Chapter 31

Langston Hughes and His World

David Chioni M o o re

African American poetry lourished in the early twentieth century – key

igures included James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and
Countee Cullen – giving African American poets a more established but still
marked presence, seen not as American poets (who were Negro) but as Negro
poets. Much the same obtained in African American poetry’s next major lo-
rescence, in Black Arts–era writers like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and the
elder Gwendolyn Brooks. Their markedness, or status as an inevitably raced
collective, can be seen in a 1993 precursor to the present volume, Jay Parini’s
Columbia History of American Poetry. Parini’s History ofers single-author chap-
ters for Longfellow, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens,
Williams, Crane, and Auden – all there individually as poets, but not as whites.
In contrast, the volume assigns the seven African American poets named
previously, plus Langston Hughes, to three chapters set aside for black poets:
“Early African American Poetry,” “The Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance,”
and “The Black Arts Poets.”1 “Oicial” recognition that African American
poets could stand unclustered and be seen as integral rather than supplemen-
tary to “general” or white American traditions arrived a decade later in Sacvan
Bercovitch’s eight-volume Cambridge History of American Literature, whose
chapter “Langston Hughes: The Color of Modernism” argued for the individ-
ual importance of at least one raced poet, and for his position in a seemingly
unraced literary movement.2
Thus the present chapter, part of a next-stage consideration of African
American poetry, is titled “Langston Hughes and His World.” This title sug-
gests many things. “World,” for one, is a capacious term, far larger than (for
example) “circle,” and it includes but exceeds the United States. “World” is
also not “era” or “age” and so argues that Hughes’s long career is framed
as well by space as it is by time. “World,” too, is in the singular, relecting
Hughes’s conviction, and the evidence of his work, that Harlem piano play-
ers, Georgia mothers, conscript Moors, Spanish Negroes in the cane ields,

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

and even Chinese workers in the foundries can all ind voice in one poetic
oeuvre. The title’s “his” suggests not that Hughes owned the world, but that
he considered it his artistic home. In that broad light, this chapter surveys and
assesses the poet Langston Hughes in the context of his many worldly links.
More speciically, it proposes four frameworks through which Hughes and his
many diverse works, especially his poems, can productively be viewed: the
bardic-demotic, left-internationalist/Afro-planetary, professional, and subli-
mated-closeted frameworks.
The great African American poet and man of letters James Langston
Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, into an uncertain
future.3 Although descended on his mother’s side from distinguished African
American activists and leaders, Hughes was abandoned early by his father,
who hated U.S. racism and became a prosperous if cold-hearted business-
man and landowner in Mexico. Hughes was likewise not well cared for by his
mother. His childhood was spent living with diferent relatives (and some-
times his mother) in Missouri, Kansas, and inally Ohio, where he attended
Cleveland’s burgeoning multicultural Central High School, graduating in
1920 as the class poet. Sent by his father to study engineering at Columbia
University in New York – an unusual distinction for an African American of
that era – Hughes dropped out after one year and took up work as a messboy
on an ill-maintained freight ship that plied the coast of Africa. In his irst pub-
lished autobiography, Hughes said he tossed all his books overboard as the
ship left New York, but he confessed in a draft that he had kept one volume:
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. After a brief return to the United States, Hughes
shipped out again for Europe, where he spent several vagabond months before
repairing again to New York. Throughout the 1920s, Hughes divided his time
among Europe, Harlem (the great center of Negro cultural life in New York),
Washington, D.C., and the small but distinguished historically black Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. in 1929. (In deference
to Hughes’s lifelong usage and self-identiication, this chapter will often use
the respectful term “Negro,” preferred in American speech through at least
Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Hughes saw himself as a poet from a young age. Although he claimed an
accidental origin for this vocation (he was the only Negro in his grade school
class, and because Negroes were supposed to have rhythm, he was elected class
poet), he self-identiied primarily as a poet (or a “social poet”) from his late
teens until his death. He published his irst and eternally most famous poem,
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the W. E. B. Du Bois–edited oicial magazine
of the NAACP, the Crisis, in June 1921, when he was just nineteen. During the

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 Langston Hughes and His World

1920s, Hughes rapidly became a major igure in the Harlem Renaissance, pub-
lishing a growing body of verse in prominent black and white periodicals, and
enjoying emerging connections with noted black and white igures such as the
philosopher Alain Locke and the litterateur Carl Van Vechten. All this led to the
publication of Hughes’s irst volume, The Weary Blues, in 1926, and his second,
Fine Clothes to the Jew, in 1927, by the young yet elite irm of Alfred A. Knopf.4
As a rough characterization, African American poetry in the few decades
prior to Hughes came in two main styles: a genteel tradition, composed
largely in the staid, formulaic rhyme schemes found in mainstream white
poetry of that time, and a “dialect” tradition, rendered in a caricatured ver-
sion of African American peasant speech, which, often double voiced, wryly
explored the race relations of the day. Many poets wrote both; some were
dismayed that the latter sold better, as when Paul Dunbar complained that the
world preferred “a jingle in a broken tongue.”5 Themes and subjects ranged
across slavery, freedom, dignity, resistance, uplift, song, race, the South, and
Christian igures and motifs, including sufering, redemption, deliverance, the
cross, Daniel, Judas, Cain, and Christ.
Important poets of this era, such as James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay,
and, intensely but briely, the modernist Jean Toomer, began to surpass pre-
decessor traditions. Johnson (1871–1938) was by turns a teacher, lawyer, song
lyricist, U.S. diplomat in Venezuela and Nicaragua, novelist, and scholar. His
poems richly invoked African American folk and spiritual musical traditions,
as in “O Black and Unknown Bards”:
O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred ire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?
...
Who heard great “Jordan roll”? Whose starward eye
Saw chariot “swing low”? And who was he
That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh,
“Nobody knows de trouble I see”?6
His 1900 poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” later set to music by his brother,
the composer John Rosamond Johnson, is known to this day as the Negro (or
black or African American) national anthem. No reader of American poetry
could then have anticipated the recitation of its last stanza, 109 years later, at
the start of the Reverend Joseph Lowery’s benediction for Barack Obama’s
presidential inauguration. Claude McKay (1889–1948), a novelist and activist

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

as well as poet, was Jamaica born but a U.S. resident and international traveler
from his early twenties to his death. After two 1912 books of poems in Jamaican
English, McKay moved to the United States and began to combine conven-
tional verse forms in standard English with a franker, more militant voice and
new urban settings. His critique of prostitution in “Harlem Shadows” speaks
bitterly of “dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet” who trudge, “thinly shod, from
street to street,” to “bend and barter at desire’s call.” His bold 1919 sonnet “If
We Must Die,” irst published in the radical magazine Liberator, galvanized a
generation of African American readers. It began by asserting that “If we must
die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot” and
ended thus: “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to
the wall, dying, but ighting back!”7
Langston Hughes arrived on this scene in 1921 at age nineteen, his best
poems suf used with unusually mature insight and historical and geographic
scope. We must reproduce his irst-published and most enduring poem, “The
Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in full:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
low of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.8

