The Poet Speaks of Dreaming: Langston Hughes and Black Children
By Tony Medina
To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me (“Dream Variations” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 40)
Leaving Harlem for Africa
in search of myself
I throw my books over the ship
into the black mouth of the sea
The water must be hungry
‘cause it swallows
those books down mean
I am letting go of my past
like tears dropped from my face
one by one
Books I read as a lonely lonely child
books I hardly read at college
uptown in Harlem running wild
I want to change myself and grow
set out on my own journey
nothing left but my
imagination and memory
Learn from experience
not just books
Leaving Harlem for Africa
I stare at the mouth
of the great big sea
swallowing my books
Glad it ain’t me Medina 18)
The Big Sea, Langston Hughes’s chronicle of his nascent years as a lonely child and subsequent sojourn as a struggling artist, finds him at a crossroads in his dream of becoming a poet. Escaping the trappings of a Columbia University both tortuously stifling and spiritually and culturally alienating, Hughes leaves Harlem and jumps a freight ship to Africa, the ancestral home of his identity. A childhood of estrangement from his mother, Hughes longed to be embraced by his Motherland, as mysterious to him as his own mother’s fractious shadow and disappearing acts. But he has to travel light and must make the heart- wrenching decision to discard his books into the black mouth of the sea, symbolizing a sort of reverse Middle Passage, separating him from his sankofa.
It is during this initial journey to The Motherland that Hughes rejects his father’s insistence that he become an engineer instead of a writer; thus, casting off his father’s patronage to strike out on his own. Once ship bound, Hughes finds himself staring into the blank mirror of that sea. He throws his books—primarily schoolbooks and books he had read as a child—overboard. But Hughes keeps one, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, his favorite poet, for that’s all he needs—that, and courage.
It must have been difficult for Hughes to leave what was familiar for parts unknown and to part with the source of so much of his comfort and clarity—books; for, as he says repeatedly throughout The Big Sea, “Books had been happening to me” (4).
Books had been happening to Hughes. When he was a child he would often go with his mother to the library. Books, stories, and poetry fascinated him. After his grandmother died, he continued to spend his time in libraries when he went to live with his mother, stepfather and stepbrother. Books kept him company and comforted him during his times of loneliness and isolation. Books determined the course of his life. And he would spend the rest of his life ensuring—to a certain extent—that books would be happening to black people and especially happening to black children, for they were the wellspring from which he drew his poems, stories, essays, plays, blues and songs.
•
When I was a skinny high school kid hungering for books to feed my loneliness, and to inspire me to write, I found myself one rainy fall Saturday afternoon in a bookstore in Grand Central Station. While browsing the poetry section for some inspiration to help me along on my dream of becoming a poet, moving my index finger along the H’s, I touched upon a brown spine with bright red letters trimmed in white among the myriad titles of mostly American poets standing tightly on the shelf like a platoon in formation. The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes called out to me like a neon sign commanding my attention. It was a modest, pocket-sized paperback with a generous amount of poems that did not seem intimidating—in terms of its length—but inviting.
What struck me first and foremost about this brown book was that it was the first time I had seen a brown face on the cover of a book! I’d gone through my spell of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings and others, but this one, with a black-and-white shot of Langston Hughes writing at a manual typewriter in a pinstriped, short-sleeved shirt, looking over his shoulder, staring back at the camera’s eye with a mustache and wavy, jet black hair, struck me.
Hughes looked like my father and my uncles and so many people in my Bronx neighborhood. I was simultaneously captivated by a sudden sense of familiarity—Langston Hughes was family. I was even more thrilled when I cracked open his book to the sights and sounds of a world I found all too familiar: of every day black and brown folks on the streets of Harlem, in bars, on street corners, in the world, sassing and celebrating blackness and blueness with humor, reverence, sadness and pride. When I saw Hughes’s face and I read Hughes’s bold blatant and subtle statements against racism, heard his voice in all its blue elegance and grace, I had to have that book.
The classic and contemporary writers I was reading at the time were all white. As all budding writers often do, I imitated them. But I not only imitated their styles, I found myself writing from their perspective. In fact, I had no idea that black writers or a black aesthetic even existed and connected to who I was and what I was experiencing as a young, black Puerto Rican kid from the projects, that is, until I discovered Hughes. So I poured over my first Langston Hughes book, wore it out with each reading, soaking up each poem with images that reflected my reality. This collection of poetry gave me a sense of self-worth, discovery and identity, which inevitably guided me to fulfill my dream to become a poet and writer like Langston Hughes.
•
To say that Hughes was a dreamer is to state the obvious. With poems such as “Dreams,” “Dream Boogie,” “Dream Dust,” “Dreamer,” “Dream Variation,” “Dream,” “Dream Deferred,” “I Continue to Dream,” “Dream of Freedom” and “I Dream a World,” Hughes had established a psychological landscape for achievement and fashioning what Black Arts poet and theoretician Larry Neal referred to as a “vision for a liberated future” in the consciousness of black people in general and black children in particular. Long before the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his paradigm shifting “I Have a Dream” speech, Hughes wrote and spoke these prescient words:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
(“Let America Be America Again” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 189)
Hughes’s sibylline dream poem was possibly (and ostensibly) the moral compass and guide for Dr. King, who, suppositionally, is a child of Hughes, and whom, undoubtedly, must have been nurtured on his empowering poetry—particularly those celebrating the beauty of blackness and those bespeaking the necessity for dreaming.
