The challenge Langston Hughes presents is not that his work is obscure, his life operatic or achievements invisible—rather Hughes as person and poet presents too much, is far too accessible. His personal history seems clearer than Dickinson’s, less tragic than Dunbar’s; like Whitman’s, his writing seems to need no explanation. Here, of course, lies the danger with Hughes, a writer who remains what I call “deceptively simple.” Or, as a student of mine unwittingly, even intuitively, reversed, Hughes is “simply deceptive.” For all his clear language, precise diction, and even his famous folk character Jesse B. Semple, Hughes is anything but.
The early life of the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race”—a title Hughes wore with pride—speaks of the Great Migration of the early parts of the century. Born in Joplin, Missouri, he was uprooted and lived with his grandmother in Lawrence and Topeka, Kansas. Most people don’t think of black folks when they think Kansas; fewer would dream of poetry.1 As a fellow Topekan, however, I feel a special connection to Hughes, especially given this early and at times alienating portion of his life. Something in his poems’ easygoing yet reserved tone feels forged from that Kansas background: what might be called a pragmatic skepticism has been an open heartland secret to anyone who has lived there; is what over the years has kept Kansans going through drought and locusts and floods; and is what ultimately kept Bob Dole from winning the 1996 presidential election. (Though this Kansas stoicism, steady on the plow, learned from his Kansas mother and grandparents, may be exactly what helped Barack Obama win the 2008 election.)
Kansans understand this skepticism verging on cynicism—and admit it to no one. We choose instead to export wheat and tornadoes and, oddly enough, black poets. Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Topeka though she and her parents lit out for the greener pastures or at least taller skyline of Chicago by the time she was a few months old; this move to the big city also characterizes Kansans, including Hughes, who eventually settled and died in Harlem, U.S.A. Like Joyce’s Ireland or Baptist Heaven, Kansas is a place defined by its absence, by distance. Not just the leagues that place contains, but the lengths from which we can see it well.
With this distance in mind, perhaps we can better understand Hughes’s relation to his work and arguably his life—what I call his poetics of refusal. Perhaps Hughes’s painful Kansas past, which he often describes as lonely, may help explain the “distance” sometimes found in his poems, as well as their underlying melancholy. In many ways, this ironic distance simply recasts a blues aesthetic that says
Du Bois’s double consciousness becomes in Hughes’s hands a double negative that for the blues author and audience adds up if not to a positive, then to a “dark” humor: Laughing to Keep from Crying, as Hughes named a collection of short stories; even more refusal is found in the title of his novel of the life of a boy in Kansas, Not without Laughter. For Hughes and us “blues people,” survival means the small span between despair and laughter, between having and not, between buying a gun to off yourself and not being able to afford the bullets.
The difference between the blues figure and the hard-luck, absurdist stereotypes of minstrelsy so prominent in the early parts of the century is one of form—and audience. Both are things Hughes understood innately, and responded to—almost to a fault, in the case of audience, sometimes crossing the line he elsewhere drew between poetry and lighter verse. Of course, the innovations that Hughes achieved, in championing the folkways and form of the blues, seem obvious or easy now, but when he published The Weary Blues (1926) and even more important, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), he caught hell. The black bourgeoisie came down on Hughes the hardest, terming him the “Poet Low-rate of Harlem” for writing about common folk, what today’s tastemakers might call “negative images”: janitors, adulterers, juke jointers, bad men, loose women, real people people people. And what advice he gave them people! “Put on yo’ red silk stockings, / Black gal. Go out and let the white boys / Look at yo’ legs.” Even today such images get read as “literal advice” and not, as Hughes called it in The Big Sea, an “ironic poem.”
“We know we are beautiful. And ugly too,” Hughes wrote in his groundbreaking manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), arguing either against whitewashing our images to make ourselves look better, or against (as he signifies on the unnamed “young poet,” likely Countee Cullen) wanting to be white. After climbing the mountain, Hughes dug in, breaking first ground, trying to dig his way back to the motherland by way of the Mississippi.
