Church was home.
As a black girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I so needed that space. I attended a predominantly white elementary school. My classmates often let me know that they detested the way I talked, the way I wore my hair and the food I brought from home for lunch.
So when my English teacher introduced her poetry unit, using Langston Hughes as the first poet, my spirit leapt for joy just as it did at church. I recognized the vernacular in his poems. I knew that mother who told her son that life for her
had been no crystal stair. I understood the stench of
rotting dreams, I knew the longing of a people wanting America to make good on its promise. When Hughes called
his people beautiful like the night sky, my grandpa and cousins and neighbors came to mind. I said “amen” in that classroom for the first time. The lesson spoke directly to me, about me.
Poetry became my sanctuary.
I grew up in a state where black people make up 2 percent of the population, so I needed a refuge for my blackness. I needed permission to celebrate and critique where I came from. It was validating to know that the struggle of someone like my mother was worthy of a poem, that my dreams were important enough to be recorded. Hughes’s poetry was a witness to my experience, my existence.
Throughout my schooling, there were many more poetry units of study, and almost always there was one black poet on the syllabus: Langston Hughes. But the poems were always the same ones — the ones about dreams. Every year during Black History Month, my classmates and I recited “Harlem” and “Dream Variations.”
EIt wasn’t until college that I learned that Hughes wasn’t just a dreamer. The poet who wrote about deferred dreams was the same writer who wrote, “If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a fish to be a fish without getting hooked, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be a place in this American country where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.”
Hughes wrote, “I swear to the Lord/I still can’t see/Why democracy means/Everybody but me.”
He wrote, “I tire so of hearing people say,/Let things take their course./Tomorrow is another day./I do not need my freedom when I’m dead./I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.”
Sometimes he wrote rebukes: “Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn’t lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in their liberalism.”
Hughes declared he, too, was America but also wrote, “America was never America to me.” He loved and critiqued his country, his people.
I often wonder why my teachers didn’t share this side of Hughes. Why were they so comfortable with black struggle but not our rage? Hughes’s words were not just dirge nor were they only jubilee. They were protest, too.
Hughes’s words were — and are — sanctuary. The kind I grew up in: loud, comforting, affirming, challenging, political. They sustain me as I work in the Harlem brownstone where the poet lived during the last 20 years of his life.
The first day of February is the beginning of Black History Month and what would have been Hughes’s 116th birthday. As we honor his legacy, I hope we remember this dreamer-poet who loved Harlem and his people with a fierce, unapologetic love. As we commemorate his birthday, I hope we embrace his anger and frustration and remember not only his dreams but also his demands.
I hope we dig into his work, as we do Scripture, and find something that speaks to us, pushes us past comfort, makes us say amen.
