All Men are Created Equal:

Langston Hughess Opposition to Discrimination

Against African Americans

By Reidun Kornelie Mork

A Thesis presented to the English Department

the University of Oslo

in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements

for the Master degree

Spring Term 2005

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface 3

Introduction 4

Chapter I.

Worship and Persecution: The Ordeal of the Artists 16

Chapter II.

Proletarians Unite: The Financial and Working Conditions of the Blacks 45

Chapter III.

Separated as the Fingers, United as the Hand: Education and Segregation 69

Conclusion 88

Bibliography 92

Abbreviations 95

2
 Preface

When I was first acquainted with Langston Hughes, what struck me as his most prominent

feature was the stamina of his will to revive and preserve the dignity of his race. He never

seemed to have chosen the easy way out of any situation, or to allow himself to be abstracted

from his task. He refused to imitate the life style of white people, although his complexion

was light enough to allow him to pass for a Mexican or a Latino. In his effort to identify with

the blacks he regarded himself as all black, and used all his talents and his energy to better the

situation for African Americans. In this thesis I have examined to some extent the reasons for

this attitude, and given a few examples of how he went about to achieve his aim. His

production is so huge that it was necessary to concentrate on a small section of it. I have

chosen a selection of articles from his column in the Chicago Defender, a few of his poems,

and the history book Black Magic. To pinpoint the development in the African Americans

cause, I have concentrated on the segregation policy, and the different stages of the practice of

it. I have tried to depict the historical background, and to give an account of the current event

that spurred his articles or his poems. In this way I have attempted to show the progress in the

blacks fight for equality, and in the gradual abandonment of segregation. In this process I

have employed the method of New Historicism, and viewed the text in the context of the

cultural conditions of its time of production. It seems very appropriate in this case to see the

making of a text as an interactive process, the text being both a product and a producer of

cultural energies and codes (Abrams 183). I have chosen three fields to look into. Chapter I

concentrates on the African American artists and their performances in theatres, clubs, and

cafes. Chapter II is about employment and the financial conditions of African Americans, and

Chapter III deals with education.

3
 Introduction.

Langston Hughess literary production has a wide range, and according to the critics the

variety is just as notable in quality as it is in genre. There seems, however, to be a general

consensus that his artistic values were of an undisputable high quality. The dissension appears

to stem from his lack of ability to make the sufficient effort to hone his tool into brilliance.

James Baldwin, when reviewing Selected Poems (1959), gives vent to his frustration in The

New York Times Book Review of March 29, 1959, as follows: Every time I read Langston

Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts, and depressed that he has done so

little with them (Critics 37).

Baldwin is not the only one to hold this opinion. Hughes seems to have slackened over

the years. His first poems were welcomed with jubilation, and his blues and jazz poems still

tower in the world of poetry. However, he obviously had his ups and downs all along. As

early as in 1931, hoping to publish a book of verse with the publisher Alfred A. Knopf,

Hughes sent a collection of poems to Carl Van Vechten for approval. VanVechten told him

that he found the poems to be insignificant, and that they would mean a decline from his

earlier achievements, The Weary Blues and Mulatto. He actually told Hughes: I

shouldnt wonder if you are pretty nearly through with poetry (Rampersad 197). Still,

Hughes sent the manuscript to Knopf, who rejected it. One of the editors, Bernard Smith,

made an interesting observation: The non-racial lyrics were neither distinguished nor

important, all the best poems were in the section devoted to racial protest. . . . After the high

quality of Not Without Laughter the book would be an act of retrogression (Rampersad 197).

At about this time, in 1932, Hughes is known to have exclaimed to Claude McKay: Ive

4
never felt so un-poetic in my life. I think I shall write no more poems. I suppose I am not

miserable enough. I usually have to feel very bad to put anything down and terrible to make

up poems (Rampersad 172). Also according to other critics, the genuinely good poems are

all to be found in connection with his early period. In 1949, in his review of One Way Ticket

in the Saturday Review of January 22nd, Saunders Redding is merciless in his condemnation:

It is a tribute to Langston Hughess earlier accomplishments that his reputation continues

undimmed by verse which of late is often jejune and iterative. Intellectual recognition of the

thinning out of his creativeness is inescapable, but emotional acceptance of the fact comes

hard. An old loving admiration simply will not die (Critics 31). He calls the volume stale,

flat and spiritless and continues: The reason for this dull level of lifelessness has a simple

explanation. Hughes harks back to a youthfulness that is no longer green. He has long since

matured beyond the limited expressive capacity of the idiom he uses in One Way Ticket. . . .

While Hughess rejection of his own growth shows an admirable loyalty to his self-

commitment as the poet of the simple, Negro common-folk, the peasant, the labourer, the

city slum-dweller-, it does a disservice to his art. And of course the fact is that Langston

Hughes is not now, nor ever truly was one of the simple common people (Critics 31).

The way I interpret this statement is that Hughes has not been paying attention to the

development in African American society. The accusation seems to be that when he continues

to employ oversimplified symbols, idioms, and words in general, he is suggesting that the

African Americans are in the same position in 1949 as they were in the 1920s. To put it

bluntly, he is accused of being totally out of touch, as if he himself has grown, but does not

recognise progress in his favourite subject, African Americans. Two years later, in 1951, in

The New York Times Book Review of May 6th, Babette Deutsch states that she finds the same

limitations in Montage of a Dream Deferred. After having praised Hughess gifts as an artist

writer, she continues: Yet the book as a whole leaves one less responsive to the poets

5
achievements than to the limitations of folk art. . . . His verse suffers from a kind of contrived

naivet. . . . It is a pity that a poet of undeniable gifts has not been more rigorous in his use of

them (Critics 32; italics mine). On the same page Babette Deutsch claims that he is a

popular singer because he has elected to remain one (Critics 32; italics mine).

If this is the case, it suggests either that Hughes is condescending, or that he remains

loyal to his vocation. In my opinion, the latter is the case. At an early stage of his career

Hughes deliberately chose the voice of the oppressed, the dialect of the lower-class blacks, to

convey his message. He is also the person who accused Countee Cullen of wanting to be

white, because he preferred to be called just a writer, not a black writer. Hughes himself

wanted very much to be black, in fact, it is amazing how strong this urge was, taking into

consideration how small an amount of his origin actually was African American. Both his

grandfathers were white and one of his grandmothers was a Native American. Still, his

outburst when he saw Africa for the first time rejects all but his black blood: My Africa!

Motherland of the Negro peoples! And me a Negro! (The Big Sea 10). Negro or not,

Hughess poems are a tribute to the black race, in form as well as in content. His most popular

form he found in the black music, the blues and jazz. This music is derived from African

American song, the basic instrument of illiterate people to express all kinds of feelings. The

blues in particular conveys something archetypal, authentic, and powerful. It embraces body

and soul, pain and pleasure, and it appears to be created by an ability to live, enjoy, and suffer,

which the white man seems to have civilized away. Hughes transferred this music into poetry,

and in doing so, he acknowledged his background and demonstrated his main project, to show

the world that African Americans have a dignity of their own, and do not have to adapt to

the ways of white folks.

If this colloquial style seemed out of place in his later period, it was mostly his poetry

which suffered from it. His Simple stories were highly valued, and in contradiction to

6
Saunders Redding in his review of One Way Ticket mentioned above, Carl van Vechten

claims that Hughes really belongs in black society: He is so completely at home when he

writes about Harlem that he can be both careless and sloppy, he says, and continues: In his

Simple books he is seldom either, and Simple Takes a Wife is a superior achievement to the

first of the series, Simple Speaks His Mind (Critics 33). The Simple stories, being a kind of

philosophy about general human matters, undoubtedly served their purpose in providing the

black audience with a face, an individuality, a suffering, contemplating person. If one wants

to trace the progress in the black peoples struggle for equality, however, his articles, also in

the Chicago Defender, are a better source, due to the fact that he there comments directly on

current events.

Hughes has been called one of the more controversial names in the history of

American poetry (CP 3). To be controversial requires strength, and Langston Hughes does

indeed stand out in the crowd as a very determined and strong young man. While the attitude

expressed by most of the African American society in the early 1900s tended towards

assimilation, Hughes wanted whole heartedly to preserve the heritage from earlier generations

and restore the dignity of black Americans. He thought ill of those who imitated the life style

of the white majority, and in The Big Sea he expresses this feeling: The better class

Washington colored people . . . were in the whole as unbearable and snobbish a group of

people as I have ever come in contact with anywhere. They lived in comfortable houses, had

fine cars, played bridge, drank Scotch, gave exclusive formal parties, and dressed well, but

seemed to me all together lacking in real culture and good common sense (Miller 14). He

also said: The irony is that these blacks accept and mirror the absurd values of the American

main stream, which segregates blacks even as it praises their exoticism and primitivism

(Miller 14).

7
 Hughess pride in his African origin may well have had something to do with his

father. They were poles apart, and it might be suggested that his dedication to the black

struggle was partly triggered by his fathers attitude to suppressed people in general. Hughes

writes in The Big Sea: My father had a great contempt for poor people. He thought it was

their own fault that they were poor. He added: My father hated Negroes. I think he hated

himself, too, for being a Negro (Jemie xxiv). Needless to say, Hughess relationship with his

father was very difficult, and Jemie states that he was close to suicide the summer of 1919,

during his stay with him (xxiv). Langston was seventeen at that time. Opposing his father

would be the natural reaction of any seventeen year old, so in this way his father may well

have been an influential factor in the forming of young Langstons convictions. Faith Berry

seems to agree with this view. She says about The Negro Speaks of Rivers: It emerged in

part from thoughts about his father, whose racial attitudes Hughes found so different from his

own(24). The strongest impact, however, appears to have been his Native American

grandmother. His delight in her is obvious in the following: You see, my grandmother was

very proud, and she would never beg or borrow anything from anybody. She sat, very much

like an Indian, copper-colored with long black hair, just a little grey at places at seventy, sat in

her rocker and read the Bible, or held me in her lap and told me long, beautiful stories about

people who wanted to make the Negroes free, and how her father had apprenticed to him

many slaves in Fayetteville, North Carolina, before the war, so that they could work out their

freedom under him as stone masons. And once they had worked out their purchase, he would

see that they reached the North . . . She was the last surviving widow of John Browns raid . . .

Nobody ever cried in my grandmothers stories (The Big Sea 17).

Another factor in the process of finding his vocation was his time at Columbia

University. After arriving in New York to start his education there, he had a week before

8
classes started, and he spent it getting acquainted with Harlem. Berry says: There was still a

mixed racial community in 1921, but it was already called the Negro Capital of the world. . .

Langston Hughes was fascinated: I wanted to shake hands with them, speak to them! (27).

He also was impressed to find that famous black artists whom he had read about in the black

press, lived in his neighbourhood. The fact that he could actually meet them on the street

thrilled him immensely. It is not difficult to understand his fascination with Harlem. Here,

obviously was a community where one actually embraced and applauded black people, a

place to be if not proud of being black, then certainly not ashamed either. And the

atmosphere! Berry confirms this comprehension of the young mans state of mind: At age

nineteen, Hughes was much taken with the myth of Harlems exoticism as any white person

during the nineteen twenties. His youthful impression of a gay, rollicking Harlem outweighed

any realization that it was a community whose growing economic and social problems were

causing it to emerge as a ghetto. But he learned (28).

In sharp contrast to his time spent in Harlem, stood his existence at the university. He

was not comfortable there. At first, it turned out that the university authorities had not

realized, at the time, that they were assigning a room at the dormitory to a coloured person.

This was generally not done, and on his arrival they were reluctant to admit him. It was a bad

start, and things did not improve. Nothing seemed to agree with him. He found his subjects,

except for the English Literature, boring. In addition, Berry calls his assignment as part of the

reportorial staff at The Spectator, the Columbia University newspaper, an unpleasant joke.

He was asked to cover the fraternity beat and social events, but Afro-Americans were not

welcomed into fraternity hours or at social functions (29). These factors obviously also

contributed to the decision he made at the end of the academic year. He then left the

university and moved to Harlem to spend all his energy on his literary endeavours. The

experience of this period, feeling so at home in black society and so out of place among the

9
whites, must have influenced and strengthened his determination to identify with, and engage

himself in, the black struggle.

When Zell Ingram and Langston Hughes returned from Haiti in 1931, they had an

encounter with a lady who was going to be of the greatest importance to Hughess attitude

towards the African Americans. The two young writers were received by Mrs. Mary McLeod

Bethune, also called Americas leading Negro woman, at her home in Daytona Beach.

Here, in 1904, she had founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls.

This formidable lady hitchhiked with them to the North, to the young mens delight. What

luck for us, Hughes would recall of an encounter so timely as to be almost providential.We

shared Mrs. Bethunes wit and wisdom, too, the wisdom of a jet-black woman, who had risen

from a barefooted field hand in a cotton patch to be head of one of the leading junior colleges

in America, and a leader of her people. At the crucial moment, on his return to the United

States, he had found the perfect figure to counteract in his mind the still unvanquished image

of godmother. Big-boned, black-skinned, and dynamic, at once both commanding and

maternal, Mrs. Bethune seemed to personify for Langston, in this pivotal moment of his life,

what their race might be, and he himself might be in his relationship to it (Rampersad 211).

This remarkable lady had set out, at the age of twentynine, with one dollar and fifty cents as

her sole monetary possession, and founded her school. The institution grew quickly, and she

soon found herself to be the focus of black society in Daytona. She was a brilliant organizer,

and prominent black leaders were quick to recognize her. Rampersad tells us: Appointed first

by Calvin Coolidge, then by Herbert Hoover, to the National Child Welfare Commission,

she gave advice to both presidents on race and education, - eventually she would serve five

presidents in this way (212). Where segregation was concerned, it was not tolerated on the

campus of Daytona Beach. Mrs. Bethune solicited support from white people, both locals and

visitors, and at least on one occasion she organized a protest against the Ku Klux Klan. It was

10
she, too, who set Hughes on the track of reading tours, which was to become his main income

over several years. You should go all over the South with your poems, she urged him. People

need poetry (Rampersad 212). She obviously was of great significance in young Langstons

carreer as a poet.

Whatever caused it, Hughes turned to the roots of black life and black culture for

themes as well as for the techniques to express them. In retrospect it is inevitable to regard

him as a pioneer in advance of the cultural movement in the 1960s and 1970s, when

everybody went ethnic and the black people marched for their rights. His message, like

theirs, was: We shall overcome.

Pride is a key word with Langston Hughes. It is when exposing the proud black woman

and the proud black man he hits his white audience the hardest with the insanity of treating

these people like inferiors to themselves. The Negro Speaks of Rivers is his most

outstanding testimony to the pride he felt in belonging to the black race (CP 23). It is also

evidence of his conviction of his project at an early stage of his life. He wrote it at the age of

seventeen right after his graduation from high school in 1920, on the train to Mexico to spend

that disastrous summer with his father. It is a fascinating scene; here is this young man, a rare

mixture of genes, not particularly dark-skinned, sitting by a train window and being given

these powerful words, acting as a medium to talk on behalf of black Americans.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers is a tribute to the black man, not to a sad mulatto like

himself, and it is a powerful manifestation of the significance of the black people in the past.

The poem implies that the black mans wisdom and strength is derived from his long

coexistence with nature and God. The river, the symbol of eternity, deep, ever flowing and

mysterious, has transferred to the black man its immortality: my soul has grown deep like the

river. It indicates that he was present at the first of our known cultures, the river-cultures at

11
the Euphrates and the Tigris, and then follows his ascent throughout history, towards ever

greater skill.

First he uses the image of the primitive tribe member, asleep in his humble hut by the

river Congo, perfectly contented in his unpretentious existence. At the next stage of his

progress, the Negro is shown as the proud and capable constructor of one of the worlds

wonders. Now he is not sleeping by the river. He is placed above it, overlooking it to find a

site for his masterpiece. I looked upon the Nile/and raised the pyramids above it.

After having situated the Negro in such an elevated position, the poet does not have to

spell out to the reader the abhorrence of the act of making the Negro a slave and treating him

like cattle. He only emphasizes the stupidity and the cruelty of it by telling us that eternity

rejoices when the injustice is undone: I heard the singing of the Mississippi/and Ive seen its

muddy bosom burn all golden in the sunset, when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. The

repetition of the phrase My soul has grown deep like the river turns it into a warning:

Remember my worth. I am as good as you are. Perhaps better.

Jemie tells us: The poem is related to Zora Neal Hurstons judgement of the mythic

High John de Conquer, whom she held as a symbol of the triumphant spirit of the black

America: that John was of the Be class, Be here when the ruthless man comes, and be here

when he is gone (103-104). By making the black man present from the earliest times and

emphasizing his presence through the stages of history, Hughes assures his readers that the

black man also will survive for the future, and again restore his dignity and power. The

repetition of the personal pronoun at the beginning of four successive lines places the subject

of the black man in a universal position, strikingly emphasizing his worth:

I bathed in the Euphrates

I built my hut near the Congo
I looked upon the Nile
I heard the singing of

12
 This poem proved to be of great significance to Hughess career. He sent it to Jessie

Fauset. I took the beautiful dignified creation to Dr. Du Bois, Fauset recalled, and said:

What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like this and is

still unknown to us? (Watson 53). Du Bois published it in his magazine, The Crisis, the

organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP.

W.E.B. Du Bois was regarded as the forefather of the Harlem Renaissance, and the

magazine, which was founded in November 1910, was the magazine that paved the way for

the Renaissance (Watson 17). It had a large readership, about 95,000 in 1919, mostly

middle class. Consequently, the effect of Hughess first publication must have been to give

him a flying start as a spokesman for his peoples rights. Du Bois had high aspirations for the

black race: They combined progressive race-politics, (African-Americans should develop

their own institutions, write about their own experience, embrace pan-Africanism), and elitist

uplift, (Howard University, domestic property, Dunbar Apartments). The block of socially

aspiring Negroes about whom Du Bois wrote was known as the Talented Tenth and derisively

known as the dicties. . . Du Bois predicted: The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are

worthy of saving up to their vantage ground (Watson 18-19). Being included in this circle

gave Hughes an excellent vantage point to realize his poetic vocation. The Negro Speaks of

Rivers paved the way to his position by making his audience listen when he spoke. One of

the most significant departments in which he let his voice be heard was the practice of

segregating blacks and whites in their everyday life.

