#the weary blues

[manwalksintobar]

Poem // Langston Hughes

We have tomorrow Bright before us Like a flame. Yesterday A night-gone thing, A sun-down name. And dawn-today Broad arch above the road we came.

[mccoppinscrapyard]

My top books of the year and Honorable Mentions

[thechanelmuse]

My Book Review

The Big Sea is an intimate, sweeping (travel) memoir that engulfs you into the world, thoughts, revelations, and life of Langston Hughes as he comes of age in his 20s in the 1920s to the onset of The Great Depression. The book’s title symbolizes the emotional states of deep sadness (depression) and loneliness, the vastness life has to offer, the curiosity of flowing into uncharted territories, the beauty of what lies beneath soon to reach the surface, the voyage by water itself and, most of all, freedom.

“Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling.”

Life is literature; it's a reflection of fork in the road journeys amongst a sea of possibilities along the way. There are motifs from childhood trauma and child-parent relationships to dreams and happiness that arise in The Big Sea, alongside one of the book's main themes: the intricacy of race. 

Black — the bottom classification of the US caste system built on a social construct transitioning into the cultural identity for a specific ethnic group (Black Americans) — is underscored against the higher deemed status and permanence and flatness of "white." Hughes and I share the same great-grandmother on his maternal side, Lucy Jane Langston—his first and my sixth. In The Big Sea, he describes Lucy as "colored" as he would himself although she was Pamunkey. In turn, upon touching down on the soil of Dakar in Senegal, Langston notes: 

“The great Africa of my dreams! But there was one thing that hurt me a lot when I talked with the people. The Africans looked at me and would not believe I was a Negro.”

What you’re (“racially”) called in your house won’t be understood in someone else’s house. Race that’s defined in colors (black, white, red) was a foreign ass concept then and now for anyone from differing homelands with tribes, or similar words but different meanings absent of skin color. It’s heritage that’s attached. That same (Black/US Negro) heritage was a revulsion for Hughes’ self-loathing father, James Nathaniel Hughes. He hated Negroes and was willing to assimilate to anything else, leading him to try to permanently meld into the cultural identity of Mexicans in Mexico. 

Throughout this memoir, Hughes interchangeably uses the US (re)classifications of Negro, Colored and Black to make sense of the world for himself. He deep dives into how he views himself and cultural identity; the way his family, himself, and others in his community choose to navigate through caste barriers; and compares and contrasts his racial status during his wide travel within and outside the United States, all while maintaining his steady net in the big sea.

SN: The photos aren’t included in book, but are pivotal to the details in the book. 

Caroline “Carrie” (Langston) Hughes holding her son, Langston (1901)

Langston Hughes at age 3 (1904)

Carrie and Langston (1907)

James Nathaniel Hughes, the father of Langston Hughes

Mary (Patterson) Langston, Langston Hughes’ maternal grandmother who raised him

Langston Hughes with Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher and Hubert T. Delaney on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, Harlem, on the occasion of a party in Hughes' honor (1924)

Langston Hughes working as a busboy in hotel restaurant before his writing career took hold. He left three poems beside poet Vachel Lindsay's plate and Lindsay read them the next evening at the start of his recital. (Washington D.C., 1925)

Langston Hughes’ poetry book, The Weary Blues, which he wrote in the midst of traveling (1925)

Fire!! magazine created by Langston Hughes, Richard Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, John Davis, Aaron Douglas, and Wallace Henry Thurman (November 1926) 

Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston at Tuskegee Institute (1927)

[ldreamofgenie]

“Wine-maiden

Of the jazz-tuned night,

Lips

Sweet as purple dew,

Breasts

Like the pillows of all sweet dreams,

Who crushed

The grapes of joy

And dripped their juice

On you?”

—To A Black Dancer In “The Little Savoy.” Langston Hughes (1926)

[lawfuljude]

[monabee-draws]

Been so many years but I am still an Anders lover at heart. Please listen to this and tell me its not Handers coded af like I'm obsessed with them

"You want a revelation, some kind of resolution

But it's a conversation I just can't have tonight

(Tell me what you want me to say)"

- is PEAK Hawke between Act 2 and Act 3

And

"Would you leave me if I told you what I've done?

And would you leave me if I told you what I've become?"

- is practically Anders all the way through.

[theartoffresco]

[fakesorbet]

gem headpiece , bird motif , archers , created by and serve the higher deities …. THEYRE SIBLINGS TO MEEE

[xenomorphicdna]

@aluminum-angels i made an entire doodle page just to prove a point

Their relationships do not fail, they get along just fine and they love each other very much

Peace and love among my rw ocs

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

if i can get even one person to listen to The Mechanisms i would have fulfilled my purpose

[manwalksintobar]

Epilogue // Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.

Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.

Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

[minban]

all kaveh wants is to be taken by the hand and spun around in a slow dance

[altruistic-meme]

finally figured out the dynamic with my cats:

[poetryandpickles]

Birthright

I was born with

Fangs and claws

Blood and rage

And a crown on my head. I fought

because

they told me I needed to

how else would I survive?

And the world was cruel, so

I fought,

tore,

slaughtered

paved the path to my throne in blood

And so they drop, one after the other

To their knees before me; call me queen, call me blessed, call me beautiful

...but all I wanted was

Simple land

Simple hands

Small feet running through the halls

And one to call me darling

[boinin]

We're confirmed to be in the end game folks. As for the missing step... who could it be?

Raichi?

Yukimiya??

...Igaguri???

[propertyofkylar]

this is so me