Selected Letters of Langston Hughes: Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel

Perhaps the enclosed sequence from ASK YOUR MAMA might be of interest to THE FLOATING BEAR—since the dozens are still news to lots of people.³⁴ But don’t mind returning it, if not suitable to your needs. (I’ve got more rejection slips then if you live so long). Stamps enclosed.

Either you are getting square, or the Whitney folks are getting hip.… … Which? At any rate, I hear they are giving you “earnest consideration.” (I hope it turns into “due” consideration.)³⁵

¹ On January 31, at the Antioch Baptist Church of Brooklyn, Hughes participated in the program Spiritual Spectacular, a performance of religious songs and poetry.

² Shakespeare in Harlem, which opened at the 41st Street Theatre in New York City on February 9, closed after thirty-two performances.

³ The novel The Cool World (1959) by Warren Miller (1921–1966), a white writer, is narrated by the fourteen-year-old leader of a Harlem street gang. The Broadway staging of its adaptation ran for only two performances (February 22 and 23, 1960).

⁴ Hughes most likely refers to Nonnie Anderson, a young mixed-race woman who becomes pregnant by her white lover in the novel Strange Fruit (1944) written by Lillian Smith (1897–1966). Nonnie is a graduate of Spelman College, not Fisk University.

⁵ The novel The Bad Seed, by William March (1893–1954), about an eight-year-old girl willing to kill to get her way, was the basis of a Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959). Robert Anderson (1917–2009) adapted his play Tea and Sympathy (1953) for a 1956 film of the same name, in which a teenaged boy is bullied about his perceived sexuality. A Hatful of Rain (1953), by the playwright Michael V. Gazzo (1923–1995), presents the struggles of a young man addicted to morphine. Set in Rio, the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) (1959) is loosely based on the Greek myth of the star-crossed lovers Orpheus and Eurydice. The play The Respectful Prostitute (1946), by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), was the basis for a 1952 French film about a New York prostitute who witnesses the murder of a black man.

⁶ The future Nobel Prize–winning Nigerian writer Akinwande Oluwole “Wole” Soyinka (b. 1934) allowed Hughes to include his poems “The Immigrant” and “And the Other Immigrant” in An African Treasury: Articles / Essays / Stories / Poems by Black Africans (Crown, 1960).

⁷ Horace Julian Bond (b. 1940), son of Horace Mann Bond, a former president of Lincoln University, was one of the younger leaders of the civil rights movement. In 1960, he helped to found the influential Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

⁸ In New Negro Poets: USA (Indiana University Press, 1964), Hughes included two of Bond’s poems, “Year Without Seasons” and “Beast with Chrome Teeth.”

⁹ The singing star Della Reese (b. 1931) did not appear in the Westport Playhouse opening of Tambourines to Glory on September 5, 1960. The lead female was the pianist and sometime singer Hazel Scott (1920–1981). Hughes found her performance weak. When Tambourines to Glory opened on Broadway in November 1963, Hilda Simms (1918–1994) enacted the role.

¹⁰ Odetta Holmes (1930–2008), known professionally as Odetta, was an actress and folksinger with ties to the civil rights movement. Clara Ward (1924–1973), a famous gospel singer, performed the part of Birdie Lee in the Broadway production.

¹¹ Presumably Hughes refers to the annual banquet of the NAACP in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he received the Spingarn Medal.

¹² Differences between Hughes and Jan Meyerowitz reached a critical point after their one-act opera, Port Town, had its premiere at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts on August 4, 1960.

¹³ Loften Mitchell (1919–2001), an African American playwright, was nominated for a Tony Award in 1976 for his book for the hit musical Bubbling Brown Sugar. In 1957, he and the producer Stella Holt staged his play A Land Beyond the River at Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York.

¹⁴ The play discussed is Tambourines to Glory, produced at the Westport Playhouse in Connecticut starting in August 1960. The play was to have been the third production that season of the Theatre Guild in New York, but some observers, black and white alike, worried that its comic elements were out of tune with the harsh realities of the current civil rights movement.