The segregation policy was mostly a southern phenomenon, and to trace its roots it is

necessary to go all the way back to the civil war.The reason for the extreme hostility towards

blacks in the South, much more prominent than in the North, is to be found in the

environment and the climate of the two parts of the continent. The South was ideal for the big

tobacco and cotton plantations, where great numbers of unskilled labour were needed. Thus

13
the South came to build its economy on black slaves, and succeeded to the point that they

wanted to break out of the Union. The North with its industrial areas was constantly fed with

cheap white labourers who never made it on their own beyond the first harbour, so slavery

was never practised to the same degree there. They never became dependant upon it. So,

when Abraham Lincoln needed help to defeat the rebels of the South, he could afford to make

the emancipation of the slaves his main aim, in order to get much needed assistance from

Europe. When the South was finally defeated in 1865, it did not mean just a surrender. It

marked the end of a culture. After four years of war the South lay with broken back. The

people were starving, the fields ruined, the big plantation houses plundered or burned down

by passing Northern troops. On top of it all the Southerners were told that their slaves, who

they had previously regarded as so much property, now were their equals in all respects. To

expect this society of abrupt and forced equality to function from day one would have been

extremely nave. There is a limit to the amount of injustice, rightly felt or not, a society can

take before it erupts, and the government in Washington had to soften the blow to mitigate the

hatred from the population in the South. This was done by sanctioning the bill of White

control of the South. The Southerners interpreted this as a permission to treat the blacks any

way they wanted. Since they could not take revenge on the federal government for all their

losses, they took out their hatred on the blacks, and dared the federal government to interfere.

One way of manipulating the justice system was to prohibit black people from the jury

system, and even though the Supreme Court had established their right to act as jurors, this

right was very seldom put into practice. The legal system was slowly and gradually changed

by complicated manoeuvres and sanctioned by the laws of the city or state. In this way the

prohibitions were made legal, and the segregation became the everyday way of life. The

penalty for violating the laws was often death, and many African Americans gave their lives

to save their dignity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, conditions became desperate.

14
In 1905 a conference was held, instigated by Andrew Carnegie, and including black leaders

such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. They made a resolution to press for

absolute civil, political, and public equality. In 1910, the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People was formed, and the NAACP charter was signed by several

prominent persons, including Du Bois, Jane Addams, and Lincoln Steffens. Its agenda was

straightforward: To secure the basic citizenship rights guaranteed by the 14th and 15th

amendment to the United States Constitution. Most specifically this meant an end of all

segregation laws, a right to equal education, and a guarantee of the right to vote (To Make

Our World Anew 377-382). Their fight was an uphill struggle though, and the civil rights

proved to be even more difficult to obtain than the political rights.

This is the reality Langston Hughes was born into. In 1909 he was seven years old. In

1919, at the age of seventeen, he wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers, and in 1944 we find

him still going strong about his theme: equality and respect. He ran at that time a column in

the Chicago Defender. It is only a small part of his production of that period, but it was very

useful in his effort to reach white people with his claims for the blacks. Ruth Reese says about

his Simple figure: He was a spokesman whom from day to day told about what the Negros

felt and meant, seen from the little mans sad platform, in a sublime form of humorous

wagging (197; translation mine). The part about Simple occupied about a third of Hughess

column in the Chicago Defender, and it proved to be a huge success. According to Reese it

made white people start reading the Chicago Defender and thereby made them susceptible to

his comments on current events. Inevitably it also strengthened his reputation as a writer, and

helped bringing attention to the rest of his production.

15
 Chapter I

Worship and Persecution: The Ordeal of the Artists

Justice
----------
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we blacks are wise.
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.(CP 31).

Justice was first published in Amsterdam News in April 1923. At that time Langston

Hughes worked as a mess boy aboard the Oronoke. It was anchored at Jones Point, a few

miles south of West Point, to serve as mother-ship to the Bellbuckle and the West

Hassayampa. Rampersad tells us that he was very productive during this period. After he had

recovered from his disappointment when he learned that the ship was going nowhere, he

found the surroundings and his shipmates, being of many nationalities, inspiring (Rampersad

61).

He was twenty-one years old, and according to the records, eager for life and adventure,

bursting to fight injustice as he had experienced it so far. As this was before his trip to the

South, where he was confronted with really hateful segregation for the first time, this poem

can be read as a testimony from a young soul, an outburst of frustration from one who still

expects life to be just, one who is not yet worn out by a lifetime of maltreatment.

Like most of his racial poems, Justice conveys a serious message. To picture justice

as a goddess is nothing new, and she has often been accused of blindness. What makes this

poem so visual, and thereby powerful, is the third line, imagining her eyes as festering sores

behind her bandage. The vivid picture of a piece of cloth, soiled by the rotten liquid from

16
the sores, across the face of the noblest symbol of democracy, hits the reader hard. It indicates

not only malfunctioning in society, it claims that the society is in decay. The poem is

universal. There is only one word to classify it as a racial protest, the word black in the

second line. Except for that single word the poem could have been written about any field of

injustice, or any group of oppressed people, or any particular incident. However, it is, as we in

our days recognize, the undisputable truth about the conditions of the black people in the

U.S.A. at that time. There was no justice for African Americans in 1923, in any field of

existence, in the nation whose creed it was that all men are created equal. They were

discriminated in every possible way. They were, for instance, abused as persons even as they

were celebrated as artists. They were the last to get a job and the first to loose it, and their

chances of getting an education were strictly limited. This could hardly be called democracy,

and Justice is one of Hughess first attacks on the lack of democratic practice in the U.S.A.

Hughess poems Childrens Rhymes is somewhat related to Justice:

Whats written down

for white folks
aint for us a-tall
Liberty and Justice-
Huh-for all.(CP 390).

All though Justice and this jingle share the same theme, the failure of democracy, the latter

has singled out the targets of the unjust treatment. By naming the white folks as the

fortunate ones, Hughes places their opposite, the blacks, as the maltreated. The achievement

of this alteration is immediately revealed. The evasive, all embracing accusation in Justice

leaves the reader with too much to cope with. Yes, we agree, life is not just. That is the way of

the world, and something that everybody experiences sooner or later. This is knowledge so

old that we have idioms in our language to describe it. In this light there does not seem to be

much we can do to remedy this state of affairs. In Childrens Rhymes, though, the injustice

has been narrowed down to something we actually can do something about. Hughes pinpoints

17
the situation of the African Americans, and thereby makes it everybodys responsibility. The

reference to the written words elevates the issue to the highest level of authority, and the very

foundation of the nation. Brown refers to this time as when certain notion of liberty, justice,

and equality were cited, justified, and of course, written down, in various guises, in the

Declaration of Independence and later in the Constitution of the United States(CLC Vol. 10,

281). What Brown calls the ironic ambiguity of the verse is expressed in the third and the

fourth line: aint for us a-tall / Liberty and Justice. A society which excludes a whole group

of its members from their constitutional rights is neither liberal nor just. As Brown phrases it:

In this way the white Americans failed their own ideal, and denied themselves the substance

of those libertarian ideas that have been enshrined in the sacred rhetoric, and history, of the

American Revolution (CLC Vol. 10. 281). In this way the American society is inflicting

damage upon itself. It is the same accusation as the line festering sores in Justice

indicates, only more precise.

The form, too, of the Childrens Rhymes, increases the impact of the message. In

choosing the children as speakers, Hughes reveals that the injustice has penetrated all levels of

the black community. It can be seen as an indication that the practice has become so common

that the children chant about it in accompaniment to their play, without reacting to the content

of the words. Brown is of a different opinion, though. He calls their chanting knowing sneers

about nonexistent liberty and justice (CLC Vol. 10, 281). However, the effect is the same. If

Hughess intention is to demonstrate political consciousness and bitterness in the children, the

accusation is just as hard.

The oral style and the dialect in the verse serve to underline the identity of the speaker .

In phrasing the last two lines as direct speech, Hughes forces the reader to meet the speaker

face to face. One is left with an image of the black man or the black child turning and walking

away in disgust at the white mans deceit: Huh-For all. On the whole, the choice of words

18
and the layout of the verse seem deliberate and well planned. The comparison between the

two poems seems to confirm Bernard Smiths statement above, that all the best poems were

in the section devoted to racial protest. Although Justice is very striking in its clipped and

simple form, it seems to be the product of a moments inspiration, received and written down

with no further pondering. If Hughes had really worked on it to perfect it, he would have

rewritten the second line. The word thing is a sloppy expression in almost any context, and

should be avoided in such a short poem, where every single word carries great significance.

This might be an early sign of the characteristic which in later years brought critics to accuse

him, as mentioned above, of a laziness that led to lack of perfection in his works.

On the other hand quite the opposite could be the case. Hughes was very determined,

determined to achieve better conditions for his race, and the size of his production bears

witness to that fact. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that he may have gained in quality if he

had reduced the quantity of the works which were steadily streaming from his pen. It is hard

to alter ones natural inclinations, though, and Hughes was in a hurry, always on the run,

seeking new places, new challenges, and new ways to fight for his conviction, fighting the

injustice he saw practiced in his surroundings every day. The poems Justice and Childrens

Rhymes include all aspects of existence. In my opinion they can serve as an opening

declaration, a base for Hughess exploration of all the different departments where the blacks

were suppressed and scorned. One of these departments is the realm of the entertainers.

The importance of the artists in paving the way to equality between the races can hardly

be overestimated. The written word in all its variations was naturally a most efficient tool, and

poets and authors and journalists certainly made their contribution. Still, black music, with its

playing and dancing and singing artists, took a shortcut to the hearts of the whites. The

Harlem Renaissance is perhaps the most striking example of this fashion, and it was here, in

the realm of entertainment, that segregation came to its most absurd display. The exoticism of

19
the black arts were in strong demand among the white population already in the 1920s,

when the white middle class invaded the cafes and clubs in Harlem. In those early days it was

unimaginable to regard the black artist to be anything close to equal to his white spectators.

He was simply an underling with a rare gift, a monkey with one amazing trick, who was

allowed to appear in the proximity of his white audience only as long as he was good at this

trick of his. The fact that the trick, the captivating power and disturbing appeal in the blues

and jazz, was the result of generations of suffering and agony, was not recognized. In the

Langston Hughes Reader, we read: The Blues! Songs folks make up when their heart hurts,

thats what the Blues are. Sad funny songs too sad to be funny and too funny to be sad.

Thus one of the characters in the Negro play, DONT YOU WANT TO BE FREE?, at the

Harlem Suitcase Theatre, defines the Blues. Then he goes on to say: Colored folks made up

the Blues. . . . We made em out of being poor and lonely, and homes busted up, and broke

(Reader 159). This misery is heartbreakingly clearly expressed in Hughess opening poem of

his first volume, The Weary Blues, published in February 1926 (CP 50).

The speaker of the poem is describing a singing pianist who plays on Harlems Lennox

Avenue. The atmosphere is vividly created through the carefully chosen words, which lull the

reader into the lazy rhythm of the blues: Droning a drowsy . . . Rocking back and forth to a

mellow croon. . . By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light. The image of the ebony hands on

the ivory keys becomes a dramatic reminder of the contrast between the conditions of the

blacks and the conditions of the whites. R. Baxter Miller says: Where poetic images exist, as

part of human language, they necessarily contribute to emotive and moral discourse. For the

Black American and social poet, they intensely reconfirm the tension between the pictured

world (American Dream) and the real one (racial lynching) (Critics 109). Even the poor

piano is moaning, and the piano players stool is rickety. It is altogether a miserable life. The

speaker of the poem shows his indignation at the treatment of the piano player when he says:

20
He played the sad ragged tune like a musical fool. This gives associations to the Fool of

kings and noblemen in earlier times, who had to pay homage to his master in order to survive.

Still, that fool often had to be very smart to be able to act his part sufficiently, and was in fact

more often than not in a position to manipulate his superiors. Perhaps our piano player, while

entertaining the white people, is a potential threat, despite his subdued position. The thump,

thump, thump went his foot on the floor could indicate that. He may not be conscious of it

himself, but his misery, which is so agreeably expressed to the whites, is a time bomb. History

shows that there is a limit to how long injustice can be inflicted, and endured, before the

mechanisms of equality tip the balance. The piano player tells the reader: Aint got nobody

in all this world/and I wished that I had died. Finally he sleeps; like a rock or a man thats

dead, all worn out by his effort to satisfy his audience until the dawn of day: The stars went

out and so did the moon.

The melting together of form, technique and theme in this poem is quite unique.

Expressed through the blues, the theme, which is the piano players misery, becomes the pain

of the artist and the pleasure of his audience. This technique serves to expose very clearly the

immense abuse which is taking place. The picture of the white Americans applauding the

black Americans despair is a harsh reminder to society that something must be done about

such unfair conditions. They persisted, though, for decades to follow.

In 1967 Langston Hughes, together with Milton Meltzer, published Black Magic: A

Pictorial History of the African-American in the Performing Arts. In the foreword to the 1990

edition Ossie Davis calls Hughes recording secretary to the tribe, and states that he

considered it his job to keep the tribe together. He continues in pointing out Hughess way

of always reminding African Americans of the importance of their arts. The dancing and

singing and all the black entertainment he says, is the only field in which the blacks are in

control of the whites. He calls it an island of self-sufficiency set in a sea of almost universal

21
doubt (Black Magic foreword). This makes sense. In fact, in retrospect it is hard to imagine

any other spearhead sharp enough to pierce the invisible but seemingly impenetrable partition

between blacks and whites. In this respect Langston Hughess contribution is unique, and

Black Magic with its combination of facts, photographs and exciting story telling is yet

another example of Hughess engagement in the blacks cause, and of the diversity of his

production. Davies recognizes the significance in exhibiting the proud history of the black

arts. He says: Our art, to us, was always, and still is, a form of self-assertion, a form of

struggle, a repository of self esteem that racism, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan could never

beat out of us the only authentic history that black folks have in America, because we made

it ourselves (Black Magic foreword).

On the flyleaf of the book Milton Meltzer tells us that it was to have no dedication, but

right after it was finished and before it could be published, Hughes died. Meltzer says: I

think now, that the artists who played and sang and danced in the many works he created for

them, and the audience to whom he gave such joy, would want to see the book dedicated

To Langston, with love.

In the chapter called Boulders in the Path in Black Magic, Hughes tells a tale of

situations which would have been ridiculous except for the personal tragedy they frequently

involved. When touring the country, black artists had to suffer all kinds of humiliations. In

1937 the black jazz singer Bessie Smith, known as Empress of the Blues, died after a car

accident, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Rumour has it that she died because she was refused

admittance to the hospitals close enough to save her life, because they were for whites only.

By the time she arrived at the nearest black hospital, she had bled to death. Bessie Smith was

regarded as the greatest jazz singer of her time by the black society. After her death she was

canonized by all, blacks and whites, and the way she died became a heavy argument against

segregation. Segregation of the audience was quite common, of course. The blacks were most

22
often exiled to the top gallery, ironically called Nigger Heaven. Worse still, in some places,

like at the National Theatre in Washington, blacks were prohibited from entering. All black

casts were popular, but mixed casts could not perform. In some cases this turned into absurd

situations. Hughes says: Colored concert artists could not use their regular accompanist if the

pianist happened to be white (as was Kosti Vehanen with Marian Anderson), or else the

pianist must be hidden behind a screen (Black Magic 282). This scene implies a degree of

self delusion among the whites verging on insanity, and one cannot begin to comprehend the

bitterness it must have created in the heart of this one of historys greatest singers. Sometimes

following the restrictions would not be enough. When giving a concert in his home town of

Birmingham, Nat King Cole was knocked down and nearly dragged from the stage by two

white ruffians because they knew he had an integrated orchestra (Black Magic 282). In his

case, it did not help that it was hidden behind a screen. This was as late as 1956.

Thirty-one years earlier, in 1925, Hughes wrote and published The Jester, describing

the conditions of the performing artist. According to Hughess article in the Chicago

Defender of September 23, 1944, the audience had started to mingle as early as that. Hughes

is describing the situation at the famous Club Zanzibar at that time as follows: Negro

customers are usually led straight to the raised platform running around three sides. They are

never put on the center-side facing the stage until the side seats are full, then maybe a few

dark folks spill over onto the main level (Chicago Defender 53-54). He ends his piece in

putting forward what seems the only sensible suggestion: Since white and colored people

dance all over the same dance-floor there, and jitterbug and bump all up against each other,

and nobody seems to mind it in the least, the sensible thing, it would seem to me, for the

management of the Zanzibar to do, would be to let people of any color sit anywhere, and stop

putting that chocolate band of humanity all around the walls (Chicago Defender 54). Blacks

23
and whites dancing together. This seems to be a major improvement, at a rather early stage in

the process.

For the artists, however, matters had not improved as late as 1956. At first this seemed

an odd observation, but as Hughes tells us, it was only on the dance floor this social

intercourse took place. Considering this fact, we land on the seemingly only possible

explanation. Once again the white race and the black race are united in celebrating an art

form, and the power of the arts becomes more significant than ever. Here are the couples on

the dance floor, intertwining in their mutual pleasure in the dancing, perfectly equal, perfectly

at ease in each others company. The wall of segregation has vanished in thin air, or at least

been hoisted to the skies in order to allow this interlude, this short truce. Then the music

stops, and the wall comes crashing down again. The blacks and the whites go to their allotted

stations, the blacks to form their humble chocolate band around the walls, the whites to

claim, as a matter of course, their privileged places in the centre. The same farce is taking

place in the theatre. The artists on the stage captivate their audience who give themselves over

in the appreciation of the performance to the point that artists and audience are one body in

the sharing of the art. Then the curtain falls, and the segregation is re-established. I think this

is another evidence of the significance of the entertainers in the fight for equal rights. They

were the fore runners, but they also were the ones who experienced the irrationality and the

ordeals of the practice most tangible on body and soul.