Interestingly enough, for such a landlocked childhood, Hughes’s first famous poem was “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”—a classic-sounding, long-lined, Whitmanesque reverie. In many ways the poem foreshadows so-called literary Garveyism, a returning to African roots—and in taking the “white man” out of Whitman, Hughes taps into a larger zeitgeist, taking us through the rivers Congo, Nile, the “Euphrates when dawns were young,” and, ultimately, a river of the dead that, unlike the mythical Lethe, refuses to forget. Or to ignore his blackness.
Listen to the reason Hughes gives for writing the poem on a journey to see his expatriate father in Mexico: “All day on the train I had been thinking about my father and his strange dislike of his own people. I didn’t understand it, because I was a Negro, and I liked Negroes very much.” This long memory and literary acceptance of his own blackness, of the “motherland” as opposed to his “father’s land,” is part of his appeal, and a defining quality of Hughes’s long literary life.
But in describing his early life in his stunning autobiography The Big Sea (1940), Hughes leaves out plenty. Arnold Rampersad, Hughes’s biographer, literary executor, and champion, sums this up this way: “In The Big Sea, deeper meaning is deliberately concealed within a seemingly disingenuous, apparently transparent, or even shallow narrative. In a genre defined in its modern mode by confession, Hughes appears to give virtually nothing away of a personal nature.”3 Rampersad links this reticence, let’s call it, to a sort of racial code, “a gamble” by Hughes—“who depended almost desperately on the smiling surface he offered to the world”—to please white publishers while speaking to black readers who held decoder rings. Particularly when dealing with issues of his white patron (whom he had a terrible break with) or his sexuality (conveniently left undefined or defined as “unattached” by most biographers), Hughes is less than forward—we learn little of his Eastern European female roommate in Paris or, more to the point, his days on board (and below deck on) a merchant marine vessel.
For me, Hughes’s reserve is less the smiling face of the slave than an elaborate, elegant storying technique found in Hughes’s poetry and in much great art. To read The Big Sea is to learn dissembling as an art form—not as pop escapism but as a populist escape hatch—a refusal to give in, to give out, and especially to give away anything. To read his poetry or The Big Sea for traces of Hughes’s life is to deny the doggedly unautobiographical nature of his work. As he himself wrote about his second book of poems, “I felt [it] was a better book than my first, because it was more impersonal, more about other people than myself, and because it made use of the Negro folk-song forms, and included poems about work and the problems of finding work, that are always so pressing with the Negro people.”4
While certainly class figures here, I want to highlight Hughes’s first given reason for the success of Fine Clothes: “It was more impersonal.” In our current confessional climate where the memoir meets the talk show, it may be hard to read the impersonal as desirable, or even achievable. But if we let go of our preconceptions about poetry being “personal,” or at least “autobiographical,” we can see Hughes championing a poetry for all people that is not private—a verse that is truly “free” and open to the public. There is an anonymity to his poetry, or rather, a pseudonymity, that may startle us. “I have known rivers: / Ancient, dusky rivers.” This “I” isn’t, or isn’t just, Hughes. Yet, if we look at his fellow modernists—the “extinguishing of personality” attempted by Eliot, or even William Carlos Williams’s lexicon of “thingness”—Hughes stands, if not alone, then out, creating something new, vernacular, blues based, as American as lynching and apple pie.
This merging of the American promise and its pratfalls—a fragmented violence in one hand, a homemade wholeness and even wholesomeness in the other—Hughes negotiates most of his life. Just as his grandmother’s first husband, who fought alongside John Brown for Bleeding Kansas (who Hughes was named “Langston” after), Hughes adds his voice to our many Americas. Examining his long career from the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance to his death in 1967 during the Black Arts movement, we discover many different Hugheses as well: socialist, student, reporter, world traveler, novelist, sailor, dramatist, busboy, dishwasher, poet. The Langston Hughes Reader (1958) contains multitudes—poems, plays, blues, translations, autobiographies (plural), songs, and, my favorite, “pageant.” This short history of black people in the Western world—straightforward, celebratory, funny, serious—takes in all the ways Hughes saw we are. Only Hughes of his modernist contemporaries—except perhaps Williams—would attempt such broad American history.