¹⁵ The Connection (1959), the Obie Award–winning drama by Jack Gelber (1932–2003), ran for 722 performances at the Living Theatre in New York. The Balcony (1956), by the French writer Jean Genet (1910–1986), won the Obie Award for Best Foreign Play in 1960.

¹⁶ Walker’s poetry is not included in New Negro Poets: USA. The poems noted in the letter do not appear in her volume This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989) or in her other published books.

¹⁷ Adele Glasgow, a close friend of Hughes, ran the Market Place Gallery in Harlem and also the Negro Book Society. A member of his Harlem Suitcase Theatre in 1938, she sometimes worked for him as a typist.

¹⁸ Frank Greenwood worked for a lecture-booking agency that Hughes retained after he left the Colston Leigh Agency, which had arranged his bookings for many years.

¹⁹ Hughes’s February 1961 lecture tour included a visit to Mills College in Oakland, California, where he received exactly the kind of unwanted attention that he describes in this letter. However, Mills did not bow to this pressure. All of his lectures and class meetings were held as scheduled.

²⁰ Hughes went to Philadelphia to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ministry of Franklin B. Mitchell, Jr. (1910–2000), a Lincoln University classmate.

²¹ Nnamdi “Zik” Azikiwe invited Hughes and thirty other Lincoln University graduates and professors to attend (with all expenses paid) his inauguration on November 16, 1960, as governor-general and commander-in-chief of newly independent Nigeria. Other guests of Azikiwe included W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. After a week in Nigeria, Hughes visited Rome, Paris, and London.

²² Richard Wright died on November 28, 1960. After contracting amoebic dysentery in Africa in 1957, he suffered several apparently related setbacks to his health before succumbing at the age of fifty-two to a fatal heart attack in Paris. He is buried in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery there.

²³ Probably the noted music publisher Edward B. Marks.

²⁴ One of the contracts Hughes signed that day was for Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (Norton, 1962). The NAACP commissioned the volume.

²⁵ “Ragtime” Bob Darch (1920–2002), a pianist, was the featured performer at a benefit concert in historical tribute to John William “Blind” Boone held at the University of Missouri–Columbia on March 15, 1961. Boone (1864–1927) was a revered black composer and pianist of ragtime who had lost his sight as an infant.

²⁶ In Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (Knopf, 1961), Hughes fused jazz and other black music with the form called the “dozens,” a ritual of genial insult rooted in African American culture. Each of the twelve sections of the poem is attended by musical cues that are integral to its poetic meaning. On January 26, Bontemps wrote to Hughes: “Ask Your Mama is undoubtedly a milestone in your writing career. It indicates, for one thing, that you are not ready to play it safe, but prefer to try new rhythms and styles for new effects.… Moreover, it challenges the current trends in beat poetry with something more subtle and at the same time more solid.” Most reviewers dismissed the work.

²⁷ The culmination of Hughes’s February 1961 lecture tour was an NAACP-sponsored event at the University of California–Los Angeles. He read excerpts from Ask Your Mama for the first time publicly, backed by Buddy Collette’s jazz group. Collette (1921–2010) was an influential African American jazzman, teacher, and social activist based in California.

²⁹ A convicted felon who served several years in the Ohio Penitentiary for armed robbery, Chester B. Himes (1909–1984) started writing and became one of Richard Wright’s protégés. Van Vechten helped him find a publisher for his second novel, Lonely Crusade (Knopf, 1947). A feud developed between Baldwin and Wright, which Baldwin recalls in his essay “The Exile” (Encounter, April 1961). This essay and two others appear together as “Alas, Poor Richard” in his collection Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes from a Native Son (1961).