Other early Hughes poems ofered a keen sense of voice beyond his own, in
both age and gender, such as the celebrated “Mother to Son” from 1922:
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you inds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now –
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.9

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 Langston Hughes and His World

As a formal matter, Hughes’s earliest published verse owed much to his

acknowledged models Sandburg and Whitman. Thus, although acutely
attuned to meter, form, and sound, Hughes shunned the high-culture English
verse conventions still favored by others such as Countee Cullen and McKay. As
the twenties wore on, his work steered to the adaptation of African American
song forms, especially the blues – as here in “Bound No’th Blues” from 1926:
Goin’ down de road, Lawd,
Goin’ down de road.
Down de road, Lawd,
Way, way down de road.
Got to ind somebody
To help me carry dis load.10

Thematically, Hughes’s irst decade of published work ranged widely. Dreams

loomed large and would remain for his entire career, from his 1923 injunc-
tion to “hold fast to dreams”11 to his 1950s meditations, later invoked by ig-
ures from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Barack Obama, on “a dream deferred.”
Hughes’s frank celebration of blackness and Africa (“I am a Negro: / Black as
the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa”12) had few precedents,
even if Hughes’s positive African image irst tended to stereotyped tom-toms
and jungle moons. Hughes also added to African American poetry’s long-
standing confrontation with the rural South by unl inchingly addressing the
formerly taboo topic of race mixing, as in this wrenching triply voiced excerpt
from his 1927 “Mulatto”:
The scent of pine wood stings the soft night air.
What’s the body of your mother?
Silver moonlight everywhere.
What’s the body of your mother?
Sharp pine scent in the evening air.
A nigger night,
A nigger joy,
A little yellow
Bastard boy.13

Despite all of these varied subjects, Hughes is best remembered for his engage-
ment with the urban Negro North, especially Harlem. His poems robustly
portray the dancers, piano players, hustlers, prostitutes, and other “low-down
folk” who constituted a new center of gravity in African American life. The
title poem of his irst volume, The Weary Blues, sets its raceless speaker as both
auditor and omniscient observer of an iconic Harlem scene:

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the loor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more –
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisied –
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.14

In this and many other poems, Hughes’s 1920s were indissolubly linked to the
cultural lourishing of the Harlem Renaissance, for which competing terms
then included the “New Negro Movement,” “New Negro Renaissance,” and
“Negro Literary Renaissance.” Encompassing music, theater, writing, and the
visual arts, the Harlem Renaissance captured national attention, including
that of white elites. In his memoir The Big Sea, Hughes durably termed the era
“when the Negro was in vogue.”15 Beyond new voices like Cullen and Hughes,
somewhat older poets like Johnson and McKay were key: Johnson was admired
for his landmark 1922 anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry and his own
1927 collection God’s Trombones, which did for the Negro sermon what Hughes
had done for blues; and McKay, for his 1922 collection Harlem Shadows and his
1928 novel Home to Harlem.16 Another new voice, Jean Toomer, was celebrated
for his 1923 composite Cane, which blended poems, stories, and vignettes and
is seen today as a modernist success.17 Nearly everyone discussed previously,
plus others such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Anna Julia Cooper, Eric
Walrond, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen, as well as the electrifyingly
controversial pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, were either born or spent signii-
cant time outside the United States.18
Against this backdrop, and to invoke the four-part framework outlined
early in this chapter – of bardic-demotic, left-internationalist, professional,
and closeted-elusive viewpoints – Hughes’s 1920s were spent largely in the
bardic-demotic mode, in which he spoke primarily of, as, and for the ordinary
Negro. Adapting but never mocking common Negro speech, and mobilizing
the most vernacular of Negro song forms, Hughes voiced the travails and
achievements of his people. Despite his own early Atlantic travels and those
of Harlem Renaissance igures around him, the impact of internationalism on

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 Langston Hughes and His World

Hughes’s poems was still modest: Paris served as something of an imagined

refuge, the Afro-diasporic Caribbean remained marginal, and Africa itself,
despite Hughes’s coastal encounters, was still largely an idea. As for the pro-
fessional, Hughes was still in his twenties and glad for monetary prizes, white
patrons, college scholarships, and a semivagabondish style. In the 1920s, writ-
ing was Hughes’s life, but not yet his profession.
If Hughes had a poetic rival in the 1920s, it was the NYU- and Harvard-
educated Countee Cullen (1903–1946), with his sustained command of histor-
ically lauded forms. In “Heritage” he asked, “What is Africa to me: / Copper
sun or scarlet sea, / Jungle star or jungle track, / Strong bronzed men, or regal
black / . . . / Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, / What is Africa to me?”19 In the
protest-focused “From the Dark Tower,” Cullen asserted that “We shall not
always plant while others reap / The golden increment of bursting fruit, /
Not always countenance, abject and mute / That lesser men should hold their
brothers cheap.”20 But Cullen’s most creative phase lasted less than a decade;
his political and social vision was less compelling than that of, for example,
McKay; and his brilliance in traditional European forms captured neither the
variety of African American speech nor the embrace of its newest literary
generation.
A far more demotic (but not bardic) poet, Sterling Brown (1901–1989), is often
associated with the Harlem Renaissance, but as a lifelong non–New Yorker
and Renaissance skeptic, he embodied an alternative tradition. Although edu-
cated at the elite Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., Williams College,
and Harvard, Brown spent most of the rest of his life in or near the American
South, studying black folk traditions as a professor at Howard University.
Brown’s work thus resonates with that of folk-inlected igures ranging from
Robert Burns, Carl Sandburg, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alan Lomax to the
white poets of the Popular Front. The title poem for Brown’s vernacular- and
blues-based 1932 volume Southern Road, a convict blues, included this:
Doubleshackled – hunh –
Guard behin’;
Doubleshackled – hunh –
Guard behin’;
Ball an’ chain, bebby,
On my min’.
White man tells me – hunh –
Damn yo’ soul;
White man tells me – hunh –
Damn yo’ soul;