Odd then, or perhaps fitting, that Hughes would come under fire from the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. His more overt political poems, especially of the 1930s when he went to and wrote about the Spanish Civil War and Russia, came back to haunt him—in particular “Goodbye Christ,” which raises Marxism and not the cross as deity. For decades the religious right dogged Hughes, even though the poem had been published decades before in the rather obscure Negro Worker (and perhaps even without his knowledge).5 Before the committee, Hughes recanted, and avoided the blacklist, so to speak. (Here we might agree with Bob Kaufman when he asks, “Why are all blacklists white?”)
In contrast to Paul Robeson’s standoff with HUAC and subsequent troubles, Hughes’s giving in seemed like a betrayal. He would go on to repress most of the work from this period, excising if not excusing it—to our great loss. Even if he was not blacklisted, black bars cover a great amount of what we think we know about Hughes. Hughes’s poetics of refusal becomes a bit more understandable in this context—not just as the black tradition of signifyin’, whether talking trash or “rhetorical understatement”—but as the kind of talk Othello used to win over Desdemona’s father after he’d won her.
Such cagey talk did not serve him well in the straight-talking Black Arts movement of the 1960s. We were impatient, sick of rhetoric—action was called for—as Amiri Baraka (né LeRoi Jones) wrote, “We want ‘poems that kill.’” This metaphoric murder, described as part of what the critic William J. Harris calls the “Jazz Aesthetic,” involved offing the literary fathers, just as Baraka would say John Coltrane “murdered the popular song.” Hughes took plenty of hits, yet few in the movement had read deeply enough to know of Hughes’s radical work.6
But one wonders, even with the excised 1930s, what had folks read? Hughes had been speaking in a black idiom from The Weary Blues to his book-length Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), and even in his latter work. Somebody should have told ’em Hughes was getting down all along. Caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea, Hughes, like Louis Armstrong, represented an earlier, seemingly bygone era—and though both artists responded to and even cleared space for radical changes such as bebop, both did so in such a way as to make their virtuosity simple. Deceptive.
What gets lost in most critiques is the depth of emotion Hughes expresses, despite or precisely because of the “impersonal” quality he possesses. He paints a community, a “Lenox Avenue Mural,” not a self-portrait. This is why The Big Sea, a book that changed my life, looms large on the Hughes horizon. For like any picaresque tale—and this is largely how he constructs his life—Hughes’s autobiography reveals much exactly by its gaps, by its discrete molecular leaps, by what he refuses to say.
Take The Big Sea’s opening paragraph when Hughes throws his books in the sea, as dramatic an opening of a writing life as any:
[It] was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart when I threw the books into the water. I leaned over the rail of the S. S. Malone and threw the books as far as I could out into the sea—all the books I had had at Columbia, and all the books I had lately bought to read.
By this Hughes achieves a sort of wry anti–ars poetica, a refusal of the “inkellectual.” In refusing book learnin’ he accepts something else: people.
It wasn’t only the books that I wanted to throw away, but everything unpleasant and miserable out of my past: the memory of my father, the poverty and uncertainties of my mother’s life, the stupidities of color-prejudice, black in a white world, the fear of not finding a job, the bewilderment of no one to talk to about things that trouble you, the feeling of always being controlled by others—by parents, by employers, by some outer necessity not your own. All those things I wanted to throw away. To be free of. To escape from. I wanted to be a man on my own, control my own life, and go my own way. I was twenty-one. So I threw the books in the sea.7
Here we see Hughes’s emotion, in a confession, or at least a protest. Black, Africa bound, and twenty-one, Hughes does not burn books that offend but drowns books to defend. He also participates in the African American tradition of negation as affirmation—“Bad Is Good” one chapter is titled.8 Such a powerful statement as Hughes jettisoning his books has gotten overlooked by many critics, largely because it flies into the headwind of current African American criticism, which emphasizes literacy.
