If you’re in Great Barrington on a mild day, you might take Church Street down to the Housatonic River and visit the tribute to W.E. B. DuBois, the celebrated author and activist who was born on the neighboring hillside. A recent site celebration was called “I’ve Known Rivers.” a quote from a poem by Langston Hughes that was first published by DuBois.
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than
the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi
when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,
and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
This exquisite poem, officially titled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” was written on the back of an envelope by seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes (1901-1967), later to become a novelist, a playwright, and one of the most remarkable American poets of the 20th century. For this and similar poems he became the leader of what was called the Harlem Renaissance, writing such affecting words as these:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
* * *
* * *
Hughes was born in Missouri and raised in Kansas. He was of mixed ancestry. His great-grandfather was a white slave owner; his great-grandmother was a black slave.
My old man’s a white old man
And my old mother’s black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I’m sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well.
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?
But early on, Hughes chose to identify as black and throughout his life fought for racial equality and social justice, challenging the exclusion of black people from the American Dream. He called this poem “Merry-Go-Round.
Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can’t sit side by side.
Down South on the train
There’s a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we’re put in the back —
But there ain’t no back
To a merry-go-round!
Where’s the horse
For a kid that’s black?
* * *
In 1921 Hughes came to New York to study at Columbia. He soon found himself immersed in the jazz and blues clubs in Harlem with the intoxicating sounds of jazz and blues creeping into his life and his poetry: jive language, syncopated rhythms, and the twelve-bar structure of blues. He wrote: “Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains and work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”
Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely: You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a —
You think
It’s a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
something underneath
like a —
What did I say?
Sure,
I’m happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!
Hughes was far from being a reclusive poet. Before he was twelve years old, he had lived in six different American cities. As an adult he resided at various times in Mexico, France, Italy, Spain and the Soviet Union. For a while he worked at the Grand Duc Club in Paris where “The jazz band starts playing at one and we’re still serving champagne long after daylight.”
* * *
* * *
Play that thing,
Jazz band!
Play it for the lords and ladies,
For the dukes and counts,
For the whores and gigolos,
For the American millionaires,
And the school teachers
Out for a spree.
Play it,
Jazz band!
You know that tune
That laughs and cries at the same time.
You know it.
May I?
Mais oui.
Mein Gott!
Parece una rumba.
Play it, jazz band!
You’ve got seven languages to speak in
And then some,
Even if you do come from Georgia.
Can I go home wid yuh, sweetie?
Sure.
* * *
As befits someone who could write finished poems on the back of envelopes, Hughes became a master of short verse forms. For example, here is “Street Song:”
Jack, if you got to be a rounder
Be a rounder right ––
Just don’t let mama catch you
Makin’ rounds at night.
A musical piece called “Boogie: 1 A.M.
Good evening, daddy!
I know you’ve heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred
Trilling the treble
And twining the bass
Into midnight ruffles
Of cat-gut lace.
And my favorite, “Advice.”
Folks, I’m telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean —
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.
* * *
* * *
Saving the best till last, here is Langston Hughes’s most famous jazz poem, “The Weary Blues.”
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
* * *
VIDEO. And now hear “The Weary Blues” performed by Langston Hughes himself.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: POET OF THE JAZZ AGE
