Middle Passages

IT WAS A JOURNEY undertaken reluctantly. He scarcely knew his father. James Hughes was always away—chasing fortunes in Cuba, in Mexico, anywhere but “the States, where you have to live like a nigger with niggers.” Writing decades later, the son would ponder his father’s attitude. “My father hated Negroes. I think he hated himself, too, for being a Negro. He disliked all his family because they were Negroes and remained in the United States, where none of them had a chance to be much of anything but servants.”

In the spring of 1919, after nearly a decade’s absence, James Hughes appeared in Cleveland and announced that his son would be spending the summer with him at his ranch in Mexico. From the start, the trip went badly. As the train rolled through an Arkansas hamlet, the boy peered curiously out the window of his compartment at a knot of black men on a street corner, only to have his father cut short the reverie: “Look at the niggers.” Things spiraled down from there. Mexico offered a respite from American racism, but there was no refuge from his father’s badgering or the monotony of book-keeping lessons. Eventually the boy did what he would do on a few other occasions in his life, when placed in situations of intense emotional stress: he suffered a complete physical breakdown. After three weeks in the local American hospital—a stay, he noted happily, that cost his penny-pinching father twenty dollars a day—he returned to Cleveland, determined that he would never again speak to his father.

And yet here he was, a year later, on another train bound for Mexico. He had graduated from high school and wanted to attend college, and with his mother living on a waitress’s wages, he had no choice but to turn to his father. As the train rattled southwest, he thought about his life, and about the strange counterpoint between his father’s contempt for black people and his own dawning feelings of racial kinship. At sunset, as the train rolled across a long bridge spanning the Mississippi River, he fished a pen from his pocket and jotted a poem on an envelope:

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the Flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

After an agonizing year in Mexico, the budding poet persuaded his father to pay for him to attend Columbia, ostensibly to study mining engineering. By the time he arrived in New York in September 1921, he was already something of a local celebrity. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” had appeared in July in The Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and been immediately reprinted in Literary Digest, a prestigious white journal. A second poem, “Aunt Sue’s Stories,” was published a month later. Editors and critics queued to meet this latest star in the New Negro firmament. There was a renaissance in Harlem, and Langston Hughes would be its bard.

HUGHES WAS NOT the only African American to find his way to Harlem in the wake of World War I. Between 1915 and 1920, more than five hundred thousand black Americans abandoned the states of the old Confederacy and headed north, drawn chiefly by the promise of well-paying jobs in northern industry. Surprised white southerners tried various devices to prevent the loss of their labor force, but once the migration had begun there was no stopping it. Over a million and a half black southerners moved north in the 1920s, doubling and tripling the black populations of cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York. The migration slowed during the Great Depression, but it swelled anew during the 1940s. By 1965, a half century after the onset of the exodus, more than ten million African Americans had relocated from the rural South to the urban North.

Needless to say, life in the promised land of the North rarely matched migrants’ exaggerated expectations. Last hired and first fired, black workers were confined to the least skilled, lowest paying, most dangerous industrial jobs. While freed from the scourge of legal Jim Crow, most found themselves confined to segregated ghettoes, where they paid exorbitant rents for overcrowded, decaying apartments and “kitchenettes.” While lynchings were rare in the North, violence remained a central feature of black life, with the day-to-day violence of living in blighted, impoverished circumstances punctuated by bloody riots. In 1919 alone, more than two dozen northern cities were convulsed by race riots, the bloodiest of which, in Chicago, left thirty-eight people dead and more than five hundred injured.

Yet even admitting all the violence, drudgery, and disappointment, most black southerners experienced northern migration as a dramatic improvement in their fortunes. Black people in the North voted. They sat where they chose on trains and streetcars. They sent their children to decent public schools. Working in steel mills and stockyards, railyards and factories, they earned more in a month than most black southerners could hope to earn in a year. Perhaps most important, they no longer had to endure the petty rituals of deference and degradation that defined daily life in the South. “I just begun to feel like a man,” a migrant in Chicago wrote to family members back in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. “It ’s a great deal of pleasure in knowing that you got some privilege. My children are going to the same school with the whites and I don’t have to umble to no one. I have registered—will vote the next election and there isn’t any ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’—it ’s all yes and no and Sam and Bill.”

Commentators at the time recognized the significance of the migration and speculated on its long-term consequences. “The intricate social and political problems occasioned by two dissimilar races in the United States have heretofore been deemed purely sectional matters,” a writer in The Atlantic Monthly observed in 1923. “The Negro race was found almost entirely within the Southern states, and it was always assumed that it would probably always remain there. Now suddenly the race, moved by some widespread impulse, begins of its own volition a migration northward which may alter the entire aspect of the racial question in America.” What the writer could not have foreseen is how contradictory the consequences would be. On the one hand, the appearance of black faces in previously white spaces fueled racist fears of “mongrelization.” Best sellers like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color warned that the once superior Nordic races were in danger of being swamped by inferior breeds—not only by African Americans but by hordes of swarthy immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The reach of such ideas can be measured in a variety of ways, from the rise of a powerful eugenics movement to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, a Reconstruction-era secret society that had been effectively suppressed by the federal government in the 1870s. In the realm of formal politics, concern with preserving the white character of American life expressed itself in two signature pieces of legislation, both passed in 1924: the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, which instituted the so-called one-drop rule of racial classification; and the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which slammed shut the “golden door” into the United States for all but a relative handful of immigrants from northern and western Europe.

On the other hand, the 1920s was a period of unprecedented racial exchange and cross-pollination. The same decade that produced “100 percent Americanism” and the one-drop rule also spawned the Charleston, Shuffle Along (a black musical revue that took Broadway by storm), and the new fashion of suntanning. The years of Madison Grant and the second Klan were also the years of Josephine Baker and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, of Al Jolson and George Gershwin. It was the Jazz Age, the era of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, house band at Harlem’s fabled Cotton Club, where white patrons—the club did not serve black people—could watch black musicians and dancers disport themselves in a jungle decor. In the realm of literature, the decade saw the publication of a slew of white-authored books and plays on black themes: Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, Du Bose Heyward’s Porgy, Clement Wood’s Nigger, Ronald Firbank’s Prancing Nigger, and Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, to name only a few. Most important, the 1920s spawned the Harlem Renaissance, an unprecedented outpouring of black art and literature. As Langston Hughes, one of the brightest stars of the renaissance, put it, this was “the period when the Negro was in vogue.”

How are we to account for the Negro “vogue,” especially in such a seemingly unpropitious time? Any answer must begin with World War I, which dealt a shattering blow to Western complacency. All of the modern West’s values and achievements—science and rationality, efficiency, industrial technique, faith in progress—had seemingly reached their logical conclusion in the absurdity of trench warfare, a vast machine for slaughtering human beings. The war provoked a visceral response in the cultural realm, with writers, artists, and musicians all reacting against a civilization that had apparently mortgaged its soul in pursuit of material gain. This revulsion, in turn, sparked new interest in those “primitive” folk who had allegedly avoided modernity’s spiritual blighting. In the backwash of the war, the very allegations that had long been used to demean people of color—claims about their irrationality, impulsiveness, emotionalism, passion—took on a positive hue. In historian David Lewis’s words, a stigma became a state of grace.

The war’s impact was amplified by deeper changes in Western, and specifically American, intellectual life, changes that recast popular understandings of race, setting the stage for the New Negro’s entrance. Perhaps most important was a broad rethinking of the nature and meaning of human variety, a movement away from biological explanations of human difference toward understandings grounded in culture and environment. The change began in the discipline of anthropology and was most closely associated with Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and his remarkable collection of students, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, and Zora Neale Hurston. From his earliest research among “Eskimos” in the 1880s until his death a half century later, Boas challenged prevailing ideas of fixed racial inheritance—the so-called natural limits of the racial mind. In a germinal 1894 essay, “Human Faculty as Determined by Race,” Boas denied that African Americans were a “lower type” of human, arguing that observed differences in accomplishment were best explained not by biology but in terms of social and cultural factors, including the extremely prejudicial circumstances in which black people were forced to live. Needless to say, a single scholarly paper did not sweep away racial prejudice or usher in a golden age of cultural relativism. It took years for Boas’s contentions to gain currency among his professional colleagues, and even longer for his insights to percolate into popular thought. (Ultimately it would take the horror of Nazism to discredit scientific racism fully.) Yet there is no denying the importance of Boas’s intervention. If we today discuss human variety primarily in terms of culture rather than race, and if we evaluate different cultures in relative rather than fixed or hierarchical ways, it is in large measure due to the intellectual transformation that Boas and his students wrought.

