Harlem Sings America : The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance endures in lyrical novels and prescient poetry. : THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES: A Life, <i> Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (Knopf: $30; 576 pp.)</i>

Langston Hughes is probably the best known name among African-American poets. Lionized for his genial folk language and the wry, understated rage of his later work, he has been our poet laureate for more than 50 years.

But reading “The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes” is a much more interesting journey than these frozen sentiments can capture: a journey through the landscape, language, rhythms, and feelings of black America through the better part of this century. Lovingly collected by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel, this volume errs on the side of inclusion, allowing us to see Hughes fully and decide for ourselves what is his legacy.

Hughes’ journey began in 1902, just as immigrants were constructing the urban ethos that has become so central to modern African-American identity. It ended in 1967, just as an exultant and frightening period of social change was on the wane, ushering in the bleak era of decline for poor communities that followed the Vietnam years. Reading his collected work is a journey of remembrance.

When I was in graduate school in the ‘70s, I was asked by a seminar teacher, Ezekiel Mphalele, to prepare a lecture on Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance era when the young poet first came to be known. At the end of my talk a young man sitting next to me in head-band, knees-out dungarees and other trappings of the then-dying counterculture, looked at me smugly and declared, “This guy will never last.” “He already lasts,” I said. The young man scoffed at this, saying he’d never heard of Hughes. “I will never teach him,” he said, with a finality meant to end the discussion.

“Langston Hughes is like blues music,” I told him. “You will not teach that either, but the music lives in the heads of millions who may not know where they heard the words, ‘whatever happens to a dream deferred?”’ (from “Lenox Avenue Mural”).

This was true, at least for the world I once knew. I had only left a thoroughly segregated America a decade earlier. It was the world Langston Hughes documented, and brought to song, and in his work, it lives just as vividly today.

Poetry was the gift African-American teachers bestowed upon their students. In meanly-conceived and poorly-equipped segregated schools, we stood up and recited the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, W.E.B. DuBois,Langston Hughes and so many others. People with haphazard schooling, along with the “cultured” folk, heard Langston when he came through little town after little town--sleeping in their neighbors’ homes, breaking bread and having some laughs.

Our communities still admire folks who can rhyme and make talk/song in our own specially adapted version of the language. We still learn the rhymes by ear like music. Langston was the first popular, modern street poet. His vernacular verses had the ring of something we’d heard yesterday, the simple wisdom of the folk who raised us and taught us how to survive, the coolness of street jive in cities some of us had never seen, the rage and despair all of us knew.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, when there seemed to be six black poets for every one car mechanic, we all wasted a little time trying to rewrite “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a poem Hughes composed in 1921.

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers

I learned these words at age 10 or so, and a decade later was trying to make them my own. Today, when I get up with some poems in front of a band, or write them for a chorus, I like to think that I’m carrying forth my lineage. Because our work grows out of oral performance as much as ink on page, our lineage includes many who seldom see the light of print.

Hughes, of course, is not the beginning of our lineage--that goes back to unknown griots. But in this century, he is one reason so many have stood up to say, “I, too, sing America.”

In a verse written in the ‘20s, Hughes used only a statistic: “In the Johannesburg mines / There are 240,000 / Native Africans working. / What kind of poem / Would you / Make out of that?” In those lines, in their style and content, I hear the birth of June Jordan, who still asks the same questions about the same men of Africa, working mines they have yet to own.

In “The Weary Blues,” where the singer is “droning a drowsy syncopated tune” far into the night, and in “Saturday Night,” where the “skee-dads” and “de-dads” clatter like jazz, one can hear that sound that inspires Sonia Sanchez. And in various poems from the early ‘50s, I spot the lines I used to pop out of my mouth and laugh out loud:

I play it cool

And dig all jive.

That’s the reason

I stay alive.

My motto,

As I live and learn,

is

Dig and Be Dug

In Return.

