"Never cross the divide": reconstructing Langston Hughes's 'Not Without Laughter.' (African-American poet and novelist)

In their discussions of the period in Langston Hughes's life during which he composed Not Without Laughter, Faith Berry and Arnold Rampersad detail the author's relationship with Mrs. Charlotte Mason - the wealthy white patron whom he called "Godmother" at her suggestion. They consider her critical influence on the early stages of the novel's development, including her recurrent use of the word propaganda in pointing out problematic sections of the work. Neither Berry nor Rampersad, however, studies the actual portions of text that were taken out of the novel under Godmother's considerable influence. Because the published product differs radically from its earlier versions, the compositional history of this autobiographical novel deserves close critical exploration if we wish to reconstruct the novel that Hughes intended to write. Such a reconstruction should establish the degree to which his patron's literary censorship forced Hughes to suppress his increasingly strong left-wing political notions in the novel.

Who was this woman who was to have such a profound influence on the young poet? Charlotte Mason was the wealthy widow of Dr. Rufus Osgood Mason, a noted surgeon and authority in parapsychology and therapeutic hypnotism. She wholly subscribed to her late husband's belief that "the most significant manifestations of the spiritual were found in primitive, 'child races,' such as Indians and peoples of African descent, whose creative energies had their source in the unconscious" (Berry, "Black Poets" 281). Hughes first met Mrs. Mason in the spring of 1927 in a meeting arranged by Alain Locke. A formal patronage arrangement was solidified the following November, wherein Mason would give Hughes $150 a month to alleviate the young artist's financial concerns. Hughes's writing would remain his own property, but Godmother expected to be consulted regularly on all of his artistic output, and Hughes had to provide her with a monthly itemized account of his expenses (Rampersad 156). Her insistence that he call her "Godmother" indicates that there also was to be a significant emotional aspect to the relationship.

Mrs. Mason entered into this venture with the intention of merging her own vision with Hughes's promising literary skills. In The Big Sea, Hughes writes of Godmother:

Concerning Negroes, she felt that they were America's great link with the primitive, and that they had something very precious to give to the Western World. She felt that there was mystery and mysticism and spontaneous harmony in their souls. . . . She felt that we had a deep well of the spirit within us and that we should keep it pure and deep. (316)

As Hughes phrases it, "She had discovered the New Negro and wanted to help him" (315). His attribution of Alain Locke's phrase "New Negro" to Mrs. Mason's interest in African Americans is not entirely accurate, for Locke first used the term to announce the arrival of a "younger generation" that was "vibrant with a new psychology" (3). In his introductory essay to The New Negro, Locke explains how "the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority" (4). Locke envisions a transformation from a race whose chief bond is that of a "common condition" to one having a "common consciousness" (7). As for the role of the artist in this transformation, Locke argues for the embrace of folk traditions, for while they are "rapidly vanishing in their primitive expressions," he recognizes their potential for future development as part of the race's "artistic evolution."(1)

While Mrs. Mason wanted Hughes and other young black artists to stress their African roots in their work, she did not share Locke's goal of future development. For it was the primitive expressions themselves, not any resulting development or progress, that were of highest value to her. She expressed her own goal in a letter to Locke:

I had the mystical vision of a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa, across which the Negro world, that our white United States had done everything to annihilate, should see the flaming pathway . . . and recover the treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on the earth. (qtd. in Rampersad 147-48)

In a telling formulation, Mrs. Mason described to Hughes that she envisioned the goal of their joint effort to be "the preservation of qualities that the white race lost through oppressing these primitive peoples as they landed on these shores."(2) Apparently it is the white race which lost out and needs compensation, while blacks "landed" through choice rather than coercion.

The degree to which Hughes was influenced in his early writing by Mrs. Mason's primitivism is shown in a foreword that Hughes wrote to his senior project in sociology at Lincoln University.(3) In this foreword, Hughes seems to echo Godmother's "mystic vision" which led to her fascination with the primitive:

In the primitive world, where people live closer to the earth and much nearer to the stars, every inner and outer act combines to form a single harmony, life. Not just the tribal lore then, but every movement of life becomes a part of their education. They do not, as many civilized people do, neglect the truth of the physical for the sake of the mind. Nor do they teach with speech alone, but rather with all the acts of life. There are no books, so the barrier between words and reality is not so great as with us. The earth is right under their feet. The stars are never far away. The strength of the surest dream is the strength of the primitive world. (Hughes, Big Sea 311)

Hughes would later write in The Big Sea that "a poetic foreword has no place in a sociological survey, but, nevertheless, I put it there as a kind of extra flourish." He added that the foreword "meant, I suppose, that where life is simple, truth and reality are one" (311; italics added). Faith Berry correctly hears in Hughes's apologetic tone that this foreword was something he did not want to include - that the sentiments expressed are not Hughes's but Mrs. Mason's. Berry also points out that this foreword is "strikingly similar" to the introduction to The Indian's Book, by Natalie Curtis Burlin, which includes this passage:

