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

Following Langston: A Foreword

following langston A Foreword Late summer 1967. Sumter, South Carolina. Jet magazine has just arrived as it does each and every month. Mama sits in her chair reading through the current Black history news, holding the tiny Jet pages by their corners and reading aloud in her most operatic voice. She includes in her reading news of any deaths she believes should matter to us children, whether we recognize the names called out or not. She wants us to know that both things and people come and go. Mama and Daddy are lifetime members of the NAACP. They believe in supporting Black cultural institutions. They treat Black publications like modern-day North Stars. Jet, Ebony, The Crisis all arrive and take their proper place on the main coffee table like Black constellations—shining up at us. Until we can read for ourselves, we are read to every day of our young lives. I learn very early that there are Black people who must never be forgotten. James Mercer Langston Hughes died when I was ten years old. The facts were surely read aloud: Joplin. Grandmother. Kansas. Class Poet. Dream. Harlem. Jazz. Race Pride. Mama called him a “poet of note,” reminding me that I had recited some of his poetry once, “A Dream Deferred” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” at Emmanuel Methodist Church for Black History Month. I do not remember this moment as much as I have been reminded of this moment. Langston Hughes followed me around like a great light. In my neighborhood Langston Hughes was called some variation of the Poet Laureate x  foreword of the Negro Race. For me—he was exactly that. As a young Black girl of the segregated, then begrudgingly integrated South, he might as well have been the first poet of the whole wide world. In seventh grade, I started keeping a journal and writing poetry. It would be several years before I would read somewhere, and marvel, that Langston Hughes had been the class poet of his own eighth grade. The Crisis magazine that kept arriving long after Hughes was dead was one of the places I began to check the pages of—looking for more from Langston Hughes’s many worlds: essays, librettos, plays, autobiography, children’s books, jazz histories, solo poems especially. Long after Langston had gone there were other things that kept him alive in me: reading The Big Sea and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in college, finding Fire!! in the Schomburg stacks one summer between graduate school sessions. I followed the life and work of Langston Hughes from discovery to study. I never knew quite where his bright words might lead me. I just knew I had to walk strong into the light. I was a curiously sensitive, indeed sometimes melancholy Black girl living in the Civil Rights South. I belonged to the wide wicked world of the South yet I wanted to know more than anyone seemed to want to tell me. I listened to Daddy’s jazz records and wanted more. I listened to Mama read about the Black world out and beyond and wanted to know more. I had questions about the physics of life: Who got to move through the world with their head up all effortless and easy? Who had perfected the act of walking while bowed and bent and looking down? Who got to etch their initials into things like silver cups and write letters on cotton paper made with silk thread? Who wrote and hid their stories on paper bags and napkins? Who only had time to wash and wax? Who had to move on through the world with a sack of sorrow on their shoulders? Who got to dance and be the movie star? Who always died younger with the expected broken heart? During my search for how to become the poet that I didn’t know how to become, the poetry and life of Langston Hughes guided me from all four directions of the universe. I found in James Langston Hughes’s life a horizon line, a clear path—stepping stones to get from here to there. Here was foreword  xi a poet born and raised in another small town in America—just like me, from a politically charged family—just like me. A poet raised primarily by his grandmother, who had instilled in him an everlasting sense of race pride—just...