The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes Page B

Hughes’s life, but to call Van Vechten his patron is too reductive and elevating; to call him Hughes’s mentor far too pat and patronizing. The two were that far more profound thing, friends. Van Vechten did provide an introduction to
The Weary Blues
(which follows in this anniversary edition), which, after it quotes heavily from Hughes’s “picturesque” letters, perceptively notes his stanzas “have a highly deceptive air of spontaneous improvisation” that really is studied, almost presciently seeing their “expression of an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature, seeking always to break through the veil.”
    Hughes would provide Van Vechten a lens on and even access to a black world of “life behind the veil” that he sought the rest of his life to understand and that Hughes celebrated; and when Van Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven
(1926) caused controversy from its title alone, Hughes would come to his defense under the same principle of artistic freedom that Hughes had asserted in “The Negro Artist.” It would be the silhouetted cover of
The Weary Blues
by Mexico’s Miguel Covarrubias that Hughes seemed more to mind. Suggested by Van Vechten, its iconic status now seems less an overwrought type, as it might have then, than a borrowing from the rather stately shadows of others—such as black artist Aaron Douglas, who like Hughes had lived as a child in Topeka, Kansas (where I once lived too) and with whom Hughes would collaborate over a long career.
    Even given its rich context,
The Weary Blues
remains a unique achievement. A century after Knopf began as a publisher, and nearly ninety years after his book first appeared,Hughes’s innovation still resonates with its rich lines and fascinating lives—the very liveliness it brought to the world. His is a tremendous debut, and we are lucky to have it here in print again, exactly as Hughes wrote it, in all its black, blues, and symphonic glory.
    — KEVIN YOUNG
    Decatur, Georgia
    September 6, 2014

INTRODUCING LANGSTON HUGHES TO THE READER
    I
    At the moment I cannot recall the name of any other person whatever who, at the age of twenty-three, has enjoyed so picturesque and rambling an existence as Langston Hughes. Indeed, a complete account of his disorderly and delightfully fantastic career would make a fascinating picaresque romance which I hope this young Negro will write before so much more befalls him that he may find it difficult to capture all the salient episodes within the limits of a single volume.
    Born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, he had lived, before his twelfth year, in the City of Mexico, Topeka, Kansas, Colorado Springs, Charlestown, Indiana, Kansas City, and Buffalo. He attended Central High School, from which he graduated, at Cleveland, Ohio, while in the summer, there and in Chicago, he worked as delivery- and dummy-boy in hat-stores. In his senior year he was elected class poet and editor of the Year Book.
    After four years in Cleveland, he once more joined his father in Mexico, only to migrate to New York where he entered Columbia University. There, finding the environmentdistasteful, or worse, he remained till spring, when he quit, broke with his father and, with thirteen dollars in cash, went on his own. First, he worked for a truck-farmer on Staten Island; next, he delivered flowers for Thorley; at length he partially satisfied an insatiable craving to go to sea by signing up with an old ship anchored in the Hudson for the winter. His first real cruise as a sailor carried him to the Canary Islands, the Azores, and the West Coast of Africa, of which voyage he has written: “Oh, the sun in Dakar! Oh, the little black girls of Burutu! Oh, the blue, blue bay of Loanda! Calabar, the city lost in a forest; the long, shining days at sea, the masts rocking against the stars at night; the black Kru-boy sailors, taken at Freetown, bathing on deck morning and evening; Tom Pey and Haneo, whose dangerous job it was to dive under