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BOOKS ARCHIVES
Langston Hughes: A Genius Child Comes of Age
“Hughes was the first black American writer many of us ever read... and his career remains an inspiring model for black writers determined to make a living solely from their work.”
by GREG TATE
Originally published July 1, 1988
1988 Village Voice article by Greg Tate about Langston Hughes
GRIFF DAVIS / BLACK STAR
Warts and all, the Langston Hughes who emerges from the first volume of Arnold Rampersad’s exceptional biography doesn’t suffer badly in comparison with the varnished Poet Laureate of Negro America that blacks have been raised on for generations. A
staple of high-school curricula and home recitation, Hughes figures in African-American life as significantly as in its letters, a literary hero the culture cozied up to like a warm hearth. Hughes was the first black American writer many of us ever
read, and some of his verses hold the high honor of having been accepted into the canon of black mother wit — “Son, life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” is the most famous; “Nobody loves a genius child” runs a close second. Richard Wright,
Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Nicolas Guillen, Amiri Baraka, and Gil Scott-Heron were all beneficiaries of Hughes’s lifelong encouragement of younger dark writers, and his career remains an inspiring model for black writers determined to make a
living solely from their work.
Well, an inspiring model of sorts. As Rampersad details, Hughes spent the first two decades of an adventuresome life chasing fortune more doggedly than literary fame. He was fortunate in having fame thrust upon him early — publication in W. E. B. Du
Bois’s Crisis in 1921 brought him the kindness of patrons black and white. Nevertheless, his youth reads like a 20th century guide to writing your way into history on $5 a day. Being a pauper didn’t keep him from covering the globe; much of Rampersad�
��s volume is spent tracking Hughes’s movements from the Midwest to Mexico, New York, Africa, Russia, and Spain.
Blessed with a facility for cheeriness, Hughes seems to have made it on little more than good vibes and curiosity. In the late ’30s, his veteran-bohemian advice to Manhattan newcomer Ralph Ellison was “Be nice to people, and let them buy your meals�
�� (according to Ellison, it paid off immediately). Still, the specter of capital, or rather the lack and hungry pursuit thereof, viciously haunts Rampersad’s Hughes. In plying the writer’s trade to serve the race and feed himself, Hughes made
considerable artistic, personal, and political sacrifices and compromises. These form the core of the biography’s character revelations, though Rampersad appropriately notes how deeply Hughes’s upbringing conditioned his adult persona.
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Yo Hermeneutics! Hiphopping Toward Poststructuralism
by GREG TATE
Originally published June 1, 1985
True to the old saws that artists need unhappy childhoods and bad relationships with their fathers, Hughes spent at least half his life drawing upon the misery fate had doled out to him on both counts. His parents, James and Carrie Hughes, separated
not long after he was born, and young Langston thereafter saw little of his mother, who left him for long stretches in his grandmother’s care. She was out seeking clerical work where she could find it in the poet-to-be’s birth-state, Kansas. On
his mother’s side, Hughes was descended from distinguished free blacks, the abolitionists Charles and Mary Langston, who’d worked for the underground railroad. Mary lost her first husband, James Leary, in the Harpers Ferry raid. Hughes’s father,
the self-educated son of slaves, was anything but a race man. “Detesting the poor, he especially disliked the black poor. He was unsentimental, even cold. ‘My father hated Negroes,’ Langston Hughes would judge. ‘I think he hated himself for
being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes.’ Where Carrie’s parents had instilled in her a sense of noblesse oblige, Jim Hughes seemed to look upon most blacks as undeserving cowards.”
Rebellion against his father, as certainly as the race history he got on grandma Langston’s knee (she used to wrap him in her first husband’s blood-stained shawl), played a large part in Hughes’s decision to become a race-conscious bard. Growing
up in all-white neighborhoods throughout his school years, he developed a diplomatic approach to race relations and an intellectual and emotional rapprochement with black working-class culture. Like many subsequent black middle-class writers, he
entered into a professional relationship with that culture which derived in equal parts from a sense of mission and a need to work out his own obsessions. The desire to resolve the conflict between responsibility to the race and responsibility to
literary ideals informs much black American writing. Hughes’s resolution would both nourish and compromise his art.
In 1915, when Hughes was 13, he was taken to a revival meeting by his aunt and lied about having been saved by the Holy Ghost. While he wept over the lie, he also recognized its necessity in allowing him to keep faith with black culture. “At thirteen,
Hughes probably already viewed the black world both as an insider, and far more importantly, as an outsider. The view from outside did not lead to clinical objectivity, much less alienation. Once outside, every intimate force in Hughes would drive him
toward seeking the love and approval of the race, which would become the grand obsession of his life.”
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NEIGHBORHOODS
Harlem When It Sizzled
by GREG TATE
Originally published December 7, 1982
After high school, Hughes went to Mexico to live with his father, who responded to his wish to write for a living with the advice that he should learn a skill which would take him away from the United States, “where you have lived like a nigger with
niggers.” Fueled by his father’s hate, Hughes wrote poems that fused his personal hurts with his desire for love from blacks — black maternal love in particular. Through these poems, he would eventually find a home in Crisis and an empathetic
editor in Jessie Fauset, doyenne of the Harlem Renaissance. After going to New York in the fall of 1920 to attend Columbia, Hughes upped the ante with racial verse aimed as much at unnerving his father as at providing uplift for the masses. According
to Rampersad,
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