Earlier this year, my Langston Hughes (1902-1967) reading (Part One, Part Two) was focussed more on his own writing. From his short stories to the first volume of his autobiography. But along the way, I’ve enjoyed a number of other books by and about him.

“I should get Langston in for a book signing…. His way of speaking simply and honestly about black life cuts straight to the bone.”

This is from No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller (2012) a memoir by Yaunda Micheaux Nelson, about her uncle and his bookstore. (I wonder why their names are spelled differently.) She only visited his shop once, when she was fourteen years old, and it wasn’t until many years later—after his death and after the shop was closed—that she understood how important the shop had been for the Black community.

There are ample photographs and documents to secure the reader in the historical context, and there are simple black-and-white illustrations by R. Gregory Christie which make the whole reading experience feel like a scrapbook and diary, more intimate than a history book. This has been on my TBR since Natasha recommended it; I’m glad this project finally nudged it to the top of the stack.

As usual, as soon as I declare a particular interest, it seems like the universe obliges: Langston Hughes seems to be everywhere (like those kittens in my manga reading, turning off the light switches to respond to the climate crisis).

A public radio program about 2021 music releases introduced me to Three Dream Portraits by Margaret Bonds, based on Langston Hughes’ poems, for instance. Check them out on Youtube, with bass-baritone Dashon Burton and Stefano Flavoni, on piano. And the new release referenced? It was Will Liverman’s: gorgeous!

Speaking of Langston Hughes’ poetry, there were fifty-nine poems in the 1932 edition of The Dream Keeper. The 75th anniversary edition has seven additional poems AND gorgeous illustrations by Brian Pinkney (who’s won many awards for his illustrations, including a few Coretta Scott Kings).

Most are just a few lines, accompanied on their page by a scratchboard illustration, in which a board covered with black ink is scratched away with a tool (if you’ve not seen them before, they have the precision of woodcuts with the complication of a pencil drawing).

What was once the introduction to the collection, by the poet’s wife, Augusta Baker, now appears as “A Personal Note” at the end. She considered many of these poems her favourites, and she read them to children in the late 1930s in Harlem, when she was a children’s librarian assigned to the 135th Street branch of the NYPL. (I wonder where she bought her books!)

In the middle of Extraordinary People of the Harlem Renaissance (2000) is a section which opens with a Langston Hughes quotation, devoted to the Renaissance’s Patrons, but of course Hughes has his own chapter. Sheila Jackson and P. Stephen Hardy present more than forty other short biographies too, ten pages of even shorter biographies at the end, and as many pages of recommended reading.

One of the joys of a volume like this, created with young readers in mind, is the abundance of illustrations. And, with Hughes (some others, too) the photograph is uncommon, depicting him when he is rather young (perhaps to make it even easier for young readers to identify with these historically significant figures).

Left to my own devices, I gravitate towards the writers and poets, but this volume reminds me just how many figures of interest could have their own dedicated reading lists. One in particular that caught my attention is the sculptor (activist and educator, too) Augusta Christine Savage; I’ll look out for her!

Another discovery in the children’s collection for this project is Popo and Fifina (1932) which he wrote with Arna Bontemps (1902-1973). The Opie Library edition I read (think Everyman’s Edition, but children’s books) has a very helpful introduction and afterword by Arnold Rampersad (1941–). That also reminded me that I have yet to read his Pulitzer-Prize winning, two-volume biography of Hughes.

Because Popo and Fifina takes place on the island of Haiti, it felt like a summery story for me–tragically timely, too, given the recent earthquake. The woodcuts by E. Simms Campbell (1906-1971) made the story a real pleasure.

The two authors had very different politics (Hughes more liberal and Bontemps more conservative) and their publisher insisted on a middle-ground, so the characters are poverty-stricken, and their lives depicted honestly and unsentimentally, but the injustice of the hierarchical society they inhabit were alluded to tangentially:

“The stream along the street was no bigger than the stream in some gutters after a rain. But it was clean sparkling water from the mountain, springs flowing in a little stone gully for the convenience of people who did not have private wells in their houses.”

When Brandon Fleming writes about his internship at the Anne Spencer House in his memoir Miseducated (2021), he describes sitting in the same parlor that Harlem Renaissance luminaries once sat and how he felt at home there:

“Every time I set foot on the black-and-white-checkered walkway to the front door of her Queen Anne-style house, I felt like I was stepping only holy ground. Inside, I was greeted by the spirits of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, and the many Black Renaissance leaders she hosted as they traveled through the Jim Crow South.”

It’s not a spoiler to indicate that the troubled youth Fleming describes leads him to a better place. And Miseducated ends on a powerful and inspiring note that suits this post:

“I heard the song of Frederick Douglass, and I was freed. I heard the song of Brother Malcolm, and I was freed. I heard the song of Socrates and Confucius, Langston and Zora, Ella and Billie, Baldwin and Toni, Alice and Maya, and I was freed. They say—so I, too sing. I sing so you, too, will sing. And others will be freed, but if—and only if—you decide to sing.”

Whose work has made you want to sing?