Silver Liquid Drops

Langston Hughes

Tonight I’m writing to honor Langston Hughes. It seems fitting as a part of my ongoing celebration of Black History to talk about one of my literary heroes.
(see my month’s posts for more, more, more)

Let’s start with some biographical information. I’m just going to lift this part directly from the net…

Forgive me but it was easy………my writing will follow and just hold on……the bio is important enough to include....

James Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 - May 22, 1967) Born in Joplin, Missouri, James Langston Hughes was a member of an abolitionist family. He was the great-great-grandson of Charles Henry Langston, brother of John Mercer Langston, who was the first Black American to be elected to public office, in 1855. Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, but began writing poetry in the eighth grade, and was selected as Class Poet. His father didn't think he would be able to make a living at writing, and encouraged him to pursue a more practical career. He paid his son's tuition to Columbia University on the grounds he study engineering. After a short time, Langston dropped out of the program with a B+ average; all the while he continued writing poetry. His first published poem was also one of his most famous, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", and it appeared in Brownie's Book. Later, his poems, short plays, essays and short stories appeared in the NAACP publication Crisis Magazine and in Opportunity Magazine and other publications. One of Hughes' finest essays appeared in the Nation in 1926, entitled "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain". It spoke of Black writers and poets, "who would surrender racial pride in the name of a false integration," where a talented Black writer would prefer to be considered a poet, not a Black poet, which to Hughes meant he subconsciously wanted to write like a white poet. Hughes argued, "no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself." He wrote in this essay, "We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren't, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too... If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, as strong as we know how and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves." In 1923, Hughes traveled abroad on a freighter to the Senegal, Nigeria, the Cameroons, Belgium Congo, Angola, and Guinea in Africa, and later to Italy and France, Russia and Spain. One of his favorite pastimes whether abroad or in Washington, D.C. or Harlem, New York was sitting in the clubs listening to blues, jazz and writing poetry. Through these experiences a new rhythm emerged in his writing, and a series of poems such as "The Weary Blues" were penned. He returned to Harlem, in 1924, the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. During this period, his work was frequently published and his writing flourished. In 1925 he moved to Washington, D.C., still spending more time in blues and jazz clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street...(these songs) had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." At this same time, Hughes accepted a job with Dr. Carter G. Woodson, editor of the Journal of Negro Life and History and founder of Black History Week in 1926. He returned to his beloved Harlem later that year. Langston Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. degree in 1929. In 1943, he was awarded an honorary Lit.D by his alma mater; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 and a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940. Based on a conversation with a man he knew in a Harlem bar, he created a character know as My Simple Minded Friend in a series of essays in the form of a dialogue. In 1950, he named this lovable character Jess B. Simple, and authored a series of books on him. Langston Hughes was a prolific writer. In the forty-odd years between his first book in 1926 and his death in 1967, he devoted his life to writing and lecturing. He wrote sixteen books of poems, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of "editorial" and "documentary" fiction, twenty plays, children's poetry, musicals and operas, three autobiographies, a dozen radio and television scripts and dozens of magazine articles. In addition, he edited seven anthologies. The long and distinguished list of Hughes' works includes: Not Without Laughter (1930); The Big Sea (1940); I Wonder As I Wander" (1956), his autobiographies. His collections of poetry include: The Weary Blues (1926); The Negro Mother and other Dramatic Recitations (1931); The Dream Keeper (1932); Shakespeare In Harlem (1942); Fields of Wonder (1947); One Way Ticket (1947); The First Book of Jazz (1955); Tambourines To Glory (1958); and Selected Poems (1959); The Best of Simple (1961). He edited several anthologies in an attempt to popularize black authors and their works. Some of these are: An African Treasury (1960); Poems from Black Africa (1963); New Negro Poets: USA (1964) and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers (1967). Published posthumously were: Five Plays By Langston Hughes (1968); The Panther and The Lash: Poems of Our Times (1969) and Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest (1973); The Sweet Flypaper of Life with Roy DeCarava (1984). Langston Hughes died of cancer on May 22, 1967. His residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission. His block of East 127th Street was renamed "Langston Hughes Place" . By: Andrew P. Jackson (Sekou Molefi Baako)

Poetry by Hughes

Want to know my favorite poem….

