Langston Hughes and the Price of Freedom: Poems of Love, Identity, and Resistance
- Meri Utkovska
- Feb 1, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too."
-Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
Red Roses
I'm waitin' for de springtime When de tulips grow— Sweet, sweet springtime When de tulips grow; Cause if I'd die in de winter They'd bury me under snow. Un'neath de snow, Lawd, Oh, what would I do? Un'neath de snow, I say what would I do? It's bad enough to die but I don't want freezin' too. I'm waitin' for de springtime An' de roses red, Waitin' for de springtime When de roses red 'Ll make a nice coverin' Fer a gal that's dead.
Dream Dust
By Langston Hughes
Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.
Copyright Credit: Langston Hughes, "Dream Dust" from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes.
Source: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (University of Missouri Press (BkMk Press), 2002)
Freedom
By Langston Hughes
Freedom will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.
I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.
Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
I live here, too.
I want my freedom
Just as you.
Copyright Credit: Langston Hughes, "Freedom [1]" from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes.
Source: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. (University of Missouri Press (BkMk Press), 2002)
About Langston Hughes
Born on February 1st, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri, James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, playwright, novelist, social activist, and columnist. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flourishing of black artistic, intellectual, and literary life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem.
Early Life, Family, and Writing Poetry
Hughes parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child. His father then moved to Mexico and Hughes was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, until he was thirteen. He later moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband. The family eventually settled in Cleveland, and it was then that Hughes began writing poetry.
Education, Travelling, and The Weary Blues
After graduating from high school, Hughes spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University, during which time he worked as a launderer, busboy, and assistant cook. In 1926, after moving to Washington D.C., Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues.
When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy.
In his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, David Littlejohn observed:
"On the whole, Hughes’ creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso’s, a joyful, honest monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if ‘different views engage’ us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it’s over. … Hughes’ [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do.
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Being Free Enough to Express Reality
Hughes strived to portray the reality of working-class, black lives - both the joys and the hardships- without the use of negative stereotypes and sentimental idealisation.
This approach, however, made much of his early work the subject of great criticism, for many black intellectuals felt that he was portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life.
In his book Big Sea, Hughes writes,
"Fine Clothes to the Jew [Hughes’s second book] was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES’ BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as ‘the poet low- rate of Harlem.’ Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. … The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot—and only that foot."
Faith in Humanity and the American Literary Scene
Hughes’s belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could consciously and with understanding live together led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike other writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that “most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.”
In regard to his position in the American literary scene, David Littlejohn later wrote that Hughes is
"the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. … His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson’s or Robinson Jeffers’. … By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."
Children's Poetry and Visual Art
The Sweet and Sour Animal Book and The Block are posthumously published collections of Hughes’s poetry for children that place his writing against a backdrop of visual art. The Block pairs Hughes’s poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bear the book’s title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s, and is combined with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. In the New York Times Book Review, Veronica Chambers noted that the pieces “reflect Hughes’s childlike wonder as well as his sense of humour.” She also commented on Hughes's rhymes, noting that“children love a good rhyme,” and that Hughes gave them“just a simple but seductive taste of the blues.”
Love, Jazz and Writing for the People
Hughes, who cited Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and Paul Laurence Dunbar as his greatest influences, wrote plays, short stories, novels, and poetry. He is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the great influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). Hughes's life and work were tremendously important in moulding the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen, Hughes wanted to tell the stories of his people in such a way that reflected their actual culture, including their laughter, language, and love of music, as well as their suffering.
Hughes’s poems have been translated into French, German, Russian, Czech, Spanish, and Yiddish, and many of them have been set to music. In the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, Donald B. Gibson noted that Hughes
"has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. … Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.
Body of Work and Death
In addition to his poems, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple’s Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950). He edited The Book of Negro Folklore (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958) and coedited The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949) with Arna Bontemps. He also wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and co-wrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.
Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City.
Langston Hughes: Essential Books to Get Now
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (paperback)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org "The definitive sampling of a writer whose poems were “at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance and of modernism itself, and today are fundamentals of American culture” (OPRAH Magazine).
Here, for the first time, are all the poems that Langston Hughes published during his lifetime, arranged in the general order in which he wrote them. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, the result is a treasure of a book, the essential collection of a poet whose words have entered our common language.
The collection spans five decades, and is comprised of 868 poems (nearly 300 of which never before appeared in book form) with annotations by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Alongside such famous works as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Montage of a Dream Deferred, The Collected Poems includes Hughes's lesser-known verse for children; topical poems distributed through the Associated Negro Press; and poems such as "Goodbye Christ" that were once suppressed.
The Big Sea: An Autobiography (paperback)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
"This book is the chronicle of a bright and lively artistic ear that brought the African-American people full into the twentieth century. It is a wonderful book!” —Amiri Baraka
In his incisive introduction to The Big Sea, an American classic, Arnold Rampersad writes: "This is American writing at its best--simpler than Hemingway; as simple and direct as that of another Missouri-born writer...Mark Twain."
Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."
The Short Stories of Langston Hughes (paperback)
Description
courtesy of Bookshop.org
The Short Stories of Langston Hughes, written between 1919 and 1963, showcases the author's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns.
Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected. These poignant, witty, angry, and deeply poetic stories demonstrate Hughes's uncanny gift for elucidating the most vexing questions of American race relations and human nature in general.
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