Modern American Poetry

(^406) Anita Patterson
single or double lines, and they seldom were expanded to
quatrains or longer tales.^28
Gilroy argues that the “topos of unsayability” is an outgrowth of the
experience of slavery, and no doubt DuBois and Hughes would agree. But
whereas Gilroy celebrates this topos, which can be used “to challenge the
privileged conceptions of both language and writing as preeminent
expressions of human consciousness” (74), Hughes considered it part of the
debilitating legacy of slavery and was deeply concerned about the “silences”
that structure thought and expression in the blues. True, in the short lyric
“Hey!” Hughes jokes about the curious effects of unsayability by drawing our
attention to the alluring ambiguity of the blues singer’s sustained note, “hey”:
Sun’s a settin’,
This is what I’m gonna sing.
Sun’s a settin’,
This is what I’m gonna sing:
I feels de blues a comin’,
Wonder what de blues’ll bring?
(CP,112)
But Hughes also understood how severely limiting such a convention was. In
“The Weary Blues” he suggests that unsayability cannot be a topos so long as
it is forced on African Americans by the memory of “racial terror” (Gilroy, 74).
As we have seen, the stylistic complexity of many of the poems Hughes
wrote during the 1920s and early 1930s creates a clarifying perspective on the
folk tradition and distances him from racial separatist explanations of culture.^29
Although Hughes was noted as one of the first poets to celebrate the beauty of
the blues as an American art form, he was not a “black nationalist,” in Amiri
Baraka’s sense of the term.^30 In Blues People: Negro Music in White America
(1963) Baraka began to advance a separatist line of argument:
Blues as an autonomous music had been in a sense inviolable.
There was no clear way into it ... except as concomitant with what
seems to me to be the peculiar social, cultural, economic, and
emotional experience of a black man in America.... The materials
of blues were not available to the white American.... It was as if
these materials were secret and obscure, and blues a kind of
ethno-historic rite as basic as blood.^31