This book reveals the inner life of a primitive race. The Indian looks out with reverence upon the world of nature, to him the only world, while deep in his being thrills the consciousness of a power greater than nature, greater than man, yet eternally manifest throughout all life. This consciousness is so vital to the Indian that almost his every act is linked with it. (xxiii)

The significance of Burlin's introduction is that she, like Hughes, was encouraged and subsidized by Mrs. Mason. It is no surprise then that the introduction to The Indian's Book evokes primitivistic impulses corresponding to those in Hughes's foreword.

Implicit in Mrs. Mason's collected correspondence with Hughes is the belief that her role is to protect Hughes from the harshness of a publishing environment of which he knew little. Her tone often underscores her message that she knew how to secure favorable criticism and good sales figures for her protege's work. As one explores Mrs. Mason's involvement with Hughes's composition of Not Without Laughter, however, one finds that her "protection" of Hughes seems more like censorship and that her own political and social sensibilities carry more weight than publishing economics. Berry explains:

It was [Mrs. Mason's] view that the expression of political opinions should be left to white people, like herself. Her own political opinions, however, never extended much beyond holding forth during drawing-room conversation. She never joined the NAACP. She did not even hire black servants (Berry, "Black Poets" 283)

Further evidence of Godmother's racism is given by Rampersad, who suggests that what moved Godmother most about Hughes in their initial meeting was his Native American heritage, which appealed directly to her primitive sensibility:

The Indian was Mrs. Mason's first love. Blacks were often far too civilized for her taste (on this score the raffine Alain Locke tried her patience from the start). In Langston's winsome brown boyishness, however, she saw a noble young savage; he was the Indian child she had perhaps once wished to nurture. (148)

Racial distinctions and hierarchies evidently were an intricate part of Mrs. Mason's social consciousness.

In order fully to appreciate Mrs. Mason's effect on Not Without Laughter, it is imperative to consider her actual influence on Hughes's poetic output during the years she supported him. The three or four years before her influence had been a particularly prolific time for the young poet. He had published two successful volumes of verse, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), which helped to shape his reputation as a leading Harlem Renaissance poet. While this reputation was largely based on Hughes's ability to render jazz into verse, the poet also published several poems in the radical journal The Workers Monthly. These poems show that the poet was already developing the radical political consciousness that would mark his work over the next decade. One example is "Rising Waters," published in The Workers Monthly in April 1925:

To you Who are the Foam on the sea And not the sea - What of the jagged rocks, And the waves themselves, And the force of the mounting waters? You are But foam on the sea, You rich ones - Not the sea. (Good Morning 21)

The image here is unmistakable: The speaker identifies the parasitic nature of society's wealthy ruling class. The "rich ones" are but "foam on the sea" living off of the "force of the mounting waters," or the masses. In "God to Hungry Child," another poem published that spring in The Worker's Monthly, Hughes is even more direct in expressing his feelings about the relation between the rich and the poor:

Hungry child, I didn't make this world for you. You didn't buy any stock in my railroad, You didn't invest in my corporation. Where are your shares in standard oil? I made the world for the rich And the will-be-rich And the have-always-been-rich. Not for you, Hungry child. (Good Morning 21)

The aspect of this poem that is most significant to a discussion of Not Without Laughter is the notion that human relations in this society are based on money rather than on physical need (represented here by hunger).

While Hughes's relationship with Mrs. Mason provided freedom from financial concerns, it seems to have had a negative effect on his political poetry. During Hughes's junior and senior years at Lincoln, in fact, his poetic output dropped off sharply. Berry comments that, owing to Godmother's funding, this was a period of relative financial security: "In keeping with the pattern of not writing when he did not feel blue, he wrote little and in general slighted the literary life" (Langston Hughes 94). Berry also mentions that he was making an effort to concentrate on his schoolwork and grades.

This is not to say that Hughes's political voice altogether vanished during the years 1927-29. In addition to authoring the already mentioned sociology report, he published a handful of politically radical poems, including "Sunset - Coney island" (New Masses Feb. 1928). Rampersad surmises that, by publishing his work in radical journals like New Masses, Hughes was probably offering "a clandestine challenge to Godmother, who abominated socialism" (161). He then suggests that Godmother's "deep belief in the primitive and intuitive" was the source of her antipathy towards left-wing social and political activism. While primitivism does share certain assumptions about human nature with anti-socialism, to consider it the primary source for her anti-socialist stance probably downplays the importance of Godmother's own class position. Moreover, as Berry points out, Godmother's primitivism was likely a reaction to the current vogue.