By this I certainly do not mean to say literacy has not factored into black lives and, naturally, books; or that Hughes, the prolific author, advocated any sort of illiteracy. On the contrary, Hughes, in his poetry and in this and other symbolic acts in The Big Sea, embodies and embraces what I call aliteracy. By aliteracy I mean a trickster-style technique that questions not just Western dichotomies (bad/good, black/white) but provides a system beyond which one can be defined, even by writing, or by literacy or ill-.
In other words, Hughes prefers the ability to read situations and power structures more than books—what Houston Baker describes, in speaking of Caliban in The Tempest, as “supraliteracy.”9 For Hughes, aliteracy approaches more what we say when we say “she read him,” as in figgered him for a fool. Not just Caliban but Prospero figures here, in that Prospero’s rejection of his books, thrown similarly into the sea, recognizes shifting societal orders and their relation to the word. Often literate and literary authors, whether Prospero as character or Hughes as writer, may abandon their words in order to gain a new world. (This is something seen with the fetish, aliteracy’s very embodiment.) Through it we take W. H. Auden and his “parable” of the poet existing in a dialogue between creative, beautiful Ariel and what Seamus Heaney calls “the countervailing presence of Prospero, whose covenant is with ‘truth’ rather than ‘beauty,’”10 we see how Hughes sidesteps such a truth/beauty dialogue altogether. Instead, Hughes sides with Caliban—reserving the right to curse, to cannibalize, to talk out both sides of his neck.
How significant, then, that Hughes, perched on a voyage back to Africa, Old World, motherland, throws his books into the sea! In a reversal of the Middle Passage, Hughes creates a rite of passage, turning around the paradigm of the slave stolen from Africa and taught (or, more likely, forbidden) to read English. He also turns inside out the idea of the ignorant, illiterate black who don’t know no better, Massa—a figure that, despite their best intentions, African American critics seem to reinscribe when they write of literacy and the history of white authentication of black authors. Hughes rejects it all, booklearnin’ both black and white. Often I wish I could do the same.
I am tired of ideas. Tonight I prefer lives, especially lies. I am sick of confession, thought, analysis. Throw the books into the sea and let them swim for it like Shine, the mythic black porter who refused to stay on the sinking Titanic.
Of course, the Titanic famously did not allow black passengers, including the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, who, folk songs report, danced the Eagle Rock when he found out about his close call.11 In drawing the color line, the ocean liner thought to be unsinkable proved an apt metaphor for the hubris of modernity versus a nature it cannot contain, as well as for the failure of racist pride. (Some might say these were one and the same.) The tale of the Titanic thus plays an important part in African American folk culture—not just with its rebellious porter who swam away from the sinking ship back to Africa (in a kind of bawdy Black Star Line of his own) but also with folk ballads like “Titanic” that took retribution as their theme, and other- and afterworldly justice as their means.
What for the folk songs is retribution, and rough cosmic justice, becomes in Hughes a poetics of refusal.12 But like the archetypal Draft Dodger, whether in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt or our own Muhammad Ali, it is what Hughes replaces this refusal with that startles most. “I do not have to be what you want me to be,” Muhammad Ali said after becoming a heavyweight champ and converting to Islam, going against most wishes, white or black, and refusing on principle to serve in what could have been relatively easy duty during Vietnam. Through refusal, Ali expanded his assigned role as a boxer and a black individual and an American—elevating the everyday to the status, often literally, of poetry, both in and out of the ring. No wonder one of Ali’s best poems may be what George Plimpton calls the shortest ever written in English: “Me. Whee!”13
Ali bobbed and weaved outside of the ring as well as inside. Such a rope-a-dope is strategic—not mere reticence, or worse, avoidance. In similar fashion, Hughes spends most of The Big Sea laying out shifting, seemingly contradictory points of view that refuse to be pinned down.