It is this very dream motif threaded throughout Hughes’s literary career that exemplifies his quintessential love and profound commitment to American children, particularly black children. Through creating a body of work for black children to dream in, Hughes impacts generations of black children with his clear, straightforward poems and stories in an aesthetic marked by what Katherine Capshaw Smith, author of Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, calls “empathy, communication and exchange,” to ultimately effect social change in young readers (243).
When it comes to celebrity, the apotheosis of American culture is: to much is given, much is squandered. Such an axiom cannot be applied to Hughes, for he used his celebrated status as a dean of African American literary culture as a platform in which to “interpret the beauty of [his own] people,” as he charged in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (692).
Hughes’s role in both the black and literary communities was intertwined. His role as black poet laureate was echoed by Henry Louis Gates in his essay “The Black Man’s Burden” wherein he states, “More than any other African American of this Century, Langston Hughes was elected popularly to serve as our ‘representative Negro,’ the poet of his race” (82). But Hughes was not elected. He assumed the role out of an already deep-seated sense of responsibility to his race. For Hughes—through dint or circumstance—was destined to be a spokesman for his people, at every turn using his voice and pen to challenge injustice, racial prejudice and economic inequality.
Ralph Ellison, speaking on his generation of black artists in Shadow & Act said, “We were seeking examples, patterns to live by, out of a freedom which for all its being ignored by the sociologists and subtle thinkers was implicit in the Negro situation” (xv). Yet Hughes not only understood what it meant to “seek examples,” he also appreciated what it meant to be the example. He was a heroic figure in the tradition of black heroism that viewed his role as poet as that of spokesman and recognized, acknowledged and affirmed his responsibility to black people—and particularly black children—throughout his forty-seven years as a writer-activist and social poet. To Hughes, his role as a black writer was not a burden, but a call to action.
Shaped by his maternal grandmother’s stories of the horrors and glory of his abolitionist lineage, in Hughes’s fervent mind, he imagined these accounts as actual stories—the kind found in books. He would, as “Poet Laureate of the Black Race,” assume the mantle of his maternal grandmother’s teachings. Through books for young readers such as The Dream Keeper and Other Poems and Famous Negro Heroes of America, Hughes provided black children with powerful poems and biographical sketches imbued with the dreams and cultural and historical heroes necessary for fortifying in them a profound sense of identity and pride. What is sometimes overlooked is that Langston Hughes spoke first and foremost to black children. In doing so, Hughes reconstructs for black children an image of themselves that transcends the stultifying stereotypes imposed by slavery, Jim Crow and white supremacy.
Children, I come back today
To tell you a story of the long dark way
That I had to climb, that I had to know
In order that the race might live and grow. //
God put a dream like steel in my soul.
(“The Negro Mother” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 155)
His first published work was a poem in The Brownies’ Book, which marked his entrance into the burgeoning black intellectual and cultural revolution known as the New Negro Renaissance and consequently the Harlem Renaissance that had been taking shape in other major cities like DC, Chicago and Detroit. The Brownies’ Book was a magazine for black children, edited by Harlem Renaissance novelist Jesse Fauset who hence published a number of Hughes’s poems, essays, short stories and a play in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine she coedited with W.E.B. DuBois.
The Brownies’ Book and the Crisis were both major post-Black Reconstruction publications that were the heartbeat of the New Negro Renaissance, renamed the Harlem Renaissance for its centrality as a hub for black artists and intellectuals. These publications, which circulated in the black community and were also read by progressive and curious whites, became the intellectual and cultural mouthpiece of the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance involved in the upliftment of the Negro race.
In his inception as a spokesman for his race, Hughes advanced a poetics that remonstrates against racism head-on while “interpreting the beauty of his own people and celebrating the beauty and complexity of black people.”
It would be the poetry of a young Langston Hughes that would excite the editors of The Brownies’ Book and the Crisis, affording him, early on, a national platform among the black middle class and intellectual circles. Yet, ironically, it would be Fauset and DuBois who would also criticize Hughes for his aesthetic choice in valuing not just “upstanding Negroes,” but also all black people, regardless of class or social status.
Hughes—fresh out of high school in Cleveland where he was bitten by the poetry bug after faculty and students elected him Class Poet—began writing and sending his work out for publication. After receiving validation and encouragement from Fauset and Dubois, Hughes made his way to Harlem. His initial poetry collection, The Weary Blues, would generate attention and literary standing amongst the black middle class and intellectual circles. But by his second volume, Fine Clothes to the Jew, many felt Hughes betrayed the image of black respectability that the black middle class wished to protect under the gaze of the white establishment. Poets and writers like Hughes, along with contemporaries Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman and Zora Neal Hurston, had fallen out of favor with what sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called the “Black Bourgeoisie.” By focusing on everyday black folks he encountered in Harlem, Hughes showed the “beauty and ugly” of black people, profoundly expanding the racial uplift that was the central core of DuBois’ ideology, to a more inclusive level, exemplifying a sheer love for the people. As Hughes reminds us, “The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group. We younger Negro artist who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame” (“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” 693).
