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| "Not Without Laughter" quilt by Marla Jackson |
Moderator—Tom Averill
Presentations by Katie Armitage, Elizabeth Schultz, and Alexei Zverev
*Close this window to return to the symposium page.*
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Katie Armitagea Lawrence historian, has been a consultant for several Langston Hughes books and programs, including Arnold Rampersad 's The Life of Langston Hughes,Vol. I, 1902-1941 (1986); "Voices and Visions" (a PBS American Poet series--Langston Hughes program, 1988), and a slide presentation at the "Langston Hughes in Lawrence: Black Heartland Conference" in St. Louis, Mo. Her books include, with John Lee, 19th Century Houses of Lawrence, Kansas University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art, 1991); Food in Kansas: A Cookbook for Young Kansans (1986); cocompiler, On the Hill: A Photographic History of the University of Kansas (University Press of Kansas, 1983, 1993).
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Alexei Zverev, Moscow State University, is the author of more than 400 publications, including an anthology of American poetry from its beginnings to the 1960s and a biography of Vladimir Nabokov. He was a scholar at the Gorky Institute of World Literature from 1973-1992 and has been a professor of comparative and American literature at the Russian State University for the Humanities since 1992. |
I'm Tom Averill from Washburn University. This semester I'm teaching Kansas literature at the University of Kansas. We have a wonderful panel about the geographies of Langston Hughes today. I want to thank Maryemma Graham and all the other organizers of this symposium for inviting me to be a part of this.
Langston Hughes's two autobiographical works, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, both implied geography. He was, of course, very cognizant from an earlier age of the wider world in which he might wonder, The Big Sea, which he might travel, cross, even live upon various times of his life. I'm not sure why, after growing up in Kansas, I teach Kansas literature. One of the themes that we deal with all the time is the fact that all our writers have left and all their characters have left. Very few are here. But Langston Hughes also had in him early travel to Mexico to visit his father. He probably also had some sense of that search for something better, something richer, something less racist, or maybe just something different. He shares that with a lot of Kansas writers and Kansas characters. So Hughes explored many geographies in the world, and we're going to hear about that today.
It's always important to keep in mind that the main geography that he explored was the geography of the human heart, and in that sense, he speaks to each and every one of us. He also combined that with the exploration of another geography that so few people plumb correctly: the geography of language. Those are the kinds of geography it takes years to explore. He dedicated his life to the exploration of those geographies, as well as physical geographies, through a lot of hard work, sensitivity, suffering, passion, and love. When we explore the life of Langston Hughes, we explore place, but we also explore interior geographies, and we have good people here to do that with us.
Katie Armitage is a Lawrence historian whom I've known for years and benefited from abundantly as she has taken me around Lawrence to show me the sights of the literary places, as well as the historical places in Lawrence. Elizabeth Schultz has just recently retired from the English Department here in the University. She was my teacher back in 1970 in one of the first African American literature classes taught at the University of Kansas. She has had a very distinguished career here and has received many awards for teaching and for scholarship. Finally, we have visiting us from Moscow State University, Alexei Zverev. He will talk about Langston Hughes's year in the Soviet Union.
*photos by Ken Armitage with the following exceptions: photos of Carolina Hughes and baby Langston Hughes, Mary Langston, and James Hughes used with permission of Harold Ober Associates; photos of 1911 tornado damage, Woodland Park, Central School, and New York School used with permission of Watkins Community Museum of History.
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| Carolina Hughes and Baby Langston Hughes |
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| Mary Langston |
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| James Hughes |
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| C. H. Langston Grocery |
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| Charles and Mary Langston Graves |
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| 1904 Post Office |
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| Former Barteldes Seed Store |
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| Douglas County Courthouse |
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| Masonic Temple |
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| Marker at 732 Alabama |
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| 736 Alabama |
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| Mary Dillard |
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| Dillard Home |
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| New York School |
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| Former Central School |
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| St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church |
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| Tornado Damage |
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| Tordado Damage |
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| Tornado Damage, Massachusetts St. |
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| Dazy Dozer - Woodland Park |
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| Woodland Park |
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| University of Kansas |
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| Dyche Museum at KU |
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| Kansas River |
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| Lawrence City Hall |
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| Lawrence's Motto |
Good afternoon. My goal is a fairly simply one: to give you part of the visual record of the small city of 12,000 population that was home to Langston Hughes for 9 or 10 years of his childhood.
In 1904 Lawrence had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, our semi-centennial. I brought the colorful poster that celebrated fifty years. At the top you will see a tiny little settlement hugging the banks of the Kansas River. There was even a Native American there, which was pretty interesting. The semi-centennial was quite an affair. In October, they invited the Governor, had a camp in South Park and hosted the Parker Amusement Company for an entire week. At the bottom of the poster, there is a very progressive-looking downtown and a brand new courthouse in 1904.
As many of you know, Lawrence was founded in 1854 in the midst of the controversy over slavery. The old settlers who had come—a handful of abolitionists who had been quite influential—had lived through the Bleeding Kansas period, Quantrill's Raid, and the rebuilding of Lawrence, but they were reaching the end of their lives by the time Langston came here. Langston lived here off and on with his grandmother and then for the years when he was in second grade through seventh.
Lawrence was changing. In 1900 Lawrence had an almost 20 percent African American population. That proportion began declining in the years of Langston's childhood. Now that we have a population of about 90,000, blacks comprise less than five percent of this. Lawrence was founded in the heat of the controversy over slavery, and that influenced the large African American population that was here at the turn of the century, 1900. Lawrence had stood as a symbol of freedom, particularly to African Americans in Missouri and Arkansas, but it certainly was changing by the time of Langston's childhood.
