First publication in: Terror and Its Representations –Studies in Social History & Cultural Expression in the United States & Beyond
(Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee, Milano &Montpellier 2008). Cover image: book cover for “Shakespeare in Harlem”.
Langston Hughes: Shakespeare in Harlem
When Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower in January 1961, Langston Hughes, poet, novelist, and essayist—perhaps the most important African American writer of the 20th Century—was being widely recognized and hailed. By the time of Lyndon Johnson, Hughes had the entered the American Pantheon; he was invited to the White House and entertained foreign dignitaries in Harlem. In 1966, Johnson sent Hughes as a cultural ambassador to Africa, Europe, and Latin America, where he had friends and colleagues with whom he had worked for years—Nicolas Guillen, Aimé Césaire, and Leopold Senghor. Because Hughes was an historic leader of the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s and 30s, his work had germinated the flourishing black literary culture.
While most people, today, remember Hughes as a black icon and spokesman of the 20s, he lived on for forty years in an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and terror. From the 20s until the 60s, he faced harsh criticism and oppression because of his political beliefs and actions; he was attacked for championing black women, black workers, and black culture; and he was pursued for political, religious, and sexual “deviance.” The American forces of terror made Langston Hughes withdraw his most radical and challenging poems. Terror and rejection forced him to create fictional characters and codes with which to express his socialism and his anger; intimidation made him secretive and subtle, changing his art and his expression, permanently. Between the 20s and the 60s, Langston Hughes was denounced, threatened, and hounded, not only by racism, but by that special species of terror known as “Red-Baiting.”
In the early poem “Negro,” Hughes sounds the rebellious note signaling that he is not going to be just another specimen of entertainment for the white world. He displays the bleak and brutal history of black people from Africa to Georgia, from the Congo to the Mississippi:
. . . . .
I’ve been a worker:
Under my hand the pyramids arose.
I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.
I’ve been a singer:
All the way from Africa to Georgia
I carried my sorrow songs.
I made ragtime.
I’ve been a victim:
The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.
They lynch me still in Mississippi.
. . . . .
(CP 24)
In this 20s poem, Hughes sounds his first notes of rebellion. He uses the word Black, as well as Negro, joining the new radical minority tradition begun by W.E.B. DuBois. But even DuBois worried about Hughes’ direct and earthy representation of Black workers and daily life in Harlem.
When Hughes follows The Weary Blues (1926) with his second book of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew in 1927, even his title creates controversy. But the poems in this volume go further—presenting women, workers, dancers, and lovers in direct and realistic Harlem scenes. In “Mazie Dies Alone in the City Hospital,” Hughes writes, “I’d rather die in the way I lived, / Drunk and rowdy and gay!” (CP 126). Mazie dies alone, isolated and wishing for her wild ways, still. Hughes depicts life as it was lived in Harlem with its rent parties, jazz cabarets, and hard work. He does not spare his readers the gritty details of Harlem—and he calls into question the equity of American capitalism.
But the reviewers, mostly white, reject his depictions of black life, black women, and black workers when they are exposed to the light of day. The Pittsburgh Courier called the book “piffling trash” that left the reviewer “positively sick.” The Chicago Whip called Hughes a “literary gutter rat, who perhaps alone will revel in the lecherous, lust-reeking characters.” Even the Black reviewer in the Amsterdam News, in an article entitled “Sewer Dweller” said, “The book is trash and reeks of the gutter and sewer” (Rampersad I, 140). From black and white, uptown and down, New York and beyond, the reviewers mounted the first salvo of a campaign to intimidate the young upstart, to silence him, and put an end to his pictures of Harlem life. The terror campaign had begun: Don’t show the truth, don’t defend women, workers, prostitutes, and exploited people. Get a new theme—don’t be a gutter-rat or we will exterminate you.
In “One More “S” in the U.S.A.,” Hughes responds:
Put One More s in the U.S.A.
