A High Tension in Langston Hughes s Musical Verse.pdf

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MELUS, Volume 37, Number 4 (Winter 2012)
A “High Tension” in Langston Hughes’s
Musical Verse
Erik Nielson
University of Richmond
I’m looking for a house
In the world
Where the white shadows
Will not fall.
There is no such house,
Dark brothers,
No such house
At all.
—Langston Hughes, “House in the World” (1-8)
We might be surprised to read a poem resigned to the impossibility
of liberating black life from the “white shadows” written by Langston
Hughes who, just ive years earlier, penned his essay “The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain.” In “The Negro Artist,” considered by Arnold
Rampersad to be “the inest essay of Hughes’s life” (Volume I 130), Hughes
takes on the role of spokesman for the younger generation of artists who
formed the core of the New Negro Movement, popularly referred to as
the Harlem Renaissance, and boldly asserts their intention to develop a
black aesthetic free of white inluence.1
He develops the metaphor of the
mountain to represent this inluence—“this is the mountain standing in the
way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward
whiteness” (27)—and insists that only by reaching the mountain’s summit
can black artists be “free within ourselves” (29).
The profound distinction between these words of optimism and the sense
of resignation and defeat in “House in the World” (1931) reveals perhaps
the greatest struggle to emerge from the New Negro Movement: how to
effect a black aesthetic within an environment largely monitored and con-
trolled by whites. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observes, “New Negro” was
intended to signal the formation of a “cleared space” for a “spontaneously
generated black and suficient self,” but as he also suggests, such a project
was undermined by the pervasiveness of white inluence that stood as an

166 NIELSON
obstacle to any truly independent black creative sphere (“Trope” 132). In
The New Negro (1925), arguably the seminal text of the movement, Alain
Locke expresses his optimism that this inluence can be overcome. With a
renewed self-dependence, he says, the black community is “bound to enter
a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for what-
ever pressure there may be of conditions from without” (4). For Locke and
many other artists, one of the keys to breaking free of the “conditions from
without” was creating an aesthetic based on black vernacular forms, with
a particular emphasis on music. In “The Negro Artist,” Hughes represents
the ascent to the mountaintop in terms of a descent, describing the need
for black artists to revisit the subterranean world of the “low-down folks,”
the common people who “are not afraid of spirituals” and act as if “jazz
is their child” (28).2
Whether it is the metaphor of the mountaintop or the
underground, Hughes depicts the independent space that will allow black
artists to create and perform beyond the “white shadows.”
The bold vision for a black “cleared space” articulated in “The Negro
Artist” inds its statement and its counterstatement in the eight lines of
“House in the World.” Drawing on spatial metaphors, Hughes juxtaposes a
house with the vast expanse of the world. In doing so, he emphasizes the
wide disparity between the space that blacks hope to attain (a mere house)
and what whites already control; by choosing an enclosed structure to rep-
resent that space, he also hints at the insularity that Harlem Renaissance
authors tried to effect in their pursuit of a uniquely black aesthetic. This
insularity is further reinforced by the disappearance of the world and the
repetition of house in the second stanza, symbolically representing the
constricting universe of the poem, which we also see when the speaker
narrows his intended audience from an unspeciied reader (implying a
universality) to “[d]ark brothers” in particular. Ultimately, however, the
poem’s compression—reinforced visually as the second stanza narrows
to the poem’s shortest line—suggests the futility of ever carving out a
“cleared space,” as even the smallest black spaces are haunted by the white
shadows. Notably, the longest line in the poem, which casts a metaphori-
cal shadow over the rest of the poem, contains the only reference to white-
ness, thus echoing the deep pessimism within the poem that the “[d]ark
brothers” will ever ind their own house in the white world, even if they
turn to black vernacular forms to do so.3
Given the surveillance and harassment Hughes and other black authors
endured, the reasons for such pessimism can be understood. As William J.
Maxwell’s research demonstrates, because of J. Edgar Hoover’s “excited
dread of black writing,” the FBI spent decades targeting black authors both
at home and overseas, believing that they were bent on fomenting resis-

