Posted Wednesday, October 21, 2020.
Portrait of Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten. © Van Vechten Trust. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Via Poetry Foundation.
Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven.---"Luck" by Langston Hughes, via the Poetry Society of America.
There’s a scene in “Marshall” that at first almost jarred me right out of the movie. It takes place in a Harlem nightclub and a character, played by Jussie Smollett, makes, for me, an unexpected and implausible entrance.
“What’s Langston Hughes doing in this movie?” I said out loud when I realized who Smollett was playing.
Jussie Smollett (right) as Langston Hughes with Mark St Cyr as his date for the evening in a scene from “Marshall”.
At first I thought this was one of those invented moments makers of historical films seem to feel obligated to stick into their movies to prove to audiences they’ve done their homework and if what’s happening on screen didn’t really happen, it’s authentic to the times. I was even more convinced when Rozanda Thomas as Zora Neale Hurston sits herself down at the table and begins bantering with Hughes and Chadwick Boseman’s Thurgood Marshall. But, no. I don’t know what the real life relationship between Hurston and Marshall was, but Marshall and Hughes were friends and classmates at Lincoln University and they crossed paths from time to time in the years after they graduated.
Marshall was a big man on campus (literally and figuratively; he was six-four), but Hughes may have eclipsed him:
One of the more arresting figures [Wil Haygood writes in “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America”] who would often be seen walking alongside Thrugood was Langston Hughes, already admired as a published poet. Hughes had transferred to Lincoln from Columbia University. He wore his hair pomaded...and dressed stylishly enough to draw stares…born in 1902, [he] was at least six years older than most Lincoln freshmen. He had published a remarkable book of verse, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, before his arrival at the college. Langston Hughes was also a hepcat who knew the gin joints and speakeasies of Paris before setting foot in rural Chester County. “I like the school out here immensely,” Hughes would write to his friend Carl Van Vechten…”We’re a community in ourselves. Rolling hills and trees and plenty of room. Life is crude, the dorms like barns but comfortable, food plain and solid, first bell at six-thirty, and nobody dresses up---except on Sunday...I room with the campus bootlegger.”...His celebrity could hardly have gone unnoticed. “February our freshman year a poet came into our midst...He is a product of Central High School of Cleveland,” a fellow student would come to write for a campus publication at the time. “One who travels extensively acquires a certain amount education just from contacts and so Lank came to us with many stories of the South Sea islands, northern borders of Africa.”
Hughes appears to have liked Marshall and thought highly of him, but if he was overly impressed at the time, he didn’t let on:
Hughes had quite a gift for sizing people up; it was not unexpected given his worldly wanderings. The poet thought young Thurgood Marshall keen of mind but a bit randy, remembering the Baltimorean as “rough and ready, loud and wrong, good natured and uncouth.”
One more by Hughes, via Poetry Nook, “Young Sailor”:
He carries
His own strength
And his own laughter,
His own today
And his own hereafter—
This strong young sailor
Of the wide seas.What is money for?
To spend, he says.
And wine?
To drink.
And women?
To love.
And today?
For joy.
And the green sea
For strength,
And the brown land
For laughter.And nothing hereafter.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“Marshall" is available for streaming on YouTube. Hat tip to Twitter pal Faith for recommending “Showdown”. “Young Sailor” and “Luck” are collected in “Selected Poems of Langston Hughes”. The young sailor might have been based on Hughes himself. He spent six months as a member of the crew of a freighter plying the coasts of northern Africa and southern Europe.
Comments