In contrast to The Weary Blues, which pinpoints the piano player in all his misery,

The Jester embraces entertainers in general (CP 56). This entity, which no society can

function without, has been treated with various degrees of respect during the history of our

civilization. In ancient Greece, the actors/entertainers were celebrated like half gods, both

those who displayed their performing skills on the stage, and those who demonstrated their

physical strength and endurance in the sports arena. In ancient Rome, the gladiators literally

24
fought for their lives, killing wildly in desperation to please their audience in order to survive

themselves. Hughess jester, however, is, like the piano player in The Weary Blues, a direct

reference to the Kings Fool as we know him from Shakespeares hand. The Kings Fool did

not have to kill to survive. His battle was of a different character, as his life depended upon

his masters favour. He therefore had to dedicate his whole existence to please the king, to

make him laugh, to amuse and entertain him. In order to obtain this he had to humiliate

himself and relinquish all his feelings of dignity. So has Hughess black jester been forced

to do. He has become the dumb clown of the world.

The opening image is a neat description of the perfect artist. It depicts an individual

without individuality, playing whichever part that pleases his audience at a given time,

suppressing his own personality in order to survive. He is the professional pleaser, on the

stage of life :

In one hand
I hold tragedy
And in the other
Comedy

All though the poem obviously is aimed at describing the situation of the performing artists, it

can very well be read as an image of the blacks position in general. In line 6, 7, 8, and 9

Hughes is scornful:

Laugh at me!
You would laugh.
Weep with me!
You would weep.
.

Of course they would laugh, he seems to say. Not with me, but at me, regardless of the quality

of my situation, tragedy or comedy. You would weep is also ironical in my opinion. What

he actually is saying is: As if you would weep! As if you could care less! This is the closest

he comes to an attack, except for the accusation that his superiors are silly men.

25
 Just as Holbergs servants often are allowed to outwit their masters, Shakespeares fool

is frequently given the upper hand in the struggle for power and influence over his

surroundings. Acting the idiot, the fool often is equipped with a quick mind and a shrewd

intelligence, qualities that were necessary to survive in the complicated, precarious life at

court. Hughes refers to this fact at the end of his poem. Once I was wise, he says, and the

final line places our jester in an even worse position than his ancestors when it reads: Shall I

be wise again? This indicates that the fool has lost his capacity for manipulating his

surroundings, and is now reduced to playing the part of the pathetic pleaser.

It is interesting to note that the end of the poem was written differently in Opportunity

in December 1925. Back then it appeared as follows:

Shall I
Be wise
Again?

(CP 627). What he is actually asking here is: Shall I be respected again? Shall I ever regain

the power which I once had? Hughess jester does not regard himself as stupid. The line I

am the booted, booted, fool of silly men indicates that it is his superiors who are at fault,

because they are not able to recognize his values. It only takes their awakening to enable him

to claim his rightful position in society. The way in which this phrase was emphasized in the

first publication indicates its significance. It also naturally leads to the scrutiny of the line

above, and to the realization of the marked break in form:

Once I was wise

Shall I
Be wise
Again?

These four lines constitute the two last lines in the later editions. Put together they form an

iambic pentameter in the best European tradition. They serve as an exclamation mark in

question form to close the poem and leave the reader just a tiny bit disturbed. Here Hughes

seems to have deliberately been mixing traditions in order to obtain a striking effect. Richard

26
K. Barksdale tells us in his Hughes:His Times and His Humanistic Techniques that by 1920,

what seems to me a line of assimilation, rather than integration, of black artists was taking

place in the white artistic society, as already referred to above. The creed was that by adapting

Western techniques and practices, black writers, painters and sculptures would be admitted

into a racially integrated society. It went so far as to even Europeanize the so-called spiritual

and sorrow songs of the slaves (Critics 94-95). This was the tradition Hughes refused to adapt

to, the tradition Countee Cullen followed to the extent that Hughes accused him of wanting to

be white. Still, in The Jester he seems to have made a compromise, and I find the effect

striking. These closing lines become almost rhetorical in their quest. Regarding the jester as a

person it is indeed rhetorical. Wisdom is not a thing you can have, and loose, and regain. The

jester does not need an answer. He is simply establishing the fact that he has lost his worth.

Thereby the question gets this rhetorical ring to it. This quality is transferred to the image

which the jester personifies, the image of the underestimated black source of amusement in

the superior world of the white, there for them to treat as their mood dictates. There is nothing

to indicate any change in his situation in the foreseeable future, and the last lines turn into a

hopeless sigh rather than a question to be answered.

What caused the change in later editions can only be guesswork on my part. I would not

rule out the possibility that Hughes himself made the alteration, knowing his urge to oppose

the European influence. The form of the rest of the poem is very casual, however, and

different from his folk tradition poems or his blues and jazz poems. It is simply a description

of the existence of the Black Jester, hopeless as it is, with this somewhat detached question

in the closing whether matters will improve or not in the future.

I find the atmosphere of the poem to be somewhat resigned, which I do not think was

Hughess intention. This seems to be one of his poems which lacks the finishing touch. As

mentioned before, the only parts of the text which serve to engage the temper of the reader is

27
the bit of sarcasm in line 6, 7, 8, and 9, and the closing. It would have gained by some of his

famous irony. Nevertheless, it is an accurate description of white American attitude towards

black Americans in general in the early 1900s, and because of the theme of entertainment, it

comes naturally to focus on the artist as the speaker in the poem.

In 1955 Lena Horne called off a Miami Beach engagement because the hotel in which

she was going to sing refused to register her for a room. The world wide celebrated, almost

worshipped blues singer Billie Holiday, who held her fame and popularity until the day she

died in 1959, is given a whole paragraph in Hughess book: Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the

Blues describes her long bus tour with the Artie Shaw Band. Many of the restrooms along

the highway were labelled FOR WHITE ONLY. I got to the place were I hardly ever ate, slept

or went to the bathroom without having a major NAACP-type production. . . I got so tired of

scenes in crummy roadside restaurants over being served. . . Some places they would not even

let me eat in the kitchen. Some places they would. Sometimes it was a choice between me

eating and the whole band starving. I got tired of having a federal case over breakfast, lunch

and dinner (Black Magic 282). 1955, and still a long way to go. In order to illustrate the

many setbacks in the fight against segregation, we will go back in time for about a decade.

Wheel about and turn about

An do jist so
An ebery time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow . . . (BlackMagic 16).

A little slave boy singing this refrain and cutting capers on a street corner, so the story goes,

caught the attention of an intinerant actor-singer named Daddy Rice. . . Anyhow, he picked

up from this little black boy both his song and his dance, and with it Rice became famous.

Daddy Rice blackened his face like the little colored boy and dressed in rags when he sang

Jump Jim Crow. . . . Another entertainer, performing in burnt cork, David Emmet, borrowed

the song from Rice and, as one of the first full time minstrel men carried it with acclaim

28
throughout the country. Jump Jim Crow thus became the cornerstone of what was to be for

eighty years Americas most popular form of entertainment, the black faced minstrels (Black

Magic 16-18). Later on Hughes goes on to inform us that The Virginia Minstrels were the

first blackface show to play in New York. It opened in 1843 on the Bowery, and it was

headed by the same Emmet (Black Magic 20).

Here we learn that in 1843, eighteen years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and

twenty two years before the abolition of slavery, black art was publicly cheered. One might

argue that this was merely white men in disguise, but according to Hughes, even the real

blacks enjoyed the same kind of celebration, at least as early as the 1850s, A New England

colored group, the Luca Family father, mother, and four sons were a singing sensation on

tours throughout the North before the Civil War. According to newspapers the Lucas were

received with the wildest enthusiasm in Boston in 1853 (Black Magic 28).

Hughes does not tell us anything about how the artists were treated off stage, but it is

general knowledge that they were received in the homes of some political celebrities at this

time, sometimes with the purpose to build a case against the South and have a moral excuse,

in addition to the political urge to keep the union intact, to wage war against that region.

However, one would have expected some progress in the integration of the races in a hundred

years, even in the rigorous South. When we contemplate the contents of Billie Holidays

testimony of 1955, this seems not to be the case. In between these dates we find Hughess

poem Minstrel Man,(CP 61), also expressing the misery of the performing artist. The fight

for equal rights seems to be a loosing battle. Still, results are not always immediate, and

Minstrel Man surely is a reminder of the fact that a considerable part of Americas human

beings existed under conditions unworthy of a democratic society.

Minstrel Man was first published in Crisis in December 1925, and in The New Negro

(CP 628). Here too, as in the case of The Jester, the editor has been busy with his pen, and

29
the alterations in this case have a stunning effect. Rampersad tells us that in The New Negro,

the last lines of both stanzas ended with periods (So long. and I die.). Line 12 ended with a

comma (My inner cry,). The question marks were added for the The Dream Keeper, New

York: Knopf 1932 ( CP 628). To demonstrate the difference between the two editions I

would like to reproduce both versions of the poem.

Because my mouth Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter Is wide with laughter
And my throat And my throat
Is deep with song Is deep with song,
You do not think I You do not think
Suffer after I suffer after
I have held my pain I have held my pain
So long. So long?

Because my mouth Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter Is wide with laughter
You do not hear You do not hear
My inner cry, My inner cry?
Because my feet Because my feet
Are gay with dancing Are gay with dancing
You do not know You do not know
I die. I die?

It is quite interesting to observe how the alteration of three grammatical marks changes the

relationship between the speaker of the poem, the minstrel man, and his audience. In the first

edition the minstrel is deliberately hiding his pain because, it seems, he does not want his

audience to recognize his misery. This attitude could only be dictated by pride, and that

concurs perfectly with Hughess display of the black artist in some of his other works. The

minstrel appears simply to be registering the mood of a situation in his thought. The poem

thereby becomes a mental dramatic monolog, summing up the state of affairs. There is no

accusation involved. Since the minstrel is so clever at hiding his suffering, he cannot, and, so

it seems, does not expect his audience to pity him or to take action to help him better his

position. The regular rhythm and stress on the four iambic feet which combine line one and

30
two and line three and four into two sentences, help underline the unbroken train of thoughts

that is running through the minstrels mind. The poem can also be seen as a whole.

Undisturbed as it is by grammatical marks it is possible to perceive it as a general knowledge

and acceptance of his position, in the minstrels mind.

The second edition reveals a plaintive and accusative person. His accusation can be

interpreted in more than one way. It can be understood as scorn for the audiences stupidity

and blindness to a simple fact, or as mere incredulity. In the latter of the two, the accusation

becomes even fiercer, because this notion implies that the audience is pretending not to realize

the pain behind the minstrels thin varnish of gaiety. In fact, they are fully aware of it, and it

does not bother them. His incredulous complaint may even be read to convey the suggestion

that his pain is adding to their pleasure. All in all, the speaker of the poem emerges as a

subdued and humiliated character.

Which is the most appealing of the two is a subjective decision. Which one is the most

in Hughess spirit is also hard to tell. However, I would suggest the 1925 edition. My

argument is that although his characters are often plaintive, they always seem to

counterbalance this quality with a sense of pride, this inheritance from former glorious times

that are so vividly illustrated in The Negro Speaks of Rivers. The 1932 editions speaker

does neither convey any sense of pride, nor any suggestion of the threat or danger of revenge

as a result of the suppressers idiotic underestimation of his qualities. He simply is beaten,

almost erased from the realm of humanity, as the last line indicates:

You do not know

I die?

In a way, the suggestion that they ought to have known and ought to have done something

about it, situates them above him and places him at their mercy. In the first edition,

though, they are too stupid to even notice his misery. The minstrel is simply establishing the

fact that they are going to loose their source of pleasure, a very valuable entity, because of

31
their own shortcomings. Thereby he places himself not only at the same level as them, but

above them. This sense of pride, whether it is being expressed through humour, irony, or right

out scorn, is a feature which I find to characterize Hughess racial poems like a hallmark, and

it is, in my opinion, the most powerful element in this section of his works. That is why my

assumption is that this first edition is closest to Hughess heart, and that the alterations in

1932 were made at the suggestion of the editor. In any case, these alterations can be read as

another proof that the conditions of the minstrel artist entertainer had not improved in the

interval between the two editions. In fact, they seemed to have declined in the hundred years

and more between Billie Holidays ordeal in 1955 and the success of the Luca Family in

1853. In order to understand this development, or lack of progress in the blacks struggle for

equality, it is necessary to take a closer look at the general conditions in American society at

both periods.

In the year 1800 conditions were about to improve for the slaves in the upper South.

As it dawned on science that the blacks were not some kind of half-beasts, white Americans

began to cultivate a bit of guilt towards the practice of slavery. This, together with the slaves

urge for freedom, led to a slackening of chains, both literally and imaginative. One of the first

freedom fighters, Gabriel Prosser, actually planned an armed revolution. His aim was to free

all slaves, march toward Richmond, and make Virginia a black state (To Make Our World

Anew 169). His chance of success was obviously small, but the fact that such an action was

even considered is a testimony to the spirit and hope among black Americans at that time.

Then there was a disastrous setback, caused by Eli Whitneys cotton gin. This invention

turned cotton into the countrys principle export crop, and the production increased rapidly:

In the year 1790 The south produced only 3,135 bales of cotton.
By 1800 this figure had grown to 73,145 bales. . . . On the eve of
the Civil War production peaked at 4.8 million bales. If ever
circumstances conspired against a people, it was the coming
together of the cotton gin, fertile land, and world demand. Once
this happened, slaves who might have been set free by debt-and

32
 conscious ridden Chesapeake planters were instead sold to the
planters of the cotton growing Lower South. Cotton sealed the faith
of slaves and slavery. . . . The sale and transportation of black people
within the united states thus became big business

(To Make Our World Anew 170-171).

From these facts we may deduce that by the time of the Luca Familys success, the

attitude among white Americans was that the black Americans were well under control. They

were still just so many hands, and their worth was only judged by their usefulness. They did

not represent any kind of threat to the whites supremacy. The entertainers could safely be

cheered as a few chosen, picked to please and amuse the white population.

In 1956, however, the background is changed altogether. Slavery has been abolished for

almost a hundred years, and every day of that century the claim for equality has persisted. The

black people are no longer confined to the role of serving the whites. We find them in high

positions in most departments in society. Near the end of WWII Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.,

one of black Americas most conscientious spokesmen and an effective congressman for

Harlem, declared: The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer he is

striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasnt got the world in a jug, at least he

has the stopper in his hand. . . . He walks conscious in the fact that he is no longer alone, no

longer a minority (To Make Our World Anew 445). No longer subdued by law, no longer a

minority, in stark contradiction to the situation in 1800, the black population has now grown

into a threat to the white domination of society.

It is an established fact that fear constitutes aggression, and in this case it may bee seen

as the direct cause of the hatred which was demonstrated towards the touring artists in the

lower South. It is a nature-given instinct to fight for the best position in the pack, and human

beings are no exception in that matter. The white audience had no choice but to kowtow to the

brilliance of the black performers. Even if they had not appreciated their art, which they

sincerely did, they would have had to submit to the fact that many of these artists were

33
celebrated all over the world. Their significance on the stage was undisputable and could not

be touched. Still, they were not divinities, they had to eat, and then they were back to the

normal position as blacks among whites and could be put in their place. My opinion is that

this diehard resistance against equality was carried out by extremists, and against their own

best convictions. There is no way that anybody could have claimed that this behaviour was

decent or just. It was an attack in a weird kind of self-defence against the inevitable current of

events. In Black Magic Hughes refers to Ethel Waterss book His Eyes is on the Sparrow,

where she tells about some experiences from her touring days down South. In Atlanta, she

once had to leave the town in an old horse cart under the cover of darkness. The reason for

this hasty departure was that she had a dispute with the white owner of the theatre she was

performing in, over the tuning of a piano. As a consequence, he had her followed by the

police, and gave orders that she should not be allowed to buy a railway ticket. In Macon, also

in Georgia, she tells that the body of a lynched boy was thrown into the lobby of a colored

theatre as a warning to other Negroes not to be uppity(282). These incidents, in all their

insanity, can in my opinion only be seen as the desperate acts of irrational rage caused by

plain fright. In the end they probably served the blacks better than any protest, by making

them martyrs to their cause.

Trumpet Player

----------------------

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 wips
About his thighs.

34
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has a head of vibrant hair
Tamed down,
Patent leathered now
Until it gleams
Like jet
Were jet a crown.

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

Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlights but a spotlight
In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the seas a bar glass
Sucker size.

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

But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note. (CP 338).

One of the most internationally celebrated black artists in the early and midtwentieth

century was the trumpet player Louis Armstrong. Born in 1901, he was Hughess

contemporary, and he was world famous for the sound of his golden instrument. In

35
combination with his raucous, bruised voice, his trumpet brought the themes of the blues and

the jazz brilliantly home to his listeners. He is generally estimated to be the most influential

person in the history of the blues and the jazz. During his time he published more than 1500

gramophone records. Most of them became classics. He had a particular gift for renewal,

without changing his simple style and naturalness, and his performances were always full of

joy and inspiration. Armstrong was accused, in his time, of being too obliging to the whites.

Later on, his behaviour was judged to be a technique of survival. The fact is that he took some

brave actions against segregation in his hometown, New Orleans. Segregation laws were not

abandoned in New Orleans until 1965. Long after that, the greatest trumpet player in New

Orleans was said to be the white Al Hirt, not Louis Armstrong.1 All in all, it is difficult to

imagine a more likely source of inspiration for Hughess poem Trumpet Player than Louis

Armstrong.