HIGH TENSION IN MUSICAL VERSE 167
tance within the US (256). Black musicians, however, frequently drew the
wary gaze of the white world, too, something they were keenly aware of.
Within their music and the literature that employs their music, white pres-
ence is constantly felt, simultaneously revealing its “fundamental role in
structuring black cultural forms” (Bernard 268) and complicating any for-
mulation of an independent and insular black vernacular culture to form
the basis of a black aesthetic. Black music was in many ways shaped by
its constant engagement with the unique culture of suspicion and surveil-
lance from which it emerged. Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred
(1951) illustrates how even in verse inspired by bebop, a form character-
ized in large part by its rejection of white culture, we ind manifestations
of that dialogue—and perhaps an explanation for why Hughes declared
that “There is no such house” where “the white shadows / Will not fall.”
This sentiment suggests that there is no sovereign space for black artists,
and in trying to ind it, they succeed only in revealing the constant tension
between “the eyes of others” (Du Bois 7) and the attempts to evade them
that have long deined black art in the United States.
Music as the Form of Things Known
Scholars often note that while black literature has remained inextrica-
bly linked to the white literary culture that helped shaped it, black music
has evolved relatively free of white inluence. This is what Gates refers to
as the “independent and collateral evolution of black music” (“Dis” 104),
an evolution that many critics agree was relatively insulated from the
“conditions from without.” As a result, music has become for many artists
and critics a kind of Rosetta Stone for black culture: if you can understand
black music, you can understand the people who created it; if you hope
to build a literature that relects an independent black aesthetic, it must
draw on musical structures. This is one of the fundamental precepts of the
Black Arts Movement—that a written literature must attempt to capture
the orality of black culture, especially as found in the blues and jazz forms
that lourished in the irst half of the twentieth century.Amiri Baraka made
the primacy of music explicit. Blues and jazz, he asserted, “have been the
only consistent exhibitors of ‘Negritude’ in formal American culture sim-
ply because the bearers of its tradition maintained their essential identities
as Negroes; in no other art . . . has this been possible” (“Myth” 165-66).
For Baraka and many others, black music comprises part of what Richard
Wright once called “The Forms of Things Unknown,” the vast store of
black folk expression that remains distinct from mainstream culture (123).
Baraka, like Hughes, hoped that in drawing on these forms, artists could

168 NIELSON
begin to effect the kind of separation Hughes explores in both “The Negro
Artist” and “House in the World.”
But black music in the US has been known to the dominant white cul-
ture, and in many ways its evolution has been shaped by the omnipresence
of that culture.4
Consider the spirituals. They evolved as a coded music
that often frustrated the interpretation of white observers and listeners, and
so, too, did the music that grew out of them. Nowhere is this more appar-
ent than in the encrypted lyrics of the blues—what James H. Cone refers to
as “secular spirituals” (100). As the blues became more popular and there-
fore more visible to a mainstream audience, they increasingly made use of
metaphor and double entendre to camoulage themes that in plain language
certainly would have been objectionable. Whether musicians were sneak-
ing in sexual references or obliquely protesting the conditions for blacks in
the Jim Crow South, they found the need to retain an insularity as they did
so, with blues performers living within what Robert Springer calls their
“own personally circumscribed world” (285).5
Springer notes the various
ways artists maintained a kind of self-circumscription, including through
the frequent use of double-entendre and also through a “cryptic language
of numbers” (282) and sometimes even jive and Pig Latin, all of which
provided a cloaking mechanism against the white “eyes of others.”6
While this multifaceted coding in blues lyrics is to some degree a relec-
tion of the broader resistance staged within African American Vernacular
English (AAVE) to assimilation into mainstream American culture, schol-
ars have regularly pointed out that music is one of the most signiicant
sources of black Americans’ linguistic code as well. In other words, the
experience of the musician provides “a kind of standard in the Black
English-speaking community” (Smitherman 52), and to some extent the
distinctive nature of AAVE can be traced to the igure of the musician who,
watched and scrutinized, writes lyrics that express a recurring need for
inscrutability in the face of the outside world (Smitherman 50-55). While
this igure of the evasive musician can be traced back to the spirituals
and beyond,7
what sets apart blues musicians and their successors is that,
unlike the slaves, they openly sought the visibility and recognition that
they simultaneously relected, creating an important dynamic that under-
scores the signiicance of an outside presence to an art form that is often
regarded as uniquely insular.
Yet whites did not represent the only outside presence to which blues
and later musical forms responded. The antipathy between black musi-
cians and black churches, for example, is well known, a dynamic that
persists even today with religious leaders who take high-proile stances
against forms such as rap music. But white presence has always been

viewed as the most signiicant threat, often interfering with musicians’
ability to perform. Indeed, the jook joint, typically associated with the
rural South in the early part of the twentieth century, came into being spe-
ciically to counter the often hostile white presence that regularly sought
to restrict black music and dance. It represented a type of subaltern counter
public sphere,8
the “last retreat . . . for black people who want[ed] to get
away from whites, and the pressures of the day” (Oliver, Blues Off 46).
This sense of privacy, a literal “cleared space” that gave rise to the blues,
caused Zora Neale Hurston to proclaim that “[m]usically speaking, the
Jook is the most important place in America” (304). Jook joints were often
secretive, remaining nameless and moving from location to location, and
were frequently the targets of police harassment (Hunter 171). They are
throwbacks to the hidden spots in the wilderness where the slaves used
to sing and dance (Dixon 3); as with slave music, the blues are a product
of the struggle to ind autonomy in an environment that was frequently
unwilling to grant it.
As Katrina Hazzard-Gordon makes clear, the jook tradition has been
very important inAfricanAmerican culture, extending far beyond the rural
South and into the more urban honky-tonks, speakeasies, and after-hours
clubs that provided an insular environment for blacks to sing and dance
in relative autonomy. Rent shouts (or rent parties) also became popular
venues for entertainment because, like the jook, they were elusive and
secretive, popping up unpredictably and then shutting down before the
authorities could intervene. These private spaces were the closest thing
to a “cleared space” blacks could achieve, and they continued to thrive
among those who, as Hughes put it, “didn’t like to be stared at by white
folks” (“When” 178). Ostensibly, many of the night clubs that sprang up
in New York and other urban centers as jazz replaced blues replicated the
jook tradition. They often drew on plantation themes of the deep South
(consider names such as Cotton Club, Plantation Club, or Club Alabam)
and created atmospheres of dark seclusion, similar to the hazy jooks and
after-hours clubs that inspired them. However, beneath the surface, they
deviated dramatically from the insularity of jooks, most apparent in their
preference for a white clientele; in fact, many well-known clubs (The
Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Small’s Paradise) generally excluded black
patrons altogether. These venues and others, therefore, marked an impor-
tant intersection of black music and white presence. That is, they were the
sites where many of the most important jazz musicians played, often to
predominantly white crowds, complicating the notion that their art was in
any way uniquely black. Indeed, in his poem “Cabaret,” Sterling Brown
locates in these clubs the disengagement between the true source of black

