Finding Langston

“Nothing here belongs to us, just whoever pays the rent.”

This is Langston’s assessment of the small apartment he lives in with his father, and it betrays the sense of alienation he feels as he begins a new life in Chicago. Just as nothing belongs to them in the apartment, Langston feels he does not belong in Chicago, where the sights, sounds, and people are unfamiliar and, from Langston’s perspective, inhospitable. Because the city seemingly lacks all the comforts of home, Langston imagines it cannot be a real home for “whoever” lives there. He will start to reconsider this judgment as he gets to know Miss Fulton, who is proud to say she was born in Chicago and her parents “still live at Forty-Fifth and St. Lawrence” (68).

“Country boy’s been my name since I came to Chicago.” 

Langston loses his home when he moves to Chicago, but he also loses important aspects of his identity. Judging him by his tattered shoes and worn overalls, Langston’s classmates call him “country boy,” a label that utterly fails to capture who he is on the inside, beneath appearances. Moreover, it erases his real name, Langston—a name that gains significance later the novel as Langston uncovers its connections to his mother and to the poetry he loves.

“Sitting in the house reading ain’t gonna help him grow into a man, Teena.” 

Spoken by Langston’s father to his mother, these words articulate the tension between Langston’s parents regarding their son’s favorite pastime and illuminate the conflict Langston himself experiences over his passion for reading. Because Langston internalizes Henry’s belief that reading is not a masculine activity, he feels shame over his fondness for books. As a result, Langston hides from his father the books he borrows from the Chicago Public Library and conceals from everyone the self inside him that loves quiet libraries and reading poetry.

“‘Handsome just like his daddy,’ folks been saying since the day I was born, but I never took a liking to the work Daddy did in the fields.” 

Because of his appearance, Langston is misjudged by others, even his own father. He looks like his strong father; he is big and has “thick arms” (25), so others assume he enjoys strenuous activities, such as farm work. As the novel repeatedly illustrates, however, outward appearances are often at odds with the inner reality of individuals. Langston, who actually prefers reading, knows this from personal experience, but he is also guilty of judging others based on appearances, as he learns when he becomes better acquainted with Miss Fulton and Clem.

“I’m gonna write me some music about

Daybreak in Alabama

And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it

Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist

And falling out of heaven like soft dew.

I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it

and the scent of pine needles

And the smell of red clay after rain.”

Select verses from Langston Hughes’s poetry appear throughout the novel, but these lines from “Daybreak in Alabama” explicitly figure writing poetry as writing “some music.” They also employ anaphora, a rhetorical device that, like a song’s refrain, involves the repetition of the same words at the start of successive clauses. Hughes’s poetry captivates Langston from the moment he reads it largely because the imagery elicits his memories of Alabama’s pine trees and red clay. Langston’s appreciation of the musical—or blues—rhythm of the poems develops when Miss Fulton reads one aloud for him, and he eventually understands that in Hughes’s poetry, he hears the sounds of loss and longing that he knows so well.

“Since then, she had to be a mamma and a daddy. A man and a woman I guess.” 

These are Langston’s thoughts about his grandmother, who, after her husband died, took care of her family and her farm in equal measure, doing the work of a man and a woman. In this respect she defies the gendered division of labor Henry promotes when he argues Langston should be working outdoors, not staying inside with his mother. Langston loves and admires his grandmother, and it was partly due to her influence (along with his mother’s) that he felt free to disregard gender expectations while living in Alabama and spent his days reading. Once Langston moves away from his grandmother and his home, he no longer feels at liberty to express his true self.

“Me and your mama heard a lot of folks talk about up north, a man can provide for his family without always scraping and bowing.”

When Langston express his wish to return to Alabama, Henry explains they moved north because they had heard it was a land of opportunity for African Americans. As Lesa Cline-Ransome writes in her author’s note, Langston and his father are part of history-in-the-making as “just two of the seven million blacks who migrated north during what is now called the Great Migration” (105). Between 1916 and 1970, a wave of African Americans fled the entrenched racial injustices of the South to begin new lives in Northern cities, where a booming industrial economy created the need for a large factory workforce. Henry finds a job at a paper factory and is proud to “provide for his family” while maintaining his integrity, but for Langston, life in the North seems to diminish his freedom to be himself. This will change when he discovers the cultural legacy of the Great Migration, namely the poetry of Langston Hughes.

