Works for Children and Young Adults

African American Review, Winter, 2004 by R. Baxter Miller

Works for Children and Young Adults. Vol. 11. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Edited with an introduction by Dianne Johnson. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2003. 392 pp. $44.95.

In the 1990s, Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel researched a chronological Collected Poems (1994); Akiba Sullivan Harper complemented their fine detective work with Langston Hughes: Short Stories (1996). Christopher D. De Santis edited the collection of essays, Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender (1995). In the new century, Susan Duffy has contributed The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (2000), and Emily Bernard a comparative edition, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964 (2001). Altogether, they make for arguably the most significant outpouring of basic research on Hughes since his death on May 22, 1967, at Polyclinic Hospital in New York City. Readers from all walks of life will appreciate the ready availability of such important texts about this much admired, much-admiring author.

The artistry and historicity of Dianne Johnson's volume make it especially appealing to young readers. Since the 393-page text actually includes variously 10 pamphlets of stories, fiction, and history from 1932 through 1960 (and uncollected poetry dating back to 1921), small children in particular would enjoy such rich morsels. Johnson has arranged portions of Hughes's work by genre, theme, or figures that delightfully encapsulate his often polished perceptions of detailed scenes. Once read as a unified text--of which the pamphlets and previously unpublished pieces and poems were not originally part--Works for Children as a whole provides two symbolic stories across all the others. One becomes Hughes's hypertale about the variously innocent and experienced world of the child and of the mature detached narrator telling the tale; a complementary story reveals a rhythm that informs all of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. The balancing stories inform subconsciously the shape and structure of the book with the new design's literally allowing for the fiction and poetry in the first part to face the history in the final parts.

In addition to an informative introduction of 11 pages, a one-page note on the texts provides a useful context, as does another about the illustrations. Because true of all volumes in the Missouri series, a six-page chronology about the writer's life and work serves as standard fare. Four primary sections in the omnibus volume include contributions from the Brownie's Book (1921), which was the children's insert into The Crisis; The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932); about 15 memorable poems, of which at least 12 are actually reprinted from Hughes's first volume, The Weary Blues (1926); and Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti (1932) along with stories from Black Misery (1969) and The Pasteboard Bandit (1935; 1997)). Rounding out the children's literary world are five juvenile histories by Hughes: The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Rhythms (1954), The First Book of Jazz (1955), The First Book of the West Indies (1956), and The First Book of Africa (1960). Especially for those of us who often prioritize his poetry--while wondering exactly what he was writing between Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and Ask Your Mama (1961)--his juvenilia and stories account for his sustained work during the mid-century decade.

Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti (1932) should help encourage future interpretations of Hughes's literary voice since only two volumes, Langston Hughes (1967) and The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes (1989) broadly engage the literary work itself. Certainly the current volume seems a unified narrative infused with various motifs of childhood adventure, from enchanting dances on tropical nights, to kite-flying in tricky winds, from woodwork sculptures, or simply to summer swims to the local lighthouse. More subtly, the collection depicts the artist as a young man. Early on, brother Popo and sister Fifina walk barefoot between two-long eared burros ("Going to Town") down a high road to the seacoast, their peasant parents Papa Jean and Mamma Anna happily at their sides. Eventually the path leads from their grandmother's home in the country to a new location in town. There, standing at the apex on the hillside, the father holds his hands on his hips while spying the point at which the mountain would seem to touch the sky. Slowly the family descends to the new home in the valley below: "All the way up the hill under the banana trees, and across the gurgling brook, they could hear the drums beating happily ("Drums at Night"). When a hawk subsequently attacks the child's toy ("The New Kite"), the boy's jerking string grounds the predator, "Like an evil bird with a broken wing." If Hughes's phrasing sounds familiar, it is--ubiquitous to the point of Hallmark greeting cards. In the Dream Keeper the soaring bird's wings must never be clipped, for the hawk threatens the Dream that must prevail.