Langston Hughes

The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence

C. James Trotman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317946168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1995. This volume focuses on the life and influence of Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and forms part of the Critical Studies in Black Life and Culture series. The series is devoted to original, book-Iength studies of African American developments. Written by well-qualified scholars, the series is interdisciplinary and global, interpreting tendencies and themes wherever African Americans have left their mark.

The Harlem Renaissance

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Whose Sweet Angel Child?
Blues Women, Langston Hughes, and Writing During the Harlem Renaissance

Cheryl A. Wall

Rutgers University

Reckless Blues

When I was young, nothing but a child,

When I was young, nothing but a child,

All you men tried to drive me wild.

Now I'm growing old,

Now I'm growing old,

And I got what it takes to get all you men's soul.

My mama says I'm reckless, my daddy says I'm wild,

My mama says I'm reckless, my daddy says I'm wild,

I ain't good lookin', but I'm somebody's angel child.

Daddy, Mama wants some loving; Daddy, mama wants some hugging

Honey, Pretty Poppa, Mama wants some loving, I vow.

Honey, Pretty Poppa, Mama wants some loving right now.¹

Recorded by Bessie Smith in 1925, “Reckless Blues” is a statement of self-validation in the face of social rejection, sexual exploitation, and personal alienation. In her maturity the speaker has seized control of her sexuality—autonomy compensates for aging—and relishes the pleasures that autonomy affords. The lyric dissolves the proverbial dichotomy between the good woman and the bad woman. Despite her inability to conform to the accepted standards of female beauty and her refusal to conform to the acceptable standards of female behavior, Smith's persona insists that she is somebody's angel child.

Smith's two accompanists on the record are Fred Longshaw, who gets composer credit for this version of a folk blues, and Louis Armstrong. Longshaw plays the harmonium; its organlike timbre complements the poignancy of the lyric and Smith's mournful contralto. But Armstrong's cornet provides the emotional counterpoint. His response to Bessie's call confirms that life's challenges can be and have been met. The last verse particularizes Smith's version of the song; it makes the point explicitly that while a woman's sexuality makes her vulnerable to male exploitation, it is the key to survival. The mood of the lyric and the music meet. Smith's increasingly assertive tone and Armstrong's increasingly intricate obbligatos culminate in the final verse to convey the persona's mastery of her life and situation. The recording documents Smith's mastery of her art.

Today, scholars recognize Bessie Smith and the so-called classic blues singers as major figures in the cultural history of the 1920s and 1930s.² For many writers, particularly black women writers, the blues woman is a symbol of black female creativity and autonomy whose art informs and empowers their own. That was surely not true in the blues women's time. Generally even those black intellectuals who, like W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, wrote of the profound beauty and meaning of the spirituals, were deaf to the same qualities in the blues. Blues women were even less likely than their male counterparts to have their music acknowledged as art. (Sterling Brown's poetic portrait of Ma Rainey is the most notable exception.) Among other reasons, their propensity for flamboyant dress and reckless behavior dismayed and embarrassed their more decorous brothers and sisters.

Langston Hughes was, characteristically, prescient in his understanding of the blues women's significance. As one imperative of his artistic manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” declared: “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand” (309). Not only was Hughes drawn to the compressed poetry of the blues, he aspired to a cultural role analogous to the blues troubadour. Fittingly, he was a student and admirer of the blues woman's art.

In 1926 Hughes made his pilgrimage to the Empress's domain. Bessie Smith was appearing at the Regent Theater in Baltimore when the author of the just published The Weary Blues made his way backstage to pay his respects. Doubtless he knew her recording “Mama's Got the Blues,” which began “Some people say the weary blues ain't bad.” Perhaps he hoped for recognition as a fellow blues artist. According to Hughes's biographer, Arnold Rampersad, whatever such aspirations he held were dashed. Miss Smith was not impressed. Hughes was disappointed in turn when he asked whether she had a theory about blues as Art: “Naw, she didn't know nothing about no art. All she knew was that blues had put her ‘in de money’” (Rampersad, 123).

Whether she chose to theorize about it or not, Hughes understood that Bessie Smith knew a great deal about art. He understood as well that her life, and the lives of the other blues queens, could be the stuff of fiction. In his 1930 novel, Not Without Laughter, Hughes became the first writer to represent the figure of the blues woman in literature. His character Harriett Williams should be considered a precursor to the memorable blues women invented by Alice Walker in The Color Purple, Toni Cade Bambara in “Medley,” and Sherley Anne Williams in Someone Sweet Angel Child. I want to analyze Hughes's representation and to speculate briefly about the reasons no comparable representation would appear in the fiction of black women for decades to come.

Hughes knew the folk blues from childhood. As an adult, he came to admire the so-called “classic blues” as well. Scholar Steven Tracy, whose authoritative study, Langston Hughes & the Blues, reconstructs the blues influences which shape and inform Hughes's poetry, notes the writer's “preference for the city, and especially vaudeville blues singers.” Bessie, Mamie, Clara, and Trixie Smith, along with Ma Rainey, were among his personal favorites (Tracy, 117–119).