170 NIELSON
music—“Down in the valleys” of the South (84)—and the version played
in the night clubs frequented by the “Rich, lashy, puffy-faced, / Hebrew
and Anglo-Saxon” and “The overlords . . . with their glittering darlings”
(1-3).9
Such clubs, which constituted the primary venues for jazz performance,
helped launch the careers of many of the era’s most important musicians
and became central to the thriving nightlife that characterized places like
Harlem. However, their own vitality threatened them, making them fre-
quent targets of law enforcement. The oppressive cabaret laws in New
York, for example, permitted the city to closely monitor and close down
establishments that did not conform to the city’s intrusive patchwork of
regulations related to musical entertainment—regulations that went so
far as to dictate what and how many instruments could be played at a
time. While in theory these laws applied to all establishments, their intent
was clear. As Paul Chevigny puts it, the city’s regulations were “largely
directed at the black music and dance that was performed at the Harlem
clubs, as well as the social mixing of the races” (33). Because jazz in
particular was associated with moral degradation—many regarded it as
a “symbol of barbarism, primitivism, savagery, and animalism” (Merriam
242)—it was targeted; furthermore, as the laws began to restrict musicians
with any criminal history from playing in the city, hundreds of perform-
ers found themselves locked out of the city, most notably Billie Holiday
and Thelonious Monk, both of whom had their cabaret cards, which were
required by the city, revoked.10
Jazz musicians soon found themselves surrounded by an inescapable
white presence. On the one hand, many whites admired the music and
locked to hear it, and eventually white musicians such as Paul Whiteman
also began to take it up.11
On the other hand, many detested the music
and what they believed was a culture that promoted promiscuity, drug
and alcohol abuse, and uncomfortably close contact between blacks and
whites. The result was that in cities across America, there were anti-jazz
campaigns of surveillance and intimidation sponsored by private citizens,
often in concert with local, state, and federal authorities, aimed at pre-
serving the civilization that jazz was threatening.12
This literal visibility,
combined with the explosion of race records in the mid 1920s that were
consumed by both black and white audiences, led to an exposure that was
undoubtedly a threat to the insularity that music and the culture surround-
ing it seemed able to afford. Sieglinde Lemke observes, “Black jazz was
everywhere by the mid 1920s” (81), which the musicians were keenly
aware of as well. Their response was often an attempt to maintain their
visibility (a requisite of proitability) while at the same time constructing

mechanisms intended to frustrate it.
One example of such a mechanism is seen in the birth of “cool,” a
concept that Joel Dinerstein links to a kind of masking. According to
Dinerstein, Lester Young was instrumental in creating a “cool” style that
favored the internalization of emotion and the externalization of a calm
“mask in the face of hostile, provocative outside forces.” This was evident
in his playing style and in the various “strategies of self-insulation” Young
employed to “resist the white ‘gaze’” (240-41). Rather than donning the
smiling minstrel mask worn by blacks trying to accommodate white expec-
tations, Young preferred aloofness and separation, apparent in everything
from his clothes to his speech. For example, he rejected the suits typically
worn by performers in favor of sweaters and stocking caps or pork-pie hats.
He pioneered the use of sunglasses on stage, both indoors and out, which
became an important element in the self-representational style of black
jazz musicians (and the musicians to follow) because it symbolized the
sort of cool, detached mask that Young and others favored. Furthermore,
he contributed to the slang of the jazz world, inventing words and phrases
that were virtually impenetrable even to fellow musicians. His penchant
for a linguistic code—a tradition in black music—caught on with Charlie
Parker and Miles Davis and became one of the most important aspects
of the musical culture of the 1940s and beyond. This is evident in rap
music, which is known as perhaps the most fertile source of neologism
and semantic inversion since jazz. The need for a linguistic code has been
related to the need to deine an “in group,” and linguistic variety has long
served the purpose of delineating groups and cultures from one another.
In the case of black musicians, however, the specter of white presence
also made such a code a necessity in maintaining personal and creative
autonomy. What we know about black slang terms generally is that they
become obsolete, losing “their linguistic currency in the black community
if or when they move into the white mainstream” (Smitherman 70). They
constantly change, causing the coded grammar to engage in a process of
call-and-response with the white culture that it cannot ignore.
The ever-changing nature of black slang is not exclusive to the music
world; it characterizes AAVE generally. But music, easily the form of
African American expression most exposed to the white mainstream, has
been the greatest source of an encrypted black language, indicating its
unique position in a dialogic process between black music and white cul-
ture. In other words, if black music went underground, the “white shadows”
followed it there. This can explain the rebellion among black jazz musi-
cians that took place in the 1940s with the development of bebop. Feeling
pennedinbythewhitepresencethatwaseithersuppressingorappropriating

