Langston Hughes Centennial Symposium

DRAFT

"That Tune that Laughs and Cries": Modernist Inventions and Interventions in the Writings of Langston Hughes

Plain and Simple Folk

Moderator—Barbara Ryan
Presentations by Akiba Sullivan Harper,John Lowe, and Trudier Harris-Lopez

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Barbara Ryan is an assistant professor of English and Black studies at the University of Missouri—Kansas City. Her recent publications include an essay on black servitude as depicted by Charles W. Chesnutt, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Victoria Earle Matthews. She gives statewide presentations on Langston Hughes and Mark Twain for the Kansas Humanities Council. Listen to Barbara Ryan's introduction. (streaming audio file) Link to print transcript.

Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, professor of English at Spelman College, is the editor of The Return of Simple by Langston Hughes (Hill & Wang, 1994) and Langston Hughes: Short Stories (Hill & Wang, 1996) and author of Not So Simple: The "Simple" Stories by Langston Hughes (University of Missouri Press, 1995). She has published articles and book reviews in American Literature; Callaloo; Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence; The Langston Hughes Review; Notable Black American Men; Obsidian II; The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States;and Phylon. Listen to Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper's presentation. (streaming audio file) Link to print transcript.

John Lowe is professor of English at Louisiana State University, where he teaches African American, Southern, and ethnic literature and theory. He is the author of Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy (University of Illinois Press, 1994); editor of Conversations with Ernest Gaines (University of Mississippi Press, 1995) and Redefining Southern Culture (Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming); as well as coeditor of The Future of Southern Letters(Oxford University Press, 1996). He is currently completing The Americanization of Ethnic Humor, a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary examination of changing patterns in American comic literature. Listen to John Lowe's presentation . (streaming audio file) Link to print transcript

Trudier Harris-Lopez is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has authored, edited, or coedited twenty volumes. Her most recent critical studies are The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston (University of Georgia Press, 1996), Gloria Naylor and Randall Kenan (1996), and Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (Palgrave, 2001). Listen to Trudier Harris-Lopez' presentation. (streaming audio file) Link to print transcript

Introduction by Barbara Ryan

Barbara Ryan: My name is Barbara Ryan. I teach at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, but I bet you're really more interested in our panelists today. Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper is a professor of English at Spelman College. She is an editor of The Return of Simple and Langston Hughes: Short Stories, and the author of a book everyone must read, Not So Simple: The "Simple" Stories by Langston Hughes. She is also an editor for the University of Missouri project the Collected Works of Langston Hughes. She edited volumes seven and eight and wrote introductions for both. These are valuable treasures you'll want to own.

Our second speaker, John Lowe, is a professor of English at Louisiana State University, where he teaches African American, Southern, and ethnic literature and theory. He is the author of Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy and the editor of Conversations with Ernest Gaines, which is a treasure. He's busy at work on several projects, but look out for The Americanization of Ethnic Humor, a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary examination of changing patterns in American comic literature.

Our third speaker is Trudier Harris, the J. Carlyle Sitterson professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She's written a lot of books, but a personal favorite for me would certainly be Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature.

Presentation by Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper

Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper: Thank you, Barbara Ryan, for the wonderful introduction. I certainly celebrate this opportunity to enjoy the symposium, which is a marvelous and fitting tribute to the centennial of the birth of Langston Hughes. This symposium has also become a sort of reunion for those of us who were in Joplin, Missouri, in 1981 for the first Langston Hughes Study Conference. At that time, 1981, I was a note-taking graduate student sitting in the audience; therefore, I am happy and blessed, at this time, to be a published Hughes scholar and to be sharing this panel with distinguished presenters, Trudier Harris-Lopez and John Lowe.

Please focus with me on the need for plain and simple heroes. Langston Hughes's 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" has become a standard. Even beginning scholars have read and appreciate the value of that essay. It is often anthologized and even more often excerpted. Nearly every explanation of the Harlem Renaissance identifies Hughes's essay as a manifesto for the new Negro writers. And it was. Hughes, however, lived and wrote long after the Harlem Renaissance. In this, the second century of Langston Hughes, especially with the benefit of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes now being issued by the University of Missouri Press, our scholarship needs to move beyond the comfortable passages of that heavily harvested manifesto and those often memorized poems of the 1920s.