Thanks in part to W. E. B. Du Bois, who featured Boas’s work in the pages of The Crisis, the new anthropology was well known to the postwar generation of black writers and artists, as well as to the white publishers, patrons, and critics who promoted and reviewed their work. Its contribution to the New Negro movement can scarcely be overstated. Emerging ideas of cultural relativism legitimized difference, making it possible for black writers and artists to explore distinctive aspects of black life without apologetics or implications of inferiority. People who might previously have been dismissed as inferior or backward could now be valued on their own terms, as possessors of distinct cultures, with their own norms, values, and notions of beauty. This new impulse was institutionalized in the discipline of folklore studies, which emerged in the 1910s and 1920s, complete with its own professional society and journal, which Boas edited. Much of the material in the journal was collected by Boas’s own students, who embarked to the four corners of the world—Mead to Samoa, Benedict to Japan and the American Southwest, Zora Neale Hurston to Eatonville, Florida, the all-black town in which she grew up—to catalogue the cultures of premodern folk before they were lost in modernity’s relentless forward march.

The Boasian revolution was closely related to another momentous, if elusive, transformation in Western culture. If the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition marked the high tide of nineteenth-century beliefs in progress and material mastery, the years that followed brought a rising countercurrent, a growing awareness of the spiritual costs of progress, of the aridity and soullessness of the burgeoning industrial order. One of the signature attributes of this sensibility was a feeling of inauthenticity, of experiencing life at a remove, of having (as we still say today) lost touch with oneself amid the demands of daily life. Even before the coming of the Great War, Western writers and artists spoke of overcivilization, of life so constrained by culture and convention as to be sterile, decadent. There were echoes here of earlier movements, of European romanticism and American transcendentalism, yet the sheer pervasiveness of such ideas marked the early twentieth century as a cultural watershed.

Nowhere were fears of overcivilization more pronounced than in the arts. Chafing against what they saw as an exhausted, inbred tradition, a generation of writers, artists, and musicians cast about for fresh sources of inspiration. And where better to look than to those people who were ostensibly less civilized and constrained, those blessed primitives who still lived near to nature’s heart? The classic example is Pablo Picasso, whose encounter with African sculpture at a 1907 exhibition in Paris revolutionized twentieth-century painting and plastic arts. The same quest for authenticity and immediacy propelled Paul Gauguin’s flight to Tahiti and Antonín Dvořák’s appropriation of African American spirituals in his luminous New World Symphony. Just as scientists today search the world’s shrinking rain forests for unknown plants from which to produce new drugs to cure disease, European artists a century ago turned to “primitive” people in search of balm for a diseased soul.

Americans also looked to the folk as the remedy to a rootless, atomized age. In the years before the New Negro’s arrival, the U.S. literary scene experienced enthusiasms for Irish, Russian, even Bengali writing, all of which purportedly possessed an earthiness and soul lacking in Anglo-American letters. The early twentieth century also marked a pivotal chapter in America’s strange romance with Native Americans, who, having been conquered and dispossessed, could now safely be embraced as spiritual mentors. Charlotte Osgood Mason, the Park Avenue heiress who later served as a patron to Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, spent the 1910s pursuing Native Americans’ “intuitive” spirit. Mabel Dodge Luhan, hostess of New York’s most celebrated literary salon, actually moved to New Mexico, the better to connect with the “tribal oversoul.”

Set against this backdrop, the Harlem Renaissance seems not just predictable but well-nigh inevitable. For who was more earthy, more irrepressible, more natural than the Negro? “What American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color, music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods,” declared Carl Van Doren, literary editor of Century magazine and one of the first to herald what would become the New Negro movement. “If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are.” A critic for The Nation, discussing a performance by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, made the same claim about dance. Bojangles, the reviewer opined, offered Americans “the great desideratum of modern art, a clean shortcut to areas of enjoyment long closed to us by the accumulated rubbish of the culture route.” Philanthropist and art collector Albert C. Barnes, a patron of the New Negro movement, offered perhaps the fullest statement of the argument. “The white man in the mass cannot compete with the Negro in spiritual endowment,” he wrote. “Many centuries have attenuated his original gifts and have made his mind dominate his spirit. . . . The requirements for practical efficiency in a world alien to his spirit have worn thin his religion and devitalized his art. His art and his life are no longer one and the same as they were in primitive man.” What was needed, Barnes concluded, was a kind of “working alliance” between whites and blacks, reuniting mind and body, reason and soul, in a new America.

Today, more than eighty years later, black music, art, and literature are so integral to our understanding of American culture that it takes an effort of imagination to understand just how revolutionary these ideas were in their time. The vast American exhibition at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition had not included a single African American product or artifact; it simply never occurred to organizers that black people had contributed meaningfully to American civilization. For them, as for most white Americans, the Negro was a cultural foundling, a figure devoid of accomplishment or civilization beyond what had rubbed off from whites. A generation later, the Negro was embraced, at least in artistic and literary circles, as an evangel, whose message would heal a wounded world.

As if all this were not precondition enough, the period around the First World War was also the moment when Americans discovered Sigmund Freud. Freud only visited the United States one time and he loathed it, but Americans loved him. His understanding of personality as a continuous struggle between id (representing the primal and instinctual) and superego (representing culture and repression) dovetailed perfectly with the era’s fears about overcivilization. To Freud’s chagrin, it was in the United States that his books sold best and his influence was greatest, nowhere more than in New York City, which by 1929 boasted more than five hundred Freudian analysts. (Freud even had a dramatic impact on the embryonic advertising profession, that quintessentially American industry, where the economy of desire met the marketplace: Edward Bernays, whose 1928 book, Propaganda, was the bible of the American advertising profession, was the doctor’s nephew.) While Freud had very little to say on the subject of race—his patients, after all, were chiefly bourgeois women from Vienna—his theory was quickly racialized by Americans, with Negroes, inevitably, cast in the role of the id. Mapped onto American society, Freudian theory lent a scientific imprimatur to what artists and critics were already saying: that white civilization had been crippled by repression; that black people retained some privileged access to the primal, instinctive sources of behavior; that the psychic balance of society could somehow be restored by tapping back into blacks’ spiritual and emotional vitality.

Historians today no longer believe in Clio, the muse whom the Greeks believed directed the course of history. But there are moments in human experience at which the convergence of historical forces seems so orchestrated as to appear almost purposeful. The Harlem Renaissance offers a case in point. A multitude of circumstances converged in the first decades of the twentieth century: revolutions in literature, art, and the social sciences; a calamitous war; a mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. And all these developments came to a point in a single place. New York City was headquarters of the new anthropology and of Freudian psychology. It was home to the nation’s leading publishing houses and to a dizzying array of literary journals. It was the theatrical and artistic capital of the nation, and increasingly of the world. Most important, New York was home to Harlem, the “Mecca of the New Negro.” A product of historical accident, of a real-estate slump that compelled developers to sell to blacks housing built for whites, Harlem attracted migrants from every corner of the black world. By the end of the 1920s, this city within a city boasted nearly a quarter of a million inhabitants, making it not simply the largest black settlement in the United States but the largest black settlement in human history up to that time. Harlem was something new under the sun, a fit birthplace for a New Negro.

THE ARTISTS AND WRITERS associated with the New Negro movement came to Harlem by many pathways. Countee Cullen was a New Yorker, but Claude McKay hailed from Jamaica, where he had worked as a police constable. Nella Larsen came from Chicago by way of Denmark. Wallace Thurman had worked as a postal clerk in Los Angeles alongside Arna Bontemps. Zora Neale Hurston came from Florida, shaving a decade off her age en route, the better to capitalize on the enthusiasm for young black artists. Richard Bruce Nugent and Rudolph Fisher both came from Washington, D.C.; Nugent attended art school, while Fisher graduated from Brown. Jesse Fausset came from a blue-blooded family in Philadelphia, whose members spoke French at dinner. Aaron Douglas hailed from Kansas. Yet no one followed a more circuitous course than James Langston Hughes.

Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in February 1902. Like the subjects of so many of his later poems, he was of mixed racial origin. On his maternal side, he traced his descent to a white Virginia planter, who had scandalized slaveholding society by living as man and wife with a former slave of African and Indian descent. The couple’s children, who carried their mother’s surname, all grew up to be prominent political leaders, including the poet’s namesake, John Mercer Langston, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives. John’s older brother, Charles, Hughes’s grandfather, never held political office, but he was one of the most prominent black men in Kansas, serving as a newspaper editor and grand master of the state’s black Masonic fraternity. In the 1860s, Charles, whose first wife had died, married Mary Leary, a freeborn woman of African and Indian descent, whose first husband had died with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. The couple’s political convictions were reflected in the names they gave their children, including Nat Turner, after the slave revolutionary, and Dessalines, after the great Haitian general. Carrie, Langston’s mother, was the youngest.

Hughes inherited a proud pedigree from his maternal forebears, but little else. When Charles Langston died in 1892, he left no estate. Carrie, who had just completed high school, had to relinquish her dream of attending college, a setback that doubtless contributed to her perpetual sense of grievance. Her disposition was not improved by her 1898 marriage to James Hughes. Like the Langstons, Hughes was a product of sexual transgression: both his grandfathers were southern white men, one of them a slave trader. In his case, however, the alchemy of black and white produced a very different temperament. The noblesse oblige and threadbare respectability that prevailed in the Langston household had been replaced in James Hughes’s case by restless ambition, crass materialism and, if his son is to be believed, a frank contempt for black people. By the time he married Carrie he had already pursued a half dozen professions, including teacher, surveyor, law clerk, homesteader, store owner, and stenographer. By the time Langston was born he was on the move again, heading first to Cuba and then to Mexico, leaving wife and child behind.

Though he rarely spoke of it, Hughes had a lonely and impoverished childhood, made all the more confusing by his parents’ periodic, always abortive, reunions. For the most part, he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Leary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas, with his increasingly self-absorbed mother occasionally reappearing to reclaim him. In addition to Joplin and Lawrence, Hughes spent parts of his childhood in Buffalo, Colorado Springs, Mexico City (during one of his parents’ reunions), rural Indiana, Kansas City, and Topeka, where his mother, in an odd prequel to the Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka case of 1954, successfully fought to enroll him at the local white school. When his grandmother died in 1914, Hughes went to live with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois. They later moved to Cleveland, where he attended high school.

Like so many other lonely children, Hughes found a refuge in books; as he put it, he “believed in books more than in people.” His “earliest memories of written words” were of the Bible and of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose sonorous evocations of black “soul” echoed through several of his early poems. By his teenage years, Hughes’s tastes had gravitated in more democratic directions. He was well versed in the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, whose use of Negro dialect had ignited a debate that would flare anew in the 1920s. He devoured the work of Carl Sandburg, bard of the common man, and Vachel Lindsay, whose epic poem, “The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race,” a blackface performance piece full of drums and bellowing and severed hands, had shocked American audiences in the last days before World War I. (Lindsay would later claim to have “discovered” Hughes, based on a 1924 encounter in a restaurant, where Langston was working as a busboy.) He admired Mark Twain, whose penchant for sly satire and comic reversal would resurface in some of his own fiction. His most enduring loyalty was probably to Walt Whitman, that most American of American poets, a man who glimpsed beauty in the same humble places where Hughes would find it.

All the pain and perplexity of Hughes’s childhood was registered in the personality of the adult, producing the strange antinomies of his character: his legendary bonhomie and his abiding loneliness, his desperate need to belong and his extraordinary emotional reserve. Though he had sexual encounters with both men and women, he seems never to have had a sustained romantic relationship. While openness and accessibility are the hallmarks of his poetry, Hughes himself remained an enigma, even to those who knew him best. Wallace Thurman, his close friend and collaborator, despaired of ever understanding him. “You are in the final analysis the most consarned and diabolical creature, to say nothing of being either the most egregiously simple or excessively complex person I know,” he complained in 1929. In his novel Infants of the Spring, published three years later, Thurman created a “close-mouthed and cagey” character, Tony Crews, modeled on Hughes, of whom he wrote: “He fended off every attempt to probe into his inner self and did this with such an unconscious and naïve air that the prober soon came to one of two conclusions: Either he had no depth whatsoever, or else he was too deep for plumbing by ordinary mortals.”

The peculiarities of his upbringing also left a deep, if paradoxical imprint on Hughes’s racial identity. While his father despised black people, his grandmother was a race woman, who cherished her membership in one of black America’s most celebrated families. Yet her race pride was of a distinctly aristocratic stripe, which became more pronounced as the family’s fortunes declined. She refused to allow her grandson to play with other children, and strictly forbade the singing of spirituals, which she regarded as common. Denied membership in the local white Presbyterian church, she chose not to attend church at all rather than to join a black church. Hughes’s first brushes with the lower-class folk that he would celebrate in his poetry were fleeting, stolen affairs. He heard snatches of the blues during a childhood visit to Kansas City. He first heard black preaching while lodged with neighbors following his grandmother’s death. During his high school years in Cleveland, he worked as a soda jerk, rubbing elbows with migrants fresh from the South. While his mother bemoaned the migrants’ arrival, Langston thrilled to their music, their verbal jousting, “the thunderclaps of their laughter.”

It is difficult to psychoanalyze the living, let alone the dead, but it seems reasonable to suppose that Hughes’s reverence for common black folk first surfaced as a kind of adolescent rebellion against his own family, against both his father’s contempt and his grandmother and mother’s sniffing superiority. The people whom they had rejected would become the cornerstone of his art. He would celebrate the majesty of Negroes’ music, the curious power of their speech, the lyric grace of their bodies, forging through words the sense of identity and kinship that he had never found in his own family. While obviously a product of unique circumstances, this sensibility would prove a perfect qualification for membership in the New Negro movement, many of whose adherents were self-consciously rebelling against the artistic inhibitions and crabbed respectability of their older, more bourgeois forebears. In his work in Fire!, a short-lived journal for the “younger generation” of black writers, and his germinal 1925 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes would lash out at black elders who had so internalized white cultural and aesthetic judgments that they were no longer able “to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.”

Yet however heartfelt his identification with the Negro, Hughes’s perspective remained peculiarly that of an outsider. In contrast to Zora Neale Hurston, his one-time collaborator and a woman who seemingly embodied all the attributes of the “low-down folk” she described in her work, Hughes remained acutely conscious of the distance between himself and his subjects. The author of “Jazzonia,” the man who so brilliantly captured the rhythms and sensibility of jazz in words, was embarrassingly unmusical himself. The poet who painted the “Night-dark girl of the swaying hips” in “Nude Young Dancer” was so physically self-conscious that he rarely stepped onto a dance floor. Even as critics hailed him as the poet laureate of the Negro race—or “poet low-rate,” as one black critic huffed—Hughes remained the outsider looking in.

Had Hughes simply continued to mine this vein, his literary reputation would be secure. But he did much more. Perhaps it was moving to New York, or perhaps just escaping the shadow of his family, but the insistence on racial identity in his early poems was soon replaced by something richer and more ambiguous, an appreciation, even embrace, of his status as both insider and outsider. In poems like “Nude Young Dancer” or “The Weary Blues” (also the title of his first book), the voice is not that of the lithe dancer or of the drowsy pianist but of the poet himself, confronting a beauty that he recognizes but can never fully comprehend or possess. The keynote of such works is not celebration but poignancy, the sweet sadness of unconsummated desire. They are marvelous creations, these poems, suggestive at once of the wry wisdom of an old man and of a wounded, wondrous child, gazing out at black life from the window of a train.

BY THE TIME Hughes arrived, the Harlem Renaissance had already commenced. Claude McKay’s defiant sonnet, “If We Must Die,” cited by most historians as the opening salvo of the movement, was published in the Red Summer of 1919. The years that followed brought Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones and the fabulous success of Shuffle Along. As Hughes packed for Columbia, novelist Jean Toomer was teaching school on a plantation outside Sparta, Georgia, from which experience would come Cane, his lyrical “swan-song” to a “song-lit race of slaves.” As Alain Locke, self-proclaimed majordomo of the movement, put it, a new race was entering modernity, singing as it came.

