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

Preface

preface October 29, 1928 I want you to help me this time and I won’t bother you ever again. Dear, why don’t you love me. Why aren’t we more loving and chummy. Why don’t you ever confide in me. I know I have no sense to help you in your work but I’d enjoy your confidence. Now Langston, I have no one else to talk to, you will agree with me and help me won’t you if you can? Please don’t be angry because I want to go, for I’d see everyone I ever knew so I am wild to go. February 15, 1933 Yes, your mother is an actress at last, the dream I dreamed as a little child is very near realized. I am one of the principals in Hall Johnson’s show “Run Little Chillun Run.” February 3, 1938 “I get out very little and am nearly crazy being so lonely, sometimes. But I can’t stand it. Car fare is so high one can’t go often now days. I have 6 months.” These epigraphs are snapshots framing the fascinating, albeit conflicted life of Carolyn “Carrie” Hughes Clark—mother of the renowned poet, fiction writer, playwright, and essayist Langston Hughes. Between 1926 and 1930, when Langston is in his twenties, she worries, cajoles, demands, and generally holds her son emotionally hostage. During the next few years, she flies high, feeling free and valued as a person, an artist, and a woman as she realizes her lifelong dream of performing onstage to an audience of adoring xiv  preface fans. Toward the end of the 1930s, she spirals downward into a lonely abyss of bad health, isolation, poverty, and death. When she writes her dutiful son in February 1938 about her sense of devastation and loneliness, she did not have six months to live—only four. She died June 3 in New York City, where her “dear boy” had taken her for care in the time she had remaining. My Dear Boy focuses on an important but heretofore largely unexplored dimension of Langston Hughes. What is known about Langston has been nicely captured in a number of well-argued biographies and collections of his correspondence. A perfect complement to them, however, is available in the underused collection of extant correspondence written by his mother. Her letters are a treasure trove of ideas and information that shed new light on Langston, especially his family dynamic and aesthetic achievement. The perspective on their relationship that emerges from Carrie’s letters to her dear son is often one of insensitivity, if not downright pain. But eliciting sympathy for traumatic family interactions is not the purpose of this book. The goal instead is to explicate Hughes family dynamics. Carrie’s role in orchestrating the interrelationships of family members is crucial to understanding their effect on Langston, including his response to her many entreaties and how he embeds familial themes in the art he creates in the mid-1920s to the late 1930s—the period during which she corresponds with him. Her letters, then, force her out of the shadows and into the same light of those who have already been considered significant influences on his aesthetic development. The letters in this book, which cover twelve years, 1926–38, are found in the Langston Hughes Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Why Carrie’s letters have received virtually no attention en masse is difficult to determine. One explanation may entail availability. Precisely when her letters were added to her son’s voluminous archive at the Beinecke Library is uncertain. Prior to his death in 1967, Langston had been shipping boxes of his papers to the collection for nearly twenty years, and a large group was sent soon after his death. It is safe to assume that Carrie’s letters were for a longtime simply included in his enormous body of papers with no special effort to identify or isolate them. Sadly, a record of who had access to the manuscripts and letters is preface  xv lost to history too. Shifting library policies meant that some materials were made public as they were catalogued and processed, while others remained restricted for various reasons. Scholars have long acknowledged Carrie in their work on Langston, some even using fugitive letters as evidence for their arguments. Regennia N. Williams and...