I'm going to show you now a series of slides. This lovely portrait of Carrie Hughes is taken from Arnold Rampersad's wonderful biography of Langston Hughes. Langston, as you know, was quite young here. In the 1905 Kansas Census, I found this listing for one residence in the first ward of Lawrence, Kansas: Mary Langston, age 69, and Langston Hughes, age 4. So he was here even before that famous second-grade incident.
The Langstons came to Kansas because Charles Langston, shown here with the hat in front of his chest—this is the Oberlin, Ohio, Rescuers—was very active in Oberlin, Ohio, in the Underground Railroad. In fact, that's where he met Mary. He had come here during the Civil War to help recruit black members of the Massachusetts 54th Unit that became famous during the Civil War. After the Civil War, he brought his family to Douglas County in 1868. Carrie was born just outside of Lawrence in Lakeview, where Charles Langston briefly farmed. They later moved the family to town. He and a partner had a grocery store on Massachusetts Street, and the building still stands at 826 Massachusetts. (It wasn't as colorful then.) Mary and Charles Langston lived out their lives here. Charles Langston died ten years before Langston Hughes was born. For many years, they were in unmarked graves at Lawrence 's Oak Hill Cemetery, on the edge of the cemetery. About ten years ago, a teacher and students at Pickney School persuaded a local mortuary to donate these stones so that those graves could be marked.
Carrie and James Hughes had separated shortly after Langston's birth in Joplin, Missouri. That's why Carrie brought the young Langston here to Lawrence to stay with her mother while she sought work and other opportunities. James Hughes did not ever live here, to my knowledge.
In The Big Sea Langston tells us that he came here permanently in the second grade. I want to back up a bit and quote from The Big Sea about his grandfather, Charles Langston, whom, of course, he never knew.
"My Grandfather never made much money, but he went into politics looking for a bigger freedom than the Emancipation Proclamation had provided."
In The Big Sea, a little bit later, he says:
"When I was in second grade, my grandmother took me to Lawrence, raised me and I was unhappy a long time and very lonesome living with my grandmother and then it was books that began to happen to me."
Fortunately for Langston Hughes and for Lawrence, there was a brand new library: the Carnegie Library at Ninth and Vermont . (It still stands.) It had been opened in December 1904, and, according to the rules that I have pursued through the helpful people at the library, this Carnegie Library was open to anyone of good deportment who would come to the reading and reference room. We think that Langston Hughes walked across the marble stairs of this neo-classical building of limestone and tan brick. We've recently had a plaque made that will quote that excerpt I just read to you from The Big Sea.
Another building that he would immediately recognize downtown was the post office at the time of his childhood—this beaux arts building at Seventh and New Hampshire, now the Lawrence Journal World News Center. That was in the days when the U.S. Post Office built a good building.
He would certainly recognize the Sunflower Surplus building. It was Barteldes Seed Company in his childhood, and I think that he made some change by selling seeds. He tells us that he sold seeds, among other odd jobs, because Mary Langston had a very hard time with money.
And the courthouse was new in 1903, anchoring the other end of Massachusetts Street .
The Masonic Temple must have been quite a sight when Langston was 9 years old. In that era, 1911, Egyptian architecture was briefly in vogue. It still stands.
The little house at 732 Alabama has unfortunately disappeared. One time I went by, and it was gone. The house next door, according to my memory, was very similar and it still stands. The house at 732 Alabama was where Mary Langston lived and raised Carrie, Nate, and the young Langston Hughes. It was on the edge of what we now know as the Old West Lawrence National Historic District.
Langston would recognize many of those homes, certainly the old Simons Hospital. Those homes have been painted though. They would have been typically painted white and were less colorful in his childhood.
Langston entered second grade in Pinckney School. The school building was replaced in 1930, but he would certainly recognize the ravine extending from the Kansas River, which is still in Clinton Park.
Kansas was peculiar as a border state in the way that separation of the races was handled. The first three primary grades were taught in segregated classrooms by a separate teacher within Pinckney School. By fourth grade the children went together.
This was a classroom of Mary Dillard. We're not sure that Langston Hughes was in this class because the photograph was not dated. Mary Dillard was a graduate of the University of Kansas, one of the first African Americans. In later years she became a principal of a local all-black school. She and Langston corresponded over the years.
This is the Dillard house at 520 Louisiana. It's quite a handsome house—it still stands.
This is New York School. When Mary Langston would get desperate for money, she would rent out the entire little house and move to 731 New York Street and Masonic Temple live with her friends the Reeds. They were wonderful people that Langston called Uncle and Auntie Reed. That house is also gone. This is the former New York School, however. I talked to a number of people 25 years ago who remembered Langston there.
One building that Langston would recognize is the Central School at 901 Kentucky, but only the first floor. It lost its third floor long ago. It was at Central School that the famous or infamous Jim Crow Row happened. The teacher, Ida Lyons, put the black children in one row. Langston Hughes got busy in his beautiful handwriting and wrote notes saying, "Jim Crow Row." He, John Taylor, and other friends threw the notes out the window. They got in a heap of trouble and were thrown out of school. They were only readmitted when a prominent African American doctor, Dr. Harvey, came and vouched for them.
Ida Lyons, seen here in a newspaper photo, remembered it a bit differently, according to one of Prof. Bill Tuttle's students who interviewed her late in her life. John Taylor, who was very creditable, told me that this event did occur.