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

Got no need, bebby,

To be tole.21

Brown’s alternative tradition, however, sparked little interest among contem-

porary readers and appeared in book form only after his era’s 1920s peak. He
thus devoted himself to teaching, scholarship, and commentary but enjoyed
a late-life revival, warmly embraced (and freshly published) by poets of the
1970s.
Although Langston Hughes was not a “theoretical” poet, his 1926 essay
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in the inl uen-
tial white leftist magazine the Nation, became the literary manifesto of the
Harlem Renaissance. In it, Hughes criticized the white-aspiring preferences of
the Negro middle and upper classes, defended his portraits of “the low-down
folks,” rejected sterile respectability, and concluded by asserting the right of
his generation to “express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. . . .
If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. . . .
If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know
how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”22
For all the majesty of this declaration – one of Hughes’s rare published
statements on his writerly profession – Hughes did care deeply what his col-
ored readers thought. To be sure, he had a taste, especially in his twenties
and thirties, for upsetting pieties, but as an emerging professional, he worked
tirelessly to reach ever-wider audiences. Some of this is seen in his substantial
work as an anthologizer, discussed subsequently, and in his lifelong com-
mitment to national poetry-reading tours, which emphasized Negro venues.
His publisher correspondence contains frequent requests for inexpensive edi-
tions he could sell while on the road, and hundreds of his personal letters
mention an enclosed gift volume of his verse. Here we see the fusion of
the demotic and professional Langston Hughes. In sharp contrast to near-
contemporary white modernists like Eliot, Cummings, Stevens, and Pound;
the noted black modernist Melvin B. Tolson; or the later African American
poet Robert Hayden, almost all of Hughes’s nearly 900 published poems
could be readily understood by a reader (or listener) of limited formal edu-
cation. Indeed, one of the best-known moments in Hughesian reception his-
tory came in Jonathan Kozol’s 1967 critique of American schools, Death at an
Early Age, which recounted Kozol’s iring from a public elementary school
in Roxbury, Massachusetts, for assigning his black fourth graders poetry by
Hughes.23 To return to Hughes’s “Racial Mountain,” Hughes would not have

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 Langston Hughes and His World

cared if white principals (or Negro parents) disliked his poems, but he cared
immensely if anyone, especially ordinary readers, were barred from coming
to his work.
Langston Hughes’s 1930s difered sharply from his 1920s and can be charac-
terized as the radical-global phase of both his writing and his life. He gained
his irst extended exposure to the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean
with visits to Cuba in 1930 and Haiti in 1931 – spaces he considered brethren
within the African diaspora. There he met the Cuban négrismo poet Nicolás
Guillén and the Haitian indigenist poet, novelist, and ethnologist Jacques
Roumain. Hughes translated both into English, and they returned the favor
in French and Spanish. Thus by January 1932, at age twenty-nine, Hughes had
already traveled to four continents – unprecedented for an African American
writer of his era – and, with the 1929 German volume Afrika Singt, had appeared
in at least four languages.24 The more he learned about the United States and
the black Atlantic, the more he adopted a radical leftist account of the whole
world’s injustice. In a U.S.-focused mode, his critique of the abuse of reli-
gion by the powerful was never stronger than in the riveting poem “Christ in
Alabama” (from Contempo in 1931), which begins:
Christ is a Nigger,
Beaten and black –
O, bare your back.
Mary is His Mother –
Mammy of the South,
Silence your mouth.25

Such U.S.-focused poems aside, the 1930s most profoundly marked the emer-
gence of Hughes’s third major mode, beyond the already described bardic-
demotic and professional: the left-internationalist. For example, his protest
poem “Scottsboro,” also published in December 1931, began “8 black boys
in a Southern jail. / World, turn pale!” but then moved rapidly to invoke not
just standard Euramerican martyr igures like Christ, John Brown, and Jeanne
d’Arc but also the Haitian revolutionary Dessalines, the black insurrectionist
Nat Turner, the controversial young Gandhi, the anti-U.S. Nicaraguan revolu-
tionary Sandino, and “Lenin with the lag blood red.”26 “Left-internationalist,”
however, is too vague a word for what Hughes became. He is best termed a
rooted Afro-planetarist, meaning that, whether reporting on a Moscow visit,
analyzing changes in the Uzbek poetic tradition, or relecting on Japan’s role in
World War II, Hughes and his poems saw the world through what he termed
“Negro eyes.”27

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

In this connection, in March 1932, while in California on the inal leg of a

cross-country poetry-reading tour, Hughes got an invitation from the New
York–based African American activist and editor Louise Thompson to join a
Negro artists and musicians group traveling to the Soviet Union to serve as
screenwriter for a Soviet motion picture, Black and White, about the oppres-
sion of African Americans in the U.S. South. Soviet Moscow was a relatively
race-free revelation, but the ilm project soon fell apart. Hughes, however,
remained and received permission to travel to largely forbidden Soviet Central
Asia, which he saw as the USSR’s own colored, dusty, cotton-growing South.
There he wrote poems, met literary and cultural elites, and toured (often with
Arthur Koestler) factories and collective farms.28
In this phase of his career, Hughes was at his worst a bad propagandist.
There is little to cherish, politically or poetically, in poems that begin like this:
“Put one more S in the U.S.A. / To make it Soviet. / One more S in the U.S.A. /
Oh, we’ll live to see it yet.”29 One of his most strident 1930s poems, “Goodbye
Christ,” later caused him massive troubles when repeatedly reprinted by his
detractors in the 1940s and 1950s.30 Indeed it is unclear whether one should
classify some of Hughes’s 1930s compositions, such as the “mass chants” he
wrote for rallies, as poetry. But the thirties also saw Hughes write initially
little-noted poems that would be interpreted decades later as important mod-
ernist interventions, such as the 1934 “Cubes.” Its irst stanza begins, “In the
days of the broken cubes of Picasso,” and ends, unexpectedly, “I met on the
boulevards of Paris / An African from Senegal.” The poem links France’s
long historical entanglements with “the cubes of black and white, / black and
white, / black and white” to a long roster of colonial and economic sorrows.31
Even a poem with a title as wince-worthy as “Ballads of Lenin” was, on closer
inspection, a moving and heterodox claim to include the worldwide colored
poor in a white-dominated leftist pantheon.32 Hughes’s internationalist com-
mitments were furthered by his 1937 work as an Associated Negro Press jour-
nalist reporting from the Spanish Civil War. During this era, Hughes poems
such as “Letter from Spain” – which began “We captured a wounded Moor
today. / He was just as dark as me. / I said, Boy, what you been doin’ here /
Fightin’ against the free?” – illustrate the widely divergent estimations of his
work.33 For some critics, “Letter from Spain” embodies both vernacular elo-
quence and a far-seeing awareness that preigures later global political conigu-
rations like the Non-Aligned Movement. Such critics hold that Hughes’s Afro-
planetarism supplies substantive depth, while his mild vernacular bespeaks
demotic strength.34 For others, such as Hughes’s unsurpassed biographer and
most inl uential critic Arnold Rampersad, “Letter from Spain” is a “maudlin