172 NIELSON
their music, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others
began experimenting with a jazz that favored improvisation, fast tempos,
and asymmetrical phrasing, creating a sound that was jarring to audiences
more familiar with the smoother, danceable songs of the swing era that
preceded bebop. The musical dissonance was a relection of the younger
generation’s frustrations with the social position of blacks in urban
America, who found themselves “not only trapped in the ghetto but pinned
beneath the heel of police repression” (Farrell and Johnson 59), and with
the exploited position of the black entertainer.As Ralph Ellison notes in his
appraisal of bebop in the early 1950s, the dissonant sounds and complex
progressions worked out by bebop’s creators “sprang partially from their
desire to create a jazz which could not be so easily imitated and exploited
by white musicians to whom the market was more open” (212).13
Bebopisoftenregardedasarebellion,orrevolt,becauseofitssometimes
militant attempt to create a black insular space, frequently with the rejec-
tion of any white presence whatsoever. Initially, it evolved as “part of an
isolated black underground, an ‘in group’expression that allowed relatively
undisturbed experimentation away from white eyes” (Erenberg 227).
Bebop performers, taking up where entertainers such as Lester Young
left off, adopted their own subcultural wardrobe (sunglasses, for example,
became mainstays on stage, sartorial representations of the rejection of
a white gaze) and continued to create an impenetrable lingo to maintain
the symbolic space that the underground clubs provided in a literal sense.
Some performers, including Parker and Gillespie, began turning their
backs on their (often white) audiences, dispensing with the “cool” mask
altogether in favor of an unabashed rejection. Bebop performers’ open
rebellion against white presence even extended to their musical predeces-
sors; as Eric Lott writes, bebop’s “relationship to earlier styles [was] one
of calculated hostility” (602), further evidence that these young musicians
were, in strident and unambiguous terms, attempting to effect a “cleared
space” that was unencumbered by the legacy of musicians who played
their music at the behest of whites.
While this musical rebellion anticipates what Black Arts writers did a
generation later, bebop’s openly antagonistic stance had paradoxical effects.
For one, bebop’s subversive qualities ultimately enhanced its avant-garde
cachet, thereby heightening its commercial appeal. The result was that
even its most visible signs of resistance—the lingo and the clothes—
quickly became commodiied and reproduced in the white population
(DeVeaux 24).14
More important, bebop’s antagonism and growing public
prominence also garnered unwanted attention from the authorities, mak-
ing performers more frequent targets of the police. John Lowney writes:

As jazz became increasingly associated by political and police authorities with
illegal drug use, jazz musicians were identiied with Communists as agents
of moral decay and threats to national unity. Jazz clubs were iniltrated by
undercover agents, and numerous musicians were convicted of illegal drug
possession, losing . . . their livelihoods. (367)
Just as black artists’ and activists’ visibility led to their being targeted dur-
ing World War I (1914-18) as potential German sympathizers, they were
targeted during the Cold War as well, with musicians in particular por-
trayed as some of the most potent and visible symbols of un-American
behavior.15
In the case of bebop and black music generally, any innovation
that has the effect of excluding white presence actually invites that pres-
ence, requiring further insularity and then inviting increased white scru-
tiny. This complex dialogue between visibility and invisibility, absence
and presence, has always been at the heart of black music in the US.
While music is one of the most uniquely black forms of artistic expres-
sion in the US, it has nevertheless suffered, like literature, from the para-
doxical effect of visibility. Visibility brings popularity and proitability,
both of which provide the resources necessary for artists to innovate, and
without those resources, the practical realities of life would keep many
authors and musicians from being able to earn a living by their craft.
However, in the US, this visibility also amounts to an intrusion of the white
sphere on the black, an intrusion that grows in direct proportion to the vis-
ibility of black art. This complicates theoretical frameworks that tend to
foreground the “[f]orms of [t]hings [u]nknown” as sites of black creative
autonomy. While these vernacular theories often consider the full range
of black culture, including folk traditions that have remained relatively
free of white inluence, music generally rises to prominence as the form
most capable of yielding insight into the ever-elusive black aesthetic.16
One reason for this is the resistance black music has shown in the face of
pervasive white inluence: by remaining as elusive as possible, the spiri-
tuals, blues, and jazz have all demonstrated their opposition to cultural
negation. Yet that elusiveness suggests an ongoing dynamic from which
black art does not escape untouched by the “white shadows” that Hughes
laments. Instead, it bears the mark of those shadows.
Post-Harlem Renaissance Hughes
For black literature, drawing on music means drawing on this same
dynamic, and it seems itting to take a closer look at how it operates within
the post-Harlem Renaissance poetry of Langston Hughes, who drew on
black music to develop his own “cleared space,” yet resigned himself to

