Wasting no time, T. S. Eliot comes right out with it in the first line of his poem, The Waste Land, "April is the cruelest month." Certainly a case can be made for April's cruelty. Foolishness and fools are honored, often with cruel jokes, on the first day in April. Our Civil War started with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April. President Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theater in April. The great San Francisco earthquake struck in April. RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in April. President Franklin Roosevelt died in April. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April. And, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, slow to catch on to Eliot's pronouncement of cruelty, waited thirty-three years, until 1955, to move Tax Day from March and set it in April.
And there Tax Day still stands: a veritable mid-April monument to cruelty and my personal candidate for the cruelest day in the cruelest month. I remember telling myself solemnly in January that this year would be different; this year I would get on top of my tax returns early; no more waiting until the last minute. Sure, you know how that worked out. Just like every other year, there I was on the weekend before Tax Day busily trying to cram my tax data into Turbo Tax. By April 14, I was sealing up those three dreaded envelopes in preparation for mailing on the deadline: one of the forms was a request for an extension of time to file. Sighing and moaning inwardly, my thoughts were echoes from January, "I should have done this sooner."
"I should have done this sooner," was also what popped into my mind when I first began to read, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Hughes was a prolific writer, and since I was a bit familiar with his poetry, I initially avoided the poetry to get some experience with his other writings and a start on Arnold Rampersad's two volume biography of Hughes. In addition to poetry Hughes wrote novels, short stories, essays, autobiography, history, plays, and perhaps most surprisingly opera librettos. But the core of Hughes's writing is his poetry, and it was only when I finally turned to The Collected Poems… that I started to feel some real understanding of this man and what he was about.
Opinion about Hughes's poetry is divided. The poems tend to be simple, lyrical expressions of the poet's vision of African American life and the American experience. He wrote in everyday language, and he often used African American dialect in his poems. For many African Americans, Hughes is their unofficial poet laureate. Hughes was imbued with an intense love for African American culture, particularly the blues and jazz which he fused into his poetry to create a new kind of verse. A poem like The Weary Blues is good example. It begins like this:
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lennox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway …
He did a lazy sway …
To the tune o'those Weary Blues
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
The detractors of Hughes's poetry are principally academics and other literary sophisticates. They criticize his poems, saying that they are too simple and lack the kind of complexity and ambiguity that reflect modern life. Such critics would be inclined perhaps more toward poetry in the style of Eliot's The Waste Land, with which we began this morning. Eliot issued notes on the first publication of this poem to guide the reader to many of its allusions and explain the plan of the poem. There is another common non-artistic criticism of Hughes's poems. Some hold that his poems, particularly some from the Great Depression Era, are politically radical and unpatriotic. We'll come back to this in a bit.
Hughes was a restless man, always flitting from one place to another. And before we join him in some of his life's travels on the Langston Express, we have to pack away some biographical baggage. James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902. His parents were an African American couple: James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes. The marriage broke up shortly after Langston was born. James was soon off for Cuba, and Carrie took the infant Langston back to her home town, Lawrence, Kansas. Langston spent nearly all of the next thirteen years in Lawrence, where his grandmother, Mary Langston, was his principle caregiver. With neither a mother nor a father around, sheer loneliness led Langston to books and reading for solace. He was a good student. Langston lived in Lawrence until his grandmother died, and then he went to live with his mother in Illinois and then in Ohio.
So, now it's time to take our first excursion on board the Langston Express. It's Cleveland 1920; Langston Hughes arrives alone to board the train for Mexico where he's to visit his father. Hughes has just graduated from Central High in Cleveland. As he boards the train he's feeling sad and depressed. Perhaps he's thinking of the previous summer when his father suddenly reentered his life. James Hughes, now living in Mexico, has become prosperous and wants to reconnect with his son. James comes to Cleveland and takes Langston to Mexico for the summer, where Langston learns that his father hates Negroes. Even at this age Langston has a deep love of African Americans, and he responds with a deep and abiding hatred for his father.
However, Hughes bites his tongue and says nothing to his father about his anger. This disagreement with his father was typical for Langston Hughes: he was a kind, gentle, soft spoken person who finds it nearly impossible to express anger. Even when directly confronted with racism, he would subdue his anger and keep his balance. Hughes could pay a price for internalizing his anger in this way. His anger could resurface as physical illness, which is what had happened with his father the previous summer.
Hughes is so driven by his determination to become a writer that he's temporarily put aside his hatred and is headed for Mexico where he hopes to persuade his father to fund his college education. As the train crosses the Mississippi River he composes one of his best loved poems, The Negro Speaks of Rivers (our Opening Words, this morning). In his autobiography Hughes writes, "... I felt pretty bad when I got on the train. I felt bad for the next three or four years, to tell the truth ... my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything ..."
In Mexico he continues to write poems, learns Spanish and German, and teaches English to others at a private school. He begins to publish his writing in Black literary journals and publications in America. But his father rebuffs Langston's plea for college assistance and scoffs at the idea that Langston can become a writer. His father wants Langston to become a mining engineer to exploit some land he owns. Nearly a year passes and when Langston shows his father copies of his published writings, James Hughes relents and agrees to help Langston with his education. Langston leaves Mexico bound for New York City, and by choice never sees his father again.
Langston arrives in New York City and enrolls as a student at Columbia University. Here a whole new world of African American culture opens up to him when he discovers Harlem. He does well at Columbia, but decides to leave after a year. Race and discrimination are a factor in this decision. Later he finishes his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. More importantly in New York, Langston continues to write and publish and makes connections with the literary establishment that set the stage for him to become one of the major poets of the Harlem Renaissance.