When I first read this poem, my immediate impulse was to place it in the blues-and-jazz

category. Then I realized that I was being mislead by my associations to Armstrongs face and

the sound of his trumpet. The theme most definitely is the blues and jazz, and the poem is a

declaration of the amount of suffering and deprivation it takes to create such heartrending and

beautiful music. The form, though, is of quite a different character. The slightly broken

pentameter and the uneven end rhymes add another dimension to the poem. When Hughes

employs this old European tradition in his expression, he lifts and broadens the message out

of the confinement of the African American community. It makes the reader envision the

speaker of the poem as a representative of a far larger audience, a white man indeed, paying

homage to the black artist and his art.

The first stanza describes the entire history of the African Americans misery. It takes a

lot of pondering and many readings to grasp the entire content of this stanza. By a trick of the

1
www.carlpetter.comtextsarmstrong.htm

36
tense of the word blaze, Hughes adds generations of time to his description. If he had used

the present tense, it would have pointed directly to the eyes of the trumpet player. That would

not have made sense. After all, nobody is whipping him. The phrase the smoldering

memories of slaveships / blazed takes us back to the time of those who actually remembered

the root of the evil, the capturing in their home country and the enslavement in the new world.

So, the memories of the slaveships and of former greatness and fall is the link between the

first slaves and the generations to follow. When they were beaten and whipped, they were

reminded of the wrongdoings their people had suffered, and their minds blazed with anger and

resentment. This is the inheritance of the trumpet player. This is the burden he has to bear. In

addition to his own humiliations, he has to carry with him those of all his forefathers. He is

mentally battered and bruised by it, and this weariness it is that is shown like moons/beneath

his eyes.

The succession of the stanzas seems a bit out of place. Stanzas number two and four

share the same theme, and so do stanzas number three and five. It is not beneficial to the flow

of the poem to part them. The obvious reason why Hughes has done this is the connection

from stanza three to stanza four, by the repetition of the word desire. This repetition is

significant in its efficiency to build up to and emphasise the sense of longing in stanza three.

So, facing the choice, one would rather sacrifice the continuity than this effect.

As for stanzas two and four, they both deal with the description of this particular human

being, who is the result of a process which has been going on for hundreds of years. In stanza

two there are two words which immediately stand out as significant, the words tamed and

crown. At first they seem to be unquestionable opposites. The word tamed gives

associations to a wild animal, crown to a human being at the peak of civilization.

Indisputably, the two words signify bottom and top, or rather beginning and end, of a line of

development. The question here is whether this development qualifies to be called a positive

37
progress. One could argue that the consequence of civilization has, at all times and in all

cultures, meant the proportional degeneration of human ability to survive without it. One can

question if it is profitable in the long run to become dependant upon all the wonderful

achievements civilization brings. The answer appears to be negative. All civilizations known

in the history of mankind follow the same pattern. At first they develop slowly, then more

rapidly, and finally they end in destruction.

The fact that the white mans society has forced the black man to slick back his hair in

order to conform does not mean that he is diminished. Hughes seems to imply that even after

centuries of oppression and persecution, the black man is still in possession of his ancestors

pride. Even when he is forced to change his appearance, he carries the sign of his humiliation

as a crown. So, they have not managed to tame him. It is only on the surface he has adhered

to their ways. He has kept his own values intact, far more precious than those of the whites,

Hughes seems to claim. So, the two words do not describe opposites, because actually, there

has been no change! The word tamed then becomes a mockery of the whites, who think

they can break the black mans pride just because they have managed to make him straighten

out his vibrant hair.

On the other hand, Hughes could be referring to what Peter Bruck calls the cult of the

primitive black that many white took for granted in the 1920s (BLC 1060). In that case it is

not as if he is praising the human pride of the trumpet player. He is rather lamenting the fact

that the black man, the wild spirit, has been caged. This puts him in a pitiful position. He

becomes a regrettable object, just as misplaced as a wild animal behind bars. Regardless of

point of view, this becomes a discussion of identity. The significance of identity seems to be

an underlying theme in much of Hughess poetry. In this poem, too, identity is a key word, the

identity of the proud black.

38
 The longer I studied Hughess works and his public statements, the more clearly there

appeared a certain ambivalence in his attitude towards black people and black culture. There

seems to be a great number of contradictions in his utterances. On the one hand he praises the

ebony ancestor as his own, like in The Negro Speaks of Rivers. On the other hand there is

his reaction towards his patroness, Charlotte Mason, or Godmother, who found that he was

not exotic enough in his works. He said, after their break up was a fact: She wanted me to be

primitive, to know and feel the intuition of the primitive. Unfortunately, I did not feel the

rhythm of the primitive surging through me, and so I could not live and write as though I did

(BLC 1060). Nevertheless, Hughes is avid in his praise of the primitive, and this is perhaps

not a contradiction after all. He almost seems to have a fascination with black history and

culture, which is also demonstrated in his urge to be recognised as black. In box 492 of

Hughess personal papers at Yale University in New Haven, I found a folder marked Notes

on a Lecture on Africa/1930 Jan. Here he says: I look upon Africa as the last sanctuary of

the human race, as the last sanctuary of animal life, and the last of human peace. Luckily it

has not been touched by the white man, . . . that most destructive of all forces . . . You feel the

earth spirit, which is very different from the human spirit. 2 This goes a long way to explain

the nature of his attraction. It seems as if the reason may partly be found in his mixed blood.

The fact is that it makes him a spectator to the realm of blackness. He is white enough to be

attracted to the exoticism of it, and not black enough to belong. The whites too, are drawn to

the primitive aspects of the black arts. It thrills them because it is strange and exotic, and

perhaps also because it corresponds with something humanly archetypal deep down in their

soul, something that materialism has almost managed to cultivate away. At the same time,

proud as they are of their splendid civilization which has allowed them to remove themselves

from nature, they can despise the same primitivism in the blacks. They have obviously lagged

2
The Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

39
behind in the struggle of progress, and are positioned on a lower rung of the ladder of

evolution.

In order to contradict this view, Hughes seems to attempt a reversal of this fixed order.

He appears to claim that the development of western civilization is a decline, not a progress.

He, being both black and white is in the position to judge, and by his worship of black culture

he certainly makes clear his preference. His appreciation of the blacks goes to the extent that

he tries to renounce his white blood. Nevertheless, it is his white blood that pays homage to

his lost values. Those values are the primitive, or perhaps archetypal sides of his origin which

the white man has lost on his way to material glory. Hughes himself verifies this claim. In a

letter to William Dickens, dated Oct. 13, 1931, he expresses concern about his ability to reach

his black audience: In many cases the context, too, of Negro books, has been uninteresting or

displeasing to a large part of the race. They have not cared for jazz-poetry or low-down novels

and one cant blame them since they know such things all too well in life (BLC 1057). I

think this statement speaks for itself. It both confirms the necessity of being an outsider to

appreciate black culture and the artistic display of it, and places Hughes firmly as an outside

admirer, however much he wants to identify with the blacks.

Stanza four of Trumpet Player could have been written by one of the great romantic

poets of the 1800s. Phrases from a poem by Yeats, from his early and thereby romantic

production, The Stolen Child, also springs to mind:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild
With a feary, hand in hand,
For the worlds more full of weeping than you can understand.

( Norton Anthology of English Literature 2090).

This is what our trumpet player desires. However, he has to make do with the

substitutes that civilization has provided him with. He is a true representative of the romantic

40
idea that mans place is in nature, and that civilization degenerates him and makes him

unhappy. The phrase longing for the moon has a double impact, since this is an expression

we use to describe a situation where the object of the desire is unobtainable. What he gets

instead, is a poor compensation for the real thing. On the one hand there is the, at that time,

unexplored, mystical part of the infinite universe, with all its connotations of wonder, longing

and mysticism. Also it reflects the basic condition of our existence: the sun. On the other

hand, there is this small bulb of intense, artificially constructed light, not illuminating half of

the planet Earth, but restricted to a small part of the room. In addition to this, it is not merely

insufficient. It directly bothers him. Everybody knows what a spotlight in his eyes would

feel like. In this case it serves as a symbol of civilizations damaging effect on human nature.

The image of the bar glass as a replacement for the sea is just as strong. The word sucker

indicates that the trumpet player is seeking comfort for his misery in the glass, read alcohol.

Instead of basking in the freedom and space of nature, he consoles himself with a pain-

killer which enables him to forget his sorrows for a while.

Stanzas three and five are focused on the music, or rather on the effect it has on the

listener. The images employed here are directly related to the speakers senses. Through them

Hughes transfers to the reader a vivid experience of the taste of honey and a sensation of

liquid fire in his blood. The listener is also the recipient of the result of the trumpet players

sufferings through the rhythm. The image he uses to describe the rhythm is not, like the

former two, of a physical quality. The ecstasy/Distilled from old desire is telling us about

the spiritual state of the artist. In this way he includes all sides of a human being, body and

soul, in an interaction between the music, the artist who performs it, the listener, and the poet,

who is transferring it into beautiful poetry.

In stanza five the trumpet player is promoted to the position of a medium. The music is

personified, and becomes an active entity in the process of the performance. The trumpet

41
player is depicted as a tool, unaware of what is taking place, as the jazz pierces his soul and

brings out a golden note.

The repetition of the word lips throughout the poem is another factor which leads the

readers associations to Louis Armstrong. He was nicknamed Satchmo, derived from

satchel mouth, a phrase very suitable to describe his prominent lips. It is also general

knowledge that he suffered from lip cancer for many years. Hughes must have been aware of

that, considering the similarity in their life spans. In my opinion, this fact adds to the degree

of suffering of the medium who transfers the message of the blues and jazz.

In May 1957, Hughess all-Negro show Simply Heavenly opened at the 85th Street

Playhouse. Although other plays had been performed continually and without incident until

then, the Fire Department now got very busy, with almost daily inspections. There was no end

to the violations now found, which had not been discovered while the other plays were on:

The steps to the womens dressing room were declared too narrow. The dressing
room was closed, so the women had to costume themselves in the toilet. Then
the stairs to the balcony were pronounced too narrow and the balcony had to be
closed, thus cutting off a portion of the box revenue. . . . Finally the Fire
Department stated that the building, a fraternal lodge hall, should have had (in
the years before) a ten thousand gallon water tank on the roof for fire
prevention. The astonished owners of the building were ordered to install one
forthwith. They thereupon gave up and asked the Simply Heavenly company to
vacate the premises, since the landlords could not afford so expensive an
installation simply to accommodate a new theatrical tenant (Black Magic 290).

The play tried to survive on other stages for a while, but in the end it dissolved and was taken

off. Simply Heavenly went on stage in August 1957. It is an interesting fact that in July the

same year Hughes was praised in a musical reading of his poetry, called A Part of the

Blues. The text on the photograph on a newspaper clipping reads: Celebrated The

contemporary author Langston Hughes 3 In my opinion this demonstrates the changes that

3
The Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, box 571

42
were taking place in society in this period. 1957 was the year when Congress passed the Civil

Rights Bill, a development obviously not welcomed in all camps.

Simply Heavenly was an all black show, so evidently the actors in that case were all

in it together, but it is generally agreed that among the performers there was very little

prejudice and intolerance. Hughes claims: Artists had their own civil right bills in their hearts

long before Washington began to make laws about it (Black Magic 282). Their solidarity was

evident from the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Actors Equity Association was

formed in 1913.This association made a great contribution to the struggle toward

democratization of every area which effected artists, from the stage to the treatment and

security when they were touring. The last page of this chapter in Black Magic is a description

of the acts of solidarity the association performed in order to obtain equal rights for blacks

and whites. The strength of the commitment of the members is exemplified in the boycott of

the National Theatre in Washington. Hughes tells us: The 54-year-old Equity, (in 1967), with

about 12,000 members, resolved in 1947 that no actors belonging to the Association should

perform in the National Theatre in Washington after May 31, unless its policy of not

admitting Negroes were dropped. At that time no legitimate theatres in Washington admitted

colored spectators. . . . It was Ingrid Bergman, Swedish star of stage and films, who brought

the Jim Crow theatre situation in Washington to a head (Black Magic 288). After an incident

were black veteran soldiers were turned away at the door of the theatre, Miss Bergman

together with the all-white cast scheduled to play at the theatre the following week, petitioned

Actors Equity to issue a ruling forbidding its members to participate in future productions in

Washington theatres (Black Magic 289).

It is not likely that Hughess choice of examples is accidental. Great names have great

impact in all areas, and in collecting such outstanding artists as Bessie Smith as victim and

Ingrid Bergman as sympathizer, Hughes makes his point very clearly. To my mind Black

43
Magic is a severe attack on segregation, and a huge contribution to the blacks cause. Poetry

does not have a large audience, while factual prose gets through to everybody. However,

history reading can be extremely boring if it is reduced to the reeling off of dry facts. Not so

this book. I join my voice with Ossie Daviss in the foreword: Black Magic is not only about

art, it is itself a prime example of that art in actionthe storytellers art: Langston chuckling

to himself at what he found like Brer Rabbit with a pencil sniffing out, hunting it down,

digging it up, putting it away; chuckling over the living history of a people, keeping it in the

back of his mind all those many years, then finally setting it down in this book (Black Magic

foreword). Also, Hughess involvement in the artists problems, and his excitement Davis

calls it his wonder at the artists great achievements, is continually giving colour and spice

to the texts. The careful cataloguing of the artists performances, on stage and off, together

with the delightfully selected pictures, bring the artists to life and stir the readers sympathy

and, if he is white, his feeling of shame about the past. In 1967 it must have been a firebrand,

a firebrand of comfort to the blacks and of enlightenment to the whites. It is also a testimony

to the fact that Hughes never tired of his task. The examples in this chapter, from The Weary

Blues in 1926, via his article in the Chicago Defender in 1956, to Black Magic, his very last

work, in 1967, establish that his engagement endured throughout his life.

44
 Chapter II

Proletarians Unite: The Financial and Working Conditions of the Blacks

The bees work

Their work is taken from them
We are like the bees
But it wont last
Forever. (CP 172).

In a chapter about the employment and the economic conditions of African Americans it

seems inevitable to start where it all began, with slavery. Americans disagree on the origin of

chattel slavery in the first British colonies. Some assert that the free blacks enjoyed the same

terms as the black bondsmen for decades long before slavery was instituted. Others hold the

opinion that slavery began as early as in 1619, a year before the Mayflower landed the Pilgrim

Fathers on American soil. In a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys, John Rolfe reported that in late

August, 1619, a Dutch vessel had arrived at Point Comfort with not anything but 20 and odd

Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Marchant bought for victualle(Black Americans 66).

However, misunderstandings may have occurred, because the reporters at the time failed to

distinguish between the buying of a service and a persons body. They make the conclusion

that in 1619 neither Negroes nor English bondservants were owned as chattels in

Virginia(Black Americans 66). The first official distinction was made by an act of the

Virginia Assembly in 1639, which stated that all persons except Negroes should be armed.

This was the first of a long train of statutory discriminations that would ultimately make of

the Negro a slave (Black Americans 67). The next stage of the progress was life servitude. In

the 1640s and 1650s it is certain that some blacks served for life and others did not. In 1660

two acts of the Virginia Assembly make it apparent that they were favourable towards the

practice, and also inclined to encourage increased importation of blacks. The reason for this

45
was obviously that black labour grew rapidly more important to the tobacco planters in

Virginia.

The final stage in the process of enslavement was the question of who should own the

children of a life-servant. Pondering this, one realizes how desperately important it was to

all parties. If the children were to follow the course of nature and automatically belong to their

parents, that would mean that each new generation was born free. It would also provide the

blacks with some degree of power and better their status. You cannot be a totally subdued

individual if you parent free children. Freeborn children would also mean hope for the future.

This was not in the interest of the slave masters, and consequently steps were taken to prevent

it. Another important issue in the matter was the miscegenation. A sexual relationship

between a white woman and a black slave was almost unheard of. On the other hand, it is an

established fact that white men took black women as their mistresses, or simply used them as

they pleased. What, then, would be the status of the child of such an alliance? The problem

was settled by the Virginia Assembly in December 1662, as they declared: Whereas some

doubts have arisen whether children got by any English man upon a Negro woman shall be

slave or free, Be it enacted. . . that all children born in this country shall be bond or free only

according to the condition of the mother. By this legislation lifelong servitude was made self

perpetuating; the children of slaves being property in the same manner as the natural increase

of life stock or other chattels (Black Americans 69).

The working conditions of the slaves were extreme in every manner. They were

deprived of the natural opportunity to profit from their ability to work, because their work

power was not theirs to sell. It belonged to their masters. An even worse consequence of the

slaves position was that they also lost the power to decide what was going to happen to their

body. It, too, was their masters possession. Many would hold the opinion that the ultimate

degradation to a human being is to lose control over the most private and precious part of

46
ones person, ones sexual life. This was the position of the slaves. They were there to use and

abuse as the mood took their master. The tragic result of some of those relationships is the

theme of Hughess poem Mulatto. It appeared first in the Saturday Review of Literature on

January 29 1927, and is part of the volume Fine Clothes to the Jew:

I am your son, white man!

...
A little yellow
Bastard boy. (CP 100).

These are the first and the two last lines of Mulatto, and they give a full explanation of the

conflict. The mulattos position was in fact even more difficult than the blacks. Being neither

black nor white, they did not truly belong in either camp. They were rejected by the black

people because they were partly white, and by the white people because they were partly

black. The speaker in Hughess poem is in the worst thinkable position. He is even rejected by

his own family, or at least part of it. Hughes is obviously not referring to contemporary

conditions. This is a reminder of the maltreatment of the African Americans in the past.

Mulatto has the shape of a performance, a kind of call and response between the

white father and his illegitimate son, and between the illegitimate and his white brother. This

dialogue is overlying a symbolic description of the environment in which the action is taking

place. The first call in the first line, I am your son, white man, is an accusation and an

appeal at the same time. He is accusing his father of bringing about his miserable position,

and appealing to him to better it. The setting is The Deep South, where segregation and

exploitation of the blacks were the most severe. The mood of the poem is created by the

description of the surroundings where the son was conceived: Georgia dusk . . . the moon

47
over turpentine woods . . . the sent of pinewoods . . . the Southern night is full of stars. This

is where the shameful act was performed: One of the pillars of the temple fell.

