Short Stories–Langston Hughes
Edited by Akiba Sullivan Harper
Hill and Wang, 299 pages, $25
Arnold Rampersad, the preeminent biographer of Langston Hughes, points out in his introduction to Akiba Sullivan Harper’s new collection of Hughes’ short stories that Hughes would have a prominent place in the pantheon of African-American authors on the basis of his fiction even if he had never written a poem or a play. Hughes’ fame as a writer of fiction rests primarily on the short, humorous pieces featuring Jesse B. Semple (a k a Simple), which first appeared in the Chicago Defender and were collected in five volumes during Hughes’ lifetime. (Harper, a scholar of Hughes’ short fiction, edited a sixth collection, “The Return of Simple,” which appeared in 1994.) While the “Simple stories” are undoubtedly among the finest works of American fiction to appear in the popular press during this century, Harper reminds readers of the range of Hughes’ short fiction, including works that have been out of print for decades or were never published in book form.
Many critics, biographers and acquaintances of Hughes’ have noted that the man and his work were apparently simple and straightforward, but on closer examination were enigmatic and contradictory, refusing to disclose themselves completely. Though Hughes’ writing changed over the years, it retained both a genuine attachment to the culture, language and experiences of “common” African-Americans in the North and South, and a persistent concern with (and insecurity about) the fluidity of racial, sexual and class identity.
Hughes’ earliest adult stories, based on his experiences as a merchant seaman in the early 1920s, are full of the contradictions of identity that ensue from the observations of an African-American narrator who has shipped out on a freighter bound for West Africa with a polyglot crew of “Greeks, West Indian Negroes, Irish, Portuguese, and Americans”; tellingly, the Americans, black and white, are not always clearly marked by race. In these stories, the crew members on an “American” freighter bond across lines of race and nationality that would divide them in the United States (though those lines occasionally surface from time to time). The African-American narrator finds himself in an Africa where the indigenous people regard him as an outsider and not distinguishable from his white (and brown) mates.
At the same time, “American” customs are sometimes upheld in a context that changes their meaning, as in “The Little Virgin,” in which a novice white seaman fights his older friend and mentor because the older sailor has struck an African prostitute for spilling his beer in a waterfront bar in Senegal. The younger sailor becomes delirious, chanting over and over, “He oughtn’t to hit a woman.” At that moment, the narrator’s understated outrage over the injustice of colonialism, racism, sexual exploitation and the miserable treatment of merchant seamen mixes with a confusion of racial, gender, class and national lines engendered by the African-American seaman witnessing another, (presumably) white seaman (from Newark) beating an African woman and then a young, blond sailor (“probably a runaway from some neat middle-class home in an inland village”) “defending the honor” of the African woman.
A similar, if more humorous, confusion of identity takes place in a much later story, “Who’s Passing for Who?” which first appeared in the Chicago-based journal Negro Story in 1946. In this story, a narrator recalls a circle of the “literary bohemia” of the Harlem Renaissance to which he belonged. This circle, like bohemias everywhere, was contemptuous of the bourgeoisie, both white and black, and was much enamored of gin and artistic modernism:
“We snubbed and high-hatted any Negro or white luckless enough not to understand Gertrude Stein, Ulysses, Man Ray, the theremin, Jean Toomer, or George Antheil.”
These bohemians meet three white voyeurs from Iowa in the Harlem nightclub Small’s Paradise. One of the three tries to defend a “white” woman knocked down by a “colored” man, only to find out that she is “colored” and the man’s wife. Upon discovering that the woman was not white, her would-be rescuer abandons his attempt and apologizes for “butting in.” The narrator and his friends, enraged that the man would take the part of a white woman but would let a “colored” woman be beaten by a “colored” “brute,” bitterly “high-hat” the Iowan until he flees the bar.
The two remaining Iowans, a man and a woman, strike up a friendly conversation with the narrator and his group about “colored people” “passing” for white. The bohemians condescendingly explain “passing” to the couple and are shocked when they declare they are “colored” and have been “passing” for years. After recovering from their initial shock, the narrator and friends relax and talk and joke freely “like colored folks do when there are no white folk around.” But their shock returns when the couple announce at the end of the evening that they really are white and had only been “passing” as “colored”:
“We didn’t say a thing. We just stood there on the corner in Harlem dumbfounded–not knowing which way we’d been fooled. Were they really white–passing for colored? Or colored–passing for white?”
In many respects, this is a perfect statement of the multiple perspectives and voices Hughes tried to embody in these stories while remaining in solidly African-American context. Hughes realized that such contradictions were in fact a major aspect of the African-American experience in a country where boundaries of race, class, ethnicity and gender could seem absolutely rigid one moment and completely fluid or porous another, with humorous or tragic results. It is also a good example of how Hughes attempted the balancing act of writing an engaged literary and genuinely popular literature that spoke for and of the everyday lives of African-Americans (and other Americans) with greater success than perhaps any other American writer of the 20th Century. To a large extent, this incorporation of many voices and perspectives, and the shifting of the boundaries of human identity, characterize much of Hughes’ work in other genres but are perhaps more clearly visible in the stories than elsewhere. Harper has rendered a valuable service to readers in making such a large and well-chosen selection of Hughes’ short fiction readily accessible in this volume.
