Poet and author of the Harlem Renaissance era, Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902 to James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes. As he reveals in his first autobiographical work The Big Sea, published in 1940, much of his childhood and young adult life after his parents’ separation was spent in transition, moving from Kansas to Mexico and then eventually overseas. Those formative years spent in travel later impacted his passion for writing. His poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” for instance, published in 1921 in The Crisis, was composed on the back of an envelope during the train ride to Mexico, where he would live with his father for a year. Similarly, his highly anthologized poem “I, Too” was composed in 1924 while in Genoa. From these early influences, Hughes rose to become one of the most prominent literary figures of the time, noted for his collections The Weary Blues and The Ways of White Folk as well as his 1926 seminal essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”
For half a century, Langston Hughes (1902–1967) wrote poetry, fiction, and plays documenting the black experience in America. A prolific writer of rare versatility and sensitivity, he chronicled the struggles African Americans faced in their daily lives, giving voice to an eloquent alternative to the mainstream understanding of what it means to be American. (Library of Congress)
Perhaps one of Hughes’s most significant and underacknowledged contributions to recording black folkloric culture is his 1958 anthology entitled the Book of Negro Folklore, co-edited with fellow Harlem Renaissance scholar Arna Bontemps. In this collection, Hughes and Bontemps gathered examples of African American folklore from New Orleans to Harlem and, in the style of Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, illustrated just a sampling of the breadth of black folk expression. This includes the tales of culture heroes such as the infamous Brer Rabbit as well as the work songs, street cries, and ghost stories passed down across generations as part of oral tradition. Like Hurston’s noted anthropological work, this collection ultimately traces the folk memories from slavery to Hughes’s present day to reveal the vibrancy of black culture and to identify the historical roots for that tom-tom drum that Hughes contends, in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” forever reverberates within the African American soul.
Primarily recording the folkloric contributions (in poetry, song, and prose) of black communities across the United States, the Book of Negro Folklore offers a compilation of songs, sermons, tall tales, and myths of the African American communities that Hughes and Bontemps encountered. The collection thus attempts to capture the black folk ethos, replacing images that might have reminded white readers of their servants—the Uncle Toms and Mammys later exploited on the minstrel screen and stage. These pieces, more importantly, represented the range of emotions felt within the larger black community. Songs such as “John Henry” depicted the discontentment experienced by African Americans as they died hammering the railroad tracks across the country. The preacher tales and tall tales shared along the porch became equally important to preserving the black cultural heritage. These works served not only as a source of entertainment for the audiences eagerly listening but at times as an expression of significant morals passed down across generational lines, a mixture of religious and cultural philosophy, and insight into race relations throughout the continental United States.
The Book of Negro Folklore also records the work of key black writers from Sterling A. Brown and his blues folk poems to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “When Malindy Sings.” Here Hughes includes several of his personal poetic contributions, many adopting the persona of the black folk whose stories he found necessary to tell. In the blues form, for instance, Hughes attempts to convey the spirit of the age by exploring common themes such as death in forms both social and cultural. In adopting the persona of the black folk around him, he fulfills one of the fundamental obligations of folklore as the Harlem Renaissance authors seemed to define it: enabling the Negro people to speak for themselves, especially at a time when the minstrel-era stereotypes of Zip Coon and Sambo were still pervasive in American society, distorting the image of African Americans.
This social and cultural approach is evident in Hughes’s novel Not Without Laughter, published in 1930 before Hughes largely committed to a project of folkloric expression in poetic and short story forms. In the novel, Hughes tells the story of Sandy Rogers, a young black male in rural Kansas whose poor upbringing and search for more (in terms of education, opportunity, etc.) was a conventional life script for many black Americans at the time. The opening sections of the novel pass down the knowledge of the elders within the black community after emancipation. Sandy’s grandmother, for example, relates the significance of Booker T. Washington’s values to the spirit and direction of the African American future, urging Sandy to become a great man and follow his path. The portrait that Hughes offers of black life in these scenes places particular emphasis on the laughter, the music, and the vibrancy of the culture with frequent depictions of Sandy and his family sitting on the porch late at night, singing the blues and gospel music as a favorite family pastime. In the novel, music serves as a vehicle to emancipation, as it so often did in African American folklore.
