October 29, 1928
I want you to help me this time and I won’t bother you ever again. Dear, why don’t you love me. Why aren’t we more loving and chummy. Why don’t you ever confide in me. I know I have no sense to help you in your work but I’d enjoy your confidence. Now Langston, I have no one else to talk to, you will agree with me and help me won’t you if you can? Please don’t be angry because I want to go, for I’d see everyone I ever knew so I am wild to go.
February 15, 1933
Yes, your mother is an actress at last, the dream I dreamed as a little child is very near realized. I am one of the principals in Hall Johnson’s show “Run Little Chillun Run.”
February 3, 1938
“I get out very little and am nearly crazy being so lonely, sometimes. But I can’t stand it. Car fare is so high one can’t go often now days. I have 6 months.”
These epigraphs are snapshots framing the fascinating, albeit conflicted life of Carolyn “Carrie” Hughes Clark—mother of the renowned poet, fiction writer, playwright, and essayist Langston Hughes. Between 1926 and 1930, when Langston is in his twenties, she worries, cajoles, demands, and generally holds her son emotionally hostage. During the next few years, she flies high, feeling free and valued as a person, an artist, and a woman as she realizes her lifelong dream of performing onstage to an audience of adoring fans. Toward the end of the 1930s, she spirals downward into a lonely abyss of bad health, isolation, poverty, and death. When she writes her dutiful son in February 1938 about her sense of devastation and loneliness, she did not have six months to live—only four. She died June 3 in New York City, where her “dear boy” had taken her for care in the time she had remaining.
My Dear Boy focuses on an important but heretofore largely unexplored dimension of Langston Hughes. What is known about Langston has been nicely captured in a number of well-argued biographies and collections of his correspondence. A perfect complement to them, however, is available in the underused collection of extant correspondence written by his mother. Her letters are a treasure trove of ideas and information that shed new light on Langston, especially his family dynamic and aesthetic achievement. The perspective on their relationship that emerges from Carrie’s letters to her dear son is often one of insensitivity, if not downright pain. But eliciting sympathy for traumatic family interactions is not the purpose of this book. The goal instead is to explicate Hughes family dynamics. Carrie’s role in orchestrating the interrelationships of family members is crucial to understanding their effect on Langston, including his response to her many entreaties and how he embeds familial themes in the art he creates in the mid-1920s to the late 1930s—the period during which she corresponds with him. Her letters, then, force her out of the shadows and into the same light of those who have already been considered significant influences on his aesthetic development.
The letters in this book, which cover twelve years, 1926–38, are found in the Langston Hughes Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Why Carrie’s letters have received virtually no attention en masse is difficult to determine. One explanation may entail availability. Precisely when her letters were added to her son’s voluminous archive at the Beinecke Library is uncertain. Prior to his death in 1967, Langston had been shipping boxes of his papers to the collection for nearly twenty years, and a large group was sent soon after his death. It is safe to assume that Carrie’s letters were for a longtime simply included in his enormous body of papers with no special effort to identify or isolate them. Sadly, a record of who had access to the manuscripts and letters is lost to history too. Shifting library policies meant that some materials were made public as they were catalogued and processed, while others remained restricted for various reasons.
Scholars have long acknowledged Carrie in their work on Langston, some even using fugitive letters as evidence for their arguments. Regennia N. Williams and Carmaletta M. Williams quoted from some of them in their coauthored essay “Mother to Son: The Letters from Carrie Hughes Clark to Langston Hughes.” With that exception, however, no one has probed her collected letters for their own integrity or the significance they hold for Langston’s aesthetic development and output. My Dear Boy undertakes such an interrogation.
While editing this body of correspondence, we were presented with a number of challenges. For instance, although Carrie Hughes was an extremely bright woman, she wrote with little or no regard for posterity or publication. Thus she often expressed herself quite informally and gave little attention to issues of complete sentences as well as proper punctuation, spelling, and grammar. For the most part, we resisted the urge to “fix” them: the letters are published as written. In a few cases, however, we felt the need to facilitate readability and clarity. Here we made silent emendations, such as adding periods or dropped characters, to make the reading smoother.
The letters present further complications. Carrie often wrote across the top, down the sides, and on the backs of pages. A few of the letters continue on after the closing “Lovingly yours, Mamma,” while others begin before the salutation, typically “My Dear Boy.” When appropriate, we place these “side notes” at the end when they read like postscripts, or before the salutation when they appear there. In each instance, we attempted to preserve the letter’s integrity by keeping sentences in the order of their creation.
We also found it important to preserve Carrie’s exact wording and spelling because they more clearly demonstrate her moods, voice, and eventually the deterioration in her skills and her health. Where her handwriting became especially shaky, we have provided notes to explain the thoughts she attempted to communicate. To Carrie’s habit of double- or triple-underlining words, we have used brackets indicating this practice as her mode of emphasis.
Authoritatively documenting the dates of the letters was another problem. Many of them were either entirely undated or labeled with a month, date, or day of the week but no year. We placed these letters chronologically by making the best determination we could about the sequence of events in Carrie’s and Langston’s lives. We also used place of residence to make decisions regarding chronological order, aided by names of cities and states included in the letters. Not all names of people and places will be familiar to today’s readers, so we have used notes to explain ones we were able to identify.
A further word about names: some biographers and critics strenuously argue that referring to subjects by their first name is akin to claiming an undue personal acquaintanceship or intimate familial knowledge. Arguments rooted in gender perspectives liken this practice, politically, to erasing a woman’s identity and thus her complexity. In opting for the more familiar names of “Carrie” and “Langston,” we claim no special relationship with this mother and her son. We are very much aware that self-identification can engender complexities, such as those that derive from Carrie’s naming and renaming of herself. We believe, however, that the brevity of first names intensifies the conflicted familial cohesion and entanglement My Dear Boy explores.
Structurally, this book eschews the traditional introduction and conclusion for a more integrative pattern we designate “prologue” and “epilogue.” These echo here an appropriate device in African American rhetorical and musical traditions: call and response. The prologue (the call) introduces Carrie and our method for reading her correspondence, while the epilogue (the response) registers Langston’s answers to his mother by examining his creative writing. Together, prologue and epilogue frame the letters and the headnotes that preface each section. Our intent is that this arrangement will provide a nearly cohesive narrative.
Our decision to forgo the point-counterpoint of Carrie and Langston exchanging letters was born out of necessity. Langston’s letters, unlike his mother’s, are still widely dispersed in libraries and personal collections, and there is no systematic listing of them. Furthermore, Carrie repeatedly begged Langston to write back to her, which tells us that he did not routinely respond to every letter she sent him. When Langston did write her back, his few extant letters are emotionally unrevealing, in keeping with his well-known predisposition for creating a wall around his innermost feelings. One only has to consult Charles Nichols’s and Emily Bernard’s collections of Langston’s correspondence to bear out this propensity. As a way of divining his views on familial relationships, we turned to his most typical mode of expression: his art.
In the absence of a full-scale biography of Carrie Hughes, then, we hope this book will provide a useful portrait of her life as well as a context in which to view it.