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 Langston Hughes and His World

dialect poem” characteristic of the “proletarian doggerel” Hughes would go

on publishing “for years to come.”35
In the broadest sense, Hughes’s 1930s poetry is indissoluble from his linkages
to the American and international left. Figures with whom Hughes interacted
included white poets such as Muriel Rukeyser, the black poet Frank Marshall
Davis, and Mike Gold, who, as editor of New Masses, regularly solicited and
published poetry by Hughes. But for all his internationalism, Hughes – unlike
igures such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and at times Paul Robeson
and W. E. B. Du Bois – never simply abandoned the United States. Indeed
Hughes’s engagement with America’s unmet promise was never deeper than
in his long 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again,” which conversed with
classic American voices like Whitman and Woody Guthrie and diverse patri-
otic anthems to rhapsodize that “I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore, /
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea, / And torn from Black Africa’s
strand I came / To build a ‘homeland of the free.’ ” Then the poem’s subse-
quent two-word stanza starkly asks, “The free?”36
It is appropriate here, at the midpoint of this essay and of Hughes’s life, to
speak to Hughes’s vast literary career beyond his poems, not least to under-
score his professional dimensions. After his groundbreaking 1926 and 1927
poetry collections, Hughes next published a gentle midwestern coming-of-
age novel, Not Without Laughter. A penetrating, stylistically diverse, and accu-
rately titled short story collection, The Ways of White Folks, was written just
after his return from the Soviet Union and appeared in 1934. Indeed, some of
its draft pages have its U.S.-set short stories on one side and draft magazine
essays on Soviet Central Asia on the other. Hughes also wrote extensively
for the theater; he completed some sixty-three pieces, including radio plays,
operas, gospel musicals, and dramas for venues from major Broadway houses
to regional Negro theaters.37 One of these, the musical Street Scene, was co-
written with Kurt Weill, while another, Mule Bone, was co-written with Zora
Neale Hurston but not produced until 1991 due to a bitter authorship dispute.
Although Hughes had been asked to write a memoir as early as 1926, his irst,
The Big Sea, would not appear until 1940; its last section remains the most
valuable irsthand portrait of the Harlem Renaissance that we have. A sec-
ond autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, a retrospectively mild recounting of
Hughes’s radical 1930s, followed in 1956.38
Through his weekly column in the nationally circulated Negro paper the
Chicago Defender, Hughes reached an enormous audience (and received a
steady paycheck) from 1942 to 1962, commenting on political, social, literary,
and artistic topics in the United States and abroad. About one-fourth of those

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

columns launched Hughes’s career as a humorist. In these columns, a usually

unnamed but bland, formal, educated narrator chats at a local bar with his
loquacious, grammar-bungling folk genius friend, Jesse B. Semple, known as
Simple. Hughes gathered his Simple stories into ive books from 1950 to 1965.
Also worth naming, for their both professional and demotic dimensions, are
Hughes’s books for children: a 1932 story, Popo and Fiina, co-written with Arna
Bontemps; a 1932 collection of verse for younger readers, The Dream Keeper;
and ive didactic “irst books” on Africa, the West Indies, rhythms, jazz, and
Negroes.39 Hughes also had a serious career as an anthologist, with The Book
of Negro Folklore, The Book of Negro Humor, Famous American Negroes, and two
groundbreaking photo histories with the visual archivist Milton Meltzer.
Returning to poetry proper, Hughes’s sense of himself in the history of
African American verse was consolidated by his 429-page anthology, co-ed-
ited with Arna Bontemps, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949, which innova-
tively contained a rich selection of “tributary poems by non-Negroes” includ-
ing Whitman (“The Runaway Slave” and the Civil War–themed “Ethiopia
Saluting the Colors”), Blake, Browning, Wordsworth (“To Toussaint
L’Ouverture”), Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Melville, Vachel Lindsay,
Hart Crane, Sandburg (“Jazz Fantasia”), and Elizabeth Bishop (“Songs for a
Colored Singer”).40 Among the irst books to recognize the complex poetic
linkages between African America and the West Indies, the anthology also
ofered a long selection of Caribbean poets, including translations from
Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, and the négritude co-founders Aimé Césaire and
Léon Damas. Interestingly, Hughes and Bontemps placed Claude McKay in
their Caribbean section, although McKay lived most of his adult life in the
United States. The Poetry of the Negro included just one poet from anywhere
in Africa, Aquah Laluah, the pen name for the prominent Anglo–Sierra
Leonean Gladys May Casely Hayford; we will return to Hughes and Africa
subsequently.
Hughes translated (in part with Ben Carruthers Guillén and Roumain),
notably recasting (with co-translator Mercer Cook) Roumain’s peasant novel
Masters of the Dew into U.S. southern rural speech.41 He translated Federico
García Lorca at least twice: the Gypsy Ballads in 1951 and, in a manuscript
unpublished until 1994, the landmark play Blood Wedding.42 Hughes was also
the irst substantial translator of the Chilean Nobel laureate poet Gabriela
Mistral.43 Further aield, Hughes translated Louis Aragon’s Soviet-themed
poetry from the French and, with assistance, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Cuba-
set poems from the Russian and some Central Asian folk poetry from the
Uzbek.44

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 Langston Hughes and His World

Hughes did not achieve inancial stability until relatively late in life, and he fre-
quently referred to himself, in letters to Arna Bontemps, as “a literary sharecrop-
per.”45 Yet Hughes was the irst African or African-descent writer in English to
make his living exclusively from his published words. But Hughes’s wide-ranging
proliicness was motivated by much more than money. Theatrical writing, for
one, is a notoriously unreliable way to wealth; it functioned for Hughes instead
as a way to reach more people. Translation proved so nonmuniicent for Hughes
that his exasperated agent Maxim Lieber once ordered him to stop. A similar
analysis can be applied to Hughes’s tireless 1950s promotion of African writing.
The fastest, richest writing job he ever had – as Hollywood co-screenwriter,
along with Clarence Muse, for the forgettable 1939 RKO musical Way Down
South – was so artistically and politically unsatisfying that he never sought such
work again.46 Instead, anthologizing, children’s writing, translation, drama, and
the promotion of African writing gave Hughes ways to present ever-fuller U.S.
and global materials to an ever-wider range of readers, to further enhance his
cultural depth and literary craft, and often to speak through other authors’ pens
or names: the bardic-demotic, internationalist, professional, and sublimated all
at once.
With this, we move to the 1940s, during which period Hughes began a steady
withdrawal from the overt Left and carefully balanced support for American
involvement (including heroic African American involvement) in the antifas-
cist ight with critique of the irony that an internally race-oppressing nation
battled racism overseas. His 1942 Shakespeare in Harlem, much like his 1927
Fine Clothes to the Jew, ofered a wide portrait of African American life in the
idiom of blues, but shorn of his 1930s political commitments. A poem that
began obscurely as an aria in his late-1930s libretto for a Haiti-themed opera
co-written with the composer William Grant Still became, with multiple later
printings, one of his most enduring statements:
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind –
Of such I dream, my world!47
More darkly, his 1942 “The Bitter River” recast prior positive imagery of
dreams and rivers to protest a Mississippi lynching. The poem’s sustained
anger is only partly captured by the irst of its many stanzas:

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

There is a bitter river

Flowing through the South.
Too long has the taste of its water
Been in my mouth.
There is a bitter river
Dark with ilth and mud.
Too long has its evil poison
Poisoned my blood.48

Toward the end of the decade, Hughes’s 1947 “Trumpet Player: 52nd Street”
deepened his long history of poetry on jazz. It begins with this:
The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
Where the smoldering memory
Of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
About his thighs.

