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Heroic "hussies" and "brilliant queers": genderracial resistance in the works of Langston Hughes
African American Review, Fall, 1994 by Anne Borden
In his writings, Langston Hughes explores the convergence of race and gender in Black men's and women's lives, questioning binary constructions of identity and exploring sensuality in relation to social change. These are the pages, as bell hooks suggests, that lay marked on bedside tables, that become worn with searching fingers, that represent something other than "the Langston Hughes most folks read or remember" (193). They are poems and stories that deal with love among Black men and women, nature, romantic quandary, mother-daughter and fatherson relations, friendship, and silences. In discussing Black male and female identity, Hughes speaks of the ways gender uniquely colors these experiences. He writes in a manner which could be described as genderracial, emphasizing how gender and racial identity are intertwined.
In an often cited passage from "The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain," Hughes comments," One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, 'I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet.' ... I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then, that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet" (692). To Hughes, identity is inseparable from, and indeed central to, one's artistry. His work is strengthened by a poetic imagination which enters the consciousness of those with varying experiences. Hughes's images are at times disturbing, also comforting, alternately sad and joyous, and directly connected to his identity as a Black man who heard the voices of many--white and of Color, male and female, gay and straight, within and without himself.
Hughes and Black Female Consciousness
Suggesting a useful approach to Hughes's genderracial concerns, Frances Beale's 1970 essay "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" comments on the tendency of social movements to privilege one liberation struggle over another in their vision of change. She cites the women's movement's dismissal of Black women's concerns in their drive to advance the status of white women, and Black Power's assertion of Black "manhood" through the subordination of Black women. And she queries, "Are there any parallels between this struggle and the movement on the part of Black women for total emancipation?" (98).
Deborah King expands on Beale and borrows from W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness to describe Black women's "multiple consciousness" ("Multiple" 292). She concurs that "the gender-only perspective alone is insufficient for understanding Black female oppression" ("Race" 4) and asserts a form of consciousness which occupies a "both/and holistic orientation" (9), a consciousness which she identifies as polyrhythmic. Drawing connections between African and African American expressive art forms and Black consciousness, King explains: "For Black women, the interrelationship among strips of strong contrast in multiple, counter rhythms which produces music, ... dance or quilts replicates the interdependence of individuals and other elements of the cosmos, all of which have strong, contrasting natures in an ever-changing yet stable whole" ("Race" 10).
Gender and race converge for Hughes's female characters, who confront genderracial myths in their exploration of identity. bell hooks notes that Hughes often invokes the voice of a Black woman, and that he appears "comfortable in this fictive transvestism" (194). In "Southern Mammy Sings," Hughes takes on a female voice to contrast the genderracial stereotype of the "mammy" with the reality of Black domestic work:
Miss Gardner's in her garden
Miss Yardman's in her yard
Miss Michaelmas is at de mass
And I am gettin' tired!
Lawd!
I am gettin' tired! (Selected 162)
The form of the poem indicates the blues as the muscial form representative of a Black woman's experience working in white folks' kitchens, contrasting sharply with the images of the cheerful, singing "mammy" seen in the minstrel show or on the big screen, and in literature.
In "Ruby Brown," Black domestic work is contrasted with the work of Black female prostitutes. A young woman, sitting on the backporch of her white employer, polishing the silver, is struck by two questions:
What can a colored girl do
On the money from a white woman's
kitchen?
And ain't there any joy in this
town?
The economic realities of sex work are reflected in Ruby Brown's decision to work in prostitution. She searches for joy among her sisters and brothers in "the sinister shuttered houses of the bottoms." Her motives for becoming a prostitute reflect tragic economic need, not "looseness" or moral corruption on her part. Hughes writes:
... the white men,
Habitues of the high shuttered houses,
Pay more money to her now
Than they ever did before,
When she worked in their
kitchens. (Selected 166)
Like "Ruby Brown," Hughes's novel Not Without Laughter explores the ways in which economic and social conditions influence the identities of Black women, embodying polyrhythm and resistance. In this work, Hughes acknowleges male perspective through the character Sandy. A young boy, Sandy remains distant and curious throughout most of the book, constantly reconciling his view of the world around him with the views of the women who raise him. Gender, race, and class converge in the dialogues among the women, which Sandy often overhears, being a quiet boy, in their kitchen conversations. His mother Anjee works as a domestic, and his grandmother Hagar takes in washing from local whites. His Aunt Harriet, once fired from a kitchen job for breaking a glass pitcher, rebels against the traditionally ascribed "respectable" occupations for Black women; she works as a carnival dancer, a blues singer, and a prostitute at different points in the story. A third sister, Tempy, is a middle-class homemaker who avoids her family in her attempt to establish herself in the middle class.
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