April Rain Song

Let the rain kiss you Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops Let the rain sing you a lullaby The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk The rain makes running pools in the gutter The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night And I love the rain. Langston Hughes

Well I found an extraordinary site of writers writing about Hughes poetry so please go here for wonderful information. And his poems are collected in a great anthology. I always had my students memorize several of his poems. They are easily among the best for the classroom, perfect as a Black History Month project.

And Quotes from Hughes …of course…..from TubeGator…of course just go to his poetry.

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it
- Langston Hughes

I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, Why Democracy means, Everybody but me.
- Langston Hughes

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
- Langston Hughes

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.
- Langston Hughes

TWO Langston Hughes BOOKS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

I Wonder As I Wander

The title of this story is taken from an Appalachian melody of Christmas, among the most beautiful I know for playing on dulcimer. (Coincidentally there is a WONDERFUL children’s book about the Appalachian tune that was collected from a child in North Carolina by the same name that is great on where this title came from)

The tune that inspired his title is just a simple song of country handiwork, a Christmas piece, I Wonder As I Wander. I made a friend this year who is inspired at a fundamental level by Langston Hughes and who is dear to me. It gave me pause to think about what to say here of this book. He lives in close connection to Hughes spirit, and may indeed embody and carry this truth in his life’s work. Not an easy thing at all…but the world is better for him. I’d hate to do it a disservice; the book is among my most favorite ever. I'm surprised that many don’t know it, this volume one of the most amazing ones he wrote. It is an autobiographical journey, a tale from his life; it serves to create an internal landscape to consider Hughes’ interior and his perspectives from a time in the 30’s looking out at global times of change where he wandered. It is worth reading for anyone, especially for someone who loves to read of the times of our lives in the 20^th century.

Hughes opens the book, which covers time from 1931 to 1938 carrying on from The Big Sea, his first autobiographical work. As I read them out of order can’t say I am sorry this was my first of the two books. It stays solidly in my head. He tells of traveling in a car on a tour in the South and the west presenting his poetry in small local homes, campus, school, and church settings in his quest to become a writer and learn the life of a black American in the context of local lives. On opening this wandering story he was reading his work in small often-rural settings and revealing black community and his meager circumstances, as he was essentially becoming the writer. He becomes involved in a film project and goes to the Soviet Union, which is such an amazing thing to read. It is a project that doesn't work out and he stays in Russia a time and continues traveling. Just to read about this time in history from his perspective in areas we could not know about in the US is worth the book. These observations and how he finally returns to the US worth the time to read. I found this the most compelling of the narrative. I felt I was wandering too, wandering free of some of the limitations of American political shaping, in a time of unrest and revolution, looking at the Soviets as they took on the start of building their country. Listening to Hughes describe the adventure, what he sees. Hughes is not given to excessive internal dialog; he is almost remarkably absent of this. Which of course is a vehicle he creates for us to wander in, he relates what he sees and it has a kind of universal journey construction. Almost anonymous, perfectly lost soul universal adventurous wanderer lost in those times, so completely crafted that I lose my "self" in the pages. I am a train, or a days delicious seafood with boiled bananas and Spanish rice learning to rumba.

I am ill equipped to summarize but Hughes is a genius, creating a kind of tableau that for me stands as visually there as the great human visual artists of these times. This he does so easily. And I feel this trip across Russia as an experience. I think what moves me is that Hughes recounts human interaction, the simplicity, and the everyday, as it might be felt by myself or was felt by him. I've spent most all of my life living in teaching in ordinary everyday, poorer worlds by choice, learning of the dignity and indignity, suffering, laughing, discovering others, in the valid and real lives of ordinary people. It makes me anecdotal and determined to honor lives. And I note in the book foreword his stating, "I've now cut out all the impersonal stuff down to a running narrative with me in the middle of every page...the kind of intense condensation that, of course, keeps an autobiography from being entirely true, in that nobody's life is pure essence without pulp, waste matter, and rind-which art, of course, throws in the trash can." Ah always genius.

Because I read a great deal of these times interested in Lillian Hellman and many other figures, his recounting his story with Arthur Koestler was so interesting. Again threaded through this personal anecdote was so much good information and perspective. He talks of Haiti and I've given these pages many times to friends connected to this country, of Cuba, China and Japan ending in Carmel in an area I lived for 9 years, which was remarkable for me, as I first encountered the book reading it sitting in a bookshop in Carmel. As I was wandering the streets reading and thinking and enjoying thoughts of his times there. These were his times of Communism, Marxism, the Scottsboro Boys, and only bits become part of the book, though I was discerning much because I did know of the times from my interests, reading and from reading more to understand his times.

