Life

ON THIS PAGE:
The Early Years
Hughes's Literary Beginnings
Radical Poetry and Plays
The Tough Times
The “Dream Deferred” Years

THE EARLY YEARS

James Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri to James Nathaniel Hughes, who practiced law, and Carrie Langston Hughes, who worked as an actress in Kansas City. The two later split when Hughes’s father left the family to work in Mexico. Hughes was given to his grandmother, Mary Langston Hughes. She raised him in Lawrence, Kansas with a little help from his mother, who was searching for jobs in hopes of supporting the three (Rampersad).

Because of the absence of a father, a mother who was rarely around, and the decline of his aging grandmother, Hughes’s adolescence left him a troubled child. Frequent sadness and depression caused him to search for an escape, which led to the discovery of his love for books: “Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books – where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language,” (Rampersad). His discovery of books, Hughes said, was attributed to his grandmother, who showed him the resources of the library before he was six years old (Miller).

Also as a child, he played with a small neighborhood boy in Lawrence whose mother was colored and whose father was white. As the boy got older, he was considered a white member of society. It was about this boy that led Hughes to write one of his first poems titled “Cross”:

My old man’s a white old man
And my old mother’s black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my block old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I’m sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well.
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black? (Rampersad 58).

Not long before Hughes began high school, his grandmother died, leaving Hughes to care for himself. It was then that he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, where he wrote his first poem and spent a year with his mother, who was remarried from 1915 to 1916. He then moved to Cleveland, Ohio with his stepfather and mother to attend high school, and he participated in many extracurricular activities including track and field and writing for the school’s magazine (Miller). In his autobiography, Hughes recalls the living conditions and his high school during his days in Cleveland:

“Rents were very high for colored people in Cleveland, and the Negro district was extremely crowded to find a place to live. We always lived, during my high school years, either in an attic or a basement, and paid quite a lot for such inconvenient quarters… Central was the high school of students of foreign-born parents – until the Negroes came…It used to be long ago the high school of the aristocrats, until the aristocrats moved farther out. Then poor whites and foreign-born took over the district. Then during the war, the Negroes came. Now Central is almost entirely a Negro school in the heart of Cleveland’s vast Negro quarter,” (Hughes 27).

During this time, Hughes also became very influenced from the writings of Walt Whitman and Carl Sanburg (Miller). Under these influences and his first hand encounters with racism and segregation in Lawrence, Hughes’s writing matured quickly, and within a year of graduating high school, he wrote many memorable poems that showcased his authentic voice with titles including “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” and “When Sue Wears Red.”  Hughes’s writings were also a response to many of the stories his grandmother had told him of the days of slavery and the circumstances of African Americans (Hughes 28-30).

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HUGHES'S LITERARY BEGINNINGS

After graduating high school, Hughes lived with his father for a disastrous year in Mexico, in which he openly admitted in his autobiography that “[he] hated [his] father” for his harshness and materialism. It was on the train ride there that he wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which was published in the June 1921 issue of Crisis (See Equality Page and Artistic Legacy Page)(Miller). In Hughes’s own words:

“…it was just sunset, and we crossed the Mississippi, slowly, over a long bridge. I looked out the window of the Pullman at the great muddy river flowing down toward the heart of the South, and I began to think what that river, the old Mississippi, had meant to Negroes in the past – how to be sold down the river was the worst fate that could overtake a slave in times of bondage,” (Hughes 55).

Upon coming back in 1921, he enrolled and attended Colombia University for a year (Rampersad). Around this time, he also wrote his first play, The Gold Piece, and had it published in a children’s magazine, Brownies’ Book (Martinson). Finding Colombia disappointing, he left and for a while worked on various jobs including floral delivery boy and vegetable farm worker. In one instance, he was a messman on a ship in Europe, and after jumping ship, spent many months in Paris as a dishwasher at a nightclub (Hughes 111).

It was in Paris that he met Mary, a young English-African lady living in the Latin Quarter. According to Hughes’s own account, the two soon became very close.  When her father was called back to England for business, Mary had to go with him. After a heartbreaking goodbye for Hughes, he wrote a short poem titled, “The Breath of a Rose”:

Love is like dew
On lilacs at dawn:
Comes the swift sun
And the dew is gone.
Love is like star-light
In the sky at morn:
Star-light that dies
When a day is born.
Love is like perfume
In the heart of a rose:
The flower withers,
The perfume goes –
Love is no more
Than the breath of a rose,
No more
Than the breath of a rose (Rampersad 305).

During this time spent at various jobs, Hughes had still been publishing his poems, thirteen of which had been included in The Crisis (Miller), which was edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles Johnson’s Opportunity. After returning from Paris in 1924, he was relatively well known among the black community of poets. He spent the following year in Washington D.C. with his mother and came in contact with Alfred A. Knopf, which led to the publication of his first volume of verse, The Weary Blues, in January 1926. Many of these poems captured Hughes’s unique technique of fusing the rhythms of blues and jazz with his traditional poetry(Miller).

The year 1926 also marked the publication of his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which talked about “the younger artists who were determined to assert racial pride and racial truth in the face of either black or white censure or criticism” (Rampersad):

We younger Negro artists...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.
The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored
people are pleased we are glad. If they are
not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We
build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we
know how, and we stand on top of the mountain,
free within ourselves.
(The Nation 122:694 [June1926])

In 1927, Hughes’s second book of verse, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was published but also received much criticism, having so clearly exposed elements of black culture to the white world. Some of these critics called Hughes a “Sewer Dweller”; another called him the “poet low-rate of Harlem,” and another called the book “about 100 pages of trash that reeked of the gutter and the sewer”.  Hughes’s response was a simple one: “Even I myself, belong to that class… I have a right to portray and side of Negro life I wish to,” (See Equality Page)(Rampersad).

