Fine Cothes to the Jew. By Langston Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1927. $2.
Fine clothes may not make either the poet or the gentleman, but they certainly help; and it is a rare genius that can strip life to the buff and still poetize it. This, however, Langston Hughes has done, in a volume that is even more starkly realistic and colloquial than his first,—“The Weary Blues.” It is a current ambition in American poetry to take the common clay of life and fashion it to living beauty, but very few have succeeded, even Masters and Sandburg not invariably. They get their effects, but often at the expense of poetry. Here, on the contrary, there is scarcely a prosaic note or a spiritual sag in spite of the fact that never has cruder colloquialism or more sordid life been put into the substance of poetry. The book is, therefore, notable as an achievement in poetic realism in addition to its particular value as a folk study in verse of Negro life.
The success of these poems owes much to the clever and apt device of taking folk-song forms and idioms as the mold into which the life of the plain people is descriptively poured. This gives not only an authentic background and the impression that it is the people themselves speaking, but the sordidness of common life is caught up in the lilt of its own poetry and without any sentimental propping attains something of the necessary elevation of art. Many of the poems are modelled in the exact metrical form of the Negro “Blues,” now so suddenly popular, and in thought and style of expression are so close as scarcely to be distinguishable from the popular variety. But these poems are not transcriptions, every now and then one catches sight of the deft poetic touch that unostentatiously transforms them into folk portraits. In the rambling improvised stanzas of folksong, there is invariably much that is inconsistent with the dominant mood; and seldom any dramatic coherence. Here we have these necessary art ingredients ingenuously added to material of real folk flavor and origin. “Gal’s Cry for a Dying Lover” is an excellent example:
Knowed somebody’s bout to die.
Heard de owl a hootin,’
Knowed somebody’s ’bout to die.
Put ma head un’neath de kiver,
Started in to moan and cry.
Hound dawg’s barkin’
Means he’s gonna leave dis world.
Hound dawg’s barkin’
Means he’s gonna leave dis world.
O, Lawd have mercy
On a po’ black girl.
Black an’ ugly
But he sho do treat me kind.
I’m black an’ ugly
But he sho do treat me kind.
High-in-heaben Jesus,
Please don’t take this man o’ mine.
After so much dead anatomy of a people’s superstition and so much sentimental balladizing on dialect chromatics, such vivid, pulsing, creative portraits of Negro folk foibles and moods are most welcome. The author apparently loves the plain people in every aspect of their lives, their gin-drinking carousals, their street brawls, their tenement; publicity, and their slum matings and partings, and reveals this segment of Negro life as it has never been shown before. Its open frankness will be a shock and a snare for the critic and moralist who cannot distinguish clay from mire. The poet has himself said elsewhere,—“The ‘low-down’ Negroes furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist, because they hold their individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.” And as one watches Langston Hughes’s own career, one wonders.
The dominant mood of this volume is the characteristic “Blue’s emotion,”—the crying laugh that “eases its misery” in song and self pity. However, there are poems of other than the folk character in the book,—none more notable than “The Mulatto,”—too long to quote, even though it is a lyric condensation of the deepest tragedy of the race problem. One that is just as pregnant with social as well as individual tragedy can serve as a brief sample of this side of younger Negro genius for tragic vision and utterance:
SONG FOR A DARK GIRL
Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.
Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.
Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.
After this there is nothing to be said about the finest tragedy having always to be Greek.