Jesus!

This image is highly saturated with internal cultural meanings. There is a kind of racial in-joke involved in its strategy. What Langston does here is riff off on the stereotypical idea that Negroes, as a race, especially like the color red. Bright, primary colors are generally associated with the dressing styles of the black working classes. But the color red, with all of its symbolic overtones, occupies a special place in Afro-American folkways. And Langston, who had a keen ear and eye for folk humor, has lent archetypal weight to the in-house jokes black Americans make about themselves concerning the color red. Langston's red, as used here, symbolizes both royalty and passionate love:

When Susanna Jones wears red
A queen from some time-dead Egyptian night
Walks once again.
Blow trumpets, Jesus!
And the beauty of Susanna Jones in red
Burns in my heart a love-fire sharp like pain.
Sweet silver trumpets,
          Jesus!

Those joyous shouts that punctuate the poem are essentially double-entendres which function to merge the sacred and profane. The speaker of the poem could either be in church or on a street corner in Harlem. The point is that the beauty of the brown-skinned Sue evokes an ecstatic outburst which can, by a subtle shift in intonation, either express Sue's holiness and regalness, or her passionate sensuality. There is a special exuberance of spirit associated with Afro-American culture. And Langston was not prudish about celebrating it. In “Song for a Banjo Dance,” the poet urges the dancer to:

                    Get way back, honey,
                    Do that low-down step.
                    Walk on over, darling,
                              Now! Come out
                              With your left.
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake 'em, honey chile. [Italics mine](5)

Again there is the double-entendre on the words “low-down step.” As used here the words are a description of the choreography of the dance, but they also convey overtones of the erotic. Nonetheless, Langston's eroticism is never prurient or voyeuristic. His work always strives to celebrate both the joys and the suffering of life.

Stylistically Langston's poetry is characterized by a robust, direct tone, and by a kind of unadorned, uncontrived eloquence which springs from the actual feel and smell of real life. This is why he is the most popularly read and memorized poet in the Afro-American community.

Langston's poetic voice is essentially saturated by the emotional ethos of the blues. His artistic power resides in his skillful rendering of the complex nuances of black, urban speech:

“BOOGIE: 1 A.M.”

Good evening, daddy!
I know you've heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred
Trilling the treble
And twining the bass
Into midnight ruffles
Of cat-gut lace.

Langston's poetry rarely exhibits the kind of complexity and density of thought that is often encountered in poetry in the tradition of Pound and Eliot. Despite the absence of cabalistic strategies for literary scholars to gnaw on, a line such as the “boogie-woogie rumble / of a dream deferred” carries a great deal of lyric clout. Just what does “the boogie woogie” rumble have to do with a “dream deferred”? And just what dream was deferred? Langston's poem “Harlem” gives part of the answer:

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?

So the dream of democracy that has been deferred grumbles and rumbles on into the small hours of the Harlem morning. Most of the characters in this montage of deferred dreams persistently question the contradictions of the dream. They are adroitly and eloquently walking the thin line between spiritual self-assertion and despair:

“DREAM BOOGIE: VARIATION ”

Tinkling treble,
Rolling bass,
High noon teeth
In a midnight face,
Great long fingers
On great big hands,
Screaming pedals
Where his twelve-shoe lands,
Looks like his eyes
Are teasing pain,
A few minutes late
For the Freedom Train.

In Langston's blues aesthetic, music is always symbolic of the larger human dilemmas in the social environment. Rarely do we find the musicians in Langston's poetry depicted as creating art devoid of social meaning and human significance. For the people in Langston's poetry the music is clearly, to quote Kenneth Burke, “equipment for living”:

Little cullud boys with fears,
frantic, kick their draftee years
into flatted fifths and flatter beers …

These lines are from a poem called, “Flatted Fifths.” Its title refers to the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie which was notable for the uniquely creative manner in which the flatted fifth was employed in jazz improvisation. To the chagrin of musicians like the drummer Max Roach, that music came to be known as “bebop,” and its adherents and fans were called “be-boppers.” Thus the poem opens with the lines: “Little cullud boys with beards / re-bop be-bop mop and stop.” Here is Langston's attempt to imitate the rhythmic figures of the new urban black music. This is consistent with Langston's aesthetic urge to coax his words as close as possible to actual songs. Like the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Walt Whitman, and Carl Sandburg, Langston's work displays a very compelling emotional quality when read aloud. The aim of this kind of poetry is the lyrical evocation of the working person's struggle to realize the American “dream.” And Langston, as the poet laureate of his people, sought persistently to maintain an urgency of voice. He either cursed the dream as nightmare or he celebrated the strength and tenacity of the people as they brought a special brand of folk humor to exploding the illusions of the dream. But through all of this Langston truly believed in the possibility of the dream's realization:

“LAUGHERS”

Dream singers,
Story tellers,
Dancers,
Loud laughers in the hands of Fate—
          My people.
Dish-washers,
Elevator-boys,
Ladies' maids,
Crap-shooters,
Cooks,
Waiters,
Jazzers,
Nurses of babies,
Loaders of ships,
Rounders,
Number writers,
Comedians in vaudeville
And band-men in circuses—
Dream-singers all,—
          My people.
Story-tellers all,—
          My people.
          Dancers—
God! What dancers!
          Singers—
God! What singers!
Singers and dancers.
Dancers and laughers.
          Laughers?
Yes, laughers … laughers … laughers—
Loud-mouth laughers in the hands
          Of Fate.(6)

Notes

1. Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1959). All other poetry quoted in this chapter except where noted is taken from this anthology.

2. George Kent, Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture (Chicago: Third World Press, 1972).

3. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940).

4. Stephen Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry (New York: Morrow, 1973). This critical anthology contains many exciting ideas about the aesthetics of Afro-American poetry.

5. Henderson.

6. Henderson.

Bibliography

The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Fine Clothes to the Jew. New York, Knopf, 1927.

The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940.

Shakespeare in Harlem. New York: Knopf, 1942.

One-Way Ticket. New York: Knopf, 1949.

Simple Speaks His Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

Montage of a Dream Deferred. New York: Henry Holt, 1951.

I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Rinehart, 1956.

The Langston Hughes Reader. New York: Braziller, 1958.

Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1959.

The Best of Simple. New York: Knopf, 1959.

Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1961.

Something in Common, and Other Stories. New York: Hill & Wang, 1963.

The Panther and the Lash. New York: Knopf, 1967.

About Langston Hughes:

Emanuel, James A. Langston Hughes. New York: Twayne, 1967.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Kent, George. Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture. Chicago: Third World Press, 1972.

Wagner, Jean, Black Poets of the United States. Translated from the French by Kenneth Douglas. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1973.