Langston Hughes’ Celebration of Black American Life

"We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how..."

Dear friends,

One of my goals this year is to use whatever influence I have to foreground and promote our shared humanity. The need for such reminders is becoming all the more crucial in our increasingly inhumane and divisive world. This newsletter is part of my effort to resist those tendencies and to encourage others to do the same. Thank you for joining me in this endeavor. Please feel encouraged to share these posts and invite others along for the journey.

Hughes, Poet Laureate of Harlem

When I selected Langston Hughes (1902-1967) as my second poet for 2024, I hadn’t yet planned these weekly reflections. The idea didn’t come to me until Christmas or so, and by then, I already had my schedule for the year in place. So it’s pure serendipity that this issue releases on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Arguably, Hughes did much to prime the cultural ground for King’s political and moral arguments on behalf of civil rights. The work of Hughes and likeminded writers provided fertile soil in which claims of equality and freedom for all Americans could take root. As a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance,¹ Hughes enlarged the boundaries of African American art. Through his work, Hughes testified to the humanity, dignity, and value of a people who had long been disenfranchised and relegated to the margins of American culture.

For sheer volume alone, Hughes had an outsized influence on the Harlem Renaissance project of renewal and reclamation. He wrote novels, plays, short stories, children’s books, an autobiography, and of course poetry. All told, he published fourteen volumes of verse, filled with poems that centered and celebrated the lives of African Americans and explored the full range of the Black experience in America.²

There are so many reasons to appreciate Hughes and his poetry that I hardly know where to begin. Maybe the best way in is what first drew me to him—teaching his poignant “Mother to Son.”

Accessible, with Hidden Depths

I was a new teacher, looking to connect my intro to lit students with poetry. I wanted them to understand what it is and to appreciate what it can do. Hughes’ “Mother to Son” is accessible and relatable: the perfect entry point to a medium that can sometimes seem esoteric and unfamiliar. Readers immediately get what Hughes is doing—his metaphorical use of the staircase (“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”), the speaker’s loving challenge to her son (“So boy, don’t you turn back”), the poem’s promotion of a wisdom that transcends formal training or privilege (“Don’t you fall now— / For I’se still goin’, honey”).

I covered Hughes’ poem because its message was so obvious and the truth conveyed so commonsensical. I knew that students could grasp the ideas and hoped they would appreciate Hughes’ poetic method for communicating them. What I didn’t bargain for was how well-crafted and profound the poem is, which I confess I underestimated before examining it more closely myself.

The first thing to note is the poem’s voice. The speaker is so vivid that it’s easy to forget she’s not a flesh-and-blood person. This is a character Hughes has brought to life, and a whole world comes into existence through his word choice, framing, and tone. Hughes is a master at quickly capturing and conveying these personae (his Jesse B. Semple stories are his finest example). Monologues like “Mother to Son” enable Hughes to marry the external, quickly recognized character type with a rich inner life, forcefully insisting on the character’s individuality, her right to be heard, her unique and hard-won insights. While Hughes drew flak for his use of dialect, with critics arguing it reinforced negative racial stereotypes, “Mother to Son” is an example of Hughes’ subversion of these caricatures, using the sagacity and tenacity of the speaker’s voice to dismantle the notion that maturity and good sense come only through formal avenues or belong only to people of means.

There’s much more to note about this poem: its brilliant structure that visually resembles a staircase, its repetition of “and” to mimic the unrelenting hardships of the speaker’s life (and in turn the mother’s determination to overcome those challenges), the tripartite structure of the argument she makes. I’ve looked at this poem many times, and it never fails to offer something new—precisely like the character (and her people) to whom Hughes turns his poetic gaze.

Egalitarian Spirit

Hughes has acknowledged Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman as significant influences on his poetry. Both are known for elevating the common man and using their work to explore the expanse of America and its people. This democratic vision is shared by Hughes, but as an African American, his experience of America’s promises was most often one of disappointment and frustration, even as he insisted on his due. In this vein, he used his pen to redraw the boundaries of American identity and to enrich its literature with the beautiful diversity of Black culture.