The November 1, 1920 opening of Eugene O'Neill's primitivistic play The Emperor Jones perhaps marks the beginning of the growing interest among white writers in dramatizing black life. John Cooley suggests that Bruce Dudley, Sherwood Anderson's protagonist in Dark Laughter (1925), "typifies the search of white Americans of his generation for cultural forms and life styles that seemed more alive than their own" (90). The idea that the embrace of black life by white authors is done for their own benefit can also be applied to O'Neill's play, for its main vehicle is the use of jungle stereotypes - at the cost of distorting black life.

In all fairness, an opposing, more positive series of effects can also be found in this primitivism vogue. Carl Van Vechten's 1926 novel Nigger Heaven made the important contribution of establishing the portrayal of black life as subject matter for popular literature. This idea could be taken a step further by suggesting that the works of the white primitivists helped to establish a sympathetic audience for black authors like Hughes who would treat the same subject matter. Furthermore, the numerous patronages and sponsorships that resulted from this vogue indisputably had a major impact, whether positive or negative, on the literature of the era. Ralph Story, in fact, says that "it is impossible to say that the art produced by black Americans between 1920 and 1932 would have ever made it into print without the support of rich whites" (285). This central question must be kept in mind as we examine the Hughes-Mason partnership at work constructing Not Without Laughter.

It was during the summer of 1928, between his junior and senior years, that Hughes wrote the first draft of Not Without Laughter. This draft was retyped, incorporating some of Hughes's own initial revisions, by the end of that year. In May of the following year, Godmother responded with her first critical reading of the full-length work by sending Hughes a 24-page letter offering comments and suggestions for each chapter.(4) While her overall reaction to the draft was enthusiastic, in her general comments and in a number of important chapter-specific criticisms, Mrs. Mason expresses the common critical theme that Hughes's authorial voice in many sections of the work becomes too prominent. Consider this powerful comment: "Oh my dear Langston, keep yourself in the background: Never cross the divide in this book, for the Power behind the Sun moved with us during your writing of these great scenes." She continues, "You are distinctly in yourself a reactionary person. Remember you have controversial [sic] old Southern blood in you taken up and clarified and transfigured for you by your Judian blood." Furthermore, she says that she wants Hughes to "really write a novel . . . which no critic [could] dismiss as propaganda." Godmother uses the term propaganda frequently enough in her criticism that one begins to wonder what Hughes could have included that would have perplexed her so.

In "White Folks," one of the chapters of which Godmother was particularly critical, Sandy is treated to a lively discussion of the treatment of blacks by whites. Mrs. Mason's critical response to the chapter follows:

This chapter needs working over. Mrs. Johnson's story, while true to life, is out of proportion and should be shortened so that it will be looked on as part of the substance and not as a digression. For the first time, in this chapter, you do not live with the people; you begin to be an onlooker.

Contrary to Mrs. Mason's advice, Hughes did not shorten Mrs. Johnson's story of Crowville in the post-emancipation era: The image of the burning community remains the centerpiece of the episode. He did, however, make several minor, but significant, editorial changes. Mrs. Johnson relates how trouble began once the whites realized that the blacks, living on the edge of town in what the whites called "Crowville," were "'doin' too well.'" The resulting tension eventually led to violence, as the following passage from the published version relates:

". . . Den looked like to me 'bout five hundred white men took torches an' started burnin' wid fiah ever' last house, an' hen-house, an' shack, an' barn, an' privy, an' shed, an' cow-slant in de place!" (79)

In an earlier version, this same passage read:

". . . Den looked like to me 'bout five hundred white men took torches an' started burnin' wid fiah ever' last house, an' hen-house, an' shack, an' barn, an' privy, an' shed, an' church, an' well-house, an' meetin'-room, an' cow-slant in de place!"(5)

The two most notable items that were purged in the editing stages are the church and the meeting room. Evidently, Hughes was compelled to exclude those places that implied congregation - as if the very suggestion of organization would be perceived as threatening by his audience.

Mrs. Mason would later clarify and qualify her critique of this chapter by saying:

I think you have misunderstood me Langston, in what I say in criticism of your chapter "White Folks." Of course I know it must be written from an onlooker's point of view, because Sandy is only a child looking on at a world he could not understand. What I object to is not that it is detached, but that the quality of the writing at that point becomes self-conscious, and has the air of the author's propaganda.(6)

Hughes apparently reacted to this criticism, as he revised the closing passage of the chapter where Harriett is complaining to the assemblage (Aunt Hager, Sister Johnson, Jimboy, Sandy, and Willie-Mae) about her treatment at the hands of white folks. Harriett's sentiment that" 'it don't matter to them if niggers have only the back row at the movies'" is concluded in the first draft (but not in the published version) with the remark" 'and aren't even wanted in their colleges when we manage to get through high school'" (ms. [794.sup.2]). The phrase"' and give us underpaid work as though it was charity at the back door up North'" is revised in the second draft to" 'and give us work like charity at the back door up North.'"(7) The published version reads, "'and [treat us] like beggars up North'" (85). This example clearly demonstrates an editorial policy that seeks to avoid direct references to economic conditions.

