Visiting Langston was written by Willie Perdomo, who the jacket flap says was raised eight blocks away from Langston Hughes’s house in Harlem, New York. It is illustrated by Bryan Collier, who now lives in Harlem. I wrote about his book Uptown in October.
Sang like love
Cried like blues
I know from reading Coming Home; from the life of Langston Hughes by Floyd Cooper that Langston was raised by his grandmother for many years when his mother was trying to make her name as an actress and his father was living and working in Mexico. His father was a lawyer but left Kansas because of difficulties finding work due to racism. As a young child Langston lived with his grandmother and listened to her stories of family heroes. Her first husband had ridden with John Brown and was killed in the struggle. One of his uncles was a lawyer that was elected to Congress. Two other of his uncles were Buffalo soldiers. She herself had worked on the Underground Railroad. She took Langston to Topeka to hear Booker T. Washington speak.
Langston was able to visit his mother and together they went to Mexico to visit his father. When his grandmother grew older and became too sick to care for him he lived with family friends for two years. He lived in Illinois with his mother and went to high school in Cleveland OH. On one of the adoption forums I visit someone posted a list of famous adoptees and his name was on the list along with Jesse Jackson, Nelson Mandela, and Malcolm X. All of these men lived with adults other than their parents for part of their childhoods, but they weren’t adopted. I think it is doing a disservice to them and their families to label them adoptees. Langston had many hardships to overcome but losing his parents to adoption wasn’t one of them. His father paid for his first year of college at Columbia. His family was a bedrock part of his growing up to be the brilliant poet he became. Floyd Cooper says, “Sometimes Langston’s ma would send for him. He’d ride the train to the Kansas City Bottoms where she’d meet him and off they’d go. They’d see plays, the opera, and visit the library, where Langston was fascinated by the big, bright, silent reading room, the long smooth tables, and librarians who would so kindly get books for him. Sometimes, when she was busy, his mother would leave him at his uncle Des’s barbershop. He liked it there, right in the center of the black district.”
Hughes is known for his celebration of his people. He is known for being an African American who celebrated his race and skin color in his work. His joyful adoration of blackness in the face of hatred and racism is one of the things that attract me to his poetry. Wikipedia says, “Hughes stressed the importance of a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism absent of self-hate that united people of African descent and Africa across the globe and encouraged pride in their own diverse black folk culture and black aesthetic. Langston Hughes was one of the few black writers of any consequence to champion racial consciousness as a source of inspiration for black artists.”
Hughes’s genius for taking his sadness and pain and turning it into a shout of joy is a gift to the world. For many years I have delighted in sharing his poetry with my students, whatever their race. Not only is his poetry inspirational and affirming for black kids, but I think his poetry give an opportunity for little white boys and girls to be able to imagine themselves in this poem:
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.
I think maybe Bryan Collier wrote his dedication (quoted above) with black kids in mind, meaning that the mirror of Langston’s artistry would affirm them and their blackness. That is wonderful. But I think the mirror works for me and everyone else as well, because it shows our humanity. In feeling and seeing Langston’s way we become stronger, more compassionate, and wiser. This mirror of his art is how we will come together. Especially for the white kids studying Black History Month who have no black kids in their school or adult black role models in their community. They need to be able to imagine themselves rejoicing in blackness and growing like a tree safe and free and happy in the world. How else will they build a better world together?