To make it Soviet.
One more s in the U.S.A.
Oh, we’ll live to see it yet.
. . . . .
(CP 176)
In 1932, Hughes and other black artists traveled to the Soviet Union to make a film called “Black and White,” about race relations in the U.S. However, the group quickly fell apart, and Hughes traveled to the eastern republics of the USSR. There he wrote “Good Morning, Revolution,”a response to Carl Sandburg’s “Good Morning, America” (Rampersad I, 163). In this daring poem, Hughes makes common cause with his new comrade “Revolution”:
Good-morning, Revolution:
You’re the very best friend
I ever had.
We gonna pal around together from now on.
. . . . .
Listen, Revolution,
We’re buddies, see—
Together,
We can take everything:
Factories, arsenals, houses, ships
Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
Bus lines, telegraphs, radios
(Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
All the tools of production,
(Great day in the morning!)
Everything—
And turn ‘em over to the people who work.
Rule and run ‘em for us people who work.
. . . . .
(CP 162-3)
For the Hughes of the 30s, the answer was clear: the Soviet Union was showing the way to end racism and exploitation. He never was able to escape from this simple statement of revolutionary belief, which dogged him for decades.
Still traveling across the Soviet Union in ’32, Hughes writes “Good-bye, Christ,” in which he talks directly to Christ, saying that His time has passed; it’s time for Christ to step aside and make room for a new hero:
. . . . .
Kings, generals, robbers, and killers—
Even to the Tsar and the Cossacks,
Even to Rockefeller’s Church,
Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.
……
Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehovah,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all—
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME—
I said, ME!
. . . . .
(CP 166)
In these poems, he celebrates the Soviet revolution and ridicules Christ and religion because he feels free to speak his mind from abroad, from the heart of the Marxist revolution. Glorifying the Russian Revolution and rejecting Christ’s power, Hughes boldly speaks his mind. When the poem reached the USA, a long series of recriminations and attacks begin to take their toll on him, profoundly affecting his public reception. “Good-bye, Christ” became the rallying point for the KKK and critics alike, inspiring continual attacks and downright terror by Christian fundamentalists, as well as red baiters.
When he tried to get a collection of these revolutionary poems accepted at Knopf, he was stymied by his friend and literary patron, Carl van Vechten, who told Hughes that “the Revolutionary poems seem very weak to me: I mean very weak on the lyric side. I think in ten years, whatever the social outcome; you’ll be ashamed of these”(Rampersad I, 266). His new poems were rejected, not because they were less accomplished than his earlier work, but because they insisted on representing the “low life” of Harlem and announcing his sympathies with Russia. Hughes feels the chill of an advancing glacier of terror.
Hughes ended his time overseas in Japan, where he played cat and mouse with the authorities, who did not trust an American poet returning from Russia. Japanese police questioned him for several days about his socialist activities in Vladivostok, and expelled him as a persona non grata, telling Hughes he “should leave without communicating with any Japanese” (Rampersad I, 274). The journalists, who interviewed him, and even a high school acquaintance, were all later arrested or expelled for talking with him. In Hawaii, he was met by an FBI agent, and he announced that Japan was a fascist country. Deported from one country and harassed by his own, Hughes realizes that he is a marked man, that his sympathies, his ideas, and his work set him apart from the prevailing beliefs—even in Depression America.
Years later, Hughes’ trip to Russia and his Marxist poems would come back to haunt him. When Texas Southern University first offer, and then deny him a poet-in residence post, the denial can be traced to white supremacists and anti-Communists who protest his hiring. These threats and intimidations foreshadow the hundreds of firings of left-wing professors and writers in the 50s. Hughes calls this dual anti-red and anti-black oppression “literary sharecropping” (Scott 157).
