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

Prologue

prologue The renowned poet, fiction writer, playwright, essayist, and humorist Langston Hughes has been the subject of countless biographies, critical studies, celebratory conferences and symposia, and other well-earned acknowledgments of his enduring body of creative writing. Hughes is widely acclaimed for his shaping influence on the development of African American literature and for his generous assistance to a younger generation of writers emerging in the early 1960s. For all the careful scrutiny given to this luminary, it is curious that one of his biggest influences has gone virtually unexamined: his mother, Carolyn “Carrie” Hughes Clark. In nearly all the attention devoted to Hughes’s blues and jazz ethos, humor, vernacular voicings, and poetic innovations, the possible role Carrie may have played in her son’s vast array of stylistic experiments and literary production has been nearly ignored. Conceptually, the matter of “influence” remains a conflicted notion. However, the idea we propose has little to do with establishing literary precursors, demonstrating convergence with or divergence from the work of other poets and fiction writers, or employing other such relational strategies with regard to authors and book reading.1 Fundamentally, My Dear Boy sets forth “influence,” using the correspondence Carrie sent to Langston , as a means of extrapolating a subtle familial transaction revealed in such representative works as his Not without Laughter, Mulatto, “Negro Mother,” and Soul Gone Home. Our use of letters to place the Self in perspective falls within a well-explored tradition. 2  prologue In her impressive study The CulturalWork of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess, Susan K. Harris thoughtfully contextualizes an important perspective on the letter-writing tradition. She begins with the most common assumption about personal letters as a rhetorical act: that “they are private conversations between individuals” (51). Using William Decker’s Epistolary Practices, she complicates this idea by noting that most letters have “multiple interfaces.” She continues: “Decker’s postmodern term ‘interface’ . . . helps us to think of letters as a two-way process instead of as a purely unidirectional, inscriber-to-recipient, mode of writing. . . . [T]hinking in terms of multiple interfaces enables us to consider the effect of the letter on the person writing it as well as the person or persons receiving it” (52). In his own way, Faulkner scholar James G. Watson offers an insight similar to Harris’s: “Personal letters are fragments of autobiography in which the Self and the Word are designedly one. They deliver the letter writer figuratively into the hands of the reader, but because they do, the Self written in private letters is vulnerable to intrusions” (William xii). Implicit in Watson’s astute observation are two key points. First, in Faulkner’s letters, the relationship between Self and Word is a self-conscious, deliberate working out of personality and self-expression. Thus the art of letter writing becomes for Faulkner a rehearsal for his fiction. Second, while the private nature of his correspondence is not intended for posterity or to be widely shared, the letters are nevertheless open to the interpretations others might bring to them. Although Carrie’s letters, even to the most casual reader, are not intended to reveal the reading communities Harris discusses, it is possible to extrapolate “multiple interfaces.” They are without the epistolary conventions governing Faulkner’s public and private correspondence, but her letters are nevertheless open to interpretation. She obviously did not write with posterity in mind. No doubt she would rankle at the examination of her correspondence for what it divulges about her own person and her contentious familial relationships. Such an exploration, though, serves a higher purpose than merely “airing dirty laundry” or exposing an idiosyncratic personality. The transaction between Self and Word in her letters manifests an inextricably linked emotional connection between her prologue  3 desperate pleas to Langston and his aesthetic response to her demanding entreaties. Thus the “interface” in her letters is a two-way process between writer and recipient: there is communication with Langston and a revelation of deep insight into her Self. Using the analysis we propose reveals a vulnerability that public readers might readily perceive. As this prologue demonstrates, Carrie’s letters reveal a life fraught with a complexity and complication heretofore unexplored and with a depth that offers her life as a shaping influence on Langston’s art. The epilogue frames his response to the intricacies of her life, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. By inscribing their relationship...