The Weary Blues Read online

  Copyright © 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, LLC

  Copyright renewed 1954 by Langston Hughes

  Foreword copyright © 2015 by Kevin Young

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.aaknopf.com/poetry

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  ISBN (eBook) 978-0-385-35298-7

  ISBN (hardcover) 978-0-385-35297-0

  Front-of-jacket image: Facsimile from the original 1926 design by Miguel Covarrubias. Print courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

  Published January 1926

  v3.1

  TO MY MOTHER

  I wish to thank the editors of The Crisis, Opportunity, Survey Graphic, Vanity Fair, The World Tomorrow, and The Amsterdam News for having first published some of the poems in this book.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  by Kevin Young

  Introducing Langston Hughes to the Reader

  by Carl Van Vechten

  Proem

  THE WEARY BLUES

  The Weary Blues

  Jazzonia

  Negro Dancers

  The Cat and the Saxophone

  Young Singer

  Cabaret

  To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s

  To a Little Lover-Lass, Dead

  Harlem Night Club

  Nude Young Dancer

  Young Prostitute

  To a Black Dancer

  Song for a Banjo Dance

  Blues Fantasy

  Lenox Avenue: Midnight

  DREAM VARIATIONS

  Dream Variation

  Winter Moon

  Poème d’Automne

  Fantasy in Purple

  March Moon

  Joy

  THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS

  The Negro Speaks of Rivers

  Cross

  The Jester

  The South

  As I Grew Older

  Aunt Sue’s Stories

  Poem

  BLACK PIERROT

  A Black Pierrot

  Harlem Night Song

  Songs to the Dark Virgin

  Ardella

  Poem—To the Black Beloved

  When Sue Wears Red

  Pierrot

  WATER-FRONT STREETS

  Water-Front Streets

  A Farewell

  Long Trip

  Port Town

  Sea Calm

  Caribbean Sunset

  Young Sailor

  Seascape

  Natcha

  Sea Charm

  Death of an Old Seaman

  SHADOWS IN THE SUN

  Beggar Boy

  Troubled Woman

  Suicide’s Note

  Sick Room

  Soledad

  To the Dark Mercedes

  Mexican Market Woman

  After Many Springs

  Young Bride

  The Dream Keeper

  Poem (To F. S.)

  OUR LAND

  Our Land

  Lament for Dark Peoples

  Afraid

  Poem—For the portrait of an African Boy

  Summer Night

  Disillusion

  Danse Africaine

  The White Ones

  Mother to Son

  Poem

  Epilogue

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  FOREWORD

  One never grows weary of The Weary Blues. Langston Hughes’s first book, published by Knopf in 1926, is one of the high points of modernism and of what has come to be called the Harlem Renaissance—that flowering of African American literature and culture in the public’s consciousness. Really an extension of the New Negro movement that began toward the start of the twentieth century, international as much as based in New York, the Harlem Renaissance represented different things to different people: to “race men” like W. E. B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, the black cultural ferment found from the teens to the nineteen twenties and beyond provided an opportunity to prove in culture things sometimes denied black folks in society—namely, their humanity.

  For a younger generation of black artists like Hughes, their humanity proved self-evident. What’s more, the freedom of expression they sought and Hughes insisted on in his 1926 manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” didn’t require putting a best foot forward in writing, or uplift in any easy sense. “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote. “We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” As such, Hughes and other young writers often sought to scandalize as a form of sympathizing with those for whom life “ain’t been no crystal stair.” If Hughes’s second book would take this as a kind of gospel, using the form of the blues to represent washwomen, porters, rounders, fools, and heroes—creating one of the best and most influential books of the twentieth century in the process—then The Weary Blues represents the start of this newfound and profound blues and jazz aesthetic.

  Hughes was in fact the first to write poetry in the blues form. He was the first to realize the blues are plural—to see in their complicated irony and earthy tone the potential to present a folk feeling both tragic and comic, one uniquely African American, which is to say, American. The blues made romance modern; modernism borrowed from the blues a new way of saying what it saw: Hughes made the blues his own, and ours too.

  As I mention in my introduction to the Everyman’s Pocket Poets volume Blues Poems (2003), the form of the blues fights the feeling of the blues. If Hughes hasn’t yet mined the blues form as fully in The Weary Blues as he would later on, he has already embraced and in large part invented the blues aesthetic, “laughing to keep from crying”:

  Does a jazz-band ever sob?

  They say a jazz-band’s gay.

  Yet as the vulgar dancers whirled

  And the wan night wore away,

  One said she heard the jazz-band sob

  When the little dawn was grey.

  The simplicity of this “Cabaret” may distract from the fact that jazz bands and vulgarity weren’t easily found in poetry before Hughes wrote of them. Hughes’s opening question here is well aware that what F. Scott Fitzgerald named the Jazz Age too often saw jazz bands as not only exclusively white but also relentlessly happy. By implying them black, and making their night not merely the fictional Great Gatsby’s grand party but its wan aftermath, Hughes reveled in the gray (and gay) he saw around him in his travels to Mexico, his exile in Paris, and home in his adopted Harlem. “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy,” Fitzgerald wrote. Hughes took tragedy and made it heroic, finding it comic too.