But Hughes’s struggle was not merely with the old guard of the Harlem Renaissance. He also struggled with fellow poets, friends and artistic rivals such as Countee Cullen whose work modeled European poets and who saw race as a burden to his artistic aspirations. Jean Toomer, another gifted contemporary, was another story entirely, for he reconciled his tragic struggle with identity by ultimately passing for white—vanishing into its world entirely. To this dismaying news, Arnold Rampersad in volume one of The Life of Langston Hughes, writes: “Hughes wondered how far fate and fame might take him away from his old dreams” (120). Rampersad reveals Hughes’s “ultimate hope” for himself, where he ruminates on his dreams and aspirations in his journal while a student at Lincoln University: “To create a Negro culture in America—a real, solid, sane, racial something growing out of the folk life, not copied from another” (173).
According to Rampersad, many critics had dismissed Hughes’s poetry as “far too simple and unlearned;” that his poetry “fails…to satisfy their desire for a modernist literature attuned to the complexities of modern life.” But Hughes’s aesthetic was both modernist in style and complex in its negation of the anachronistic paradigms of segregation and social inequality, conspicuously absent from many American modernist mainstream poets. That his politically-driven verse, with its clear-cut approach to reaching readers of all ages, was often summarily dismissed by conservative and liberal critics alike attested to Hughes’s maverick undertaking as a social poet in the American democratic tradition. That his blues and jazz innovations are sometimes overlooked in relation to American modernists is disingenuous at best.
Hughes simply believed that his poetry should speak to everyone; that one should “make it plain,” as Malcolm X put it. Hughes abhorred pretense, convolution and erudition in poetry. He privately chided black writers who felt obligated to impress with an alienating aesthetic brandishing book smarts over guilelessness. But Hughes was not anti-intellectual, by any stretch of the imagination, for his black genius was undoubtedly evident throughout his work. When Jesse B. Semple says, “Somebody is always trying to take disadvantage of me” (The Best of Simple 12), one does not need to read a dissertation to marvel at the brilliance of his signifying, giving truth to the lie of capitalism and the exploitation prevalent among those at the bottom of what Haitian poet Rene Depestre calls the “greasy pole” of its economic class structure.
To his detractors Hughes simply said, “I believe that poetry should be direct, comprehensible and the epitome of simplicity.” It is this aspect of Hughes’s proletarian aesthetic that allows his work to straddle both the adult and children’s literature realm. His first poetry collection for young readers, The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, contains poems that had previously been published in his first two adult collections, along with spot illustrations.
Hughes would go on to publish work specifically for black children, most of which are collaborations with close friend Arna Bontemps, beginning initially in the early 1930s and picking up momentum in the 1950s where Hughes published a number of cultural and historical books for black children—almost one each year—reflective of a renewed commitment to children’s literature. As Rampersad states, “Hughes understood…that there is no writing more important than writing for children” (Rampersad 26).
As Katharine Capshaw Smith states, “Bontemps and Hughes imagined themselves as the standard-bearers for a new black children’s literature, infiltrating a literary establishment which to this point had only offered biased and distorted images of African America” (7).
It is through his writing for adults and young people where Hughes wishes to reverse such conditioning. In 1941, twenty years after publishing in Crisis magazine, Hughes convincingly argues for the need for heroes in black literature:
The written word is the only record we will have of this our present, or our past, to leave behind for future generations…We have a need for heroes. We have a need for books and plays that will encourage and inspire our youth, set for them patterns of conduct, move and stir them to be forthright, strong, clear-thinking and unafraid… It is the social duty of Negro writers to reveal to the people the deep reservoir of heroism within the race…We need in literature the kind of black men and women all of us know exist in life; who are not afraid to claim our rights as human beings and as Americans… (Berry 299)
Hughes and Bontemps faced many obstacles in their production of black children’s literature. Conscious of instilling in black children a sense of identity and pride while
remaining politically persistent, they made concessions for their more blatantly political concerns such as Jim Crow and the history of racial oppression they felt black (and white) children needed to comprehend. This proved challenging for the two race men publishing in the white literary mainstream wishing to reach a wider audience. Thus, their works had to be more nuanced; unlike the books Hughes penned and published for adult audiences, which— given Hughes’s aesthetic—allowed him lateral movement in both worlds.
Hughes and Bontemps in their work for black children sought to dispel the stereotypes that have emerged in American children’s literature where black children were customarily depicted as pickaninnies and minstrels. In books such as Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti and the posthumously published The Pasteboard Bandit, Hughes and Bontemps also infuse in black children a sense of belonging to a greater African diaspora.
As a black artist unburdened by the blackness his father loathed, Hughes—through his proletarian yet lyrical poetry—scaled America’s racial mountain, denying his people both its beauty and humanity, by setting the record straight.
Shall I make a record of your beauty?
Shall I write words about you?
Shall I make a poem that will live a thousand
years and paint you in the poem?
(“My Beloved” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 36)
Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, Hughes published a steady stream of books for young readers, primarily through Dodd, Mead and Franklin Watts: Ranging from The First Book of Negroes (1952) to The First Book of Rhythms (1954) and The First Book of Jazz (1955) to The First Book of Africa (1960). This first series mainly provided black children with historical and cultural foregrounding, instilling in them a sense of pride, identity and awareness of their African and African American lineage and heroic heritage.