Langston Hughes attended the St. Luke AME Church, where, when he was living with the Reeds, he had a near-conversion experience. Mary Reed was deeply involved with this church. She ran the Sunday School, so Langston went while he was living with them. After Mary Langston died, he was left with the Reeds for quite a number of months. In both neighborhoods there were mixed races. Lawrence had African American or black clusters all around town. There was never just one black neighborhood.
This is the current Ninth Street Baptist Church. It was Warren Street Baptist in Langston's childhood. This is where Langston Hughes got his fingers slapped when he went to the funeral of George Walker, the shorter vaudevillian, seen in the slide, of the famous Williams and Walker team. The floral tributes had just poured in for this star of the vaudeville stage, and Langston said he learned not to point at things.
The theaters were segregated by certain rows.
One of the things that made a big impression on Langston when he was about nine was a tornado that destroyed part of downtown. Quite impressive. I don't think it's an accident that he began the novel Not without Laughter with a cyclone that took off Aunt Hager's front porch.
This is a sadder incident that happened during his childhood. This is the "Dazy Dozer." It was part of the Woodland Amusement Park that was a promotion of the electric street car line in east Lawrence . The incident that happened is very potent. What child wouldn't want to go there? The newspaper had promoted for weeks an all-children's day and insisted that all children were invited. But finally on the front page appeared the reality. I'm quoting from August 17, 1910 , front page:
The Journal has been asked if the colored children will be in attendance. The Journal knows that the colored children have no desire to attend social events of this kind and that they will not want to go. This is purely a social affair and of course everyone in town knows what that means.
Charles Langston must have been turning in his grave out there at Oak Hill, which was not very far away.
Certainly Langston Hughes would recognize some of the buildings on the University Campus, although it seems to me that KU—within blocks of his grandmother's house—had little influence on him. He ran around the campus. When he did—he would certainly remember the Dyche Museum, and no doubt visited. But when he wrote The Big Sea, he remembered the famous Jayhawk Chant—incorrectly, or perhaps it was the poet improving it. Those of you from far away may not know the famous "Rock Chalk, Jayhawk KU," which Langston rendered as "Walk Chalk, Jayhawk KU," but we'll forgive him.
I'm happy to say that some faculty members saw that Hughes was invited to come home and do readings when he became an author. He was here in 1932, 1958, and his last visit was in 1964, just three years before his death.
For many years Lawrence ignored this famous man, but when our new City Hall was built on the Kansas River that Langston knew so well, a poem by Langston Hughes was chosen to be Lawrence 's motto.
I'll end by saying that in today's Lawrence Journal World there was an editorial that certainly caught my eye. The editorial asks the question, "Has Lawrence erased all the prejudices Langston Hughes experienced as a boy?" It is up to us who live here. I think we'll be inspired by this wonderful conference to do what we can to see that it has. Thank you.
I'm going to speak about the natural and unnatural circumstances in Not without Laughter. The Harlem Renaissance was a big-city phenomenon. It was generated and supported by African Americans living, working, and creating in New York City streets, tenements, brownstones, cabarets, clubs, offices, and publishing houses. Yet the imagery and literary text produced by the Harlem Renaissance's major writers—such as Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, and Langston Hughes, among others—is not all urban. Rather, it reflects these writers' intimate familiarity with nature in places as distant from New York as Jamaica, Florida, and Kansas.
Based on his boyhood years growing up in Lawrence, Hughes's Not without Laughter was written 15 years after his departure from Kansas. During these intervening years, Hughes traveled the world becoming a consummate urbanite and cosmopolitan. Yet as Not without Laughter reveals, Hughes forgot neither the individuals nor experiences he encountered during his Kansas years nor the features of that land. Among the particular aspects of Kansas, which he recalls throughout the novel, are those related to nature: plants, seasons, weather, earth, and sky. In drawing on nature imagery, Hughes, like other Harlem Renaissance writers, referred explicitly to his personal experiences prior to moving to New York, as well as to the rural experiences of thousands of other African Americans participating in the Great Migration. In his novel Hughes describes nature, not as the source of transcendence, nor Darwinian determinism, nor does he romanticize or exoticize it.
I will argue that Hughes, recognizing the conventionality and neutrality of nature as imagery and subject matter for middle- and upper-class readers, exploited its rhetorical possibilities for representing complex social issues in Not without Laughter. In small Midwestern towns in the early twentieth century, as in the case with Stanton, Hughes's pseudonym for Lawrence in Not without Laughter, lower-class African Americans lived in close proximity to nature. In Stanton, nature intersects with the lives of Hughes's characters on a daily and nightly basis. As Hughes's novel develops, he makes it increasingly apparent that an involvement with nature signifies not only class difference but also a difference in the intensity and the quality of life itself. Hager's house, the setting for 22 of the novel's 33 chapters, seems open to the elements. Throughout the summer, its windows are open with lights "luring all sorts of night bugs and creepers into the house" (34).*
The porch and the backyard are extensions of the house into the outdoors. Members of the family are often on the porch talking, telling stories, catching fireflies, and watching the world go by. While the backyard, with its garden and apple tree, is a playground for Sandy, the novel's protagonist, and his friends as well, it's an open-air pavilion where the family dances, sings, and makes music. For the middle and upper classes, whose lawns are well trimmed and who stay inside for the most part, Hughes implies life is far more pretentious and sterile. However, during the winter Hager's house is permeated with cold and damp. An elderly woman comments on the difficulties for poor blacks during the winter months: "Folks is out of work everywhere and with all this sleet and rain it is a terror for the poor peoples" (133).