I have stated in writing of my teaching life that Hughes lived writing of black America, of politics, of difficult constructs, from his background, then from his education, from his broadening views, from traveling, meeting such a wide spectrum, he was writing of the lives of the poor, living the lives. But also Hughes was a great writer, thinker, a man apart. I sense his frustration as much as I can from my inadequacies, in trying to speak to these issues of fairness, of poverty, of the travesty of greed, of human lives affected by prejudice and economic and political failure. And he knew the world in a way few did. I write anecdotally of teaching in South Central, in migrant areas trying to reach out and tell the stories of kids hoping those that read can draw conclusions and understand better their real realities. I sense Hughes left to his readers a responsibility to use his journey, his insights, to think about how to make America a fairer place. How to work to create a just world. And to understand how broad a world it is.

I read in the forward about the books reception as "shallow". And I wonder....as I too wander. There is an elegant powerful truth that Hughes carries, a silent power in a poets’ voice spoken in the face of revealing things no one can hear or will hear. There is a basic return to the voyage as meaning itself, a telling of a life, a looking at life as a movement forward. I just cannot find that shallow. I find Hughes as ever one of the touchstones of my life

The Panther And The Lash

The thought of talking here about the last poetry volume of Langston Hughes is remarkably intimidating.

I will say I acquired this volume of poetry that changed my life as I began my teaching career leaping into 93rd Street School in South Central LA, to teach general ed. coming from rural West by God Virginia(in the later 1980's).

The poems read as I worked with students in LA, in Watts, resonated with me every day as I attempted to teach that very difficult 4th grade.
From my memory I recall.....

Dinner Guest:Me
I know I am
The Negro Problem
Being wined and dined,
Answering the usual questions
That come to white mind
Which seeks demurely
To probe in polite way
The why and wherewithal
Of darkness U.S.A.-
Wondering how things got this way
In current democratic night,
Mumuring gently
Over fraises du bois,
"I'm so ashamed of being white."

It goes on to conclude
"Solutions to the Problem,
Of course , wait."

With a few simple capitals he demonstrates the genius that is Hughes. I read the anger because teaching my students in the later 1980's I saw the reality of their lives and what they had to face in LA. It was crushing for me to reconcile the prose, the reality, the lives with what I had as a concept of America and "fairness".

You want to know a statistic, here's one Hughes understood.... I had a class of 42 children I dearly loved, boys not alive today. How's that for truth.

In this volume the power of his own anger and frustration meets the power of his ability to speak to this fury over inequality and injustice. I read this book to have a partner and witness, and silently hope my efforts teaching in areas of poverty meant something...God somehow I hope someone gives a damn enough to speak up too.... I am a witness. And Hughes was a black man poet; prophet Knopf allowed to speak to America because most of the time he did not speak with a lash, he spoke with silver liquid drops of truth.

This volume is really for a person prepared to look at Hughes peering into the later 60's and seeing the future. As I sat daily locked up in my classroom, and on occasion faced knife welding , gang banging intruders and rode in my car into a terror filled neighborhood, I asked myself what on earth allowed this.

In this volume Hughes reacts to Angola, Mississippi, Birmingham, Bombings in Dixie, Harlem, the truth of "The Dream".....black anger, the violence beneath the surface. What I saw teaching, the inner decay. And in his words we hear something almost mortifying. to me...

"Get out the lunch-box of your dreams
And bite into the sandwich of your heart,
And ride the Jim Crow car until it screams
And, like an atom bomb, bursts apart."

All I know is this fits my life so well it makes me cry...

" i have been seeking
what i have never found
what i don't know what i want
but it must be around
i been upset
since the day before last
but that day was so long
i done forgot when it passed
yes almost forgot
what i have not found
but i know it must be
somewhere around"

I'm recalling some, so I ask forgiveness for my quoting. I have been ultimately changed and defined by Hughes work. I'll never stop recommending this volume to those who want to talk truth as Hughes saw it shortly before his death.

And Finally a few Lesson Plan Links....

Discovering a Passion for Poetry With Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes Lesson plans and teaching ideas

Langston Hughes Mini-Unit

Lesson Plan: “The Weary Blues”: Langston Hughes and Bessie Smith