A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper

Hans Ostrom. A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood P. 2002. 495 pp. $95.00.

In 2002, the United States celebrated the centennial of the birth of Langston Hughes. The celebration was highlighted by the issuance of a U.S. postage stamp, unveiled throughout the nation at large public events highlighting the works and the life of Langston Hughes. Joplin, Missouri (his birthplace), Lawrence, Kansas (where he grew up), and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York (where his remains are interred) are just three of the sites where the stamp was unveiled and where his life and works have been celebrated. Greenwood Press and Hans Ostrom may have rushed a bit to bring out A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia in time for these grand centennial celebrations. The haste may be the reason for the inconsistencies of research, the oversights, and the occasional egregious errors that mar this otherwise useful effort to annotate a comprehensive array of Hughes's works, associates, and influences. While it is regrettable that more time or additional editorial assistance was not em ployed to catch these problems before this potentially valuable research tool was published, one may hope that Greenwood Press will give Hans Ostrom an opportunity to rectify the errors. A corrected Langston Hughes Encyclopedia would be worthy of an important: spot on reference shelves and would do justice to the works and people represented in this volume. Otherwise, the uncorrected volume may mislead or misinform future generations of Hughes researchers.

Since Hans Ostrom assumes sole responsibility for the weaknesses in the volume, one may suggest that future endeavors attempting to encompass the entire Hughes canon should be collaborative efforts. The vast extent and the many subtleties of the Hughes canon--including secondary and posthumous resources--would lead to inevitable oversights by almost any single individual. Ostrom has undertaken a noble effort, but the volume, which is called an "encyclopedia" (with its inherent implications of accuracy), contains problems that seem puzzling at best and exasperating at worst.

The volume reflects inconsistent methods of citing the individual works noted. For example, while some short stories are traced through reprintings (including the posthumous Langston Hughes: Short Stories), Simple stories are not traced to the posthumous The Return of Simple. Similarly, the poems are not traced through all the volumes in which they appear. Most tracing of the poetry follows what has already been done in the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, which has been a sort of "encyclopedia" for Hughes's poetry since its 1994 publication.

Another kind of inconsistency is in the use of separate entries for certain characters from Hughes's fiction and poems, but not for others. For example, Nunuma, the highly objectified woman in Hughes's short story "Bodies in the Moonlight," which was never reprinted in a volume of short stories during Hughes's lifetime, gets an entry despite the fact that she speaks few words, and those she does speak are in broken English. By contrast, no entry appears for Lynn Clarisse, Simple's college-educated, activist cousin, who is the title-character of a Simple story which is listed, and who also appears in at least one other story in Simple's Uncle Sam. In a similar vein, Mingo, a minor and rather insignificant character in Hughes's first novel Not Without Laughter, gets a separate entry, but Tempy Siles (aunt and occasional guardian of the protagonist, Sandy Rodgers) does not. Consuelo, the unfaithful wife in Hughes's frequently republished short story "Tragedy at the Baths" gets an entry. By contrast, Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, the feisty and proactive protagonist of Hughes's popular short story "Thank You, M'am," is not given a separate entry. Also neglected is Mrs. Sadie Maxwell-Reeves, despite her presence as a recurring character in the Simple stories and a great inspiration to Simple's second wife, Joyce Lane Semple. Thus, while the entries for individual characters are useful when they appear, they are inconsistent and might lead to distorted and unsubstantiated rankings of these characters.

It also bears noting that entries for individual characters occasionally offer details only for one character with that name, neglecting other characters of the same name in different works. For example, the entry for "Lulu" identifies a character in the obscure bluesy poem "Yesterday and Today," but makes no mention of another memorable Lulu in "Same in Blues," a poem near the end of Hughes's popular and frequently reprinted Montage of a Dream Deferred, which Hughes recorded on one of his audio collections. Likewise the entry for "Cora" is linked only to the poem by that title; the several fictional characters named Cora are not mentioned.

A third kind of inconsistency in citation involves the choice of which individual works are mentioned. Hughes's speech "The Negro Faces Fascism" receives a separate entry, although it was not published separately. The bibliographic notation cites volume one of Arnold Rampersad's biography The Life of Langston Hughes. On the other hand. Hughes's essay "The Need for Heroes" receives no entry, although it was published in The Crisis and is referenced rather extensively in my Not So Simple, a work which is included in the volume's bibliography.