From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   BOOKS ARCHIVES   
   Langston Hughes: A Genius Child Comes of Age   
      
   â€œHughes was the first black American writer many of us ever read... and his   
   career re­mains an inspiring model for black writers determined to make a   
   living solely from their work.â€�   
      
   by GREG TATE   
   Originally published July 1, 1988   
   1988 Village Voice article by Greg Tate about Langston Hughes   
   GRIFF DAVIS / BLACK STAR   
      
   Warts and all, the Langston Hughes who emerges from the first volume of Arnold   
   Rampersad’s exceptional biography doesn’t suffer badly in comparison with   
   the var­nished Poet Laureate of Negro America that blacks have been raised on   
   for generations. A    
   staple of high-school curricula and home recitation, Hughes figures in   
   African-Ameri­can life as significantly as in its letters, a literary hero   
   the culture cozied up to like a warm hearth. Hughes was the first black   
   American writer many of us ever    
   read, and some of his verses hold the high honor of having been accepted into   
   the canon of black mother wit — “Son, life for me ain’t been no crystal   
   stairâ€� is the most famous; “Nobody loves a genius childâ€� runs a close   
   second. Richard Wright,   
    Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Nicolas Guillen, Amiri Baraka, and Gil   
   Scott-Heron were all bene­ficiaries of Hughes’s lifelong encouragement of   
   younger dark writers, and his career re­mains an inspiring model for black   
   writers determined to make a    
   living solely from their work.   
      
   Well, an inspiring model of sorts. As Rampersad details, Hughes spent the   
   first two decades of an adventuresome life chas­ing fortune more doggedly   
   than literary fame. He was fortunate in having fame thrust upon him early —   
   publication in W. E. B. Du    
   Bois’s Crisis in 1921 brought him the kindness of patrons black and white.   
   Nevertheless, his youth reads like a 20th century guide to writing your way   
   into history on $5 a day. Being a pauper didn’t keep him from covering the   
   globe; much of Rampersadâ   
   €™s volume is spent tracking Hughes’s movements from the Midwest to Mexico,   
   New York, Africa, Russia, and Spain.   
      
   Blessed with a facility for cheeriness, Hughes seems to have made it on little   
   more than good vibes and curiosity. In the late ’30s, his veteran-bohemian   
   advice to Man­hattan newcomer Ralph Ellison was “Be nice to people, and let   
   them buy your mealsâ   
   €� (according to Ellison, it paid off immediate­ly). Still, the specter of   
   capital, or rather the lack and hungry pursuit thereof, viciously haunts   
   Rampersad’s Hughes. In plying the writer’s trade to serve the race and   
   feed himself, Hughes made    
   considerable artistic, personal, and political sacrifices and com­promises.   
   These form the core of the biogra­phy’s character revelations, though   
   Rampersad appropriately notes how deeply Hughes’s upbringing conditioned his   
   adult persona.   
      
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   BOOKS ARCHIVES   
   Yo Hermeneutics! Hiphopping Toward Poststructuralism   
   by GREG TATE   
   Originally published June 1, 1985   
   True to the old saws that artists need unhappy childhoods and bad   
   relationships with their fathers, Hughes spent at least half his life drawing   
   upon the misery fate had doled out to him on both counts. His parents, James   
   and Carrie Hughes, separat­ed    
   not long after he was born, and young Langston thereafter saw little of his   
   mother, who left him for long stretches in his grand­mother’s care. She was   
   out seeking clerical work where she could find it in the poet-to­-be’s   
   birth-state, Kansas. On    
   his mother’s side, Hughes was descended from distin­guished free blacks,   
   the abolitionists Charles and Mary Langston, who’d worked for the   
   underground railroad. Mary lost her first husband, James Leary, in the Harpers   
   Ferry raid. Hughes’s father,    
   the self-educated son of slaves, was anything but a race man. “Detesting the   
   poor, he especially disliked the black poor. He was unsentimental, even cold.   
   â€˜My father hated Negroes,’ Langston Hughes would judge. ‘I think he   
   hated him­self for    
   being a Negro. He disliked all of his family because they were Negroes.’   
   Where Carrie’s parents had instilled in her a sense of noblesse oblige, Jim   
   Hughes seemed to look upon most blacks as undeserving cowards.â€�   
      
   Rebellion against his father, as certainly as the race history he got on   
   grandma Lang­ston’s knee (she used to wrap him in her first husband’s   
   blood-stained shawl), played a large part in Hughes’s decision to become a   
   race-conscious bard. Growing    
   up in all­-white neighborhoods throughout his school years, he developed a   
   diplomatic approach to race relations and an intellectual and emotional   
   rapprochement with black work­ing-class culture. Like many subsequent black   
   middle-class writers, he    
   entered into a professional relationship with that culture which derived in   
   equal parts from a sense of mission and a need to work out his own obsessions.   
   The desire to resolve the conflict between responsibility to the race and   
   re­sponsibility to    
   literary ideals informs much black American writing. Hughes’s resolution   
   would both nourish and compromise his art.   
      
   In 1915, when Hughes was 13, he was taken to a revival meeting by his aunt and   
   lied about having been saved by the Holy Ghost. While he wept over the lie, he   
   also recognized its necessity in allowing him to keep faith with black   
   culture. “At thirteen,    
   Hughes probably already viewed the black world both as an insider, and far   
   more im­portantly, as an outsider. The view from outside did not lead to   
   clinical objectivity, much less alienation. Once outside, every intimate force   
   in Hughes would drive him    
   toward seeking the love and approval of the race, which would become the grand   
   obses­sion of his life.â€�   
      
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   NEIGHBORHOODS   
   Harlem When It Sizzled   
   by GREG TATE   
   Originally published December 7, 1982   
   After high school, Hughes went to Mexico to live with his father, who   
   responded to his wish to write for a living with the advice that he should   
   learn a skill which would take him away from the United States, “where you   
   have lived like a nigger with    
   niggers.â€� Fueled by his father’s hate, Hughes wrote poems that fused his   
   personal hurts with his desire for love from blacks — black maternal love in   
   particular. Through these poems, he would eventually find a home in Crisis and   
   an empathetic    
   editor in Jessie Fauset, doy­enne of the Harlem Renaissance. After going to   
   New York in the fall of 1920 to attend Columbia, Hughes upped the ante with   
   ra­cial verse aimed as much at unnerving his father as at providing uplift   
   for the masses. According    
   to Rampersad,   
      
      
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