Work also necessitates intimate interaction with nature in Hughes's representation of lower-class African American life in Stanton. Hager and her neighbors are frequently shown engaged in the laborious task of hanging the laundry out in the open. Miss Whitehead gardens and sells her produce from the back of a wagon. Black men work on the railroad, lay brick, and dig sewers. Sandy 's chores are all involved with nature, at least when he is a young boy.
In the morning he helped Aunt Hager by feeding the chickens, bringing in the water for her wash tubs, and filling the buckets from which they drank. He chopped wood too and piled it behind a kitchen stove. Then he would take the broom and sweep, dust, clean the space around the pump and under the apple tree where he played. (114)
Cultivated nature in Not without Laughter can be as bountiful as it can be brutal. Both flower and vegetable gardens are represented as lush in Not without Laugher. Food, constantly evident in the novel's scenes, comes most often from the garden: peas, corn, eggplant, yams, apples, peaches, and watermelon with an occasional fish from the river or possum from the woods.
In Not without Laughter's final eight chapters—five focusing on Sandy's life under his Aunt Tempy's tutelage, and three on his life in Chicago—nature almost entirely disappears from the narrative. The dominant imagery of these concluding chapters concerns architecture, books, streets, trains, and elevators. This erasure begins with the death of Sandy 's beloved grandmother and his adoption by his Aunt Tempy, whom Hughes associates with the black bourgeoisie. By alienating her from nature, Hughes underscores her desire not only to identify with the color and material prosperity of Stanton's upper-class whites but also to distance herself from the rich African-American culture embraced by the other members of her family.
Hughes's descriptions of Kansas's natural features do more than establish the authenticity of place or a vividly textured backdrop for human affairs. They also do more than establish the boundaries of class in Not without Laughter. Significantly, they provide him with the rhetorical means for generating what Mikhail Bahktin calls a "double directed discourse." Thus, Hughes constructs a dominate narrative in Not without Laughter that not only relies on natural imagery to appeal to its mainstream readers—including his wealthy and elderly white patron, Mrs. Charlotte Mason—but which also slips a subversive subtext into the narrative under the same guise. Hughes's subtext explicitly introduces his upper- and middle-class readers to the inequities and injustices of racism in American society, as well as to the riches of African American culture.
Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, set initially in Kansas, and opening with a tornado, gave Kansas its signature metrological event. Hughes picked up on this event for the opening of Not without Laughter, as Gordon Parks would do later for the opening of his Kansas novel The Learning Tree, published in 1963. Hughes's evocation of a Kansas tornado is both realistic and terrifying with readers experiencing it from Sandy's perspective. Trees begin by swaying in the wind. A pail tips over. The tornado appears at last "as a black cloud twisting like a ribbon in the western sky… [with] a sooty grey-green light that was rapidly turning to blackness." (4-5)
However, the tornado that devastates the community in Not without Laughter's first chapter does more than designate Kansas as the specific geographical setting for the novel. Rather than whisking its protagonist off to a fantasy land, it locates him in a specific social setting, one which initially functions to captivate readers of all classes and races in a sympathetic response. As Sandy is separated in the aftermath from his beloved grandmother, Hager, and his mother, Anjee, Hughes presents him to his readers as any isolated and terrified young boy. In his distress and disorientation Sandy 's reality turns into a surreal nightmare.
[A] piano [lies] flat on its back in the grass. Its ivory keys gleamed in the moonlight like grinning teeth, and the strange sight made his little body shiver. (8)
Desperate for his mother, he imagines that she "had been carried off by the great black wind" (8). The color imagery of these passages describing the tornado's power is non-race specific, with white and black seeming equally appalling to the small boy. Similarly, Hughes's tornado is nonjudgmental, discriminating neither among races nor classes in Stanton. A kindly, elderly white couple is killed by this natural force, while Hager loses her porch and her neighbor loses her tree. Thus, nature in Hughes's opening chapter, while threatening, appears to create an open playing field with all human beings equally vulnerable upon it.
In the subsequent chapters in Not without Laughter, Hughes represents nature seasonally, thereby underscoring the generic structure of the novel as a bildungsroman, a narrative concerning a youth's coming-of-age. Through his descriptions of natural changes occurring in summer, fall, winter, and spring with specific seasonal references to the family's apple tree and corn patch, Hughes provides a correlative for Sandy 's growth. The process of Sandy's coming-of-age consequently becomes generalized so that readers are able to relate them to the experiences of any youth, regardless of race, class, or gender.
However, in Hughes's "double directed discourse" a natural story of a boy's coming-of- age reveals the unnatural circumstances of race and poverty. Thus, in the course of Sandy's growing up, Hughes explicitly aligns the changing seasons with his protagonist developing consciousness of social and racial inequities. Hughes's description of early summer in Not without Laughter's second chapter evokes pastoral innocence with an array of plants as colorful as the people in his community and only a hint of sexual fecundity.
