I Wonder as I Wander

  I WONDER

  AS I WANDER

  AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL JOURNEY

  INTRODUCTION BY ARNOLD RAMPERSAD

  by LANGSTON HUGHES

  AMERICAN CENTURY SERIES

  HILL AND WANG • NEW YORK

  A DIVISION OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  TO ARTHUR AND MARION SPINGARN

  INTRODUCTION

  LANGSTON HUGHES was clearly in a buoyant mood when at four o’clock on Saturday, July 17, 1954, he sat down in his study at home in Harlem to begin writing his second volume of autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (1956). In that first stint, Hughes wrote thirty pages. “I hope it reads,” he wrote a friend about the new book, “as easily as it writes.” At that point, he had in mind a manuscript of no more than three hundred pages. With fat margins added in the final typewriting, the manuscript would then run to about four hundred pages—“which is just about a book.”

  In the end, however, I Wonder as I Wander turned out to be twice as long, even though it covered far fewer years (1931 to New Year’s Day, 1938) than Hughes had originally projected. By this time he was a veteran writer, but the volume of autobiography presented challenges and opportunities that Hughes had not quite anticipated. These challenges and opportunities finally asserted themselves as he moved deeper into the book.

  I Wonder as I Wander continues a story started by Hughes in his first book of autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). Although he had written most of The Big Sea in 1939, it ends early in 1931. The urge to continue telling the story of his remarkable life must have been quite strong. But the tepid sales of the earlier book (about 2,500 in the first year), despite favorable reviews, had discouraged him from starting work on another volume. However, over the years Hughes had considered it inevitable that he would one day write another volume of his life story. Finally, in 1954, a generous offer from a publisher, following a burst of publicity, moved him to resume this task.

  The Big Sea offers a thoroughly genial, sometimes moving account of Hughes’s life from his birth in Joplin, Missouri, where he lived for only a year or two before his mother took him to Lawrence, Kansas, where her family had been for many years. There, Langston grew up in the painful absence of his father, who had left his family and the United States for Mexico after becoming disheartened by racism and segregation. Langston also endured the frequent absences of his mother, an aspiring actress who often traveled in search of work. He spent his boyhood mainly with his aged maternal grandmother in a state close to poverty. In The Big Sea, he wrote frankly of his extreme loneliness growing up under these conditions, and of the discovery of books, “and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.” Books saved him and gave him the first glimpse of his future career.

  Following his grandmother’s death in 1915, and during one year (1915–1916) in Lincoln, Illinois, with his mother and her new husband, Langston wrote his first poem. Between 1916 and 1920 he lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended Central High School. Here, in a cosmopolitan, disciplined academic environment, with often talented classmates—many of them the children of immigrants from Europe—Hughes had starred as an athlete and a writer. He published stories and poems in the monthly school magazine and was eventually elected Class Poet and editor of the Annual. Most important, by graduation, Hughes had tentatively committed himself to becoming a writer—and to writing mainly about the black American experience.

  In 1921, after a year in Mexico with his father, he entered Columbia University in New York City. One year later, estranged from his father, who hated his son’s desire to be a writer, Hughes withdrew from the university. In the next four years he worked in a variety of humble jobs that nevertheless broadened and deepened his experience of the world. He was, variously, a delivery boy for a florist, a farm worker, and a messman on ships anchored up the Hudson River, up and down the west coast of Africa, and to and from Europe. Having jumped ship in Rotterdam in 1924, he made his way to Paris, where he worked as a dishwasher in a night club run by an American and staffed mainly by Americans, including jazz musicians. In Washington, D.C., in 1925, his jobs included being an office helper for Carter G. Woodson, the historian responsible for founding Negro History Week and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and Culture.

  In all his odd jobs Hughes never lost sight of his literary goals. Steadily he wrote and published poems, notably in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Crisis magazine (the official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). In May 1925, when he won first prize in a poetry contest organized by a rival magazine, he was ready for a major step in his career. Aided by the influential white writer Carl Van Vechten, he saw his first book, the collection of verse The Weary Blues, published the following year, 1926, by Alfred A. Knopf. The book appeared to generally admiring reviews in the national press as well as in black newspapers and magazines. In 1927, his second collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was widely attacked in the black press for its bold depiction of lower-class African-American life, but its novel use of jazz and blues influences sealed Hughes’s reputation as the most creative and original poet of the Harlem Renaissance.

  In 1926, Hughes entered Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, at that time one of the most prestigious black colleges in the United States. In 1929, he was awarded a bachelor’s degree. These years were equally important for the ripening of his relationship with the most important patron of his life, Charlotte Mason, a wealthy, elderly white woman. An enthusiastic believer in parapsychology and the power of folkways, Mrs. Mason (or “Godmother,” as she preferred to be called by the various artists she helped) was a volatile force who exerted enormous influence on Hughes. Generously funding his efforts, she also showered him with praise and displays of affection, as well as advice about his career as a writer. The main artistic result of their friendship was his touching novel Not Without Laughter (1930), about a black boy growing up in Kansas. Surrendering to her power, Hughes became devoted to Mrs. Mason. Thus, when “Godmother” suddenly and violently broke with him in 1930, for reasons that remain largely shrouded in mystery, the effect on him was devastating. Heartbroken, Langston made many efforts to restore the relationship, but to no avail. This experience with the capriciousness of philanthropy, as well as the onset of the Depression in the United States, set him firmly on the radical political path as the 1930s opened.