This running thread throughout much of Hughes’s work stems in part from his time at a nightclub in Montmartre in Paris, France, and his experience with the cabaret culture of Harlem in New York City. This exposure ultimately gave Hughes a greater appreciation for the jazz and blues forms that he translates later into his poetic works, beginning with his 1926 collection The Weary Blues. The title poem examines the blues as a way of life, the poem following a blues musician whose mournful tone and swaying motions are not only an expression of the artist’s soul but of the larger community in reaction to the discrimination and prejudice of American society at the time. Through such works, Hughes offers much deeper insight into African American culture than the impulse that Charlotte Osgood Mason, his wealthy white patron from 1927 to 1930, demanded he explore. Instead, these works employ both communal rhythms and forms as a means of tapping the emotion of the storied black people in addition to humanizing and complicating a largely stereotypical image of black folk.
Though largely a poet and short fiction author, Hughes proved a creative playwright as well, producing more than forty theatrical works during his literary career, each ingrained with elements of African American folkloric expression. His debut play, for example, entitled The Gold Piece, passes down generational wisdom to Hughes’s target audience: children, revealing the false promise of money and highlighting instead the value of sacrifice in obtaining true contentment. His 1935 play Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South depicts the abuse and oppression that blacks too often faced in the South as well as the intraracial color prejudice within the black community itself. The play reveals the issues of miscegenation and the resulting conflict of identity. Like most African American folklore, these works then reveal the history of its people and the sociohistorical factors that have inherently shaped black culture to date. Hughes’s goal in these works was therefore to call attention to the multidimensionality of black culture while continuing the integral storytelling tradition to which he was a noted contributor. His collections of short stories from The Ways of White Folk to the stories of Jessie B. Semple in the Chicago Defender are listed among his most noteworthy efforts toward achieving that goal.
Haley, Alex (1921–1992)
Born Alexander Palmer Haley in 1921, Alex Haley both documented and spurred an American passion for African American personal history and narrative. As the author of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, still recognized as a classic text half a century after its initial publication, Haley humanized the influential black activist and brought to a general American readership the background and beliefs of the Nation of Islam. Roots, meanwhile, Haley’s story of his own family’s journey from Africa into slavery in America, was immensely popular, both as a book and as a broadcast television spectacle, becoming one of the most watched programs in history. Although Haley later acknowledged that some of this work was not based on fact, and indeed had to deal with charges of plagiarism, Kunta Kinte, the heroic African taken into bondage by slave-hunters in West Africa, has become an American icon in his own right.
C. Fee
On May 22, 1967, Langston Hughes died from complications of prostate surgery. Even after his death, his influence on the African American literary tradition has remained, particularly his emphasis on black cultural values and his insistence that black artists not be ashamed. In his body of literature, Hughes attempted to concentrate on the rural folk and the urban Negro, despite contention from W. E. B. Du Bois, from the so-called “talented tenth” (or the African American socioeconomic elite), and from his literary critics who condemned such works as Fine Clothes to the Jew as trash. Hughes, in fact, was often criticized by the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals for parading the dirty laundry of the black community for all to see. However, this larger project that Hughes endeavored to explore in his work is significant to the preservation of the communal cultural wisdom and the stories of the African American past rooted among the masses. What Hughes sought to achieve was the recognition of black folk culture as equally important to the New Negro identity the Harlem Renaissance strived to create. In doing so, he foregrounded folkloric expression and the cultural insight it has to offer as integral to the multicultural mosaic of American life.
Christopher Allen Varlack
See also Brer Rabbit; Folklore and Folktales; Hurston, Zora Neale; John Henry; Minstrel Shows; Storytelling
Further Reading
Berry, Faith. 1983. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. 1993. Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press.
Hughes, Langston. 1940. The Big Sea. New York: Hill and Wang.
Hughes, Langston, and Arna Bontemps. 1958. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York: Dodd, Mead.
Rampersad, Arnold. 1986–1988. The Life of Langston Hughes. Vols. I and II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.