Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture

4. Poetry as Counternarrative: Retelling History

4 Poetry as Counternarrative Retelling History Because the cultural climate surrounding him in the 1950s consisted of blatant censorship and repeated accusations of communism, Hughes’s poetry deserves to be read within a framework in which he had to show discretion when speaking about lynching. Hughes discovered strategies to address the topic of lynching in his poetry without being censored. He sometimes passed his poetry by “articulating other voices with such force and clarity that readers have assumed his complete disappearance from the poem” (Ponce 528). How and where Hughes passed poems about lynching is a subject that deserves to be revisited. It is important to note that, in regard to the notion of passing, I am distinguishing between Hughes’s genres and his audience. Simple’s dialogic structure and humor inherently distanced the speakers from their author, and Hughes was certainly able to speak indignantly in the black press and in specific places such as the Chicago Defender. In addition, selective audiences could also see Hughes address lynching on the stage before the 1950s. Hughes’s 1943 play For This We Fight was performed before “a Negro Freedom Rally on June 7, 1943, They lynch me still in Mississippi Langston Hughes, “The Negro” Poetry as Counternarrative: Retelling History 117 in Madison Square Garden, New York City,” where it “played to a soldout crowd” (CW 6: 437). This play made extensive reference to the long history of lynching in America. In the play, we hear that Nat Turner was “shot hung” (CW 6: 444) and the white sympathizer Elijah Lovejoy was dragged off to be “lynched for freedom” as the mob cried out: “Kill him! Lynch him! Kill him” (CW 6: 445). As Hughes chronicles the African American struggle for freedom up to the present, a Klansman holds a rope in his hands before declaring “it will be wrapped around you next if you don’t make yourself scarce before nightfall” (CW 6: 452). By the end of the play, cast members declare their desire for many things, including the “freedom from fear” and for President Roosevelt to speak up “for the anti-lynching bill” (CW 6: 460–61). However, Hughes’s poetry was directly linked to his own political thinking well into the late 1950s. Hughes’s own testimony before HUAC further reveals this fact. Of the seven literary works about which Hughes was questioned, five were poems; the other two were a play and an essay. During the questioning, Chief Counsel Roy Cohn incorrectly referred to Hughes’s play Scottsboro Limited as a poem (United States 977). Worse, in trying to refer to one of Hughes’s essays, Cohn did not know the genre, the correct title, or the correct place of publication (United States 985). In short, Hughes experienced more liberty in genres that excited less public interest than did poetry. Representatives of the dominant culture were unwilling to let a man whom they considered to be, at the very least, a communist sympathizer berate America for its lynchings of African Americans. Unable to simply examine their own hypocrisy regarding the nation’s professed core principles of freedom and justice, they incorrectly suspected that such critical attacks veiled deeper anti-American political purposes. They feared that his rhetoric was part of a larger underground movement called communism, which appeared to be bent on either undermining the structure of the established U.S. government or overthrowing the country. Hughes learned that his identity could be coded differently in varying contexts. As we have seen, Hughes knew how to pass for Mexican while traveling by train through Texas. In Russia, he was greeted as a comrade in the 1930s. During his first trip to Africa, he learned that the native people would not regard his skin as dark enough to earn the title black. Hughes learned where and how he would and would not be allowed to pass on a personal level, and his poetry displays this same 118 Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture awareness. His negotiation of this constraint reveals that Hughes could simultaneously veil and document American lynching culture. Hughes’s poetic designs that passed despite the constraints of censorship and red baiting reveal that he was unwilling to void this all-too-important subject from his writings. A reevaluation of his poetic works recovers his inventiveness, ambition, and determination in the face of these strict parameters. This chapter explores Hughes’s ability to...