Reflecting back on the renaissance in his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes would deliberately distance himself from the era’s enthusiasm, posing instead as the bemused bystander. “I had a swell time while it lasted,” he declared in an oft-quoted passage. “But I thought it wouldn’t last long. For how could a large and enthusiastic number of people be crazy about Negroes forever? But some Harlemites thought the millennium had come. They thought the race problem had at last been solved through Art plus Gladys Bentley. They were sure the New Negro would lead a new life from then on in green pastures of tolerance. . . . I don’t know what made any Negroes think that, except that they were mostly intellectuals doing the thinking. The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”

It was a characteristic pose, but it was also disingenuous. Looking back from the perspective of 1940, after a decade of depression and political upheaval, Hughes (and many other black writers and artists) could scarcely help but feel sheepish about the excesses and exaggerated expectations of the New Negro movement. At the time, however, he was a fully paid-up member. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find any individual whose work better captured the spirit of the age: the yearning for authentic experience; the contempt for civilized hypocrisy; the valorization of black soul.

Hughes also fully partook of the age’s fascination with Africa. In an era in which black people were supposed to possess a depth and vitality lacking in whites, it was inevitable that Africa would attract new interest. Africa was the taproot, the source of the Negroes’ distinct racial gifts. Evidence of this enthusiasm was everywhere in the 1920s, from the mounting of major exhibitions of African art in European and American museums to the career of Josephine Baker, whose bare-breasted “danse sauvage” made her the toast of Paris. For the better part of a century, the United States and Europe had sent missionaries to Africa to save the benighted primitives. In the artistic and literary climate of the postwar world, it increasingly seemed that Africans might save the United States and Europe.

The change in Western imaginings of Africa was neatly encapsulated in the history of a book that proved a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic, Anthologie Nègre, published in France in 1921 and later translated and published in the United States as The African Saga. A collection of African stories and folktales, the book was compiled by Blaise Cendrars, a Swiss-French avante-garde poet and novelist and prominent member of the Lost Generation of writers gathered in postwar Paris. Cendrars presented the stories as a compendium of traditional wisdom, to redeem an exhausted, soulless Western civilization. (Cendrars had seen the horrors of modern civilization close up, having lost his right arm in the trenches of the western front.) The most striking feature of the stories, however, is their origin. Cendrars did not collect them himself—sub-Saharan Africa was one of the few places in the world to which he did not travel—nor were they drawn from black-authored texts. Instead, they were culled from European travel accounts, most of them by missionaries. It is hard to imagine a clearer example of what historians of science call a paradigm shift, the process by which the same data comes to be interpreted in radically new ways. The same stories that had been offered in the late nineteenth century as proof of Africans’ ignorance and quaint superstition were adduced a generation later as proof of their insight and profound wisdom.

Inevitably, Africa became a touchstone of the black arts movement of the 1920s. The most obvious example is Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage,” with its poignant, double-edged interrogatory: “What is Africa to me?” But Africa also suffused the critical essays of Alain Locke, the graphic art of Aaron Douglas, the furious debate on the possibilities and perils of jazz music. (“Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?,” an essay published in The Ladies’ Home Journal, offers a classic example of the latter debate.) Jean Toomer’s Cane was set in Georgia, but Africa suffused the book; as Toomer put it, “The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa.” In “Black Death,” one of Zora Neale Hurston’s first short stories, the sight of a jack-o’-lantern was enough to send a character careening back to Africa: “ . . . [T]hree hundred years of America passed like the mist of morning. Africa reached out its dark hand and claimed its own. Drums. Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom beat in her ears. Strange demons seized her. Witch doctors danced before her . . .”

Needless to say, different individuals conceived of African Americans’ relationship to Africa in different ways. Though haunted by the continent, Cullen explicitly rejected it as an artistic source, staking his lineage on language rather than race. African American poets, he wrote, “had more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African heritage.” Critic Alain Locke developed an elaborate theory of African classicism, a tradition of discipline and control that contrasted with the spontaneity and exuberance of African American art. (Locke tried to convert Langston Hughes to his view, but Hughes was having none of it; if it was “so complex” to be primitive, he quipped, “one had almost as well be civilized.”) Suggestions that African traditions might be mined as a source of inspiration and fresh motifs for classical art and music were dismissed with contempt by Zora Neale Hurston, who argued that such refinement simply killed the original, like pouring hot water on flowers. What African Americans really needed to do, she said, was to import some untutored Africans to remind them how to sing and dance properly. Journalist George Schuyler dismissed the whole business. The current enthusiasm for authentic “Negro Art,” he argued, served only to reassure “the Nordics” that the Negro was a savage, that “even when he appears to be civilized, it is only necessary to beat a tom tom or wave a rabbit’s foot and he is ready to strip off his Hart Shaffner & Marx suit, grab a spear and ride off wild-eyed on the back of a crocodile.”

Hughes shared the era’s fascination with Africa, invoking the continent in several of his early poems. For the most part, he hewed to the prevailing neoromantic view of Africa as racial source, wellspring of a primal black vitality still carried in the “blood” of African Americans. The best example—surely not the best poem—was “Danse Africaine,” written shortly after his arrival in New York City:

The recurring image of tom-toms is worth pondering. Tom-toms were everywhere in the Harlem Renaissance, usually as symbols of racial authenticity, the thumping lifeblood of a race. Yet when viewed historically, the trope is less a symbol of authenticity than of the continuing, paradoxical engagement of African Americans with Western discourses of race. The term “tom-tom” was originally imported into the English language from Urdu during the British colonization of India, though by the late nineteenth century the term was usually used in reference to Africa. Tom-toms were ubiquitous in the work of H. M. Stanley and other Dark Continent travel writers, symbolizing savagery or imminent war. The association of tom-toms with the Negro race was reinforced at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, where millions of visitors were entertained by Dahomean drummers in an ersatz African village. Among those who visited the Dahomean exhibition was Hughes’s literary hero, Vachel Lindsay, who incorporated drums into his celebrated 1914 poem, “The Congo.” Whether Hughes ever saw Lindsay perform his blackface epic is not clear, but he certainly saw O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, which gave the equation of race and tom-toms an additional Freudian gloss. Throughout the play, tom-toms sound at a steady seventy-two beats per minute, the rate of a human heartbeat, growing in volume as Jones (famously portrayed by Charles Gilpin in the 1920 New York premiere) was driven into the jungle and slowly stripped of his clothing and his sanity. All of which is to say that when Hughes invoked tom-toms in his early poetry, he was participating in a long Western tradition—a tradition that would be carried into the next generation by Tarzan movies and the Ramar of the Jungle serial.

WHAT ULTIMATELY DISTINGUISHED Hughes from most of his contemporaries was not his stereotypical ideas about Africa but the fact that he actually went there. After an undistinguished year at Columbia, he quit school and set out to see the world, just as his literary mentors—Whitman, Twain, Lindsay, Sandburg—had done before him. After working for a time on a Staten Island produce farm, he acquired sailor’s papers and secured a berth on a ship. Unfortunately, the ship onto which he signed was a derelict, moored up the Hudson along with other surplus vessels belonging to the wartime Shipping Board. Hughes spent a lonely winter on the frozen river, performing odd jobs and gambling with other sailors stranded on the ghost fleet. In his free time, he wrote poetry and read fiction, including Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Finally, in the early summer of 1923, he secured a berth on a real freighter, the West Hesseltine, bound for West Africa.

As the ship cleared the lighthouse at Sandy Hook, Hughes looked back at the American shore, aflame in the sunset, and reflected on his life. Moved by an impulse he did not fully understand, he went below and fetched a crate of books, which, in the haste of his departure, was virtually the only thing he had brought with him. Standing on the fantail, he consigned the books, one by one, to the deep, watching each flutter in the breeze and disappear in the ship’s wake. (In an early draft of The Big Sea, though not in the final version, Hughes confessed to being unable to part with one book: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.) “It was like throwing a million bricks into the sea,” he wrote, a symbolic jettisoning of the pain and perplexity of his childhood, the confusion of being black in a white country, the debilitating feeling of experiencing life at a distance. There would be no need of books where he was bound. Africa was the “real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.”