  At this point, The Big Sea ends. Describing the radical political path he followed in the next few years was the main challenge of I Wonder as I Wander. This leftward path took him first, in 1931 and 1932, on a tour of the South and the West. Traveling with a companion in a car purchased for the trip, and reading almost exclusively in black churches and schools, Hughes tested his verse on the audience he loved most of all—blacks struggling to rise in spite of the bonds of poverty and segregation in some of the most re
pressive states in the Union. Then, in June 1932, he sailed to the Soviet Union. He went there in a band of twenty-two young blacks invited to take part in a planned motion picture about race relations in the United States. When the plan collapsed, Hughes stayed on; he spent a year in the Soviet Union. In 1933 and 1934, he passed another year in Carmel, California, writing under the patronage of a wealthy Californian who (unlike “Godmother”) carefully placed no strain on their friendship or on Hughes’s art. After some months in Mexico, to which he had gone in 1934 following his father’s death there, he returned to the United States. With his income now just about dried up, he joined his mother in Oberlin, Ohio, where she was then living in poverty, dependent on relatives there. After going to New York for the Broadway opening of one of his plays, Hughes spent some time in the city he would eventually call home. Still later in the decade he lived for a few exciting months in Spain as a newspaper correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. It is at this point, with Hughes still in Europe but about to return to the United States, that I Wonder as I Wander ends.

  These seven years in the 1930s resulted in some important writing. In 1932, Hughes published a successful children’s book, Popo and Fifina (set in Haiti), written with his close friend Arna Bontemps. The California year resulted in a brilliant, comparatively bitter collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934). A book of his radical verse was refused by his publisher, Knopf, but a cheaply produced collection in a large edition, A New Song (1938), with a foreword by Mike Cold, was brought out by the International Workers Order, a Communist benevolent society. Hughes also emerged as a playwright in this decade. In 1935, his drama of miscegenation, Mulatto, opened on Broadway. In addition, several of his other plays were staged, mainly by the Gilpin Players of Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio; these included the comedies Little Ham and When the Jack Hollers, and the historical drama about Haiti, Troubled Island.

  Like almost all provocative autobiographies, I Wonder as I Wander raises questions about the tension between truth and design—about the relationship between the facts of Hughes’s life and the art of autobiography, which inevitably involves selection, suppression, and more than a little invention, as the writer seeks both to make his or her story vivid and to present a self-portrait that is compelling and also credible. Above all, radical politics and Hughes’s own evolving political consciousness presented an extraordinary challenge to him in telling about these years. In The Big Sea, he had glossed over or obscured several radical aspects of his life up to 1931. It would not be so easy to evade similar matters in the period covered by I Wonder as I Wander. Hughes did not back down from the challenge. Fully one-third of the book is devoted to his year in the U.S.S.R.; and it is safe to say that this section is the most memorable and distinguished of an eminently readable book.

  Frequently accused of being a Communist—a charge he always denied—Hughes had seen his career plagued by right-wing opposition in the forties and early fifties. Ironically, the first major act of opposition had been the raucous picketing of a literary luncheon in 1940 at which Hughes had hoped to sell copies of the recently published The Big Sea. The sabotage of the luncheon was the work of a fundamentalist religious organization whose leader had been satirized by Hughes in his most controversial radical poem, “Goodbye Christ.” This poem was almost invariably at the center of his many disputes with conservative groups. Written in the Soviet Union, the poem was published, without his prior knowledge, in 1932.

  In the thirties and forties, Hughes had also freely allowed his name to be used by a variety of pro-socialist organizations, although his actual involvement with such groups was usually token in nature. At the height of anti-Communist feeling in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation developed an extensive, though error-filled, file on his activities. The climax of opposition to Hughes came with his subpoenaed appearance as a witness in Washington, D.C., before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous investigating subcommittee in March 1953. (Soon afterward, the publisher Rinehart made Hughes an offer of $2,500 for his autobiography. He accepted the offer.)

  Hughes had not presented a very brave face to McCarthy. He refused to name anyone as having had Communist ties or sympathies, but in other ways he cooperated fully, and at a time when a few other threatened persons had defied the senator. More or less exonerated by McCarthy, Hughes then took steps to show that he was no longer of the left. He severed all his ties to socialist groups. In his writings, especially in books about black American history and culture aimed at young people, he avoided reference to the most controversial African-American radicals of the day, Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. His retreat was duly noted by the leftist community; Du Bois, for one, later publicly rebuked him on this score. Hughes was thus almost completely out of favor with the left when he sat down to write the story of his most radical decade. The task offered him a chance, if he wanted one, to consolidate his career by confirming his repudiation of the left.