Hughes’s two cabinmates on his voyage to Africa embody two aliterate storying techniques by which Hughes (and the blues he modeled on) maintains “impersonal” distance: storytelling and silence. “George had a thousand tales to tell about every town he’d ever been in. And several versions of each tale. No doubt, some of the stories were true—and some of them not true at all, but they sounded true.” And, “Sometimes George said he had relatives down South. Then, again, he said he didn’t have anybody in the whole world. Both versions concerning his relatives were probably correct.” Hughes here is describing and owning up to dissembling, recognizing fiction, or better yet, the doubling truth of fiction in storying; George proves a foil to Hughes, our (supposedly reliable) storyteller. “Sounding true” is given more importance than being true, forgoing Prospero’s “truth” again.14 Hughes knows that stories can be simultaneously true and not true; that, as in a blues song, you can have a strong family down home and still have no one in the world; atoms can stay both particle and wave, particularly in Hughes’s Big Sea.
Elsewhere in The Big Sea Hughes talks of “telling stories on oneself”—laughing, if not at a veiled self, then at the Negro’s fictional life. But he is also enacting the self-reflexive (to the point of self-indulgent) qualities of the blues. Just as bluesman Robert Johnson will refer to himself in the third person, singing how sad “Mr. Johnson” is without his “Kindhearted Woman,” Hughes casts emotion as “impersonal,” objective even. We are both there with the blues and not, the protagonist’s predicament thrown into relief by the third person. But as with Bo Diddley’s song of self “Bo Diddley,” the blues hero is also detached by his ability (and the blues form) to make myth from pain. No wonder then, as Hughes relates, “my best poems were all written when I felt the worst.”
Between the sadness and the story falls the silence. This is a telling silence, similar to what Susan Sontag describes in “The Aesthetics of Silence” as occurring in a Warhol film. From what is left unsaid, even unsayable, we get insight. For in The Big Sea, alongside the quixotic Hughes and gregarious George, sits silent Ramon, a Puerto Rican sailor: “The only thing that came out of his mouth in six months that I remember is that he said he didn’t care much for women, anyway. He preferred silk stockings—so halfway down the African coast, he bought a pair of silk stockings and slept with them under his pillow.”15 It takes little strain to hear behind these words the fetishized, silent African continent, and its totemlike fetishes, in opposition to Ramon’s rather Freudian one—but in Ramon’s literal silence and Hughes’s literary one, can we also make out the distant echoes of undisclosed sexuality?
Our oblique answer may appear in a pun a couple of paragraphs later. Mess boy Hughes relates that “The lye made the washing easy because it took all of the dirt out quick.”16 The dirt here is out, so to speak—“the lye” is less “lie” than something removed, a “sin” omitted. In many ways, his is the discretion found in Elizabeth Bishop (though in few other poets of her “confessional” generation). Heaney gives some insight into Bishop, “this most reticent and mannerly of poets,” who “was temperamentally inclined to believe in the government of the tongue—in the self-denying sense,” holding her tongue “not based on subservience but on a respect for other people’s shyness in the face of poetry’s presumption.”17 And also, in a sexuality that neither author saw as defining their work.
However, I hesitate to let us think of this “lye” as a secret, or the secret as simply sexual: rather, “the lye” is mostly bleach, which is to say, it is about whiteness; or refers to the whiteness of blackness. “You see, unfortunately, I am not black,” Hughes announces in the chapter called “Negro.”18 Here Hughes informs us that a Negro, which in America means one drop of Negro blood, in Africa means something “pure.”