Then shifts to unusually (for Hughes) sexual imagery:

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

Several stanzas later it closes by blending images of heroin, style, and release:
“The Negro / With the trumpet at his lips . . . Does not know / Upon what rif
the music slips // Its hypodermic needle / To his soul.”49
Hughes’s next strong poetic achievement came in 1951, with Montage of a
Dream Deferred, whose eighty-six separate elements form a coherent whole.
Marking a fresh musical inl uence, Hughes’s preface stated that “this poem on
contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conl icting changes, sudden
nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, [and] broken rhythms . . . of the
music of a community in transition.”50 Its opening section, “Dream Boogie,”
accordingly plays with reader expectations, in both emotional and metrical
uncertainty:

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 Langston Hughes and His World

Good morning, daddy!

Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a –
You think
It’s a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
something underneath
like a –
What did I say?
Sure,
I’m happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h! (MDD, p. 3)

In subsequent pages, Montage’s segments, ranging from eight short words

to several dozen lines, voice the earnest student, sassy neighbor, dramatic
preacher, and simple Harlem witness. Its “Theme for English B,” of interest
to any teacher-reader of this volume, may be the most perceptive short text
ever written on the relationship between black students and white professors.
A poignant short poem, “Casualty,” speaks of shell-shocked veterans of any
era, including ours: “He was a soldier in the army, / But he doesn’t walk like
one. / He walks like his soldiering / Days are done. // Son! . . . Son!” (MDD,
p. 59). Another brief entry, “Dime,” puts Hughes’s cherished and airming
1922 “Mother to Son” in a much more bitter light:
Chile, these steps is hard to climb.
Grandma, lend me a dime.
Montage of a dream deferred:
Grandma acts like
She ain’t heard.
Chile, Granny ain’t got no dime.

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

I might’ve knowed
It all the time. (MDD, p. 62)

Montage’s most widely reproduced poem, “Harlem,” begins by repeating

the volume’s standard question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” and
then, uncertain in reply, asks yet further questions that would supply, eight
years later, the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s celebrated play: “Does it dry up /
like a raisin in the sun? . . . Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it
explode?” (MDD, p. 71). Hughes’s Montage had a mixed reception in its day, espe-
cially among elites. Arthur P. Davis noted coolly in the Journal of Negro History
that it had “recaptured some of the magic” of The Weary Blues, while Babette
Deutsch of the New York Times disparaged its “facile sentimentality” and “con-
trived naïveté.”51 If Hughes had once been glad to upset reviewers with his
idelity to Negro life, he was far from glad to hear reviewers say his art had
been surpassed. For in ways it had been surpassed, in both quality and elite
acclaim, most signiicantly by Gwendolyn Brooks, ifteen years his junior and
the beneiciary of Hughes’s generous support when she was young. Brooks’s
formal versatility ranged from urban vernacular to modernist free verse to
the sonnet, as in “The Children of the Poor,” from her 1949 Pulitzer Prize–
winning Annie Allen:
What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because uninished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.52

Another segment from Montage, although little noted at the time, ofered
Hughes’s irst express poetic relection, thirty years into his career, on
homosexuality:
Café: 3 A.M.
Detectives from the vice squad
with weary sadistic eyes
spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody

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 Langston Hughes and His World

made them that way.

Police lady or Lesbian
over there?
Where? (MDD, p. 32)

This poem ofers a good starting point for consideration of Hughes’s sexual-
ity, and with it, the closeted-sublimated dimension of Hughes’s work noted
at the outset. Hughes has, especially in the past two decades, frequently been
referenced as a gay or queer or homosexual poet – three overlapping but not
identical designations. Hughes’s unsurpassed biographer, Arnold Rampersad,
has noted that, even in his exhaustive reading of the vast Hughes archive and
lengthy interviews with dozens who knew Hughes, he found no serious evi-
dence of any sustained sexual or afective relationship between Hughes and
anyone, female or male, in his entire life. Rampersad concludes that Hughes
was largely “asexual,” or that his sexual desire had been “not so much sub-
limated as vaporized.”53 Aware that Hughes’s sexuality was long subject to
question – after all, Hughes was a bachelor, poet, and former bohemian and
sailor – Rampersad inds no “concrete evidence” of Hughes’s sexual disposi-
tion, beyond perhaps a lack thereof, and asserts instead what Hughes’s close
friends felt was its “maddening elusiveness.”54
Critics and scholars reading Hughes as gay have responded that the over-
whelming power of the closet in the United States from the 1920s to the 1960s,
especially among African Americans, would have deterred Hughes from leav-
ing any clear trace of his orientation. Noting Hughes’s long-standing friend-
ships with numerous less-closeted gay men, including Carl Van Vechten, and
the degree to which Hughes’s commitment to efectiveness in (and income
from) the public sphere would have precluded his endangering that efective-
ness, such scholars instead focus on reading Hughes’s poems for their gay or
queer inlections. Exploring the “homoeroticism and other gay markings” in
these poems,55 these Hughes scholars detail “Hughes’s lyric archive of queer
sociality”56 both directly, in poems such as “Café: 3 A.M.,” “Curious,” and
“Desire,” and obliquely, in Hughes’s many tales of racial (rather than sexual)
passing.
The charge of afectional sublimation resonates with many other Hughesian
self-suppressions. Politics is Hughes’s other great axis of suppression, only
with undeniable evidence of his 1930s leftism, despite his later attempts to
recast and suppress it. But of course the literary question is not “was Hughes
a self-suppressor,” “was he in the closet,” or “was he gay,” but rather “can his
works productively be read as queer or gay,” and “how and to what efect do

