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

[On Langston Hughes, 20 East 127th Street, New York 35, N.Y. stationery]

December 22, 1966

Dear Arna:

Since LITANY AT ATLANTA by Du Bois has been anthologized so much, what would you think of possibly substituting for it in our updated edition, the poem enclosed from DARKWATER which is little known, THE PRAYERS OF GOD.³² Let me know.

Hughes placed this sticker near his signature in this letter to Bontemps. (illustration credit 35)

In parentheses beneath the title of THE PINCHOT MANSION might we not put where or what the mansion is? I have no idea what the poem is about, or where or what Buddenbrook or Forsyte refers to, or what Puchinello symbolizes. So a clue would do no harm.³³

Also in the same poem, you probably have a misprint in the third line from the bottom:

Or Forsyte stepl three tiers … etc.

What should the third word be, step, or what? Let me know, so I can make copies for the manuscript.

I saw Roy Wilkins at the Taconic party and had fun quoting him the LeRoi Jones poem:

“Roy Wilkins is an eternal faggot.…”

which amused him ³⁴.…. All the establishment was at the party: Kenneth Clark,³⁵ James Farmer,³⁶ Urban League folks, etc. But SNCC is now nix.³⁷

L. Hughes

P.S. Little Alice Walker came to see me yesterday.³⁸ She is really “cute as a button” and real bright. She brought her young Jewish NAACP lawyer fiancé with her. They’re getting married in the Spring and will live and work in MISSISSIPPI, Jackson Branch. Mine is her first important publication (and her first story in print) so I can claim her discovery, too, I reckon.…. As well as Bethune, Patterson, King—first publication, too, also Milner³⁹.…. Be SURE to read the John Williams story. Most evil of all!⁴⁰

TO ARNA BONTEMPS [TLS]

[On Langston Hughes, 20 East 127th Street, New York 35, N.Y. stationery]

January 5, 1966-7-7-7
(Got to get used to it)

Dear Arna: I reckon you’re back up North in God’s (?) country by now. How’re things in the deep dark Southland?….. Do you ever see ETC.? Don Hayakawa’s magazine.⁴¹ He just sent me the September issue with a provocative article of his on WATTS. I always think of him and Horace |Cayton| and the wild Rosenwald gang in Chi in one breath—Vandy Haygood, etc.—and somehow Karamu—maybe wilder in some ways, if the truth be known. Shades of DOLCHE VITA, U. S. A.⁴².…. Somebody ought to (NO!) write a book on the good<->time side of do-gooding. (Or am I out of my mind?)

Did I tell you that the night after Aunt Toy |Harper| was rushed back to the hospital in an ambulance, her oldest friend, our house guest for the holidays <(>for the past twenty years<)—> (Will Vodery’s widow, Rosana from Saratoga)⁴³ went to the clinic at Harlem for a headache at 9 A. M. and by 5 hadn’t come home so we got worried about her and went looking—and she had been LOST in Harlem Hospital! They’d kept her, but nobody could find her for 24 hours (and she weights 250). Mignon Richmond from Salt Lake<,>⁴⁴ who was going home the next day<,> was allowed to go all through the wards looking for her. No luck, no records. Absolutely LOST. New York hospitals are so crowded they’d put her and lots of other patients on cots in a corridor until beds were available, but nobody knew what corridor where? What with Aunt Toy being gravely ill, and Emerson’s nephew-in-law dropping dead just around the corner, we’ve had quite a holiday week between Christmas and New Year’s.… And now up comes a community committee INSISTING on giving me a testimonial for my Birthday—and me saying now (of all times) is not the time.<X> Wait a little while, till I’m 75 anyhow, and the days are less hectic. I haven’t recovered from the Detroit and Brooklyn ones yet—and have enough scrolls and plaques to last me a life time.… Anyhow, HAPPY NEW YEAR to you-all! Lang

<X> I do NOT now want NO testimonial—although they claim I will not have to be involved AT ALL. (But, having gone through them before—)<. Help!>

P. S. One cheerful note: Just got today the loveliest simpliest very small very handsome gold fleur-de-lis single insignia on vermillion-red holiday card from Josephine Baker whose elegance is still superb and who seemingly is still in her chateau at Les Milandes in spite of hell and high water and 14 children. So maybe from somewhere came the half million francs to pay off the mortgage.⁴⁵ I hope so.

P. S. 2—Aunt Toy is constantly under oxygen—and sedation.⁴⁶

¹ After The Strollin’ Twenties aired on television, some viewers were indignant. One such response came from Milton Larkin (1910–1996), an African American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and singer. Larkin wrote to Hughes on February 25: “Why did you show Harlem as such a happy place? Why didn’t you show the poor schools, tenements, rats, roaches, crime, lack of community interest, the cop on the block (who isn’t black), the number runners, the junkies, the street gangs, the exploitation by the local merchants, the slumlords and the kids hopefully looking for a way out?”

