Great Gay Poets Friday! Langston Hughes

Editor’s Note:

This is our fourth and, sadly, final post in honor of National Poetry Month, thanks to guest blogger Julia Garbowski, who conceived the idea and has done an excellent job sharing with us some of her favorites, including last week’s Edna St. Vincent Millay. Julia also shared with us great posts about Oscar Wilde and Hart Crane, and Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. This week, Julia looks at several poems by Langston Hughes.

I’m pleased to announce that Julia will be permanently joining our quickly-growing team here at The New Civil Rights Movement, and she’s working on some great ideas for future pieces. Welcome, Julia!

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, wrote one of his most well known poems at the age of seventeen. He wrote it on an envelope that he had in his pocket while riding on a train from Missouri to Mexico where he hoped to reconnect with his father. Raised mostly by his storytelling grandmother who had been one of the first women to attend Oberlin College, he had a strong sense of his black heritage.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers
By Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow

of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went

down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn

all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like rivers.

His “rivers” included a family history of prominence and folk heroes although financial stability was lacking. His white grandfather had staunchly insisted on marrying the black woman he loved, his Great-Uncle, John Mercer Langston, was the first black man to be elected to Congress in Virginia, and his grandmother’s first husband had been killed as a result of John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry. From a very early age he was given a purpose in life, –to work for equal rights for Black Americans.

In “Black Poets of the United States” Jean Wagner says of the poem that it “heralded the existence of a mystic union of Negroes in every country and every age.” But Langston Hughes’ rivers also included a stream of sexuality that he chose to hide. He carefully guarded his sexual preferences leaving some to suspect that he had none at all, while others point out that in order for him to be prominent in the Harlem Renaissance and continue to work toward black civil rights, he could not have revealed himself as gay during that time period. He died in 1967 which was two years before the Stonewall Riots that are often cited as the beginning of the gay rights movement .

When I read his poems they call me back to the black civil rights movement, but as in the following example written when he was just 20, they also speak to a greater truth about equality and human worth.

Question [1]
By Langston Hughes

When the old junk man Death

Comes to gather up our bodies

And toss them into the sack of oblivion,

I wonder if he will find

The corpse of a white multi-millionaire

Worth more pennies of eternity,

Than the black torso of

A Negro cotton-picker?

While Arnold Rampersad’s most definitive work on his life “The Life of Langston Hughes,” does not provide irrefutable evidence that he was gay, it does include sufficient evidence to build the argument. Even Rampersad writes that Hughes was attracted to black men, finding them “appealing and sexually fascinating.” But more compelling is that the question of his sexuality brings his work and life into coursework for Gay Studies at major universities and colleges throughout the country, including Yale, the University of Chicago and U.C. Berkeley.

The truth is that his sexuality was a secret; he did not claim or deny it in any case. Hughes is widely believed to have been gay because of connections to gay men and gay culture, long close friendships with out gay men, travels with companions, such as black gay artist Zell Ingram, and lack of relationships with women. Some of his poems also are given as evidence including “Young Sailor,” “Waterfront Streets,” “Café 3AM,” (about a police raid on a gay bar), and a series of unpublished poems claimed to be to a black male lover named “Beauty.”

The film “Looking for Langston” written and directed by Isaac Julien, produced by Nadine Marsh-Edwards in 1992 gives a much more definite portrayal of him as homosexual. I would love to think that Hughes thought his sexuality did not matter and therefore kept it private, but, knowing about his focus on the inequality of blacks in America, and knowing that he held close connections with gay culture; I cannot help but believe that he knew of a need to fight for the civil rights of gays as well, even if he was not ready to embrace that challenge.

I like to read my favorite Langston Hughes poem in the context of gay rights and the New Civil Rights Movement.

I, Too, Sing America
By Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

For more: “The Life of Langston Hughes” Vols I, II, by Arnold Rampersad, (Oxford University Press, 1986) “Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten” edited by Emily Bernard (Vintage Books, 2001). Also recordings at Smithsonian Folkways Records were made in 1955 of Langston Hughes reading his poems. Listen online at various sites, or look for CD: “The Dream Keeper and Other Poems of Langston Hughes” of the Folkways recordings.

Julia Garbowski lives in Royal Oak, MI and has returned to writing after 25 years of running a farm and market in Door County WI. She grew up in Sag Harbor, NY. Her B.A. in Communications is from the University of Wisconsin. She belongs to the Michigan Literary Network and her twitter name is @driftnotes.