Hughes here is tripping, storying, riffing off some of his—and our—clearest convictions about hisself, declaring he is not even black. This of course not only relates to the shifting question of “the mulatto” or of passing—issues addressed elsewhere in Hughes’s work—but also the seemingly settled question of blackness. Settled, that is, until Tiger Woods hits a white ball into a hole on a green, wins a green jacket, declares he is “Cablinasian” and then gets warned by a white man against serving up collard greens. (And do I hear “Caliban,” itself a riff off “cannibal,” in Woods’s own portmanteau for Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian?) Interestingly enough, Hughes quite often uses the term “black,” far earlier than others did—with that in mind, his famous line “Night coming tenderly / Black like me” reads not just as musically riveting but as socially advanced.19
Significantly called “Dream Variation,” the “like” in the poem’s final simile represents the moment of linkage, of connecting to something wished for—the self—located in the improvisations of dream. It also questions the American dream, belied by the lie of race and the one-drop rule, or of the unrealized promise of equality between races, which will later become the background music of Montage of a Dream Deferred.
What bothers me so much about the book that borrows the last line of “Dream Variation” as its title, Black Like Me, is that no one is black like this white author who dyes his skin to “pass” as black. There’s little “lye” here, just the lie that blackness is merely temporary, and worse, simply physical and skin deep: black is not a simile, nor metaphor, not something to be worn and then removed, despite how much white and sometimes even black folks may wish. Rather, what’s more striking are the ways in which we as writers, Americans, black folks of all “hues,” have taken Hughes’s creed “I, too, am America” and written ourselves into America with it. In addition, generations of poets have written away from it: Baraka does obliquely when he declares “You are / as any other sad man here / american,” lowercase and all. Or there’s Bob Kaufman, again the black Beat poet’s assertion of self—delirious, divided, delightful—in “I, Too, Know What I Am Not.” By the end of a series of denials—“No, I am not death wishes of sacred rapists, singing on candy gallows. / No, I am not spoor of Creole murderers hiding in crepe-paper bayous”—the self Kaufman creates is stitched not only out of what’s left, as in a patchwork, but by a series of erasures, negatives that paint a clearer picture all the same.20
As with Kaufman, the refusal in Hughes’s work is largely a rejection of the limitations of being, and an assertion of selfhood. In The Big Sea, the moments when his humanity is on the line, not just moments when he is on the other side of the color line, but the blurred moments when he could perhaps shift sides, Hughes refuses his father’s self-denial and -hate. In one chapter, “Back Home,” Hughes relates how in returning from his father and Mexico, he was mistaken for Mexican: “But I made no pretense of passing for a Mexican, or anything else, since there was no need for it—except in changing trains at San Antonio in Texas, where colored people had to use Jim Crow waiting rooms, and could not purchase a Pullman berth.” After purchasing a berth (denied by his birth), Hughes relates two incidents integral to understanding how he views being “read”: first, what he terms an “amusing” story in which a white man who sat across from him in the diner car began “staring at me intently, as if trying to puzzle out something. He stared at me a long time. Then suddenly, with a loud cry, the white man jumped up and shouted: ‘You’re a nigger, ain’t you?’ And rushed out of the car as if pursued by a plague.”21
This white fear of the contagious black death leads Hughes to grin, declaring, “I didn’t know until then that we frightened them that badly.” But then, “Something rather less amusing happened at St. Louis,” in the Show-Me State Hughes was born in. (The fact that Missourah was previously a slave state, and that Hughes was named after an ancestor involved in John Brown’s and others’ attempts to render Kansas free, should not be lost.) What he is shown is what he allows to be shown: the soda “jerk” in the train station asks if Hughes is a Mexican or a Negro, and when Hughes asks why, replies, “‘Because if you’re a Mexican, I’ll serve you,’ he said. ‘If you’re colored, I won’t.’” When Hughes answers, “I’m colored,” “The clerk turned to wait on some one else. I knew I was home in the U.S.A.”22
Hughes details the life and lessons of an African American writer in direct contrast to conventions both black and white. Rather than presenting black life as oxymoronic, a walking contradiction, the very conundrums of the black self become its selfsame comforts. Hughes articulates both of these like a limb—one he went out on, one we have lost that, ghostlike, we still miss.