174 NIELSON
the impossibility of ever creating it. In the Preface to his collection of
poems titled Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hughes describes his attempt
to experiment with musical structures, particularly bebop, in creating a
collection of poems that could capture “the conlicting changes, sudden
nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages
sometimes in the manner of the jam session.” In the same preface, Hughes
indicates that he views the collection as a single poem, a sentiment echoed
by Donald C. Dickinson, who describes Montage as “one long interrelated
poetic jam session” (91). In creating such a sequence in which the delinea-
tion between the beginning of one poem and the end of another became
obscured, Hughes “took advantage of the structural characteristics of
bebop by drastically reordering the traditional limitations imposed on the
poem” (Farrell and Johnson 61). He attempted to use the written word in a
way that could somehow capture the improvised, spontaneous nature of a
live musical performance, a jam session, and in doing so ended up blurring
the line between where poetry ended and music began, something many
of his contemporary critics noticed immediately, with some questioning
whether Montage could even be considered poetry at all (Lowney 370).
In Montage, Hughes borrows from the structures of bebop, stressing
dissonance and discontinuity by implementing two interwoven voices
(the literary and the musical) that suggest the presence of two competing
spheres in tension with one another, underscoring “the often conlicting,
even contradictory relations between public and counterpublic spheres
within black Harlem, New York City, and the nation as a whole” (Lowney
370). Throughout Montage, Hughes emphasizes this conlicting relation-
ship with regular juxtapositions of the shadowy, subterranean world of
musical Harlem and representations of white repression and surveillance,
reminding us that the two are inextricably linked.17
This is most apparent
in the section of poems titled “Early Bright,” which contains frequent allu-
sions to a hostile presence within Harlem nightlife bent on containment
and control. In “Mellow,” for instance, we get the following:
Into the laps
of black celebrities
white girls fall
like pale plums from a tree
beyond a high tension wall
wired for killing
which makes it
more thrilling (1-8)

As we have already seen, one of the primary reasons for authorities’regular
intrusions into Harlem nightlife was a deep-seated concern with interracial
contact, especially between white women—called “girls” here, thereby
heightening their vulnerability—and black men.18
In “Mellow,” we begin
with a simile comparing these white girls who seek black celebrities to
plums falling from a tree (with the obvious play on fall as the girls fall
for these celebrities). This natural imagery (suggesting that the attraction
is natural—these girls have no more say in the matter than does a plum
falling from a tree) quickly and unexpectedly gives way to a “high tension
wall / wired for killing” that wrenches us away from a natural setting and
back to the frightening reality of a world that contains the type of brutal,
man-made barrier between the races that looms above the scene.
Hughes uses the poem’s structure to reinforce his emphasis on the two
competing realities by forcing the two longest lines, paired in the middle,
to jut out and form a literal wall of text that simultaneously attracts our
attention to the juxtaposition and reinforces the poem’s theme of loom-
ing barriers and containment. One aspect of the poem that is particularly
intriguing is the initial suggestion that the “black celebrities” (almost cer-
tainly musicians) are the ones empowered; after all, they have white girls
falling into their laps, so ripe for their attention that they don’t even need
picking. And yet it becomes clear that these girls have managed to circum-
vent the “high tension wall” and that if it is truly wired for killing, it is not
whites who are targeted. The black celebrities’ stasis in the poem does not
merely suggest their gravitational pull on white women—it also speaks to
their coninement behind this wall that has clearly been erected to contain
them (a wall whose electric current is evocative of the use of electricity in
penal executions). This is an example of the “high tension” we have seen
within black expression: with visibility and celebrity comes the predict-
able anxiety from the white mainstream, resulting in the mechanisms of
control symbolized by the wall that is “wired for killing.” As fame and
recognition provide greater access to the surrounding world, that same
world begins to constrict, reinforced by Hughes with the poem’s structure,
which begins with three-word lines, expands to ive-word lines, constricts
back to three-word lines, and ultimately narrows to a inal, two-word line.
Elsewhere in “Early Bright,” the distinctions between the private and
public spheres are further blurred by the police culture of surveillance that
threatens imminent violence on any sort of racial or sexual transgression
(Lowney 374). In “Café: 3 a.m.,” for instance, we are immediately faced
with “Detectives from the vice squad / with weary sadistic eyes / spot-
ting fairies” (1-3). As we see in many poems throughout “Early Bright,”
the setting is at night, the time that is supposed to provide the cloak of