George Washington Carver, who was born not far from Langston Hughes's Joplin, Missouri, birthplace, emphasized the need for crop rotation so that the soil could be enriched and offer better and more bountiful harvests; therefore, I turn to another essay, one that is every bit as powerful and significant but is seldom discussed, "The Need for Heroes," published in the Crisis magazine in 1941. Volume 10 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, edited by Christopher De Santis, who is here for this conference, has been published. That volume 10 will offer the general public and the scholarly community far more convenient access to this essay than has been previously afforded by the microfilmed editions of the NAACP magazine. Perhaps, now, more of us will consider this post- Native Son manifesto "The Need for Heroes."

Without question, Langston Hughes viewed the astronomical success of Native Son with more than mere amazement. Arnold Rampersad's biography notes that Hughes's own financial strain versus Wright's financial windfall, when his novel was selected as a Book of the Month Club choice, led to some slight envy. Rampersad speculates, "Langston must have felt at least a twinge of pure envy. After 20 years of publication, he was still poor. And with only his second book, Wright now bathed in a shower of gold." A person determined to make a living from his writing, as Hughes had done, had to feel slighted when a young star such as Richard Wright took off like a meteor. The resentment and envy multiplied when Hughes's own autobiography The Big Sea, published the same year as Native Son, failed to become a best seller.

Despite any self-doubt or envy he may have felt, Hughes also very clearly and consistently disapproved of the way that black life was represented by Nature Son's protagonist Bigger Thomas. Were rape and murder really the responses of most black people to poverty and racism? Certainly not. Therefore, Hughes offered to the Crisis "The Need for Heroes." As Faith Berry's biography of Hughes reminds us, his essay commemorated his twentieth anniversary as a contributor to the magazine. While the essay may have signaled a rallying cry that Langston Hughes was not stepping aside to watch the Richard Wrights take over in literature, it also provided a sermon that Hughes was willing to model. He would walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Hughes launches "The Need for Heroes" lamenting the potential consequences if Native Son were the only book on the bookshelves of tomorrow. He quickly adds to this sad potential his own play "Mulatto," which he says has an end that consists of murder, madness, and suicide. Hughes then speculates, "If the best of our writers continue to pour their talent into the tragedies of frustration and weakness, tomorrow we'll probably say, on the basis of available literary evidence, no wonder the Negroes never amounted to anything. There were no heroes among them. Defeat and panic, moaning, groaning, and weeping were their lot. Did nobody fight? Did nobody triumph?"

Hughes clearly places himself right alongside Richard Wright and with anyone else being considered among the best of our writers. Hence, the manifesto indeed is an assertion by Langston Hughes that he deserves to be ranked with Richard Wright and any other black writers who are heralded as the best. However, he moves on to suggest a solution to this potential disaster. And in his writings he goes on to produce literature that represented what he called, "A man, strong and unafraid who did not die a suicide, a mob victim, or a subject for execution, or a defeated, humble, beaten-down human being."

The more obvious method of recording into literature the history of the heroes and she-roes would be to name the honor roll, the Black History Month regulars. Hughes did his part in several genres to go on record as having named and claimed as noteworthy the historical figures. "The Heart of Harlem," a poem he published in 1945, resembles Simple's "A Toast to Harlem" and celebrates the attitudes and people who survive in Harlem. Joe Lewis, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Adam Clayton-Powell, and Billy Holiday all make the honor roll. Another poem, "The Ballad of Seven Songs," a poem for Emancipation Day, appeared in 1949. It lists many of the known greats including Du Bois, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, and even Dorothy Maynor, a classical singer who went on to found the Harlem School for the Arts in 1964. Hughes wrote individual poems praising specific heroes. He went on to write the libretto for Troubled Island, capturing the revolution in which slavery was overthrown in Haiti. Hughes also turned to writing many children's books, including Famous Negro Americans in 1954 and Famous Negro Heroes of America, 1958.

