Triangular Road: A Memoir (3 page)

More cause for celebration.

During our evenings on the town, my “tour guide” proved to be indefatigable. In fact, as soon as dusk fell, Mr. Hughes seemed to promptly slough off, like so much dead skin,
The Weary Blues
that overcame him at times during the day, and to metamorphose into “a man open to people and parties,” as his fellow poet and Paris habitué, Ted Joans, once described him. A postcard Mr. Hughes sent me sometime after our time together in Europe ended attests to his party-going prowess. He was back in his second home again, this time to celebrate the opening in Paris of James Baldwin’s play,
The Amen Corner.

“Paris again,” the card read. “Loved finding your letter on my return from a week in the Tunisian sun. