Words for the day after ‘The Day After’

If you chart the family tree of Langston Hughes (1902–1967) you realize why the root system of his writing is deep, dense and intricate: The DNA of African slaves and Kentucky slave-owners unleashed in him a cataclysmically creative canvas that captured the turbulence of 20th-Century American culture and converted it into words in a way seldom seen before or since.

Some categorized it as Jazz Poetry.

Rarely do style and substance swirl and twirl together so eloquently — swaying whimsically one moment, gyrating energetically the next.

Hughes expressed the African-American experience during The Harlem Renaissance, “a cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York” in the 1920s.

Words were his friends, his solace, his escape. Here’s how he explained it in his 1940 autobiography, “The Big Sea”:

“I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”

Though Hughes produced much memorable work, his poem “Let America Be America Again” seems especially appropriate given the nation’s most-recent self-inflicted wounds. 

Here’s, perhaps, its most powerful slice:

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

Redemption can be messy. Why? How do you make something better without work. Pain. Sweat. Blood. How do you make something more acceptable without discipline. Focus. Direction. Guidance.

Can’t be done.

But redemption represents a distant dream, a fixed celestial point, a Star of Bethlehem teasing the Wise to launch a demanding and difficulty journey that offers promise — but no guarantees.

What sustains men and women on such an uncertain voyage?

Hughes put it this way: “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”