Other Hughes children’s books, mined from his copious poetry and rejected projects have been posthumously published. They include Black Misery, a humor book appealing to both adults and young people satirizing American racial prejudice and the schizophrenia of Jim Crow; The Sweet and Sour Animal Book, a collection of Hughes poems paired with artwork by elementary school children from the Harlem School of the Arts; Carol of the Brown King: Nativity Poems, beautifully illustrated by Ashley Bryan where Christ is depicted as black; and The Block, an inspirational collection of poems by Hughes celebrating the hopes and dreams of black children and the black community with gorgeous collages by Romare Bearden.
Books for young readers on Langston Hughes’s life continue to be published, introducing him to newer generations: Alice Walker’s Langston Hughes: American Poet, one of the first children’s books on Langston Hughes; Willie Perdomo’s Visiting Langston has a young, precocious black girl—a budding poet—making a sojourn with her father to visit Hughes’s Harlem home. It was at this very home where he would entertain neighborhood children on his front stoop, and teaching them to garden. This mirrors Hughes’s time spent in libraries; as a renowned poet and famous author, he could be found at the 124th Street Harlem branch of the New York Public Library (where he first encountered Countee Cullen) sitting at a tiny table in the children’s section writing and conducting research. I emulated Hughes’s love of children in Love to Langston, my own children’s biography of Hughes in verse. The author and illustrator photo on the inside flap has me and artist R. Gregory Christies on Hughes’s Harlem stoop surrounded by children; while on the back cover there is a famous shot of Hughes signing autographs during Negro History Week in Atlanta, mobbed by an ecstatic church full of black children. Lord knows the impact of such a visit; how many of those children in that 1947 photo would go on to be part of the Civil Rights movement.
•
Hughes’s alter ego Jesse B. Semple once said, “I have had so many hardships in this life that it is a wonder I’ll live until I die” (Simple’s Uncle Sam 1). This sentiment is said of Hughes in the film Brother to Brother, a fictional account of the Harlem Renaissance where artist Bruce Nugent says to his protégé, “You have no idea what kind of sacrifices it takes to be the spokesperson for the entire race” (Brother to Brother). Hughes braved the Jim Crow South in the 1930s to conduct a book tour for Mary McCloud Bethune, visiting black children in black churches. Shadowed by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, he was also dragged before the McCarthy Hearings, which jeopardized his livelihood. Hughes is the progenitor of the Black Arts Movement, yet he was criticized by a younger generation of black writers and activists when “Black Is Beautiful” became the mantra. (“Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.”) His poem, “My People” and his manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” looms large. Its genius reverberates to this day. But Hughes was not only a genius—he was generous. His magnanimity and profound influence in mentoring young black writers—his literary and spiritual children—is visible in the trailblazing brilliance in poets, writers and scholars who he has affected directly: Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka (nee LeRoi Jones), Mari Evans, Calvin Hernton and Alice Walker; and indirectly through poets like Nikki Giovanni whose “Ego Tripping” is daughter to “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes has over 70 poems where dreams and dreaming are a motif. Hughes is our quintessential dreamer. His poetry and prose for black children lifted them up to, as Katherine Capshaw Smith reminds us, “assume a substantial role in the present identity and future possibilities of the community” (241).
Hughes’s legacy can be seen in Black Creators for Children, a collective of young black authors, illustrators, editors and designers working in children’s publishing that formed in Harlem in the mid-1970s. Led by artist Tom Feelings and including Pat Cummings, Marie Brown, Wade and Cheryl Hudson, and Bernadette and George Ford, Black Creators for Children continued Hughes and Bontemps’s revolution in black children’s literature that not only impacted African American children, but all American children today. Their foregrounding work made it possible for all American children to connect to fully rendered African American characters by writers and illustrators sensitive to their three dimensionality.
To Hughes, black children not only matter and are beautiful, they are connected to that Africa he made his way to at the beginning of his poet’s journey; an Africa ancient as rivers. But this “darker brother” ensured that they understood that they are also a substantial part of an America blue as bruises and dreaming. Calling to generations of “dream-singers,” Langston Hughes sings to us yet and still:
I take my dreams
And make of them a bronze vase,
And a wide round fountain
With a beautiful statue in its center,
And a song with a broken heart,
And I ask you:
Do you understand my dreams?
Sometimes you say you do
And sometimes you say you don’t
Either way
It doesn’t matter.
I continue to dream.
(“Dreamer” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 111)
Works Cited
Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Connecticut: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1983. Print.
Brother to Brother. Rodney Evans, dir. Wolfe Releasing, 2004.
Gates, Henry Louis. “The Black Man’s Burden.” Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michelle Wallace. Ed. Gina Dent. New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1992. 75-83. Print.
Hughes, Langston. “Conversation on the Corner.” The Best of Simple. New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1961, 1988.
---. The Big Sea. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1940, 1986. Print.
---. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Print.
---. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932. Print.
---. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest, ed. by Faith Berry. Connecticut: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1973. Print.
---. “Census.” Simple’s Uncle Sam. New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1965, 1993, 2000. Print.
---. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Nation 23 June 1926: 692-693. Print.
Medina, Tony and R. Gregory Christie, illustrator. Love to Langston. New York: Lee & Low Books, Inc., 2002. Print.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.