The air was warm with sunlight and hundreds of purple and white morning glories laughed on the back fence. Earth and sky fresh and clean after the heavy night rain and the young corn shoots stood straight in the garden and green pea vines wound themselves around the crocked sticks. There was the mingled scent of wet soil and golden pollen on the breeze that blew carelessly through the clear air. (16)
As the summer passes, Hughes relates Sandy's gradual awakening from innocence as he comes to associate changes in nature with his growing awareness of both sexuality and social inequities. He literally awakens at night to hear his parents making love, which he relates to the ripening corn. Thus, he hears sounds:
Which he already knew accompanied the grown up embraces of bodily love and sometimes through the window he could see the moonlight glinting on the tall tassel crowned stocks of corn in the garden. (114)
Marking Sandy's fall from innocence as well as the season of fall, Hughes describes "sunny August mornings giving away to September mornings with the apple tree loaded with ripe fruit" (122).
At this time Sandy enters a new school. In chapter 11 titled "School," both Sandy and the reader are introduced to Kansas's institutionalized racism when the young boy confronts the racial cruelties of his teacher and the shame of his family's poverty. This knowledge intensifies in chapters 11 and 12, "Hard Winter" and "Christmas," midpoint in Not without Laugher. In Hughes's complex description of winter, which operates symbolically, psychologically, and realistically, it is apparent that nature can not be neutral, as it was with the tornado, in a society permeated by the unnatural circumstances of racism and poverty. In late fall, summer's romantic pastoral is replaced by a fallen world:
September passed and the corn stocks in the garden were cut. There were no more apples left on the trees. And chilly rains came to beat down the falling leaves from the maples and the elms. Cold and drearily wet October passed too with no hint of Indian summer or golden forests. (128)
Sandy 's home life is miserable. His father is absent. His mother grieving becomes ill herself. His Aunt Harriett has left. His grandmother is overworked. With freezing temperatures outside, the only warmth in Sandy's home is in the kitchen, where Hager hangs out the wash as he eats "under dripping lines of white folk's garments while he listened to his mother coughing in the next room" (132). He seems oppressed by both racism and poverty. A neighbor observes, "So many colored men's outta work here with Christmas coming and it sure is too bad" (133). And Hager answered:
"We ain't gwine have no money a-tall. Ain't no mo'n got through payin' my taxes good, an' de interest on ma mortgage, when Anjee got sick, here! Lord I tells you po' colored womens have it hard!" (135)
In depicting the coming of snow, Hughes implies a symbolic connection with the prevalence of white power:
The great heavy flakes fell with languid, gentility over the town. And silently the whiteness covered everything. The next morning the snow froze to a hard, sparkling crust on roofs and ground. (146)
Like the snow, whites in this winter season are indifferent to the sufferings of others, frozen hearted, and absorbed in the languid gentility of their respectable holidays. The contrast between the economic situation of whites and blacks, as well as the connection between the indifference of whites in the snow, is further suggested by Hughes's description of Sandy's misery on Christmas Eve:
Sandy passed the windows of many white folks' houses where the curtains were up and the warm floods of electric lights made bright cozy the rooms. In Negro shacks, too, there was the dim warmth of oil lamps and Christmas candles glowing. But at home there wasn't even a holly wreath and the snow was whiter and harder than even on the ground. (148)
The following spring melts the snow. It brings a softening to the earth and the return of sensuality to Sandy's life. However, Hughes implies that for Sandy spring is the cruelest season. Its sensuality intensifies his sexual questions, while its bleak grayness intensifies his questions of racial identity and racial justice. By the latter part of Not without Laughter, nature thus becomes both a vivid correlative for the uncertainty generated by America's endemic racism, as well as for Sandy's anxieties in clarifying both his sexual and racial identities.
Throughout Not without Laughter's first 22 chapters, the nature imagery of Hughes's "double directed discourse" initiates both his readers and Sandy into the racial class and inequities impacting African-American life. In addition, in these chapters, by imagistic and metaphorically integrating nature into his descriptions of African-Americans' color and culture, especially music and dance, he celebrates his people and their lives. In his imagistic and metaphorical references to nature, in relation to African-American color, music, and dance, Hughes might be interpreted as promoting the exotic expectations of white readers regarding African Americans, at the risk even of primitivizing the very people and culture he praises. However, his bold associations energize his novel's celebration of their diversity, beauty, and accomplishment in creating a vibrant culture despite the persistent derogations of racism and poverty. Hughes's appreciation for nature's diverse colors is unmistakable in his description of a summer garden:
The sunflowers in Willie-May's back yard were taller than Tom Johnson's head and the hollyhocks in the fence corners were almost as high. The nasturtiums, blood orange and gold, tumbled over themselves around Madame de Carter's house. Aunt Hager's sweet-william, her pinks, and her tiger lily were abloom and the apples on her single tree would soon be ripe. The adjoining yards of the three neighbors were gay with flowers. . . . Bees were heavy with honey, great green flies hum through the air and yellow black butterflies suckled at the rambling roses. (57)
His pleasure in nature's mosaic is no less, however, than his pleasure in the colors of African Americans as he boldly describes their diversity of skin tones throughout Not without Laughter, notably in chapter eight, "Dance."
Sandy looked down drowsily on the men and women, the boys and girls, circling and turning beneath him. Dresses and suites of all shades and color and faces gleaming lemon yellow, coal black, powder gray, ebony black, blue black faces, chocolate brown, orange, tan, creamy gold faces. (91)
Elsewhere in the novel, he also relates skin colors to nature, associating people with clay, roaches, blackberries, seal skins, maple sugar, or autumn leaves. Thus, in using aspects of the natural world to emphasis racial coloration, Hughes not only openly delights in the diversity within the African-American community, but he also undermines the possibility of categorizing blacks monolithically. Despite white people's enthusiasm for African-American music and dance and Harlem in the 1920s, Hughes was conscious of the fact that in Small Town, U.S.A., these vibrant and innovative manifestations of African-American culture were antithetical to dominant social concepts of respectability and propriety.
