LESSON 22
LIFE AND CREATURE OF LANGSTON HUGHES.
Plan
1.
Langston
Hughes was an American poet
2.
Langston Hughes’s literary career
One of the American poets whose works emerged directly from Negro folklore was
Langston Hughes. He kept to folklore traditions, and all his poetry was devoted to Negro problems.
Hughes also wrote short stories, novels and plays. In his later years he was a journalist and editor of
Negro publication.
Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Missouri. His parents moved from place to place in
the search for a chance to make a living. Since it was very difficult practically impossible for
Negroes to get good jobs in the States. Langston’s father decided to go to the city of Mexico taking
his wife and child, and his wife’s mother with him. But on their arrival a terrible earthquake took
place, and his mother refused to stay. She said she wanted to live in a place where there were no
earthquakes and where people spoke English. The father wanted to stay and the parents separated.
Langston did not see his father again till he was 17.
Langston went back to New England with his mother and grandmother where they lived in
great poverty. Negro families were charged double rent for the rooms, and in order to make a living
Langston’s mother to ten different jobs before Langston was 12 years old.
All his life Langston remembered his grandmother who looked very much like an Indian:
”cooper-colored with long black hair”. She was very proud and would
beg or borrow anything
from anybody. She used to Langston stories about the people who had so much to set the Negroes
free. She told him how the first husband of her mother had been killed. Her mother, an Indian girl
from the Cherokee tribe, had married freeman, Sheridan Leary,
and they had lived Oberlin,
Minnesota. She was with child when her husband went away, and nobody knew where he had gone.
All that he had told her was that he was going on a trip. A few weeks later he was brought back to
her full of bullet holes. He was one of those who had joined John Brown’s group and he had been
killed in that historic raid at Harper’s Terry.
Hughes wrote: “Though my grandmother’s stories always life moved, moved heroically
toward an end ”. He said that nobody ever cried in his grandmother’s stories.
They worked, or
schemed, or fought. But no crying. He said that when his grandmother died, he did not cry either.
Something about his grandmother’s stories had taught him uselessness of tears.
Because they had to move from place so much Langston often had to change schools. In
some towns there was no schools for colored children and he had to go to a school where he was
the only colored child. It was in these schools that he witnessed racial injustice. During the summer
vocation he worked as a delivery boy to help his mother. But his free time he spent reading books.
Despite all difficulties he did succeed in getting a secondary education; he graduated from High
School in Cleveland, Ohio.
During the next four years Hughes worked at various jobs at
large department stores and
hotels, eating butter bread of the economic slavery in which colored people were kept in America.
In 1921, with the help of his father, he entered Columbia University in New York but finding the
environment distasteful or worse, he left the University a year later and decided to travel.
Hughes signed up with a ship sailing for America. His first cruise as a sailor took him to the
Canary Islands and the west coast of Africa. In his early poem he described the exotic beauty of
Africa, the primitive life of the Negroes without exploitation and discrimination as he had seen it in
his dreams. In 1924, at the age of 22 he made two voyages to Europe he went through a tremendous
number of adventures. In Paris he found himself with only 7 dollars in his pocket. To save himself
from starvation he again had to go in to service and do all the work he one else wanted to do. In
Genua, Italy, he managed to get on a ship bound for the United States to reach\ home as a work
away. On his return to America he lived and worked for some time in Washington.
Langston Hughes’s literary career began in 1925 at a Washington
hotel where the poet
worked as a kitchen boy washing up dishes , or bus boy, who clears the tables. One night a
traveling poet Vachel Lindsay arrived in the hotel. Langston knew him. He had read his works.
Hughes told him that he lined his poems and that he was a poet too. Langston laid poems
“Negro
Dances”, “Wear Blues”
and
“Garronid”
. The next morning on his way to work Hughes read in the
paper that Vachel Lindsay had discovered or Negro boy poet.
At the hotel the reporters, were
already waiting for him. They interviewed him and they took his picture, holding up a hay of dirty
dishes in the middle of dining room. Langston took part in a poetry contest and won the first prize.
The poems Hughes wrote at the time were like the songs he heard in neighborhoods where the poor
Negroes lived: ”gay songs, because you had to be gay or die, sad songs, because you could not help
living and you kept on going”
In 1926 Hughes entered the Abraham Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, which accepted
Negro students. He graduated in 1929. He wrote his novel
“Not Without Laughter ”
while still a
student at college. In 1934 he published a book of short stories.
“The Ways of White Folks”:
These
books tell of the strange undemocratic things that happen in “the world’s greatest democracy”, the
American rulers call the United States. In 1937 during the Civil War
in Spain wrote a publicist
poem
“The Song of Spain”
. here is the part of it.
After World War 11 Hughes took a very active part in public affairs, he became public
personality. He delivered many lectures about the World War 11. Hughes had directed plays in the
Harlem Negro writers, wrote articles against extreme black nationalism and issued a book on Negro
human.
This prose at the time appeared in his series with the character Simple:
“Simple Speaks His
Mind”
, “
Simple Takes a Wife”, “Simple Takes a Claim” and “Simple’s Uncle Sam”.
Simple
expresses the thoughts of the Negro people “in arms of race”. Many of ideas criticizing American
Hughes derived from conversation with the ordinary “man in the street”.
In this series Simple expresses his thought on everything,
from plan love in the half-
humorous , half-serious way peculiar to the Negroes living in Harlem.
Langston Hughes’s late collection of poems is
“The Pan and the Lash”
written in 1967,
is devoted to Africa-not the Africa of primitive, exotic beauty, but new Africa where the
awakened Negro people are building up a new life.
