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A Dream Come True: The Grave of Langston Hughes
A Dream Come True: The Grave of Langston Hughes
Perhaps the best way to judge the enormous influence of this great writer on all of Black American culture, and Langston Hughes’ importance to his people, is to visit his grave. Seven years after his untimely death and cremation, in 1967, his ashes were scattered under the floor of the main hall in the new Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.
For a poet whose most important goal was to open a path for his people to a greater self awareness, an end to self-hate, to create a black culture and to create a way for mutual understanding between the races, it is suitable that his remains are placed in New York’s Harlem in which he chose to spend much of his life. And it is suitable that the entire library is built upon his ashes.
In the 1920’s Harlem became the center of the new black culture, having been recently populated by the children of freed slaves seeking a better life. Hughes was one of the major influences, and in 1926 wrote an article entitled, ‘’ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" in which he declared:” We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” It was indeed revolutionary, not only because it encouraged black writers, but because it encouraged them as a people.
The library itself is symbolically placed on the well-known thoroughfare of Manhattan, Broadway, and 125th street, which at this point becomes Martin Luther King Boulevard) so that Hughes’ grave is in the center of what was black culture, on the very road of his home in New York, the Y.M.C.A. “the Harlem Branch Y.” Hughes wrote about this very Y in his poem about writing a college paper, “Theme for English B.” )Readers will perhaps recognize the Y.M.C.A. more easily from the 1978 disco song by the Village People.) Hughes wrote about practically everything in the neighborhood, from Columbia University to the nightclubs, especially the people. 125th street was the legendary border between black and white neighborhoods – and the accessibility to black culture Hughes was largely responsible for – is in the center of that black culture.
The accessibility of the grave is simple and symbolic. Anyone in Manhattan can get there for the price of a subway ride. Take the number 1 train to 135st Street, cross over to the other side, and walk into the library.
Past the information desk is the hall. This is certainly as Hughes would have wanted it. Central. Under foot. Available to all.
For although it was Hughes’ first influence, Walt Whitman, who wrote that he was “everywhere under your bootsoles” and elsewhere “And am not stuck up, and am in my place,” It was Hughes more than Whitman who lived this concept every day of his life. He was not “stuck up,” but consistently attempted to live every aspect of his life within the community, and draw the subjects of his poetry as well as his prose from the voices of the children on the street, the hard-working mothers, the simple workers trying to navigate a complex world, as well as the musicians who were discovering the kinds of music that would soon define the sound of America. Most of all he was concerned with the state of anticipation and frustration of the Negro in the specific period of history, with the “Dream Deferred,” the first moments in history that blacks were beginning to dream of being part of the American dream, but finding it almost impossible to fulfill. He wrote of this dream throughout his life.
Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
That innumerable people were influenced by this poem and the poems following this one, is evident by the direct quotations. Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “Raisin in the Sun,” which became a film starring Sidney Poitier, depicts the living conditions of urban blacks and their frustrated aspirations for a better life. For many blacks in the later generation, in the sixties (including Malcolm X and Imira Baraka) this was an outdated and limiting way of thinking, and Hughes’ direct influence began to fade in his last years. Although many scholars have pointed out that Martin Luther King’s great “I have a dream” speech was drawn from the poetry of Hughes, there were those who thought of him as an “Uncle Tom,” who curried favor with the white establishment. But this reservation has been overcome in the memorial. The terra-cotta color mandala circle of the artist Houston Conwill, commissioned by the city of New York, reflects his overwhelming influence, for it overflows from the circle on to the white floor around it.
Covering the ashes of Langston Hughes is a mosaic of his earliest and best-known poem, “The Negro Thinks of Rivers,” deconstructed and reconstructed in a circular pattern.
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
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.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The musicality of the rearrangement of the poem on the floor is immediately apparent. As with jazz music, the poem is fragmented and deconstructed, so that the mosaic becomes an improvisation on the original, depending on the knowledge of the original for its resonance. But it also can recall the blues or classical fugues.
Hughes’ love of music was ethnic, but it was also eclectic. As he himself notes, he loved “Bessie, bop, or Bach.” Bessie Smith, one of the first black folk blues singers, be-bop being played to white people by black jazz musicians, and Bach, the emblem of European civilization and order. But jazz has the most ethnic significance. Hughes wrote early on in his career: “jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” (Negro artist and the racial mountain). Published in 1921, the poem reflects a movement away from the idea of a sustaining religious belief in the Negro spirituals by avoiding the spiritual Jordan river leading the slave into the afterlife, and concentrates on the rivers that are concerned with the history of the black people. The names of these rivers surround the circle.
The rivers do not only border the mandala that is Hughes’ memorial, they run out to the entrance of the hall, and trickle out elsewhere, in the way the Hughes’ writings – his plays, novels, autobiographies, essays, and poetry – lead not to the poet, but from the poet to the world outside.
Near the center of the mandala is the place and date of Hughes birth, Joplin, February 1, 1905. He was born in the year of the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Born to the second generation of freed slaves, the lives of his family were strongly history by this period of history. Separated from his family, the engineer father chose to move to Mexico where the color of his skin was not a factor of his life, and hated the racist United States. A result of mixed races, including even the Jewish race, he encouraged his son to study and transcend the limiting status of his people, but left his mother to raise her son in difficult circumstances, who gave him over to her mother to raise him while she sought employment. This grandmother told Langston stories of her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary who died at the rebellion of John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, and Hughes grew to love his people. It is not surprising that his “soul has grown deep” in such a period and with such a history in his heritage.
The floor is also mixed with other landmarks of Hughes’ life and people, including the birthdate of the founder of the library, Arthur Schomburg. It is a mark that the life of a poet who gives his life to his people remains intertwined with the fate of those people.