“‘Bible says turn the other cheek,’ Daddy says.” 

Although Henry and Langston attend church every Sunday, as they did in Alabama, Langston notes that his father’s faith has waned since Teena died. Henry still advises Langston to turn the other cheek when facing conflict, however, which is consistent with his general disapproval of emotional displays. Because Langston is well aware his father respects the stoic control of strong feelings, he hides his grief over his mother’s death and his intense loneliness, thereby suppressing important aspects of his inner self.

“I turn to the first page still thinking about how you could know someone so well but not know them at all.” 

This is Langston’s reflection after he discovers poetry in his mother’s letters. That she appreciated poetry is a revelation to Langston, not simply because he never suspected as much but because he had not imagined she guarded an inner self unknown to him. Near the end of his narrative, Langston arrives at a similar conclusion regarding his father, underscoring the theme that an individual’s inner self can never be reduced to outward appearances. It is noteworthy that Langston questions how well he can know his own mother just as he begins reading Hughes’s autobiography, casting doubt on the book’s reliability. Indeed, Langston’s visceral response to Hughes’s poems suggests they register the poet’s inner self better than his autobiography could.

“But Mama said 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.” 

Langston Hughes considered jazz music (which is closely related to the blues) the intrinsic expression of African Americans’ unique sorrows and joys, and he created a form of poetry called jazz poetry that reproduces the music’s syncopated rhythms and its spirit of endurance. Reading a collection of Hughes’s poems titled The Weary Blues, Langston recalls his father listening to the blues back in Alabama and his mother’s explanation of the music. Like the blues, Hughes’s poetry makes Langston “feel the hurt” he has buried “deep down,” hoping to hide it from his father. Even as the poems reflect Langston’s personal grief and sense of alienation, however, they affirm that his feelings are shared by many others who have also endured great loss. By assuring Langston he is not alone, the poems ease his loneliness.

“‘Library’s the only place in Chicago I want to be,’ I tell Daddy.”

Having moved to Chicago two months before his narrative begins, Langston still does not regard the city as home. When he stumbles upon the library, he finds himself in a place where he is accepted for exactly who he is: an African American boy who loves books and reading. Because no one outside the library seems to recognize or welcome Langston’s true feelings and interests, it is “the only place in Chicago” that feels like home to him. Langston considers Alabama his real home for much of the novel, but ironically, as Cline-Ransome notes, he likely “would not have been able to visit a library in rural Alabama in the 1940s” (106) due to segregation.

“That big explosion on the Navy ship in California? Port Chicago disaster, they called it. My daddy was on that.” 

After Langston tells Clem his mother recently died, Clem divulges that his father was killed in an explosion on a Navy ship. What Clem doesn’t say is that 320 Navy men and dock workers died in the “Port Chicago disaster,” and 202 of those were African Americans. In 1944, the year of the disaster, African Americans enlisted in the US Navy served in segregated units, and those units were disproportionately charged with loading ammunitions onto ships. They received insufficient training for safely handling munitions, however, so the explosion at Port Chicago in California was the result of negligence. When the Navy ordered survivors of the incident to return to work without improved training or working conditions, protests ensued. Fifty African American men who defied the Navy’s orders were convicted of mutiny and sentenced to years of hard labor.

“So the poetry you read is a way of putting all the things you feel inside on the outside.” 

With these words, Clem summarizes poetry’s appeal for Langston but also alludes to two of the novel’s important themes: the ideas that the “outside” self is not identical to the inside self and that poetry (or literature in general) can serve as a way to access one’s innermost self. For Langston, it is not just a question of discovering himself, it is a matter of embracing who he is on the inside despite the judgment of others. The poetry of Langston Hughes reflects young Langston’s own repressed feelings and thereby validates them, bolstering his courage to defend himself at school and reveal himself at home. To his credit, Langston’s father finally accepts his son, inside and out.