Back in the U.S.A. in 1934, Hughes published The Ways of White Folks, presenting stories of dutiful blacks confronting their white bosses. The book does not earn him many friends among the white bourgeoisie. Because he is seen socializing with white women in Carmel, California, where he stays at a friend’s cottage, rumors circulate around town that he is about to be physically attacked. The white upper class feels he constitutes a “bad influence” on Black people in Carmel (Rampersad I, 293). The Carmel Sun editor accuses him of subversive activities, corrupting white women, and preaching revolution, writing, “Russia would be a good place for Hughes” (Rampersad I, 294). It did not matter that these attacks were false; a poet who spoke radical ideas and hobnobbed with the white elite had to be taught a lesson. The terrorist threats on his life force Hughes to flee Carmel.
Hughes ridicules the right-wing thugs, calling them political opportunists in his essay “The Vigilantes Knock at My Door.” In the face of domestic terror, he refuses to pull in his horns. He invokes the revolution in his work, boldly rejecting censorship, disapproval, elitist prejudices, and racial discrimination. In the 30s, Hughes fights terror with rage, giving as good as he gets. Hughes becomes the poetic and polemical writer he was meant to be—growing from the lyrical Bard of “The Negro Sings of Rivers” and “The Weary Blues” to a powerful political advocate for racial equality and socialism.
By 1939, out of funds and opportunities, he is hired to write “Way Down South,” a Hollywood movie about the 1840s. On the movie set, the producers are condescending toward him because of his race, telling him he is lucky to have a job, and they force him to eat outside the studio, rather than with others in the commissary.
When “Way Down South” comes out, one leftist reviewer derides the movie as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin with Bobby Breen as Little Eva,” calling Hughes an Uncle Tom (Rampersad I, 372). Stung by critiques from the left and from black writers, Hughes feels betrayed by his own supporters. Their attacks make him more and more wary of expressing his opinions openly.
Later, in 1940, at a reading in Pasadena, California, he is picketed by evangelicals whom he had mentioned in “Good-Bye, Christ.” Hughes, surprised and stung by their demonstration, withdraws the poem, calling it one of his “youthful aberrations” (Rampersad I, 393). But then the communist press attacks him for withdrawing the radical poem. Attacks from left and right render him more and more circumspect. Adrift and depressed, he looks for a new style to respond to the suppression of his ideas. He needs to publish, and he needs to make money; but his former publishers have abandoned him.
Hughes returns to his themes and style of the 20s with Shakespeare in Harlem, a collection of poems published in 1942 that deals with the blues and Black struggles. Most of the poems in Shakespeare in Harlem take up jazz, love, folk dialect, and Harlem daily life. Under pressure from both the left and right, from publishers and the black intelligentsia, Hughes returns to what he has done before, unable to find a new voice, yet.
In search of a wider audience, in 1943, he creates two fictional characters that become new voices for Langston Hughes: Jesse B. Semple in prose and Alberta K. Johnson in poetry, who confront the Depression, directly and speak in deceptively simple and popular language. In the Chicago Defender newspaperin February 1943, Jesse B. Semple, known as Simple, speaks for the first time in Hughes’ new newspaper column. And Madame Alberta K. Johnson enters the scene in the summer of 1943, in the Hughes’ “Madame” poems. By introducing Jesse B. Semple, his fictional Harlem Everyman, as narrator of many of his newspaper columns, Hughes is appropriating the voice of a man he met in a Harlem bar. When Hughes asked the man, who makes cranks for the war effort, what the cranks are for, he simply replies, “Cranks, just cranks.”
His girlfriend replies, “You must know what the cranks are for, you’ve been working in that war plant long enough” (Rampersad II, 61). But the man replies, “Cranks, just cranks,” and Hughes finds a way to show his brothers that they are more than just cogs in the American economic machine; they have a voice, and a right to know where they fit into this vast machine (Rampersad II, 61). Hughes creates a worker who hangs out at Paddy’s Bar and Grill in Harlem, who is sometimes a simpleton, and sometimes asks just the right questions. “Simple” asks the questions that can embarrass the white boss who rules him. Here is Jesse B. Semple asking his boss for better pay:
. . . . .
