82 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • FEBRUARY 2020
REAR VIEW
LANGSTON HUGHES
WRITING BLACK AMERICA
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
He was drawn to it.
Maybe it was that serene stretch of
Havens Beach that beckoned him to
cast off the noise of city streets and
explore the bay. Perhaps it was the
chance to keep company with other
creative artists. Or, possibly, it was
finding freedom from the still-segregated
societies of the East End, New
York City, and the Deep South of the
1950s.
Before discovering that safe place,
Langston Hughes, the “poet laureate
of Harlem,” led the jazz-age Harlem
Renaissance. The African American
neighborhood’s culture inspired
poets, artists, musicians, and intellectuals
to celebrate black consciousness
in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout
the 1940s, “Hughes, more than any
other black poet or writer, recorded
faithfully the nuances of black life
and its frustrations,” wrote PBS Utah.
By the 1950s, the social activist, novelist,
playwright, and journalist — the
man whose musical poetry anticipated
that of the Beats, Black Arts poets,
and rappers — was ready to remove
his shoes and feel sand between his
toes.
A WELL-TRAVELED BUSBOY
Descended from paternal
great-grandmothers who were African
American slaves and paternal
great-grandfathers who were white
slave owners, James Mercer Langston
Hughes’ started life in Joplin, Mo., in
1902. Abandoned by his father, the
young boy was raised by his mother
and maternal grandmother. Hughes
later recalled being “unhappy for a
long time, and very lonesome … and
I began to believe in nothing but
books and the wonderful world in
books — where if people suffered,
they suffered in beautiful language.”
In Illinois, his grammar school English
teacher stressed the importance
of poetic rhythm. With only two
black students in his class, he was
elected class poet because “everyone
The porch where Langston Hughes read poetry is on the Literary Sag
Harbor Walking Tour. (Photo by Gordon Parks/1943)
knows — except us —that all ‘Negroes’
have rhythm,” he remembered wryly.
So he started writing poetry. In
high school, he read Carl Sandburg’s
work, edited the yearbook, wrote for
the school paper, and sent his work
(unsuccessfully) to magazines.
After graduation, he traveled to
Mexico, down Africa’s west coast and
to Spain on a freighter, and to Paris,
exploring what he called “racial
rhythms;” African American publications
and Vanity Fair magazine
published his poems.
He was influenced by the late Walt
Whitman, whom he called “America’s
greatest poet.” En route to Africa, in
admiration of Whitman’s statements
on equality with black slaves, Hughes
tossed all his books overboard — except
for Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Hughes’ poem I, Too became popular:
“I, too, sing America. I am the darker
brother. They send me to eat in the
kitchen …,” He included Whitman
poems in his anthology The Poetry
of the Negro and recommended that
black writers read Whitman.
Back in the states, he pioneered jazz
poetry’s simple style and syncopated
rhythms backed by jazz combos.
While working as a dining room busboy
in Washington, D.C., in 1925, he
slipped his poem “The Weary Blues”
beside the poet Vachel Lindsay’s plate.
After reading Hughes’ lines about the
bluesman — “With his ebony hands
on each ivory key he made that poor
piano moan with melody. O Blues!”
— Lindsay introduced the young
poet-author to publishers. Hughes
graduated from Lincoln University
in Pennsylvania, the first historically
black university, in 1929; his first
novel, Not Without Laughter, won the
Harmon gold medal for literature.
Starting in 1942, he worked for the
New York Post and the Chicago
Defender; his poetry flourished, ignoring
classical forms, incorporating
improvisational jazz and black folk
rhythms.
POETRY ON THE PORCH
About 100 miles east of Manhattan,
summer bungalows for upper- and
middle-class African Americans
sprang up in the 1940s and 1950s
in Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and
Ninevah, known as “SANS.” Returning
World War II soldiers and other
blacks bought properties because it
was nearly impossible for them to get
mortgages or have beach access anywhere
else because of anti-black laws
and attitudes that perpetuated mortgage
discrimination and segregation.
Hughes frequently headed to
Nineveh Place in the 1950s to stay
with his college roommate, historian
William Pickens. They read poetry
on Pickens' porch, about “workers,
roustabouts, and singers, and job
hunters…— people up today and
down tomorrow, working this week
and fired the next, beaten and baffled,
but determined not to be wholly beaten
…,” wrote Hughes.
He continued writing what he knew
about loneliness, despair, and humor,
and recorded spoken-poem albums
with such jazz greats as Thelonious
Monk and Charles Mingus before
dying of prostate cancer in 1967.
Hughes’ pioneering works have survived
for more than half a century:
Today, Ice-T, Mos Def (Yasiin Bey), and
other rappers celebrate Hughes’ jazz
poetry, and in Nineveh, the poetry
porch is featured on the Literary Sag
Harbor Walking Tour.
In Sag Harbor he read his poetry about “people
up today and down tomorrow, working this
week and fired the next, beaten and baffled,
but determined not to be wholly beaten.”
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