Two of the chapters of which Godmother expressed full approval were "Work" and "School." The first she called an "excellent picture of the difficulties of Negro work-a-day existence without any hint of propagandic writing." "School" she found to be "more poignant through the fact that it is presented without comment on the injustices done the negro children." Her concern therefore seems to be that Hughes's novel portray the conditions he had seen around him as he was growing up without the accompaniment of narrative critical commentary. Mrs. Mason's literary theory, as we can construct it through her critical commentary, does not reveal a strict opposition to didacticism in fiction. For there are several passages in which Hughes "tells" truth with which she agrees. In "Work," for example, the narrative voice sympathetically portrays Annjee as "hard-working." She doesn't complain about her severe treatment by her white employer, Mrs. Rice. The narrator gives Sandy's reaction to this treatment:

Mrs. Rice went out again through the swinging door, but Sandy stood near the sink with a burning face and eyes that had suddenly filled with angry tears. He couldn't help it - hearing his sweating mother reprimanded by this tall white woman in the flowered dress. (70)

Sandy's response is thus portrayed as emotionally charged, and the didacticism coming out of the narrative voice in the chapter rallies around Annjee's notion that when she gets to heaven she'll be able to "sit down up there" herself.

More accurately, then, Mrs. Mason is opposed to left-wing didacticism, which perhaps accounts for Hughes's reworking of the "Children's Day" chapter. In this chapter, Hughes depicts the way the town's bigotry tragically affects the young children by showing how Sandy and Willie-Mae are turned away from a town fair solely because of their skin color. The diametrically opposed responses of Aunt Hager and Sister Johnson to this event illustrate two types of personal responses to racism that the novel (as published) illustrates. Sister Johnson turns to hatred saying, "'Dey ain't nary hell hot 'nough to bum ole white folks, 'cause dey's devils deyselves! De dirty hounds!'" Aunt Hager characteristically preaches forgiveness and suggests that the children "'have a party of [their] own'" (211). Neither, however, advocates taking action against this blatant injustice, a reaction that the following passage from the second draft shows Hughes originally intended:

Rev. Butler, Madam de Carter, and all the leading Negroes of the town including Tempy wrote letters to the paper about it, and went to see the white people in charge. None of the letters were ever published, however. The park officials placed the blame on the paper while the editor of the Daily Leader said, on the contrary, that it was the policy of the park to bar Negroes and he could do nothing about it The mayor of Stanton said he wasn't running for office anymore so it wasn't his business to say anything. Nobody apologized and nobody cared, - except the colored folks. But Willie-Mae and Sandy never clipped coupons from the Leader again. (ms. 795)

One could argue that it would have been out of character for Tempy to align herself with the lower castes of her race and speak out against the whites, for it is through Tempy that Hughes develops the notion that class is as powerful as race in dividing the town. Nevertheless, the exclusion of this paragraph from the novel alters the consequence of the entire episode; what remains is the dialectic between Sister Johnson's hatred and Aunt Hager's forgiveness, with neither position leading to political action. Especially significant is the effect that this resignation has on the children: The omitted paragraph's last sentence shows that Hughes once intended for Sandy and Willie-Mae to learn an important lesson about their own political power from this episode.

The published version of "Children's Day" also includes a letter from Anjee to Sandy. This "Dear Little Son" letter was originally meant to stand on its own as a separate chapter, and the manuscript includes several phrases - speaking once again in a direct way about economic oppression - which are conspicuously missing from the final copy. For instance, Anjee's original description of her job read," 'I got a job too but it doesn't pay so well and there are long hours in a boarding house for old white men'" (italics added). Also, the phrase "trying to make money in the auto business" (ms. 795) appears in the manuscript after "There are white and colored here. . . ."

In the same letter of May 1929, Godmother comments to Hughes about this letter from Anjee saying, "It would be wise not to put in an attempt on Anjee's part to describe the rough element from the South. She would be incapable of this and it would amount to Langston Hughes propaganda." The passage to which she refers reads in the manuscript as follows with the cross-outs signifying the author's editorial markings on the typed draft:

Most of the coloreds are from the south what have started to come up here and they say it is no good down south because the white folks are so evil in Alabama.