In years to come, Hughes would offer different accounts of his African journey. The romantic rendering of black bodies in The Big Sea—“the bare, pointed breasts of women in the marketplace,” “the rippling muscles of men loading palm oil and cocoa beans”—bore little relationship to the sentiments he expressed at the time. “You should see the clothes they wear here,” he told his mother, in a letter written after the ship first made landfall in Dakar. “[E]verything from overcoats to nothing. I have laughed until I can’t. No two people dress alike. . . . It’s a scream.” Both versions differed from an unpublished 1925 autobiographical fragment, “L’Histoire De Ma Vie,” prepared at the behest of Carl Van Vechten, who was writing the foreword of The Weary Blues, Hughes’s first book of poetry. “It was a gorgeous trip,” he wrote, striking the pose of vagabond poet—“a ship full of young life touching the edges of a dark, living land.”

The broad outlines of the trip are known. The West Hesseltine—in The Big Sea, Hughes called it the S.S. Malone—set out on June 13, 1923, and returned in late October, more than five months later. The forty-man crew—as drunken and dissolute a lot as ever sailed the ocean, by Hughes’s account—included a few men of color, including Hughes, a pair of Puerto Rican stewards, and George, a dark-skinned, blues-singing pantryman from Kentucky, who had left his career as valet to a female impersonator to go to sea. A fat Dutch captain, a figure straight from the Katzenjammer Kids, presided over the motley crew. The ship also carried six passengers, including five white missionaries bound for the Congo, a timorous bunch who watched the crew’s dissolution with ill-concealed horror. The final passenger was a black tailor, a follower of Marcus Garvey, bound for Lagos, where he hoped to open a school and business. While the “missionaries carried Bibles and hymn-books,” the Garveyite carried “bolts of cloth, shears, and tailoring tools.” He “had long worshipped Africa from afar and . . . had a theory of civilization all his own,” Hughes recalled. “He thought that if he could just teach the Africans to wear proper clothes, coats and pants, they would be brought forward a long way toward the standards of our world.”

In Freetown, the ship added a hundred Kru men and boys to its complement, in keeping with local custom and still prevalent ideas about the dangers to white people of working in the African sun. The Kru worked the ship for the duration of its stay on the coast, loading and unloading cargo, swabbing decks and polishing brass, cooking and cleaning for crew and passengers. Kru men earned just two shillings per day, a fraction of what Hughes, the lowest-paid crew member, earned; Kru children, two of whom assumed the poet’s messmate duties, worked for free. At the close of each workday, the Kru showered naked beneath a saltwater hose on the afterdeck, a practice that naturally horrified the missionaries. “The Africans were very polite, however—more so than the Nordics—and, respecting the missionaries, they turned their backs and hid their sex between their legs, evidently not realizing it then stuck out behind.” Whatever discomfort he himself felt, Hughes got over it quickly, and several of the Kru men became good friends. For him, as for generations of Western travelers to West Africa, the Kru played the role of cultural interpreters, explaining many things he might otherwise have misunderstood or overlooked completely. It was one of the Kru men, probably his friend Tom Pey, who first explained to the disconcerted poet why Africans regarded him as a “white man.”

Over the course of three months, the West Hesseltine visited more than thirty ports, from Dakar in French Senegal to Luanda in Portuguese Angola. Some were major coastal cities; others were flyblown outposts carved from the jungle. (At Boma, eighty miles up the Congo River, the ship tied not to a dock but to a massive baobab tree, conceivably the same tree on which missionary William Sheppard had carved his initials a generation before.) Hughes described several of the stops in “Ships, Sea and Africa,” an impressionistic prose poem published in The Crisis. The piece was essentially a litany of exotic images: the “billowing robes” of “Muhammedans”; villages “hidden in deep cocoanut groves”; surfboats filled with “black naked paddlers, their superbly muscled bodies, damp with sea-spray, glistening in the sunshine.” Most of the stops were too brief to allow exploring, and on those occasions when Hughes and his shipmates did get shore leave they made straight for bars and brothels. Describing the visit to Carl Van Vechten two years later, Hughes remembered “the vile houses of rottening women in Lagos” and the “millions of whiskey bottles” bobbing in the ship’s wake, but such images did not appear in “Ships, Sea and Africa,” which rendered the continent as an enchanted land.

In his two surviving letters from the journey and in most of his statements after returning, Hughes described the voyage as “a delightful trip,” full of novel sights and colorful incident. “Old sailors” described the West African run as “the worst trip in the world,” he told Van Vechten. “But for me it wasn’t. For me it was the ‘Great Adventure.’” Only rarely did he allow a glimpse of deeper emotions. In one British colony, he was befriended by a mulatto boy, Edward, the offspring of an African mother and a white merchant banker, who had since returned to England. Edward and his mother were no longer welcome in the white compound in which they had lived; at the same time, they were ostracized by other Africans. The youth took to Hughes, peppering him with questions: “Could we take him away with us? Was it true that in America the black people were friendly to the mulatto people?” Hughes had little to offer in response, besides his address and the suggestion that he write. One letter did arrive, but it went unanswered. “I have a way of not answering letters when I don’t know what to say,” the poet confessed. Years later, he would craft the episode into a short story, “African Morning.”

Part of what made the episode so heartrending to Hughes was his sense of identification with the boy, not only as a man of mixed descent himself but also as an individual searching for a sense of identity and home. Traveling to Africa was supposed to have resolved the problem. “Africa!” he had cheered, when the “dust-green hills” of the continent first materialized on the eastern horizon. “My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples! And me a Negro!” But the resolution he sought eluded him. To borrow a phrase from contemporary novelist Thomas Wolfe, Hughes was discovering that “you can’t go home again.” He had crossed the ocean, jettisoned his books, penned poems about palm trees and tom-toms, yet he remained a stranger, unable to bridge the great historical chasm that separated him and other African Americans from Africa.

It was an unsettling predicament, at once familiar and radically new. Nineteenth-century African American visitors to Africa had obviously experienced their own feelings of dislocation and disillusionment, but they had traveled under different auspices, with different, less personal, expectations. As Tom Pey, who had seen African Americans come and go, put it, they came “mostly as missionaries, to teach us something, since they think we know nothing.” Even a secular black nationalist like Martin Delany assumed the mantle of missionary in Africa, projecting a great black nation-state, enriched by modern education, science, commercial agriculture, and other “Mechanical and Industrial Occupations.” Hughes, living on the other side of the great intellectual revolution of the early twentieth century, came not to share the blessings of modern civilization but to flee them, to escape the ambiguity of black life in America and reclaim a better, truer self. But Africa had rebuffed him, as it would rebuff other visitors who presumed to claim it as their own.

Innumerable African American travelers in Africa have experienced such moments of disillusionment, moments bringing them face-to-face with Africa’s unfamiliarity and their own painful Americanness. Some have responded with resignation, others with rage. Hughes responded, characteristically, by translating alienation into art. Though Africans’ refusal to accept him “hurt me a lot,” it also suited him, placing him in the same position of loving outsider that he occupied in relation to the African American folk he had long celebrated in his poetry. Probably the best example is “Burutu Moon,” an impressionistic account of a village on the Niger Delta, published in The Crisis. Walking amid thatched huts and mango trees under a low moon, Hughes heard the sound of drums, the thumping tom-toms he had conjured so often in his poetry. It was “the drums of Omali,” his guide explained. When Hughes asked to see them he was politely but firmly rebuffed: the ceremony was not for the eyes of a “white man.” “I climbed the straight ladder back to the deck of my ship,” the essay concluded. “Far off, at the edge of the clearing, over against the forest, I heard the drums of Omali, the Ju-ju. Above, the moon was like a gold-ripe fruit in heaven, a gold-ripe fruit too sweet for the taste of man.”

