The genial yet guarded persona of Langston Hughes, who was born on this day in 1902, curtailed not only what he was able to achieve as an artist but what he was able to express as a man.
And where was Langston? His tight-lippedness when it came to his own “degenerate” behavior kept him from identifying such people as “F.S.,” the dedicatee of another poem that appeared in “The Weary Blues”:Soft as it began—Hughes’s genial, generous, and guarded persona was self-protective, certainly. It’s important to remember that he came of age in an era during which gay men—and blacks—were physically and mentally abused for being what they were.
In 1899, the young, ambitious couple moved to Joplin, where Carrie gave birth to Langston in 1902. A year later, when James secured a position in Mexico City, where he felt that he stood a better chance of success, Carrie dropped Langston off at her mother’s, and followed him south. The couple bickered, reconciled, parted, sometimes with Langston in tow, often not; for the most part, the boy was reared by his judicious but loving grandmother, Mary. By 1907, they had separated permanently.
Still, there was solace. There were books by W. E. B. Du Bois, and the formality and strange wisdom of the Bible. There was black pride, too. In 1910, Mary and her grandson went to Osawatomie, Kansas, where former President Theodore Roosevelt honored her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who had died during the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
Open to Hughes was the great wide world, the adventure of travel, and those writers—Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman—who not only freed the young writer from traditional literary forms but showed him that he could sing his America, too. In 1921, he moved to New York to study at Columbia University, but what he fell in love with was the “Negro city”: Harlem. Before coming to New York, he had spent more than a year in patriarchal purgatory in Mexico; now he was “hungry” to be withpeople.
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