The Redwood Coast
Review
Volume 9, Number 2
Spring 2007
A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer
It is not possible to go very far into
Langston Hughes research without run­
ning into the name Arnold Rampersad.
Dean of Humanities and Professor of
English at Stanford University, Rampersad
is the author of a two-volume biography,
The Life of Langston Hughes. He has also
contributed extensively in the form of
essays and biographical sketches introduc­
ing Hughes and his work to readers of col­
lections, anthologies and children’s books.
Hughes’s two volumes of autobiography,
The Big Sea and I Wonder As I Wander,
make for interesting and enjoyable read­
ing. Rampersad’s biography fills in lots of
blanks, presenting a much more complex
and conflicted individual. I came away
from the Hughes books thinking that he
was a wonderful writer and a courageous
individual. From reading Rampersad, I
have come to appreciate Hughes even
more as a writer and human being.
habitat
The River
in the Sky
George Keithley
M
See sky page 4
J
Gordon Parks
y son and his wife are watching
two sandpipers on the edge of
a pond. Chris and Fiona have
joined me at the Gray Lodge Wildlife
Area, a refuge for migrating birds along
the Pacific Flyway. A cold wind bends the
huge bulrushes that surround us. It leans
into them, then it ebbs, and they bow and
sway. Their rustling is part of a gentle
din—varieties of birdsong, the wind
pushing the leafless brush and feathering
the sedge grasses, wings now and then
flapping at the water—interrupted by the
complaining quacks of a grumpy duck.
It’s not stillness, exactly, but a peace­
ful interplay of activity and silence. At
Uskoye, in what was once a remote wet­
land region in pre-tsarist Russia, we’re
told Alexander Pushkin later roamed
among lakes and ponds no larger than
these. High-spirited and Byronic, in
black boots and his crimson cloak, he
chanted his poems to test their sono­
rous texture in the vibrant natural world
beyond the opulent salon or a prince’s
paneled library or cloistered study. To his
dismay the startled waterfowl bristled and
squawked—everyone’s a critic—as they
flapped into the air and took flight.
In this wetland region of Northern
California hundreds of ducks are win­
tering today, but many thousands have
moved on. They were mallards, pintails,
the ruddy duck, the ring-neck, the bluewinged teal. The unhappy loner is a wood
duck. He’s an uncommon species in this
locale in any season, and in the somber
light his paint-bright coloring captures
our attention. The crown of his head is
iridescent green, the forehead and sides
of the head are lustrous black, with white
arc-shaped markings. His beak is black
and white and a curious pomegranate
orange, and his chin and throat are white.
His scarlet eyes look fierce. But he seems
simply puzzled at his solitary state as he
paddles here and there, delivering his out­
spoken qreck-qreck, while sending ripples
out among the rushes. The sandpipers,
finding shelter in the marsh, ignore him.
The marsh includes clumps of eel grass
amid broad ponds where the water is jade
blue under a pewter sky. In the distance,
top­ping the tawny bulrushes, the cotton­
woods gleam with the pale gold of early
winter.
Six weeks ago much of this watery
haven belonged to the ducks. Traveling
south-by-southeast from Siberia, Canada,
and Alaska, they gathered overhead in
dark clouds—60,000 to 70,000 ducks
bunched together in the sky. Then the
deafening descent, wings thrashing the
air and the water, until at last the flocks
settled here to begin courting and mating.
Cold rains drummed on the ponds.
When the air cleared the pintails and teals
whistled and the wood ducks quacked like
the solitary straggler on the pond today.
For days the foraging ducks filled these
ponds and inlets with their characteristic
“feeding chuckle.” Then they departed
and a hush hung over the marsh.
We stepped into that stillness an hour
ago.
Dream Boogie
The epic journey of Langston Hughes
Daniel Barth
The world’s great political leaders—
consider Jesus, Churchill, Lincoln, Lenin,
Martin Luther King—have all drawn
upon the beautiful rhythms, sounds and
expressions found in everyday speech. So
did Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Will Rogers,
Woody Guthrie, Langston Hughes.
F
—Pete Seeger
orty years after his death the
work of Langston Hughes con­
tinues to be read widely and to
influence contemporary art and
culture. His 1958 novel Tambourines to Glory was recently reissued,
many of his other books remain in print,
and the 16-volume Collected Works of
Langston Hughes was completed in 2003.