³⁰ In 1939, Margaret Walker (Alexander) traveled from Chicago to New York apparently in pursuit of Richard Wright. They fell out after Walker, who had known Wright in Chicago, accused him of having too close a friendship with the playwright Ted Ward. Amused, Hughes wrote a ditty he called “Epic” about the incident. It goes: “Margaret Walker is a talker / When she came to town / What she said put Ted in bed / And turned Dick upside down.”

³¹ In 1961, the veteran journalist Carl Rowan was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for public affairs by President John F. Kennedy. He became ambassador to Finland in 1963 and director of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1964.

³² Leontyne Price (b. 1927), singing with the Italian tenor Franco Corelli, shared in an ovation of at least thirty minutes at the end of a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore on January 27, 1961, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Corelli and Price, who sang the role of Leonora, made their debuts at the Met that evening.

³³ Bontemps responded: “As soon as Carl Rowan is settled down in his job I will definitely take up with him the question of Negro authors in USIA libraries, etc. I’m sure he will be sensitive to the fact that his books were just as absent as yours or mine.”

³⁴ The poet Diane Di Prima (b. 1934) edited the mimeographed literary newsletter The Floating Bear from 1961 to 1969. LeRoi Jones (with whom she had a daughter, Dominique Di Prima) was her coeditor from 1961 to 1963.

³⁵ Jones was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship in 1961.

³⁶ Baldwin’s essay collection Nobody Knows My Name (1961), a best-seller in the United States, became an influential volume in the civil rights movement.

³⁷ An editor at Knopf, Judith Jones worked with Hughes on Ask Your Mama and other projects in the 1960s. Blanche Knopf, Hughes’s former editor there, had become president of the firm in 1957. Widely known in the publishing world for having rescued the diary of Anne Frank from a pile of rejected manuscripts, Jones also edited books by other renowned authors such as the chef Julia Child and the novelist John Updike.

³⁸ Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958. The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, started in 1933 by the acclaimed choreographer Ted Shawn on a farm in western Massachusetts, is the longest-running and probably the most prestigious dance festival in the United States.

³⁹ Hughes asked the jazz pianist Randy Weston (b. 1926) to compose a score for Ask Your Mama. The men had collaborated on Weston’s 1960 recording Uhuru Afrika! (“Freedom Africa!”), for which Hughes wrote the poem “African Woman.”

⁴⁰ Maurice Peress (b. 1930) is an orchestra conductor and educator. In 1961, he was an assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

⁴¹ Gwendolyn Walters was a winner of the Marian Anderson Award for musical excellence.

⁴² Arna Bontemps was then working on his book Famous Negro Athletes (Dodd, Mead, 1964). According to records of the Grand National, an annual steeplechase held in Liverpool, England, Samuel J. Bush was not the winning jockey in 1917 or 1918.

⁴³ George Houston Bass (1938–1990), a Fisk University graduate, moved to New York to attend the business school at Columbia. Recommended by Arna Bontemps, who had known him at Fisk, Bass served as Hughes’s secretary from June 1959 to July 1964. Hughes later appointed him executor-trustee of his estate. Eventually Bass became a professor in the fields of theater and African American Studies at Brown University.

⁴⁴ George Bass was then a leader of Voices, Inc., an a cappella octet that performed a series of song-documentary programs for CBS Television in New York. As a leading lawyer for the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) helped to win the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In 1967, he became the first African American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. “Spaulding” is probably one of the sons of Charles C. Spaulding (1874–1952). The grandson of a former slave, Spaulding had been a noted entrepreneur, especially as a cofounder of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. His sons, Charles, Jr., John, and Booker Spaulding, worked in the thriving business their father created. The African American contralto Carol Brice (1918–1985) had sung at a concert to mark Franklin Roosevelt’s third inauguration in 1941.

⁴⁵ The poet and scholar James A. Emanuel (1921–2013) wrote a study of Hughes’s short fiction as his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. In 1967, Emanuel’s Langston Hughes (based on that study) was published by Twayne in its “United States Authors” series. He became a professor of English at City College of the City University of New York. Later, after he moved to France, he published more than a dozen books of poetry.

