"A Little Yellow Bastard Boy": Paternal Rejection, Filial Insistence, and the Triumph of African American Cultural Aesthetics in Langston Hughes's "Mulatto"

College Literature, Spring 2008 by Lamb, Robert Paul

On March 3, 1927, Langsten Hughes, responding to an invitation from the Walt Whitman Foundation, addressed a small gathering at the poet's final residence on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey. In his talk, he credited Whitman as an ancestor. "I believe," he said, implicitly contrasting his and Whitman's democratic poetics with the typically opaque art of white modernist poets in their heyday, "that poetry should be direct, comprehensible, and the epitome of simplicity" (Rampersad 1986, 145-46).l Hughes's statement was itself characteristically direct; he and Whitman were self-consciously "people's poets" who deliberately wrote verse intended to be read and meaningfully understood by a large general audience. Both ran afoul of genteel critics for their aesthetic and thematic egalitarianism, as well as for their belief that poetry should deal with, and often embrace, less than ideal aspects of human life. But they had even more in common than this. Both men were shrewd, ironic, and exceedingly well-read. Although their verse was widely accessible, nevertheless the poetry of each was informed by highly developed traditions that made it, beneath the surface of manifest meanings, subtly rich and philosophically complex. Whitman drew upon Emersonian transcendentalism and Eastern philosophies, while Hughes brought to his poetry African and African American aesthetics as these were being rediscovered and further developed during the Harlem Renaissance.

A few months before his 1927 address to the Whitman Foundation, Hughes had published his second book of poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew, with the prestigious house of Alfred A. Knopf. More unified and more experimental than his first book, The Weary Blues (1926), Fine Clothes is divided into six sections. It opens with "A Note on the Blues," in which Hughes offers his own definition of the term and states that the eight poems of the first section ("Blues") and nine poems of the final section ("And Blues") are "written after the manner of the Negro folk-songs known as Blues"; these, he differentiates from "spirituals" by their "strict poetic pattern: one line repeated and a third line to rhyme with the first two" (1927,13).2The second section ("Railroad Avenue") contains thirteen poems that feature the voices and lives of poor, urban African Americans: hotel employees, prostitutes, cabaret girls, prize fighters, dice players, alcoholics, card players, elevator operators, porters, and night club workers. The third section ("Glory! Hallelujah!") contains nine poems patterned after spirituals, with singers calling out to God. It contrasts with the poems of the first and last sections, although there are resonances of blues in several of the poems, and one poem, "Moan," is nearly in a blues form. The fourth section ("Beale Street Love") takes place in Memphis among the vernacular characters who speak of their sorrows in love; these ten poems evoke a blues spirit, though they are not in the blues form. The eight poems of the fifth section ("From the Georgia Roads") take place in the rural South, although there is one, "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret," located elsewhere, and another, "Laughers," that, in Whitmanesque fashion, itemizes the national black community by occupation: e.g., "Crapshooters, / Cooks, /Waiters, /Jazzers, / Nurses of babies, / Loaders of ships, / Rounders" (Hughes 1927, 77). But the Parisian jazz band is "from Georgia"-which links them to this section-and the "laughers," wherever in America they hail from, are "Dream-singers all" and "Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands / Of Fate" (77-78)-which links them thematically to the mood of the blues. Less easily located in the blues aesthetics of Fine Clothes to the Jew is another fifth section poem, "Mulatto," in which a biracial child calls out to his white father for recognition, and is rebuffed, first by his father and then by his white half-siblings.

"Mulatto" was well received at the time of its publication, and has been highly regarded ever since. Despite this general critical approbation, however, it has never been given its due, either in the canon of American poetry or in the African American canon. Of the major anthologies, it is included only in The Norton Anthology of American Literature and is even missing from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Nor has it ever received a reading remotely commensurate with its complexity or importance. This essay, then, will offer the first fully developed reading of "Mulatto": examining how the debates surrounding the reception of Fine Clothes to the Jew led both African American and white critics to overlook the poem; then presenting the necessary contexts (Hughes's concern with biracialism, his relationship with his father, his employment of both call and response and of signifying, and his deliberate intertextuality with Jean Toomer's Cane); and concluding with a detailed analysis that takes into account the poem's intricate formal properties while demonstrating its extraordinary aesthetic and cultural richness.