  Hughes took no such approach in I Wonder at I Wander. He had not lost his affection for the people of the Soviet Union, where he had been well treated, and he despised the tactics of Senator McCarthy. On the other hand, he would write no propaganda for, or even direct praise of, the U.S.S.R. as a nation, much less of radical socialism as a system. He also had no personal axes to grind, no personal scores to settle in this book. There are lively and sometimes criticizing portraits of certain individuals, but he offers himself at the same time as a man with a simple tale to tell. “This,” he announces simply in his first paragraph, “is the story of a Negro who wanted to make his living from poems and stories.” But it is also the story of a man determined to enjoy his life as he made his living. Both The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander are marked by an urgent sense of the need to take tremendous pleasure in life, as well as a willingness to face life boldly, not timidly; the central character, Langston Hughes, is ever restless to know more of the world and the peoples of the world.

  Hughes’s simplicity is often deceptive, but his two books of autobiography are alike in that both tell of accidents and misfortunes but almost always—there are some exceptions—with lightheartedness and bubbling good humor. He saw laughter as an essential ingredient of the spirit of the blues, the complex way of feeling with which he associated the majority of black Americans as they faced life and its vicissitudes. Hurts and insults are mentioned but never dwelt on, and they elicit not rancor or bitterness in Hughes but irony, laughter, or a stoicism that values an almost unconscious graciousness. Nothing so well illustrates his attitude to pain as his depiction of Mrs. Charlotte Mason at the start of I Wonder as I Wander. Although she had caused him the deepest hurt of his adult life, “Godmother” becomes in his text “the kind lady who had been my patron.” And her baffling anger at him is made almost reasonable: “She wanted me to be more African than Harlem—primitive in the simple, intuitive and noble sense of the word. I couldn’t be, having grown up in Kansas City, Chicago and Cleveland.” (Actually, Hughes had spent little time in either Kansas City or Chicago.) Still, he concedes the existence of the hurt that would change his life: “So that winter had left me ill in my soul. I could not put my mind on writing for months.”

  This fundamental approach, which amounts to a philosophy of life, steered Hughes through the ideological and other dangers presented by the politics of the volume. Everywhere, what is most important to Hughes is the personal, human element of his story—his own reactions, his encounters with individuals, his almost compulsive desire to enter into the lives of the common people, so that he is never a stranger abroad. Where others recoil from unsanitary conditions among “primitive” peoples, or insist on restrictions and distinctions often based on class and color, Hughes joins the masses in their habits and rituals, and he does so without resort to ideology but out of the love for humanity that marked his life. In revising his manuscript, he knew that if he kept himself at the center, his book would be alive. “I’ve now cut out all the impersonal stuff,” he wrote h
is editor at one point, “down to a running narrative with me in the middle of every page … the kind of intense condensation that, of course, keeps an autobiography from being entirely true, in that nobody’s life is pure essence without pulp, waste matter, and rind—which art, of course, throws in the trash can.”

  I Wonder as I Wander is a much bigger book than The Big Sea, although it covers only seven years whereas the latter covers thirty. The main difference is the quantity of detail in the later book, which itself was probably based on a stricter attitude to research. At first, Hughes had set out jauntily to write the book from memory. “If the publishers want a really documented book,” he wrote a friend, “they ought to advance some documented money—enough to do nothing else for two or three years. I refuses to sharecrop long for short rations!” Somewhere along the way, perhaps after reading the brilliant anti-Communist writer Arthur Koestler’s Invisible Writing, which tells in part of Koestler’s travels in Soviet Central Asia, where he and Hughes met in 1932, Hughes decided to write a weightier book. Perhaps he did so in response to his impression that Koestler’s backward glances in his book had been “all with a jaundiced eye,” and thus unfair to the Soviet Union; perhaps he simply responded to the general gravity of Koestler’s work, without wishing to match it in degree. Where the earlier book became, in its later stages, a sort of “cavalcade” of the Harlem Renaissance, I Wonder as I Wander remains a more disciplined accounting of the months and years covered.

  However, Hughes never surrenders his basic approach, which is anecdotal rather than analytical, gently ironic rather than preachy or pedantic. He remains true to his balancing between joy and irony as he tells of his time in 1931 in Cuba, where he enjoys life even as he carefully notes racist and unchecked capitalist white American influences; in Haiti, later that year, where U.S. Marines make a mockery of Haitian independence; in the Soviet Union, which is both realizing its promise in the revolutionary socialist programs of Lenin and Stalin and at the same time betraying that promise in the purges and false trials; in 1933 in China, which has become a football for European powers; the same year in Japan, which is increasingly a police state, and where he is virtually deported after a short visit; or in 1937 in Madrid, where Hughes finds himself more than once literally under fire, as Republican forces defending Madrid withstand the siege of the city by the forces of General Franco.