“What did he say then?”
“He said, ‘You talk like a red.’
“I said, ‘What do you mean, red?’
“He said, ‘You know what I mean—red, communist. After all this country has done for you Negroes,
I didn’t think you’d turn out to be a red.’
“I said, ‘In my opinion, a man can be any color except yellow. I’d be yellow if I did not stand up for my rights.’
“The boss said, ‘You have no right to draw wages and not work.’
“I said, ‘I have done work, I do work, and I will work—but also a man is due to eat for his work, to have some clothes, and a roof over his head. For what little you are paying me, I can’t hardly keep body and soul together. Don’t you reckon I have a soul?’ I said.
“Boss said, ‘I have nothing to do with your soul. All I am concerned about is your work. You are talking like a communist, and I will not have no reds in my plant.’
(CW 7:156, cited in Scott 137-138)
These so-called Simple columns made Hughes a more popular writer than ever before and spawned several volumes such as Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple’s Uncle Sam, which became required reading for Black people all over the country, North and South. With wry humor and naïve insights, Hughes fashions a character, who speaks simply and naively about Black people’s daily lives in America. Hughes becomes, at last, a popular writer in his own country.
This new character of Simple is Hughes’ answer to the repression, the attacks, the vigilantism, and the rejections—all the intimidating terrors of critics who rejected and ridiculed his revolutionary work of the 30s. Instead of writing angry poems, Simple answers those who have terrorized Hughes. Hughes realizes that his poetry of the 30s could incite anger and rage; but Simple’s new and subtler voice can induce thought and reflection among Blacks, and perhaps even whites. He wants African Americans to understand the impact of the war on their lives. He wants them to question the basis of white authority.
People all over the country adopt the Chicago Defender’s Jesse B. Semple as their simple sage. In the very first column, Simple must be convinced to join the U.S. war effort because the Nazis would install a curfew and make him go home at nine p.m. The Nazis’ strict work ethic tells Simple’s audience about their own present working conditions. Although Hughes enrolls Black workers in the war effort, he uses Simple to point out the contradictions in the American economy, where blacks can make only survival wages. Through Simple’s down to earth reactions, Hughes reaches great numbers of Black people for the first time—those in America, who work for the war machine, and those who live under the radar, earning meager wages for hard labor.
On April 26, 1947, in one of his early “Simple Speaks” columns, “When a Man sees Red,” Hughes imagines Jesse B. Semple appearing before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee. Simple asks the Chairman why he is not allowed to drive a train and why the only Blacks he sees at the train station are sweeping the sidewalks. When the Committee Chairman accuses him of being a labor organizer and an international communist, Simple asks:
. . . . .
“‘Why? Because I want to drive a train?’
“’Yes,’ yells the Chairman, ‘because you want to drive a train! This is a white man’s country. These is white men’s trains! You cannot drive one. And down where I come from, neither can you ride in a WHITE coach.’
“‘You don’t have any coaches for red Russians,’ I said.
“’No,’ yells the Chairman, ‘but we’ll have them as soon as I can pass a law.’
“‘Then where would I ride,’ I asked. ‘In the COLORED coach or in the RED coach?’
“‘You will ride nowhere,’ yells the Chairman, ‘because you will be in jail.’
“‘Then I will break your jail up,’ I said, ‘because I am entitled to liberty whilst pursuing happiness.’
“‘Contempt of court!’ bangs the Chairman.”
(CW 7:158, cited in Scott 139)
Folks read the Simple stories in the back rooms of general stores in the south–in smuggled copies brought down by train. Southern whites responded by banning the columns, which directly addressed southern and northern racial terrorism. Hughes, himself, and his characters in the column become national heroes for African Americans and progressive thinkers, almost overnight.
