Langston Hughes’s poetry captures a moment in time – the Harlem Renaissance – but foresees the future and recounts the past. There’s so much there. The video of “The Weary Blues” juxtaposes Hughes’s words with the obvious energy and jazz of Cab Calloway’s “hi-de-ho;” Calloway is neither weary nor blue, and I found, at first glance, that the words of the poem didn’t go with the vitality of the song and dance in the video, but watching it again and reading the other poems, I started putting together the history.

In “Democracy” and “Dream Deferred,” Hughes makes the argument of W.E.B. duBois and Malcolm X – we cannot wait for freedom and equality, for our dreams, or nothing will happen. “Democracy” says that “I do not need my freedom when I’m dead,” and “Dream Deferred” asks if it “explode[s].” In either case, we can’t take advantage of the dream. The future is bleak if it is without action, and I found the video images filled with the action that the narrative did not have; again, the man in “The Weary Blues” “slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.” He’s moaning and melancholy, and he’s not doing anything to change his situation.

In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” there’s more of the history, dating back to the Euphrates, the “cradle of civilization,” through the Congo and the Nile to the Mississippi. In one verse, Hughes briefly covers the journey of the black man to this country, and expresses a depth of feeling about the past. The rivers are the flow of that history and are “ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human rivers.” I wondered what influence this poem had on later works. (First the song “Ol’ Man River” from the musical “Showboat” came to mind – but this was a fleeting connection.) The river part, in particular, of Maya Angelou’s inaugural poem for Bill Clinton “A Rock, A River, A Tree” was what I wanted to read again:

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast
.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.

Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.

The River sings and sings on.

The whole text can be read at: http://poetry.eserver.org/angelou.html.

Hughes’ poems connect his own past, present and future. In his eulogy of Cab Calloway, former Mayor David N. Dinkins paraphrased Langston Hughes, saying, "Cab took the heartbeat of Harlem, put it on a record and let it whirl" (NYTimes 11/20/94). The poem from which this is paraphrased is “Juke Box Love Song,” a short love poem for Harlem and for “my sweet brown Harlem girl.” It’s very different from “The Weary Blues.”
Sheila Joseph