Finding Langston

While Langston Hughes was a writer who actually lived in Chicago during the 1930s, in Finding Langston he symbolizes the inner self that 11-year-old Langston struggles to conceal. Langston’s mother encouraged him to embrace his true nature and supported his fondness for reading, once saying, “They can’t make books fast enough to keep up with your readin’” (20). Following his mother’s death and his move to Chicago, Langston eschews books and buries his feelings of misery because his father has little tolerance for them. Whereas the outer Langston appears to conform to his father’s expectations, the inner Langston acknowledges, by way of his narrative voice, the grief and loneliness he cannot reveal to others.

When Langston discovers the poetry of Langston Hughes, he finds “a way of putting all the things you feel inside on the outside” (99). His mother named him after Langston Hughes, and it proves a fitting choice. Upon Langston’s first encounter with Hughes’s poetry, he thinks, “Feels like reading words from my heart” (22). The poems voice the suffering that generations of African Americans endured before Langston, yet it is a suffering much like Langston’s own, born of loss, prejudice, and intolerance. As he becomes more familiar with Hughes’s work, Langston wonders if he, too, grew up in Alabama, because as Langston notes, in “Hughes’ words I can smell that earthy clay in the front yard. Can hear the voice of my Mama” (57). Langston recognizes himself in Hughes’s poems, which capture his memories of Alabama even as they express his feelings of alienation in Chicago. Moreover, inasmuch as Hughes’s words reflect, affirm, and validate the inner self Langston has hidden from others, they empower him to reclaim that self and build a new life in a new place.

Music—and particularly a form of jazz known as the blues—is a motif the novel enlists to convey the unique power of Hughes’s poetry to resonate and communicate with Langston’s inner self. When Miss Fulton reads one of Hughes’s poems to Langston, he thinks she “reads in a way that sounds like she’s singing a song” (71). Langston’s father reacts similarly after Langston reads aloud Hughes’s poetry, remarking, “Sounds a lot like the blues” (87). Finally, near the end of the novel, Langston realizes that his mother named him after the poet and that “Langston Hughes made her heart sing the way he does mine” (93).

It is fitting that Langston’s narrative voice speaks of Hughes’s poetry in terms of music, as Hughes is credited with pioneering a new form of poetry that incorporates the folk idioms and syncopated rhythms of jazz music. Originally published in the 1920s, Hughes’s poetry challenged the literary norms that prevailed in American White culture and, for that reason, was not received enthusiastically by everyone, including other Black writers. But Hughes did not have an assimilationist agenda; rather, he hoped to capture in his works the racial consciousness of African Americans, which he believed was manifest in the sounds of jazz. Indeed, in his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes writes,

jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed with a smile. (Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” 1926.)

Jazz and the blues are related forms of music. Both developed in the American South and are indebted to African cultural traditions as well as the experiences of African American slaves. In Finding Langston, Langston opens Hughes’s 1926 book The Weary Blues and recalls that his father “listened to the blues back in Alabama on an old scratchy record” (80). Echoing Hughes’s appraisal of jazz, Langston’s mother maintained that “the blues makes you feel the hurt deep down in your gut and the blues is about how much colored folks go through in life and love” (80). By evoking the sounds of the blues, Hughes’s poetry expresses the African American community’s collective experience of both irrepressible joy and of “pain swallowed with a smile.” This is why Langston, who swallows his own pain, “can feel the choking in [… his] throat” (30) when he first reads Hughes’s writing. As he eventually explains to Clem, Hughes’s poems make Langston feel “like someone is talking just to you. And that someone else knows what it feels like being… you” (98). The sounds of the poems resonate with Langston’s inner self and make his “heart sing” (93).

Langston’s story is set in 1946, a time when the practice of racial segregation consigned African Americans to separate public institutions and facilities, particularly in the South. An 1896 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Plessy versus Ferguson upheld the legality of segregation, presuming public facilities for Black and White people would be equal. As Langston’s observations establish, however, this separate-but-equal doctrine gave rise to systemic racial discrimination and inequality. Langston remembers his mother saying, “They don’t let colored folks in libraries, baby” (19), because, as Cline-Ransome writes, “of all the libraries in the state of Alabama, fewer than one-third were available to black residents” (106) in the 1940s. Recalling the train ride to Chicago with his father, Langston notes, “In the colored section, we could smell the smoke and the air was thick. The white car was at the end of the train, folks said with plenty of seats and air clean and fresh” (10). Until the 1950s, the US military implemented racial segregation, as well. Clem says his father died in an explosion on a Navy ship, but the unspoken historical reality is that in 1944 the “Port Chicago disaster” (98) decimated a Black naval unit. Due to the negligence of military leaders, over 200 African American servicemen were killed when munitions were mishandled.

Although Langston describes how racial segregation affects his life, he does so without apparent bitterness or indignation. He is young and, at this point, unprepared to question the ways of the world around him. Yet segregation is an important motif in his narrative, inasmuch as it illustrates the injustices that may result from judging others according to outward appearances. Indeed, racial discrimination epitomizes the hazards of relying on the appearance of others to draw conclusions about their identity and worth. While Langston comes to appreciate that one’s identity on the inside always exceeds what others see on the outside, the American justice system did not recognize the error of racial segregation until the 1950s and 1960s, when court decisions began to overturn the constitutionality of segregation laws.