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Langston Hughes' enduring legacy


His inspirational writings have kept the poet current 100 years after his birth.
By M. Dion Thompson
Sun Staff

February 22, 2002

Langston Hughes lives!

Listen to his poetry sounding through the voice of a fifth-grade boy who ends a recitation of "I, Too, Sing America" by raising a defiant fist straight from the days of Black Power:

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed -

I, too, am America.

Langston Hughes, the black poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, lives. He's on a postage stamp issued this month. He looks good, suave and elegant in that classic style. You could easily imagine him toasting the evening with Duke Ellington and keeping company with Lena Horne. After all, he was a night owl, most comfortable between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.

He lives because in this, the centennial year of his birth, his art
continues to set off sympathetic vibrations in the hearts of those who approach his work.

Andrea Jackson, who this month is guiding her Northwood Elementary School students on a journey through Hughes' life and literature, knows this to be true. As the young defiant one takes his seat, she turns to her class andasks:
"What connections did you make?"

"That we are proud to be black, and proud to be Americans," one student replies.

Therein lies a summation of Hughes, a writer who, in the words of
Professor Dolan Hubbard, a Hughes scholar, celebrated "the linguistic universe of black people."

Of course, he wasn't always a revered figure. Hughes, whose life
includes the classic wanderlust of American writers, was controversial when he began publishing in the 1920s. Works that have since become touchstones of America's literary voice were then cause for concern.

Critics complained his poetry was too straightforward, too simple. It lacked depth. For the first time black literary expression was being widely recognized. Writers struggled over who would speak for black America and with what voice.

On one hand there was Countee Cullen, whose eloquent sonnets of black life -"Yet Do I Marvel" and "From The Dark Tower" - sounded a tone handed down from Shakespeare and John Donne. Some would say Cullen wrote in a foreign tongue. Then there was Hughes.

"Langston Hughes harkens back to a Walt Whitman, who said the poets should write in the language of the people," said Hubbard, chairman of the department of English and language arts at Morgan State University.

Maybe that is why his poems are well-remembered and recited by
children, like the ones from Highlandtown Middle School who gave a presentation earlier this week at the main branch of the post office on East Fayette Street. Maybe that is why the playwright Lorraine Hansberry turned to his "Dream Deferred" for the title of her groundbreaking play, A Raisin In The Sun. Hughes' language was familiar. It came from the American experience.

"He wrote about the common black people, and what could be more indicative of the common black people than the language they created, the vernacular, the blues," said Hubbard, also president of the Langston Hughes Society, a national group of academics and Hughes devotees. "Hughes was not only
looking to liberate black language, but liberate black expression from the Anglo-European aesthetic traditions."

In "Madam and her Madam" his narrator gives off this blues lament:

I worked for a woman,

She wasn't mean -

But she had a twelve-room

House to clean.

He wanted his poems to be a true statement of the lives of his people. Then as now, it was too easy to fall into stereotypes and caricatures, too easy to turn the vernacular into a comic dialect. Hughes consciously sought to avoid that trap. And his audiences responded.

"When he read his poetry, people could see themselves in his words," said Hubbard. "They could hear the voice of their relatives and their friends."

Jackson said her fifth-grade students were fascinated by Hughes' life as much as by his poetry.

He was born in Joplin, Mo., in 1902 to a family that numbered among its ancestors a militant abolitionist, a member of John Brown's fighters at Harper's Ferry, and John Mercer Langston, a prominent black man of the 19th century. Hughes was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston.

He left Columbia University in New York after a year and began three years of wandering. For awhile he worked aboard a freighter off the west coast of Africa. He also spent several months in Paris, the de rigueur stop for American artists, before returning to the United States in 1924. He had already published "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."

It is the type of poem fit for Paul Robeson or James Earl Jones,
someone with a sonorous, commanding voice, someone who can bring a certain stature to the words.

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. ...

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

But in Jackson's class the task falls to a little girl, who speaks
softly, shyly, the last phrase falling away. The teacher challenges her students to take their understanding to a deeper level where they can begin to see the motivations that prodded his pen, the experiences that gave him a positive view of black American life.

"We didn't want to just recite poetry. We wanted to make a connection," said Jackson. "He's proof that you can achieve anything. He had a gift, and with that gift he made a marvelous contribution."

For Kwame Alexander, poet and founder of BlackWords Inc. publishing house in Alexandria, Va., Hughes was the consummate writer, versatile, able to make a living from his craft.

"He's written it all. The poetry. The music. The film," said Alexander, who is writing a theatrical tribute based on Hughes' Jesse B. Semple stories. "They have the humor. They have the social protest. They are so timely."

A favorite is "Feet Live Their Own Life" in which Semple, a common man of the people, says the story of his life begins with his feet.

"These feet have walked 10,000 miles working for white folks and
another 10,000 keeping up with colored," says Semple, whose name forms a code for Hughes' approach to writing.

Just Be Simple.

"I think that's the beauty of quality literature, of literature that
comes from a place of passion, as opposed to a place of packaging," said Alexander. "It just resonates with you. It never stops resonating with you."

There were complicated times in his life, especially during the
McCarthy era of the 1950s. In 1953, he was forced to appear before U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Though he denied ever being a member of the Communist Party, Hughes characterized as misguided some of his earlier verse. Hubbard believes Hughes was trying
to escape the hell that had been brought down on the heads of Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois.

"He did not want to have his pen silenced," said Hubbard. "But, to be fair to the historical record, that was not Hughes' finest hour."

The testimony did not follow Hughes. His career continued with
musicals, children's books and poetry. He died of cancer on May 22, 1967, in Harlem. His block on East 127th Street has been renamed Langston Hughes Place.

In 1926, while still a young man, Hughes penned a manifesto that would inform his work for the rest of his life. The essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," remains a definitive statement.

"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our
individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," he wrote. "We know we are beautiful. And ugly too ... We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves."

Copyright (c) 2002, The Baltimore Sun

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