While Hughes celebrated the great black folks of the past whose names will be recorded in history, he also urged in "The Need for Heroes" that others should be included in our literature. Black folk, in his words, "who may or may not always speak perfect English, but who are courageous, straightforward, strong, whose gaiety is not of the 'Ya-sa, Boss' variety all the time, and whose words and thoughts gather up what is in our hearts and say it clearly and plainly for all to hear."

As is evident in all of the Hughes's canon, this practicing of what he preached would not occur universally, but it did happen significantly with the creation of "living heroes who are your neighbors," in the words of his essay. These heroes include, but are not limited to, Jesse B. Simple and Simple's landlady, Madame Butler, and even the "shero" of "Thank You, Ma'am," Mrs. Lou Ella Bates Washington Jones, and the narrator protagonist of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Sister Mary Bradley. Of course, the poetic queen of dramatic monologue, Madame Alberta K. Johnson, would be another obvious, every day shero. Indeed, scores of other heroes and sheroes, both famous and ordinary, people the individual poems and stories that appeared after "The Need for Heroes."

In his essay Langston Hughes distinguished his call for heroes from the field of humor, tragedy, struggle, folklore, or day-to-day achievements. But he said, "Where in all these books is that compelling flame of spirit and passion that makes a man say I too am a hero because my race has produced heroes like that." Hughes insisted that black writers should represent heroes, both male and female, in their work. Not just the famous such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, but the ordinary heroes who work hard and save their meager earnings so that their own sons and daughters might have a brighter tomorrow. "These ordinary heroes," Hughes insisted, "might not speak that proper English, but they were no less intelligent and no less important to hear."

Since my colleague John Lowe is going to elaborate on humor in the Simple stories, I'd like to briefly note the cast of characters from the Simple stories who boldly and proudly stake their claim on democracy. Cousin Minnie and Simple both participate in riots to protest the squelching of their rights in Harlem. Cousin Minnie and Cousin Franklin Delanor Roosevelt Brown both abandon the oppression of the South and head north, indeed end up in Harlem, to seek their democracy, their freedom. Cousin Lynn Clarisse does not remain in Harlem but when she returns to the South, she also is a shero because she is a freedom writer. Even Joyce Lane Simple, his second wife, proudly proclaims her desire to see, and these are her words, "how to get a good education for every child of every black woman. Also, how to be sure husbands and fathers make a decent living anywhere in the world. Also, that no woman has to be beholding to any man, white or black, for her living. And, no woman needs to make her body a part of the job." Joyce Lane Simple from Africa 's daughters.

As Thadious Davis is saying in the panel concurrent with ours, Hughes also frequently retreated to a kind of literary ventriloquism, projecting this heroic behavior into the actions and words of women. Maybe the last person in any of Hughes's writings you would ever think to look to for heroism would be Simple's landlady, as much grief as he has with her. But indeed, in the story "Nothing But Roomers," and that's R-O-O-M-E-R-S, when she explains her personal history, Madame Butler tells us how she got her education the hard way. When she tells her story, if she were a blues woman, she would merely be telling you how her man had done her wrong. But instead with Madame Butler we see the survivor, the hero, in her. Here's a synopsis of her story:

I was working in a tobacco barn when I was fourteen. I first married when I was sixteen and started buying a house. This man is my third husband and this house is my fourth house. And this house, I swear I am going to keep. Neither husbands nor mortgages is going to take this house from me. I handles the business myself, now. This property is in my own name and all the papers. Losing husbands and losing houses is what has been my education. Now I say, to hell with husbands. I am going to hang on to this house. I'll tell any woman a roof over your head is better than a husband in your bed. A good woman can always get a man, but houses cost money.

Madame Butler goes on to detail the ways she has lost her previous houses and husbands. Heroically, she learns from each mistake and builds so that she doesn't make the same mistake again. Eventually she reaches the point where she now manages her household very tightly. With this explanation, we understand why she has so many restrictions against which Simple chafes.

In terms of technique, it is worth noting that while most of the Simple canon involves stories that Simple narrates to his bar buddy, Boyd, "Nothing but Roomers" appears as an episode that we readers view as it happens. The Boyd does not appear and the dialogue is not presented as if it is being filtered or recalled by Simple.