Yet from the opening of chapter five, "Guitar," Hughes foregrounds his sense of the culture's significance of the blues by italicizing them and inserting them unadulterated into his narrative, a procedure he continues throughout Not without Laughter, thereby assuring that the energy and the poetry of these African-American lyrics are recognized and experienced directly by the readers. In Not without Laughter Hughes seduces a sexually puritanical readership—both white and black—by assuring them that his young protagonist's sexual awakening occurs gradually, vicariously, and naturally as the corn and apples ripen, as bees pollinate flowers. Similarly, natural metaphors become the means for both conveying and mitigating the powerful sexual subtext of the blues and of African Americans dancing. He specifically chooses blues lyrics to introduce the blues in chapter five, "Guitar," which relies on natural metaphors.
Throw yo' arms around me, baby / Like de circle round de sun, / An' tell yo' pretty papa / How you want yo' lovin' done! / Did you ever see peaches / Growin' on a watermelon vine? / Says did you ever see peaches / On a watermelon vine? / Did you ever see a woman / That I couldn't get for mine? (46-47)
Hughes conveys the sexuality of Jimboy's singing by describing his fingers running softly, "light as a breeze over his guitar strings, imitating the wind rustling though the long leaves of the corn as he glances toward the sexually attuned Anjee" (50).
Sandy is fascinated by pulsating life and the blues from his days in Stanton, where he hears his father and his Aunt Harriett singing and playing until the end of the novel, when he attends Harriett's concert in Chicago. In her blues songs, nature resonates with a loss of sexual love:
Red sun, Red sun, why don't you rise today? / Red sun, O sun why don't you rise today? / My heart is breakin'—my baby's gone away. (298)
And,
Little birds, little birds, ain't you gonna' sing this morn? / Says, little chirppin' birds, ain't you gonna sing this morn? / I cannot sleep—my lovin' man is gone. (298)
Chapter eight, "Dance," the longest chapter in Not without Laughter, focuses on an extended description of music and dance. Here Hughes also constructs natural metaphors to evoke his conviction that African-American music and dance is irresistible in its urgency, and its energy crosses racial class and geographic boundaries.
The music was like a lazy river flowing between mountains carving a canon coolly, calmly, and without insistence. . . . the piano was the water flowing, and the high, thin cords of the banjo were the mountains floating in the clouds. But in sultry tones, alone and always, the brass coronet spoke harshly about the earth. (84)
. . . the drum beats had become sharp with surly sound, like heavy waves that beat angrily on a granite rock. And under the dissolute spell of its own rhythm the music had got quite beyond itself. . . . Cruel, dissolute, unadorned was the music now like the body of a ravished woman on the sun-baked earth; violent and hard, like a giant standing over his bleeding mate in the blazing sun. . . . The earth rolls relentlessly, and the sun blazes forever on the earth, breeding, breeding. But why do you insist like the earth, music? Rolling and breeding, earth and sun for ever, relentlessly? But why do you insist like the sun? Like the lips of women? Like the bodies of men, relentlessly? . . . Who understands the earth? Who understands the sun? (89-90)
Through the generic natural references in this passage of elevated rhetoric, Hughes triumphantly exults the music and dance of his people to relate to all peoples in all times and places.
Balancing the sun and the earth, metaphors he repeatedly relates to African-American music and dance in Not without Laughter, Hughes poses another cosmic sign: stars. Stars shine throughout the novel in relation to multiple episodes. They shine after the tornado, above the blues-singing Jimboy; a star drops over the porch following Sis Johnson's account of a race riot; and they faded "to points of dying fire" when Sandy returns from the dance with Harriett (96). Although stars initially appear in the novel as an erratic and indifferent sign as his narrative evolves, Hughes associates them increasingly with Hager and Sandy and with transcendent possibilities for a better life on earth. "[W]hile the lighting bugs glowed and glimmered and the katydids chirruped, and the stars sparkled in the far-off heavens," Sandy listens on the porch to Aunt Hager's stories of "years of faith and labor, love and struggle" (177).
When he is sorrowfully disillusioned by the whites' discrimination against the black children on Children's Day, he and Hager watched the evening star. In the spiritual that she sings and that Hughes sets into his narrative as he had set the blues, Hughes transforms the star into a beacon of hope:
From this world o' trouble free, / Stars beyond! / Stars beyond! / There's a star fo' you an' me / Stars beyond! (200)
At the time of Hager's illness, on the morning of her funeral, and after her death, Sandy focuses on the stars (200, 224, 269). Through his imagery of stars in relation to the spirituals, Hughes reinforces Hager's particular legacy to her grandson, the legacy of her dream that he can prevail through hard work and hope. Like the earthy legacy of music and dance that Sandy receives from his father and his Aunt Harriett, Hager's heavenly legacy is one that Sandy knows has been passed down historically from "generations of toil-worn Negroes." Sandy vigorously resists his Aunt Tempy's insistence that he deny the importance of his African-American cultural identity. One evening prior to his departure from his constrictive life with her, Hughes describes Sandy in his upstairs room as conscious of "a cool earth smelling breeze [which] lifted the white curtains," allowing him to appreciate "the stars and the tops of the budding maple trees . . . under the night sky" (269).