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

his writings re-channel what he could or would not say?” The answers to these
questions vary.
Remarkably, Hughes seems never to have attempted a full-ledged love
poem in a half-century literary career.57 Yet elsewhere Hughes’s personal re-
channeling produced some of his most vivid creations, from his fearless alter
ego Simple to the sassy, uncompromising “Madam” Alberta K. Johnson. At
some level, however, reading the sublimated Hughes often requires pursuit
of the not-said, never more explicitly than in the 1933 poem “Personal,” which
begins, “In an envelope marked: / Personal / God addressed me a letter,” and
then describes, or does not describe, Hughes’s “answer,” also “In an envelope
marked: / Personal.”58
At this juncture, a discussion of the place of Hughes’s primary biographer
and major critic, Arnold Rampersad, is required. After publishing a superb
literary biography of W. E. B. Du Bois, Rampersad arranged with George
Houston Bass, Hughes’s last private secretary and co-executor of his literary
estate, to write Hughes’s biography, based in good measure on access to the
trove of papers held at Yale’s Beinecke Library and only later opened to all
scholars. The resulting two-volume Life of Langston Hughes (1986 and 1988) set
a nearly unsurpassed standard for American literary biography. No scholar,
past or present, commands as full an understanding of Langston Hughes
as Arnold Rampersad. What is more, as co-executor, Rampersad has been
involved in the continued publication of Hughes’s extant and archival works,
often penning introductions to fresh Hughes volumes edited by others.
In consequence, current readers and scholars of Langston Hughes, the
author of the present chapter included, engage not simply Hughes’s literary
history but the literary history of Rampersad’s Langston Hughes. Thus (to
choose one example), proponents of gay or queer interpretations of Hughes’s
verse also contend with Rampersad’s view of Hughes. Likewise, admirers of
Hughes’s radical-internationalist poems make claims not just on Hughes but
also against Rampersad’s negative framing of Hughes’s radical-internation-
alist incarnation. I do not mean to suggest a negative relationship or efect –
indeed, to the contrary. But never has the literary afterlife of a major American
poet been so thoroughly inlected by his leading biographer, scholar, succes-
sor co-executor, and critic.
The standard Hughes volume today is the 1994 Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes, co-edited by Rampersad and David Roessel. Rampersad and Roessel
follow standard practice by printing the last published version of each poem
authorized by the poet in his life. But Hughes was far from the same poet in
1959 or 1967 that he had been in 1926 or 1931. Early in this chapter, for example,

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 Langston Hughes and His World

one inds a portion of Hughes’s “Bound No’th Blues” as originally printed in

the National Urban League’s magazine Opportunity and Hughes’s The Weary
Blues in 1926. But the Collected Poems version comes from his 1959 Selected Poems,
which “whitened” the voice by shifting “de” and “dis” to “the” and “this.”
Although many of Hughes’s changes are described in the Collected Poems’s
notes, others are not. A good example is Hughes’s “Christ in Alabama,” dis-
cussed previously. The poem irst appeared in the leftist Chapel Hill magazine
Contempo in December 1931, and then in Hughes’s now-rare 1932 Scottsboro
Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse. But today’s readers typically know
“Christ in Alabama” only in its milder 1967 version. This more recent version
difers, among other things, in capitalization, italicized voice, an “us” changed
to “Him,” and the closing line breaks: the irst six lines of the later version, for
example, replace dashes with colons, remove all italics, and add an exclama-
tion point in line 3.59
Hughes’s 1930s past would haunt him. Called to testify before Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s subcommittee in 1953, Hughes endured a withering assault on his
prior radical verse, especially “Goodbye Christ,” and nearly saw his writing life
destroyed. Although his brief public testimony suggests a mild, even “supine”
posture before the committee,60 the recently released transcript of his long
private interrogation reveals that Hughes mobilized a vast range of rhetorical
strategies and tactics, decidedly not including deiance or anger, to defuse the
committee’s ire.61 And he named no names. He emerged with his reputation
diminished on the left but in general intact. Still, he engaged in even greater
self- and retrospective suppression for the remainder of the decade. The bal-
ance of Hughes’s 1950s was not devoted to new poems; he focused instead on
his second memoir (1956), the Langston Hughes Reader (1958), Selected Poems
(1959), and many more workmanlike or semicommercial publications. His cre-
ative reputation was far below its peak; the most damaging evidence of this
was James Baldwin’s brutal New York Times Book Review account of Hughes’s
Selected Poems, which began with this: “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.”62
On a far more airming note, the 1950s also saw Hughes’s deep interna-
tionalism reignite, now in direct exchange with Africa. In 1923, Hughes had
visited many African ports as a menial sailor. He thematized the continent
in often stereotyped ways in the three decades to follow, penned a scathing
poem on the Johannesburg mines in 1925, and kept vaguely aware of the con-
tinent’s anticolonial struggles. But that was about the extent of his involve-
ment. Although he was revered by the Francophone négritude movement and

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

by many Anglophone African poets from the early 1930s on, Hughes him-
self was barely aware of their existence.63 Hughes’s African consciousness
reawakened in 1953 when he received, out of the blue, an invitation to judge
an Africa-wide short story contest for the widely distributed, black-oriented
South African magazine Drum. Impressed by the entries, Hughes determined
to assemble an African anthology for the U.S. and British markets at a time
when African writing of any kind had a microscopic presence in both nations.
It took nearly a decade, endless correspondence, and heavy triangulation
between emerging African writers and American and U.K. publishers before
Hughes came out with the multigenre African Treasury in 1960 and Poems from
Black Africa in 1963.64 Nearly every notable Francophone and Anglophone
African poet and writer of the 1950s and early 1960s corresponded warmly
with Hughes, the most widely known black writer in the world, before his
death in 1967.
Hughes traveled to the continent ive times during this period, at times as a
U.S. State Department cultural ambassador. In November 1960, with Hughes
in the audience, his short, uplifting 1924 poem “Youth” (“We have tomorrow
/ Bright before us / Like a lame”) was recited by his old Lincoln University
schoolmate Nnamdi Azikiwe at the close of Azikiwe’s inauguration as the irst
governor-general of independent Nigeria.65 Hughes’s post-1953 re-cognition
of himself as a pan-African or Afro-planetary internationalist fueled his last
major poetry achievement, the luxuriously produced 1961 Ask Your Mama: 12
Moods for Jazz. Conceived as a single poem, Ask Your Mama takes its impe-
tus from the comic/bitter African American insult ritual called “the dozens,”
as here:
IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES
where sit-ins are conducted
by those yet uninducted
and ballots drop in boxes
where bullets are the tellers
they asked me at thanksgiving
did i vote for nixon?
i said, voted for your mama.66

Despite its origin in the dozens, Ask Your Mama goes far beyond its insult-driven
seed. It was conceived, like Hughes’s 1951 Montage, as a multifocal portrait of
a Negro world, although 1961’s portrait was much more densely allusive, vio-
lent, and global than any before. Accompanied by narrative musical cues in its
right-hand column, Ask Your Mama begins:

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 Langston Hughes and His World

