Making It New: 1900–1945 489of his people, to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro – and beautiful.’ ” This
does not mean, Hughes said, that the black writer should simply idealize black life.
“We know we are beautiful,” he observed. “And ugly too.” But it did mean that black
writers should devote themselves to uncovering the power and glory of African-
American traditions, the “heritage of rhythm and warmth” and “incongruous humor
that, so often, as in Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears.”
True to this formula, Hughes made black people his subject, especially “low-down
folks, the so-called common element.” His poetry shows him more interested in the
ordinary men and women of the fields and streets, and in particular of Harlem, than
in the black bourgeoisie – who, on the few occasions when they do appear in his
work, are “ ‘buked and scorned.” Like Whitman, Hughes’s aim is clearly identification,
imaginative empathy with these people. He is, above all, a dramatic poet, speaking
through a multiplicity of voices – a young schoolchild, perhaps (“Theme for English
B”), a smart and sassy older woman (“Madam’s Past History”), or a dying man
(“Sylvester’s Dying Bed”) – so as to capture the multiple layers, the pace, drive, and
variety of black American life. Like Whitman, too, although in a much more specific
sense, Hughes is a socially committed poet. “The major aims of my work,” he declared,
“have been to interpret and comment upon Negro life, and its relations to the
problems of Democracy.” This commitment is most evident in the work that permits
itself overt social comment: some of the poems written within a Marxist frame in the
1930s, say (“Christ in Alabama”), or, more generally, his bitter attacks on “The lazy,
laughing South / With blood on its mouth.” But it is just as powerful a shaping force
in works dramatizing the petty frustrations and particular oppressions of individual
black people (“Ballad of the Landlord”), their dreams of liberation (“Dream
Variations”) or their stony endurance (“Life is Fine”). “I’ve been scarred and battered,”
admits the narrator of one poem, “Still Here,” then adds: “But I don’t care! / I’m still
here!”; and his one voice, defiant, resolute, even hopeful, speaks for a thousand others.
“Most of my ... poems are racial in theme,” Hughes said. “In many of them I try
to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz.” The latter remark
suggests another, crucial way in which consciousness of the black tradition enters
into his work. Hughes may have learned a great deal about free verse from Sandburg,
Lindsay, and above all Whitman, but he learned even more from African-American
music, and what he called its “conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and
impudent interjections, broken rhythms ... punctuated by ... riffs, runs, breaks, and
distortions.” “Jazz is a heartbeat,” Hughes argued, “its heartbeat is yours.” By “jazz”
Hughes nearly always meant black musical culture in general: jazz, as he saw it, was
a vast sea “that washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume with a steady old
beat, or off-beat.” That sea was the source of spirituals, work songs, field hollers, and
shouts, as it was of blues, gospel, ragtime, and rock and roll. “A few more years,” he
observes, “and Rock and Roll will no doubt be washed back half forgotten into the
sea of jazz.” In the meantime, it too could play its part in fostering an art of subversion,
for the essence of jazz, Hughes believed, was that it was open-ended and
improvisational and as such challenged the closed structures of the dominant white
culture. Whether it assumed the shape of, say, jive or be-bop – offering “a revoltGGray_c04.indd 489ray_c 04 .indd 489 8 8/1/2011 7:54:04 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 04 AM