  The Weary Blues also pioneers the jazz aesthetic. While others had earlier described jazz, often at a remove—notably Carl Sandburg in his “Jazz Fantasia”—Hughes knew that with jazz the form is the feeling. His poetry recognizes ecstasy not as a rarified state but a newborn freedom jazz helped him capture on the page. His first book is filled with exclamation points (“Sweet silver trumpets, / Jesus!”) and typographical incursions (“Jazz-boys, jazz-boys,— / Play, plAY, PLAY!”); he even ends one poem simply: “!” He used this jazz aesthetic—one radical and racy and racial—to describe everything from a “Troubled Woman” to a “Danse Africaine.” Sometimes this asymmetrical aesthetic is refined and refracted in short poems like “Winter Moon,” quoted in full:

 
; How thin and sharp is the moon tonight!

  How thin and sharp and ghostly white

  Is the slim curved crook of the moon tonight!

  Or take the enigmatic testimony of “Suicide’s Note”:

  The calm,

  Cool face of the river

  Asked me for a kiss.

  From similar so-called American haiku Hughes would later craft his mid-career and mid-century masterpiece, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), which would give us quite a different Harlem in transition after the war, bringing bebop artistry to the page. In The Weary Blues he would first perfect that mix of hope with heartbreak—though individual poems may provide one or the other, as in his later book-length epic, they add up to a whole that truly sings.

  Death is never far in this book, including in the title poem, which after a “Proem” (or prologue-poem) sets the scene, we find ourselves “Down on Lenox Avenue the other night” where the speaker watches a blues singer perform. The poem quotes the bluesman’s song:

  “I got the Weary Blues

  And I can’t be satisfied.

  Got the Weary Blues

  And can’t be satisfied—

  I ain’t happy no mo’

  And I wish that I had died.”

  The poem ends with a description of the singer who “slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.” Though in the end he’s begun to identify with the singer, the “I” in the poem is still only an observer—but what an observer!—rather than the blues people that Hughes would regularly go on to speak as, and even for. This isn’t to say that The Weary Blues isn’t filled with personae (such as “When Sue Wears Red”) or with nude dancers, beggar boys, cabaret singers, young sailors, and everyday folk who would dominate Hughes’s further work. But it’s the poems that speak of being “Black like me”—black still being fighting words in some quarters—that prove especially moving. Hughes manages remarkably to take Whitman’s American “I” and write himself into it. After labeling the final section “Our Land,” the volume ends with one of the more memorable lines of the century, almost an anthem: “I, too, am America.”

  Offering up a series of “Dream Variations,” as one section is called, Hughes, it becomes clear, is celebrating, critiquing, and completing the American dream, that desire for equality or at least opportunity. But his America takes in the Americas—including Mexico, where his estranged father moved to flee the color line of the United States—and even the West Coast of Africa, which he’d also visited. His well-paced poetry is laced with an impeccable exile. The Weary Blues has so many now-classic verses that exemplify this it is hard to single out just one. But certainly we must mention “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which, like the book’s proem, manages to recast the “I” as racial and universal, declaring, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The first mature poem Hughes wrote (in 1920), here “Rivers” is dedicated to Du Bois; it is the poem he would end every reading with. Could it speak of the same river that had asked the suicide for a kiss? However mighty, this river, both real and metaphoric, flowed across and united a nation that, even if it didn’t keep all its promises, still managed to hold out promise.

  Writer Carl Van Vechten had helped guide Hughes’s poems to Knopf, which would become his longtime publisher. But just as he would capitalize on seeing the popular poet Vachel Lindsay in a restaurant he worked in—playing up his being a newly “discovered” busboy poet, even though The Weary Blues was already in production—it was Hughes alone who made the most of such opportunities. Van Vechten and Hughes would remain close to the end of Hughes’s life, but to call Van Vechten his patron is too reductive and elevating; to call him Hughes’s mentor far too pat and patronizing. The two were that far more profound thing, friends. Van Vechten did provide an introduction to The Weary Blues (which follows in this anniversary edition), which, after it quotes heavily from Hughes’s “picturesque” letters, perceptively notes his stanzas “have a highly deceptive air of spontaneous improvisation” that really is studied, almost presciently seeing their “expression of an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature, seeking always to break through the veil.”

  Hughes would provide Van Vechten a lens on and even access to a black world of “life behind the veil” that he sought the rest of his life to understand and that Hughes celebrated; and when Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926) caused controversy from its title alone, Hughes would come to his defense under the same principle of artistic freedom that Hughes had asserted in “The Negro Artist.” It would be the silhouetted cover of The Weary Blues by Mexico’s Miguel Covarrubias that Hughes seemed more to mind. Suggested by Van Vechten, its iconic status now seems less an overwrought type, as it might have then, than a borrowing from the rather stately shadows of others—such as black artist Aaron Douglas, who like Hughes had lived as a child in Topeka, Kansas (where I once lived too) and with whom Hughes would collaborate over a long career.