When Hughes first comes to the attention of the arch-terrorist J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime FBI chief (himself gay) assigns agents to compile records documenting Hughes’ life and communist connections. In the FBI file, we find a fantasy Hughes—telling us that he was married to June Croll, a white woman—not true—and besides, many critics believe Hughes was gay. The FBI reports claim that Hughes is 5’8, but he was 5’4.” The file says that Hughes was an avowed member of the Communist Party—also not true. They claim that he called for a race war—not true—and that he went to Russia to study communism—also not true (Rampersad II, 92). Hoover’s fantasy Langston Hughes leads a far more exciting and suspect life than the real man.
In 1949, Life magazine publishes an article titled “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus: Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Front.” In the article, Life claims that Albert Einstein, Paul Robeson, Leonard Bernstein, Dorothy Parker, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Susan B. Anthony, Arthur Miller, and Langston Hughes are all communist dupes and reds. Life runs a photo essay with pictures of all the famous writers who assemble at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for the “Cultural and Scientific Conference” of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (Rampersad II, 167). Hughes is one of the sponsors of the conference but does not speak—he lays low and lets other writers handle the running of the conference. The Life article is a culmination of right-wing attacks on Hughes in major media—he was attacked for years, and now the magazine attaches him to every left-wing cause. And he is denounced in radio shows and articles from Gerald L.K. Smith to the Readers Digest (Rampersad II, 168).
The Defender columns, featuring Simple’s views and other timely insights from Hughes, put him on the map; but ironically, it also brings him to the attention of the very committee before which his fictional figure appeared. The Simple-HUAC fantasy becomes a reality, when McCarthy’s Senate Un-American Activities Committee calls Hughes to testify in Washington, D.C., about his early “red” poems and his disrespectful Simple columns. The Senate Committee cites “Something to Lean On,” among other Hughes’ works as the reason for his hearing. In “Something to Lean On,” the Committee Chairman, asks Simple:
. . . . .
“You figure the Constitution has fallen down on you?”
“I do,” said Simple. “Just like it fell down on that poor Negro
lynched last month.
Did anybody out of that mob go to jail? Not a
living soul! But just kidnap some little small white baby and take it
across the street, and you will do twenty years. The F.B.I. will spread
its dragnet and drag in forty suspections before morning. And, if you
are colored, don’t be caught selling a half pint of bootleg licker, or
writing a few numbers.
They will put you in every jail there is!”
(CW 7, 134)
The despicable Roy Cohn (also mentor to Trump) of the Senate Committee refuses to negotiate with Hughes and takes his usual hostile, bitter stance toward the Black poet. Cohn, himself a closeted gay man, seemed incensed by Hughes’ success and outward calm. By 1953, all Hughes’ books had been pulled from State libraries, even ones that were not controversial. As Rampersad states:
Estimating that thirty thousand volumes were tainted by the left, McCarthy saw to it that several hundred books were removed.
Many were reduced to pulp and eleven were actually burned; various programs were eliminated, and several libraries closed altogether. (Rampersad II, 211)
Although Hughes seems calm, as he approaches the hearing, he is trembling; and he labored over his five-page statement in which he denied ever being a member of the Communist Party. He claimed that his work was often misinterpreted. Hughes gives a bravura performance, deflecting Cohn and evading McCarthy’s direct accusations. Hughes never invokes the Fifth Amendment, and he never gives up names of others. Hughes’ approach is to tell the truth and to assert democratic values in a dignified manner.
In their pre-hearing meeting, Hughes even praises the values of democracy and accepts the legitimacy of the Congressional committee, itself. Once again, his tactic for confrontation was to avoid confrontation. Like the trickster Br’er Rabbit in Uncle Remus, Hughes knows the terrain from years of suppression, alienation, and intimidation. He uses the same tactic when the subject of his sexuality is approached. He had evolved a set of maneuvers that accepted authority to its face, while living a secret life: he had used that elusive anti-terrorist tactic as a socialist, as a gay person, and as a Black man in a white world.