They say they are devils there. (ms 795)

Godmother's censorship in this instance led to the removal of an extremely interesting left-wing political insight on Hughes's part. In commenting that Anjee would not have been capable of the phrase the rough clement, Godmother does not consider that Anjee's political vocabulary could have changed as a result of moving from Kansas to Chicago. What Hughes's draft implies is that Anjee's feelings about the Southern "colored" contingent belie not her personal experience with the people in question, but rather a societal generalization. Moreover, this generalization can be read as a statement against capitalism by Hughes, as it suggests that the ruling class has successfully created an unnatural division (between Southern and Northern blacks) within the oppressed proletariat.

One might query whether or not Hughes himself would have been capable in 1929 of such a radical critique of false consciousness. We know that by 1932 he was writing of breaking down capitalism's superficial division between poor whites and poor blacks in "An Open Letter to the South." As far back as 1926, however, Hughes had published a poem in Palms offering concrete evidence that he was aware that capitalism generates a state of false consciousness. The poem is titled "African Fog":

Singing black boatmen An August morning In the thick white fog at Sekondi Coming out to take cargo From anchored alien ships - You do not know the fog We strange so-civilized ones Sail in always. (Good Morning 9)

The implied critique in Not Without Laughter of the false consciousness behind Anjee's generalization thus seems consistent with Hughes's own developing political consciousness.

Like much else in the "Children's Day" chapter, Hughes eventually edited out this political aspect of Annjee's letter. Hughes's deference to Godmother's editorial policy continued in the chapter's final passages. In the fourth paragraph from the end, the narrator's voice concludes that ". . . not even watermelon and the long letter could drive away his sick feeling about the park" (213). In the manuscript, the narrator continues:

White people - there were so many things in Stanton that they kept colored folks out of; the new moving picture theatre that Dogberry helped build, and the new Y.M.C.A. that had sent out swimming tickets to all the white school boys for their use of the pool in the spring and summer, but the colored boys still had to bath [sic] in the muddy river where every year somebody got drowned. (ms. 795)

Had this passage not been cut, it would have added weight to the whole episode of Children's Day by moving the incident beyond the range of personal tragedy - by allowing for its identification with the more widespread reality about the treatment of blacks.

In the last paragraph of this chapter, the manuscript includes Aunt Hager's answer to Sandy's query "'They don't like us here either, do they?'" She shakes her head and tells him "'. . . Don't start frettin' yo' self yet, honey chile, 'bout white folks. You's got such a long ways to go'" (ms. 795). In the published version, Aunt Hager doesn't answer and then turns to song as Sandy "heard a great chorus out of the black past - singing generations of toil-worn Negroes, echoing Hager's voice" (214). This ending is characteristic of the indirect way in which Hughes, in the final version, manages to include a critical voice - despite Godmother's objections - by using heightened poetic, even epiphanic, language.

One of the critical narrative voices which Godmother describes as "a cool report of an outside observer" can be found in "Revival," a counter-chapter to "Carnival" that was included in the manuscript but omitted from the final version. Godmother's May 1929 criticism of it reads, "The sermon is very poor, much too long, and never is stirring until the final paragraphs." One of the central ideas in this episode is that the revival serves as a central gathering place for the masses. The "outside observer" says of Madam de Carter:

She was, so she said, a stout race woman and lodge organizer besides, so she felt it her duty to attend all meetings, conclaves, conventions, revivals, annual sermons, or whatever other occasion might bring together the masses of her people. (ms. [794.sup.2])

Hughes then takes Sandy's perspective and develops the important notion of the inherent diversity in the masses:

Sandy watched them as they came, - some of them old and gray-headed; some of them in the prime of life; some mere boys and girls; and many little children. Bent and wrinkled ash-colored old grannies; strong-shouldered black hod-carriers; buxom wash-women, truck drivers, young nurse girls, railroad workers in overalls, ditch diggers, maid servants, cooks, garbage collectors, porters, baggage men, seamstresses, farm hands, saw-mill hands, chamber maids, bell boys, - dark and humble people. (ms. [794.sup.2])

In placing the emphasis on the various employments, this listing demonstrates that the solidarity among these revival attendees consists not only in their skin color, but in the oppressive jobs to which they are enslaved. This passage also can be read as a continuation of an intertextual dialogue between Hughes and Wait Whitman: The Weary Blues (1926) included Hughes's famous "I, Too, Sing America," which reversed Whitman's celebratory tone in "I Hear America Singing." Like the passage cited above from the "Revival" draft, Whitman's poem uses an occupational listing (including mechanic, carpenter, mason, boatman, and shoemaker) to show a common thread of song. Hughes simply hears and therefore sings a very different song than does Whitman. He also attempts to sing a very different song than the one Mrs. Mason's primitivism was impressing on him.

