She was a homemaker from Joliet who had never ventured out of the Midwest. He was a world-renowned poet who had traveled around the globe five times before they ever met.
It was her search through the family’s bloodline that in 1958 led Margrett Ann Duncan to Langston Hughes, her first cousin once removed. But it was their fondness and admiration for each other that kept them close for almost a decade.
She baked maple nut cakes and mailed them to him in an aluminum pan. The sweet token would be waiting for him at his East 127th Street apartment in Harlem when he returned from a trip to Paris or San Francisco or the West Indies. Afterward, he would return the pan filled with autographed books of his writings, candy for her four children and always a friendly note expressing his gratitude.
On her birthday, Valentine’s Day and Christmas, the arrival of flowers, cards or sometimes a singing telegram became an annual ritual that she cherished as much as his almost-monthly letters. On green-and-white stationery, Hughes shared almost every aspect of his life with the woman he fondly called his “No. 1 Coz.” He wrote of his travels, his lectures, his performances and the people he had met in faraway places. He spoke of his family, inquired about hers and promised to visit as soon as he could. She preserved every memento in a brown vinyl scrapbook kept locked away in a safe deposit box.
When his work brought him to Chicago, Hughes often stayed with Duncan and her husband in an 11-room home in Joliet she had inherited from her Aunt Jessie. Normally, Hughes would read poetry or perform readings to the accompaniment of a jazz quartet, but Duncan’s favorite performance was when he appeared on stage in Chicago with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. When her cousin was in town, the family partied into the early morning hours, then spent the rest of the day exchanging life stories.
A woman of few financial means, Duncan relished the time she spent with Hughes, who showered her with the wealth of his knowledge and exposed her, through his letters, to a world she would never know firsthand but could visit time and time again in her dreams.
“Langston was very jovial, very loving and very generous,” said Duncan, now 79 and living in Gary, Ind. “When he visited, he would say, `Don’t invite any friends over. I want to have you all to myself.’
“He opened up a new world of relatives and things going on that I wouldn’t have been aware of, even though I read his (newspaper) column. To the rest of the world he was a celebrity, but to my brother and me, he was a beloved relative.”
For years, Aunt Jessie had told people that she was a cousin of Langston Hughes, but no one believed her, least of all Duncan. When Aunt Jessie died in 1953, well into her 90s, Duncan found evidence in an old trunk linking Langston to her father’s Hughes family bloodline.
“I used to say to myself, `Boy, this woman has an imagination out of sight.’ But when I started going through her stuff after she died, I found the Hughes name written on the back of several different things. And there were lots of old pictures. I said, `Well, maybe she’s right,’ and that caused me to write Langston a letter.”
She sent the letter in care of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper that ran a popular weekly column by Hughes, and explained the family lineage. He answered via an airmail special-delivery letter, she said, confirming that they were indeed related. Duncan’s paternal grandmother and Hughes’ father were sister and brother.
Duncan never answered that letter, but a few years later Hughes tracked her down. He was coming to Chicago and wanted to meet her and her brother.
“When I came up the stairs of his hotel, he met me at the elevator. He said, `Oh Margrett, I’m so glad to see you.’ He put his arms around me and gave me a big hug and kiss. I thought, `This man has never seen me.’ But he seemed genuinely glad to meet us. He pulled out a copy of my father’s obituary that he said he’d been carrying in his briefcase.”
About a year later, Hughes bought her a plane ticket to California to meet other relatives, including his Uncle John, who was Duncan’s great uncle. It was there that she realized the scope of his popularity.
Langston Hughes had been a primary voice of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, a period that produced a slew of popular black writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen and Claude McKay, whose poetry expressed the social, political and religious aspects of the African-American experience. But Hughes, widely popular for his humorous writings, reigned as “The Poet Laureate of Harlem.”
“He never married or had children. He said he was married to his books,” Duncan said. “He was very happy doing what he was doing.”
Prior to his death in 1967 from complications from prostate surgery, Hughes wrote a wealth of poems, plays, short stories, novels, newspaper columns, scripts and even opera librettos. The world fell in love with his fictional character, Jesse B. Simple, a warm, humorous and often confused personality whom Hughes employed in his newspaper column and essays to vent his political concerns and questions about man’s humanity.
He used his talents to paint a vivid picture of what it was like to be a black man in America. In spite of the adversity, he always found the funny side of life, a style that sometimes garnered criticism from those who believed his humor skirted the seriousness of the black man’s plight. Still, blacks and many whites read his work religiously.
“Though he was very young, his popularity extended far beyond the Renaissance in the 1920s and it still does today,” said Milton Meltzer, a New York writer who co-authored two books with Hughes in the 1950s and later chronicled his life story in “Langston Hughes: A Biography.”
“He was a remarkably talented guy with a wonderfully warm and sympathetic personality and a man who had compassion for people, both black and white.”
A newspaper article once described Hughes as “a man who has spent most of his life having fun.” He had a passion for living that was eclipsed only by his love for writing. Long before he began writing to Duncan, he exchanged letters with his close friend, Chicago writer Arna Bontemps. Between 1925 and 1967, the two men wrote some 2,300 letters in which they critiqued each other’s work, discussed race relations and world events and pondered the survival of Afro-American culture.
Among the letters published in a book, “Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters 1925-1967,” is a reference to his cousins in Chicago.
In Chi I found (with most patient help of long distance operator, the missing relatives whose names I only knew half and addresses not at all) in Joliet and Gary, so did not have to visit those cities, instead the never-before-seen cousins drove up to Chicago to see me, and very nice folks they are, too, a brother and sister, both married with kids, homes, and cars — real solid citizens — as Uncle John thought they would be — yet fun loving and took me night-clubbing. . . . So we all like each other and I am glad I located them for my Uncle — and myself. They had lots of old family pictures I’d never seen before, even old tin types. The kind of folks who don’t lose their history in basements.
Duncan gave Hughes something he’d never had–knowledge about his father’s family. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and he lived with his maternal grandmother in Lawrence, Kan., until he was 12. When she died he moved to Lincoln, Ill., with his mother, and after high school lived a year with his father in Mexico. Among Duncan’s vast collection of antiques and family heirlooms handed down from Aunt Jessie was a picture of Langston’s grandfather, a man he had never seen. He borrowed the photograph from Duncan, she said, and never returned it.
“He said he was going to write a book about our family,” said Duncan, whose father died before meeting Hughes. “He queried my mother about family history because she knew all about my father’s side of the family.”
Duncan and her brother grew up much like their cousin. Their parents, too, separated when they were young. She and her brother clung to each other, and Langston Hughes clung to them.
Her favorite poem by Hughes, called “Still Here,” expresses how she often feels:
I been
Scarred and battered.
My hopes
The wind done scattered.
Snow has frized me.
Sun is baked me.
Looks like, between ’em,
They done tried to make me
Stop living,
Stop laughing
Stop singing —
But I don’t care
Folks I’m
Still here!
“It relates to his lifestyle and mine because . . . he didn’t have a home either,” Duncan said. “(That) may be why we became so close. We had so much in common. He never had a lot of money, but he lived well.
“Some well-to-do people can’t communicate with the common man. But Langston loved to go where the people were, to nightclubs, dives and dens, and after-hour places with people who didn’t have anything. He took time to talk to everybody.”
