explore issues related to religion. What is the right
faith? How can one find spiritual fulfillment?
Berry’s commercial publishing ventures have
not overshadowed her scholarly work. Mediated
Messages and African-American Culture: Contempo-
rary Issues (1996), coedited with Carmen L. Man-
ning-Miller, was published almost simultaneously
with So Good. Contributors examine the media’s
images and messages about African Americans. In
1997, Mediated Messages received the Meyers Cen-
ter Award for the Study of Human Rights in North
America. In addition to continuing to teach in the
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
at the University of Iowa, Berry published The 50
Most Influential Black Films (2001), coauthored
with her brother, S. Torriano Berry, a professor of
film studies at Howard University. Capturing the
historical and social contexts of movies starring
and largely produced by African Americans since
the start of the film industry, the book is a valuable
resource, particularly for media scholars.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berry, Venise T., and Carmen L. Manning-Miller, eds.
Mediated Messages and African American Culture:
Contemporary Issues. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage
Publications, 1996.
Townes, Glenn R. “When It Feels Good.” Pitch Weekly,
6–12 February 1997, 46.
Vanessa Shelton
Big Sea, The Langston Hughes (1940)
The Big Sea is the first of LANGSTON HUGHES’s
autobiographical texts, preceding I Wonder as I
Wander (1957). Probably the best-known and
most prolific writer of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE,
Hughes offers, in The Big Sea, insight into his de-
velopment as an artist and a major literary figure.
The work covers his early years, from his child-
hood in Kansas through his years as a mess boy on
a merchant ship to his impressions of the Harlem
Renaissance.
Hughes divides The Big Sea into three parts. In
Part I, he begins with his departure for Africa on
the S.S. Malone, a merchant ship, at 21 years old.
Born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin,
Missouri, in 1902, Hughes grew up in Lawrence,
Kansas. Although he knew his parents, Carrie
Langston Hughes and James Nathaniel Hughes,
his maternal grandmother primarily raised him
until he was 12 years old. After Hughes was named
class poet of his elementary school in Kansas, he
wrote for the Central High School magazine in
Cleveland, Ohio. In the remaining chapters of
Part I, Hughes recalls his trips to Mexico to visit
his estranged father, and Columbia University,
which he left after his first year to write and work.
Both were unpleasant experiences. Fearing a life
of dull, physical labor, Hughes joined the mer-
chant marine.
In Part II of The Big Sea, Hughes recounts his
exploits in Africa and the West Indies, where his
coworkers took economic and sexual advantage
of the indigenous population. In Paris, France, he
worked as a dishwasher, spending his days “writing
poems and having champagne for breakfast” (163).
Hughes concludes Part II with his entry into the
literary world of Harlem. After being “discovered”
by poet Vachel Lindsay while he was working as a
busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel, Hughes en-
tered the OPPORTUNITY magazine literary contest,
winning the poetry prize. At the awards banquet,
Hughes met CARL VAN VECHTEN, who became in-
strumental in the publication of The Weary Blues,
Hughes’s first poetry collection.
In Part III, the concluding section of The Big
Sea, Hughes recalls his life in Harlem during the
“Black Renaissance,” his college experience at Lin-
coln University in Pennsylvania, and his travels
through the American South. Hughes offers com-
mentaries on JEAN TOOMER’s racial politics, A’Lelia
Walker’s extravagant parties, Carl Van Vechten’s
controversial novel NIGGER HEAVEN, and Hughes’s
own difficulties with his collection of poems Fine
Clothes to the Jew. Additionally, Hughes critiques
the all-white faculty at his alma mater, Lincoln
University, as well as the patronage system that fu-
eled the Harlem Renaissance. The final chapter of
The Big Sea discusses the quarrel that signaled the
end of his friendship with ZORA NEALE HURSTON
and their collaboration on the play Mule Bone.
The break seemed emblematic of the end of theBig Sea, The 45