A major portion of the "Revival" chapter is dedicated to a sermon that offers the churchgoers a form of catharsis from the psychological pressures of their external environment. More interesting and radical is the portrayal of Jesus; it is emphasized that he gained power without the benefit of money or class position:

"Then the big people of the land heard about Jesus, the chiefs and the scribes, the rulers and the finely clad, the politicians and the bankers, - and they began to conspire against Him because He had power. Without robes of purple, without scepter and without crown, without money and without titles - He had power]" (ms. [794.sup.2])

The preacher completes the analogy linking Jesus and the oppressed race by saying, "'Yes, they had called Him everything but a child o' the King. An' then they lynched Him on de cross'" (ms. [794.sup.2]). Obviously, this passage is an open suggestion to the masses that the "rulers" keep their power by destroying those, like Jesus, who rise up in challenge. Just as obviously, it was doomed never to reach the printer's hands.

Religion, of course, is not the only catharsis considered in the novel. Mrs. Mason wrote ecstatic praise of the "Guitar" chapter, calling it "distinctly one of the most poetic chapters." She added that it had "the quality of charm that is found among the Negroes, where creation is the normal birth of the night." This chapter taken by itself is a good representation of what many critics have labeled the published work's leitmotif; namely, the celebration of the blues form as an emancipation from the dreary misery in the lives of Hughes's characters - at least for those, like Harriett, who don't choose the religious route of escape. Charles S. Johnson, for example, wrote in a 1928 essay about Hughes's jazz poetry that the blues "always strike a note of despondency and yet they provoke laughter. Is not this a vital adjustment, that curious condition of survival so manifest in practically all social relations'' (143). The critic H. Nigel Thomas likewise picked up on the saving nature of black American rituals as represented in Not Without Laughter (116-120). As evidence of the relief to be found in the blues, Thomas points to the song used to soothe Sandy after the Children's Day incident. We know, however, that this was not the effect Hughes originally intended.

This theme of the blues as emancipatory becomes problematic, however, when we get to the chapter in which it finds its greatest expression - "Dance." In his miscellaneous notes for the novel, Hughes wrote of jazz, "There was a deep terrible elemental sadness spread with a staccato surface of gaiety like the bubble that might be on the water covering a dead man."(8) In Not Without Laughter, an unknown voice, alien to the book's regular narrator and expressing an "elemental sadness," descends upon the frenzied dance scene asking unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions. Included among Hughes's manuscripts is a poem entitled "Poem for a Dance" which suggests the origin of this voice:

The earth rolls relentlessly, And the sun blazes forever on the earth, Breeding, breeding, breeding. But why do you insist like the earth, Music? Rolling and breeding, Earth and sun relentlessly. But why do you insist like the sun? like the lips of women? Like the bodies of men, relentlessly? "Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!" But why do you insist, Music?

Who understands the earth? Do you Mingo? Who understands the sun? Do you, Harriett? Does anybody know - Among you high-yallers, you jelly-beans, You pinks and pretty-daddies, Among you seal-skin browns, smooth blacks, Easy risers, chocolates-to-the-bone - Does anybody know the answer? "Aw, play it, Benbow!" It's midnight. De clock is strikin' twelve, an'. . . . . . "Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!"(9)

Meaning in these lines comes not only from the tone behind the speaker's relentless questioning, but from the symbolism of the black race as a victim relentlessly beaten down by the sun (representing the white race). There is strong irony in the fact that a race with more natural protection against the sun's harmful rays is nevertheless harmed or at least threatened by it. More complex and interesting is the earth which seems to work in harmony with the sun and lacks mythological mother-to-all compassion. The earth most likely represents the material existence of these oppressed people. Perhaps the most significant line of the poem is "But why do you insist like the earth, Music?" For in this line the speaker gives the blues ("Music") the same role as the earth - it relentlessly oppresses. It is also, therefore, placed on the same level as the sun, and so we are left to conclude that Hughes is suggesting a very different relationship between the blues and the people who turn to it for escape than is usually assumed.

The sense of insistence and relentlessness in the tone of the poem, together with the "rolling and breeding" imagery, suggests that there is also a sexual charge underlying the poem's energy. In the paragraph which precedes the passage in which this poem is converted into prose, the imagery is not just sexual but in fact strongly suggests rape. The final version reads:

Cruel, desolate, unadorned was their music now, like the body of a ravished woman on the sun-baked earth; violent and hard, like a giant standing over his bleeding mate in the blazing sun. The odors of bodies, the stings of flesh, and the utter emptiness of soul when all is done . . . .(97)

The imagery is even more graphic in the draft, which includes "the ravished body of a woman squirming" and "like a passion-ridden giant standing over a bleeding mate" (ms. 795). In the purged "Revival" chapter, in fact, the preacher is described as "a tall, powerful, jet-black man with a head like a giant's" (ms. 79[4.sup.2]). Through this parallel imagery, Hughes has allied religion with the blues to represent two of the more subtle forces working in opposition to the struggle against racial inequality.