⁴⁶ On November 3, 1961, Hughes attended a White House luncheon hosted by President Kennedy in honor of the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of Senegal. On November 6 in New York, the National Institute of Arts and Letters (which had elected Hughes a member that year) hosted a dinner he attended in honor of the British intellectual C. P. Snow (1905–1980).

⁴⁷ “Leading Southern cracker novelist” refers to the Mississippi-based author William Faulkner (1897–1962), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. In 1962, he won the Gold Medal for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (the elite inner circle of the National Institute of Arts and Letters) despite Hughes’s objections. In the 1950s Faulkner vigorously opposed racial segregation, but in 1956 The Sunday Times of London reported him as saying that he would “fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” Faulkner denied saying so but also urged moderation in the national response to the concerns of most Southern whites.

⁴⁸ Zelma Watson George (1903–1994) was a civil rights activist, musicologist, and college teacher. Managed by the W. Colston Leigh Agency, she lectured widely in the 1960s on behalf of organizations such as the Danforth Foundation and the American Association of Colleges.

⁴⁹ On December 13, 1961, Hughes traveled to Africa with a delegation of performers, including Randy Weston, Nina Simone, and Odetta, organized by the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC). The main purpose of the trip was to take part in an arts festival in Lagos, Nigeria. He remained there until January 7, 1962.

⁵⁰ In 1947, the Senegalese writer and editor Alioune Diop (1910–1980) founded Présence Africaine, the major journal of the Negritude movement.

⁵¹ The South African writer and scholar Es’kia Mphahlele, born Ezekiel Mphahlele (1919–2008) was one of the founders of modern African literature. Best known perhaps for Down Second Avenue (1959), an autobiography, he grew up in Pretoria. Later he earned a doctorate from the University of Colorado and also taught there and at the University of Pennsylvania.

⁵² J. Saunders Redding (1906–1988) was a professor (at Morehouse College, Hampton Institute, and Cornell University), and a literary scholar noted especially for his study To Make a Poet Black (1939).

⁵³ The Dutch-born Rosey E. Pool (1905–1971) was a translator from English into Dutch. A popular figure, she translated several of Hughes’s poems and also works by various African writers who lived, like her, in London.

⁵⁴ E. Simms Campbell (1906–1971), a successful African American cartoonist, had illustrated Hughes and Bontemps’s Popo and Fifina in 1932. He moved his family to Switzerland in 1957 and lived there until 1970.

⁵⁵ In the section “Invitation to Philanthropy” in his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes tells the droll story of a strange woman who asks him for money on behalf of an obviously nonexistent foundation to improve race relations.

⁵⁶ Hughes’s gospel play Black Nativity (1961) is probably the most frequently produced of his dramatic works. Critics hailed its opening performance on December 11, 1961, at the 41st Street Theatre in Manhattan. In 2013, a film version of the musical play, also called Black Nativity, was released. (Black Nativity was probably inspired by the success of Gian Carlo Menotti’s one-act opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, reputedly the most frequently produced of all operas following its premiere on NBC Television in 1951. Black Nativity was staged in 1962 at Menotti’s popular Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.)

⁵⁷ Eager to build on the success of Black Nativity, Lawrence Langner encouraged Hughes to update the script of Tambourines to Glory, also a gospel musical.

⁵⁸ In 1961, W. E. B. Du Bois joined the Communist Party of the United States and left the United States to live in Ghana. In 1963, after the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, he renounced his citizenship and became a Ghanaian. He died there later that year.

⁵⁹ Eva Tanguay (1878–1947) was a vaudeville performer. Gilda Gray (1901–1959) was a Polish-born actress known for doing the Shimmy dance in films in the 1920s.

⁶⁰ Her Name Was Sojourner Truth, by the Austrian actress and writer Hertha Pauli (1906–1973), was published in 1962.