There are so many other examples that I could share with you. A favorite of mine is "Thank You, Ma'am" in which Mrs. Lou Ella Bates Washington Jones converts an attempted purse snatching into a teachable moment. In this story she realizes that the young man who would snatch her purse lacks anyone at home to tell him to wash his face, and he has no one at home to feed him supper. So instead of calling the police, because after all, what would he learn in prison and from whom would he learn things, she instead feeds him, has his face washed, and finds out what he was going to steal and gives him enough money to buy the thing he would have stolen to achieve. In her presentation in the 1981 Langston Hughes Study Conference in Joplin, Missouri, Eloise McKenny Johnson, who also is at this conference, described her discovery that Mary McLeod Bethune was a likely model for Mrs. Lou Ella Bates Washington Jones.

There are, in all of these works, the element of the hero. I would share with you from the conclusion of Hughes's essay:

We need in literature the kind of black men and women all of us know exist in life. Who are not afraid to claim our rights as human beings and as Americans. Who are not afraid of the mobsters, the crooked politicians, and the often-ignorant short-sided and dangerous white demagogues in places of power. Who are not afraid of the sometimes veeno-Black demagogues paid to fool and mislead their own people. We need in our books those who remember the past when one word of freedom was enough to bring the lash to our backs, yet that word was spoken. We need in our books those who have known the day after day heroism of work and struggle and facing of drudgery and insult that some son or daughter might get through school and acquire the knowledge that leads to a better life where opportunities are brighter and work is less drab, less humiliating, and less hard. Yet, for us, that work was done. We need in our books those who have lived through the days when even to move into a decent house outside the black slums in Detroit or Cleveland or Chicago was to bring out the mob, stones through windows, bullets, and danger of death. Yet, we moved into those house. We know we are not weak, ignorant, frustrated or quelled. We know the race has its heroes, whether anybody puts them into books or not. We know we are heroes ourselves and can make a better world. Someday there will be many books and plays and songs that say that. Today there are strangely few. Negro literature has a need for heroes. Then it will come alive, speak, sing, and flame with meaning for the Negro people.

This conclusion for "The Need for Heroes" evokes the often-quoted conclusion of "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." It also suggests that Hughes himself was heroic, although in his correspondence he tried to deny having intended to suggest any such thing.

Throughout his career Langston Hughes championed the day-to-day heroism of ordinary people. Through his depictions, he leads his readers to champion them too. Therefore, while the essay "The Need for Heroes" certainly responded to Langston Hughes's feelings about Native Son, the essay also genuinely represented what Hughes felt writers should do. He had practiced that message throughout his writing career. His fame and recognition may not have skyrocketed as did Wright's, but his reputation has endured, and his works have continued to inspire new generations of young people. Without question, people who read about Mrs. Lou Ella Bates Washington Jones or Jesse B. Simple will not feel that blacks were cowards beaten down by racism and poverty. Instead, they will see that with kindness and with endurance, blacks heroically met and overcame the slings and arrows of racism and poverty.

Presentation by John Lowe

" Jazz, Jive, and Jam": The Subversive Humor of Simple 

It's very thrilling to be here but also daunting to share the stage with these two eminent scholars. Akiba Sullivan Harper literally wrote the book on Simple. I contemplated a three-word paper, "Read Akiba's Book," but I'm going to do a little bit more than that.

We have come to honor and acknowledge Langston Hughes as a great poet, a playwright, a fiction writer, an essayist, a racial leader of the twentieth century. But we also insist he was one of the foremost humorists of his time. In all these venues he used comedy to delight, to instruct, and to subvert. Nowhere is this more evident than in his magnificent Simple stories, the series of conversations between the egghead Boyd and the down-home Harlem raconteur Jesse B. Semple. Originally published in the Chicago Defender, these pieces were eventually collected in multiple volumes and might profitably be read as Hughes' own sardonic, wry look at the vagaries of racial experience in America. Employing an arsenal of humorous tools such as dialect, caricature, puns, signifying, linguistic code switching, tall tales, malapropisms, barnyard humor, folklore, and body humor, Hughes created a hilarious, yet poignant commentary that could be appreciated by all Americans, but one that had special resonance for the brother in black. Hughes uses humor in virtually all the many genres he explored, but it was in place most abundantly in his stage comedies, particularly "Little Ham," which was just produced in New York, and the Simple sketches, which began to appear in the 1940s. He continued to use Simple as the comic commentator on human foibles for more than twenty years. Of course, there's a lot of Hughes himself in Simple. The rest of him is in Boyd, but I think Hughes's deepest feelings are in Simple.

