INTRODUCING LANGSTON HUGHES TO THE READER
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I_ _At the moment I cannot recall the name of any other person whateverwho, at the age of twenty-three, has enjoyed so picturesque andrambling an existence as Langston Hughes. Indeed, a complete accountof his disorderly and delightfully fantastic career would make afascinating picaresque romance which I hope this young Negro willwrite before so much more befalls him that he may find it difficult tocapture all the salient episodes within the limits of a single volume._ _Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, he had lived, beforehis twelfth year, in the City of Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, ColoradoSprings, Charlestown, Indiana, Kansas City, and Buffalo. He attendedCentral High School, from which he graduated, at Cleveland, Ohio,while in the summer, there and in Chicago, he worked as delivery- anddummy-boy in hat-stores. In his senior year he was elected class poetand editor of the Year Book._ _After four years in Cleveland, he once more joined his fatherin Mexico, only to migrate to New York where he entered ColumbiaUniversity. There, finding the environment distasteful, or worse, heremained till spring, when he quit, broke with his father and, withthirteen dollars in cash, went on his own. First, he worked for atruck-farmer on Staten Island; next, he delivered flowers for Thorley;at length he partially satisfied an insatiable craving to go to sea bysigning up with an old ship anchored in the Hudson for the winter. Hisfirst real cruise as a sailor carried him to the Canary Islands, theAzores, and the West Coast of Africa, of which voyage he has written:“Oh, the sun in Dakar! Oh, the little black girls of Burutu! Oh, theblue, blue bay of Loanda! Calabar, the city lost in a forest; the long,shining days at sea, the masts rocking against the stars at night;the black Kru-boy sailors, taken at Freetown, bathing on deck morningand evening; Tom Pey and Haneo, whose dangerous job it was to diveunder the seven-ton mahogany logs floating and bobbing at the ship’sside and fasten them to the chains of the crane; the vile houses ofrotting women at Lagos; the desolation of the Congo; Johnny Walker,and the millions of whisky bottles buried in the sea along the WestCoast; the daily fights on board, officers, sailors, everybody drunk;the timorous, frightened missionaries we carried as passengers; andGeorge, the Kentucky colored boy, dancing and singing the Blues on theafter-deck under the stars.”_ _Returning to New York with plenty of money and a monkey, he presentlyshipped again—this time for Holland. Again he came back to New York andagain he sailed—on his twenty-second birthday: February 1, 1924. Threeweeks later he found himself in Paris with less than seven dollars.However, he was soon provided for: a woman of his own race engaged himas doorman at her boîte de nuit. Later he was employed, first as secondcook, then as waiter, at the Grand Duc, where the Negro entertainer,Florence, sang at this epoch. Here he made friends with an Italianfamily who carried him off to their villa at Desenzano on Lago diGarda where he passed a happy month, followed by a night in Veronaand a week in Venice. On his way back across Italy his passport wasstolen and he became a beach-comber in Genoa. He has described hislife there to me: “Wine and figs and pasta. And sunlight! And amusingcompanions, dozens of other beach-combers roving the dockyards andwater-front streets, getting their heads whacked by the Fascisti, andbreaking one loaf of bread into so many pieces that nobody got morethan a crumb. I lived in the public gardens along the water-front andslept in the Albergo Populare for two lire a night amidst the snoresof hundreds of other derelicts.... I painted my way home as a sailor.It seems that I must have painted the whole ship myself. We made aregular ‘grand tour’: Livorno, Napoli (we passed so close to Capri Icould have cried). Then all around Sicily—Catania, Messina, Palermo—theLipari Islands, miserable little peaks of pumice stone out in the sea;then across to Spain, divine Spain! My buddy and I went on a spree inValencia for a night and a day.... Oh, the sweet wine of Valencia!”_ _He arrived in New York on November 10, 1924. That evening I attended adance given in Harlem by the National Association for the Advancementof Colored People. Some time during the course of the night, WalterWhite asked me to meet two young Negro poets. He introduced me toCountée Cullen and Langston Hughes. Before that moment I had neverheard of either of them._ _II_ _I have merely sketched a primitive outline of a career as rich inadventures as a fruit-cake is full of raisins. I have alreadystated that I hope Langston Hughes may be persuaded to set it downon paper in the minutest detail, for the bull-fights in Mexico, thedrunken gaiety of the Grand Duc, the delicately exquisite grace of thelittle black girls at Burutu, the exotic languor of the Spanish womenat Valencia, the barbaric jazz dances of the cabarets in New York’s ownHarlem, the companionship of sailors of many races and nationalities,all have stamped an indelible impression on the highly sensitized,poetic imagination of this young Negro, an impression which has foundits initial expression in the poems assembled in this book._ _And also herein may be discerned that nostalgia for color and warmthand beauty which explains this boy’s nomadic instincts._ _“We should have a land of sun,Of gorgeous sun,And a land of fragrant waterWhere the twilightIs a soft bandanna handkerchiefOf rose and gold,And not this land where life is cold,”_ _he sings. Again, he tells his dream:_ _“To fling my arms wideIn the face of the sun,Dance! whirl! whirl!Till the quick day is done.Rest at pale evening....A tall, slim tree....Night coming tenderly.Black like me.”_ _More of this wistful longing may be discovered in the poems entitled_The South _and_ As I Grew Older. _His verses, however, are by no meanslimited to an exclusive mood; he writes caressingly of little blackprostitutes in Harlem; his cabaret songs throb with the true jazzrhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism; he criesbitterly from the heart of his race in_ Cross _and_ The Jester; _hesighs, in one of the most successful of his fragile poems, over theloss of a loved friend. Always, however, his stanzas are subjective,personal. They are the (I had almost said informal, for they have ahighly deceptive air of spontaneous improvisation) expression of anessentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature, seeking always tobreak through the veil that obscures for him, at least in some degree,the ultimate needs of that nature._ _To the Negro race in America, since the day when Phillis Wheatleyindited lines to General George Washington and other aristocraticfigures (for Phillis Wheatley never sang “My way’s cloudy,” or “By anby, I’m goin to lay down dis heavy load”) there have been born manypoets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, JeanToomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Countée Cullen, are a few of the morememorable names. Not the least of these names, I think, is that ofLangston Hughes, and perhaps his adventures and personality offer thepromise of as rich a fulfillment as has been the lot of any of theothers._
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