² Hughes edited The Book of Negro Humor (Dodd, Mead, 1966). He called the volume “the first definitive well-rounded collection of American Negro humor.”

³ James Brown (1933–2006) was often called “the Godfather of Soul.”

⁴ Duke Ellington’s band provided some of the music for The Strollin’ Twenties.

⁵ William Demby (1922–2013), a Fisk University graduate, was then living in Rome. He wrote and published his novels Beetlecreek (1950) and The Catacombs (1965) during his time there.

⁶ Robert Hayden (1913–1980) won the Grand Prize in Poetry at the first World Festival of Negro Arts. Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, he was educated at Detroit City College (later Wayne State University) and the University of Michigan, where the British-born poet W. H. Auden encouraged him. His volumes include Words in the Mourning Time (1970) and Angle of Ascent (1975). In addition to serving as a professor at Fisk, from 1976 to 1978 he was consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. He was the first African American to hold this position.

⁷ After spending April 1966 in Dakar, Hughes left Senegal to begin his reading tour of Africa at the request of the U.S. Department of State.

⁸ Arminta Adams played the piano at the Dakar Festival.

⁹ The poet Margaret Danner (1915–1984) traveled to Africa in 1966 on a Whitney Fellowship. In Dakar, Senegal, she read some of her poems at the Festival.

¹⁰ Sidney Williams was the activist executive secretary of the Chicago Urban League from 1947 until 1955, when conservative board members removed him.

¹¹ Raoul Abdul (1929–2010), Hughes’s secretary at this time, was a formally trained concert singer, an actor, and a promoter of classical music concerts in Harlem.

¹² A reference to John V. Lindsay (1921–2000), who became mayor of New York City in January 1966. At six feet four inches, Lindsay was at the time probably the tallest man to have held that position.

¹³ Hughes wrote the poem “Emperor Haile Selassie” for the Ethiopian ruler. It was later published in Negro Digest (November 1966).

¹⁴ Blanche Knopf, Hughes’s main editor at Alfred A. Knopf for most of his career, died in her sleep on June 6, 1966, in New York after a struggle of many years with cancer.

¹⁵ The librarian Jean Blackwell Hutson (1914–1998), a longtime friend of Hughes, was curator and then chief of what became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at the main branch (on 135th Street) of the New York Public Library in Harlem.

¹⁶ In 1967, Little, Brown published Hughes’s The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present. It included Bontemps’s best-known story, “A Summer Tragedy.”

¹⁷ Hughes and Milton Meltzer published Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment (Prentice Hall, 1967).

¹⁸ Hughes and Bontemps were working on the second edition of their 1949 anthology, The Poetry of the Negro. This edition would be published in 1970. No poem by Jack Micheline (1929–1998) appears in the later volume.

¹⁹ The poetry of Frank Horne (1899–1974) was published in The Crisis and Opportunity as well as various anthologies. In 1925, his “Letters Found Near a Suicide” took second place in that year’s Crisis literary contest (Countee Cullen won first place, and Hughes was third). Later a member of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” Horne held several positions within the U.S. Housing Authority.

²⁰ Fenton Johnson (1888–1958) is considered a key forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he published his first volume of poetry, A Little Dreaming, in 1913, followed by Visions of Dusk (1915) and Songs of the Soul (1916). His work also appeared in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine.

²¹ Hughes and Bontemps did not include Lloyd Addison’s poetry in their anthology. In London, Paul Breman later published a small volume by the avant-garde writer Russell Atkins (b. 1926).

²² Calvin Hernton (1933–2001), a professor and frequent commentator on racial, social, and literary issues, was probably best known for his volume Sex and Racism in America (1965).

²³ “Alabama,” by Julia Fields (b. 1938), appears in The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1970.

²⁴ Knopf published Hughes’s The Panther and the Lash: Poems for Our Times (1967) after his death that year.

²⁵ Hughes offered Knopf the following statement for possible use in publicizing the book: “The Panther and the Lash is a collection of poems by Langston Hughes in which is distilled the essence of the emotional undercurrents that have rocked America in our present decade of racial dilemmas, freedom marches, sit-ins, speeches, prayers, violence and non-violence, loud longings and silent hopes that now involve the entire nation.”

²⁶ Arthur Huff Fauset (1899–1983), a trained anthropologist and published author, was the half-brother of Jessie Redmon Fauset.

²⁷ Hughes was misled here in this spelling of Fauset’s middle name as “REDMOND.” It was “Redmon.” The mistake made its way into both editions of The Poetry of the Negro (1949 and 1970), as well as into publications by several other editors and writers.