I would like to think that in this passage Hughes implies that Sandy here lifts the unnatural curtains of racism and emphatically claims his natural African-American heritage of both heaven and earth. Later, in Chicago, he discovers yearningly that there are "no trees, no yards, no grass that he had known at home" (281). Yet, at the end of Not without Laughter, Hughes makes it apparent that the now mature Sandy has the capacity to remember the all-important legacies from his rural home and to integrate them into his new urban life. After all, it was from his own boyhood memories of both natural and unnatural circumstances that Hughes, himself another small-town, Midwestern boy transplanted to a major metropolis, created so many of his major poems, as well as Not without Laughter itself. Thank you.
*All quotes from Not without Laughter are from the Macmillan (1969) edition.
DRAFT
I've been interested in Hughes as a person and as a poet since my student days. Naturally, the subject I chose for this conference is Hughes's trip to the Soviet Union in 1932. The geography that Hughes explored was the geography of human heart, but it was also that of social conditions and attitudes. I think this interest in social conditions and attitudes brought him to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.
The idea of this journey originated in the spring the year when Hughes was invited to write dialects for a film Black and White done by ________________ film studio, an international venture. Then the framework of the workers' international relief project was known by the common term Communist International, a block of Marxist-orientated political movements under total control of the Soviet Communist Party. Being very much on the left at that time, Hughes was able to use his chance visit to the country which in his opinion as well as the opinion of many left ______________ intellectuals of the time.(?) He presented the fulfilled or most fulfilled dream of the oppressed masses.
The trip was sponsored by the corporating(?) committee for production of a Soviet film on Negro life, a short-lived international and antirational(?) based in New York. A group of twenty-two people sailed to Leningrad in June. It included only two professional actors. Hughes stayed in the Soviet Union for almost a year. His experiences are described in his book I Wonder as I Wander, to enter three years later(?) , and they are meticulously reconstructed by his biographers. Curiously, this pilgrimage was barely mentioned by Soviet scholars writing on Hughes in the 1950s and the 1960s, when his name was widely known in Russian and his poems were frequently translated. It looks as though facts relative to this journey were somehow stifled in the Soviet Union. This happened quite often if the authorities were not completely satisfied with the reports of the Russian fellow travelers.
As friends, the American and European writers were described by the Communist media. But Hughes never gave officials any reason for dissatisfaction. What he wrote and published in the Soviet periodicals, as well as in the New York papers, during his stay was in complete accordance with the Communist propaganda. His tribulation (?) of the Soviet Union experience of rebuilding the country did not change seriously years after the journey. Thus impassioned about it, Hughes wrote in 1946 that he "found the whole human meaning of the Soviet Union and its material and spiritual significance to the world of tomorrow."
This is a very unusual case for the fellow travelers, who typically turn from fire _____________ to bitter disappointment after they have seen some of the Soviet reality with their own eyes. Inspite of the poet's fidelity to what he called "a better world in birth," twenty years after the trip when much had changed in this world, the critics were reluctant even to mention the articles and the small book of impressions Hughes had built from his reports to the Moscow and the New York papers. This was not a matter of _____________ . The real reason for their silence was that returning to this material after the death of Stalin and the fall of the 1950s could only harm the image of Hughes as an important artist, which he was considered by the Russian public. He would be accused of being either incredibly naïve or consciously dishonest. He would be thought of as an impossibly credit-less person. In fact, he would be laughed at by those who more or less knew the real Soviet situation of the early 1930s, the time of growing suppression, terror, and famine.
Still it would have been __________ to accuse the Great Red Black Poet, as Hughes was occasionally described by the American press, of ignorance and simple heartedness. Many people in the Soviet Union at that time were as trustful as Hughes turned out to be, and he had his own reasons for his belief in the ____________ future of the whole human family. Hughes understood the Soviet experience and in his own perspective focused on racial relations at home. This is a crucial fact for everybody who tries to explain the poet's vision and appreciation of Soviet life.
The script of Black and White turned out to be desperately hopeless. It was written by somebody who had never been to the United States and contained numerous blunders. The group hastily gathered. The film did not move very smoothly, the German producer could not speak English, and the studio was short of money for the shooting. The project was dropped after two months of vain effort to improve the initial version of what Hughes describes as a pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts. His visa did not expire until January 1933. Then he was allowed to stay for five months and he went home across Siberia and Japan. Hughes decided to use the extra time for travel in Soviet Central Asia, in Uzbekistan, and __________________(he give another location's name here ). The names are more familiar to the American public today than half a year ago, I think. So he traveled in Uzbekistan and _________, where he spent the whole autumn. It is not easy to understand why Hughes decided to visit these faraway states that were off limits to the foreigners at the time so that the board(?) had to get letters of support from influential newspapers and from the Union of Soviet Writers. In I Wonder as I Wander he says that his purpose was to see "a colored land moving to the orbits he had reserved for whites."