We next pick up the Langston Express in March 1953 when Hughes, under some financial stress, has to borrow money for a flight from New York to Washington. Now well-established as one of the most distinguished Black writers in America, he has been subpoenaed to appear before Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The subpoena gave no reason for requiring Langston's appearance. But the reason was obvious: Hughes had been accused of Communist activity since the 1930s. During the Great Depression Hughes had been interested in Marxist ideology. But it was his poetry and one poem in particular, Goodbye Christ, first published in 1932 which caused the most turmoil. Let me share just a bit of this poem with you:
Listen, Christ
You did alright in your day, I reckon—
But that Day's gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too
Called it Bible—
But it's dead now,
The popes and preachers've
Made too much money from it.
. . .
Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all—
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin worker ME—
I said ME!
. . .
Anti-communists were livid about this poem and attacked Hughes from the 1930s on. The FBI began tracking Hughes in 1940, a fact which Hughes did not know at the time of the subpoena. Hughes testified courageously without invoking the Fifth Amendment. Speaking to the McCarthy Committee about Goodbye Christ Hughes said, "... it has been widely misunderstood as an anti-religious poem. This I did not mean it to be, but rather a poem against racketeering, profiteering, racial segregation, and showmanship in religion which, at the time, I felt was undermining the foundations of the great and decent ideals for which Christ himself stood." Hughes testified that while he had once looked favorably on certain aspects of Communism, he had given up such views. He testified that he was never a member of the Communist party, nor was he an atheist, and he implicated no others in his testimony. Hughes later told friends that Senator McCarthy had excused him with a direct look and a wink. Langston Hughes had been exonerated, but he continued to be hounded by anti-communist groups for the rest of his life.
In the fall of 1968 the Langston Express headed home. Langston had been invited by the University of Kansas to come and be publicly honored in his home town, Lawrence, Kansas. Hughes accepted with delight. He went and capped off a morning of student lectures with a reading of his poems to jazz accompaniment. The program was a hit, and Hughes seemed to enjoy himself immensely. Still, itŐs hard to think that being in Lawrence didn't remind him of the discrimination and loneliness that he experienced there.
Perhaps, he remembered the teacher that segregated all the black students into a single row. Langston did not passively accept this; he hung signs on each black student's desk saying, "Jim Crow Row." He was literally chased out of the school by the teacher and then expelled. After representatives of the black community met with school authorities, Langston was reinstated and the "Jim Crow Row" was eliminated. Or perhaps he remembered another teacher who advised her white pupils that eating licorice sticks would turn them black like Langston. One of Langston's white playmates told him, in all apparent innocence, that he was better than Langston because Langston was a nigger.
To compound the isolation of racism and poverty there was young Langston's craving for affection: for a father, for a mother, for a home. Instead he was abandoned by his father, neglected by his mother, passed around between his grandmother and family friends, or just left on his own. As an adult he came to terms with his childhood in some measure, but the loneliness remained with him always and was a major force in shaping his life. He lived alone in a bachelor apartment in Harlem, and this man who so craved family never married, never had a lover or children. The grand affection between Hughes and the African American community was perhaps the closest he ever came to experiencing family love.
The final excursion of the Langston Express came in 1967. By the mid-1960s Hughes's health had begun to show signs of deterioration. A heavy smoker, his voice had turned raspy, his breath labored, and his once athletic build roly-poly. He entered the hospital in May after months of experiencing, and neglecting, urinary problems. A serious infection, which set in after prostate surgery, led to Langston Hughes's death on May 22.
Arranging Hughes memorial service was mass confusion since his written instructions could not be found, and scattered memories of his wishes had to suffice. No minister or religious ceremony was involved. Instead a blues-jazz trio performed several pieces including Langston's specific request, Duke Ellington's, Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me. Three of Hughes's poems were read including Fantasy in Purple, which ends with the stanza:
Beat the drums of tragedy for me,
And let the white violins whir thin and slow,
But blow one blaring trumpet note of sun
To go with me
To the darkness
where I go.
So what "blaring trumpet note" shall we blow for Langston Hughes on this Sunday morning? The whole history of African Americans in this country is an affront to the principle of every person having worth and dignity. Langston Hughes is just one small story in the larger history of a people in our nation. Yet Hughes's story makes it clear that as a nation we have made progress toward justice and equity for African Americans. I have no doubt that if Hughes had been here to see the election of an African American president, he would have cried for the third time in his life.
What I find most compelling in Hughes's story is his unrequited longing for family. A longing, which it seems to me, motivated his affection for the African American community and ironically set him at odds with own father. Racism and poverty were certainly influential in Hughes's life. For all of us today, economic hard times and the fear of impoverishment hang over both our personal and religious families. Our newspapers and even our candles of sharing bring this home week after week. Last week's newspaper, for instance, brought the emotionally devastating story of a family destroyed by murders and suicide, thought to have been motivated in part by economic stress.
Such stories are a signal that more than ever we need to strengthen our religious family, to support each other and our community. We've seen hard times before and doubtless will see them again. We need to be realistic about our prospects, and not let fear take over. And most of all we need to hold fast to our dreams, individually, within our families, and within this Fellowship. We may have to face some tough decisions, and it may take us longer to get where we want to go, but we shouldn't just dismiss our hopes and dreams. "Where there is no vision, the people perish," as Proverbs puts it. And now, I'll let Langston Hughes have the last "blaring trumpet notes":
The Dream Keeper
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your heart-melodies
That I may wrap them
In blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
So may it be.
Copyright © 2009 Merrill Milham. All Rights Reserved.