176 NIELSON
darkness to conceal the activities that are subject to this type of “sadistic”
repression, and yet even in the darkest recesses of the poems, this private
space is threatened. In “Café: 3 a.m.,” there is no attempt to evade this
surveillance; instead, the poem inverts its perspective, focusing its gaze
back onto the police themselves, with the speaker asking, “Police Lady
or Lesbian / over there?” (9-10). What’s notable is that even as the poem
turns the tables on the hostile police presence, it does so by capitalizing on
the same values that regard homosexuality as a “vice” worthy of policing,
and thus is unable to escape the larger structures of suspicion and intoler-
ance that led to fairy spotting in the irst place. Some of the poems echo
and internalize this culture of repression even as they defy it, a process
that characterizes the black music Hughes draws on throughout Montage.
One of the inal poems in “Early Bright”—“Jam Session”—demon-
strates this same dynamic of deiance and repression. If we recall Hughes’s
claim that the entire Montage collection was meant to be patterned after
a jam session, then this particular poem ought to provide an important
insight into how this dynamic is intended to shape the whole:
Letting midnight
out on bail
pop-a-da
having been
detained in jail
oop-pop-a-da
for sprinkling salt
on a dreamer’s tail
pop-a-da (1-9)
Here we ind the familiar context of containment and repression, this time
represented by the imprisonment of “midnight,” a personiication of the
time that, throughout Montage and much of Hughes’s poetry, is associated
with black liberty. The caveat Hughes develops in “Early Bright” is that
any black freedom is only relative, as the “sadistic eyes” of the white gaze
never fully disappear. The imprisonment of “midnight,” then, becomes an
effective metaphor for the overarching containment of black space. Even
the release—“Letting midnight / out on bail”—further reinforces the cir-
cumscription, with “bail” serving as a tether to the (white) legal system
that here reaches beyond the spatial and into the temporal, as even time
(midnight) is doing time.
What makes this poem so complex is its apparent illogic. “[M]idnight,”
we learn, is jailed “for sprinkling salt / on a dreamer’s tail,” a line that
derives from the centuries’ old proverb that you can catch a bird by sprin-

kling salt on its tail (“To put”). What is most notable is that midnight—a
recurring symbol of black freedom, indeed blackness, in much of Hughes’s
poetry—is guilty of deferring yet another black dream within Montage.19
In other words, blackness itself functions as the agent of white repres-
sion, denying light to black ambition just as one denies light to a bird by
sprinkling salt on its tail, yet it is incarcerated for doing so. This apparent
contradiction illuminates one of Hughes’s most complex articulations of
white control over black space: what ostensibly serves the white mech-
anisms of control over blacks is nevertheless viewed as a transgression
and punished as such when it involves any black agency whatsoever. In
“sprinkling salt / on a dreamer’s tail,” “midnight” seems to have internal-
ized white values and set into motion the “automatic functioning of power”
in which blacks are “caught up in a power situation of which they are
themselves the bearers” (Foucault 201). For Michel Foucault, the goal of
a discipline-based system of permanent visibility is its perfect function-
ing, but here race complicates matters. As “Jam Session” suggests, white
power must manifest itself as such in the black sphere, ensuring its own
visibility and punishing any attempt to co-opt its operation.20
In terms of message and structure, this complexity hinges on the word
dreamer. The poem, especially in light of the others within “Early Bright,”
would be more consistent if dreamer were replaced with dream. In that case,
“midnight,” a representation of black liberty, would have been imprisoned
for trying to sprinkle salt on a dream, that is, for daring to grasp or attain
rather than contain it. Then we would have Hughes’s more straightforward
formulation of white repression of black aspiration. But in his consider-
ation of transgression, Hughes actually transgresses by complicating that
fundamental black/white dynamic and introducing his only ive-syllable
line at the end, thereby breaking out of the meter and structure of the
rest of the poem and giving it a visual tail on which salt can be sprinkled.
Dreamer, the only disyllabic word in the line, adds that crucial extra syl-
lable where dream could not, and in the process forces both form and con-
tent to accommodate “the conlicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and
impudent interjections, [and] broken rhythms” reminiscent of a bebop jam
session, which Hughes explicitly set out to incorporate in Montage. L. L.
Dickson notes that in these inal lines “the poem has expanded its rhythms,
just as those recurrent deferred dreams constantly push into every section
of the Montage, form following meaning and sound following sense” (31).
Hence, a poem that treats the intricate structures of power and contain-
ment inds a way to use musical unpredictability to break free of its own
structures, suggesting that a broader struggle for black space should be
waged with music, too.

