The Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes
The Harlem Renaissance is the period when African Americans created a new and exciting scene in Harlem in New York city in early 20th century. A very diverse group of people: writers, musicians and visual artists laid the foundations for what was to become one of the cornerstones of contemporary American culture. This is how I discovered two inextricably intertwined things that truly fascinate me: the Cotton Club and Langston Hughes.
Every movement worth the name needs two things: a temple and torchbearers. Because that’s exactly what happened in Harlem: a movement that bestowed us with things we’re now enjoying without being exactly familiar with their roots, in many cases. I’m not talking about ideology, human rights or activism-though art itself is the ultimate form of activism. I’m referring to the social aspect of it and how it affected the cultural identity of contemporary African Americans.
The Cotton Club was launched in 1923. It’s very tempting to find connections with 1920s Berlin and clubs like Bob Fosse’s fictional KitKat. Yet this place was arguably the most notorious jazz club during the Prohibition era with all the credentials: illegal booze, mobsters, dancing and quite a few daring hemlines shaking to the music of Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters or Fletcher Henderson.
While it combined the cream of the crop when it comes to entertainment, it was also firmly sticking to racist principles because most patrons were white while the artists on stage were African American. If you think Berghain club’s admission policy in Berlin is ambiguous at best, there was nothing ambiguous at the Cotton Club: the only black people allowed in the crowd were black celebrities.
Still, it was as hip as it gets. You had to find a way to get on the list. There was a possibility you’d be rubbing shoulders with Judy Garland or George Gershwin. One of those this infamous beehive attracted as well was the poet Langston Hughes. Although he wasn’t white either, the galaxy of black superstars that got their break over there was too intriguing to ignore.
Though they weren’t much more than court trubadours for the white elites, they managed to turn it into a celebration of their art and culture. The list is long indeed: from Ellington and Louis Amstrong to Count Basie and Billie Holiday who brilliantly portrayed their struggles in her song Strange Fruit. Singing it at the Cotton Club must have felt like playing Leopoldi’s Buchenwaldlied in German World War II death camps. I’m not sure she did.
The impressive legacy of Hughes hides quite a few gems that carve a deep imprint on the reader’s imagination and accomplish with ease what’s essential to poetry itself. There’s a spice of stoicism of suffering, mirroring the sentiments of Billie Holiday’s tragic heroes from Strange Fruit. In one of his poems, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, we can clearly grasp the melancholy acting as a lens through which he perceives the world and the narrative it conveys. Especially the one which is off limits for African Americans in a society that’s built on a legacy of blood, bones and skin. The very image of a river has something ethereal and dynamic, they’re the original archetype. Because humans come and go, civilisations disappear, but the rivers stay put. They’re the only reliable constant witness of our pitiful history.
According to the Poetry Foundation, there’s a very interesting background to the origins of the poem itself: “Hughes wrote this poem, one of his best known and most celebrated, on the back of an envelope when he just 17 years old. As he recounts in his autobiography The Big Sea, he was traveling to visit his father when his train crossed the Mississippi, and he “began to think what that river … meant to Negroes in the past.”
Every poem is composed in an architectural manner: the cornerstone of the core image is supported by the rest which leads the way to it, without necessarily being reduced to narrative fillers. With genuinely good writing, there’s no such thing as a filler and everything falls into place as a harmonious puzzle. If the verse packs the punch properly, every stone has to be a cornerstone.
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
He recounts their names: Kongo, Nile, Euphrates, closing off with Abraham Lincoln descending down the Mississipi river that turns to gold in a spectacular sunset apparition of godlike beauty. He makes you feel it: the warm glow of the last rays of sun tickling your eyeballs. This is the difference between a poet and a wannabe. Because poets are not bohemian simpletons.
They have the extraordinary gift to see and grasp. They have the urge to remember and put it down in writing for without poetry there’d be no history: ancient epics were written in verses. The Quran was too. This is certainly no coincidence. Only poetry can create this sensation and communicate a rare sensitivity to the fragile beauty of the world. Words can’t protect it, but they can preserve it providing that immortality humans have been chasing since the beginning of time. That’s what religion is for.
The Cotton Club operated until 1940. Before that, the Duke Ellington Orchestra served as the house band between 1927 and 1931. Strangely, the racist exoticism of it also provided us with some important hallmarks of 20th century pop culture, embodied in that legendary image of Josephine Baker dancing the charleston in a mad daze as if her life depended on it.
It wasn’t exactly on par with King Leopold’s human zoo with caged Africans, but it was simultaneously unforgettable and unforgivable. You just couldn’t take your eyes away and we still kind of can’t. For better or worse, it’s one of the first things that come up when her name pops up. Her limbs were infused with jazz and her face distorted in a suitably animalistic fashion.
The Club changed direction in 1935, when it dismissed its original rules and opened up for black patrons as well. Which was probably only a matter of time anyway since there was too much black talent on stage to keep the rest out and away from the mob’s own craft beer, as they’d call it today. Prohibition might have had tried to put a stop to selling alcohol, instead it only led to the creation of a vast network of illegal bootlegging ran by Italians like Lucky Luciano, Al Capone and Frank Costello. Allegedly, there were more than 30,000 speakesies in New York alone in the 1920s. It’s simple and we all went through it. Kids tend to start smoking mostly after having been threatened with punishment if they do. Kicking the habit is a different song though. Few manage to do it at once. I know I couldn’t.
Langston Hughes wasn’t the only literary paragon of the movement. There was Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen and Claude McKay among others. Born in Jamaica, McKay came to America to study and decided to stay in Harlem. His book Harlem Shadows is established him in the literary scene and influenced others that followed in his footsteps. One of those was Hughes himself. Language is the very fibre of his poetry. Its audiovisuality is exacerbated by the elements missing, rather than those which are there. Some of the words are cut like limbs of plantation slaves, yet their power is all the stronger for it. It can’t be withheld: if language were a gun, his words would be the silencer on top. Because in his case, silence is the ultimate sound. Yet strangely, you don’t feel abbreviated for it. But let him show you what I’m talking about here. The verses belong to him after all:
When the old junk man Death
Comes to gather up our bodies
And toss them into the sack of oblivion
I wonder if he will find
The corpse of a white multi-millionaire
Worth more pennies of eternity,
Than the black torso of
A Negro cotton-picker?
(Negro, Question 1)
Think about it. It’s formulated as a question which requires an answer. Is there one? Above all, are we worthy of it at all? I’m not sure anymore. Because the question mark is the end is what it’s all about. The gun, now without the silencer. This time, Langston Hughes decides on which side of the firing squad you will be. Are you ready? In his metaphorical gun, all the bullets are real. Only the scars will be invisible. Yet, don’t be fooled: it’s still going to itch. The poet always has the last laugh. It can’t be denied to him.
And what about Josephine? Oh, Josephine. Keep dancing our scars away. A woman, a praying mantis and a Venus flytrap. She had it all and we loved her for it. A walking volcano. If she led you into a burning crater, it would be easier to move a mountain than to resist her. Try putting a silencer on that. It won’t work. The irresistibility of charleston will melt your knees before it takes you into the ethers of paradise. Langston Hughes must be already there. The pennies of eternity rain blessings on the cotton-pickers. Too bad for the multi-millionaires: there’s no ATM in heaven.
