by Charles Everett Pace

James Mercer Langston Hughes’s world view was shaped from the creative crucible of childhood images, inspired from stories ancestral and books historical. This imaginative meeting of heritage and literature for the child dreamer would provide direction for the adult as both artist and political thinker. Through living the writer’s life Hughes did proclaimed, time and again, about the wondrous creative power of dreams…dreams denied, dreams achieved, dreams deferred but never dreams defeated. Thus, through childhood preparation in ways my on-stage re-creations will explore why Hughes advised young readers to “hold fast to dreams.”

A teenage Langston Hughes burst forth on the national literary scene with images that transcended both time and space, when The Crises (1920) published “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. Inspired as his train crossed the Mississippi River while traveling to visit his expatriate father, James Hughes in Mexico. This poem and the context of its creation signaled the cultural, historical and international scope of his emerging vision. Settling in New York City upon his return to the United States Hughes rapidly emerged as ‘first among equals’ of “Young Turks” who were birthing the black “New Negro” contribution of the creative movement spanning the Western world. Its American contingent, centered in Manhattan, brought black and white artists together in a way that was unprecedented even in the American imagination.

The central question that soon arose was how could he leverage the benefits of this emerging creative economy towards a career as writer? In I Wonder as I Wonder, his second autobiography, he informs us that “I want to write seriously and as well as I can, about the Negro people, and make that kind of writing earn for me a living.” Thus begins the central creative tension that defines much of his existence in a long and productive life; how to forge the dynamics of black subject matter output, to the desires of white publishers, while wrapping his unique vision around the problems of democracy in American life.

Hughes’s agenda was to produce an imaginative record of the day to day strivings of ordinary black folk and move them from the periphery to the center of cultural representation, as they in turn, strove to move themselves to the center of the American mainstream. He would use their folk creation in music, folklore, religion, fashion, dance, with the blues genre as the central organizing form of his creative imagination; through print and performance he hoped to popularize his literary out-put, while raising its folk source to the level of a classical art.

What began as national cultural aspirations, within the Harlem local context, quickly grew to international scope, in form as well as in content, through his constant travel across borders, state and national, racial, as well as, cultural. His travels produced creative collaborations that encompassed several countries across five continents: Europe, Africa, Asia, as well as, the Americas-North and South, including Islands in the Caribbean. Hughes’s imagination exploring alternative ways to advance the democratic agenda, in forming “a more perfect union”, was not only the vision for a country but Hughes “dreamed a world.”

The major character traits of Hughes were his helpfulness, smoothness, lack of ego, civility and grand sense of humor. Whether reacting to protest and pickets by followers of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in Pasadena, California, or responding to members of the Black press, about his generally acclaimed book of poems Fine Clothes to the Jew (1926), “it reeks of the gutter and the sewer” while dubbing him “Poet Low rate” of Harlem, Langston was always above the fray. Even when he was hauled before the Senate Sub-Committee on Permanent Investigations chaired by Senator Joseph McCarty (March, 1953) through it all, Hughes’ response was a model grace, class and civility as he showed how public exchange in being diverse does not have to be divisive. In his manner and bearing he demonstrated how we Americans in our domestic relations as well as, in our international relations should strive to be civil rather than crass.

Hughes end the end managed to win over his critics. When asked his assessment of Hughes, Amira Baraka (LeRoi Jones) offered this observation, more than twenty years after his initial critique of Langston doing the late 1960’s: “See, what I thought about Langston was that Langston was very glib and facile, that he could write, you know, as easily as breathing, an it’s true. What I didn’t understand is the consistently high quality of all that he did write.“ Thus, Langston is a model of not only bridge-building among nations, races and culture but the generations.

So how do we live through a life journey in the midst of despair everywhere and end up in a place of hope? Life, always in the process of becoming, never telegraphs its end in ways that can be reliably read as truth. And, because one’s true future is one of infinite possibilities whose inevitabity is only know at the end. Thus, while in this mist we should hold on to dreams and take note of the fact that whatever is here today tomorrow will be changed. What is constant and can remain the same are the imaginings of the creative mind constructing alternatives of our own choosing; imagines that we can and should work daily to make real. Thus, we can take guidance from Langston’s musing that …

It is wise

to suffer illusions,

Delusion,

Even dreams-

To believe that in this life

What is real

May also be what it seems,

What is not true

May be-

For you.