Hughes loved to laugh. He was a fabled raconteur and jokester. His sassy letters to Van Vechten, Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston, to name only a few correspondents, reveal how spontaneous and inventive his personal wit could be. He published a path-breaking anthology of African-American humor, he delighted in comic folklore, and he commented quite frequently on both the need for humor in life and also the ways in which humor works.

Ethnic humor, which is frequently a weapon of oppression wielded by the group in power, can, through inversion, become a weapon of liberation. At times it can be used aggressively to serve the purposes of revolution, but it can also serve as a mode of communication and conciliation. Hughes understood this. He said, "Humor is a weapon, too, of no mean value against one's foes. Think what colored people in the United States could do with a magazine devoted to satire and fun, especially," he notes, "one aimed at the racists of society. Since we have not been able to moralize them out of existence with indignant editorials, maybe we could laugh them to death with well-aimed ridicule. I'd like to see writers of both races write about our problems with black tongue and white cheek or vice versa. Sometimes I try; Simple helps me." Simple helps because he speaks to the yearning we all have to be free from official strictures and unnecessary complications. At the Chancellor's house last night, the chorus sang the words, "Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free," and Simple, our man, while poor and put upon, has the rebellious freedom of folk culture. As Bakhtin has noted, "We cannot understand cultural and literary life and the struggle of mankind's historic past if we ignore that peculiar folk humor that has always existed and was never merged with the official culture of the ruling classes. We do not hear the voice of the people . . . all the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of the laughing people. Without hearing this chorus, we cannot understand the drama as a whole." Hughes gave us that chorus.

Significantly, the Simple stories appeared in black newspapers. One sees Hughes's understanding of the community-building aspect of these journals in an unpublished address "Humor in the Negro Press" he made in Chicago to a press club banquet in 1957. He was an avid reader all through his life of community papers and made sure he got copies of the local edition wherever he traveled. And he said, in fact, "Whenever I find myself in a town where the colored papers are not available like Carmel, California, I feel on weekends as though I were completely out of this world." Hughes particularly admired those "impish souls," as he called them in black pressrooms, which cranked out headlines such as this Mother's Day entry: "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Has the World All Loused Up." "Easterners," he announces, "have not yet forgotten an Afro-American news headline some years ago, 'Groom Honeymoons with Best Man," surely a sly dig at the notorious Countee Cullen-Yolande Du Bois wedding, which featured Harold Jackman as best man."

Hughes went on to extol funny writers. "For writers of humor, there is the inimitable Zora Neale Hurston, who is one of the most amusing and aggravating female scribes living. There's Evelyn Cunningham, Nat Williams, Enoch Williams, Ted Posten and George Schuyler, whose wry satire carries a punch as well as a laugh." And of course he named his friends Arna Bontemps, Nipsey Russell, Moms Mabley, and several others. On the other hand, he got down on journals that didn't feature humor. "Serious colored magazines like the Crisis or Phylon do not publish humor even when it is given to them free. These magazines evidently think the race problem is too deep for comic relief. Such earnestness is contrary to mass Negro thinking. Colored people are always laughing at some wry Jim Crow incident or absurd nuance of the color line. If Negroes took all the white world's daily boorishness to heart and wept over it as profoundly as our serious writers do, we would've been dead long ago."

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were models for dealing with ethnicity and oppression in comic columns. Newspapers featured rustic or ethnic columnists who spoke about matters of the day in dialect. The great paradigm for this genre is Finley Peter Dunne's talkative immigrant Irish bartender, Mr. Dooley, who doled out drinks and wisdom in equal measure to his rather dense customer, Mr. Hennessy, which suggested the duo of Simple and Boyd Hughes would use himself later.

