Today’s post for the Year Club is one of those rare occasions when I am not posting on an Australian short story. The simple reason is that I could not find one in my anthologies, and I am keen to read from my physical TBR. Happily, I found one in Great short stories by African-American writers, and it was by a writer I have read before, though it could be a bit of a cheat … read on …

Langston Hughes

Wikipedia tells us that James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and was “best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance (about which I have written before).  He was also “an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist” as well as “an early innovator of jazz poetry“. My anthology editors, Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell, describe him in their biographical note, as “one of the most famous African-American writers of the [twentieth] century [who] continually published poems, plays, novels, short stories, essays, translations, children’s books, and edited anthologies”. They say that “knowing first-hand the financial difficulties and discouragement of being a writer of colour, he helped numerous African Americans get noticed and published”. Poet Kwame Alexander, writing in the Beltway poetry quarterly, adds “operas, librettos, television and film scripts” and “lyrics, essays, [and] reference manuals” to his writing credentials. He was prolific.

Wikipedia explains that like many African Americans, he was of mixed ancestry, with both of his paternal great-grandmothers being enslaved Africans, and both paternal great-grandfathers being white slave owners in Kentucky. The old story! He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in other Midwestern cities. His parents separated soon after his birth. Apparently, his father, who “wanted to escape the racial intolerance of the United States”, moved to Cuba and then Mexico. The critical point for us, however, is that, because his mother travelled a lot for work, he was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother. “Through stories of Black resistance, dignity, and perseverance, [she] shaped his understanding of racial responsibility” and imbued him “with a duty to help his race”. Consequently, continues Wikipedia, he “identified with neglected and downtrodden black people all his life, and centered their lives honestly in his work”.

I’ll leave his biography here, but if you are interested, start at Wikipedia which has an extensive, well-referenced article.

I mentioned that I have read him before – and I have, but in poetry anthologies, some of them for children. He captured my attention, not just because he was new to me but because his subject matter – social justice and civil rights – interests me. I have not read his prose before.

“Feet live their own life”

I said in my opening paragraph that this selection for the Year Club could be a bit of a cheat. This is because this story was originally published in the Chicago Defender in 1943. However, my anthologists selected the story from a book published in 1961, and say that the version there is “an expansion and revision” of that original column. I think this makes it valid for the 1961 Year Club!

So, the story. Wikipedia pointed me to The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, which says that soon after inaugurating a theatre group in Chicago in 1941, Hughes went to work for the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper founded in 1905. It was here that Hughes introduced readers to his character Jesse B. Semple, aka Simple. The Hall of Fame says that

Hughes combined powerful rhetoric with down-home humor to attack or reflect the conditions of African-Americans at the time. He was eloquent and clear – and no injustice escaped his literary wrath. To some, this column was Hughes’ most powerful and relevant work. He became the voice of a people who were beginning to secure their place in society.  Hughes wrote his column for the Defender for 20 years.

“Feet live their own life” is, in fact, based on Hughes’ first column in the Defender, making it an excellent introduction to the character. Being a column, it is a very short short story, running to just three pages in the anthology. It is set in a bar, as I think are all the Simple stories, and comprises a conversation between an unnamed, somewhat serious narrator, a foil in other words, and Simple. It starts:

“If you want to know about my life,” said Simple as he blew the foam from the top of the newly filled glass the bartender put before him, “don’t look at my face, don’t look at my hands. Look at my feet and see if you can tell how long I been standing on them.”

It is a humorous character study with a political edge and a lacing of wisdom. Simple is – as his name suggests – an ordinary man, a black everyman. In this story, he introduces his readers to the travails of his life, to which those like him, the people Hughes wanted to reach and represent, could relate:

These feet have supported everything from a cotton bale to a hongry woman. These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with coloured. These feet have stood at altars, crap tables, free lunches, bars, graves, kitchen doors, betting windows, hospital clinics, WPA desks, social security railings, and in all kinds of lines from soup lines to the draft …

These are life events his readers knew. When our narrator counters that all this is general, and asks for something specific that his feet have done, Simple tells him how his right foot had broken the window of a white man’s shop and his left foot had set him off running from the cops. But why, asks our narrator, would he “go around kicking out windows”. Simple says

“You have to ask my great-great-grandpa why. He must of been simple – else why did he let them capture him in Africa and sell him for a slave to breed my great-grandpa in slavery to breed my grandpa in slavery to breed my pa to breed me to look at that window and say, ‘It ain’t mine! Bam-mmm-mm-m!’ and kick it out?”

When our logical narrator suggests that the bar glass he is drinking from is also not his, but he’s not smashing that, Simple responds, logically

“It’s got my beer in it”

I think you get the gist. Simple is a comic character who is able to say the outrageous and the human things and bring his point home. He is humorous and wise, silly and pointed at the same time. I enjoy writing like this, writing that tells the truth with warmth and humour.

I am sure many of you will know Langston Hughes. I’d love to hear your thoughts about reading him – in whatever form you have.

* Read for the 1961 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

Langston Hughes
“Feet live their own life” (first published in The best of Simple, 1961)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 181-183
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online in audio version at archive.org and