Smith, Katherine Capshaw. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Print.
By Tony Medina
To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me (“Dream Variations” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 40)
Leaving Harlem for Africa
in search of myself
I throw my books over the ship
into the black mouth of the sea
The water must be hungry
‘cause it swallows
those books down mean
I am letting go of my past
like tears dropped from my face
one by one
Books I read as a lonely lonely child
books I hardly read at college
uptown in Harlem running wild
I want to change myself and grow
set out on my own journey
nothing left but my
imagination and memory
Learn from experience
not just books
Leaving Harlem for Africa
I stare at the mouth
of the great big sea
swallowing my books
Glad it ain’t me Medina 18)
The Big Sea, Langston Hughes’s chronicle of his nascent years as a lonely child and subsequent sojourn as a struggling artist, finds him at a crossroads in his dream of becoming a poet. Escaping the trappings of a Columbia University both tortuously stifling and spiritually and culturally alienating, Hughes leaves Harlem and jumps a freight ship to Africa, the ancestral home of his identity. A childhood of estrangement from his mother, Hughes longed to be embraced by his Motherland, as mysterious to him as his own mother’s fractious shadow and disappearing acts. But he has to travel light and must make the heart- wrenching decision to discard his books into the black mouth of the sea, symbolizing a sort of reverse Middle Passage, separating him from his sankofa.
It is during this initial journey to The Motherland that Hughes rejects his father’s insistence that he become an engineer instead of a writer; thus, casting off his father’s patronage to strike out on his own. Once ship bound, Hughes finds himself staring into the blank mirror of that sea. He throws his books—primarily schoolbooks and books he had read as a child—overboard. But Hughes keeps one, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, his favorite poet, for that’s all he needs—that, and courage.
It must have been difficult for Hughes to leave what was familiar for parts unknown and to part with the source of so much of his comfort and clarity—books; for, as he says repeatedly throughout The Big Sea, “Books had been happening to me” (4).
Books had been happening to Hughes. When he was a child he would often go with his mother to the library. Books, stories, and poetry fascinated him. After his grandmother died, he continued to spend his time in libraries when he went to live with his mother, stepfather and stepbrother. Books kept him company and comforted him during his times of loneliness and isolation. Books determined the course of his life. And he would spend the rest of his life ensuring—to a certain extent—that books would be happening to black people and especially happening to black children, for they were the wellspring from which he drew his poems, stories, essays, plays, blues and songs.
•
When I was a skinny high school kid hungering for books to feed my loneliness, and to inspire me to write, I found myself one rainy fall Saturday afternoon in a bookstore in Grand Central Station. While browsing the poetry section for some inspiration to help me along on my dream of becoming a poet, moving my index finger along the H’s, I touched upon a brown spine with bright red letters trimmed in white among the myriad titles of mostly American poets standing tightly on the shelf like a platoon in formation. The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes called out to me like a neon sign commanding my attention. It was a modest, pocket-sized paperback with a generous amount of poems that did not seem intimidating—in terms of its length—but inviting.
What struck me first and foremost about this brown book was that it was the first time I had seen a brown face on the cover of a book! I’d gone through my spell of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings and others, but this one, with a black-and-white shot of Langston Hughes writing at a manual typewriter in a pinstriped, short-sleeved shirt, looking over his shoulder, staring back at the camera’s eye with a mustache and wavy, jet black hair, struck me.
Hughes looked like my father and my uncles and so many people in my Bronx neighborhood. I was simultaneously captivated by a sudden sense of familiarity—Langston Hughes was family. I was even more thrilled when I cracked open his book to the sights and sounds of a world I found all too familiar: of every day black and brown folks on the streets of Harlem, in bars, on street corners, in the world, sassing and celebrating blackness and blueness with humor, reverence, sadness and pride. When I saw Hughes’s face and I read Hughes’s bold blatant and subtle statements against racism, heard his voice in all its blue elegance and grace, I had to have that book.
The classic and contemporary writers I was reading at the time were all white. As all budding writers often do, I imitated them. But I not only imitated their styles, I found myself writing from their perspective. In fact, I had no idea that black writers or a black aesthetic even existed and connected to who I was and what I was experiencing as a young, black Puerto Rican kid from the projects, that is, until I discovered Hughes. So I poured over my first Langston Hughes book, wore it out with each reading, soaking up each poem with images that reflected my reality. This collection of poetry gave me a sense of self-worth, discovery and identity, which inevitably guided me to fulfill my dream to become a poet and writer like Langston Hughes.
•
To say that Hughes was a dreamer is to state the obvious. With poems such as “Dreams,” “Dream Boogie,” “Dream Dust,” “Dreamer,” “Dream Variation,” “Dream,” “Dream Deferred,” “I Continue to Dream,” “Dream of Freedom” and “I Dream a World,” Hughes had established a psychological landscape for achievement and fashioning what Black Arts poet and theoretician Larry Neal referred to as a “vision for a liberated future” in the consciousness of black people in general and black children in particular. Long before the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his paradigm shifting “I Have a Dream” speech, Hughes wrote and spoke these prescient words:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
(“Let America Be America Again” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 189)
Hughes’s sibylline dream poem was possibly (and ostensibly) the moral compass and guide for Dr. King, who, suppositionally, is a child of Hughes, and whom, undoubtedly, must have been nurtured on his empowering poetry—particularly those celebrating the beauty of blackness and those bespeaking the necessity for dreaming.