The temple is the social structure, and it has been disturbed by white having sex with

black. Hughes is obviously ironic here, suggesting that the white man is committing sacrilege

by degrading himself with a black woman. The outcome of this despicable union is the little

yellow boy, the little yellow star. This little yellow star is not alone, though. The Southern

night is full of them, a fact which indicates strength in numbers and a warning of danger. The

image of the star also brings associations to the Jews, who have been persecuted throughout

history. Even to indicate such a similarity is a strong accusation towards a society which is

founded on the idea of liberty and equality. At the same time, the symbol of the star tells us

that he is a splendid thing, this little yellow boy. In this way, he uses the same symbol to

elevate the worth of the mulatto, and remind his readers of how merciless society can be. The

response to the speakers call is given in the same blunt manner: You are my son!/ Like

hell! The finality in the rejection is emphasized by the use of an exclamation mark instead of

a question mark after son. The claim thereby is treated as an absurdity, and a flat denial is

the only response it deserves. Both the call and the response illustrate a cold, hard, matter of

fact every day life. This serves to emphasize the poets description of the warm, sensual, and

heavily scented nights. Hughes gives us the perfect surroundings for love and passion. Then

he adds abuse and contempt to one part of the couple, and pain and humiliation to the other.

The plural of the bodies of nigger wenches, and the position against black fences, depicts

a scene of one-sided, loveless lust. In this manner the gravity of the misdeed stands out even

more clearly.

At my first reading of the poem I was a bit displeased with the sentence what is a body

but a toy, without being able to pinpoint what was wrong with it. When I learned from the

footnote of Collected Poems that it had not appeared either in the earlier version in the

48
Saturday Review of Literature or in Fine Clothes to the Jew, I took a closer look. This time

the effect was clear. By using the expression a body without painting it black to the reader,

Hughes is generalizing, and thereby draws the concentration away from his theme, the abuse

of black women. The speaker, the abuser this time, could even have been talking about his

own body as a toy to bring him pleasure. The fact that it is repeated only increases the

damaging effect. It seems all the more surplus since Hughes later on in the poem hits his

target precisely with an almost similar sentence: Whats the body of your mother? Then the

poet goes on to give us a summary of what this is all about in four lines of mockingly cheerful

rhythm and rhyme:

A nigger night
A nigger joy
A little yellow
Bastard boy.

This is nothing to take at all seriously. Both the action of the white man, and the result of it,

can be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders. The fact that he is condemning his own flesh

and blood to a life in misery is not admitted, or perhaps not even considered.

The third voice in the call and response dialogue is the white brother. Here Hughes

comments on the perhaps most appalling condition of the mixed children of the earliest times:

the presence of their white siblings. Let us picture a plantation in the Deep South, and assume

the theme of Mulatto to be dealing with conditions before the Civil War. At that time the

working conditions and the economic status of the son would have been at bottom pitch. If

he was a field hand his life would consist of sweat and toil and no prospect whatsoever to

better his position. His working conditions presented an insurmountable hindrance. He would

hardly get a glimpse of his white brothers and sisters. His complexion would give away his

origin, though, and probably cause him trouble even among his black family members.

However, the son would be in an even more appalling position if he was among those who

where picked to serve in the house or in the stables. There, although half of him was a product

49
of his white fathers genes with all which that implies, he would be obliged to serve his

siblings as a mere slave. Watching their often luxurious life, he would have to bow and adjust

to their moods. The effect of such a position on a persons psyche is inconceivable to us.

Hughes tells us what he is going to experience, if he dares to suggest kinship:

Naw, you aint my brother

Niggers aint my brother
Not ever
Niggers aint my brother

The fact that this was accepted behaviour in a society which proclaimed equality for all its

members seems like a demonstration of the human potential for hypocrisy and self

indulgence. The ironic witticism that all men are created equal but some are more equal than

others appears to be an appropriate description of reality. However, even if the mulatto in the

poem is told to: git on back there in the night / you aint white, Hughes gives him the last

word. The poem ends with a demand: I am your son, white man!/A little yellow/Bastard

boy.

In his Symbolizing America in Langston Hughess Father and Son, Dolan Hubbard

discusses Hughess views on the mulatto and the culture of race in Father and Son. As an

introduction to the essay he gives an account of how Hughess great-grandfather, a white man

fell in love with one of his slave-girls, freed her, married her, and acknowledged the four

children she bore him. As a consequence, the whole family was ostracized. Although their

marriage was technically illegal, they were buried side by side like man and wife on the farm.

Hubbard deduces that Hughess fascination with the mulatto and the treatment of his

characters are dictated by his ancestors. This seems quite logical. Not only was his great-

grandfather, Ralph Quarles, a pioneer in his own way, both his grandfather, Charles Langston,

and his uncle, John Mercer Langston, were distinguished educators and politicians. Hubbard

maintains that being a descendant of one of the more prominent black families in the

50
nineteenth century America had the consequence that he continually explored his dual

ancestry (CLC Vol. 108, 314).

While Mulatto has a general appeal and could be situated within a time span of more

than a century, the short story Father and Son is placed in the 1930s. It thereby points its

critical finger directly to the authorities of that period. The setting is the Norwood plantation

in South Georgia with all the classical ingredients: the Big House, the workers quarters, and

the blacks, singing as they toil. This appears to be conditions very much the same as a

hundred years ago. However, there have been changes, and at first glance they appear to be

major. The workers are no longer slaves. They are free to leave whenever they choose. Surely,

this represents a revolution in American society. Perhaps even more revolutionary is the fact

that the patriarch up in the Big House is actually providing for his mixed children. He even

sends them to college. A slight scratch on the surface, though, reveals the fact that the

alterations are superficial. The field workers, however free they may be on paper, are working

just as hard. These are the 1930s, and with the depression at hand the fighting for jobs would

plunge wages to ground level. To be able to eat you had to struggle to find a job and then stick

to it for dear life. So much for freedom. Whereas Norwoods behaviour to his mulatto

children is concerned, it works smoothly as long as it is not put to the test. When his son Bert,

obviously enlightened by his stay at Atlanta college, claims what he means is his birthright,

his father refuses to acknowledge him. Hubbard says: The colonel cannot publicly

acknowledge his black children; to do so would be tantamount to undermining the credibility

of the system that empowers him, and which has shaped his image of himself (CLC Vol.

108, 315). Hubbard goes on to declare that Hughes in Father and Son attacks the romantic

view of the South. He demands that the Civil War was not fought for a noble and just cause,

and it is time to stop worshipping the heroes from that conflict. He points out that the South is

existing upon an outdated economic system, one that no longer can sustain itself, and

51
conveys Hughess message to be that: The apologists for this ideology do not acknowledge

the violence that it takes to make the system work for the few while the many suffer in

silence (CLC Vol. 108, 315).

So, what Hughes is actually conveying to his audience is that the South is still

dependant upon the working force of the poor and oppressed black population. The South was

founded on black labour, and has to relay on it for the duration of its culture. Seen from this

angle, it becomes clear why the politicians in the South were so desperate to maintain the

segregation policy. Black people had to be reminded of their inferiority all the time during

their everyday life, even when they were taking a bus ride or visiting a public toilet. That was

the only way to avoid a revolt.

Far worse than to be obliged to work too hard, as has been the blacks lot so far in this

discussion, is the prospect of being deprived of the opportunity to work altogether. Out of

Work was published in Poetry in April 1940, in the aftermath of the Depression. Hughes had

some personal experience with the problem of getting a job. After leaving university he had to

fend for himself since his fathers allowance depended upon his continuing his studies. He

started to answer adds for any kind of work he could do, all in vain. He tried for jobs as a bus

boy, waiter, handyman, and clerk, but soon realized that unless the notice specified

coloured there was no use in applying. He later wrote about this period: Experience was

proving my father right. On many sides, the color line barred your way from making a living

in America (Berry 32). After temporary employment on a truck farm on Staten Island, he

found himself in a seemingly futile search for a job. He reached the point that he feared that

he simply might not get work at all. Berry says: His Harlem landlady a strongly maternal,

amiable, optimistic Negro woman, named Mrs. Dorsey could not reconcile him to the

situation, but she encouraged him daily not to give up (Berry 33). This is interesting because,

as Berry also says, Mrs. Dorsey inspired him to write Mother to Son.

52
 A decade later, in 1931, Hughes focused on the financial crisis that was gripping the

country. Even though his opinions were rather radical, they were well founded on the

disastrously high level of unemployment among African Americans. An Urban League

study showed that With a population only a quarter Negro, half the unemployed in Huston

were black; in Little Rock, Arkansas, blacks formed twenty percent of the city but more than

half of the unemployment, in Memphis, almost twice as many blacks as whites were without a

job (Rampersad 214). On arriving back in the North after his trip to Haiti in 1931, Hughes

had in mind to write another novel. This national crisis, however, challenged his social

conscience, and he decided to follow Mrs. Bethunes advice and make a reading tour to the

South. His aim was to create an interest in racial expressions through books, and to do what I

can to encourage young talent among our people (Rampersad 214). In between his return to

New York and his departure for the South, Hughes made a marked move to the far left. His

change of attitude was so discernible that he was accused of having joined the Communist

Party of the United States. This accusation he had to face, and he strongly denied it for the

rest of his life (Rampersad 215). Given the no discriminating ideology of communism,

Hughes was bound to be attracted by it. Truly, some of his poems from that period are rather

red, or at least radical. In Tired he actually calls for armed revolution: Let us take a

knife/and cut the world in two/And see what worms are eating/At the rind (Good Morning

36). In September, 1932, his poem Good Morning Revolution was published in New

Masses:

Good Morning Revolution:

Youre the very best friend
I ever had.(Good Morning 3).

These opening lines of the poem are obviously a proclamation of a dedication to a cause.

Revolution is a general expression. However, since the one which took place in the USSR

53
was the most recent in time in 1932, Socialism or Communism immediately springs to mind.

The personification of the revolution adds to the impact of the statement. The definition of a

friend is someone who would do almost anything for you and never let you down. By

pronouncing the revolution as his best friend, Hughes is indicating that it has already proved

its worth. It also commits Hughes to be just as faithful to the revolution as it has proved, and

will go on proving, to be to him. If Hughes really had reservations about Communism, as he

later claimed, he most certainly does not display it here. Here he seems to kowtow to

Communism as a solution to all the problems and injustice of his own society. Given the

background, this is quite a natural reaction. As already mentioned, what caught Hughess

attention most prominently during his trip to the USSR was the apparently non-existing race

discrimination. He naturally came to give the ideology of that society the credit for such

conditions. As it had taken an armed revolution to bring these conditions about, he saw that

as a means to change the status of the African Americans as well. In addition to being a

challenge to rebel, the poem is, in a subtle way, a protest against segregation. It could be read

as an indirect appeal to white workers to show solidarity to black workers.

From the dialect he employs in the poem, I deduce that the speaker is not black. His

verbs are almost all in the correct tense. There is only one exception, the you was in line

nine. If he wanted to depict a black speaker he would have confused the verbs in a more or

less deliberate manner. The abbreviations and the ellipsis are also modest. He uses them in

vacationin (line 22),and in hangin (line 15), but he writes everything, (line 35 and

42), morning (line 41 and 46), and greetings (line 49) correctly. He has double negative

in line 29 and 30: Me I aint never been warm in winter / Me I aint never known security

. However, he is correct in line 17: And aint got a damn thing in this world. The rest of

the abbreviations and touches of dialect indicates a white man from the working classes. In

fact it is even almost too educated to be representative of a person from the floor, the

54
stereotype of a working man. He certainly does not emerge from the poem as black. In this

way, Hughes is ignoring the colour line, simply by pretending that it does not exist. A

worker is a worker, he seems to assume, whatever complexion he might be. They have to

stick together if they are to succeed in their struggle for better conditions. He refuses to

recognize the facts of the statistics, the fact that society is divided in three major parts where

work is concerned. Instead of facing the reality of the division into bosses, white workers, and

black workers, he talks as if there are just bosses and workers. The workers, the

buddies, have in their power to take over society if they join forces. The suggestion of

this union also implies the certainty of equality between black and white. Hughes demands

that white workers admit that fact, recognize their opportunity, and act.

I find that in this attempt to uniform his speaker in order to make him a universal

representative, Hughes gets his claws clipped. There is no edge to his message. We have

heard it all before, and we are tired of it. He even goes as far as to quote Marxs definition of

social power: All the tools of production (line 42). Somehow, this is not Langston Hughes.

Faith Berry is of a different opinion, though. In the introduction to her collection of Hughess

long hidden revolutionary poems Good Morning Revolution, she demands that: The works

were collected as evidence of some of the best writing ever done by Hughes (Good Morning

xiv). Arnold Rampersad does not agree with this. He states that the most prominent of

Hughess poems, such as The Negro Speaks of Rivers and Mother to Son, could not have

been written under the Communist aesthetic. He also claims that Hughes fails in his attempt to

combine revolutionary rage with his vocation to fight for the blacks. He calls the result not a

poem, but ideology, tempered and sharpened into slogans (CLC Vol. 108, 296). His opinion

is that in this process Hughess identity is lost, and he draws the conclusion: Only Hughes

could have written The Negro Speaks of Rivers, but given the right mixture of radical rage

55
and literary adroitness on the part of the writer, Good Morning Revolution could have been

written by almost anyone (CLC Vol. 108, 296).

From the way he handled this part of his production, one can deduce that Hughes was

not quite comfortable with it. Saunders Redding establishes the fact that Hughes refused to

read his revolutionary poetry at many occasions when it would have been most appropriate to

do so. He leaves to Faith Berry to explain why (Good Morning ix, x). She, on her part, refuses

to accept that it was because of his acknowledgement of poor quality. The publishers are the

ones to blame, she says. At the time, the editors and the critics shared the opinion that this part

of Hughess production did not fit his popular image. They put it down to bad influence at a

time when many American writers were moving toward the left in reaction to the rise of

Fascism in Europe and the malfunction of Capitalism at home. It was regarded as an isolated

phase of his earlier career (Good Morning xi). It is a fact, though, that some of his most

radical works came into being alongside his popular work. On this foundation Berry suggests

that: The phase actually lasted as long as he lived (Good Morning xi). However, in order to

be able to make a livelihood out of his writing, he had to oblige to his publishers and keep

these works out of the main focus of his audience. In an attempt to remain faithful to his

principles he contributed this part of his production to small, insignificant magazines. To let it

dominate his image would have cost him too dearly, and perhaps tongue-tied him altogether,

Berry seems to imply (Good Morning xii). Among Hughess diaries and notes from his trip to

Russia and China in 1932-33, I found an interesting sheet of typed text. It read:

Russian friends were always asking how I could be so interested in the workers
without belonging to the party. . . . I explained too, that my being a Negro, and
90 % of the Negroes being workers manual workers further propelled me
to the workers cause. But you are an intellectual, theyd say. Well, I would
answer, Negro intellectuals are in the same boat as the rest of their people.
Roland Hayes sometimes sings in places where he couldnt buy a ticket to his
Own concert if he were outside in the lobby and not on the stage.4

4
The Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

56
This seems to me to be a proof of his relaxed attitude towards Communism. To him it

obviously was just another approach to his original and everlasting goal: better conditions for

the black people. It presumably would not have cost him too much agony to renounce his

radical works.

In an essay published in 1986, Arnold Rampersad suggests another reason why he did

this. He argues that the leftist critics failed Hughes. While his revolutionary poems were too

radical to be appreciated by the bourgeoisie press, to the leftists they were not radical enough.

He states that Hughes craved the approval of the left from the very start of his career. He was

introduced to the movement as early as his Central High School years, between 1916 and

1920. Nevertheless, he had nothing published in the radical press at this early stage of his

commitment. Rampersad says: The point here is that Hughes probably did not try the

Liberator before he had reached a certain proficiency as a poet. The leftists at the Liberator,

however, made clear what they thought of his work by rejecting all of it (CLC Vol. 108,

293). The fact is that Hughes had been published for four years and had become some kind of

a notability, before a genuinely radical journal accepted any of his works. It is to be found in

the Communist Workers Monthly in March 1925. Rampersad questions the motive for this

embrace. He suggests that the Workers Monthly simply was getting on the Hughes

bandwagon and concludes: Established names can be drawn to the leftist journals; for

reasons that are probably not hard to understand, the journals themselves often seem

incapable of growing their own (CLC Vol. 108, 293). Even if the leftist press did accept his

works on and off from then on, they continued to criticize his lack of radicalism. Rampersad

tells us that the line I am afraid of this civilization in the mouth of a person in one of

Hughess poems caused the radical poet James Rorty to accuse Hughes himself of being

afraid. The reviewers radicalism overwhelms the poet and often overwhelms poetry

57
itself, Rampersad says, and the last comment is a reprimand. One wonders how, under such

harsh conditions, any poetry gets written (CLC Vol. 108, 293).

Luckily, the conditions did not put Hughes off writing poetry. Despite repeated

rejections, accusations of being of a petty bourgeois upbringing, and later, an intellectual,

all this placing him on the outer edge of your class of the working class, his pace never

slowed (CLC Vol. 108, 294). What happened was that he turned more radical every year,

perhaps in an effort to please his leftist critics. He obviously wanted very much to be

recognized in that camp. Whatever the reason may have been, he came to write some of the

most radical pieces of verse ever written by an American, and finally he was appreciated by

the leftists. According to Rampersad, when Lydia Filatova wrote an article in International

Literature about LANGSTON HUGHES: American Writer in 1933, he came away, in her

final analysis, with flying colors (CLC Vol. 108, 294). How totally dedicated he was to

revolutionary ideology is demonstrated by a letter to his friend Prentiss Taylor: Never must

mysticism or beauty be gotten into any religious motive when used as a proletarian weapon

( CLC Vol. 10, 295). Furthermore, this statement seems to be a direct reaction to Filatovas

contemptuous condemnation of the religious poems in Fine Clothes to the Jew: The

soporific action of religion, with its gospel of non resistance, largely accounts for the

difficulty of spreading Communism among the masses of Negro toilers. Hughes in religious

ecstasy complains to heaven, sings about white wings of angels, and seeks solace in prayer

(CLC Vol. 108, 294). Quite a broadside, which obviously had its effect. After finally being

accepted by the left, Hughes found himself rebuked by his former admirers. Blanche Knopf

refused to publish his revolutionary poems and Carl Van Vechten predicted that he would

grow to be ashamed of them.