Hughes and McCarthy seemed to have come to an understanding. “Good-Bye, Christ” is not read in open hearing and Hughes does not denounce his detractors—he even admits that Senator Dirksen had treated him graciously. When Hughes returns home to New York, he notes that McCarthy finished the hearing with an almost secret wink at Hughes, signifying perhaps that each had got what he needed. McCarthy geta to chastise Hughes, and Hughes retains his dignity.
The right-wing forces resume their attacks on Hughes within a month, and he must tread carefully after the hearing, refusing to endorse left wing causes. He removes his name from the anti-fascist league, where it stood on the stationary with Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Orson Welles, Eugene O’Neill ,and Dorothy Parker. Hughes avoids the public martyrdom that Robeson is forced to endure and retains his place as a cultural icon.
Did Hughes sell out or did he elude McCarthy’s terrorist tactics? He had always survived, and he had always been forced by terror to be discreet and cautious, especially after the trip to the Soviet Union. Perhaps the new character of Simple embodies his new techniques of both evasion and directness, dealing with terror vicariously, through his naïve and aggressive fictional voices. Like Alberta K. Johnson, he throws his words back at his pursuers: “Madam, to you!”
Even after the McCarthy hearing, the terror does not let up. Although the Committee seems to relent, the right-wing activists do not. Just as years before in Pasadena, when Hughes was picketed by fundamentalists, in 1960 Hughes is threatened with a bombing before his reading in Buffalo. Police watch anxiously, while the poet nervously read as the bomb scare turns out to be false. A couple of weeks later in Grand Rapids, Michigan, white churchmen protest his appearance, and Hughes cancels his reading (Rampersad II, 306).
Such is the result of 40 years of dodging attacks, indirect censorship, and direct intimidation—even while he champions his race, and all other oppressed peoples—women, poor, gay, uneducated, prostitutes, and the underprivileged. He becomes the friend and mentor to poets and writers all over the world. Hughes, like Robeson, is friend to creative minds and national spirits, but he faces a growing terror from his perch in Harlem. Hughes dies in 1967, after a crowded, triumphal reading at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, where the crowd is so large that Hughes, himself, cannot get in. When he attempts to move to the front, he tells a member of the audience that he is Langston Hughes. The fan replies: “Yeah, and I’m Richard Wright!” Even at the end, he is not recognized.
The present day is echoing the past, painfully—so many people, like Cindy Sheehan and Salman Rushdie and James Baldwin and Angela Davis have lived under threat of exposure and loss of livelihood and life. We do know, however, that they all have been martyrs to a continuing U.S. campaign of terror. We will never know how Hughes and Robeson or Lenny Bruce and Billie Holiday would have thrived, freed from the terrors induced by U.S. cultural myopia. We only know that each fought back in a life-long battle.
Works Cited
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 7,
The Early Simple Stories. Ed., Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper. Columbia,
Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Hughes, Langston. The Return of Simple. New York: Hill & Wang, 1994.
Rampersad, Arnold, and David Roessel, eds. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986-1988.
Scott, Jonathan. Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
Barry David Horwitz has taught English & American Lit., Theater, and Politics for many decades. He was Prof. of English for thirty-five years at Saint Mary’s College. Before that he taught at Univ/Calif., Berkeley; Univ/Paris, Sorbonne; Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris; Univ/Maryland, NATO; and Univ. of Montpellier, France. For the last 15 years, he has been the Artistic Director of The Quixotic Players, a group that specializes in Greek classics in modern adaptations, as well as Shakespearean and modern plays. He has performed, directed, and produced plays from Aeschylus to Albee, as well as serving as Dramaturge. He acted as Tiresias in Bacchae for Shotgun Players. He has recently written on modern American drama–“American Dream Conspiracy: Williams, Miller, and Albee”—in a French journal: Divergences.be. Now on FUN-Employment, he loves to see small theater work around the S.F. Bay.