It is this very dream motif threaded throughout Hughes’s literary career that exemplifies his quintessential love and profound commitment to American children, particularly black children. Through creating a body of work for black children to dream in, Hughes impacts generations of black children with his clear, straightforward poems and stories in an aesthetic marked by what Katherine Capshaw Smith, author of Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, calls “empathy, communication and exchange,” to ultimately effect social change in young readers (243).
When it comes to celebrity, the apotheosis of American culture is: to much is given, much is squandered. Such an axiom cannot be applied to Hughes, for he used his celebrated status as a dean of African American literary culture as a platform in which to “interpret the beauty of [his own] people,” as he charged in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (692).
Hughes’s role in both the black and literary communities was intertwined. His role as black poet laureate was echoed by Henry Louis Gates in his essay “The Black Man’s Burden” wherein he states, “More than any other African American of this Century, Langston Hughes was elected popularly to serve as our ‘representative Negro,’ the poet of his race” (82). But Hughes was not elected. He assumed the role out of an already deep-seated sense of responsibility to his race. For Hughes—through dint or circumstance—was destined to be a spokesman for his people, at every turn using his voice and pen to challenge injustice, racial prejudice and economic inequality.
Ralph Ellison, speaking on his generation of black artists in Shadow & Act said, “We were seeking examples, patterns to live by, out of a freedom which for all its being ignored by the sociologists and subtle thinkers was implicit in the Negro situation” (xv). Yet Hughes not only understood what it meant to “seek examples,” he also appreciated what it meant to be the example. He was a heroic figure in the tradition of black heroism that viewed his role as poet as that of spokesman and recognized, acknowledged and affirmed his responsibility to black people—and particularly black children—throughout his forty-seven years as a writer-activist and social poet. To Hughes, his role as a black writer was not a burden, but a call to action.
Shaped by his maternal grandmother’s stories of the horrors and glory of his abolitionist lineage, in Hughes’s fervent mind, he imagined these accounts as actual stories—the kind found in books. He would, as “Poet Laureate of the Black Race,” assume the mantle of his maternal grandmother’s teachings. Through books for young readers such as The Dream Keeper and Other Poems and Famous Negro Heroes of America, Hughes provided black children with powerful poems and biographical sketches imbued with the dreams and cultural and historical heroes necessary for fortifying in them a profound sense of identity and pride. What is sometimes overlooked is that Langston Hughes spoke first and foremost to black children. In doing so, Hughes reconstructs for black children an image of themselves that transcends the stultifying stereotypes imposed by slavery, Jim Crow and white supremacy.
Children, I come back today
To tell you a story of the long dark way
That I had to climb, that I had to know
In order that the race might live and grow. //
God put a dream like steel in my soul.
(“The Negro Mother” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 155)
His first published work was a poem in The Brownies’ Book, which marked his entrance into the burgeoning black intellectual and cultural revolution known as the New Negro Renaissance and consequently the Harlem Renaissance that had been taking shape in other major cities like DC, Chicago and Detroit. The Brownies’ Book was a magazine for black children, edited by Harlem Renaissance novelist Jesse Fauset who hence published a number of Hughes’s poems, essays, short stories and a play in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine she coedited with W.E.B. DuBois.
The Brownies’ Book and the Crisis were both major post-Black Reconstruction publications that were the heartbeat of the New Negro Renaissance, renamed the Harlem Renaissance for its centrality as a hub for black artists and intellectuals. These publications, which circulated in the black community and were also read by progressive and curious whites, became the intellectual and cultural mouthpiece of the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance involved in the upliftment of the Negro race.
In his inception as a spokesman for his race, Hughes advanced a poetics that remonstrates against racism head-on while “interpreting the beauty of his own people and celebrating the beauty and complexity of black people.”
It would be the poetry of a young Langston Hughes that would excite the editors of The Brownies’ Book and the Crisis, affording him, early on, a national platform among the black middle class and intellectual circles. Yet, ironically, it would be Fauset and DuBois who would also criticize Hughes for his aesthetic choice in valuing not just “upstanding Negroes,” but also all black people, regardless of class or social status.
Hughes—fresh out of high school in Cleveland where he was bitten by the poetry bug after faculty and students elected him Class Poet—began writing and sending his work out for publication. After receiving validation and encouragement from Fauset and Dubois, Hughes made his way to Harlem. His initial poetry collection, The Weary Blues, would generate attention and literary standing amongst the black middle class and intellectual circles. But by his second volume, Fine Clothes to the Jew, many felt Hughes betrayed the image of black respectability that the black middle class wished to protect under the gaze of the white establishment. Poets and writers like Hughes, along with contemporaries Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman and Zora Neal Hurston, had fallen out of favor with what sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called the “Black Bourgeoisie.” By focusing on everyday black folks he encountered in Harlem, Hughes showed the “beauty and ugly” of black people, profoundly expanding the racial uplift that was the central core of DuBois’ ideology, to a more inclusive level, exemplifying a sheer love for the people. As Hughes reminds us, “The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group. We younger Negro artist who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame” (“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” 693).