Whatever the reason was, the fact is that he did reject this part of his production.

Rampersad does not go as far as to claim he was ashamed of these poems, but he does admit

58
that it is rather interesting that he did not include them in his Collected Poems. Interesting?

It does not seem as if he had much of a choice if he wanted his audience to keep on listening

to him. Whether his radical commitment was a phase or not, the poetry from that period did

not serve his cause. In retrospect it seems only to have been a delay, and it hampered him in

his work for years to come. It would have taken a fanatical Communist to continue on the

radical course if he knew it would cost him his reputation as a writer. Although Hughes

obviously was intoxicated by Communist ideas at their first encounter, his later behaviour

proves that he was nothing of the kind. He willingly enough denounced his Communist past

to the McCarthy Committee in 1958. Hughes was first and foremost a black poet, fighting for

the rights of the black people, and thereby the black worker. His ambition to integrate black

workers and white workers and conform his style to leftist demands at the same time reduces

the impact of his message. His voice is drowned in the voices of the masses, too similar to

theirs to be distinguished from the crowd. Somehow the black worker gets lost in the

multitude of rebellions on the globe. Good Morning Revolution! qualifies as an easily read

demonstration of this approach, and the failure of it.

After this scrutiny of his, in my opinion, least successful techniques, I will now

concentrate on the field in which he is regarded to be the number one, the blues and jazz

poems:

I walked de streets till

De shoes wore off my feet
I done walked de streets till
De shoes wore off my feet
Been lookin for a job
Sos that I could eat. (CP 217).

Out of Work is a perfect representative of Hughess blues poems. The structure of the six-

line stanzas, the beat of the syllables, and the plaintive theme makes it a classic. It brings to

mind Blind Willie Johnsons penetrating lament, with the simple guitar as the only

59
accompaniment. Blind Willie Johnson, whose voice is now on its way to outer space aboard

the Voyager as Voice of the Century on earth, just in case there is somebody out there to

listen. This is yet another reminder of how significant the blues form was to Hughess

success, and how ingenious his choice was. The association to the realm of blues music that

automatically struck the reader would multiply the impact of the written word considerably.

Out of Work is adhering to the most consistent form of the blues. Rampersad tells us about

that form: This is a three-line stanza, in which the second line restates the first, and the third

provides a contrasting response to both (CLC Vol. 108, 310). At first glance this seems to

disqualify Out of Work in the way proclaimed above, considering the number of lines. In

reading it through, however, one realizes that even though it consists of six lines, it has only

three sentences:

I walked de streets till de shoes wore off my feet.

I done walked de streets till de shoes wore off my feet.
Been looking for a job sos that I could eat.

So far it confirms well to the blues. The last sentence, however, is a little dubious.

Rather than a contrasting response, it seems to be a natural and concluding part of the

monologue. Nevertheless, it sounds genuine enough, and the language confirms that this is a

black person speaking. The first, and most pin-pointing detail, is the omission of the voiced

sound of the finite article. I walked de streets till/de shoes wore of my feet. (line one, first

stanza), and So I went to de WPA, (line one, second stanza). This practice is consistent

throughout the poem. It is also a hallmark of the black dialects, and rules out all possibility of

the speaker being white. The second suggestion is an error in the tense of the verb, and it

appears in the second line of the first stanza. I done walked is almost artistic in its

determined neglect of grammatical rules. At first glance it is not quite clear what is wrong.

60
One could, for instance, wish for a had in addition to the done. That would transfer the

sentence to a more common feature of the black dialects, the duplicity of construction both in

negation and in statement. After a closer look, though, we realize that our anticipation has

lead us astray. All we have to do is swap the done with a have to make the sentence

grammatically correct. However, it must have taken a long line of deduction to replace an

auxiliary in the present tense with another in the past tense. It really seems like an artistic

innovation, and this kind of alteration in grammar is a characteristic of the African American

dialects. Another feature, not so characteristic of the black dialects, though, is the double

negative. We find one in line one, stanza two: I couldnt find no job. The Lawd in the

first line of the first stanza, and the ellipsis in lookin, ( line three stanza one), and livin

(line one stanza four) complete the picture.

In an inexplicable manner these alterations seem to represent an enrichment to the

expression of the poem rather than a limitation. In his essay from 1989 Arnold Rampersad

refers to Ralph Ellisons word about the language of the blues. Ellison states that it is

a transcendence of those conditions created within the Negro community by the denial of

social justice (CLC Vol. 108, 310). If that is the case, the language is most appropriate in the

mouth of the speaker in Out of Work. In his book The Legacy of the Blues, Samuel

Charters asserts that it was a rich, vital, expressive language that stripped away the

misconception that the black society was simply a poor, discouraged version of the white. It

was impossible not to hear the differences. No one could listen to the blues without realizing

that there were two Americas (CLC Vol. l08, 310).

Hughes has said that The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when

they are sung, people laugh (CLC Vol. 108, 310). The reason for this phenomenon is quite

obvious in most of Hughess blues poems. It is the speakers laughing not to cry approach

to his ordeal which makes the audience respond in this manner. The situation is so bad it

61
becomes ridiculous. So the speaker is laughing at the madness of it all, and inspires his

audience to do the same. Out of work displays this technique to the full. It was written in

the aftermath of the Depression, and the speaker has worn his shoes off looking for work. The

WPA, the Works Projects Administration, a Depression era job program, tells him that he has

to stay in town for a year and a day before he can get any kind of employment:

A year and a day, Lawd,

In this great big lonesome town!
A year and a day in this
Great big lonesome town.
I might starve for a year but
That extra day will get me down.

The absurdity of this statement, that 365 days would be all right and 366 impossible, suggests

the same kind of absurdity as in the WPAs regulations. In this way the rules are reduced to a

laughing matter. Nevertheless, the person in the poem is proclaiming his own destruction,

brought about by that extra day. Therefore, in the disguise of an ironic understatement, it

becomes a dramatic criticism of society. The extra day seems to be a symbol of the devilish

methods the system puts into practice in order to oppress the poor. The little, black man

admits that society is going to achieve its aim, but by giving the admission the form of a joke

he emerges as the victor. His spirit is capable of mocking his miserable prospect. The impact

of the dialect is excellently demonstrated in this poem. It gives the speaker a face and a

suffering soul. Through six lines of apparent everyday talk Hughes picks his words carefully

and makes the self mocking, ironic humour a strategy to reveal depths of despair.

The ingenious simplicity of Out of Work is striking when it is compared to the clich

ridden, bombastic shouting of Good Morning Revolution. Here the blues form is presented

at its best. Rampersad tells us that this technique was the result of a process which stretched

over five years. From 1922 on, Hughes started to engage with the blues in his poetry. First

from a distance, then gradually closing in. It was not until 1927, in Fine Clothes to the Jew

says Rampersad, that he wrote in the form itself. Thus he acknowledged at last the full

62
dignity of the people who had invented it (CLC Vol. 108, 311). In 1940, when Out of

Work came into being, he had had more than a decade to polish his technique. The poem is a

testimony to that fact. It also is an appeal to the leaders of society to make an effort to change

the statistics of black unemployment.

In 1986 John O. Hodges published an essay in which he discusses the alleged

inconsistency in Hughess writing. He starts off by pointing to Hughess impressive

production, both in range and quantity. Then he claims that the very bredth of Hughess works

would inevitably provoke the same variety in comment from his critics. Thus he explains that

some of his contemporaries called him the poet laureate of the Negro people, while to

others he was the poet low rate of Harlem. The most peculiar fact, he adds, is that that kind

of contradictory remarks were often made by the same critic at different times. Hodges

concludes as follows: What this reveals, it seems to me, is something about the allusiveness

of an individual whose writing often exhibited a surface simplicity that belied its true

complexity (CLC Vol. 108, 290). Hodges also puts forward the significance of the turbulent

times which coincided with Hughess career as a writer. The rapid changes, both in the world

in general and in the situation of the African Americans, was the direct reason for the variety

in Hughess works. Hughes could not allow himself to confirm to one style as a hallmark.

What he needed, says Hodges, was a flexible and dynamic idiom and tone to deal with the

many inconsistencies, paradoxes, and wide mood swings in the lives of the people he

celebrated in his various writings (CLC Vol. 108, 290).

The poem Black Workers, which is quoted at the beginning of this chapter is to be

found in Faith Berrys collection of neglected poems, Good Morning Revolution (11). In all

its simplicity it represents a third form of poetry Hughes employed to convey his message. It

is different from both the blues form and the free verse of his most radical production. In

contradiction to Good Morning Revolution, it does not shout. There are no quotations to

63
strengthen its impact, no heavily striking metaphors or artistic twitches of language to strike

the reader. All it has in common with Good Morning Revolution is the message. Hughess

only trick in this case is the comparison to the bees. Oddly enough it seems to suffice. The

picture of a beehive, swarming with activity comes easily to mind. In addition the bee, like the

ant, is renowned for its interminable toil. The image of the product of this toil snapped away

from the worthy workers of the hive gives vivid associations to centuries of unjust treatment

of black workers.

But it wont last

Forever.

It is just a statement of a fact, as if some divine mechanism which could not be stopped was

already set in motion. There is no need to shout. The outcome is inevitable. It is only a

question of time. The eloquence of this short phrase makes it a good example of the

simplicity that belies the true complexity in many of Hughess works. This poem was written

in Hughess most revolutionary period. All though it obviously is inspired by his Socialist

acquaintances, the title states that it is representing the black workers specifically. Spoken in a

calm and trustworthy manner, it is an assurance that the present conditions are going to

change for the better.

More than two hundred years earlier, similar words were spoken to the blacks. In the

year 1800, as mentioned above, Gabriel Prosser also planned an armed revolution to free the

slaves. By then it had begun to dawn on the slave owners that the blacks were human beings

like themselves, not some kind of a mixture of a savage and a child, as Cecil Rhodes once

phrased it. As told before, Prossers aim was to make Virginia a black state (To Make Our

World Anew 169).

In 1933 the demand for a revolution was stronger and more widespread than ever

before in history. The mere mentioning of workers and workers rights was in 1933

synonymous with Communism. This is probably the reason why Black Workers was found

64
among Hughess unpublished works. As already mentioned above, his Communist

sympathies caused him a lot of trouble. On his reading tours he was often met with hostile

demonstrations, and he was ostracized by certain parts of society. All though this poem gives

associations all the way back to the days of slavery, long before any such thing as

Communism was preached, Hughes presumedly found it safest to keep it from the scrutiny of

his critics. In addition comes the fact that if one removes the title the poem becomes universal

and all the more threatening to the bourgeoisie. Being forced to abandon a substantial portion

of his production meant a tangible setback in Hughess career. As the role of the black people

has been the workers role all the way along, it must have hampered Hughes considerably to

be forced to watch his tongue on this subject. The concealment of such a low voiced and

seemingly innocent poem as Black Worker is a testimony to that condition.

The last poem to be discussed in this chapter, Negro Servant, carried no dangerous

political message (CP 131). Its theme was well known and need not be hidden from the eyes

of the ruling classes. The setting, in Harlem, restricts the theme to the black problem. The

worker this time is depicted as the perpetual servant, whose only purpose has been to make

the living easier for the whites, ever since the slave days of his ancient forefathers. This has

nothing to do with Communism, so there would be no harm done to anybody in publishing it.

The poem could easily be read as a description of Hughess own existence in the early

twenties. From his own pen we have learned that he was enchanted by Harlem from the very

first he set foot there, shortly after he had quit university. We also know how he searched in

vain for a decent job. In the end he had to make do with the humblest positions as a delivery

boy and a servant to white people. Indeed, he would know what it felt like to be a Negro

Servant.

The opening lines depicts him in this role subdued, polite/Kind, thoughtful to the faces

that are white. Then, to counterbalance this humiliation, he has to go all the way back to his

65
African origin, to the times before the whites made his ancestors into slaves. Once again, as in

The Negro Speaks of Rivers, he finds his pride in the past, in Africa. He refers directly to

the drums and the tribal dances of those times. He even includes the veldt, which is the

name of the plains in South Africa. He leaves no doubt to where his heart is longing to be. It

is a yearning for the freedom and the sense of dignity and power associated with the Africa of

old times. He cannot have that, but he has found its substitute in Harlem: Dark Harlem waits

for you. There he finds the drums of life in the blues, which is a direct link to the past,

derived from the ancient African rhythm: Oh, dreams, Oh, songs, Oh, saxophones at night!

There he can live out his longings among his kindred spirits, his equals. Oh, sweet relief

from faces that are white!

The first impression of this poem is that it serves as a heartfelt eulogy to Harlem. After

a closer look, however, I seem to observe a hidden rebellion. It is to be found in the style of

the poem. When I first read it through I found it somehow annoying. Usually, a stop, a change

of lines, or the length of a line are instruments to emphasize the poets message. Negro

Servant did not function like that. The meter was all in a muddle, and the rhyme was

haphazardly used to the extent that the poem would have been better off without it. The poem

was neither free verse, nor did it have a set meter. Then it slowly dawned on me what Hughes

had done. I rearranged the lines, and found that with only small adjustments it fell into an

almost perfect iambic pentameter:

All day subdued, polite,

Kind, thoughtful to the faces that are white.
Oh, tribal dance!
Oh, drums!
Oh, veldt at night!

Kind thoughtful to the faces that are white

Oh, tribal dance! Oh, drums! Oh, veldt at night!

The most significant changes had to be made in this verse:

At six oclock, or seven, or eight,

66
Youre through.
Youve worked all day.
Dark Harlem waits for you.
The bus, the sub,
Pay-nights a taxi
Through the park.
Oh, drums of life in Harlem after dark!

At six oclock, or sevn or eight youre through

Youve worked all day. Dark Harlem waits for you.
The bus,( ) Pay-nights a taxi through the park.
Oh, drums of life in Harlem after dark!

By an ellipsis in seven in the first line, and leaving out the sub in the third line, it fits.

O, dreams! Oh, songs! Oh, saxophones at night!

Oh, sweet relief from faces that are white!

This is what I think could be a demonstration from Hughes. He had written the poem in

iambic pentameter, which is the most traditional European foot there is. Then he had ripped it

up and used it to expose the gap and discrepancies between the two cultures.

Although subtly presented, to me it seems a severe attack. The question whether it was

appropriate for the black writers to adapt to the traditions of the Old World was hotly debated

in the 1920s. One of those who where considered to be the most dedicated to the conservatism

of form was Claude McKay. In an essay from 1986 Rampersad tells us that As a poet

McKay was absolutely ensnared by the sonnet, which for all the variety possible within its

lines is perhaps the most telling sign of conservatism in writing of poetry in English (CLC

Vol. 108. 307).

McKay obviously saw nothing untoward in attacking the White Fiends in their own style.

Another conservative was Countee Cullen. His idol was John Keats. He passionately wanted

African Americans to embrace the traditions of the Old World and adhere to them. In

contradiction to Hughess insistence on being black, even if he was not, Cullen felt his

complexion to be a obstacle to him as an artist. He expressed his regrets in his probably most

67
famous couplet: this curious thing/To make a poet black and bid him sing (CLC Vol. 108,

307).

Hughes in his turn, as we all know, engaged himself in the enterprise of making a brand

new form, and make it as black and far from the European tradition as possible. Although that

particular form eventually became his trademark, that does not mean he left out all other

methods. His literary output shows an abundance of variety, naturally more or less successful.

Whether Negro Servant is a sample of the first or the latter of the two may be left to

personal opinion. To my mind it functions better when it is laid out in couplets, in the old

European traditional style. It conveys the smells, the sounds, and the atmosphere of Dark

Harlem with both lucid elegance and convincing intensity. It thereby gives the humble

servant a background of interesting exoticism, which elevates him and adds to his dignity.

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 Chapter III

Separate as the Fingers, United as the Hand: Segregation and Education

The significance of education in the building of societies can hardly be overestimated. As the

definition of education is the opportunity to learn from other peoples experiences it must

be recognized as the foundation of all progress. Without it, every human being would have to

start from scratch. Since we are born with only one instinct, to suck our nourishment, the

consequences of such conditions would have been lethal. The human race as it appears at

present would face immediate extinction without daily tutoring of its offspring from the very

beginning of life. Except for a few basic tricks that we need to survive, and which are given

to every human being, education has always been a means to establish the hierarchy of the

society. Some of the subjects were shown how to labour with the earth, others were educated

to become leaders. Consequently, education lead to control, over other peoples lives as well

as ones own. The right to rule in a society more often than not was inherited rather than

granted by the subjects as a well-earned position. This fact in time inevitably produced more

bad leaders than able ones. An elected leader would have proved his ability to hold his

position before he entered it, and could therefore be assumed to rule with justice and wisdom.

A person who found himself in a ruling position by the chance of birth might not be quite up

to the task. If not, he would have to hide his shortcomings. One way of keeping the crowds

under control is to keep them ignorant. Knowledge is power, and power in the lower classes

has always constituted a threat to the privileged ones. Langston Hughes gives an example of

that in Father and Son. As told in my chapter 2, the illegitimate son comes home from his

studies at Atlanta University and claims his birthright from his father. This direct link between

education and rebellion against unjust conditions has been a theme with Hughes from his

69
earliest years as a poet. He was convinced that equal education for black and white Americans

was one of the essentials in the struggle for equality. The segregation of the educational

system in the South seems to have been a challenge to him from his first encounter with it

during his reading tours. He was merciless in his condemnation of some of the black

principals humble attitude towards the white authorities.

