The Return of Simple
By Langston Hughes
Hill and Wang, 218 pages, $20
Periodically a newspaper columnist will create a street-smart alter ego with a better fix on the day’s issues than that of editorial-page pundits and political science professors.
The genre is one of the glories of American journalism. Its founding father was Finley Peter Dunne, whose Mr. Dooley lectured turn-of-the-century newspaper readers from a fictionalized bar on Chicago’s Archer Avenue. This tradition of sidewalk philosophers is continued by Mike Royko’s Slats Grobnik. Half a century ago, it was represented by Jesse B. Semple, or Simple to his friends, in the newspaper columns of poet and playwright Langston Hughes.
But until well into Simple’s career, his wit and wisdom were unknown to most Americans because Hughes’ columns appeared in the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, long before being picked up by the New York Post.
“The Return of Simple,” a newly published anthology of Hughes’ columns, provides bittersweet evidence of how badly served white
readers of the 1940s and ’50s were by a journalistic byproduct of the Jim Crow barriers that divided American society. Hughes took note of the attendant irony in 1950 when informing his column’s readers of the critical success of the first collection of Simple stories to be published in book form.
Simple, he wrote, “this gentleman of color, who can’t get a cup of coffee in a public place in towns and cities where most of our American book reviewers live (unless it is a `colored’ place) is, nevertheless, being most warmly received by white critics from Texas to Maine.”
Simple’s lair was an imaginary Harlem bar whose place on the ladder of life was clearly marked by a wall sign: “Don’t ask for credit-he’s dead.”
Hughes’ columns took the form of conversations between Simple and an unnamed narrator whose textbook English contrasted with Simple’s ghetto patois, a verbal signature at once ungrammatical and richly poetic.
The narrator asked: “I often wonder why so many colored people say, `I taken,’ instead of, `I took’?”
“Because they are taken, I reckon,” Simple said. “Lord knows I have been taken in more ways than one-for a ride, for my week’s salary, my good name, and everything else but undertaken.”
Simple, a self-confessed womanizer, measured his failed marriages and numerous affairs with biological metaphors: “Love is a many-splintered thing,” sang Simple, standing at the bar. “If my heart had rings in it like a tree log, you could tell how many loves I have had-I mean of the heart not the body.”
Simple assumed all men shared his weakness for the fair sex, a liability he ascribed to forces larger than any of them:
“Even when a man is not idle, the Devil sends his wenches after you,” he observed.
At the distance of half a century, it is remarkable how problems Simple confronted remain facts of inner-city life today. Hughes’ columns decried white merchants who made their money in Harlem’s shops but split for the safety of the suburbs at the close of business hours. To the police of Simple’s day, all black men spelled trouble.
Simple himself refused to be a quitter:
“I been treading on the sea of life all my life, and have not sunk yet. I refuses to sink. In spite of womens, white folks, landlords, landladies, cold waves, and riots, I am still here.”
While Simple and his tavern cronies observed life from Harlem barstools, some of their observations transcend all boundaries of race and social standing. At one point, for instance, Simple took up with an older woman. A realist, she fully expected someday to lose him to a younger rival. She shrugged off his protests of love eternal with a description of the seasons of the human heart that by itself is well worth the price of this anthology:
“She would say, `June-time is a good month, sugar, but it goes away and stays all winter. When it comes back in the spring, it don’t always come back the same. And for some folks, June don’t come back a-tall.’ “