178 NIELSON
In “Jam Session,” Hughes’s familiar use of italics and indentation
demarcates the space for a second musical voice that is engaged in a
dialogue (or call-and-response) with the literary voice. His attempts to
complicate the meaning of the poem are further reinforced by the musi-
cal punctuations, which are literarily nonsensical and get the inal word
in the poem with “pop-a-da,” which of course is not even a word, but
an attempt to use print to capture sound. If this is a jam session, then the
two actors here are literature and music, trading phrases with one another
and offering insight into a broader jam session that black literature and
music have been engaged in. If music is intended to function as a black
“cleared space,” then “Jam Session” complicates that. For one, we ought to
note the musical repetition, standing in contrast to the literary progression,
which suggests a certain stasis, the inability for music to break free of its
literary conines. We notice, for example, that the second musical inter-
jection, “oop-pop-a-da,” reaches four syllables and threatens to vie for
spatial dominance by extending beyond the previous line. However, when
that happens, the literary response is to regain preeminence by introduc-
ing the irst and only ive-syllable line in the poem. If Hughes is setting us
up for a battle between the two voices, we are quickly disappointed when
the inal line, “pop-a-da,” recedes, returning to the conines of the poem,
just as “midnight,” only out on bail, will return to face the justice system.
Here the literary subordinates and subsumes the musical, staging within
the poem the larger, and ultimately futile, search for a black space in a
world permeated by white shadows.
If the dialogue between music and literature is representative of the
much broader dynamic between black art and white suspicion, few authors
were better situated to tackle the subject than Langston Hughes, who found
himself the target of institutional surveillance, suspicion, and harassment
throughout much of his career. As Rampersad reveals, the FBI began tak-
ing interest in Hughes as early as 1940, not only because of his suspected
Communism, but also because of the mistaken belief that Hughes had
called for a race war in which Caucasians would be subjugated to people
of color (Volume II 92). Hughes was not the irst black author to draw this
kind of attention from the authorities, but the extent and duration of the
attention he faced is particularly noteworthy. As a person of particular
interest to J. Edgar Hoover, Hughes regularly found virtually every aspect
of his life invaded by law enforcement: his mail was scrutinized, his pri-
vate meetings iniltrated, his friends and contacts interrogated, his every
movement under watch when he travelled, even as it became clear that
any oficial connections between Hughes and Communism could not be
substantiated (Rampersad, Volume II 92; Berry 126). The often-hidden

surveillance became public in 1953, when he was summoned to appear
before Joseph McCarthy’s infamous Subcommittee on Investigations to
account for his alleged subversive and un-American activities. That hear-
ing did not mark the end of the government’s interest in him, though, as
the FBI maintained a classiied ile on Hughes until his death in 1967.
Like many of his poems, Hughes’s life reveals a great deal about the
challenges to establishing or deining a unique black art in the US. Hughes
regularly turned to black music to create the metaphorical “cleared space”
needed to effect a black aesthetic, but while black music certainly draws
on uniquely black traditions, suggesting a certain insularity, it has always
evolved in part in response to a pervasive white gaze, suggesting that the
call-and-response within the music is being mirrored by a similar dialogue
between black art and white society—the “white shadows.” Hughes’s
poems demonstrate this clearly, foregrounding both voices in the same
poems, forcing them into a dialogic process in which they “intersect with
each other in many different ways” so that they can be “juxtaposed to one
another, mutually supplement one another, [and] contradict one another”
(Bakhtin 291-92).21
By giving space in his work to both voices, Hughes took an important
step toward the articulation of a distinctly black aesthetic, but his ulti-
mate pessimism about establishing a true “cleared space” left his works
unable to climb to the top of the racial mountain. However, his pessimism
revealed the extent to which black art is shaped and deined by its ongoing
dialogue with a white culture that has long sought to contain it.22
Speaking
of this relationship, particularly as it pertained to Hughes’s successors
in the Black Arts Movement, Stephen Henderson notes that even while
addressing a black audience, the black poet “knew that the white world
was looking over his shoulder” (25). This constant white presence reveals
a relationship that is at the heart of black art in the United States.
Notes
The Estate of Langston Hughes owns copyright (© 1994) to the poems “Cafe:
3a.m.,” “House in the World,” “Jam Session,” and “Mellow.” Excerpts in this es-
say are printed with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House,
Inc.
1. Hughes’s essay was written as a direct response to George S. Schuyler’s “The
Negro-Art Hokum,” which rejects the possibility that a distinctly black art can
exist in an environment in which blacks ind themselves “subject to the same
economic and social forces that mold the actions and thoughts of the white

