Respecting the Folk

Abstract

Respecting the Folk Roland L. Williams Jr. (bio) The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 4, ed. Arnold Rampersad. University of Missouri Press, 2001. 2001. 344 pp. $29.95. American society has produced not many authors as versatile as Langston Hughes. Born in Joplin, Missouri, during 1902, yet raised by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, after his parents divorced, he began to write poems in high school. While books became his best friends, a dreary year at Columbia University drove him to doubt their worth and drop out of school. He dropped his library overboard when he started a stint as a merchant marine, but literature had a hold on him that he could never shake. Eventually, Hughes resumed college at Lincoln University, where he settled on a literary career that yielded volumes of poetry which have garnered continuous acclaim. Often forgotten, however, is the fact that, before his death in 1967, he also published autobiography, criticism, drama, fiction, and journalism, along with children’s stories. Collected, his writings form a mosaic of the black experience in his lifetime, worthy of constant recognition. A philosophy of black art articulated at the height of the Harlem Renaissance inspired his work. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” relates the logic that guided his choice of subjects and themes. Printed in a 1926 issue of The Nation, the essay encourages African-American artists to resist a tendency among the black bourgeoisie to idolize white culture. In the piece, Hughes advises fellow black artists to mine the dreams and dealings of “the low-down folks, the so-called common element,” individuals who relish gin and jazz, shout their religion, and soften their sorrows with laughter. He advocated this approach with the belief that it would fulfill an obligation to raise respect for folkways. Hughes stayed true to that outlook. Rhymes and rhythms, images and idioms, principles and plots gathered from black folk life fill his first book of verse, The Weary Blues (1926). In The Big Sea (1940), the earliest of two autobiographies, recording his struggle to forge an identity, the narrator confesses that the concept behind his initial novel grew from a wish “to write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West.” Ironically, entitled the Ways of White Folks (1934), his original collection of short stories highlight the ways in which humble blacks have braved the color bar in the twentieth century. The writer created a classic folk figure in the persona of Jesse B. Semple, who speaks his mind in a series of columns written by Hughes for the Chicago Defender over a span of twenty years. His work for children, beginning in 1932 with Popo and Fifina, in addition to his Broadway play Mulatto, which opened in 1935, features topics and motifs that foster pride among blacks. Hughes maintained the same sense of mission prior to his death, when he drafted nearly the last of better thirty-five books, a history of the NAACP, Fight for Freedom (1962). Until recently, the bulk of his material faced extinction. As his reputation came to rest on [End Page 532] his poetry, his other work passed out of print. Fortunately, the University of Missouri has come to the rescue. For twelve years, Beverly Jarrett, chief editor at the university press, labored to negotiate permission to issue a comprehensive compilation of Hughes’s writings. Consequently, in June 2001, the Missouri University Press was able to release the first few of an eighteen-volume set titled The Complete Works of Langston Hughes. Three in number, the initial group, edited by Arnold Rampersad, contains poetry written over close to half a century. Jarrett expects to have the rest of the collection available by the date of the author’s hundredth birthday. The fourth volume in the series appeared a month after the first ones. It consists of Hughes’s two published novels. There is Not without Laughter (1930), a wry bildüngsroman about a poor black boy named Sandy, who aspires to rise in society for the good of blacks with the assistance of learning. The accompanying narrative, Tambourines to Glory (1958), paints a bittersweet portrait of two women who lift themselves out of...