IN THE
in the quarter
in the quarter of the negroes
where the doors are doors of paper
dust of dingy atoms
blows a scratchy sound.
amorphous jack-o’-lanterns caper
and the wind won’t wait for midnight
for fun to blow doors down.67
A few score additional lines in the same voice then invoke, among other great
African American igures, “Leontyne Sammy Harry Poitier / Lovely Lena
Marian Louis Pearlie Mae,” and then George S. Schuyler, “Jimmy Baldwin,”
“Arna Bontemps chief consultant,” and “Lieder, lovely lieder / And a leaf of
collard green.” But then Ask Your Mama veers to a global, anticolonial mode:
IN THE SHADOW OF THE NEGROES
Nkrumah
In the shadow of the negroes
Nasser nasser
In the shadow of the negroes
Zik Azikiwe
Cuba castro guinea touré
For need or propaganda
Kenyatta
And the tom dogs of the cabin
The cocoa and the cane brake
The chain gang and the slave block
Tarred and feathered nations
Seagram’s and four roses
$5.00 bags a deck or dagga.
...
And they asked me right at christmas
If my blackness, would it rub off?
I said, ask your mama.68
Needless to say, this difers sharply from any prior poetry by Hughes, not
only in its sustained intensity but also in its reliance on speciic knowledge.
For understanding Ask Your Mama requires a vast grasp not only of African
American references but also of mid-twentieth-century African, Afro-diasporic,
and global Third World events and persons. Although massively internation-
alist and Afro-planetary, it is one of the few nondemotic poems Hughes ever
wrote. To choose but one of the preceding uncommon terms, “dagga” is the

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

Afrikaans- and Kohekohe-derived South African English term for marijuana –

something few American readers knew in 1961. Unsurprisingly, contemporary
reviews of Ask Your Mama ranged from laudatory to derisive to confused.
The keenest came from the pioneering Africana studies scholar John Henrik
Clarke in the black progressive journal Freedomways. Stating correctly that
the poem represented Hughes’s estimable outreach to “a second generation,”
Clarke concluded by noting that if this second generation wished to know
what the irst Negro generation thought of Hughes, the task was simple: “Ask
Your Mama.”69
Hughes wrote little notable poetry in the remaining six years of his life.
To be sure, his poems responded to the tumult of the 1960s: they marked
the emergence of independent African nation-states, sang a “backlash blues”
about white opposition to what he still termed “Negro advancement,”
engaged the heightened strife in northern cities, and revisited long-standing
themes. But Hughes broke no new formal or stylistic ground. Whatever thun-
der he still held could not compete with the profane intensity of the Black Arts
Movement poets, especially Amiri Baraka, who until the last year of Hughes’s
life still went by LeRoi Jones. The two writers had a mutually respectful if
increasingly distant relationship across their generational divide; their dis-
tance lowed from Jones’s sense of Hughes’s political and stylistic datedness,
and Hughes’s reactions to poems such as Jones’s 1966 “Black Art.”
Apart from a highly successful late career as the originator of yet another
genre, the gospel musical or gospel play – key achievements being Black
Nativity and Jerico Jim Crow – Hughes’s 1960s had a senior-statesman lavor,
replete with the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, induction into the National
Institute of Arts and Letters (preceded among African Americans only by Du
Bois), European leisure travel, and an invitation to a White House luncheon
hosted by President Kennedy to honor visiting Senegalese president Léopold
Senghor. Langston Hughes died in New York on May 22, 1967, at sixty-ive,
of complications following prostate surgery. His jazz-infused Harlem funeral
was heavily attended.
Hughes’s poetic afterlife has taken on many guises. Among ordinary
American readers (especially but not only African Americans), his presence
has been unbroken. For the white public in particular, this has lowed from his
continual assignment in American schools. The widespread popular embrace
of Hughes’s poems, as well as his memoirs, short stories, and other writ-
ings, contrasts with an older, eroding, but still extant academic notion, based
perhaps on insuiciently examined standards, that Hughes was less literar-
ily important than the midcentury African American prose writers James

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 Langston Hughes and His World

Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright and midcentury white poets like
Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, or Ezra Pound. In this light, it is worth suggesting
that Hughes’s tremendously wide and profuse professional literary output
may have masked his depth. One wonders what critical reputation Hughes
would have today if he had had, like his near contemporary Elizabeth Bishop,
the monetary resources and personal inclination to concentrate on poems
only, or if today we read, as we do with Bishop, only the best 105 of the nearly
900 poems Hughes put in print.
Also important here is history’s l uctuating view of mandarin versus bardic-
demotic verse – with Hughes’s poems decisively in the latter camp – and of
social-political versus personal or abstracted poetry, with Hughes’s Afro-
planetary commitments again putting him on the wrong side of most elite
and academic taste. As for the fourth assessment framework ofered in this
chapter, the closeted-elusive, the literary question is again not “was Langston
gay but in the closet” but rather “how productively did Hughes re-channel
what he would or could not say?” And the answer is, again, quite mixed. In
all of these domains, historical shifts in reader interests, canons of taste, and
scholarly understanding of movements such as modernism have continually
refreshed our view of Hughes. Throughout it all lies a core view of Langston
Hughes – a professional, bardic-demotic, and Afro-planetarist writer who
might have had a lot to hide and a descendent of Whitman, Sandburg, and a
complex Negro tradition – as the most committed, innovative, sympathetic,
and deeply rooted poetic exponent of African American life, and the most
globally engaged major American poet of any kind. In Hughes’s words, and in
Hughes’s world, it’s not so far from here to yonder.

Notes
1. Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier (eds.), The Columbia History of American Poetry
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
2. Irene Ramalho Santos, “Langston Hughes: The Color of Modernism,” The
Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 5, Poetry and Criticism 1900–1950, ed.
Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
3. Much of Hughes’s biography is multiply attested, well known, and naturally
relies on Hughes’s two memoirs: The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander
(1956). Still, the authoritative source for Hughes’s life, on which this chapter
substantially relies, is Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. I,
1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and
Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. II, 1941–1967: I Dream a World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

4. Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), and Fine
Clothes to the Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927).
5. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Poet” (1903), in Herbert Woodward Martin (ed.),
Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 152.
6. James Weldon Johnson, Writings, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Library
of America, 2004), pp. 817–18.
7. Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), pp. 22, 53.
8. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” The Crisis ( June 1921), p. 71.
9. Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” The Crisis (December 1922), p. 87.
10. Langston Hughes, “Bound No’th Blues,” Opportunity (October 1926), p. 315.
11. “Dreams,” irst published in 1923, here from Langston Hughes, The Dream
Keeper and Other Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 4.
12. Langston Hughes, “The Negro,” The Crisis ( January 1922), p. 113, and later
published as “Proem” in Hughes, The Weary Blues, p. 19.
13. Langston Hughes, “Mulatto,” Saturday Review of Literature ( January 29, 1927),
p. 547.
14. Hughes, The Weary Blues, pp. 23–24.
15. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), p. 223.
16. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New
York: Viking, 1927); James Weldon Johnson (ed.), The Book of American Negro
Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922); Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), and Home to Harlem (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1928).
17. Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923).
18. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the
Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003), p. 4.
19. Countee Cullen, “Heritage,” in Color (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925),
p. 36.
20. Countee Cullen, “From the Dark Tower,” in Copper Sun (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1927), p. 3.
21. Sterling A. Brown, “Southern Road,” in Southern Road (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1932), p. 47.
22. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation
( June 23, 1926), pp. 692–94.
23. Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (Boston: Houghton Mil in, 1967), chap-
ters 17–20.
24. Anna Nussbaum (ed.), Afrika Singt: Eine Auslese neuer afro-amerikanischer Lyrik,
trans. Hermann Kesser, Josef Luitpold, Anna Siemsen, and Anna Nussbaum
(Vienna: Speidel, 1929).
25. Langston Hughes, “Christ in Alabama,” Contempo (December 1931), p. 1.
26. Langston Hughes, “Scottsboro,” Opportunity (December 1931), p. 379.