⁶¹ Hughes refers to his musical play The Gospel Glory: A Passion Play (1962), about the Crucifixion. Later that year, he and Alfred Duckett (1917–1984), a veteran writer but an inexperienced producer, launched the work at the Temple of the Church of God in Christ in Brooklyn. After a particularly ragged staging of the play in Westport, Connecticut, Hughes ended his arrangement with Duckett.

⁶² The Dutch-born bookseller Paul Breman (1931–2008) edited and wrote the introduction to Waring Cuney’s volume of poetry Puzzles (DeRoos, 1960). He operated a small press in London, where he published the “Heritage Series of Black Poetry,” featuring African American poets, from 1962 to 1975. Arna Bontemps’s first poetry collection, Personals (1963), was part of this series.

⁶³ In 1962, Georgia Douglas Johnson published Share My World, her first book of poems in more than thirty years.

⁶⁴ Jackie Robinson (1919–1972) broke the color barrier in modern Major League Baseball in 1947 when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1963, he and his wife, Rachel Robinson (b. 1922), began hosting jazz concerts on the grounds at their home in Stamford, Connecticut, to raise funds for civil rights and other worthy causes.

⁶⁵ On March 24, 1962, on national television, Emile Griffith (1938–1913) and Benny “the Kid” Paret (1937–1962) fought for the world welterweight boxing title at Madison Square Garden in New York. Enraged by Paret’s taunts asserting that Griffith was gay, Griffith knocked him out after a severe beating. Paret never regained consciousness. He died on April 3.

⁶⁶ The Chicago-based entertainer Oscar Brown, Jr. (1926–2005) set Brooks’s poem to music under the title “Elegy (Plain Black Boy).”

⁶⁷ The African American poet and writer Henry Blakely (1917?–1996) was Gwendolyn Brooks’s husband.

⁶⁸ William “Bloke” Modisane (1923–1986), a South African writer and actor, moved to England in 1959 to escape apartheid. His autobiography, Blame Me on History (E. P. Dutton, 1963), tells of his life in South Africa. Writing to Hughes, Modisane had greeted him in Sesotho and isiZulu. Hughes responds with an attempt at Bantu.

⁶⁹ Modisane had written to inform Hughes that he faced eviction because his union had gone on strike. Hughes responded with a check (“the enclosed”).

⁷⁰ Hughes and Modisane later went to Kampala, Uganda, to attend the M’Bari Writers Congress at Makerere College (later University) from June 11 to 15. Other writers in attendance included Wole Soyinka, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Chinua Achebe.

⁷¹ From Uganda, Hughes stopped at Cairo and Rome en route to Spoleto in Umbria, Italy, where he saw Black Nativity performed at Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds.

⁷² Robie Macaulay (1919–1995), a writer and critic, succeeded the poet John Crowe Ransom as editor of The Kenyon Review. In 1966 he became fiction editor at Playboy magazine.

⁷³ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, formerly J. T. Ngugi (b. 1938), is an internationally known Kenyan author and American-based university professor. His first play was staged when he was a student at Makerere College in 1962, around the time that he first met Hughes. His first novel, A Grain of Wheat, appeared in 1964.

⁷⁴ Grace Ogot (b. 1930) published her first novel, The Promised Land, in 1966. Drawn to politics, she became the first Kenyan woman to serve as an assistant cabinet member. She did so in the government of Daniel Arap Moi, who later imprisoned Ngugi for political reasons.

⁷⁵ Invited by the U.S. government, Hughes went to Ghana to speak at the dedication of the new United States Information Service (USIS) Center and Library in Accra. (The U.S. ambassador was William P. Mahoney. Hughes had known his wife, Alice, a niece of Noël Sullivan, since she was a little girl, and had been a guest of the Mahoneys at their Phoenix home before Mahoney’s appointment.) In late June, after his trip to Cairo and Italy, he returned to Africa for this event. The USIS, as units of the United States Information Agency centered outside the U.S. were known, was a branch of the Department of State. The latter took over its functions in 1999.