Their interest in the blues was something Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (novelist, music critic, and bon vivant) shared. Hughes offered his assistance to Van Vechten when the latter wrote several pioneering articles on the blues, particularly women's blues, for the magazine Vanity Fair. Van Vechten was persuaded that the blues were at least equal to the spirituals as music and superior to them as poetry. Blues were “eloquent with rich idioms, metaphoric phrases, and striking word combinations” (Kellner, 44). To support his premise, Van Vechten quoted “Gulf Coast Blues,” as recorded by Bessie Smith, and evoked the authority of “the young Negro poet, Langston Hughes,” whose career he had begun to promote.

In a letter from which Van Vechten quotes at length, Hughes glossed the blues lyric and praised the vividness of its imagery.³ Recounting his own visit to West Africa, he suggested a link between the blues ethos and African musical traditions. In the most incisive comment, Hughes drew his own contrast between the spirituals and the blues: “The blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter. The absurd, incongruous laughter of a sadness without even a god to appeal to” (Kellner, 46). It is this laughter which his novel seeks to inscribe.

Two women embody the conflict between the spirituals and the blues in Not Without Laughter. Hager Williams and her youngest daughter Harriett are locked in a battle that is both philosophical and generational. Initially, Harriett appears to be her mother's opposite. Angry and rebellious, she refuses to accept the place society assigns her. She is highly intelligent but drops out of school after her seemingly liberal teacher and classmates fail to intervene when she is Jim-Crowed on a class trip. With each racist incident, Harriett's hatred of whites intensifies. In vain Hager urges her daughter to transcend bitterness. As an ex-slave, Hager recognizes the evil whites have done, yet she refuses to view them as evil. Instead, she grants whites a humanity equal to hers. She explains that whites are good as far as they can see, but when it comes to blacks, they cannot see far. Harriett is not moved.

No passage exemplifies Sterling Brown's description of the novel as “poetic realism” better than the prose poem recounting Hager Williams's forty years as a washerwoman: “Bought this house washin,' and made as many payments as Cudge [her husband] come near; an' raised ma chillen washin'; an' when Cudge taken sick an' laid on his back for mo'n a year I taken care o' him washin' … an' here I is with ma arms still in de tub!” (135–136).⁴ Harriett, by contrast, refuses the domestic's role. Disgusted by the low pay, insults, and sexual harassment, she quits her job at a country club. There is no poetry in her catalog of the menial tasks required to earn a weekly wage of five dollars.

Most tellingly, Harriett rejects her mother's religion. Christianity is the bedrock out of which Hager derives her beliefs and behavioral codes. She is shocked to hear Harriett declare that the church has made “you old Negroes act like Salvation Army people … afraid to even laugh on Sundays, afraid for a girl and boy to look at one another, or for people to go to dances. Your old Jesus is white, I guess that's why! He's white and stiff and don't like niggers” (42). Harriett's words, like her music, are blasphemous to her mother, whose response to this particular outburst is to begin a fervent prayer.

A cultural rebel, Harriett enacts the role blues scholar William Barlow attributes to blues men: “They acted as proselytizers of a gospel of secularization in which the belief in freedom became associated with personal mobility—freedom of movement in this world here and now, rather than salvation later on in the next” (5). In Harriett's view, Hager's faith has no utility. It transforms neither Hager's material condition—the family remains poor and is occasionally destitute—nor her social status. Whites call on her to nurse their sick and comfort their bereaved, but they deny her even the respect a proper name and title confer. She is “Aunt” Hager. Bound by her work and religion, Hager is locked in place. Harriett's disavowal of Christianity enables her to imagine alternative sites.

Harriett's secular temple is the cabaret; the priests are jazz musicians.⁵ In one of the novel's most extended scenes and through some of its most evocative language, Hughes depicts BENBOW's FAMOUS KANSAS CITY BAND in performance. The typography stresses the brashness of the commercial enterprise. The text experiments further with its transliteration of musical sounds (“Whaw-whaw … whaw-whaw-whaw”), as it represents the phases of performance from the “hip-rocking notes” of Easy Rider to the Lazy River One-Step to the urbane rhythms of St. Louis Blues.

Tellingly, the music that produces catharsis is the band's improvised rendition of a folk blues, a “plain old familiar blues, heart-breaking and extravagant, ma-baby's-gone-from-me blues.” Like the other congregants, Harriett is transported. “It was true that men and women were dancing together, but their feet had gone down through the floor into the earth, each dancer's alone—down into the center of things” (93). They go to the point, perhaps, where one experiences the existential validation that one is, indeed, somebody's angel child.

However cleansing spiritually, in the social world of the novel, Harriett's behavior is irresponsible. Lost in the music, she has stayed out all night herself, and worse, she has kept her young nephew Sandy out all night as well. Awaiting Harriett's return, her mother sits “with the open Bible on her lap … and a bundle of switches on the floor at her feet” (98).

Clearly, Harriett is destined to leave home. Hughes constructs the narrative of her leave-taking out of the myths and legends that surrounded the blues queens. Gertrude Rainey left home at fourteen to join a vaudeville act; only after serving a long ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Contributors
• Original Half Title page
• A P(a)lace for Langston Hughes
• Lincoln University Conference
• The Harlem Renaissance
• Race, Culture, and Gender in Langston Hughes
• The Man and His Continuing Influence
• Index