Many of Hughes’ poems intentionally interact with Whitman’s work in particular. “I Hear America Singing” was a favorite sounding board. Where Whitman catalogues a wide range of laborers and domestic workers, Hughes expands that list in “My People” to make room for racial pride. The positions Hughes enumerates (“Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of babies, / Loaders of ships, …”) are, he contends, all “Dream-singers, / Story-tellers, / Dancers, …”). Hughes was a realist about the challenges structural inequalities posed to African American progress (see “I, Too,” “The Black Man Speaks,” and “Harlem” as examples). But he retained his optimism that it might be otherwise (although that optimism was admittedly tempered toward the end of his life). For Hughes, art and poetry was a means to that end. Through the stories and songs and dance of his people, this poem among them, Hughes truly believed they would become “[l]oud-mouthed laughers in the hands of Fate.”

Channeling the Collective

Interestingly enough, Hughes was thrust into poetry at age 13, when he was selected by his schoolmates to be their class poet. Most likely, Hughes’ poetic sensibilities were so evident that others instinctively recognized the aptness of the choice. Hughes took this appointment with dreadful seriousness, and that first year wrote 16 poems in praise of his teachers and fellow students. From what I can tell, these initial poems don’t survive,³ but Hughes’ grade-school vision of poetry as acclamation, as means of social uplift, remained. Hughes wrote about African Americans, for African Americans (albeit inclusively, inviting others in), and without apology.

The poet’s use of folk music as inspiration highlights the populist bent of his work. He drew on jazz (“Jazzonia”), blues (“The Weary Blues”), and spirituals (“Spirituals”). In so doing, Hughes was able to blend the individual with the collective, offering up a singular voice that channels the weighty history of a remarkable people. David Littlejohn explains how this feature sets his work apart: “Hughes’ [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do.”⁴ We see this genius unleashed in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a poem that Hughes wrote when he was only 17.⁵

The speaker uses the first-person “I” while reaching across centuries, back to ancient lands and times, and surveying the sweep of human history. The past collapses into the present as the speaker links great civilizations one to another, assuming credit for their power and prestige on behalf of the ones on whose backs the cultures were indisputably built (“I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it”).

And yet the poem remains a meditation, a moving tribute to the unjustly exploited with a note of hope that they will at long last have recompense: “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.” Most poignant in this poem is the character and discernment born from this undeniable adversity. Hughes is nothing if not redemptive. “My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” the speaker repeats with mounting solemnity.

For full effect, you’ll want to hear Hughes read it himself. In fact, I’ll let him have the final word on his work and rightfully so.

Miscellany

Before you go, let me pass on the following exhortation about our human need for art from Fuller professor W. David O. Taylor. It was brought to my attention by a friend and co-laborer in the bringing-beauty-to-social-media business, and I think it deserves our consideration:

A world without the arts is a world, to paraphrase the language of Genesis 2, where the trees that God made are only “good for food” and not also “pleasing to the eye.” It’s a world where only the “utility” of things matters and where the “beauty” of things is treated as a secondary, optional and dispensable thing. It’s a world that is crushed under the oppressive weight of the need to feel “useful.” It's a world where activism makes no space for contemplation, where “doing” and not “being” is prioritized, where propositional speech is seen as superior to figurative language of the arts which enables us to “figure out” the reality of the world in faithful, truthful ways. It's a world where the aesthetic design of our clothes and cities and culinary dishes is felt to be superfluous, rather than fundamental to the world that God so loves. This is not a world worth living in and it bears no resemblance to the world that the Triune God has made.... To reject the arts is to reject the very fabric of creation, the calling of humans to create culture, and the responsibility of Christians to bear radical witness to the new creation.⁶

Here’s to beauty, friends. I’ll be back next week, and this time with Shakespeare!

Marybeth

1. The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic and intellectual movement of the 1920s and 30s (cut short by the Great Depression). Although Harlem birthed and nurtured the movement, its influence was far-reaching and testified to the value and contributions of African American thinkers and artists. Read more here: https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance

2. He did so, not without much criticism. Robert Niemi explains that some of Hughes’ peers found his use of dialect and his focus on the lower class fed racial stereotypes. See Robert Niemi, “The Poetry of Hughes,” Masterplots II: African American Literature, Revised Edition, December 2008, p. 1-3. Hughes addressed this criticism directly in his 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The subtitle for this post comes from Hughes’ powerful conclusion, affirming that progress requires that Black artists must first be true to themselves.

3. I did a little digging but may have missed them. Please do share if you know where they may be found.

4. “Langston Hughes,” Poetry Foundation.

5. 17!

6. Taylor’s reflections were posted in this thread on X, formerly known as Twitter.