Dunne was playing off a fascination with ethnic "types" that accompanied increased immigration from Europe and the South. Figure one shows a cluster of heads from a magazine that was very popular in the late nineteenth century called Judge. You can see there's very prominent at the top, an African-American figure, but there also are Chinese, and this one on the left is an Irishman with a pipe. I think you'll see they're all simianized, in other words, made to look like apes. Various members of this bouquet of ethnicity became white later. The Irish and the Italians, in particular, were not deemed white until a lot of activity had gone on. Mr. Dooley helped on that issue.

Other ethnic writers across the nation took heart from this ploy of Mr. Dooley's and created comic columns of their own. Dunne had Mr. Dooley speak in a heavy brogue. Hughes, too, saw dialect not as a sign of ignorance but rather as "richly wise, creative, and humorous laden with metaphor and therefore tactile and appealing." Since dialect, at least to the oppressor, is part and parcel of the negative stereotype, pride in dialect constitutes inversion creating a pride-inspiring prism, one that may be reversed for the critical inspection of the other, white Protestant America. At the same time dialect writing is a kind of protective cloak that a critic can wear; the rustic satirist is less inclined to draw the immediate ire of the urbane reader.

Dunne spoke about this while he was writing editorials for The Post in Chicago. "We became engaged in a bitter fight with crooks in the city council. It occurred to me that while it might be dangerous to call an alderman a thief in English, no one could sue if a comic Irishman denounced a statesman as a thief." Mr. Dooley, the fictional character, opined in 1906 about his own relocation to Chicago from County Roscommon. "I was afraid I wasn't goin' to assimilate with th' airlyer pilgrim fathers an' th' institchooions iv th' country, but I soon found that a long swing iv th' pick made me as good as another man, an' it didn't require a gr-reat intellect or sometimes anny at all to vote th' dimmycrat ticket, an' befure I was here a month, I felt enough like a native-born American to burn a witch."

We should remember that most of the folks up in Harlem were immigrants from the South and elsewhere and thus had much in common with the immigrant Irish. Dunne and Hughes saw to it that their readers didn't laugh at Mr. Dooley and Simple, but with them. Humor democratizes, and laughter always creates intimacy as it does between Simple and virtually all the other figures he encounters, at least among Harlemites. Hughes, first in columns and then in the books that followed, inverted the formula used by Dunne. Simple, the folk philosopher, gets questioned in Harlem bars and streets by Boyd, whose congruence with Mr. Dooley's kind of dimwitted companion, Mr. Hennesey, comes not from ignorance, but from his lack of a firm folk base. He hails from the West and seems to be fascinated with Simple's down-home wit and wisdom. As such, Simple is his teacher in a reeducation process. Moreover, Boyd is the narrator, whereas the Mr. Dooley sketches are related by an omniscient narrator. Further, Boyd invariably gets Simple going by asking rather direct, often provocative, questions. He issues, in other words, a call and Simple provides a response.

However, we should also remember that Simple, like Scheherazade, might have a valid reason for spinning out his tales at some length. If he's going to answer Boyd's question, the least Boyd can do is buy him another beer. Never forget that Simple is a performer. His riffs on his love life, politics, Harlemites, and other topics are never matter-of-fact. Even the more somber pieces are richly inventive, drenched in metaphor, idiom, and spontaneous comic coinages. Simple is virtually always styling out, showboating, grandstanding, all modes of positive self-assertion, and humor gives all these performance the lift-off that leads to exhilaration.

Further, Hughes creates comedy out of dueling vernaculars within the race, even within Simple himself. Harlem brought together the salty jive-talk of the city's hipsters with the metaphor-drenched, down-home speech of Southern migrants. Simple, of course, is master of both idioms, and much of his comic effect comes from his clever code switching. As an added fillip, we've got the verbal dueling with Boyd, whose correct but stiff English offers a perfect foil for Simple's verbal inventiveness. Both of them bear many resemblances respectively to the balanced pair of the rounder Jake and the intellectual Ray in Claude McKay's classic Home to Harlem. Hughes may well have had them in mind after his own characters began to take on more detailed Harlem personalities. Both writers sought to bridge the gap between the folk and the talented tenth and to indicate that the second group needed to remember where it came from, not only because that was the right thing to do, because also it would strengthen them and keep them from sterile imitation of upper-class whites.