Hughes returned to college in 1926 after receiving a scholarship funded by Amy Spingarn of the NAACP. In 1929, he graduated from an almost all-black class at Lincoln University earning a B.A. (Martinson), and a year later, he published his first novel entitled Not Without Laughter, which described the life of a black Midwestern boy that somewhat reflected Hughes’s own personal experiences.  This won the Harmon gold medal for literature and marked the start of Hughes’s career in writing. With $400 as a prize, he fled the United States to Cuba and Haiti where he lived for a few months and contemplated his life decisions. Upon returning to the states at the start of the Great Depression, he published anti-imperialist essays and poems in many different journals (Rampersad). While in Haiti, Hughes received $1000 to undertake a reading tour of the south for a year (Miller). Many of these readings sparked a lot of controversy of other blacks and whites, and also led Hughes to risk his life at least twice. Around this time, Hughes had also given up his blues and lyrical/rhythmic poetry for more radical poetry (Rampersad).

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RADICAL POETRY AND PLAYS

In June 1932, Hughes decided to spend a year in the Soviet Union, where he was warmly welcomed and regarded as a prolific writer. In his book, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, which was published in the Soviet Union, he claimed that segregation in America “contrasted the humane Soviet treatment of its ethnic minorities…” (Hughes). Also while in the Soviet Union, he published some of his most radical verses: “Good Morning Revolution,” “Columbia,” and “Goodbye Christ” (Rampersad). He returned to the states in August 1933 with a new cynicism about race in America.

1934 marked the publication of the collection, The Ways of White Folks. Hughes also became a writer of fiction for some of the leading magazines in the nation. His father, whom he had not seen since 1921, also died late that year. Hughes traveled to Mexico for his funeral and stayed for a while (Rampersad). Feeling no remorse, he attempted to translate some of his short stories into Spanish for progressive young Mexicans, but because it was not regarded well from American editors, the attempt failed, leaving Hughes penniless. He returned to Oberlin, Ohio in 1935 to live with his mother (Miller).

Upon returning, he received the news that his play, Mulatto: A Play of the Deep South, was to open on Broadway. He then worked closely with the Karamu Theater in Cleveland to try and repeat the big success of Mulatto. Some of his other titles included Little Ham (1936), Troubled Island (1936), Joy to My Soul and Front Porch, which were staged. However, none of these plays were a major critical success, leaving Hughes with no money (Rampersad).

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THE TOUGH TIMES

Hughes’s bad luck continued in 1939 when he accepted a chance to work in Hollywood on a movie showcasing the popular boy singer Bobby Breen. With the movie failing, he had another chance in 1940 to showcase his autobiography at a major book release at a hotel in Pasadena, California. This luncheon, however, was cancelled because of an evangelical group who accused Hughes of atheism and communism. His luck turned upwards in 1942 when his next book of verse, Shakespeare in Harlem, was published and written with his former style of the blues and lyrical phrases and rhythms. At the end of the year, Hughes accepted an offer to write a column for the black weekly Chicago Defender. This sustained him for the rest of his life, lasting more than 20 years, and his columns were later edited and adapted into five books. The big shift in Hughes’s life at this time was marked by a stable work environment for the writer as well as his writings turning back to matters such as segregation and inequality of blacks, which was noticed by the black community in 1943 with his collections of propagandistic verse, Jim Crow’s Last Stand (Miller).

In the early 1940s, Hughes wrote dozens of songs pertaining to the war effort in hopes of a commercial hit. In 1947, the Broadway premiere of Street Scene left composer Kurt Weill and writer Elmer Rice at a loss for lyrics, so they had turned to Hughes for his simple lyricism. Although the musical play only ran five months, this gave Hughes enough money to buy a house in the heart of Harlem, where he lived for the rest of his life (Martinson).

The year 1947 also marked the publication of Hughes’s only volume of poetry without racial reference, Fields of Wonder. Some people loved it because of the beautiful verse, but others thought it lacked originality or any purpose (Rampersad). In 1949, another volume of verse, One-Way Ticket, was published and regarded as his finest volume in years. Between the publications of these two volumes, he started yet another volume of verse entitled Montage of a Dream Deferred, which many critics believed was inspired by his new found financial freedom including owning his own house. This volume was published in 1951 (Miller).

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THE “DREAM DEFERRED” YEARS

Hughes accepted many other contracts for many different books, plays and musical projects. In addition to his five volumes of verse, he published two new collections of short stories, Laughing to Keep from Crying (1952) and Something in Common (1963), as well as a novel titled, Tambourines to Glory (1958), and a small narrative, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955). A decade after publishing Montage of a Dream Deferred, another breakthrough in Hughes’s poetry occurred with a twelve part poem, Ask Your Mama (1961), which was about a riot by young whites when they were kicked out of a Newport Jazz Festival (Rampersad).

Over the next few years until his death, Hughes wrote here and there, including a second volume of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wonder, which traces his life from 1931, which was where The Big Sea ended, to 1938. Over the course of his life, Hughes had a prolific impact on the lives of the working-class blacks, and reflected the lives of African Americans not only through his poetry, but also through the rhythms and moods of jazz and blues. Hughes was hard at work on various literary projects until he died in New York City on May 22, 1967 (James).

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