Yet Hughes refuses to believe in ghosts, just as he refuses to fully “pass” as Mexican, as his father essentially did. The poetics of refusal violates stereotype, much like in The Big Sea his taking up a bet to spend the night alone on a haunted ship to prove to his white shipmates he is neither spooked nor a spook. I fear I have given the impression of monklike Hughes, stoically working without a care for material things or the world or sexuality, composing well-etched, impersonal lyrics. He is more Monk than that—Thelonious, that is—oddly phrased, famous, a musicians’ musician till recently better known as a composer than as the skilled player he actually is.
It is as if we have been speaking of the blues as a 12-bar, flatted tone structure without discussing its radical content, its social commentary. We should not re-present Hughes as he can casually be read as: a good-hearted, chaste humanist who wishes to sit at the American table. Or someone who begins his life wanting to overturn the table, to refuse to eat “the leavings” of white folks, who then gets politically muzzled by McCarthyism and gradualism until he accepts scraps with a smile. Till he was merely, as James Baldwin pus it in the late St. Clair Bourne’s documentary on Hughes, rehearsing the blues.23 To counter this we need only to read “12 Moods for Jazz” from 1961, whose title sums up Hughes’s and black folks’ constant backtalk: Ask Your Mama.
For Hughes is not only including himself in America (“I am the darker brother”) but also saying he is older than America (“My soul has grown deep like the rivers”), and far wiser. His poetics of refusal is one of protest in the end, the literary equivalent of a sit-in, and arguably its predecessor. He shall not be moved: his poems’ heft and breadth (and breath) are not just part of Hughes’s being that rare breed, a working writer, but also a critique of those who seek to limit or fail to understand black invention. His poems are speech acts made active, musical, and ultimately political in the manner of Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” or Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner”—not through talking on about the Man but by taking apart his forms. That both of these musical “covers” are wordless should not surprise us—they reach what lies beyond the limits of human speech, and for what’s at the beating, tom-tom heart of jazz.
At his best Hughes achieves this same kind of jazz wordlessness, charting a refusal whose absence of direct reproach is in itself critique.24 This poetics as refusal negotiates the refrain from Montage of a Dream Deferred—“Why should it be my dream deferred overlong?”—and the very idea of “refraining” as restraint. This refrain is also in the scat of the term “bebop” itself—which in Montage evolves to “re-bop,” “mop,” and even “Be-Bach.” As with scat, what could be construed as silence, nonsense, or mere noise should instead be seen as emotion, expression, the dissonance of urban, American, and black lives.
This brings us full circle, to the same people Hughes spent his life defending and defining, and the question again of aliteracy—for besides “reading” people, there are also two other aspects of this idea. First, the aliterate notion of “writing”—or art in its forms, whether blues or Beethoven—as being essentially nonliterary, or beyond a rarefied realm usually reserved for scholars or other bigots. And second, and more telling, aliteracy embraces the nonliteral, recognizing in trickster fashion that things ain’t always what they seem, that every shut eye ain’t asleep, every good-bye ain’t gone.
Hughes lets us know that literalness is often negative; that sticking to the letter of an unfair law can sure prove deadly. From Jim Crow to slavery this point may seem obvious, but in the right hands protest is exactly this—a combination of the obvious and the unsayable, an appeal beyond standard conventions to a greater, abstract—let’s call it poetic—truth. “Besides the implicit mode of Negro-American culture is abstract, and this comes from the very nature of our relationship to this country.”25 Hughes in his wisdom realizes that this truth is deadly serious, yet often can get across better with humor, dark as it may be.
