488 Making It New: 1900–1945slave masters and drivers vary from the brutal to the paternalistic, and those who
sympathize with the revolt number among them those who invoke “the Rights of
Man” and those who quote the Bible, immigrant French radicals, American liberals,
and Quakers. Each voice and view is allowed its opportunity as, in a strategy that
might be called cinematic, Bontemps rapidly cuts from one to another. And that
strategy is crucial not only to the form but to the meaning, the political conscience
of the novel. The prevailing idea, deriving from radical socialist aesthetics of the
1930s, is of the reality and power of mass consciousness. Bontemps is clearly
expressing here the sense, the conviction that change arises from the bottom up.
What is known as Gabriel’s revolt, he intimates, was not ultimately a one man show,
any more than any process or event in history is. It was not down to any one
individual imposing his will on others and altering the course of events. Gabriel is a
strong character, certainly, but he is strong (we are invited to believe) because he is
the living symbol of the will of the people, black and white, to be free. And that will
is never more firmly expressed than when Gabriel goes to his death with pride and
defiance, telling each of his comrades to “die like a free man.” In doing so, he
exemplifies most clearly the spirit of African-American slaves, but he stands also for
a more universal impulse toward liberty. “Don’t you want to be free?” That question
is asked at least three times in the novel. First and last, the question is addressed to
the black masses, past and present, which is why, perhaps, Langston Hughes took it
as the title of the first play he wrote for the Harlem Suitcase Theatre in 1938. In
between, though, it is addressed to all those suffering oppression, black and white,
male and female – and, for that matter, in America and beyond.
Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was the most eminent poet associated with what
he later called “the years of Manhattan’s black Renaissance,” “when the Negro was in
vogue.” He was not just a poet. He wrote novels (Not Without Laughter (1930),
Tambourines to Glory (1958)), plays (collected in Five Plays (1963)), short stories
(The Ways of White Folks (1934), Laughing to Keep From Crying (1952), Something in
Common (1963)), and autobiography (The Big Sea (1940), I Wonder as I Wander
(1956)). He wrote numerous essays on social, historical, and musical subjects, edited
collections of black folklore, poetry, and stories. In the latter part of his life he
devoted his energies to writing the “Simple Stories,” involving an apparently slow,
even dull-witted black character who always manages to outwit his antagonists
(Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), Simple Stakes a Claim
(1957), Simple’s Uncle Sam (1965)). But it is for his poetry that he is likely to be
remembered. His first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926
with the support of Carl Van Vechten. Other collections that appeared over the next
forty years include Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), Harlem (1942), Montage of a
Dream Deferred (1951), and Ask Your Mama (1961). And all of it is marked by
a powerful commitment to the notion of a separate and distinctive black identity, a
sense of the shared presence of African-Americans that Hughes announced in his
seminal essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926). “To my mind, it
is the duty of the young Negro artist,” Hughes wrote in that essay, “to change through
the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white’ hidden in the aspirationsGGray_c04.indd 488ray_c 04 .indd 488 8 8/1/2011 7:54:04 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 04 AM