Arts and Letters

Langston Hughes was born in 1902. He died in 1967 at a moment of deep crisis in the history of his people. I wish that he might have lived to see this crisis through.

Ever since the beginning of our friendship in 1936, Langston was to me always a messenger from another country, bringing me tidings of places I had not been and was not able to go. There was first the bitter news of the Depression years, told in his short stories, such as his powerful "On the Road" and "Slice Him Down." I had left America in 1923, and did not have the means of returning until 1941. From the distance of Europe, my country's financial collapse was an unreal drama, seen as if through the wrong end of the opera-glasses. The monumental tragedy remained smaller than life-size. It was Langston's work that turned the opera-glasses around for me and gave all that had taken place, and was still taking place, its true dimensions.

In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, I learned in a very immediate way through Langston's letters to me from Spain, and through his scrupulously honest reporting, a great deal I had not known before. I learned that Americans of integrity had not hesitated to put the weight of their principles and the meaning of their lives in the balance (and, as it happened, their reputations for decades to come), and were fighting in Spain and writing in Spain in a dedicated effort to avert the second world war. Langston covered the activities and participation of Negroes in the International Brigade (writing for the Afro-American and other publications). His writings, and his presence at that moment in betrayed and devastated Spain are an essential part of the record of that honorable and memorable footnote to American history.

Langston Hughes and I did not actually meet until 1941, when I returned from nearly twenty years abroad. Through our visits to each other then and our talks together—and always through his work—I learned more from him than I had ever known before about the Negro ghetto. I became familiar with the unfamiliar geography of that other world. For the first time then I read Langston's poetry, "Vagabonds" and "Summer Evening" and others that I still re-read. In The Sweet Flypaper of Life, published in 1955, is some of Langston's most moving and important writing:

When the bicycle of the Lord bearing His messenger with a telegram for Sister Mary Bradley saying 'Come home' arrived at 113 West 134th Street, New York City, Sister Bradley said, 'Boy, take that right back to St. Peter because I am not prepared to go… For one thing,' said Sister Mary, 'I want to stay here and see what this integration the Supreme Court has done decreed is going to be like.'

I wish that Langston could also have dismissed the messenger boy with the telegram the day he came to his hospital room.

Shortly after his death, Lorraine Freeman wrote of Langston Hughes in The Village Voice:

Let us not weep that he was not born with a white passport into the great USA. Color neither added nor took away from this unusual man. He made us laugh. He made us weep, he made us wonder. As a human being first, a black woman second, I can truthfully say, black or white, he was a great man.

Twenty-five years ago the role of the black artist in a white society was not an easy role to play. It is not much easier to play now. Langston played it with unfailing patience and grace. Had he lived, that patience might understandably have been exhausted. This we cannot know now.

Once—I think it was in 1961—I went to the opening night of his play, Simple. It was scheduled to begin at 8:30, but when I reached the theatre shortly before the scheduled hour I found a deserted lobby and a sign saying: "Quiet. Curtain is up." That is how I think now of Langston's too early and unscheduled going. The curtain is up, dear friend, and we listen in silence to the opening and the closing lines, and all the lines in between.