Hughes struck the same wistful tone in a quartet of short stories, written in 1926, shortly after his enrollment at Lincoln University. The stories, recounting the experiences of the crew of the West Ilana, a freighter obviously based on the West Hesseltine, “plowed warmer, more sensual waters than he had ever sailed before,” as the poet’s biographer Arnold Rampersad has noted. All turned on the inability of “civilized” Westerners, white and black, ever fully to possess Africa, which Hughes personified as a luscious but elusive black woman. In “Bodies in the Moonlight,” for example, two shipmates, one plainly based on Hughes himself, vainly vied for the affections of a strangely enigmatic African woman, revealingly named Numina, or spirit. In “Luani of the Jungle,” the bedazzled Westerner was a French poet, who had fallen under the spell of a West African student named Luani. Again and again, the Frenchman tried to leave her, but each time he returned. “I write poems about her and destroy them,” he explained to the story’s narrator. “I leave her and I come back. I do not know why. I’m like a madman and she ’s the soul of her jungles, quiet and terrible, beautiful and dangerous, fascinating and death-like. I’m leaving her again, but I know I’ll come back . . . I know I’ll come back.”

A PARK AVENUE HEIRESS, Charlotte Mason epitomized the early-twentieth-century American search for authentic experience and primitive vitalism. Her late husband, Rufus Osgood Mason, was a pioneer in the field of “psychical” research, publishing books on such topics as hypnotism, spiritualism, and the “subliminal self.” Charlotte shared his psychical interests, but she devoted most of her energy to “primitive” peoples, whom she believed retained access to reservoirs of spirit and harmony lost to modern man. Prior to World War I, her interest focused chiefly on Indians: she underwrote the first collection of Native American music, and even lived for a time among Plains Indians herself. Initially, she disdained African Americans as too tainted by white civilization to be interesting, but in the 1920s she was swept up in the Negro vogue. Her initial plan, conveyed to her in a “mystical vision,” was to establish a “Harlem Museum of African Art,” a “great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa, across which the Negro world, that our white United States had done everything to annihilate, should see the flaming pathway . . . and recover the treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on the earth.” When that plan did not materialize, she set her sights more modestly, offering herself instead as a financial patron and spiritual counselor to young Negro writers. Through the offices of Alain Locke, whom she met at a lecture on African art, she acquired two promising protégés: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

For historians and literary scholars, Mrs. Mason (or Godmother, as she insisted on being called) has come to symbolize all the unsettling aspects of the 1920s Negro vogue: paternalism, decadence, exoticism. According to Hurston, Mason sat in a “throne-like chair” and ate caviar and capon while her clients sat “on footstools at her feet” and regaled her with “the raucous sayings and doings of the Negroes farthest down,” those who were “utterly sincere in living.” Yet Mason’s support clearly served Hughes. Most obvious, it gave him the financial stability he had always craved. From their first encounter in 1927 (when she graced the penniless poet with a fifty-dollar bill) to their final breakup in 1930, Hughes received a generous monthly stipend, as well as a host of perquisites—stationery, theater tickets, the services of a typist, even the use of her town car and driver. The relationship also fed Hughes emotionally. Not only did Mason confirm his belief in the soul beauty of the black race, but she also provided the kind of lavish praise and doting attention that he had never received from his own beleaguered mother, much less from his father. He was her “winged poet Child,” a “shining messenger of hope for his people,” a “golden star in the Firmament of Primitive Peoples,” whose achievements would dazzle the heavens.

Zora Neale Hurston played Mrs. Mason as the tricksters she described in her books might have played her, offering fulsome gratitude in her presence and then ridiculing her behind her back. Hughes lacked Hurston’s emotional armor. Awed by Mason’s generosity and spiritual grandeur, he struggled to become the artist she envisioned. When she divined his calling to write a novel, he wrote a novel. When she dismissed a poem as lacking soul or smacking of self-consciousness, he dutifully tried again. The hard-earned perspective that he had achieved in his relationship with African American folk culture (and later with Africa) did not suit Mason at all. He must allow the spirit of his African and Native American ancestors to possess him. He must burn away all the civilized debris that cluttered his art and life.

Writing in The Big Sea a decade later, Hughes recounted the inevitable breakup. The precipitant was a gift that he had not adequately acknowledged, but behind the charge of ingratitude was Mason’s belief that the poet was not owning his gifts, not taking full advantage of his responsibility to create a truly racial art. “She wanted me to be primitive and know and feel the intuitions of the primitive,” he wrote. “But unfortunately, I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging through me, and so I could not live and write as though I did. I was only an American Negro—who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa—but I was not African. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem.” The account captured the burden of the dispute, but the matter-of-fact tone could not have been more misleading. Devastated by Mason’s rejection, Hughes penned abject letters, begging her forgiveness. “I love you,” he wrote. “I need you very much. . . . You must not let me hurt you again. I know well that I am dull and slow, but I do not want to remain that way. I don’t know what to say except that I am truly sorry that I have not changed rapidly enough into what you would have me be.” Mason took him back, and even gave him $500 for a trip to Cuba, an experience that she hoped would reawaken his primitive sensibility. But the seeds of hurt and suspicion continued to sprout, and by the middle of 1930 she had permanently expelled him from her life, provoking another emotional and physical collapse.

For all her expostulations on Hughes’s divine gifts, Charlotte Mason had failed to recognize his genius. She wanted him to claim his racial birthright, not realizing that he was fundamentally a poet of loss; she wanted him to be whole, never understanding the depth of his incompleteness. It was during the turmoil of 1930 that Hughes produced “Afro-American Fragment,” arguably the single greatest poem he ever wrote:

So long,
So far away
Is Africa.
Not even memories alive
Save those that history books create,
Save those that songs
Beat back into the blood—
Beat out of blood with words sad-sung
In strange un-Negro tongue—
So long,
So far away
Is Africa.
Subdued and time-lost
Are the drums—and yet
Through some vast mist of race
There comes this song
I do not understand
This song of atavistic land,
Of bitter yearnings lost
Without a place—
So long,
So far away
Is Africa’s
Dark face.

IN HUGHES’ S ACCOUNT in The Big Sea, his abandonment by Mrs. Mason was of little long-term significance, since the Harlem Renaissance had already run its course. “We were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes,” he wrote. “Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noël Coward. Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money.” The claim, ratified by countless historians, was not in fact true. More books by black writers were published in the 1930s than in the preceding decade. Prizes and patronage remained abundant. Nonetheless, the early 1930s did mark a transforming moment in the history of the black arts movement, as the dark cloud of depression settled over the land. With Americans, white and black, standing in breadlines, with half of Harlemites unemployed, the exuberant hopes of the 1920s, the dreams of revolution through art, seemed self-indulgent and silly. “[N]o cultural advance is safe without some sound economic underpinning,” admitted Alain Locke, one of the New Negro’s most extravagant boosters, “and no emerging elite—artistic, professional or mercantile—can suspend itself in thin air over the abyss of a mass of unemployed stranded in an over-expensive, disease- and crime-ridden slum.”

The early 1930s also marked a watershed in the career of Langston Hughes. In the aftermath of the break with Mrs. Mason, his writing veered sharply toward political radicalism. Hughes had always fancied himself a progressive, a tribune of the common man, in the tradition of Whitman and Sandburg. Like other black writers, he was touched by the radical currents coursing through Harlem in the 1920s, and occasionally published his work in socialist journals like The Messenger and The Workers’ Monthly. But his radicalism had remained muted in his poetry, partly because of the influence of Mrs. Mason but also because of qualities of his temperament—his eagerness to please, his difficulty expressing anger, his gift for seeing beauty in even the bleakest circumstances. In a few poems, his anger burst forth, most obviously in “Johannesburg Mines,” a mocking rejoinder to Jessie Fausett, literary editor of The Crisis, who had rejected one of his early Africa poems as too angry. “In the Johannesburg mines / There are 240,000 / Native Africans working,” he wrote. “What kind of poem / Would you / Make out of that?” For the most part, however, Hughes eschewed overtly political themes, focusing instead on the laughter, resilience, and beauty of Negro people.

All that changed abruptly in the early 1930s. In later years, Hughes would insist that he never joined the Communist Party, but there is no doubt that he spent most of the Depression decade in party circles. He participated in the John Reed Club and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, both C.P. fronts, and made The New Masses the primary outlet for his poetry. He first unveiled his new persona in “Merry Christmas,” a withering attack on Western imperialism in Africa and Asia, published at the end of 1930. In “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria,” he turned his eyes to the United States, juxtaposing images of diamond-draped women eating watercress in the newly opened luxury hotel with images of back-bent millions shivering beneath the tracks of the elevated train. The poem ended with a revolutionary Annunciation: “Hail Mary, Mother of God! / the new Christ child of the Revolution’s about to be born. / (Kick hard, red baby, in the bitter womb of the mob.)”

