My Dear Boy: Carrie Hughes's Letters to Langston Hughes, 1926-1938

Things Fall Apart, 1935

Things Fall Apart 1935 The year 1935 proves to be, arguably, the lowest point in Carrie’s life. If the thirty-three letters she writes to Langston are any indication—the most in any of the twelve years represented here—her precipitous fall following her stint on stage signifies she has reached rock bottom. The pressure she puts on Langston to fuse more fully with her and Gwyn increases exponentially. Strategically, she focuses on four themes in an effort to force him to accede to her needs and demands: (1) Gwyn’s life, (2) her increased loneliness, (3) the discovery of a tumor in her breast, and (4) poverty so grave that she might have to resort to living on a county poor farm. The death of Langston’s father, James Hughes, on October 22, 1934, incurs an additional obligation for Langston. He returns to Mexico in December to assist James’s longtime friends and heirs to his estate, the Patino sisters, in settling James’s will and business affairs. Not to be outdone in her perceived contest for Langston’s affections, Carrie forces his trip to become an emotional tug of war. Beginning in January 1935, she writes passionately, pleading for Langston to return to Oberlin because she desperately needs him. The initial strategy is to elicit Langston’s sympathies by using Gwyn’s poor health and even poorer academic performance as emotional appeals. “I am very much worried about Gwyn,” she writes. “He is so thin and pale and has so little to build on.” Since Langston is “so far away,” she feels compelled to worry “just nearly to death with every thing.” Gwyn, she frantically implies, vacillates between noble pursuits 92  things fall apart and moral dissolution: wishing to write, acquiring money, desiring marriage , and consuming too much liquor. That he relapses into poor health three more times increases her anxiety and helplessness. Utterly frustrated with Gwyn, she throws up her hands and cries: “I am alone with him night and day and sometimes I feel I can’t go on then I spruce up and try it again.” In a telling coda, she softens a bit: “I guess many mothers has done the same.” How ironic she should invoke maternal instinct as an argument for supporting Gwyn when the pattern of “abandoning and returning” defines the relationship she had with Langston when he was Gwyn’s age. The maternal instinct toward Gwyn that she carefully displays evolves into another connectional strategy with Langston. “If he goes,” writes Carrie about Gwyn’s desire to seek employment in another city, “it will leave me alone for the first time in my life.” Once again her feelings occupy center stage. With a tone of self-pity, she beseeches Langston: “[I] hate to live alone so if Gwyn goes I will have to hear what you think best for your lonely little Mother.” No doubt the pathos dripping from these lines appears to be sincere, but the effect is emotional manipulation. Her words also render invisible and, hence unimportant, Langston’s emotional needs. At no point does she acknowledge the many times Langston lived alone when she was off following her dreams or her man. Gwyn’s poor health and her increased loneliness when he leaves exacerbate another problem for Carrie: her deepening impoverishment. Rhetorically , she frames her condition masterfully into an emotional dilemma. Faced with eviction and no place to go, she desperately writes: “I am again at the place I can’t go and I can’t stay.” This one phrase succinctly captures Carrie’s life at arguably her lowest point. In trying to hold on to Gwyn and provide also for herself, she tells Langston: “Now the problem is what and where and when, If I am to have Gwyn. I don’t know where to stay.” The power of these appeals, in Bowen terms, is actually a test of the degree to which the family has successfully bonded. The fundamental question is how will the family bond to solve a problem that has been properly identified as threatening their unity and still emerge from the crisis with self-differentiation. Carrie elects a strategy that proves to be inappropriate enmeshment. She divests herself from any blame for their problems or any things fall apart  93 responsibility for finding a workable solution when she shifts the burden for a remedy onto Langston’s shoulders. On one...