  Even given its rich context, The Weary Blues remains a unique achievement. A century after Knopf began as a publisher, and nearly ninety years after his book first appeared, Hughes’s innovation still resonates with its rich lines and fascinating lives—the very liveliness it brought to the world. His is a tremendous debut, and we are lucky to have it here in print again, exactly as Hughes wrote it, in all its black, blues, and symphonic glory.

  —KEVIN YOUNG

  Decatur, Georgia

  September 6, 2014

  INTRODUCING LANGSTON HUGHES TO THE READER

  I

  At the moment I cannot recall the name of any other person whatever who, at the age of twenty-three, has enjoyed so picturesque and rambling an existence as Langston Hughes. Indeed, a complete account of his disorderly and delightfully fantastic career would make a fascinating picaresque romance which I hope this young Negro will write before so much more befalls him that he may find it difficult to capture all the salient episodes within the limits of a single volume.

  Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, he had lived, before his twelfth year, in the City of Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado Springs, Charlestown, Indiana, Kansas City, and Buffalo. He attended Central High School, from which he graduated, at Cleveland, Ohio, while in the summer, there and in Chicago, he worked as delivery- and dummy-boy in hat-stores. In his senior year he was elected class poet and editor of the Year Book.

  After four years in Cleveland, he once more joined his father in Mexico, only to migrate to New York where he entered Columbia University. There, finding the environment distasteful, or worse, he remained till spring, when he quit, broke with his father and, with thirteen dollars in cash, went on his own. First, he worked for a truck-farmer on Staten Island; next, he delivered flowers for Thorley; at length he partially satisfied an insatiable craving to go to sea by signing up with an old ship anchored in the Hudson for the winter. His first real cruise as a sailor carried him to the Canary Islands, the Azores, and the West Coast of Africa, of which voyage he has written: “Oh, the sun in Dakar! Oh, the little black girls of Burutu! Oh, the blue, blue bay of Loanda! Calabar, the city lost in a forest; the long, shining days at sea, the masts rocking against the stars at night; the black Kru-boy sailors, taken at Freetown, bathing on deck morning and evening; Tom Pey and Haneo, whose dangerous job it was to dive under the seven-ton mahogany logs floating and bobbing at the ship’s side and fasten them to the chains of the crane; the vile houses of rotting women at Lagos; the desolation of the Congo; Johnny Walker, and the millions of whisky bottles buried in the sea along the West Coast; the daily fights on board, officers, sailors, everybody drunk; the timorous, frightened missionaries we carried as passengers; and George, the Kentucky colored boy, dancing and singing the Blues on the after-deck under the stars.”

  Returning to New York with plenty of money and a monkey, he presently shipped again—this time for Holland. Again he came back to New York and again he sailed—on his twenty-second birthday: February 1, 1924. Three weeks later he found himself in Paris with less than seven do
llars. However, he was soon provided for: a woman of his own race engaged him as doorman at her boîte de nuit. Later he was employed, first as second cook, then as waiter, at the Grand Duc, where the Negro entertainer, Florence, sang at this epoch. Here he made friends with an Italian family who carried him off to their villa at Desenzano on Lago di Garda where he passed a happy month, followed by a night in Verona and a week in Venice. On his way back across Italy his passport was stolen and he became a beach-comber in Genoa. He has described his life there to me: “Wine and figs and pasta. And sunlight! And amusing companions, dozens of other beach-combers roving the dockyards and water-front streets, getting their heads whacked by the Fascisti, and breaking one loaf of bread into so many pieces that nobody got more than a crumb. I lived in the public gardens along the water-front and slept in the Albergo Populare for two lire a night amidst the snores of hundreds of other derelicts.… I painted my way home as a sailor. It seems that I must have painted the whole ship myself. We made a regular ‘grand tour’: Livorno, Napoli (we passed so close to Capri I could have cried). Then all around Sicily—Catania, Messina, Palermo—the Lipari Islands, miserable little peaks of pumice stone out in the sea; then across to Spain, divine Spain! My buddy and I went on a spree in Valencia for a night and a day.… Oh, the sweet wine of Valencia!”

  He arrived in New York on November 10, 1924. That evening I attended a dance given in Harlem by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some time during the course of the night, Walter White asked me to meet two young Negro poets. He introduced me to Countée Cullen and Langston Hughes. Before that moment I had never heard of either of them.

  II

  I have merely sketched a primitive outline of a career as rich in adventures as a fruit-cake is full of raisins. I have already stated that I hope Langston Hughes may be persuaded to set it down on paper in the minutest detail, for the bull-fights in Mexico, the drunken gaiety of the Grand Duc, the delicately exquisite grace of the little black girls at Burutu, the exotic languor of the Spanish women at Valencia, the barbaric jazz dances of the cabarets in New York’s own Harlem, the companionship of sailors of many races and nationalities, all have stamped an indelible impression on the highly sensitized, poetic imagination of this young Negro, an impression which has found its initial expression in the poems assembled in this book.