For Hughes, as for so many of his contemporaries, the revolutionary road passed through Scottsboro, Alabama. In March 1931, nine young black men were hauled from a freight train and falsely accused of raping two white women. In the farcical trials that followed, eight were condemned to death, and the ninth was sentenced to life in prison. The case became a cause célèbre, especially after International Labor Defense, an arm of the Communist Party, assumed control of the defense. Hughes raised money for the case and even traveled to Scottsboro to meet the young men, from which came the book Scottsboro Limited, featuring a quartet of poems and a one-act play. If there were any doubts about Hughes’s new political affiliation, the book erased them. In the poem “Scottsboro,” he placed the eight condemned men in a tradition of martyred freedom fighters stretching from Christ to Lenin. The politics of the play were even broader, with a finale in which black and white workers joined together under a red flag to smash the electric chair, before joining the audience in singing the “Internationale.”

In 1932, Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union along with a troupe of African Americans to participate in a party-sponsored film on American race relations. The venture quickly collapsed in acrimony (much to the delight of the mainstream American press), and troupe members trickled back to the United States, bearing tales of disappointment and betrayal. Hughes, however, was too seasoned a traveler—and too blithe a spirit—to succumb easily to disillusionment. “Quite truthfully, there was no toilet paper,” he later wrote. “And no Jim Crow.” He spent nearly a year in the Soviet Union, most of it in Central Asia, where he examined the country’s policy toward its dark-skinned minorities. His observations (which Soviet officials collected and published as a short book) were glowing: after centuries of czarist oppression, the Soviet Union had abolished all forms of racial discrimination and created a genuinely equalitarian society. Other realities of Soviet life— famine, stifling bureaucracy, brutal suppression of political dissent—were left unremarked. Hughes’s reticence is especially noteworthy given that his main traveling companion was Arthur Koestler, whose 1940 novel, Darkness at Noon, a searing account of a political show trial, would mark an epoch in the international Left’s renunciation of the Soviet Union. Hughes actually attended the Turkistan trial on which Koestler partially based his novel, but the experience left him unmoved. When Koestler tried to engage him in a discussion about the accused, he had only a flippant reply. He “looks guilty to me,” he reportedly said, “of what I don’t know, but he just looks like a rogue.” For Koestler, this vapid response was almost as depressing as the trial itself.

As Hughes’s politics became more revolutionary, his poetry became less so. While poems like “Goodbye Christ” and “Good Morning Revolution” still relied on vernacular language—Hughes never lost his ear for how ordinary people speak—they were written in plain style, with none of the jazz experimentation that had marked his earlier work. The sentiments were direct and didactic; the tone was angry rather than wistful. Hughes’s friend Carl Van Vechten, who had helped to arrange the publication of his first volume of poetry in 1926, tried to call him back to original gifts. “The revolutionary poems seem very weak to me,” he wrote in 1933. “I mean very weak on the lyric side. I think in ten years, whatever the social outcome, you will be ashamed of them.” The remark would prove prophetic, but Hughes at the time had little interest in reverting to an aesthetic that he, like other leftist critics of the 1930s, had come to disdain as bourgeois. In an address “To Negro Writers,” prepared for the first American Writers’ Congress in 1935, he disparaged poets—presumably including his former self—who focused on black people’s capacity “to laugh and sing and dance and make music.” What was needed was not irresponsible bohemianism but “practical” poetry, poetry that would inspire revolutionary consciousness “on the solid ground” of the working class.

Hughes remained a Soviet loyalist until 1939. He joined the procession of left-wing intellectuals to Spain, extolling the heroism of Republican forces in such poems as “Letter from Spain.” He defended the show trials of “the Trotskyite-Bucharinite traitors” and hailed the U.S.S.R. as a bulwark against fascism. For him, as for so many other American leftists, revelation of the Nazi-Soviet pact was a crushing blow. At that moment, Hughes renounced his faith in Communist revolution. He also renounced revolutionary poetry. “I am laying off political poetry for a while,” he wrote a friend in early 1940, affecting something of his old insouciance. “[T]he world situation, me-thinks, is too complicated for so simple an art. So I am going back (indeed have gone) to nature, Negroes, and love.”

The Big Sea, the book that would offer the fullest account of Hughes’s visit to Africa, was written in the aftermath of that declaration. As Arnold Rampersad has noted, the autobiography is best read as an act of literary self-rehabilitation. Written in a breezy, light-hearted style, the book was intended as “The Saga of a Negro Poet”—not the revolutionary poet of the 1930s, but the youthful poet of the 1920s, struggling to claim kinship with a graceful, beautiful race. (Hughes strategically ended the book with his 1930 divorce from Mrs. Mason, saying nothing about his Depression-era links to the party or his long sojourn in the Soviet Union.) The 1923 journey to Africa provided the book’s centerpiece. Hughes rendered the trip as a kind of “innocents abroad,” a tale of youthful adventure and racial self-discovery. He recounted jettisoning his books from the fantail of the ship. He described his colorful cabinmate, George, the hijinks of his pet monkey, Jocko, and the Garveyite tailor setting off with bolts of cloth, determined to capture Africa’s vast, untapped market for pants. And he rehearsed the conversation with the Kru man who called him a “white man.”

In keeping with the book’s purposes, Hughes steered clear of explictly political discussion. Yet the account was less innocent than it appeared. Threaded through the tropical sunsets and swaying palms was a devastating portrait of Western imperialism, though one rendered in poetical rather than polemical language. In one extraordinary sentence, Hughes offered a catalogue of images to describe his ship’s passage down the African coast. In form and tone, the sentence hearkened back to his 1923 prose poem, “Ships, Sea and Africa,” but inserted between the “singing boatmen on dark rivers” and “distant beat of obea drums in the night” was a litany of a different kind: “ten-year-old wharf rats offering nightly to take sailors to see ‘my sister, two shillings,’ elephantiasis and swollen bellies under palm trees, white men with guns at their belts, inns and taverns with signs up, EUROPEANS ONLY, missionary churches with the Negroes in the back seats and the whites who teach Jesus in the front rows.” Hughes may have reverted to themes of “nature, Negroes, and love,” but he had not forgotten what he had learned in the 1930s.

Like the Marxist he had once been, Hughes focused on questions of production and exchange. The men with glistening skin and rippling muscles were not just objects for aesthetic contemplation but workers, paid a pittance to load the bounty of Africa—“palm oil and cocoa beans and mahogany”—into the holds of alien ships. In exchange, Africans received “machinery and tools, canned goods, and Hollywood films”—the detritus of Western civilization. In such passages, Hughes revealed again the great historical gulf that separated twentieth-century African Americans from their nineteenth-century predecessors. For men like Paul Cuffe, Martin Delany, and Henry McNeil Turner, commerce was an agency of progress and civilization, but for Hughes, in contrast, commerce was a cancer, slowly devouring the continent. The West Hesseltine (rechristened the S.S. Malone in the book) became a symbol of Western fraud and rapacity. After Africans in a French colony declined to accept the crew’s British money, one of Hughes’s shipmates hit upon the idea of using United Cigar Store coupons, which bore a likeness to French francs. When local traders accepted the coupons as tender, the crew poured ashore and “bought up the town,” steaming away before the ruse was discovered. At another port, a pair of young prostitutes rowed out to the ship, “hoping to make some money.” While one of the girls was claimed by the bo’sun, the other was thrown to the floor of the crew’s quarters, “stripped of her flowered cloth,” and gang-raped, while thirty sailors “sat up on bunks to watch, smoked, yelled, and joked, and waited for their turn. Each time a man would rise, the little African girl on the floor would say: ‘Mon-nee! Mon-nee!’ But nobody had a cent . . .”