Keeping his ancestry in mind, Hughess preoccupation with the educational system

seems inevitable. His mothers family was one of the most well-educated African Americans

in the nineteenth century, and that would obviously have formed Hughess attitude in this

field. To him education must have seemed like a matter of course. His own first experience

with segregation in the schools occurred when he was six. His mother at that time worked as a

stenographer in Topeka, and Hughes had difficulties in being admitted to a white school there.

His recollection of the incident was that my mother, who was always ready to do battle for

the rights of a free people, went directly to the school board, and got me into the Harrison

Street School (Berry 4). He was almost the only black pupil, and it does not require much

imagination to realize the impact such surroundings would have on an impressionable six-

year old. Berry confirms this notion: Through his experiences at the Harrison Street School,

he learned not only that he was a child without parents, but also that, unlike those around him,

he was black (Berry 5). The effect of these early experiences is evident in his conduct later

in life. His obvious pleasure in provoking authorities on all levels shows that, rather than

intimidating him, they inspired his vocation to fight for the rights of the blacks. Perhaps the

most provoking poem of them all is Christ in Alabama. It came into being from a

confrontation with the segregation system at a university in the South:

70
 Christ in Alabama.

-----------------------

Christ is a nigger
Beaten and black
Oh, bare your back!

Mary is his mother

Mammy of the South
Silence your mouth.

God is his father

White master above
Grant him your love.

Most holy bastard

Of the bleeding Mouth
Nigger Christ
On the cross
Of the South. (CP 143).

The theme of this poem, and one could claim, a justification for its cruel message, is the

bible verse: And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch

as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me ( St.

Matthew, 25.40). The first two lines of the first stanza is a direct demand to that effect. The

Nigger is one of Christs smallest, so by beating him they also beat Christ. The alliteration

in Beaten and black has an astounding impact on the associations of the reader. It seems as

if it is not only the initial letters which correspond. The two words appear in a disturbing

manner to belong together. In a peculiar way they seem to be related, although there is

nothing neither orthographic nor semantic to link them. After some pondering, though, one

realizes that there is! Just like old and tired, and young and gay, beaten and black are

connected through endless repetitions of cruel events in which the blacks have been beaten by

the whites. From the childhood bedside reading of Uncle Toms Cabin onwards, the image of

71
the maltreated black man has followed us until this very day. Over the years the beating of the

blacks, both mentally and physically, has become a familiar image, so familiar that the words

seem naturally connected. In the poem they point directly to a spiritual beating of Hughes

himself.

In 1931 he was admitted to do a reading of his poetry at a white college. This was

surely an extraordinary event at that time, even if the University of North Carolina, Chapel

Hill was probably the most progressive white university in the South. Looking back on the

history of educational segregation, we realize that any real break through in this field was still

more than twenty years in the future. Thus Langston Hughes once again positioned himself in

the vanguard. His courage and his pleasure in being provocative is displayed through his

behaviour during that stay. Although he was admitted to read his poems at the university, he

found that none of the (white) teachers or leaders offered to put him up for the night. He

eventually found quarters with two female students (suggested by Rampersad to be the total

membership of the local John Reed Club) (Rampersad 224). Provoked by this humiliating

treatment, and on request from the editors of the progressive magazine Contempo, Hughes

responded with Christ in Alabama. It produced an uproar at the university, and he barely

escaped a mob.

The recipient of the message in the poem is unquestionably the white Americans. After

the accusation of this hideous crime in the first two lines comes something in between a

warning and a threat: Oh, bare your back! Prepare for the punishment for centuries of

cruel and unchristian behaviour!, Hughes seems to shout from the mountain. Once again an

image springs to mind, an image of millions of blacks being flogged by the supreme master,

white and Christian and in his own right to rule the savage. Mistake, Hughes seems to

say, big mistake! You were not beating a savage, a half animal. You were beating the very

centre of your existence, the highest in your hierarchy, not the lowest. You were beating your

72
saviour, who had freed you from eternal condemnation, Christ himself. Oh, bare your

backs! The Oh and the exclamation mark give the line a biblical quality and thereby

emphasizes the inevitability of it. Punishment has to come, because the Almighty himself will

see to it that justice prevails in the end.

The second stanza is a praise to black women. The image of her as the Virgin Mary,

mother of all, corresponds directly with the black Mammy of the South, also a mother of

all. It is one of historys great paradoxes that although the white masters regarded the blacks

as some sort of inferior creatures, they still trusted them with the care of their children from

birth. From all that has been written about the master/slave period emerges the assertion that

the bonds between mammy and child were often stronger than between mother and child.

Since the mammy obviously was able not only to substitute for the mother but actually do her

job better, one would assume that respect for the mammy would follow naturally. That is not

what Hughes conveys in the poem. Silence your mouth, he says. Hold your tongue in

reverence of the black woman.

The third stanza speaks on behalf of the mulatto, and it contains the same theme as

Hughess poem of that title discussed in Chapter II. The most prominent sting of this verse is

the reference to the white master as God. This is pinpointing the white master of the big

house, accusing him of having a godlike perception of himself. It also repeats the fact that if

so, then his son is half god and should be treated like one. Hughes is ironic here. What he is

actually saying is: Face facts and behave like a human being. The black man and the mixed

one are equal with the white. Grant him your love! Accept the bastard!

In the last stanza he includes both the nigger in the first and the bastard in the

third stanza. They are still both presented as representatives of Christ on earth: Most holy

bastard, Nigger Christ. This time the whites are not merely accused of beating the blacks.

Now Hughes goes all the way and draws a direct parallel between the crucifixion of Jesus

73
Christ and the practice of the Ku Klux Klan, The cross/Of the South. Acknowledging the

fact that the Klan not only used the cross as their emblem, but also donned the robes of

ancient Christian societies, the impact of the accusation becomes grave. Here we have these

sworn Christian men, out beating and killing Christ himself in Christs own holy name.

The reaction to the publishing of the poem were thunderous. Rampersad tells us: The

powerful Textile Bulletin denounced the insulting and blasphemous articles of the Negro

Langston Hughes. Three hundred persons signed a protest to the state against the angel of

darkness. . . It is bad enough to call Christ a bastard, a local politician fumed about Christ

in Alabama, but to call him a nigger, thats too much! (Rampersad 225). The records

show that Hughes was not in the least discouraged by these events. On the contrary, he moved

like a man possessed, Rampersad says, and he assured Walter White that he had had a swell

time at Chapel Hill (Rampersad 225, 226). Another proof that Hughes was pleased with the

poem and its effect is the fact that he had it reprinted in his final book of poems, The Panther

and the Lash in 1967. In his essay The Literary Experiments of Langston Hughes, James

A. Emanuel calls it that passionately brave and artful poem (Black Genius 181).

As he had been a student at several white educational institutions, Hughes was able to

recognize the difference in quality between black universities and white ones.

Throughout his reading tour in the South, he was appalled by the cowardice of the leaders in

the various universities he visited. He found them backward and servile towards the white

government. He said: In general, many black schools are not trying to make men and women

out of their students at all they are doing their best to produce spineless uncle Toms,

uninformed and full of mental and moral evasions (Rampersad 232). In his introduction to

Negro Songs of Protest by Lawrence Gillert, he again attacks the cowardice of most educated

blacks: Fear has silenced their mouths. . . . The tossed scrap of American philanthropy has

74
bribed their leaders. . . . The charity luxury of Fisk, Spelman, Howard, fool and delude their

students. . . . The black millions as a mass are still hungry, poor, and beaten

(Rampersad 232). In 1927 Hughes visited the Tuskegee Institute. Here he was faced with

what Rampersad calls a contradiction between education and leadership (Rampersad 232).

Tuskegee was the wealthiest of the black schools at that time with its 2600 students. The man

in charge was the well known Booker T. Washington. To his horror, Hughes found on campus

a guest house for whites only! (Rampersad 232). Perhaps he should have expected

something like that. It was general knowledge at the time that Booker T. Washington was not

altogether against some form of segregation. His creed was that blacks and whites should be

separate as fingers and united as a hand. All though Hughes quite clearly was of a different

opinion and despite the segregated guest house, he doubtlessly held Washington in the

greatest esteem, as we shall see later on in this chapter.

In Hughess personal papers at the Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale

University, I found another example of the importance Hughes placed on education. In one of

his notebooks from his trip to Russia and China in 1932-33, there was this description of a

school at Kushai: 1st Turkmenian Normal School. 350 students. 38 teachers. Biology well

equipt labororatory,(his error), charts . . . etc. Five white rats, turtles, frogs. Then follows

immaculate data of students and teachers background.5 In another notebook in the same

folder he praises the progress in the educational system after the revolution: Before

Revolution only 200 Turk. Now 75,000 pupils. How did they develop 4,300 native teachers in

13 years? (Box 492). This seems to have been written in admiration of the system which had

both the wisdom to recognize the importance of education and the ability to bring results in

that field.

5
The Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,box 492

75
 In his article Fair Play in Dixie in the Chicago Defender of March 17, 1945, Hughes

aims his attack on the Southern majority in our country (80). The article is one of many

examples of Hughess ability to vary his tactics. Only a year previously he published Hold

Tight! Theyre Crazy White! in the Chicago Defender of March 11 1944. The theme in the

two texts seems to be the same, but the styles could hardly be more different. The latter of the

two is obviously inspired by the sociologist Franklin Frazers The Pathology of Race

Prejudice. Hughes is quoting him in his article: Race prejudice shows precisely the same

characteristics as those ascribed to insanity (Chicago Defender 77). With this statement of a

professional as foundation, Hughes throws off all caution and gives vent to his seemingly long

subdued frustration in an outburst of exaggerated accusations. Some folks have gone mad

from being white, he says. Their madness is visible in the fact that they think they are meant

to rule the world. He makes his point very clear, when he puts South Africa with its

Apartheid system, Hitlers Germany, and Dixie in the same category. He claims that they are

mad, wrong in the head, abnormal, and need to be psychoanalysed (Chicago Defender 77).

His proof is that It does not make sense to deny Negroes the vote and than call Negroes bad

citizens when they have no chance to be good ones. It does not make sense to deny Negroes

equal educational facilities and then accuse them of being ignorant (Chicago Defender 77).

This is what is done in Dixie, so he suggests that the Southerners be given help to rid

themselves of this pathological domination complex. He hopes that the Carnegie Fund of

the Julius Rosenwald Foundation will find the funds to psychoanalyse their heads, and help

to straighten them out a bit. He is concerned: They need help to get back to their right

minds, because they are dangerous (Chicago Defender 78). It is not very likely that this

belligerent outburst served Hughess purpose. Such wild accusations, without any connection

to reality, could only alienate and separate the parties in the race conflict. It could also hamper

Hughes in his future attempts to be taken seriously.

76
 In Fair Play in Dixie he goes to the opposite extreme. From wild exaggerations he

switches to deliberate understatements. This he contrives by adapting to the forms of the

legendary gentleman of the South. It gives associations to social conditions where honour was

more precious than life, and a mans word was enough to close any deal. His opening lines

confirm this first impression, and set the moral standard of the article: I regret to say it, but

so far as I can see, the Southern majority in our country has no sense of fair play at all

(Chicago Defender 80). Quite a change from the angry scream of Hold Tight! The contents,

however, are very much the same. In the first paragraph he once again points out the

paradoxical behaviour of the Southerners when they first deny blacks the right to equal

education, and then accuse them of being ignorant. Furthermore, how they claim that blacks

are un-cultural and at the same time close the state universities to them, bar them from

theatres, and deny them access to public libraries (Chicago Defender 80). The effect of this

low voiced, modest approach from one gentleman to others of the same quality, reaches its

peak in a phrase that deserves to be called the understatement of the year. First he reminds

his audience of the practice of the Ku Klux Klan, how a gang of forty or more would grab a

single black and torture him or even lynch him. Then he claims simply that such behaviour is

not fair play, because he was only one and they were so many! By addressing them as if they

only need a reminder in order to change their behaviour, he implies that they are gentlemen,

not mere savages. In this way he forces his audience to realize the horror of these mens

conduct.

Despite Hughess, and all the other fighters for equalitys efforts, this state of affairs

was not easily changed. Ten years after this article, in 1955, Judge Tom P. Brady made his

speech Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation . . . America has Its Choice (Eyes 83).

The Monday he is referring to is the Monday, May 17, 1954. That is the day of the U.S.

Supreme Court decision which was going to rock the South in its foundation. To comprehend

77
the full meaning of this blow, it is necessary to go all the way back to 1868. That year the

Fourteenth Amendment was made to remove all legal distinctions among all persons born or

naturalized in the United States (Eyes 67). In 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson established the

separate but equal doctrine. The next significant trial in history was the Brown v Board of

Education in 1954, where the Supreme Court reversed the separate but equal doctrine in its

decision on Bradys Black Monday. The decision stated that a classification based solely

on race violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Eyes 62). In his

speech, which is a passionate defence of segregation policy, Brady uses exactly the same

arguments that Hughes attacks in the two articles above. Bradys main argument is that the

blacks had never proved their right to be treated as equal Americans. One quotation could

represent the essence of his speech. After referring to the history of America, the conquering

of the West, the Indian wars, the liberation of Texas, Custer, and El Alamo, all events which

took place when the blacks were still slaves, he roars: In the struggle for development, in the

expansion and growth which was taking place, in the laying of the solid foundation of our

nation, it is ridiculous to assume that the American Negro played any part except as a body

servant or a hostler (Eyes 85). As if the American Negro had the opportunity.

However contradictory this appeal was, it had its effect. Massive resistance against

racial integration brought quick results. In 1955, the year after the Brown v Board of

Education decision, the Brown II decision was made. It asked African Americans to defer

the exercise of a constitutional right, and gave southern states time to hold fast to the practice

and doctrine of segregation (Eyes 62). However, at this point in history it was plain that it

was only a question of time before desegregation would be put into practice. The diehard

Council Right Southerners would have to give in at some point, even if they would fight

progress at every step. The Civil Rights movement was still in the making, but its accelerating

effect spread like a forest fire.

78
 This also seems to be Hughess opinion in The Dilemma of the Negro Teacher Facing

Desegregation, printed in the Chicago Defender in October 1955. He ignores the Brown II

decision and acts as if the pupils rights are confirmed, as they truly were, if only on paper.

His concern in this text is the black teachers and their possible difficulties in getting

integrated. He says: As citizens, they should have the right to teach in ANY school, just as

our children now have Supreme Court approval to enter any school

(Chicago Defender 38). This article is the third example of Hughess different styles in factual

prose. It has no irony, no exaggerations, and no understatements. It is held in a matter of fact

tone, and as well as anticipating forthcoming problems, he suggests how they can be solved.

Most of the text is neutral to the extent that it could have been written by an outsider. There is

one very subjective side to it, though, and that part of the article is not just strongly

opinionated, it also marks an alteration from Hughess general view on the question of

equality between the races.

The black-white question regarded from a broad perspective can be seen from three

possible points if view. Tom Brady and his like represent one side, namely that the blacks are

inferior to the whites. In his Black Monday speech he leaves no doubt about his heartfelt

conviction. He even claims to have the proof of it, as shown above. At the other extreme we

find W.E.B. du Bois, who obviously regarded the blacks as superior to the whites. From some

of his statements it seems as if he would like to keep the blacks separated from the whites in

order to maintain this superiority. His call to blacks is to weld together and show how great

a contribution the black genius could bring to the world, the great message we have for

humanity (Eyes 8). Hughes, although he was a great admirer of du Bois, does not seem to go

to such lengths. His works seem to aim at approval from the white part of society. By

depicting the beauty in the black arts and the proud history of the blacks, he wants

79
acknowledgement of the equality between the races. He does not approve of superiority in any

of the parts.

In this article, however, he is promoting the quality of the black teachers as superior to

the white ones. He claims that a blacks teacher has community standing and influence

beyond that enjoyed by most whites. He is also of the opinion that a white grammar school

teacher is just another teacher in the eyes of society(Chicago Defender 38). To prove the

validity of his argument, he points to some of the most prominent persons among the African

Americans. Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and James Weldon Johnson, all

of them among the greatest names in African American life, and all of them teachers

(Chicago Defender 38). His concern at this point is whether this valuable work force will be

maintained, that is, if they will be integrated. He articulates his misgivings about the fact that

some all-black educational institutions were facing the possibility of being closed. His

solution to the problem must have seemed a little high-flying fifty years ago. Considering the

circumstances at the time, his matter of fact suggestion seem nave and provoking at the same

time. Once again he speaks as if a full consent existed between the white and the black

population. He proposes to turn all the all-black institutions into all-American institutions, but

with special curricula such as African history, in order to enlighten the whites. In addition to

this he suggests that some of them could become centres of interracial culture and social

engineering designed towards the building of a better America, with particular emphasis on

race relations (Chicago Defender 39). To sum it all up, the article seems to convey an

impossible dream dressed in a realistic garment in an effort to influence society. Once again

Hughes is to be found in the vanguard, anticipating the future, and acting as if it already

represents the present.

The present, however, was significantly more complicated. Hughess article

80
Concerning a great Mississippi writer, printed in the Chicago Defender on May 26 1956, is

a testimony to that fact. It was a direct reply to an utterance given by William Faulkner, one

of the greatest American authors. It was given in an interview which Russell Warren Howe

conducted in connection with certain riots at the University of Alabama when an African

American girl was given admission to the university. Faulkners comment on that event was:

As long as theres a middle road, all right, Ill be on it. But if it came to fighting, Id fight for

Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out in the streets and shooting

Negroes (Chicago Defender 247).

