Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II by Rampersad Arnold;

Author:Rampersad, Arnold;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2002-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

MAKING HAY 1957 to 1958

I play it cool

And dig all jive

That’s the reason

I stay alive.

My motto,

As I live and learn,

is:

Dig And Be Dug

In Return.

“Motto,” 1951

BEAMING WITH CONFIDENCE about his future, Hughes rang in the new year by attending so many celebrations—three “white” gatherings downtown, two “cullud” parties uptown in Harlem, capped by a lively visit at six o’clock in the morning to his favorite Harlem nightclub, the Baby Grand—that even he was amazed by his carousing. Certainly there were tasks at hand, and he was eager to accomplish them. Yet he was also determined to enjoy his success. “I am ready to retire to an ivory tower,” he wrote to his friend Arna Bontemps, “but have never yet spotted one in Harlem.” By “ivory tower” he did not mean a place for pure contemplation. At most, he wanted only a quiet room apart from the worst distractions, some place where he could take advantage, without fear of constant interruption, of the bonanza of professional opportunities that he saw on almost every side, now that his political rehabilitation was apparently complete. He wanted to exploit these opportunties and through them secure a measure of financial prosperity; he also wanted to enjoy himself. Only after the last New Year’s toast was drunk did Langston plunge readily into a year he soon called, with good reason, “about the busiest of my life.”

In his public appearances he veered away from the controversies that had once almost silenced him. Faced with the news of increasing turmoil in the South over civil rights, he emphasized humor and good cheer. On January 10, as the main speaker at a gala luncheon in Chicago when the predominantly black Windy City Press Club gave its first Man-of-the-Year award to the hero of Birmingham, Alabama, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston talked not about the civil rights struggle but about “Humor and the Negro Press.” The Negro press, he explained, with its volatile journalistic mixture of solemnity on civil rights and scandal, of stodginess and sensationalism, was “my favorite reading”—the main thing he missed (along with American ice cream) when he was overseas. On the whole, the black press was too solemn—a point he emphasized when he allowed his Chicago Defender stalwart, Jesse B. Semple, to explicate each letter in the hated word “Mississippi,” starting with “Murders” and ending with “Infidels.” Simple made “a double entendre out of P-P over Mississippi,” Langston reported, “which Simple will do when he gets to be an angel, hoping the Dixiecrats don’t have time to get their umbrellas up as he wets all over Mississippi.”

As for Martin Luther King, Jr.—he should run for President of the United States, Simple argued later that year in the Defender. The fact that King wasn’t thirty-five years old meant nothing. “What Rev. King lacks in years,” Simple asserted, “he makes up in guts. He did not run away from Montgomery when they put a bomb under his house, did he? What he lacks in years he also makes up in being wise.

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