But Hughes’s struggle was not merely with the old guard of the Harlem Renaissance. He also struggled with fellow poets, friends and artistic rivals such as Countee Cullen whose work modeled European poets and who saw race as a burden to his artistic aspirations. Jean Toomer, another gifted contemporary, was another story entirely, for he reconciled his tragic struggle with identity by ultimately passing for white—vanishing into its world entirely. To this dismaying news, Arnold Rampersad in volume one of The Life of Langston Hughes, writes: “Hughes wondered how far fate and fame might take him away from his old dreams” (120). Rampersad reveals Hughes’s “ultimate hope” for himself, where he ruminates on his dreams and aspirations in his journal while a student at Lincoln University: “To create a Negro culture in America—a real, solid, sane, racial something growing out of the folk life, not copied from another” (173).
According to Rampersad, many critics had dismissed Hughes’s poetry as “far too simple and unlearned;” that his poetry “fails…to satisfy their desire for a modernist literature attuned to the complexities of modern life.” But Hughes’s aesthetic was both modernist in style and complex in its negation of the anachronistic paradigms of segregation and social inequality, conspicuously absent from many American modernist mainstream poets. That his politically-driven verse, with its clear-cut approach to reaching readers of all ages, was often summarily dismissed by conservative and liberal critics alike attested to Hughes’s maverick undertaking as a social poet in the American democratic tradition. That his blues and jazz innovations are sometimes overlooked in relation to American modernists is disingenuous at best.
Hughes simply believed that his poetry should speak to everyone; that one should “make it plain,” as Malcolm X put it. Hughes abhorred pretense, convolution and erudition in poetry. He privately chided black writers who felt obligated to impress with an alienating aesthetic brandishing book smarts over guilelessness. But Hughes was not anti-intellectual, by any stretch of the imagination, for his black genius was undoubtedly evident throughout his work. When Jesse B. Semple says, “Somebody is always trying to take disadvantage of me” (The Best of Simple 12), one does not need to read a dissertation to marvel at the brilliance of his signifying, giving truth to the lie of capitalism and the exploitation prevalent among those at the bottom of what Haitian poet Rene Depestre calls the “greasy pole” of its economic class structure.
To his detractors Hughes simply said, “I believe that poetry should be direct, comprehensible and the epitome of simplicity.” It is this aspect of Hughes’s proletarian aesthetic that allows his work to straddle both the adult and children’s literature realm. His first poetry collection for young readers, The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, contains poems that had previously been published in his first two adult collections, along with spot illustrations.
Hughes would go on to publish work specifically for black children, most of which are collaborations with close friend Arna Bontemps, beginning initially in the early 1930s and picking up momentum in the 1950s where Hughes published a number of cultural and historical books for black children—almost one each year—reflective of a renewed commitment to children’s literature. As Rampersad states, “Hughes understood…that there is no writing more important than writing for children” (Rampersad 26).
As Katharine Capshaw Smith states, “Bontemps and Hughes imagined themselves as the standard-bearers for a new black children’s literature, infiltrating a literary establishment which to this point had only offered biased and distorted images of African America” (7).
It is through his writing for adults and young people where Hughes wishes to reverse such conditioning. In 1941, twenty years after publishing in Crisis magazine, Hughes convincingly argues for the need for heroes in black literature:
The written word is the only record we will have of this our present, or our past, to leave behind for future generations…We have a need for heroes. We have a need for books and plays that will encourage and inspire our youth, set for them patterns of conduct, move and stir them to be forthright, strong, clear-thinking and unafraid… It is the social duty of Negro writers to reveal to the people the deep reservoir of heroism within the race…We need in literature the kind of black men and women all of us know exist in life; who are not afraid to claim our rights as human beings and as Americans… (Berry 299)
Hughes and Bontemps faced many obstacles in their production of black children’s literature. Conscious of instilling in black children a sense of identity and pride while
remaining politically persistent, they made concessions for their more blatantly political concerns such as Jim Crow and the history of racial oppression they felt black (and white) children needed to comprehend. This proved challenging for the two race men publishing in the white literary mainstream wishing to reach a wider audience. Thus, their works had to be more nuanced; unlike the books Hughes penned and published for adult audiences, which— given Hughes’s aesthetic—allowed him lateral movement in both worlds.
Hughes and Bontemps in their work for black children sought to dispel the stereotypes that have emerged in American children’s literature where black children were customarily depicted as pickaninnies and minstrels. In books such as Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti and the posthumously published The Pasteboard Bandit, Hughes and Bontemps also infuse in black children a sense of belonging to a greater African diaspora.
As a black artist unburdened by the blackness his father loathed, Hughes—through his proletarian yet lyrical poetry—scaled America’s racial mountain, denying his people both its beauty and humanity, by setting the record straight.
Shall I make a record of your beauty?
Shall I write words about you?
Shall I make a poem that will live a thousand
years and paint you in the poem?
(“My Beloved” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 36)
Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, Hughes published a steady stream of books for young readers, primarily through Dodd, Mead and Franklin Watts: Ranging from The First Book of Negroes (1952) to The First Book of Rhythms (1954) and The First Book of Jazz (1955) to The First Book of Africa (1960). This first series mainly provided black children with historical and cultural foregrounding, instilling in them a sense of pride, identity and awareness of their African and African American lineage and heroic heritage.
