I know nothing about Langston Hughes except he was a Black poet, novelist, and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance. For the 1940 Club, I thought it would be interesting to read The Big Sea, his autobiography.
Hughes had a pretty interesting life. Although he was in some ways from distinguished stock and his father was wealthy, his parents split up when he was young and he was very poor for much of his life.
Hughes’s parents split for good after his father took the family to Mexico, and almost immediately there was a big earthquake, so his mother took Langston and left. He was raised mostly by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, while his mother traveled here and there trying to make a living. When his grandmother died, he went to some of her friends, rejoining his mother and stepfather as he got older.
Race is a major theme of Hughes’s life. Most of it was during the Great Migration, so housing for Black people was very expensive and scarce. I didn’t realize that at the time Jim Crow laws were all over the United States, not just in the South. The famous Cotton Club in Harlem, for example, was, as he put it, for white people and gangsters.
Hughes’s book opens when, after a year at Columbia University, he signs on with a freighter as a mess boy. He is excited to set foot in Africa, which he sees as a sort of spiritual home. But he is astonished to find that the Africans don’t consider him, a light-skinned man, to be Black.
Hughes seemed to have no fear and went his own way much of the time, traveling fearlessly, quitting good jobs because he didn’t like them and taking menial ones, splitting from a mentor. The book is interesting, written mostly as a series of anecdotes, but it does not tell much about his personal life. That is, it tells what he does but not much about how he feels or anything about very personal subjects. For example, late in the book, he has a break with Zora Neale Hurston that at least partially has to do with a woman he’s seeing (and partially about differences around a play they wrote together), but he does not otherwise mention this woman or any romantic life.
A few chapters about the Harlem Renaissances are a little boring, just mentioning lots of names, many of which mean nothing to us anymore. Here, he is often too general. For example, he recalls a party where amusing stories were told about the Queen of Romania. Of course, we want to know what they are, but he doesn’t tell us.
Considering when the book was written, there are lots of terms used that for our times are cringe-worthy, especially the constant use of “Negro.” He explains why “Black” (which became more socially acceptable during the 70’s) was not acceptable at the time.
I enjoyed most of this novel, but sometimes the descriptions of things that were popular then, some events, and the wording of things made me squirm. It just reads as very outdated.
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