The technique involved here, which was purely American in detail, is actually classical in concept. For Simple is a modern avatar of Silenus, a rather homely hair-covered old man who had a beautiful soul. Ancient Greek culture used him as a trope for mystical inversion, crude and simple without, the complex and finely wrought within. There's a hedonistic strain to Silenus, too, for he was the teacher of Bacchus, the god of wine. This pose suited Socrates and Rabelais as well. Closer to home, the Yankee peddler figure Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the frontier humorists, and the cracker-barrel philosophers who populate the pages of traditional American literary humor all share this stance. In African-American literature, the sly Uncle Julius of Chesnutt's conjure stories is a similar figure. Like Simple, he's forced by racist society to take on a double pose and consciousness and to use his humor as a subversive weapon. As such, they needed to do what James Weldon Johnson said members of the Harlem Renaissance should do. "The colored poet in the United States needs to do something like Synge did for the Irish. He needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without . . . a form . . . that will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos too . . . which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow the widest range of subject and treatment."

Johnson's eloquent call found a response from Hughes, who used humor to forge a sense of authenticity and creativity and as a come-on and as a mask, for under the pose was a preacher, and under the jokes was a Jeremiah. Over and over, Hughes, under the guise of making fun of rampant racism and corruption, manages to simultaneously present, without overly moral commentary, the terrible conditions of the people he describes and the factors that lead to those conditions.

In terms of setting: in social conditions conducive to humor, the atmosphere is relaxed and participants don't feel constrained by the formality of the occasion. The psychological affect of imagining yourself in an intimate bar with Simple or Mr. Dooley provides a familiar setting for unwinding, for telling jokes and stories. Mr. Dooley is true, moreover, to the traditional role the saloonkeeper had always played in Ireland, where he was often a politician as well. In New York, too, the saloon was the political center of the community in more ways than one. Ethnic drama frequently unfolds in a barroom, and most of the Simple sketches take place there, where Simple meets Boyd over a beer. The stimulating liquor, communally shared, becomes a metaphor for both the conversation and the warming humor. It stimulates the requisite creative juices of the imagination and thus becomes an essential ingredient in ritualistic comic performances and contests.

So Simple comes from a long line of Silenus/Remus figures, but there's an important new element in Hughes's portrayal. Many of these commentators are older men in previous traditions, and they're almost always bachelors. Sexual potency has been subtracted, perhaps, in order to simplify the portrayal of a wise everyman. Mr. Dooley, in fact, is a bachelor. Uncle Remus's white creator, Joel Chandler Harris, aged and feminized his narrator to make him more acceptable to white readers. In contrast, Simple is constantly in love, in bed, in trouble, or sometimes all three with some woman. Indeed, numerous critics have felt that the bodacious range of women in his work constitutes the main appeal of the stories. From upwardly striving, almost dicty Joyce to party-girl Zarita, Hughes acquaints us with wise, or sometimes wicked, women from eight to eighty, "cull none." Boyd finds his double in Simple's intellectual cousin Glen Clarisse, while Simple himself is mirrored in his loud-talking, wig-wearing barfly Cousin Minnie. But like Simple, she too erupts, albeit in comic invective against racial injustice. Eventually, in the last Simple book, she becomes a virtual freedom fighter. The extraordinary sensitivity Hughes displayed toward women in all his varied works finds a richly comic register in these Harlem sketches.

Simple's humor is always corrective, and Boyd and others, particularly Joyce, try to correct him too. In comically teasing some of the race's failings, Hughes follows an honored, if dangerous, path. If a joke is told about your group by a member of your group to your group, then it's okay to laugh. If the joke is told by a member of your group about your group to another group, it may not be so cool to laugh. Think about the varied reactions African-Americans have had to the routines of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. If a nonmember of our group tells a joke about our group to us, it's not acceptable. And if he tells it to other groups when we aren't there, it's really bad; it's an outrage.