²⁸ Vilma Howard’s poem “The Citizen” was included in New Negro Poets: USA. Associated with The Paris Review in the 1950s, she lived for many years in Europe.

²⁹ The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) is now known as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

³⁰ Also a playwright and an actor, Lewis G. Alexander (1900–1945) of Washington, D.C., was one of the poets featured in 1926 in the sole issue of Fire!! He also published work in The Messenger and Opportunity, and in Countee Cullen’s special number on black poets for Palms (October 1926).

³¹ Federico García Lorca’s tragedy Yerma was written and first staged in 1934. (See also letter dated August 30, 1938.)

³² Despite this comment, “A Litany at Atlanta” and not “The Prayers of God” was included in the second edition of The Poetry of the Negro (1970).

³³ No poem entitled “The Pinchot Mansion” or any with these references appears in the volume.

³⁴ Hughes quotes the first words of LeRoi Jones’s “Civil Rights Poem,” which was included later in Jones’s Black Magic … Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). Wilkins was then executive director of the NAACP.

³⁵ A study involving the conflicted responses of African American children when offered a choice between black dolls and white dolls, prepared by the psychologists Kenneth Clark (1914–1983) and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark (1917–1983), stressed the harm done by segregation to the self-esteem of black children. This work influenced the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

³⁶ James L. Farmer, Jr. (1920–1999), was a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

³⁷ The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), formed in April 1960 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, organized sit-ins and was also involved in the Freedom Rides of 1961, the 1963 March on Washington, and the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.

³⁸ Hughes published the first story to appear in print by Alice Walker (b. 1944) when he included “To Hell with Dying” in The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present (Little, Brown, 1967). Walker later won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple (1982). In 1967 she married Melvyn Leventhal, a lawyer, and moved with him to Mississippi.

³⁹ The Best Short Stories includes Lebert Bethune’s “The Burglar,” Lindsay Patterson’s “Red Bonnet,” Woodie King, Jr.’s, “Beautiful Light and Black Our Dreams,” and Ronald Milner’s “Junkie-Joe Had Some Money.”

⁴⁰ John A. Williams’s “Son in the Afternoon” also appears in the volume.

⁴¹ Samuel Ichiye “Don” Hayakawa (1906–1992), an English professor, a university president, and a U.S. senator from California, edited (1943–1970) ETC, the journal of the International Society for General Semantics. He lived for several years in Chicago, where his close friends included Horace Cayton. Hughes refers to the article “Reflections on a Visit to Watts” by Hayakawa and Barry Goodfield about the Watts Riots in Los Angeles that left thirty-four persons dead between August 11 and 17, 1965.

⁴² A reference to the film director Federico Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960).

⁴³ Will Vodery (1885–1951), an African American composer, created vocal and choral arrangements for the original Broadway production of Show Boat (1927).

⁴⁴ Mignon Richmond, a graduate of Utah State Agricultural College, was active in the NAACP and YWCA.

⁴⁵ Josephine Baker (1906–1975), born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, was a singer, dancer, actress, and patriot who was awarded the Croix de Guerre, a military honor, for her work in the French Resistance in World War II. Arriving as an unknown in Paris in 1925 with La Revue Nègre, she soon built an enormous following. Eventually she became a French citizen and a revered figure. In the 1960s she was also known for her “Rainbow Tribe,” a group of a dozen or more children she adopted from all over the world. They lived together at her Château des Milandes in the Dordogne. About this time she was dogged by reports of financial insolvency.

⁴⁶ Toy Harper collapsed in 1966, between Christmas and New Year’s, and was taken to Sydenham Hospital in Harlem.

⁴⁷ The house at 20 East 127th Street was undergoing major repairs.

⁴⁸ Milton Meltzer, Hughes’s collaborator on Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment (1967), wrote Langston Hughes: A Biography (Crowell, 1968).

⁴⁹ With a large section on Hughes, Jean Wagner published Poètes nègres des États-Unis; le sentiment racial et religieux dans la poésie de P. L. Dunbar à L. Hughes (1890–1940) (Librairie Istra, 1963) in France. The study appeared in the United States as Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (University of Illinois Press, 1973). Raymond Quinot’s Langston Hughes, ou l’Étoile Noire (Ed. du C.E.L.F., 1964) was published in Belgium.

⁵⁰ Editions Robert Laffont, the French publisher of L’Ingénu de Harlem, the first French book based on Hughes’s Simple stories, invited him to visit Paris to help launch the volume.

⁵¹ Quoting from Irving Berlin’s classic song “Always” (1925), Hughes replaced the final “always” with its French equivalent, “Toujours,” to bid goodbye to his best friend. On May 1, Bontemps replied: “I think one whose career in writing has reached the point of warm reflection and the reading of biographies of himself has earned residence in Paris, prior to residence in glory.” Hughes entered the hospital for tests a few days later.