Langston Hughes: Backlash blues
Love, truth, and white America
The Book:
The Big Sea: An Autobiography
By Langston Hughes
First published in 1940
Alfred A. Knopf
The Talk:
As a high school freshman I got permission to visit the library during study hall. I wandered the stacks every day, surrounded by a thousand doors of possibility. I wanted it all.
One day I stumbled across a few dusty cloth-bound copies of Langston Hughes. It was free verse with a musical structure to it—the Blues—holding it together and pushing it forward. It was also the first poetry I had read with a social, political edge.
I wrote some very bad, brooding poems in imitation of Hughes about the injustices of being a high schooler. But he taught me to listen for the rhythm of speech and to have a bold voice. He taught me the power of the simplest words, that one could read the same short poem over and over, and it would go deeper and deeper still.
Hughes was a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and I had inadvertently tapped the main root of American culture. As I have written about before, the creative genius of Black Americans is the often occulted vital center of American identity—it’s music, dance, performance, fashion, food, sports, humor, religion, and language.
T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes were both American poets at the same time. Both were from Missouri. But Eliot wrote with a British affectation. Hughes wrote like an American. While Eliot was renouncing his U.S. citizenship, Hughes was on road trips with Zora Neale Hurston through the South, collecting folk tales that would be the fodder for new plays.
In his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea Langston Hughes tells the story of his life in a series of vignettes from the start of the 20th Century to the 1930s. His prose style is sometimes compared to Hemingway, who wrote with simple words in simple sentences which were freighted with heavy psychological subtext. This is true with Hughes, though I think the subtext here is often social and critical. Hughes tells many stories about his experiences of Jim Crow America and racism more generally, while leaving his white and black readers to fill in the things unsaid.
The fact that white and black audiences may fill those gaps very differently has given the book a reputation for being too coy, too slippery, too evasive. (Similarly, Hughes’ affinity for socialist ideas is obvious from the book but left undefined. His sexuality is similarly elided.)
Even so, that tension was not lost on Hughes himself. The heart of the book is a dance between truth-telling and a desire to be loved. The person that Hughes reveals is shy, kind, sensitive. Someone hungry to be friends with anyone and everyone. Someone with a tender soul for every creature and person—but also with an independent streak at the same time, a Romantic individual reacting passionately against social constraint.
Young man, suppose I told the truth
Hughes describes three episodes that form the structure of an otherwise unstructured book.
The first is from his childhood in Kansas. At a revival service, he feels pressured to feel the presence of Jesus. When he feels nothing, the service continues—with him as the lone holdout. As the social pressure builds, he comes forward and pretends he has converted.
Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped in the air. My aunt threw her arms around me. The minister took me by the hand and led me to the platform.
When things quieted down, in a hushed silence, punctuated by a few ecstatic “Amens,” all the new young lambs were blessed in the name of God. Then joyous singing filled the room.
That night, for the last time in my life but one—for I was a big boy twelve years old—I cried. I cried, in bed alone, and couldn’t stop. I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt heard me. She woke up and told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost had come into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. But I was really crying because I couldn’t bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was a Jesus any more, since he didn’t come to help me.
Why Hughes is crying is complex. Surely the intensity of the experience and social pressure plays a role. But also, he chose social acceptance over truth (who wouldn’t?) and it creates a wound that reappears throughout the book in different ways. He appears to have failed his community, but in fact he has failed himself—and he will refuse to allow that failure ever again.
The second scene occurs when Hughes is a teenager living with his father in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. His father is a successful businessman who pressures him to get a college degree in engineering and run his business with him in Mexico. Every cell in Hughes’ body rejects this path—for nascent political reasons (his identification with the poor), for racial reasons (his identification with the Black community in America), for aesthetic reasons (his love of literature), and for dispositional reasons (his hatred of math). Here Hughes chooses these truths about himself over his father, and his rejection of his father’s plans leads to a permanent rift between them.
The third scene involves a wealthy white patron who lavishes the poet with money and praise. She pays for everything he wants, even shuttling him around New York in her chauffeured car. She seems to be a genuinely kind and wholesome person who believes in him. She is, in a way, everything he has ever desired in life—appreciation, acceptance, unlimited resources for his creative work, and the complete freedom from money worries. (Money is another theme, perhaps the primary theme, of the whole book: Not having it, trying to find it, earning it, spending it, sharing it.)
