- It starred Regina Taylor in the role of Cora
Jenkins and Cherry Jones as Mrs. Studevants.
Hughes scholar Faith Berry proposes that
“every story in the book was biting, trenchant, and
critical of the prevailing attitudes of whites toward
African Americans at the time” [Berry, 201]. Con-
temporary reviews of the work also noticed
Hughes’s dramatic departure from “the singing, vi-
brant rhythm” that so defined his poetry and com-
mented on the “suppressed, almost weary, quality
of bitterness” found in the story “One Christmas
Eve” and that permeated the rest of the volume.
Reviewer John Chambers suggested that Hughes
was well equipped to write “stories of life at the
edge of the colored line.” “[H]e knows the condi-
tions of Negro existence in a callous white world,”
Chambers asserted, and is “able to discount disap-
pointment before it hits him. The tragedies of his
stories are undeniably real. But they sound, in the
telling, like an old man recalling the troubles and
defeats of his youth. An old man recalling tragedy
does so with an air of ‘Well, it was fated so to hap-
pen.’ Mr. Hughes’s stories have this air of finality
about them” (Chambers, 21).
The Ways of White Folksis a definitive and
haunting meditation on American society, and it
confirmed Hughes’s status as one of America’s
most insightful writers and eloquent social critics.
Bibliography
Bernard, Emily. Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of
Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.New York:
Knopf, 2001.
Berry, Faith, ed. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond
Harlem.Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Com-
pany, 1983.
Chambers, John. “Books of the Times.” New York Times,
28 June 1934, 21.
Nichols, Charles H., ed. Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes
Letters, 1925–1967. New York: Paragon House,
1990.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too,
Sing America.Vol. 1, 1902–1941.New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Weary Blues, TheLangston Hughes(1926)
The first published work of poet LANGSTON
HUGHES. Hughes dedicated to his mother the vol-
ume that he completed with much encouragement
and advice from CARLVANVECHTEN. The presti-
gious New York company ALFREDA. KNOPFpub-
lished the book in 1926. The magazine VANITY
FAIR,impressed by the work, bought prepublica-
tion rights to several of the poems and published
them in the magazine. Miguel Covarrubias, a Mex-
ican artist who became a major contributor to the
Harlem Renaissance art tradition, designed the
dust jacket of the book. Van Vechten, who had
submitted the manuscript to Knopf on Hughes’s
behalf, wrote the introduction to the volume.
The poems are divided into seven sections, and
most include a poem that incorporates the section
title. These sections include “The Weary Blues,”
“Dream Variations,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,”
“A Black Pierrot,” “Water Front Streets,” “Shadows
in the Sun,” and “Our Land.” “Proem,” an indepen-
dent piece that underscored the pan-Africanist per-
spectives that endowed many Hughes poems with
such power, was the first poem in the volume and
preceded the rest of the works that were organized
into specific groups. In “Proem” the speaker notes
all of the different roles that he plays in the world.
These include being a Negro, slave, worker, singer,
and victim. “I am a Negro,” the speaker declares in
the opening stanza, “Black as the night is black, /
Black like the depths of my Africa.” He goes on to
bridge time and space, linking the great accomplish-
ments of unacknowledged Africans to those of dis-
regarded but indispensable African Americans: “I’ve
been a worker: / Under my hand the pyramids arose.
/ I made mortar for the Woolworth Building.”
Hughes also incorporates an explicit political com-
mentary that is capable of galvanizing readers to
protest the global persecution of peoples of color. In
one of the poem’s most moving stanzas, he writes
“I’ve been a victim: / The Belgians cut off my hands
in the Congo. / They lynch me now in Texas.”
The refrain in the title poem, “The Weary
Blues,” originates from “a black man’s soul” and re-
veals a lasting hunger for a life that apparently is
out of reach. “I got the Weary Blues / And I can’t
be satisfied. / Got the Weary Blues / And can’t be
satisfied—/ I ain’t happy no mo’ / And I wish that I
had died.” Additional poems in the opening sec-
tion such as “Negro Dancers,” “The Cat and the
Saxophone,” “To Midnight Nan at Leroy’s,” and
“Harlem Night Club” maintain the focus on music,Weary Blues, The 555