⁷⁶ Negritude was a literary movement in the 1930s and 1940s among French-speaking authors that focused on “black consciousness.” Its key developers included Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), who acknowledged the influence of Hughes’s work on their thinking.

⁷⁷ Hughes refers to James Baldwin’s best-selling novel Another Country (1962), which includes graphic descriptions of interracial sex as well as gay and bisexual male liaisons.

⁷⁸ Harold Robbins (1916–1997) achieved notoriety with his sexually explicit novel The Carpetbaggers (Simon & Schuster, 1961).

⁷⁹ John Alfred Williams (b. 1925) is a prolific novelist whose books include The Angry Ones (1960) and The Man Who Cried I Am (1967). In 1962, the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters in New York (of which Hughes was a member) chose Williams for one of its annual writing residencies at the American Academy in Rome. In an unprecedented response, the organization in Rome refused to accept Williams. When the New York body then offered Williams a writing grant, he declined it.

⁸⁰ Leonard Lyons (1906–1976) wrote his syndicated column The Lyons Den for the New York Post from 1934 to 1974. Bennett Cerf (1898–1971), cofounder of Random House, wrote a daily humor column called Try and Stop Me for the King Features syndicate. John Sengstacke (1912–1997) was publisher of The Chicago Defender, where Hughes’s weekly column, Here to Yonder, had appeared since 1942. With nationally syndicated (white) columnists available much more cheaply, the Defender wanted to alter Hughes’s contract and reduce his salary.

⁸¹ The word “important” was probably written by Arna Bontemps after he read the contents of this letter.

⁸² The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel and published by Knopf, finally appeared in 1994.

⁸³ In 1964, Donald C. Dickinson (later a professor of library science at the University of Arizona, Tucson) published his doctoral dissertation, A Bio-bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1920–1960. In 1972, Archon Books published a revised edition to include Hughes’s work up to his death in 1967.

⁸⁴ On March 13, Bontemps responded: “Your letter of Monday (11) covers the matter of the Collected Poems and the Authorized Biography of L. H. with your usual thoroughness and feeling for essentials. I propose to do both, and I regard my authorization as a sacred trust.”

⁸⁵ See also Hughes’s letter to Emanuel of September 19, 1961.

⁸⁶ Constance M. Maxon, a freelance writer, was said to be working on an unauthorized biography of Hughes. The biography was never published.

⁸⁷ A housewife in Windom, Kansas, Faith Wilson (who was white) began writing Hughes in November 1951 after she casually took one of his books out of her local library. “I had no idea who you were,” she admitted to Hughes. They corresponded for more than ten years, with their letters offering an unusual perspective on race relations at the time. They finally met some years after the letters began, when Wilson and her husband visited New York.

⁸⁸ Hughes adapts the first line of William Wordsworth’s well-known sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us.” It was first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).

⁸⁹ The writer Emily Kimbrough (1899–1989), who contributed pieces to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines, also published fourteen books.

⁹⁰ Marcus Cook Connelly (1890–1980) won a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Green Pastures (1931).

⁹¹ The dinner was in honor of Lloyd K. Garrison, who had advised Hughes in his 1953 encounter with Senator Joseph McCarthy. In private practice as a lawyer, Garrison was also a veteran counselor of the NAACP and past president of the National Urban League.

⁹² A flamboyant Texas financier, Billie Sol Estes (1925–2013) was convicted on March 28, 1963, of four counts of mail fraud and one count of conspiracy involving $24 million in fraudulent mortgages. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

⁹³ Mike Todd was married at one time to the movie star Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011). The film Around the World in Eighty Days, which Todd’s company produced in 1956, won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Picture. Their marriage ended in 1958 when Todd died in a plane crash in New Mexico.

⁹⁴ Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. A former governor of Illinois, he ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic Party nominee for president in 1952 and 1956.