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 Langston Hughes and His World

27. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New

York: Rinehart, 1956), p. 116.
28. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, pp. 101–90, although Hughes’s autobiographical
account of this period plays down his most radical dimensions.
29. Langston Hughes, “One More ‘S’ in the U.S.A.,” Daily Worker (April 2,
1934), p. 7.
30. First published without Hughes’s permission in The Negro Worker (November–
December 1932), p. 32.
31. Langston Hughes, “Cubes,” New Masses (March 13, 1934), p. 22.
32. Langston Hughes, “Ballads of Lenin” (initially published as “Ballad of Lenin”),
Anvil (May 1933), p. 17.
33. Langston Hughes, “Letter from Spain,” Volunteer for Liberty (November 15,
1937), p. 3.
34. See, for example, Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of
the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 186–207.
35. Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 351.
36. Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” Esquire ( July 1936),
p. 92, and in diferent form in Langston Hughes, A New Song (New York:
International Workers Order, 1938).
37. Susan Dufy, The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 2, 201.
38. J. Saunders Redding, “Travels of Langston Hughes: Events as Seen in Passing,”
New York Herald Tribune (December 23, 1956), p. 7.
39. In chronological order, the titles of these books are as follows: The First Book
of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Rhythms (1954), The First Book of Jazz (1955),
The First Book of the West Indies (1956), and The First Book of Africa (1960; rev. ed.
1964).
40. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (eds.), The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949
(New York: Doubleday, 1949).
41. Nicolás Guillén, Cuba Libre, trans. Langston Hughes and Ben Frederic
Carruthers (Los Angeles: Anderson & Ritchie, 1948). Jacques Roumain,
Masters of the Dew, trans. Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook (New York:
Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947).
42. Federico García Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. Langston Hughes, Beloit Poetry
Journal, chapbook no. 1 (1951). Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding, trans.
Langston Hughes (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994).
43. Gabriela Mistral, Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, trans. Langston Hughes
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957).
44. Louis Aragon, “Magnitogorsk,” trans. Langston Hughes, International
Literature 4 (1933–1934), pp. 82–83. The typescripts of Hughes’s and Lydia
Filatova’s joint translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Syphilis” and “Black
and White” are held in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Research

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 David C hi on i Mo o re

Center, Sc. 891.7-M. Ghafur Ghulom, “On the Turksib Roads,” translated
from the Uzbek by Langston Hughes with the assistance of the author and
Nina Zorokovina, International Literature 5 (March 1933), pp. 67–69.
45. See, for example, Charles H. Nichols (ed.), Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes
Letters, 1925–1967 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), pp. 277, 282, 283, 292, 408.
46. Langston Hughes, “Statement in Round Numbers Concerning the Relative
Merits of ‘Way Down South’ and ‘Don’t You Want to Be Free’ as Compiled
by the Author Mr. Langston Hughes.” Typescript “sent to Louise, Loren,
Arna,” November 6, 1939. Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, JWJ Mss 26 367.5927.
47. Langston Hughes, “I Dream a World,” in Langston Hughes, Collected Poems,
ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994),
p. 311.
48. Hughes, Collected Poems, pp. 242–44.
49. Langston Hughes, Fields of Wonder (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), pp.
91–93.
50. Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (New York: Henry Holt, 1951),
p. 1. This text will subsequently be cited parenthetically as MDD.
51. Arthur P. Davis, “Review of Montage of a Dream Deferred, by Langston Hughes,”
Journal of Negro History 36:2 (April 1951), pp. 224–26. Babette Deutsch, “Waste
Land of Harlem: Review of Montage of a Dream Deferred, by Langston Hughes,”
New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1951, p. 12.
52. Gwendolyn Brooks, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Elizabeth Alexander
(New York: Library of America, 2005), p. 49.
53. Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, p. 69.
54. Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 336.
55. Karl L. Stenger, “Langston Hughes (1902–1967),” in Emmanuel Nelson
(ed.), African American Dramatists (New York: Greenwood, 2004), pp.
226–46, 228.
56. Shane Vogel, “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics
of Harlem Nightlife,” Criticism 48:3 (2006), pp. 397–425, 400. See also Anne
Borden, “Heroic ‘Hussies’ and ‘Brilliant Queers’: Genderracial Resistance
in the Works of Langston Hughes,” African American Review 28:3 (1994), pp.
333–45; and also Juda Bennett, “Multiple Passings and the Double Death of
Langston Hughes,” Biography 23:4 (2000), pp. 670–93.
57. Tellingly, the closest he came seems to have been a handwritten poem given
to the beautiful Afro-Chinese Trinidadian Soviet dancer Si-Lan (Sylvia) Chen,
to whom Hughes could not commit: “I am so sad / Over half a kiss / That
with half a pencil / I write this.” See Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol.
1, p. 265.
58. Langston Hughes, “Personal,” The Crisis (October 1933), p. 238.

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 Langston Hughes and His World

59. The versions quoted here are from Contempo (December 1931), p. 1, and
Hughes, Collected Poems (1994), p. 142.
60. This is the interpretation of Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 219.
61. “Testimony of Langston Hughes (Accompanied by His Counsel, Frank D.
Reeves),” Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
of the Committee on Government Operations, vol. 2, Eighty-Third Congress, First
Session, 1953, made public January 2003 (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Oice, 2003), pp. 972–98.
62. James Baldwin, “Sermons and Blues,” review of Selected Poems of Langston
Hughes. New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1959, p. 6.
63. For example, late in the editing of his 1949 anthology The Poetry of the Negro, a
letter came to Hughes from the Howard University French professor Mercer
Cook advocating inclusion of the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold
Senghor. But Hughes had never heard the name and couldn’t insert Senghor
in time. Correspondence between Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook,
August 9, 10, and 11, 1948. Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, box 47, folder 867.
64. Langston Hughes (ed.), An African Treasury (New York: Crown, 1960), and
Langston Hughes (ed.), Poems from Black Africa (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1963).
65. Langston Hughes, “Youth,” The Crisis (August 1924), p. 163. See Rampersad,
Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 2, p. 325.
66. Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1961), p. 70.
67. Hughes, Ask Your Mama, p. 3.
68. Hughes, Ask Your Mama, pp. 5–8.
69. John Henrik Clarke, “Book Reviews,” review of Langston Hughes, Ask Your
Mama, Freedomways 2 ( January 1962), pp. 102–03.

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