This ends my February journey with Langston Hughes: first his book of poems, Selected Poems, and now his second memoir. The exposed brick beauty of those Harlem apartments interior that you read about in works from the Harlem Renaissance writers, are now modernized high-end properties, their unique historical frameworks still poetic portraits.
Before this, the house was ivy-covered, almost in the process of being torn down by the city, while in the same neighborhood, Harlem's beauty was finally being seen, being revitalized, but its history distorted. Hughes' house in Harlem stood empty and dilapidated until recently, when Harlem writers were able to raise enough money to turn it into an artist colony (you can read about the process here=>.
"For ten years I had been a writer of sorts, but a writer who wrote mostly because, when I felt bad, writing kept me from feeling worse it put my inner emotions into exterior form, and gave me an outlet for words that never came in conversation." While on tour in the American Jim Crow South, he could not eat anywhere he wanted, rest anywhere he could afford, or use the restroom at his leisure because he was a black man, yet his play ran on Broadway and was "listed among the twelve longest runs for 1935-36" (even if it took him a while to realize that someone else was putting his name to his work, even if his agent didn't tell him about the play until after it was produced, even if he had to get the Dramatist Guild to represent him so he get paid royalties for his own work). He was seated as a guest of honor in Japan's most celebrated theaters, yet he was deported from Japan due to fears that he'd travelled to Russia and China, so he could have been a communist. Hughes could not sit at the same table with Hemingway in America, due to the color lines drawn, but both he and Hemingway could dine together with writers in Barcelona, during the war. In Hughes' memoir, I read as he observed how art in the form of theatre, dance, writing, folklore, music, and graphics helped snap portraits of the world during a time of social change. What is it about art that calms the soul and rejuvenates the mind? In times of unrest, art uncovers the truth and displays it with unwavering subtlety.
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