Langston Hughes's Childhood - Essay Example

Langston Hughes No other has been able to capture the spirit, and embody the feelings, of being black in America during the 20th century thanLangston Hughes, and few have been more criticized for it. Early in his career, as a spokesman for the left, he was able to elevate the level of discourse on black America without the loss of dignity suffered by begging or pandering. Hughes had the ability to write about black without speaking of race and talk about poverty without mentioning class. He has at times been revered as an important American artist and again marginalized in the shadows of the other great writers of the period. Hughes published more than thirty-five books that utilized such diverse formats as poetry, scripts, operas, essays, and musicals aimed at both children's and adult audiences. Langston Hughes was able to not only illustrate what it meant to be black, but he was also able to show blacks what it meant to be American. Langston Hughes's love of writing and his social consciousness were formulated during his early years as a black child living in the early 1900s. Born in 1902 to a family with a deep literary tradition and a convention for education, Hughes gravitated towards writing at an early age. Hughes's father, James Nathaniel Hughes, studied law and moved to Mexico after being denied admittance to the bar in the Oklahoma Territory, leaving his wife and young Langston behind. Unable to support her young child, Carrie Hughes moved from job to job in Missouri and Kansas, while young Langston stayed with his maternal grandmother for most of the next decade in Lawrence Kansas. Langston was briefly reunited with his father in Mexico in 1908, but by this time he had already begun to reject the materialism sought by his father (Tracy 25). Langston had become keenly aware of the difference between wealth and poverty, and the social value of both. Langston Hughes was exposed to other writers in his family at an early age. His mother "demonstrated a dramatic imagination through writing poetry and delivering monologues in costume" (Tracy 25). His great-uncle, John Mercer Langston, attained some literary notoriety with an autobiography published under the title From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital in 1894 (Tracy 25). Hughes's imagination was spurred on further by his grandmother's imagination and a visit to the Topeka library. He would remark later in life that, "even before I was six books began to happen to me, so that after a while there came a time when I believed in books more than in people which, of course, was wrong" (Tracy 26). Hughes briefly returned to Mexico in 1921 to live with his father, and it was then that he penned "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", arguably his first important work. It was published in 1922 by the W.E.B. DuBois publication Crisis, thus launching his long literary career. Hughes's early childhood experiences and his literary success with the Crisis placed him as a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. By 1920 several major black organizations such as the NAACP and The Urban League, had located their offices in Harlem, New York. Harlem had become a magnet for black America as African-Americans were defining their American identity. Taylor describes the rising tide of black dignity as follows: As Harlem consolidated its role as a "black belt," it took on a powerful significance for writers and artists. From 1919 to 1929 the cultural movement defining the neighborhood's heyday took place: the Harlem Renaissance. Those were the years, wrote Langston Hughes, when "Harlem was in vogue." The philosophy and art that came out of Harlem at this time have had a lasting significance for the development of modern black consciousness. (7) The crucible of Harlem with its conflict and fury would propel Hughes to develop an individual style that shaped the future of black America, black literature, and the Civil Rights movement. It was in Harlem that Langston Hughes gained widespread acceptance as an important American writer. During the early 1920s, Hughes had traveled to the Caribbean and Africa, where he was influenced by the writings of Marcus Garvey. In 1926 he published his first collection of poetry titled Weary Blues. This early collection helped to accent and define Harlem as the cultural hub of black America with such poems as "Cabaret", "Jazzonia", and "Harlem Night Club". His poetry spoke of jazz, dancing, and the freedom of expression available to the Harlem artist. Yet, Hughes was also pointing out the inequalities that existed and the fragile social fabric that held them together. In his poem "Young Prostitute" Hughes paints a poignant picture of life just beneath the surface gaiety: Her dark brown face Is like a withered flower On a broken stem. Those come cheap in Harlem So they say.1 "Young Prostitute" was published soon after the poem "Liars" which reflects the influence that Garvey was having on his social conscience, and weaves a mistrust of pretension and what Hughes calls the "too white truth" (Berry and Hughes 39). The attitudes of the celebration of black culture fused with the anger that boiled just beneath the surface to create a dignified definition of black America and paved the way for future racial and social movements. During the 1930s Hughes turned to writing musicals and Broadway plays. He had moderate success with Mulatto (1935), Little Ham (1936), and Emperor of Haiti (1936). These works were intertwined with comedy, a call for desegregation, and an admiration for socialism, and Mulatto broached the socially sensitive subject of miscegenation. The subject of mixed marriages brought to the forefront the issue of color, and not simply race. Hughes was known for calling attention to skin color in his writings. According to Bodenhorn, "he referred to African-Americans as brown, light-brown, golden, yellow, high-yellow, almost white, blond, three-quarters