Central Asia was the Soviet cotton belt. Avidly Hughes intended to compare it with his native land. He treated the Turk men and the Uzbeks with their dark skin as the Russian colored population—actually, they are not blacks—naturally. He was pleasantly amazed on the train to Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, to see that those natives used the same cars as the whites and shared tables with them in the diner. This was something unusual to a person with knowledge of segregation. The feeling that he's not Jim Crowed here was a revelation for the son of the oppressed nationalities Hughes consistently speaks himself in the travel(?) schedules. He was given an interpreter, mostly probably a secret service man, but it never seemed to bother Hughes in the least. Possibly he didn't even suspect that this English-speaking person reported his every step to the chiefs from State Security. Talking on a train to the Corbaniff (sp) mayor of the ancient city of Bokhara produced a mass impression on Hughes, who was certain that all news given to him by that man or rather by the interpreter, making the ideal logical corrections when and if necessary, was shear truth. In "A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia," a booklet issued by the Corporative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR in 1934, Hughes writes that Corbaniff (sp) was:
A mine of information about the liberation of Central Asia and the best changes that have come about there after the revolution, truly the land of before and after. Before the revolution, animals and homes molars(?) and base, that is, local dictators. After the revolution, the workers in power. Before: half of one percent of the people literate. Now: fifty percent read and write. Before: the land was robbed of its raw material for the factories of the Russian capitalists. Now: there are factories and ____________ have big plants, electric stations, stick style(?) means.
Before Corbaniff(sp) said,
Tracheal(?) persecution and segregation, the natives treated like dogs. Now that it is finished, Russian and native, Jew and Gentile, white and brown live and work together.
Being a bit short in the Soviet administration and nationally appointed hard-liner, Corbaniff (sp) was bound to say exactly these things. He would never mention that thousands of Uzbek peasants died of starvation or were sent to prisons and camps if they resented the collectivization that was all but finished by that time when the papers were full of fairy tales about the great achievement of the Collective Fronts with their slave labor system nor would he mention the smoldering hate of the local Muslims for the new colonialists with current party members however absolutely serious over a decaying—these people's faith.
But the very fact of desegregation—although it has never been complete and meant nothing but another form of segregation—suppressing the non-Communist believers was of enormous importance to Hughes. He was so much taken by the achievements gained under the banner of the Soviet _____________ words that he would willing accept all lies as well as all material deprivation like meals of camel sausage and hard bread or using a smelly wooden shack in the yard for toilet. Describing what seems to him as evidence of an amazing social progress, Hughes often repeats his main point: the natives of Central Asia run their own country. He met a girl from a poor family, who, according to her story, had been sold to a harem when she was 11 years old. She ran away and eventually became vice president of the Uzbek Republic. Hughes is so fascinated he does not feel the slightest doubt about the correctness of this autobiography, which was possibly concocted especially for his future report in the New Masses.
This story was not typical. After the revolution, women in Central Asia typically remained what they have always been: an illiterate working force for the cotton plantations. But there were no black mayors in America of the 1930s and black women had absolutely no rights. So meeting a native woman who stood so high in the political hierarchy was, to Hughes, something of a miracle, and he seemed not to suspect that this is anything but a Soviet version of social tokenism. In Bokhara they show Hughes an old religious school, Midres (sp) , which was once famous but is now empty. Nobody mentions that religion is blatantly prosecuted after the revolution. And Hughes shows no evidence of understanding that depriving people of their faith is one of the great crimes of the new regime against the native population. Instead, he's full of joy, saying that "religion had gone into the museum and out of the world."
The most important thing for Hughes is that there are plans to demolish the old city. All was mentioned among the wonders of the East and to realize projects worked for a brand new town. Old minorities and walls and hobbles(?) will be torn down and within the next ten years a new modern city will be built. Fortunately it never came to that, even in the Soviet time. This is thinking characteristic for the revolutionary mentality at the time as represented by poets like _______________________, whom Hughes tried to translate when he got back to Moscow. But there was additional reason for the cocksure enthusiasm demonstrated by Hughes in his "Jazzman of Soviet Central Asia." The title of his booklet emphasizes that he looks at this world as a Negro. Being a Negro, he wants some radical and irrevocable social changes, and he is willing to convince himself that such changes are possible and beneficial.
Evidently Hughes disagreed about the value of Soviet experience with Arthur Koestler, who would soon write his famous novel Darkness at Noon and desert the Communist camp forever. They met in Ashkhabad, the Turkmen capital, where Koestler was gathering material for the articles he printed in the left-wing Berlin periodical. By that time, Koestler has stopped being an olden Communist and a harbinger of the common world revolution, but his final break with the Marxist doctrine was still ahead. However, he felt rather gloomy about the counterfeiters in the Soviet Union, and he tried to cool down the bright expectations of Hughes. They discussed one of the first show trials when a high-standing official was accused of traitorous actions during the collectivization and sentenced without evidence. There could be numerous similar trials very soon. Koestler felt that the great revolution was over and the great terror was beginning. Hughes objected that his fears were nothing but exaggeration. He couldn't have judged otherwise. His ___________ feeling that he had seen a dream come true would not stand such terrible blows. The final pages of the booklet describe _______________ construction site for a huge electrical and chemical development closed at the ____________ . The lines sound like a prose poem utilizing the birth of the new society of justice and happiness created by the formerly depraved people.
They had the power to transform the whole future, to build, to build, to build. Now I know why the nearby in denim(?) power trembles and Africa 's terrors and the wretched sleep. _________ will throw such a light on this southern sky in Soviet Asia.
There are a million ___________, _________ was a kid whom Hughes met and liked a lot. So there are a million kids with strong hands and young hearts proud of new buildings on new land in a new world. A million kids like this will build and build and build and the light will shine, not only on their sky alone.
There's no need to point out how erroneous these predictions proved to be. It is, however, important to understand that they were to an extent inevitable. Taking into consideration the specific black American prospective from the mantel to(?) Hughes traveling in Soviet Central Asia, he constantly tries to persuade himself that this is the real solution of racial problems that are so excruciating to him. It's not his fault that he was so easily deceived. Thank you.
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Listen to Thomas Averill's introduction.