These three episodes function like the three temptations of Jesus in the Bible.
Jesus is challenged to turn stones into bread. (Hughes’ temptation by his father to become a businessman and make money, to literally feed himself, as Hughes will spend large portions of the book desperate for food.)
Jesus is tempted to leap from the temple so that angels with catch him. (Hughes’ temptation to fake a spiritual experience, to perform for others.)
Jesus is offered all the kingdoms of the world, if he will bow to Satan. (His patron’s offer to give him a comfortable situation to pursue his art.)
Eventually, Hughes writes a poem criticizing the building of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel during the Great Depression, offering thousand-dollar rooms (no blacks allowed) while people slept under newspapers in the street. This marks the first small rift with his wealthy patron, eventually leading to the breakup of their relationship. Hughes, in his own telling, passes the final test. After being offered all the money (and all the affection and praise) he could ever have imagined, he chooses truth-telling in the end.
Truth-telling was not the route of successful Black leaders at the time. Hughes tells a story about writing a sociological survey while in college that criticized the all-white faculty at his all-black university.
One of the famous old grads of Lincoln [University], in objecting to the baldness with which the facts of my survey were presented, said to me at graduation: “Young man, suppose I told the truth to white folks. I never could have built the great institution I’ve built for my race.” (And he has created a large and much needed institution for the Negro population in a great Middle Western city.) He continued: “You don’t get things out of white folks that way.”
I’m gonna leave you with the blues
“So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. … My kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.” ~ Chris Rock, 2014
The final third of the book is an extended recollection of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. From his perspective in the 1940s, Hughes is ambivalent about the era. The “Black Renaissance,” as he explains it, was more a surge of white interest in Black culture rather than a unique flourishing of Black talent.
White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo.
White interest flowed into Harlem, and it flowed out just as fast when the economy collapsed in 1929. And Black artists, performers, writers, and thinkers continued producing great works—before, during, and after. And the inequalities of common people remained just as they were—before, during, and after.
It’s hard not to read this now in light of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, which may be understood in retrospect as a surge of white interest, sympathy, and concern about racial injustice, a surge that has since receded.
Over a year before the start of the current administration, the whole of 2024, there was a parade of headlines about corporations and universities reversing, removing, or hiding their diversity and inclusion programs.
"The backlash is real": Behind DEI’s rise and fall (Axios, 4/2/24)
America’s HR Lobby Scraps the ‘E’ From DEI (WSJ, 7/12/24)
“By emphasizing inclusion-first, we aim to address the current shortcomings of DE&I programs, which have led to societal backlash,” the group said in a statement posted on LinkedIn.
‘The S&P 500 without the woke sh*t’: Here come the MAGA funds (Semafor, 11/26/24)
The fund is a bet on the Trump economy and the broader backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that the president-elect tapped into on his way to victory.
Boardroom diversity stalls in the face of conservative backlash (Reuters, 1/6/25)
“Young man, suppose I told the truth to white folks.”
In the 1960s Hughes wrote the lyrics to “Backlash Blues” and gave them to Nina Simone to sing.
Mr. Backlash, Mr. Blacklash
Just who do think I am?
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages
And send my son to Vietnam
You give me second class houses
And second class schools
Do you think that all colored folks
Are just second class fools?
Oh Mr. Blacklash, I’m gonna leave you
With the blues
When I try to find a job
To earn a little cash
All you got to offer
Is your mean old white backlash
But the world is big
Big and bright and round
And it’s full of folks like me
Who are black, yellow, beige and brown
Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you
With the blues
Here’s my favorite version of Nina Simone’s:
Simone adds her own lyrics at the end:
When Langston Hughes died,
he told me many months before,
he said, Nina keep on working
til they open up the door
and one of these days when you make it
and the doors are open wide,
make sure you tell them exactly where it’s at
so they’ll be no other place to hide
so I’m telling you—
warning you—
telling you now,
I’m gonna leave you with the blues
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Black Mermaids - Roy Wood Jr. (YouTube)