Heroic "hussies" and "brilliant queers": genderracial resistance in the works of Langston Hughes

African American Review, Fall, 1994 by Anne Borden

In "Daybreak in Alabama" Hughes suggests that human language limits our articulation of dreams, that it is too tethered to social hierarchy. Yet still he struggles with words as he ponders their limitations, using words to describe the music he wants to write. He contrasts natural images of the South--"the scent of pine needles/And the smell of red clay after rain"--with dreamlike visions:

Of black and white black white black

people

And I'm gonna put white hands

And black hands and brown and yel-

low hands

And red clay earth hands in it

Touching everyone with kind

fingers.... (Selected 157)

In disrupting race and gender classifications, Hughes breaks down hierarchical barriers and allows readers to envision Alabama transmuted from its reality of hunger and small hard hate, of "mixing blood and rain," to a blending of people in touch and kindness--race, gender, and class hierarchy transformed. This contrasting imagery sounds a blue note, a powerful space on the page, where laughter and tears meet.

"Joy" alludes to such a place of power, again through the use of sensual imagery:

I went to look for Joy

Slim, dancing Joy,

Gay, laughing Joy

Bright-eyed Joy--

And I found her

Driving the butcher's cart

In the arms of the butcher boy!

(Selected 57)

The speaker is at once dismayed and pleased to find Joy "in the arms of the butcher boy." Joy is demystified, found amidst the chaotic harmony of city streets and work, in the space we occupy between barbarism and tender hope. The poem asserts that joy exists all around us in our ability to love and dream. Here, as in his well-known "Harlem," the dream is a human right, a daily act of resistance.

Anticipating the current rediscovery of Hughes's work by Black gay artists, "Old Walt" examines poet Walt Whitman's life through the lens of Hughes's experience. Isaac Julien's film Looking for Langston, a meditation on Hughes and the Black gay artists' tradition,(2) transposes Hughes and Black gay life much in the manner which Hughes transposes Whitman and his own artistic searching:

Old Walt Whitman

Went finding and seeking,

Finding less than sought

Seeking more than found,

Every detail minding

Of the seeking or the finding.

Pleasured equally

In seeking as in finding

Each detail minding,

Old Walt went seeking

And finding. (Selected 100)

bell hooks writes that "it is [the] evocation of pleasure that is seductive, that suggests the poem is about sensuality and desire" (193). The overlapping of desire and discovery points to the interaction between the two realms. In this search we see the yearning bringing finding and the finding spurring yearning; dreams and their actualization are spun together.

As artists, both Hughes and Whitman act as visionaries in unique ways, transcending social constructs momentarily through the poetic imagination. Hughes uses this dreamspace to inquire into the nature of power, eventually interogating his own role in the creative process. As we have seen, Hughes, in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," demonstrated his awareness of his role as a Negro writer, and made inquiry into his own identity and the power in that role. In "To Artina," he problematizes his relationship as writer with his poetic subject through the use of romantic, sensual imagery: