LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)
The One and Only
by Charles Everett Pace

James Langston Hughes’ mold-breaking ways emerged as an act of nature. A descendent from a maternal lineage of abolitionists, writers, pioneers and politicians, as well as his expatriate father, Hughes appeared destined for a life of significance. Hughes broke the mold in his career choice (writer), subject matter (Black culture), and like other family members, his wandering ways. He was born in Missouri, raised in Kansas, Illinois and Ohio, and lived in Harlem, Paris and other places. His literary journey began upon publication at age 18 of his poem I’ve Known Rivers, written as his train crossed the Mississippi, as he traveled to visit his father in Mexico. Forty-one years later, the journey reached a major milestone upon his induction into the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

By age 28 Hughes asserted “I had to make a living from writing itself” and became the first African-American to earn his living exclusively from writing.  Soon jubilant, though melancholy proved the greater muse, Hughes and his contemporaries burst forth with a profusion of literary output.

Hughes’s poetry, and especially his blues poetry, also broke the mold in the representation of Black people in America. Hughes felt that the blues form illuminates best a Black aesthetic because it is an African-American folk form. Popularized in print, raised to a high art, the blues courageously engage the world. Says Hughes, “Politics in any country in the world is dangerous. For the poet, politics in any country had better be disguised as poetry. Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And, only poetry can be his resurrection.”

Through the blues, Hughes explored Black people’s complicated relationship with democracy. He embodied this complication of self expression in hostile space. Love, laughter, ambivalence served him well as themes, but most revealingly, Langston wrote about dreams. The American dream. Is it one conferred or deferred? And to whom? And, at what price?

Uncompromisingly a “race man,” yet Hughes linked himself resolutely to humanity. “I’ve never felt,” he related to a friend in 1961, “that my ‘me’ was any less or any more than anybody else. Nor have I ever felt very race-conscious in the ingrown sense – which is maybe why I have an objectivity of sorts in my writing which is not as ‘colored’ as it seems to be on the surface.”

In response to a Who’s Who in America (1967) request for a one sentence summary of his life’s goal, Hughes wrote, “My seeking has been to explain and illuminate [Black people’s] condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.” Christened by his peers “the people’s poet,” Langston Hughes gave the world a glimpse into the Black side of what Black America was, is, and so far as I can see, will be for generations to come. Word.

RECOMMENDED READING

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Hill and Wang, 1940.
If you read only one book about Langston Hughes, read this delightful autobiography, which chronicles his youth in Kansas, extended romps around Europe and Africa as a merchant seaman, as well as trips to Mexico and the Caribbean. It’s also one of the best chronicles of the Harlem Renaissance on record.
 
Rampersad, Arnold, ed., and Roessel, David, assoc. ed. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
This book is an excellent record of how a creative artist can change his writing style to mirror his political consciousness. It also shows how Langston developed from a blues to a jazz poet, thus illustrating the effect that Black music had on his writing.
 
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

---. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1941-1967, I Dream A World.
New York: Oxford University, Press, 1988.
These two volumes by Rampersad are the definitive scholarly works on Langston by one of America's premier literary historians, cultural critics, and all around nice guy.
 
Rampersad, Arnold and Roessel, David, ed., and Andrews, Benny. Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes. New York: Sterling Publishing Com., Inc., 2006.
Although the title says "for young people," I would add “for all people.”  Andrews’ images, which begin with adults and children at work on the cover, and features two drummers and a saxophone player on the inside jacket, perfectly illustrate what Hughes does with words, music, and musicality through his poetry. The editors have done an excellent job in their selection.  If you read just one volume of Hughes’ many books of poetry, this would be it.

CHARLES EVERETT PACE

Charles Everett Pace, was a program advisor, Texas Union, University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Purdue University, and Centre College of Kentucky. Pace graduated from Texarkana Community College, the University of Texas at Austin (B.A. biology) and Purdue University (M.A. American studies-history/anthropology). A 17-year veteran of The Great Plains Chautauqua, Pace and George Frein gave the keynote address at the final Presidential debate between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. Pace has also conducted U. S. Government Public Diplomacy Missions in 25 cities and nine countries across Africa. He does Chautauqua presentations as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. His latest work is in "Creative Leadership Training for Today's Students." Pace is a full-time Chautauquan living in Texarkana, Texas. Further information: www.charleseverettpace.com

LANGSTON HUGHES

QUOTES

"There are words like liberty
that almost make me cry.
If you had known what I know
you would know why."
– “Words Like Freedom”
 
"And I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother.  Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books – where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas."
– The Big Sea, p. 16
 
"For every artist the old moral problem of truth and compromise frequently comes to the fore.  Compromise often brings food and drink, truth alone glorifies the spirit.”
– The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. II., p. 121
 
"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
– "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," quoted in The Life of Langston

 Hughes, Vol I, p. 131
 
"Get out the lunch-box of your dreams
And bite into the sandwich of your heart,
And ride the Jim Crow car until it screams
And, like an atom bomb, bursts apart.”
– The life of Langston Hughes, Vol II, p. 227
 
"In Topeka, as a small child, my mother took me with her to the little vine-covered library on the grounds of the Capitol. There I fell in love with librarians, and I have been in love with them ever since – those very nice women who help you find wonderful books!" 
 – The Big Sea, p. 26

“My motto,
As I live and learn,
is
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.”
– Langston Hughes

Jazz at my funeral play:  "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me." – Langston Hughes

"Lots of white guys wrote about black musicians, but from our own people only Langston, it seems, bothered to write about us." – Randy Weston, jazz musician and president of the African American Music Society 

"For a man as great as he was, his sheer ease was something to behold." – Randy Weston

TIMELINE