Hughes realizes that the blues and religion work in different ways, both leading to complacency rather than to action. Religion, especially as experienced by Aunt Hager, provides a source of catharsis, a release for pent up anger. Its hope comes in the form of a promised afterlife where skin color will not be held against anyone and all will be equal before God. Life itself, then, is meant to be merely survived as better times will follow it. In the blues, there is also a degree of physical release for participants, but the blues differs from religion in that it forces the individual to face her misery. There is cathexis rather than catharsis; the participants try to lose themselves in the music, only to have their own feelings become more deeply invested with those expressed in the songs. This reading is thus an inversion of the aforementioned approach that sees the blues as emancipatory.

Perhaps the most crucial line in this chapter is the statement that the music "made the dancers move, in that little hall, like pawns on a frenetic checker-board" (97). This simile is the most open Marxist assertion in the published version of the novel, and one suspects that it remains only because it is so cleverly embedded in such a highly figurative passage, so far removed from the central narrative voice. Its implications are unavoidable, however, and it helps to explicate the poetic voice that follows. In effect, Hughes's speaker in the poem asks the music why it assists the sun in keeping his people oppressed; he asks in vain whether Harriett or any of the participants "understands" the effect of the music on them. They do not, of course, for as "pawns" with very little power, their ability to grasp their own human consciousness is subjugated to the constructs of the oppressive social system.

Curiously, Godmother does not offer a harsh critique of this chapter in her letter to Hughes. One can conjecture that this is because it plays into her notions of the true expression of the "primitive" black soul. Perhaps, then, this is Hughes's most skillfully written chapter, as it manages to offer a strong political sentiment while avoiding Godmother's censorship. To achieve this, Hughes had to venture into new areas of expression - best exemplified by the passages that were transposed directly from the poetic form - that rely on a narrative voice far removed from the protagonist. This distance is the key factor differentiating this chapter from those earlier passages that Godmother read as "propaganda."

In the last few chapters of the novel, we are presented with a matured Sandy experiencing urban life while living in Chicago with his mother. The picture that develops, however, is that of a youth who is overwhelmed by the city and depressed by its dreariness. The manuscripts show that Hughes originally intended for Sandy to experience something more:

Sandy and the student of the thick books went out together, talking as they walked toward the L station through the hot hard Chicago streets where the lights were being lighted. The black student had been at Lucy Laney's school in Georgia and was fired with a great ambition for the future of the race, He told Sandy that night about the South, how beautiful and how ugly it was, and about the terrible condition of Negro education there, with no schools for the masses of the people. He himself wanted to found a school such as Lucy Laney had established for the academic education of the race. So many more schools were needed, he said, so many more teachers and so much more vision!

Sandy, listening to this earnest young black man talk, wondered if he, too, couldn't perhaps someday be a teacher and thus help the dark millions in Mississippi and Georgia and the lower South who were still without light and without help. He wondered if he could do something about it - about the lynchings and the peonage farms, the robberies of the cotton dealers, the low wages, and the closed doors of escape locked behind the curtains of darkness.

Together the two young boys discussed the great problems of Negro America and they forgot that they were going up town, as train after train went by and left them standing on the platform of the elevated station. They forgot that they were only poor workers in a big hotel - for their dreams had gone far beyond themselves . . . . (ms. 795)

The omission of this entire passage from the published novel has serious implications for the unwritten future of Sandy. This passage shows that there is a form of escape ("they forgot that they were only poor workers") which may be constructive, whereas religion and the blues may be destructive. This is not to suggest that Hughes necessarily took education to be the answer, but it does depict progress in the consciousness of the novel's protagonist. In the manuscript's scenario, Sandy takes the first steps toward change by joining intellectual forces with another potential leader and by assuming the critical perspective which so troubled Godmother. It is important to note that, when Sandy wonders if he could do something about the various ills besetting the "dark millions," he refers to "peonage farms" and "low wages." These references to poor economic conditions reinforce the character's developed sensibility towards such matters. The published Sandy, however, is ultimately nothing more than a naive, observant youth who does not want "to be a servant at the mercies of white people forever" (312) and whose real prospects for improving civil rights for his race are at best far in the future.

In the novel Hughes sent to be published, even the Princess of the Blues's final words of benediction concerning Sandy's future lack the impact and forcefulness which were once intended. In a passage in Hughes's miscellaneous notes to the novel, he wrote the following lines for Harriett:

"The people who come to bear me sing, Sandy, those are the people you've got to help, dirty, ragged workers for little of nothings in the big cities, five dollars a week servant, ten dollar poters [sic] in the small towns, and their cousins and brothers back in the country down South almost in slavery yet. They pay their thirty cents to come and hear me sing end see the comedian act a fool so they can laugh for a little while, but don't think they're all happy people - like the white man does, just because a nigger grins. My dark people, they're the ones that need help, Sandy."(10)

The published version effaces the view that Harriett, Sandy, and the others are oppressed as much by their economic condition as by their skin color.