Community centers, schools and libraries
are named for him. A much-used elemen­
tary school history text, America Will Be,
takes its title from one of his poems. That
same poem, “Let America Be America
Again,” was used as a theme by the John
Kerry campaign, and a chapbook of
Hughes poems with an Introduction by the
Senator was published in 2004. Kentucky
blues man Tyrone Cotton wrote music for
a Hughes poem, “As Befits a Man,” and
included it on a 2005 CD. In February of
this year, at the Bowery Poetry Club in
New York, a group of poets and musicians
staged a two-hour tribute to Hughes’s life
and work.
Thornton Wilder once remarked that
his literary career consisted of a succes­
sion of infatuations with admired writers.
This is something that I think many of
us who write can relate to. We all have
our favorites. I remember my excite­
ment when I read Walt Whitman and Jack
Kerouac for the first time. I wasn’t too
impressionable—I took to the open road
and got a summer Forest Service job as a
firefighter. After reading Huckleberry Finn
I started smoking a pipe. Later phases
included Thomas Wolfe, J. D. Salinger,
Hermann Hesse and Kurt Vonnegut.
In recent years the writer who has
grown more in my estimation and made
a bigger impression on me than any other
is Langston Hughes. I started getting into
Hughes after reading several poems that
knocked me out: “Dream Boogie,” “Har­
lem,” “The Weary Blues” and “Daybreak
in Alabama.” I decided to read more
of his work and to read about his life,
starting with his early autobiography The
Big Sea. I came away amazed by his life
story and by how little I had heard about it
previously. From the early 1920s through
the late 1960s he traveled more and gave
more readings than anybody, and had one
of the most amazingly varied careers in
the history of American letters. In addition
to poems, novels and short stories, he
wrote plays, song lyrics, children’s books,
essays, dialogues (the “Simple” pieces,
of which more later), biographies and
histories. He also worked as a journal­
ist, editor and translator. He was the first
African American to earn his living solely
as a writer, and the first to have an interna­
tional reputation and following.
Reviewers criticized
his work for being
too simplistic, for not
adequately reflecting or expressing
the complexities of
the modern world.
I don’t think those
critics understood
what he was after, or
the complexities of
minority experience
that he did express.
ames Langston Hughes was born
February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri.
His father was a lawyer and businessman,
his mother a would-be actress. Shortly
after he was born his parents separated.
Disdainful of segregation in the US, but
also of Negroes who put up with it, his
father moved to Mexico City to pursue his
career. Langston was taken to Lawrence,
Kansas, where he lived primarily with
his maternal grandmother until he was
13 years old. His mother remarried and
eventually moved to Lincoln, Illinois.
Langston joined her and graduated from
junior high there. In 1915 the family
moved to Cleveland. Langston attended
predominantly white Central High, where
many of his friends were children of
recent European immigrants.
Hughes was precocious. He wrote
passable poems ands stories while still
in high school. By his senior year he was
reading Guy de Maupassant in French
and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in Spanish. He
credits de Maupassant with turning him on
to the possibility of life as a writer. One of
his best poems was written when he was
just 18, after graduating from high school,
as he rode a train to Mexico to visit his
father. He writes about it in The Big Sea:
Now it was just sunset, and we
crossed the Mississippi slowly, over a
long bridge. I looked out the window
of the Pullman at the great muddy river
flowing toward the heart of the South,
and I began to think what that river, the
old Mississippi, had meant to Negroes in
the past—how to be sold down the river
was the worst fate that could overtake
a slave in times of bondage. Then I re­
membered reading how Abraham Lincoln
had made a trip down the Mississippi on
a raft to New Orleans, and how he had
seen slavery at its worst, and had decided
within himself that it should be removed
from American life. Then I began to think
about other rivers in our past—the Congo
and the Niger and the Nile in Africa—and
the thought came to me: ‘I’ve known riv­
ers,’ and I put it down on the back of an
envelope I had in my pocket, and within
the space of ten or fifteen minutes, as the
train gathered speed in the dusk, I had
written this poem, which I called “The
Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
He spent the next year in Mexico.
His father had plans for him to study in
Switzerland, but Langston felt the pull
of Harlem and chose New York instead.
He attended Columbia, but Harlem was
his true university. There he met W. E.
B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Zora Neale
Hurston, Countee Cullen and many others.
He began publishing poetry and became a
leading light of the Harlem Renaissance.
After one academic year he never returned
to Columbia. Later he completed his un­
See hughes page 10