B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (13 page)

The opening lines of the poem contained the homework assignment. The poem was “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes. The class was English II, sophomore English. I am in Texas, age fifteen.

I already knew the name Langston Hughes; my mother’s bookshelves held a copy of his biography along with a thick volume of his correspondence with Arna Bontemps. These I used to comb selectively, looking for bits of juicy Harlem Renaissance gossip. Also, there was a volume called
The Best of Simple,
which I had never read. By the time we studied him in my high school class, I must have heard at least one poem, probably the one about the
Negro whose soul has grown deep like the rivers, or the poem in which a mother admonishes her child that
life for me ain’t been no crystal stair
.
Both were popular selections for Black History Month assemblies and talent shows.

I dutifully followed the instruction for the homework assignment: we were to write a poem in the style of Hughes’s “Theme.” My imitation did not improve upon the original. Like that poem’s protagonist, I was also
the only colored student in my class.
I was too young to properly consider the riddle that distinction provoked for Hughes’s student and for me:
So will my page be colored that I write?

I remember reading the lines in which the protagonist described himself as
twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem
and recently displaced to
this college on the hill above Harlem.
I assumed Hughes was writing of Columbia University, where he’d briefly been a student. My knowledge of Harlem geography was then nonexistent; now I know that
the steps from the hill
that lead
through a park
and across
St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh,
to the protagonist’s lodgings at the YMCA on 135th Street, describe a descent I have made many times, from the Gothic spires of City College, through St. Nicholas Park, and into the neighborhood’s heart.

Back then, in Texas, I relied on an imaginary map of upper Manhattan. The directions it gave suited me, for I could think of no gap greater than between what I knew of Columbia University and what I believed I knew of Harlem. It was a gap that corresponded precisely with the distance between my private Episcopalian high school and the house where I’d write my own theme.
I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you
… wrote Hughes. I pictured the poet looking down from his perch onto the streets of Harlem below. Finding the sounds of Hughes’s Harlem more intriguing than the noise in my own neighborhood, I tried to hear Harlem, too.

And what did I hear of Harlem? It is difficult to reach across time toward the echoes of that earlier perception. What I find
there is another Langston Hughes poem, and another homework assignment. This poem was full of questions:

We weren’t required to imitate this poem, answer its successive questions, or map its rhyme scheme. The poem was an object for our study of figurative language. We were instructed to pay special attention to the similes embedded in each line: the dream that dries up, festers, stinks, crusts over, and sags. Each action was a tiny metamorphosis, in which the subject of Hughes’s inquiry darts across the space of language, from the concrete and observable to the realm of imagination and emotion.

I would not have noted then, as I do now, that the final line takes a shorter path to meaning. It defies the established pattern, expanding the field of our lesson: it is not a simile. When the dream explodes, it doesn’t do so after the manner of anything else. It explodes because that is the natural resolution of all unfulfilled dreams—combustion is their destiny. To deliver his message, Hughes switches from similes to the more urgent vehicle of metaphor.

I remember appreciating the simplicity of the poem’s title: “Harlem.” The name did not appear anywhere else in the poem, but by virtue of that title alone, the images described in Hughes’s lines took on a documentary quality. Faithfully trusting the poet as a source of reportage, I thought: of course Harlem is a place where dreams are consumed by various degrees of frustration. We (my white classmates and me) did not have to know much about the place to be somehow certain of that.

Armed with a new appreciation of figurative speech, I looked for more Hughes in the school library and discovered the romance of his love poems. There was “Harlem Night Song”:

I memorized the poem and imagined a bard at least as handsome as Langston Hughes singing those words to me. And there was “Juke Box Love Song”:

Hughes had harsher songs, the tone of which would have pierced the mood and cleared the dance floor of all love-struck couples. So, until many years later I skipped over poems like “The Weary Blues.” Lenox Avenue was still the bandstand, but the poet was not striking up Tin Pan Alley love songs. This was a funereal dirge, sung without accompaniment. Reading its opening lines in the midst of my Harlem rhapsodies, I moved on to another poem. Here’s what I missed:

Also at the school library, I found pictures that I associated with Hughes’s Harlem poems. They were from Aaron Siskind’s
Harlem Document,
a collection of photographs made during the Great Depression. They showed families crammed into tenements and dancers at the Savoy ballroom, marchers on Seventh Avenue, and schoolchildren playing stickball. I found shots of a street vendor selling watermelons from the back of a truck, and children playing in the shell of an abandoned building whose doorway is marked
KEEP OUT
. Siskind ventured into private apartments to record family scenes: Here is a woman in a crowded, disheveled
kitchen. She stands before an icebox with the door open, looking in. Her face is just barely in profile; the camera seems unconcerned with her defining features. On the nearest side of that turned-away face, you can nearly glimpse a smile, or at least a hint of amusement. She wears a stylish ensemble—a fluted tea-length black skirt that falls above elegant yet sensible shoes, a blouse with draped keyhole openings at the shoulders.

Untitled [Street Facade 1], from “Harlem Document Series,” ca. 1937 – 1940. (Photo by Aaron Siskind / Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)

Untitled [Street Facade 2], from “Harlem Document Series,” ca. 1937 – 1940. (Photo by Aaron Siskind / Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)

The photograph could be read as “Depression-era woman looking for food,” but the woman stands with the poise of a spokesmodel for a kitchen-appliance store showing off the latest modern conveniences. The picture captures her fine clothes, her grace, and that hint of a smile. But perhaps we are meant to register only her black skin, her cramped surroundings, and wonder if the icebox is empty.

Siskind was concerned with showing the destitution of Harlem
during the Depression. But among the photos I studied in
Harlem Document,
the one that occupied me most carried the fewest social signifiers—no skin, no appliances, no face denying the
camera’s view. It showed only the front of an apartment building, its facade staring blankly at the camera, its many windows boarded up with horizontal slats. The repetition of the windows
and the boards created a jarring visual beat, abstracting the poverty that was figured elsewhere so explicitly.

Untitled [Street Facade 3], from “Harlem Document Series,” ca. 1937 – 1940. (Photo by Aaron Siskind / Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)