Such an overwhelming abundance of evidence of serious censorship by Mrs. Mason leads one to wonder how the young Hughes could have endured his relationship with her. Berry believes "the young poet had accepted her as a surrogate mother, whose interest in him was entirely unselfish and altogether motivated by maternal love" ("Black Poets" 282). This hypothesis is supported by the fact that Hughes naively expected to be able to maintain a close friendship with Godmother after he officially broke economic ties with her. Perhaps for this reason, Hughes never showed her his "Poet to Patron" poem, which he wrote in 1930 but did not publish until nine years later when their break was complete:

What right has anyone to say That I Must throw out pieces of my heart for pay?

For bread that helps to make My heart beat true, I must sell myself To you?

A factory shift's better, A week's meagre pay, Than a perfumed note asking What poems today? (147)

In this poem we hear the same consciousness of class position that characterizes the speaker's voice in "Park Bench." There is a real source of inner conflict for the poet in the poem's theme of selling out. Part of the "New Negro" credo as postulated by Locke was that "the Negro to-day wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not" (11). Hughes was certainly pretending to be what he was not for the sake of his officious white patron.

In reflecting on his fellow Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, Hughes once wrote, "They thought the race problem had been solved through Art . . . . I don't know what made any Negroes think that except that they were mostly intellectuals doing the thinking. The ordinary Negroes hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance" (qtd. in Berry, "Black Poets" 283). The fact that Hughes was conscious of the limits of art to bring about social change suggests that he was probably aware of the limited effect the published version of Not Without Laughter would have on the "race problem." For despite the novel's artistic merits, Hughes would probably be the first to point out that revolutionary political ideas are conspicuously missing from the book. From the available manuscript evidence, however, we are left with the strong impression that the book the author set out to write did offer a more consciously left-wing political agenda for social change. Furthermore, even the first drafts of this manuscript have to be considered as written out of Hughes's consciousness of this audience of one. We are left to imagine what Hughes might have written if Mrs. Mason had been out of the picture altogether.

Notes

1. Locke to Kellogg, 23 Feb. 1926, Survey Associates Papers, as rpt. in Allan H. Spear's introduction to The New Negro.

2. Mason, letter to Hughes, 11 July 1929. Langston Hughes Papers, JWJ Hughes Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U.

3. The project itself became highly controversial when his findings were published in the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper. Most outrageous to Hughes was the fact that sixty-three percent of the all-black student body favored keeping an all-white faculty. Hughes deplored the general sentiment his findings belied; the uproar extended to many Lincoln alumni and other black institutions.

4. Mason, letter to Hughes, 29 May 1929, Langston Hughes Papers, JWJ Hughes Collection.

5. Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter ms. 79[4.sup.2], 21 June-16 Aug. 1928, JWJ Hughes Collection.

6. Mrs. Charlotte Mason, letter to Langston Hughes, July 1929, Langston Hughes Papers, JWJ Hughes Collection.

7. Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter ms. 795, Oct.-Dec. 1928, JWJ Hughes Collection.

8. Hughes, ms. 798: "Misc. Notes"; "Notes - Jazz," JWJ Hughes Collection.

9. Hughes, ms. 795 - this poem, on its own page, is included in this ms. in front of the "Dance" section.

10. Hughes, ms. 798: "Misc. Notes," JWJ Hughes Collection.

Works Cited

Berry, Faith. "Black Poets, White Patrons: The Hadera Renaissance Years of L. H." Crisis July 1981: 278 -306.

-----. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1983.

Burlin, Natalie Curtis. The Indian's Book. New York: Dover, 1968.

Cooley, John R. Savages and Naturals: Black Portraits by White Writers in Modern American Literature. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1982.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1986.

-----. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest. Ed. Faith Berry. 2nd ed. New York: Citadel, 1992.

-----. Not Without Laughter New York: Knopf, 1930.

-----. "Poet to Patron." American Mercury June 1939: 147.

-----. "Sunset - Coney Island." New Masses Feb. 1928: 13.

Johnson, Charles S. "Jazz Poetry and Blues." Criticial Essays on Langston Hughes. Ed. Edward J. Mullen. Boston: Hall, 1986.

Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. 1925. New York: Johnson, 1968.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Story, Ralph D. "Patronage and the Harlem Renaissance: You Get What You Pay For." CLA Journal 32.3 (1989): 284-95.

Thomas, H. Nigel. From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel. New York: Greenwood, 1988.

Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing." Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Scully Bradley. New York: Norton, 1968.12-13.

John P. Shields lives in San Francisco and is currently working on a book of poetry. His interest in Langston Hughes was fostered at the Rutgers-Newark Graduate English program.