At the same time, I laugh even more at how the beat poet Ted Joans returned the favor: “All spades / wear shades / and carry blades.” I remember poets with a sense of humor--who could play with those scary-looking, jive talking, cross-the-street-when-you-see-us images of African-Americans that define us now more and more. I hear Amiri Baraka, David Henderson, Notzake Shange, Haki Madhubuti, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Ethelbert Miller, A.B. Spellman, Public Enemy, Greg Tate, Lucille Clifton--I can’t even name you all, my sister and brother poets who moved more to blank verse but kept Hughes’ rhyming humor and borrowed from him the license to give sound back to poetry, and put the vernacular to wise use.

In the late ‘20s and during the Depression, Hughes’ mind turned to revolution, and he tried mightily to be like his own poetic hero, Claude McKay, a fiery Jamaican-born socialist and “race man.” When Hughes was still a student at Lincoln University and read McKay’s “If We Must Die,” an anthem inspired by the lynchings and riots of Red Summer of 1919, he decided this was the kind of poet he’d like to be. Unlike McKay, who admired sonnets, Hughes embraced the class analysis but kept the street folks’ voice.

Say, listen, Revolution:

You know, the boss where I used to work,

The guy that gimme the air to cut down expenses

He gave an accessible spin to the ideas that W.E.B. DuBois and others went to lengths to explain in the pages of “Crisis” and other black intellectual publications:

It is the same everywhere for me:

On the docks at Sierra Leone,

In the cotton fields of Alabama,

In the diamond mines of Kimberley,

On the coffee hills of Haiti,

The banana lands of Central America,

The streets of Harlem,

And the cities of Morocco and Tripoli.

Black:

Exploited, beaten and robbed

This was not received wisdom. Hughes had been on those docks; he knew the hills of Haiti. He’d seen his own reflection, his own oppression, while touring with the Merchant Marines, or waiting tables or singing for his supper with a few lines as a famous poet. Still, Hughes was no McKay, who chose revolutionaries and European exile and heard the news of Harlem through Hughes’ letter. And like many of his brethren in Harlem, men and women who show up at the integrated socialist socials and rallies in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Hughes left the doctrine soon enough.

In the ‘40s, he returned to the “naturalist” boarding house, those voices yelling from the kitchen and the basic blues form:

“I ain’t got no sugar, Hattie,

I gambled your dime away.

Ain’t got no sugar, I

Done gambled that dime away.

If you’s a wise woman, Hattie,

You ain’t gonna have nothin’ to say.

In retrospect, his poems from the ‘50s almost seem to have been lying in wait for the thunder of marchers, the dogs unleashed in Alabama, the sound of Stokley Carmichael shouting, “Black Power.” Lying in wait for all that new language of the Negro Problem, or the Northern Liberal, or “Mister Backlash, Mister Backlash! Just who do you think I am?” In “Demonstration” he asked,

Did you ever walk into a fire hose

With the water turned up full blast?

Did you ever walk toward police guns

When each step might be your last?

Did you ever stand up in the face of snarling dogs . . .

Did you ever feel the tear gas burn?

Sometimes when I’m looking out my window on the third floor rear, where I do my writing, Langston Hughes crosses my mind. While I memorized his verse, I never gave any thought to who he was as a man. He was all of us, I thought. And that was the posture he took, the face he presented to the world. Few of us are so daring anymore. We speak for the small one known as I.

And on those days, as my eyes move away from the computer and to the collected poems, I think about how he turned a room at the third-floor rear in a house in Harlem into a cottage industry in order to survive. I think about how often he thought he couldn’t make it work.

It seems odd to say this, but as much as he wrote, most of it was for the rest of us; little of it shared his own private pain. Reading Arnold Rampersad’s acclaimed “Life of Langston Hughes” (Oxford), I was stunned by how many private demons plagued this poet who reveled in “the sweet fly-paper of life” and warned us to endure but “not without laughter.” He was often indignant at the dismissal of a black poet, and plagued with insecurities, sometimes because he knew he was dashing off lines, or fulfilling a contract without passion or the best of his mind.

And yet he persevered, demanding a place for this cornucopia of voices, for all of us American folk inhabiting his third-floor-rear room. He is there, with his best face forward, and all the others too. In “The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,” he has at last been given what he knew we all were due.