In the opening line of his article, Hughes wonders whether Faulkner is going to be

punished for this statement. Then he elaborates the question by comparing Faulkner to Paul

Robeson, the world famous black singer, who lost his passport for allegedly saying

something not nearly so subversified (Chicago Defender 91). Now Hughes asks if the same

will happen to Faulkner. This introductory part of the text reveals the devastating conflict that

was ruling every day life in the Southern states of the United States at that time. It displays the

impossible practice of passing a law to protect certain members of society, and then appealing

to the same group to act as if the law did not exist. The Brown II decision, as told above,

actually gave southerners free hands in their dealings with African Americans. Hence the

Federal Government was caught in a trap constituted by its own decisions. Hughes, though,

chooses to ignore the Brown II decision. Again he is anticipating future progress, assuming

that the law will treat Mr. Faulkner in the same manner as it treated Mr. Robeson. In

presenting his view this way he is pretending to rely on the Federal Government to function as

it is elected to do, according to the Law of the Land. It is a subtle sort of pressure, and it has

often proved more effective than open criticism of the conditions at any given time. The

comparison between Robeson and Faulkner turns out to be quite a deliberate choice. Hughess

purpose is revealed when he expresses his wish that Mr. Faulkner should be allowed to keep

81
his passport. Otherwise he would be stuck in Mississippi, and Hughes wants him to go as far

away as possible, to the moon, Mars, or Venus (Chicago Defender 91).

His next paragraph he uses to praise Faulkner as an excellent writer and a sincere

citizen (The Chicago Defender 91). He does not doubt that Mr. Faulkner means what he

says. What is incomprehensible to Hughes is why he is saying it. To emphasize his next attack

he changes paragraphs again, and also his style of approach. Now he is surprised, taken aback,

astonished, by Mr. Faulkners attitude, as if he did not have the slightest inkling that any

enlightened person could nourish such feelings. Incredulously he asks: Doesnt he want me

to go to school ever in life with the rest of the Americans in Mississippi? Am I a varmint or

something that he wants me, colored, to wait and wait outside of the good life, while

everybody else, white, Mexican, Oriental, native and foreign born, Jew or gentile, go to the

university of Mississippi if they want but me? (The Chicago Defender 91). Hughes, of

course, was perfectly aware of the facts of life. Surveys made in 1940 showed a severe

disparity between the American citizens constitutional rights and the reality in practice. In

1940 the number of white people with no schooling was 3,2 %, of non-whites 11,7%.

Unfortunately, there is no data exclusively on blacks, only for the entire group of non-whites.

However, from James A. Geschwenders essay Social Structure and the Negro Revolution,

we learn that the non-white population consisted of 90% blacks at the time of both surveys

that I am referring to (Black Americans 454). The position of the non-whites may therefore be

regarded as approximately that of the blacks. As for the ones who did go to school in 1940,

30,5 % of the whites went four years to elementary school, 11,4 % of the non-whites did. 13

% of the whites had four years at High-School, while only 3,8% of the non-whites were that

fortunate. 5,9 % of the whites went to college for four years, a mere 1,4 % of the non-whites

made it to that level. Even if the survey of 1960 shows improvement as both groups move

upwards in the system, the differences between the races are almost unchanged. It shows 2%

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whites with no schooling, 6,6 % non-whites. 22,1 % of the whites get four years at high-

school, 11,7% of the non-whites. Four years at college is granted 10,3 % of the whites, and

3,4 % of the non-whites. These figures show that the non-whites are always lagging behind

the whites in the upward climb. They reveal that the whites in general are moving from the

middle to the top of the educational system, the non-whites move from the bottom to the

middle. However, they also indicate that there is a marked progress towards equality between

whites and non-whites in the lower age groups. This fact would inevitable manifest itself

upward in the system as the pupils grew older, and lead to a situation where non-whites

improved their educational accomplishments relative to the whites. It should be noted, though,

that these surveys cover all of the US except Hawaii and Alaska. The situation in the

segregation states in the South is not especially recorded. Still, at the time of his article in

1956, one is safe to assume that Hughes was painfully aware of the situation, both in the

country in general and in the South in particular. With their practice of segregation in addition

to the practice of the over all suppression of African Americans, the South doubtlessly

contributed their fair share to the depressing statistics. Still, Hughes is ignoring the appalling

everyday treatment of the blacks, and sticking stubbornly to his indisputable constitutional

rights.

The rest of the text is in my opinion too emotional to be rated as high quality literature

in any genre. It seems as if Hughes gets carried away on a wave of frustration. Again he goes

to the extreme, and accuses Faulkner of being mad. In doing so he uses expressions which

place him outside the ranks of sophisticated scholars, such as he has blowed his top, and

his wig is gone (Chicago Defender 92). On the other hand, this could of course be

intentional. By using these phrases he would endear himself to the uneducated black readers.

Nevertheless, such language would alienate him from the white gentry of the South, and his

appeal would have no effect unless he managed to reach that particular group of citizens.

83
However, with these expressions he identifies with the largest group of African Americans,

the commoners. The phrases convey an important message. He is not just a writer in an

elevated position in society. He is a representative of the frustrated masses.

Toward the end of the piece there is an interesting sentence. After wondering what

would have happened to Mr. Faulkner in this situation if he were black, he answers the

question himself: He would be in jail, else investigated by Senator Estlands committee,

surveyed by the FBI, and called all the names in the book by the patriotic editorial writers

who damned Josephine Baker to hell and gone for exaggerating a little about lynchings before

the white gentry of Mr. Faulkners state dropped little Emmet Till in the river with an iron

wheel tied to his feet (Chicago Defender 92). Here, in one run-on-line Hughes manages to

display the extent of incongruity between crime and punishment, working both ways. On the

one hand, Mr. Faulkner, who has publicly declared that he is prepared to defy a constitutional

law, even admitting that he is quite willing to commit murder, is not punished at all. On the

other extreme there is Emmet Till, a fourteen year-old boy on a visit to relatives in

Mississippi, in 1955. A Chicago boy, and not familiar with the conditions of the South, he

allegedly whistled at a white girl. For this crime he was brutally murdered and thrown in the

river, condemned to death without a trial. His murderers, though, two white men, were cleared

by an all white jury (Eyes 37-38).

This section of the text is a reflection of Hughess upset mood. It is an emotional

outburst, quite similar to Hold Tight!. By depicting Faulkner as a black man he is pointing

mockingly to the malfunction of the American democracy. He leaves his readers with the

impression of the South as a lawless, barbaric society. The expression little Emmet Till

emphasizes the fact that the victim was a child. Thereby he marks the white gentry, the

carriers of the sophisticated culture of the South, as brutes who are killing children. He is

painting a picture of a society which is existing on false premises. The gentry are savage

84
killers. The esteemed author, the noble mind of the Nobel prize is a gunman, out on the streets

killing people.

1958 was a watershed in the struggle for equality in the educational field in the South.

That was the year when Ernest Green graduated from Central High School in Little Rock,

Arkansas. This event took place on May 27nd, and on June 14th that year, Hughes comments

on it in an exuberant article in the Chicago Defender. This article is yet another example of

his variety in style.

The first ten lines, which constitute the introduction of the article, are composed by the

book, with a presentation of the topic and the conflict. The topic is, of course, civil rights,

and the conflict is the difficulty the black people have in putting those rights into practice. In

order to emphasize the magnitude of the young mans achievement he first points out that

in some parts of our country just average day-to-day living needs from the Negroes more

courage and determination than it does from whites (Chicago Defender 43).

At this point there is a marked change in style in the text. The first example is when he

calls the diploma a banner of singular glory. This image gives associations to historic

heroes at horse with their banners flying at the spearhead of a victorious army. It thereby

classifies Ernest Greens victory as one that turns the historic events, which it obviously did.

From here on Hughes also starts to repeat the word diploma. All in all he does this twenty

times. These images and repetitions give the text a distinctly lyrical quality. Parts of it appear

more like a poem than like a piece of actual prose:

The dim wonder of book learning in the minds of countless slaves

who dared not touch a book for fear of flogging lies in that diploma . . .
The tears of slave mothers who desperately wanted their children to learn
moisten all the letters in Ernest Greens diploma. His diploma is not an
ordinary diploma. No! It is the diploma of all the people who
remembered . . . (Chicago Defender 44).

The depiction of the scene where Ernest Green receives his graduation paper is perhaps

the most solemn part of the text. First he reminds his readers of The Knights of the White

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Circle and The Ku Klux Klan and all the horror they inflicted on black people who tried to

get some kind of education. Then he uses the image of evening dew to describe their

sufferings: And the dew of ancient pain moistened his diploma, and the tears of all the

generations of enforced ignorance fell upon his hand as he reached out to accept the token of

graduation, his diploma! (Chicago Defender 44). The image of the dew that fell gently over

the stadium conveys almost religious connotations. It becomes like a blessing from heaven of

the ceremony, a token of gratitude from all those who lived and died without being granted

this opportunity. Then he concentrates on the diploma itself, and describes it as a symbol of

everything that has been done to make this moment possible. He manages to include all the

various departments of society. The sweat of work and fear is rolled into the diploma, he says.

In this connection he mentions both the physical workers and the great minds. The ribbon

around the paper is the symbol of all the prayers in all the little churches in the South. The

golden seal on the document is the symbol of song. This symbol represents all the

congregations who gave offers to education, the professional singers who raised money for

the cause, and the song of the black mother as she toiled over her washing to provide her

children with an education. In this way he includes all aspects of life, work, religion and art.

By reminding his readers of the fact that all levels of society have been involved in the

struggle, he once again emphasizes the significance of education, and ends his jubilant script

by proclaiming Ernest Green the man of the year.

In the struggle against segregation, this celebration of victory is just as important as the

harsh attacks on maltreatment. The captivating form of the article leaves no reader unaffected.

Hughes emphasizes the event, and thereby extents the effect of it. In addition he is keeping his

audience informed about both progress and setback in the Civil Rights Movement. He proves

to be a living source of both information and propaganda. Considering the numbers of readers

of the Chicago Defender, Langston Hughes must have made a difference in this field. The

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celebration of Ernest Greens diploma can therefore be seen as the marking of a private as

well as a public victory.

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 Conclusion

To study Langston Hughes has been a somewhat overwhelming process. I did not realise the

immensity of his production until I started my research. Also the variety of his works is quite

stunning. Between 1926, when he had his break through with The Weary Blues, and his

untimely death in 1967, he wrote sixteen books of poems, two novels, seven collections of

short stories, two autobiographies, five works of non-fiction, and nine childrens books. In

addition to this, he edited nine anthologies of poetry, folklore, short fiction, and humor.

Furthermore, he translated Jacques Roumain, Nicholas Guilln, Gabriela Mistral, and

Frederico Garcia Lorca. He also wrote at least thirty plays (Critics ix). The nick-names which

were used to describe him also tell of variation, both in genre and quality. It seems quite

remarkable that such different expressions as Shakespeare in Harlem, the poet laureate of

the Negro, and the poet low-rate of Harlem was used to classify one and the same person

(Critics ix). The huge amount of literary work can only be a result of his unwavering

dedication, which never seems to have slackened. In fact, it appears to thrive in times of

trouble and adversity. After having finished my study of him I see him more clearly than ever

as a pioneer in the matter of style, and a frontline fighter for the cause of the blacks. By using

the black voice as a weapon in his fight for African Americans rights, he managed to

present the demand for just treatment in a very striking fashion. Because he employed the

popular blues and jazz in his poetry, he identified its origin and forced the white population to

recognize and appreciate the assets of the black culture. He thus clearly displayed the

connection between the internationally celebrated music, and the culture of the blacks.

Thereby he transformed the black masses from being beggars at the back door, pleading for

acceptable living conditions, to highly appreciated contributors with something precious to

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offer. Through his poetry he displayed clearly the connection between the internationally

celebrated music, and the culture of the African Americans.

It is not easily explained how this idea first came to him. He was not a natural

himself. As stated above, he said himself that his reason for breaking up with the

Godmother was that he was not in possession of that primitive rhythm. Still he managed

to conquer the literate world with the rhythm of his poetry, and thereby communicate the

mixture of pride and misery among black Americans. The blues and jazz form constantly

reminded the reader that these much admired art forms are a prominent feature of the people

that the whites regarded as inferior to themselves. The words carry an accusation of

maltreatment, and a demand for change. In this fashion the message is given a double effect,

in that it is conveyed in both the words and the style. In retrospect it seems such an obvious

thing to do, because it turned out to be a success. However, at the time it was dismissed by

many authorities in the realm of literature. In the preface to Langston Hughes: Critical

Perspectives Past and Present, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says: Hughes, well before his

compeers, Sterling Brown, and Zora Neal Hurston, demonstrated how to use black vernacular

langauage and music especially the blues and jazz as a poetic diction, a formal language

of poetry, and at a moment when other black writers thought the task fruitless at best,

detrimental at worst. Indeed, so much of the best of the African-American literary tradition

Brown, Hurston, Ellison, Morrison grows out of the vernacular into the very stuff of

literature (Critics x, xi). By this statement, Gates recognizes Hughes as a pioneer in the field

of poetry. However, Gates is here talking about only one of Hughess tools. I find his

variation in style, within the genres, most intriguing. This goes for both his poems and his

articles in the Chicago Defender. The ability to adjust the mood of the text to its theme is, in

my opinion, a characteristic with Hughes.

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 So much for his poetic talents. Another part of the puzzle is his, what must be called

vocation, and his perseverance in pursuing it. As I have suggested earlier, the fact that he was

an outsider was perhaps the direct cause of both. He might have been attracted by the

exoticism of it all, enough to want to be part of it, without being able to fulfil the requirements

for membership. In the same way his texts may be seen to be just a little removed from the

real thing, with a sufficient touch of artificiality to add to their ability to excite their readers.

Arnold Rampersad also seems to suggest something along those lines, in his review of Fine

Clothes to the Jew. He says that his impressionistic recording of everyday life resulted from

his impotence, his acknowledged sense of inferiority to the black masses from whom he took

his voice (Critics xi). It is essential in this connection that Rampersad regarded Fine Clothes

to the Jew to be Hughess greatest achievement.

One of the most fascinating qualities of that part of Hughess production which I have

examined is the actuality of the texts. Whether a poem or an article in the Chicago Defender,

they always seem to coincide with some major event in his life or in the flow of history. His

attacks on segregation policy and its effect on black Americans lives never seem to have

ceased. This part of his work is an illustration of his alert awareness of current events in the

march towards equality. To appreciate the stamina it took to keep on fighting, one has to

recognize the setbacks and the slowness of the process.

The years between 1936 and 1959 are regarded as the time of the birth of the Civil

Rights Movement. On a time line found on the Internet, Jesse Owenss four gold medals in

the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, is marked as the first step in the movement. Further on, I

notice with interest the importance of the artists in the progress. The painters, the musicians,

and the writers represent most of the events during the 1930s. The next major achievement is

obtained in connection with WWII, when the all-black 99th Pursuit Squadron of the U.S.

Army Air Corps was formed in 1941. Gradually, but slowly, doors which had formerly been

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closed began to crack open during the 1940s. However, the first evidently major step forward

was taken as late as in 1957, when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. established the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was the same year as President Dwight D.

Eisenhower ordered federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, after unsuccessfully trying to

persuade Governor Orval Faubus to give up efforts to block desegregation at Central High

School.The world, on a whole, may so far have been indifferent to the historical development

which was taking place in the United States, but it was shaken awake by the massive march

on Wahsington D.C. in 1963. Martin Luther King Jr.s I have a Dream speech is still on the

syllabus of Norwegian highschool students.

In 1964, the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers, two white and one black,

were found in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Aftenposten of 9 January 2005 brings the baffling

news that now, forty years later, 79 year old preacher and saw-mill owner, Ray Killen, has

been charged with the killings. He is accused of having recruited and organized the gang from

the Ku Klux Klan that committed the murders. In my opinion this is a representative

illustration of the stubborn resistance which has met the Civil Rights Movement. Two more

major events followed in 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into

law, and Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The last major step

forward that Langston Hughes was there to watch, was when Thurgood Marshall became the

first African-American U.S. Supreme Court justice in 1967.6

Here stops the track of Langston Hughes. Thus far, all along, he was in the arena with his

comments, raging, praising, lamenting, attacking. He was always alert to the latest step in the

development, whether it went forwards or backwards. As we must acknowledge the immense

impact of the artists in the struggle for equality, it is inevitable to picture him as an

outstanding and more than average influential representative from that realm.

6
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 Bibliography

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Seventh Edition. Massachusetts: Heinle &

Heinle, 1999.

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes Before and Beyond Harlem. Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence

Hill,1983.

Black Literature Criticism. Vol. 2. Ed. James P. Draper. Detroit: Gale Research 1992.

Contemporary Literary Critcism. Vol. 108. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Detroit: Gale Research,

1998.

Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 10. Ed. Dedria Bryfonska. Detroit: Gale Research,

1979.

Hughes, Langston. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writing by

Langston Hughes. Ed. Faith Berry. New York: Lawrence Hill & Company Publishers, 1973.

Hughes, Langston. Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender. Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 1995.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. London: Pluto Press, 1986.

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Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad and

David Roessel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Hughes, Langston. The Langston Hughes Reader. New York: George Braziller, 1969.

Hughes, Langston and Milton Meltzer. Black Magic: A Pictorial History of African

Americans in the Performing Arts. New York: Crown, 1967.

Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1976.

Langston Hughes Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Therman B. ODaniel. New York:

William Morrow, 1971.

Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. H.L. Gates Jr. and K.A.

Appiah. New York: Amistad Press,1993.

Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington, KY: The

University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1989.

Reese, Ruth. Lang, sort vei. Oslo: Tiden Norsk Forlag, 1972.

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The Black Americans: Interpretive Readings. Ed. Seth M. Scheiner and Tilden G. Edelstein.

New York: Holt, Reinehart, and Winston, 1971.

The Bible. Authorized King James Version. Oxford: OUP, 1997.

The Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, JWJ MSS 26. Series XIV Personal Papers,

Yale University, New Haven, USA.

The Eyes on the Prize: Civil Rights Reader. Ed. Clayborne Carson, David J. Garrow, Gerald

Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. Ed. Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl

Lewis. Oxford: OUP, 2000.

Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African American Culture 1920 1930.

New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.

Louis Armstrongwww.carlpetter.comtextsarmstrong.htm

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 Abbreviations.

BLC Black Literature Criticism.

CLC Contemporary Literary Criticism

CP The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes.

Critics L. Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present..

Reader Hughes, L. The Langston Hughes Reader.

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