The Big Sea said little about the journey back to New York, which ended with the summary firing of the entire crew. Other hands would offload the ship’s cargo, including 1,770 casks of palm oil from Nigeria, nearly 5,000 bags of cocoa beans from the Gold Coast, and 100 massive mahogany logs from the Ivory Coast, each weighing several tons. Hughes had watched in wonder as Kru men, bobbing alongside the ship, fastened chains around those floating logs so that the ship’s crane could winch them into the hold. Writing about the spectacle seventeen years later, he was still impressed with the beauty and danger of the work, which he compared to the bullfights he had once watched in Mexico. But he also reflected on the forces that compelled men to cut down their ancient forests and risk being crushed to death between wood and steel hull for two shillings a day. Some of those logs would become chests of drawers. Others would be joined to ebony and ivory, also looted from Africa, and fashioned into pianos. For the author of “The Weary Blues,” it made for a sobering image: an aging jazzman, wringing a melody from an instrument “made of wood and life, energy and death out of Africa.”

LANGSTON HUGHES was just twenty-one when he visited Africa in 1923. By the time he returned, he was nearly sixty. Much had changed in his absence. Africa was ablaze with the promise of independence; in 1960, the year of his return, no fewer than seventeen African colonies joined the ranks of independent nations. In Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, even apartheid South Africa, a generation of young writers offered the world a new vision of the richness and complexity of modern African life. Many, indeed most, of these emerging African writers counted Hughes as one of their formative influences.

Over the years, Hughes had received occasional letters from aspiring African writers. He had a strong following among the Francophone writers of the Négritude movement, who found in his evocations of the soul beauty of the Negro race a keynote for their own developing aesthetic. His writing had an even greater impact in South Africa. At a time when the South African government, under the auspices of its Grand Apartheid policy, was tightening urban influx laws and forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of “redundant” Africans from cities to desiccated ethnic homelands, a generation of African and “Coloured” writers—Peter Abrahams, Bloke Modisane, Richard Rive, Can Themba, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Henry Nxumalo—found in the work of Hughes and other African American writers, musicians, and artists a precious model of black urbanity and achievement. Many of these writers were associated with Drum magazine, a monthly published in Sophiatown, a mixed-race slum outside Johannesburg, which had already been targeted for removal by the state. The very first issue of Drum included Countee Cullen’s “Heritage”—“What is Africa to me?”—and subsequent issues featured the work of other Harlem Renaissance-era poets, including Hughes.

In 1954, Henry Nxumalo, Drum’s editor, wrote to Hughes and asked him to serve as a judge in the magazine’s annual short-story contest. The invitation could hardly have come at a better time for the poet, whose career was at a low point. Hughes’s literary reputation had plunged in the years after World War II, as the high priests of high modernism dismissed his work as too accessible, simple, not serious literature at all. He had also endured a recent political humiliation, appearing in 1953 as a cooperating witness before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations. In his prepared statement and in responses to questioning, Hughes acquitted himself better than most, expressing contrition for his youthful “errors” but defending the American values of free speech and open dissent. Still, there was something more than a little unseemly in the spectacle of the poet agreeing, under McCarthy’s prodding, on the need to remove his books from the shelves of overseas libraries opened by the U.S. Information Service lest they infect Africans with dangerous Communist sentiments.

The invitation from Drum buoyed Hughes’s spirits, and he threw himself into the task, reading not just the submitted entries but as much recent African writing as he could get his hands on. By 1955, he had begun work on two books. The First Book of Africa was a collection of African short stories for young readers, an audience that Hughes had long cherished. An African Treasury: Articles, Essays, Stories, Poems by Black Africans was a more conventional anthology, which afforded American readers one of their first glimpses not only of the Drum contingent but also of such writers as Léopold Senghor, Efua Sutherland, and future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. During the last years of his life, Hughes would become a friend and mentor to many of the writers featured in the books, extending to them the same encouragement and genial companionship he had always extended to younger African American writers.

In December 1960, Hughes returned to Africa for the first time in thirty-seven years to witness the installation of his old Lincoln University classmate, Nnamdi Azikiwe, as governor general of newly independent Nigeria. In the eighteen months that followed, he made two more visits, attending a festival of Afro-American and African arts in Nigeria in late 1961 and an African writers conference in Uganda six months after that. He had obviously come up in the world since his messmate days, sleeping in first-class hotels and receiving encomiums at state dinners, yet he was much the man he had always been—unpretentious, approachable, full of enthusiasm and wonder. Everywhere he went, he was surrounded by young African writers, who, in the words of The New York Times, “haunted his hotel the way American youngsters dog favorite baseball players.”

As in his first visit, Hughes found the continent at once exhilarating and disillusioning. The promise of African independence thrilled him, yet he recognized the problems of poverty, corruption, and creeping authoritarianism. He was particularly alarmed by the violent chaos of Lagos, which he described as “a combination of the most enticing travel folders on the tropics and Dürer’s impressions of Dante’s Inferno.” He was also struck, as he had been four decades before, by moments of miscommunication between visiting African Americans and their African hosts. But any disappointment he felt was masked with his trademark irony and self-deprecation. “In the new African countries, honest, I thought everything was roses and sunrise and dew,” he wrote. “How naïve can even an ancestor-worshipper like me be?”

During his 1962 visit to the African writers’ conference in Uganda, Hughes made a side trip to Accra, Ghana, to dedicate the new U.S. Information Service library. Hughes was no naïf (though he could play the role) and he had no illusions about the reasons for the invitation. Africa had become important terrain in the global Cold War, with Americans and Soviets vying to persuade African people of the superiority of their respective social systems. Not surprisingly, the Soviet campaign emphasized American racism, contrasting the debasement of black people in the United States with the U.S.S.R.’s enlightened policy toward “national minorities.” To counter such efforts, the U.S. government organized a variety of exchanges and tours by prominent African Americans, including Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, both of whom toured Africa under the auspices of the State Department. Hughes’s dedication of Accra’s new U.S.I.S. Library was part of that effort, though it was also a distinctly ironic event, coming as it did just nine years after his books had been removed from U.S.I.S. libraries around the world. Hughes, characteristically, expressed no bitterness, offering instead a moving reflection on the relationship of African and American freedom. Perhaps mindful of his old Kru friend, Tom Pey, who had complained of African Americans who came “to teach us something, because they think we know nothing,” Hughes stressed that he had come “to offer an exchange of knowledge (not merely to give in the old patronizing sense)”—an exchange that promised not only to benefit Africa, but also to reinvigorate America’s own values of freedom and equality. “Black Africa today is sending rejuvenating currents of liberty over all the earth reaching even as far as Little Rock, Birmingham, and Jackson, Mississippi,” he declared.

Hughes visited Africa for the last time in 1966, a year before his death, when he was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to head the American delegation at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. Though cast as a celebration, the festival unfolded in grim circumstances. The wave of postindependence coups d’état that had begun with the C.I.A.-sponsored overthrow of Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba had claimed his old friend Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was ousted by the Nigerian military in early 1966. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, global symbol of African independence, would fall a few months later. The situation in the United States, while less catastrophic, was also deeply distressing to Hughes. Despite the achievement of landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation, the racial situation grew increasingly polarized. The ghetto uprisings that began in the northeast in the summers of 1963 and 1964 reached a climax in the cataclysmic Watts riot of 1965, and few doubted that more “long hot summers” awaited the nation. In the realm of art, a new generation of black writers had come to the fore, led by LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), whose angry, abusive writing Hughes found depressing and distasteful. “The most talented of the young Negro writers,” he warned, “have become America’s prophets of doom, black ravens cawing over carrion.”

Hughes delivered the keynote address to the World Festival of Negro Arts against this backdrop. If “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” represented the prolegomenon of his career, then “Black Writers in a Troubled World” was his valedictory. Addressing an audience of writers from all over the globe, Hughes reviewed the three pillars of his creed: love of humanity, faith in art, and reverence for the Negro race, that endless river of blackness that flowed in and through him. “If one may ascribe a prime function to any creative writing,” he declared, “it is, I think, to affirm life, to yea-say the excitement of living in relation to the vast rhythms of the universe of which we are a part, to untie the riddles of the gutter in order to closer tie the knot between man and God. As to Negro writing and writers, one of our aims, it seems to me, should be to gather the strengths of our people in Africa and the Americas into a tapestry of words as strong as the bronzes of Benin . . . the beat of the blues, and the Uhuru of African freedom, and give it to the world with pride and love.”