Other Hughes children’s books, mined from his copious poetry and rejected projects have been posthumously published. They include Black Misery, a humor book appealing to both adults and young people satirizing American racial prejudice and the schizophrenia of Jim Crow; The Sweet and Sour Animal Book, a collection of Hughes poems paired with artwork by elementary school children from the Harlem School of the Arts; Carol of the Brown King: Nativity Poems, beautifully illustrated by Ashley Bryan where Christ is depicted as black; and The Block, an inspirational collection of poems by Hughes celebrating the hopes and dreams of black children and the black community with gorgeous collages by Romare Bearden.
Books for young readers on Langston Hughes’s life continue to be published, introducing him to newer generations: Alice Walker’s Langston Hughes: American Poet, one of the first children’s books on Langston Hughes; Willie Perdomo’s Visiting Langston has a young, precocious black girl—a budding poet—making a sojourn with her father to visit Hughes’s Harlem home. It was at this very home where he would entertain neighborhood children on his front stoop, and teaching them to garden. This mirrors Hughes’s time spent in libraries; as a renowned poet and famous author, he could be found at the 124th Street Harlem branch of the New York Public Library (where he first encountered Countee Cullen) sitting at a tiny table in the children’s section writing and conducting research. I emulated Hughes’s love of children in Love to Langston, my own children’s biography of Hughes in verse. The author and illustrator photo on the inside flap has me and artist R. Gregory Christies on Hughes’s Harlem stoop surrounded by children; while on the back cover there is a famous shot of Hughes signing autographs during Negro History Week in Atlanta, mobbed by an ecstatic church full of black children. Lord knows the impact of such a visit; how many of those children in that 1947 photo would go on to be part of the Civil Rights movement.
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Hughes’s alter ego Jesse B. Semple once said, “I have had so many hardships in this life that it is a wonder I’ll live until I die” (Simple’s Uncle Sam 1). This sentiment is said of Hughes in the film Brother to Brother, a fictional account of the Harlem Renaissance where artist Bruce Nugent says to his protégé, “You have no idea what kind of sacrifices it takes to be the spokesperson for the entire race” (Brother to Brother). Hughes braved the Jim Crow South in the 1930s to conduct a book tour for Mary McCloud Bethune, visiting black children in black churches. Shadowed by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, he was also dragged before the McCarthy Hearings, which jeopardized his livelihood. Hughes is the progenitor of the Black Arts Movement, yet he was criticized by a younger generation of black writers and activists when “Black Is Beautiful” became the mantra. (“Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.”) His poem, “My People” and his manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” looms large. Its genius reverberates to this day. But Hughes was not only a genius—he was generous. His magnanimity and profound influence in mentoring young black writers—his literary and spiritual children—is visible in the trailblazing brilliance in poets, writers and scholars who he has affected directly: Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka (nee LeRoi Jones), Mari Evans, Calvin Hernton and Alice Walker; and indirectly through poets like Nikki Giovanni whose “Ego Tripping” is daughter to “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes has over 70 poems where dreams and dreaming are a motif. Hughes is our quintessential dreamer. His poetry and prose for black children lifted them up to, as Katherine Capshaw Smith reminds us, “assume a substantial role in the present identity and future possibilities of the community” (241).
Hughes’s legacy can be seen in Black Creators for Children, a collective of young black authors, illustrators, editors and designers working in children’s publishing that formed in Harlem in the mid-1970s. Led by artist Tom Feelings and including Pat Cummings, Marie Brown, Wade and Cheryl Hudson, and Bernadette and George Ford, Black Creators for Children continued Hughes and Bontemps’s revolution in black children’s literature that not only impacted African American children, but all American children today. Their foregrounding work made it possible for all American children to connect to fully rendered African American characters by writers and illustrators sensitive to their three dimensionality.
To Hughes, black children not only matter and are beautiful, they are connected to that Africa he made his way to at the beginning of his poet’s journey; an Africa ancient as rivers. But this “darker brother” ensured that they understood that they are also a substantial part of an America blue as bruises and dreaming. Calling to generations of “dream-singers,” Langston Hughes sings to us yet and still:
I take my dreams
And make of them a bronze vase,
And a wide round fountain
With a beautiful statue in its center,
And a song with a broken heart,
And I ask you:
Do you understand my dreams?
Sometimes you say you do
And sometimes you say you don’t
Either way
It doesn’t matter.
I continue to dream.
(“Dreamer” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 111)
Works Cited
Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Connecticut: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1983. Print.
Brother to Brother. Rodney Evans, dir. Wolfe Releasing, 2004.
Gates, Henry Louis. “The Black Man’s Burden.” Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michelle Wallace. Ed. Gina Dent. New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1992. 75-83. Print.
Hughes, Langston. “Conversation on the Corner.” The Best of Simple. New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1961, 1988.
---. The Big Sea. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1940, 1986. Print.
---. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Print.
---. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932. Print.
---. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest, ed. by Faith Berry. Connecticut: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1973. Print.
---. “Census.” Simple’s Uncle Sam. New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1965, 1993, 2000. Print.
---. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Nation 23 June 1926: 692-693. Print.
Medina, Tony and R. Gregory Christie, illustrator. Love to Langston. New York: Lee & Low Books, Inc., 2002. Print.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.
Smith, Katherine Capshaw. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Print.
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