pink, high-toned, coffee with cream, and cafe-au-lait. In Hughes' fiction, complexion was paramount because it created interpersonal tensions, reflecting larger social dynamics" (21). Yet, while encouraging racial harmony Hughes's African-American characters, "expressed a preference for light-skinned women, and dark-skinned women resented both the men who acted on that preference and the women who benefited from it" (Bodenhorn 21). As the Harlem Renaissance became a mainstreamed and entrenched cultural movement, the country was hit by the Great Depression. Langston's socialistic viewpoints were becoming sharper as evidenced by his high-spirited trip to Moscow in 1932 to make a film on race relations and the publishing of the poem "Goodbye Christ" (Rampersad 4). The poem mocks hypocritical religion, while professing his admiration for Karl Marx and Lenin. This would start a storm of controversy to Hughes as he would be brought in front of the US Senate in 1953 to testify in regards to his left-wing politics at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his protgs Roy Cohn and David Schine. According to Rampersad, "After some rough questioning by Cohn and Schine, a deal was struck. In a week of public interrogations of leftist writers, Langston Hughes would appear before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as a cooperating witness, one ready to explain and deprecate his radical past. In return, Hughes's most inflammatory poems would not be read aloud - unlike the work of other authors who dared to resist the subcommittee" (212-213). The Great Depression and the Second World War had brought Hughes to a point where he had distanced himself from radical politics. During the period of 1930-1950 Hughes's works were often focused on the social and racial equality promoted by socialism. Still, his belief in his radical political views were being called into self-doubt, and his calls for racial equality may have lacked sincerity. The period was also marked by a lukewarm reception to his work and little more than moderate success. His most renowned work of the period was writing a column for the Chicago Defender where he introduced the character 'Simple'. Jesse B. Simple was what Blyden Jackson called, "The black everyman - an ordinary working Blackman" (qtd. in Tracy 201). Akiba Sullivan Harper, author of Not so Simple: The Simple Stories of Langston Hughes, notes that Simple is "representative of the masses of black folk in the 1940s" (qtd. in Tracy 201). The Simple stories provided Hughes with a format that was more humanist and less politically charged by, "addressing blacks during the turbulent and politically complicated years of World War II, but those were years that had afforded him some measure of aesthetic detachment" (Bass and Rampersad 4). His success would be short lived, as the McCarthy hearings of 1953, and Hughes's response, would permanently impair his reputation as a serious artist. Hughes's later life would be marred by political turmoil and criticism. After publishing The Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP in 1962, he was called to defend Martin Luther King against attacks made by militant blacks whose position he had defended only a few decades earlier. Black leaders criticized Hughes for being "old-fashioned and not entirely in tune with the mood of black America" (Nelson 250). His work has also come under scrutiny for being overly simplified, and author James Baldwin argued that Hughes's poems "take refuge in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of the experience" (Tracy 14, 16). This tone would permeate the rest of Hughes's life as he passed away on May 22, 1967. In conclusion, Langston Hughes's childhood was tempered by poverty, racism, and parental reject, which combined to ignite his creative spark. His early work was instrumental in establishing the Harlem Renaissance as the cultural heartbeat of black America. His early poetry spoke to the rhythm of blackness and illustrated to white America what it meant to be black. These emotions would foment into an anti-establishment philosophy based on racial equality and socialism. World War II retracted Hughes from politics and allowed him to explore the true nature of black culture through the character Simple for the Chicago Defender. When his socialist views were challenged by the McCarthy Subcommittee, Hughes denounced his more radical stance and forever tainted his reputation as a committed artist. His works have been revered as expressing the true nature of black culture, and criticized for being overly-simplistic. While he promoted desegregation, his novels were inundated with characters who viewed skin color in aesthetic terms. Early in his life he was criticized for his radical stance, but by 1965 he was not radical enough. Langston Hughes was an author who was always one step out of the time that he was in. Works Cited Bass, Ramona, and Arnold Rampersad, eds. Collected Works of Langston Hughes : Later Simple Stories. Vol. 8. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Berry, Faith, and Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes, Before and Beyond Harlem. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992. Bodenhorn, Howard. "The Mulatto Advantage: The Biological Consequences of Complexion in Rural Antebellum Virginia." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.1 (2002): 21-46. Hughes, Langston , Arnold Rampersad, Dolan Hubbard, and Leslie C. Sanders. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Vol. 1. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Nelson, Emmanuel, ed. African American Authors 1745-1945 : A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook . Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Taylor, Monique M. Harlem Between Heaven and Hell . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Tracy, Steven C., ed. Historical Guide to Langston Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Read More