A Dream Come True: The Grave of Langston Hughes
Perhaps the best way to judge the enormous influence of this great writer on all of Black American culture, and Langston Hughes’ importance to his people, is to visit his grave. Seven years after his untimely death and cremation, in 1967, his ashes were scattered under the floor of the main hall in the new Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.
For a poet whose most important goal was to open a path for his people to a greater self awareness, an end to self-hate, to create a black culture and to create a way for mutual understanding between the races, it is suitable that his remains are placed in New York’s Harlem in which he chose to spend much of his life. And it is suitable that the entire library is built upon his ashes.
In the 1920’s Harlem became the center of the new black culture, having been recently populated by the children of freed slaves seeking a better life. Hughes was one of the major influences, and in 1926 wrote an article entitled, ‘’ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" in which he declared:” We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” It was indeed revolutionary, not only because it encouraged black writers, but because it encouraged them as a people.
The library itself is symbolically placed on the well-known thoroughfare of Manhattan, Broadway, and 125th street, which at this point becomes Martin Luther King Boulevard) so that Hughes’ grave is in the center of what was black culture, on the very road of his home in New York, the Y.M.C.A. “the Harlem Branch Y.” Hughes wrote about this very Y in his poem about writing a college paper, “Theme for English B.” )Readers will perhaps recognize the Y.M.C.A. more easily from the 1978 disco song by the Village People.) Hughes wrote about practically everything in the neighborhood, from Columbia University to the nightclubs, especially the people. 125th street was the legendary border between black and white neighborhoods – and the accessibility to black culture Hughes was largely responsible for – is in the center of that black culture.
The accessibility of the grave is simple and symbolic. Anyone in Manhattan can get there for the price of a subway ride. Take the number 1 train to 135st Street, cross over to the other side, and walk into the library.
Past the information desk is the hall. This is certainly as Hughes would have wanted it. Central. Under foot. Available to all.
For although it was Hughes’ first influence, Walt Whitman, who wrote that he was “everywhere under your bootsoles” and elsewhere “And am not stuck up, and am in my place,” It was Hughes more than Whitman who lived this concept every day of his life. He was not “stuck up,” but consistently attempted to live every aspect of his life within the community, and draw the subjects of his poetry as well as his prose from the voices of the children on the street, the hard-working mothers, the simple workers trying to navigate a complex world, as well as the musicians who were discovering the kinds of music that would soon define the sound of America. Most of all he was concerned with the state of anticipation and frustration of the Negro in the specific period of history, with the “Dream Deferred,” the first moments in history that blacks were beginning to dream of being part of the American dream, but finding it almost impossible to fulfill. He wrote of this dream throughout his life.
Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
That innumerable people were influenced by this poem and the poems following this one, is evident by the direct quotations. Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “Raisin in the Sun,” which became a film starring Sidney Poitier, depicts the living conditions of urban blacks and their frustrated aspirations for a better life. For many blacks in the later generation, in the sixties (including Malcolm X and Imira Baraka) this was an outdated and limiting way of thinking, and Hughes’ direct influence began to fade in his last years. Although many scholars have pointed out that Martin Luther King’s great “I have a dream” speech was drawn from the poetry of Hughes, there were those who thought of him as an “Uncle Tom,” who curried favor with the white establishment. But this reservation has been overcome in the memorial. The terra-cotta color mandala circle of the artist Houston Conwill, commissioned by the city of New York, reflects his overwhelming influence, for it overflows from the circle on to the white floor around it.
Covering the ashes of Langston Hughes is a mosaic of his earliest and best-known poem, “The Negro Thinks of Rivers,” deconstructed and reconstructed in a circular pattern.
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
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.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The musicality of the rearrangement of the poem on the floor is immediately apparent. As with jazz music, the poem is fragmented and deconstructed, so that the mosaic becomes an improvisation on the original, depending on the knowledge of the original for its resonance. But it also can recall the blues or classical fugues.
Hughes’ love of music was ethnic, but it was also eclectic. As he himself notes, he loved “Bessie, bop, or Bach.” Bessie Smith, one of the first black folk blues singers, be-bop being played to white people by black jazz musicians, and Bach, the emblem of European civilization and order. But jazz has the most ethnic significance. Hughes wrote early on in his career: “jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” (Negro artist and the racial mountain). Published in 1921, the poem reflects a movement away from the idea of a sustaining religious belief in the Negro spirituals by avoiding the spiritual Jordan river leading the slave into the afterlife, and concentrates on the rivers that are concerned with the history of the black people. The names of these rivers surround the circle.
The rivers do not only border the mandala that is Hughes’ memorial, they run out to the entrance of the hall, and trickle out elsewhere, in the way the Hughes’ writings – his plays, novels, autobiographies, essays, and poetry – lead not to the poet, but from the poet to the world outside.
Near the center of the mandala is the place and date of Hughes birth, Joplin, February 1, 1905. He was born in the year of the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Born to the second generation of freed slaves, the lives of his family were strongly history by this period of history. Separated from his family, the engineer father chose to move to Mexico where the color of his skin was not a factor of his life, and hated the racist United States. A result of mixed races, including even the Jewish race, he encouraged his son to study and transcend the limiting status of his people, but left his mother to raise her son in difficult circumstances, who gave him over to her mother to raise him while she sought employment. This grandmother told Langston stories of her first husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary who died at the rebellion of John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, and Hughes grew to love his people. It is not surprising that his “soul has grown deep” in such a period and with such a history in his heritage.
The floor is also mixed with other landmarks of Hughes’ life and people, including the birthdate of the founder of the library, Arthur Schomburg. It is a mark that the life of a poet who gives his life to his people remains intertwined with the fate of those people.
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