180 NIELSON
Americans” (25).
2. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues that the metaphor of descent can be traced back
to spirituals (“Dis” 114-15). “Go Down Moses” and “Down in the Valley” are two
examples Gates cites.
3. Written in 1931, “House in the World” came just as Hughes began to shift to
a more radical socialist aesthetic. As Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel note,
in the 1930s, Hughes “wrote some of the most radical poems ever published by
an American, as well as some of the most poignant lamentations of the chasm
that often exists between American social ideals and American social reality” (4).
Many critics dismiss Hughes’s political verse of the 1930s because it seemingly
abandons the vernacular forms, especially the blues, that made his work in the
1920s and later decades so successful. For more on why Hughes’s political goals
and his views on race and class may have caused him to turn away from ver-
nacular forms in his 1930s poetry, see Anthony Dawahare (34-35). For a different
perspective, see James Smethurst, who argues that during the 1930s, Hughes was
honing his ability to “convey multiple meanings to multiple audiences” and in
doing so often imbued his revolutionary poetry with a vernacular perspective—a
“lyrical music”—that was still operative if not immediately recognizable (New
102).
4. For an important look at the way black vernacular culture has been shaped by
white culture, speciically the law, see Bryan Wagner.
5. There are many ways in which the blues attempted social protest. While songs
such as Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (1939) did so explicitly, most others did
so obliquely. See Robert Springer and Paul Oliver (Blues Fell).
6. See also J. L. Dillard for a thorough discussion of these kinds of lexical codes
and the importance of numbers to African American Vernacular English and
music lyrics. As Dillard notes, the numbers game (a form of gambling) has long
occupied a central position in black life.
7. Gates’s Signifying Monkey traces this kind of evasiveness in black expression
back to Esu-Elegbara, the trickster igure of Yoruba mythology, who often appears
in African song.
8. Nancy Fraser discusses the extent to which Habermas’s public spheres excluded
a variety of subordinated groups, forcing them to create counterpublics, which
were “discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and
circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional
interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (67).
9. As David Anderson notes, “Cabaret” is a poem about cultural exploitation, not
expression, in which “black performers are no longer offering criticism and mod-
els to the black community, but are perpetuating stereotypes of black rural life to
a segregated white audience” (1033). See also Joanne V. Gabbin (120-21).
10. For an overview of the scholarship related to the often hostile response to jazz
as it emerged in the early 1920s, see Sieglinde Lemke (59-66).
11. Because of its exotic nature, jazz was not typically viewed as a form of
American expression—that is, not until white musicians could play it. Amiri
Baraka observes that this has long been the case: “Afro-American music did

not become a completely American expression until the white man could play it”
(Blues 155).
12. One example of this was in Philadelphia, where in 1921 the mayor allowed
the police to monitor jazz dance halls to ensure that there was no inappropriate
dancing, which included anything with cheek-to-cheek or abdominal contact or
any form of dance in which the legs were kept apart (Lemke 64).
13. See Cornel West’s description of the conditions under which bebop emerged.
He also emphasizes the movement’s attempt to avoid unwanted exposure: “[I]t
shunned publicity and eschewed visibility” (475).
14. Responding to Baraka’s formulation in Blues People of modern jazz (espe-
cially bebop) as oppositional culture, Ralph Ellison commented on the quick
mainstream integration of bebop when he said, “Today nothing succeeds like a
rebellion” (253). For a discussion of how subcultural styles enter the mainstream
as commodities, see Dick Hebdige.
15. For more on the surveillance of African Americans during World War I, see
Mark Ellis.
16. See, for example, Houston A. Baker, Jr. Baker privileges the blues over other
forms within the folk tradition because he believes that they are all amalgamated
within the blues.
17. According to Smethurst, this juxtaposition is an important characteristic of
Montage, a work that was “crucial in maintaining Harlem as a literary site where
the somewhat conlicting igurations of the neighborhood as a place of refuge,
home, and prison intersected” (“Don’t” 1228).
18. Although it was relatively common to refer to women of all ages as girls dur-
ing the period in which “Mellow” was written, Hughes is generally consistent
throughout Montage about using girl to connote age—as in the poem “Preference,”
which opens with the lines, “I likes a woman / six or eight and ten years older’n
myself. / I don’t fool with these young girls.”
19. While there are no explicit racial designations in “Jam Session,” throughout
“Early Bright” and Montage generally, the forces of institutional containment are
associated with whiteness, and so it follows that midnight’s imprisonment comes
at the behest of a white power structure.
20. Wagner notes that black culture, in order to assert its own standpoint, must
irst “mimic the conditions of its alienation” (21) and that is the dynamic that
Hughes plays out in “Jam Session.” However, if staging the conditions of alien-
ation is part of a broader process of black self-assertion, then we can begin to
understand why it is punished within the poem. Here and throughout Montage,
Hughes portrays an environment in which black subjective agency, even when it
appears to serve white ends, is answered with a sprinkling of salt.
21. M. M. Bakhtin’s emphasis on heteroglossia—a double voicedness—has made
him attractive to scholarship related to African American literature because of the
obvious and important overlap between his analysis of language and Du Boisian
double-consciousness. Michael Awkward, for example, calls double voicedness
the “discursive corollary” to W. E. B. Du Bois’s model of African American

182 NIELSON
identity (56), and Gates calls it the “verbal analogue” for double consciousness
(Afterword 214-15). See also Mae Gwendolyn Henderson and Dorothy J. Hale.
22. For a discussion of how even contemporary forms such as rap music have
been shaped by their relationship with a hostile white presence, see my essay
“‘Can’t C Me’: Surveillance and Rap Music.”
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