This irony pervades Big Sea and Hughes’s work in general—Hughes gives us many examples of avoiding the literalness critics then and now have brought to bear on his work, instances where literalness works against those who insist on it. For one, George, the storyteller, has a landlord who has insisted that George get a job to pay his rent—George does as she says, and gets a job—the very one that, as he’s relating this story, has taken him out of Harlem and literally back to Africa! He got a job alright, but one that ensures she’ll not be getting any rent money soon. The landlord’s insistence on literalness (recast as paranoia in Montage’s “Ballad of a Landlord”) leads to its opposite, an escape hatch from “reality,” a running away into metaphor.
Or, the fact that, quite simply, racism can literally save your life. In the chapter “Bad Luck is Good,” a bigot who replaces the previous chief steward turns around and refuses to take an integrated crew, thereby stranding Hughes. “A day later, the boat sailed. And a month later it was at the bottom of the Black Sea!”26 having been struck by a stray mine from the Great War. Thus the big sea is actually bad and black; life a series of near misses, much like Jack Johnson and the Titanic. Or refusals, if you prefer. I can see the ad now: Segregation saves!
The literalness and lack of humor that lead to the captain’s insistence do not acknowledge the “black humor” of the situation, much less acknowledge the ways in which misreading allows “loopholes of retreat” in the letters of the natural or stated law. Such willful misreadings are the counterfeiter’s comfort zone, and figure fruitfully in Hughes’s work. As in his first famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” with The Big Sea Hughes fords the Mississippi, not just the river, but the Deep South state with its famous joke “probably invented in vaudeville”:
DARKIE, READ AND RUN!
IF YOU CAN’T READ, RUN ANYHOW!
all the while realizing the joke has a deadly punch line.
I have selected this last tale as another example of storying in order to indicate something of how Hughes keeps running away from the plantation of our expectations. Hughes’s desire to throw his books in the sea is related to embracing oral, black, vernacular culture, but also a desire to read and run, to have books be active (even if his are, in part, secretive). We might think here of Hughes’s job working for his father as rather staid “book-keeper” in contrast to his admiration for Harlem “numbers writers” who not only created a separate, autonomous financial system but in Hughes’s view were often more forthright in their support of the black arts than the black bourgeoisie.27 The numbers writer is a “runner” too—after all, to be a fugitive is in a very real sense to break the law, to go beyond what is written, prescribed, or proscribed. “Keep this nigger boy runnin’.”
For Hughes the numbers writer serves as a hero much like Hurston’s bootlegger—a kind of counterfeiter who may not fit but who provides a kind of outlaw identity that mirrors that of the writer and black folks alike. Violating his father’s will (and his “fatherland’s” laws), Hughes would rather be a bookmaker than bookkeeper, and it’s no wonder—throughout The Big Sea, Hughes champions a life outside the law, and even outside this very land that insists on African Americans as fractions, whether three-fifths a person or one-sixteenth black. Hughes is, he’s revealed, not black in some folks’ eyes, and too black in others’. And when race and its racist numbers don’t add up, forging a black identity outside such a system makes all the more sense.
In the end, what Hughes actually remembers about his trip to Mississippi “is a river front café with marvelously misspelled signs on the wall: ALL FIGHTIN MUS BE DID OUTSIDE; and another: IF YOU WANTS TO PLAY THE DOZENS GO HOME; and WHEN YOU EAT, PAY ER RUN / CAUSE MR. BOSS GOT HES GUN”28 As with the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, we should not take these misspellings as missteps, but rather as spells of another sort. The signs provide a surefooted procession, a pageant of the black vernacular Hughes champions: violent (yet somehow funny), trash talking, seeking flight. Hughes is running alright, refusing the whip, fleeing from convention, preserving the self as the artist must first and foremost—then sneaking back later under the cover of night to set us all free.