It comes as no surprise that Hughes, ordinarily a poet, also excels at poetic description in these comic sketches. "Pavement hot as a frying pan on my brazier's griddle. Heat devils dancing in the air. Men in windows, no undershirts on, which is one thing ladies can't get by with if they lean out windows. Sunset. Stoops running over with people, curbs running over with kids. August in Harlem: too hot to be August in Hell." The seemingly casual and poetic description sets the stage, however, for a comic rendition of the saga of Carlyle, whose barebones narrative actually exemplifies the recurring tragedy of the community. "Midsummer madness brings winter sadness, so curb your badness. If you can't be good, be careful."

Carlyle impregnated a girl the preceding summer, subsequently married her, and then left her when he couldn't support the family. Now he can't come back or she'll lose the welfare she has. It's a grim story, but it's told humorously and it's punctuated by Simple's mixed metaphor catcalls to the scantily clad women who pass as he tells it. "Man, look at that chick going yonder, stacked up like the Queen Mary. Baby, if you must walk away, walk straight, don't shake your tailgate." Underlying the surface comedy of this and other Simple stories lurks the overpowering presence of the other culture, that of a bureaucratic white society.

There are other ethnic groups represented in these stories, and some contemporary students have problems with that. "Simple on Indian Blood" is a good example. He uses ethnic stereotyping to comic and didactic effect without overcastigation of Indians. Simple claims to be part Indian. Anyway, it's really funny.

Let me end with a couple of cuts from "Rude Awakening" because I think one of the great things Hughes does is comic inversion or parody. In this one you'll remember Governor Orval Faubus, who was the segregationist governor of Arkansas and Senator James Eastland in Mississippi. Simple has a dream:

I dreamt I was the ruler of Dixie. Me, colored, all my people in charge of the state we Negroes helped make so beautiful. It's beautiful in Virginia, me sitting on the wide veranda, my big ol' mansion with its white pillars. I was sittin' there fannin' in my cane-bottomed rocker, who should come out bowed around the corner, but dear old Mammy Faubus. [And of course when you read that, it's the "Yo Mama" phrase from the Dozens that he's making] Around the corner of the house came a dear old white mammy who right away I know. [This is the second "Yo Mama" reference]. She'd helped raise Colonel Washington 's oldest boy. I say, "Why, good evening, Mammy Eastland."
"I'm beggin' for my church," she said.
"Are you still with my friend, Colonel Washington?"
"I would not leave them good Negroes for nothing," shouted Mammy Eastland. "Him and his family are next to God in my book. Just like you and your family folks, quality folks. God never made no better Negroes. Thank you Mr. Simple, thank you."

This is a great sketch, and I always think when I read it about the wonderful sequel where Earnest Gaines and Oprah Winfrey went to have dinner in the big house on the plantation where he used to have to go in the back door.

In the new, wonderful edition that Akiba Harper edited of the sketches that had not been published before, the final scene takes Simple off the stage. He tells Boyd he's leaving Harlem with Joyce; they've saved up money to move to the "suburbans." This takes him off the stage, or to put it another way, out of the village square. Pushkin said that the art of the theater was born in the public square and as Bakhtin notes, nothing can be private in the square, for there the individual is totally vulnerable on every side, and is all surface. The turn-of-the-century Irish-American playwright Edward Harrigan wrote a series of popular comedies featuring a teeming set of tenements around a public square, which you see here (figure 2). Most of America 's major groups inhabit this area, although the brunt of the action occurs between the Irish and the blacks. In this setting imperial aspirations must fall before the relentless deconstruction of public scrutiny and laughter. Hughes would transform this into the busy tenements and black equivalents to this boisterous, uncrowning square, here figured in the busy streetscapes, tenements, and bars of Harlem.

Hughes and many ethnic writers used humor to make their cultures more palatable. These writers also knew, of course, this is an only an opening gambit, one that would ideally lead to the full exploration of the glories of their traditions, which have so much to give to all Americans. As Hughes so movingly put it, "There is so much richness in Negro humor, so much beauty in black dreams, so much dignity in our struggle, and so much universality in our problems in us, in each living human being of color. I don't understand the tendency today some Negro artists have of seeking to run away from themselves, from us, of being afraid to sing our songs, paint our pictures, write about us." Simple, however, said it more cogently, "Jazz, jive, and jam would be better for race relations than all this high-flown gaff, baff, and gas the orders put out." To that, we can only say a heartfelt Amen.

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