Advanced, Repressed, and Popular: Langston Hughes During the Cold War1

College Literature, Spring 2006 by Scott, Jonathan

The first collaboration of the 50s was a photo-essay with African American photographer Roy DeCarava, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), and the second was a pictorial history of African Americans co-authored by the Jewish American scholar Milton Meltzer, A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1956). Finding a publisher for A Pictorial History proved extremely frustrating for Hughes and Meltzer, as more than ten firms turned down the project. According to Meltzer, "Two or three even said that blacks don't read, so why bother with them? And a few suggested going to a foundation, since no normal publisher would take on such a pointless task" (Rampersad 1988,248). In the case of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a publisher was not hard to find; the problem was that Simon and Schuster had cut costs on the book, unbeknownst to Hughes and DeCarava, by printing pocket-size paperback editions rather than the big and glossy coffee table books that were standard for works of popular photography. In the mid-60s, Hughes worked again with Meltzer on a pictorial history, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment (1967), arguably the most comprehensive history of African American popular culture ever published.

Black Magic is an exhaustive account of the origins of virtually every African American popular art form, from major elements such as hand-clapping, stick dancing, and the drum-beating rhythms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the spirituals and folk culture, to constitutive elements such as the making of homemade banjos and drums, and a list of the first African American radio commentators and newscasters. The text is filled with an amazing array of esoterica, the stuff of any lasting book on popular culture. For example, in their ninth chapter, "Just About Everything," Hughes and Meltzer provide a fascinating history of the first African American "exhibits" in P. T. Barnum's traveling circus. Barnum's first set of Siamese Twins-the fourteen-year-old Carolina twins, Millie and Christina-are discussed, along with Barnum's first "Fat Ladies," who were actually blues singers looking for steady work-Big Maybelle and Beulah Bryant. There's also a story about Barnum's first "Giants," one of whom was an African American Civil War veteran named Admiral Dot. Admiral Dot stood 7 feet 11 inches tall and weighed 600 pounds; the text is accompanied by a rare daguerreotype of the Admiral. There are also brief histories of forgotten pioneers such as "the world's most beloved nightclub hostess," Ada "Bricktop" Smith Du Conge. Made into a celebrity in Paris during the early 20s with the help of Louis Aragon, Bricktop ran the most popular nightclub in Paris for nearly twenty years. In addition to the brief histories of individual pathfinders, there are short histories of institutions such as the Lincoln Theater in Harlem, the Lafayette Players, and the American Negro Theater, which began in the basement of the New York Public Library. But perhaps the most delightful and useful aspect of the book is, not surprisingly, the graphics. Mixed throughout the text are playbills, posters, signed photographs, advertisements, rare photographs of artists at work, newspaper clippings, drawings, and diagrams.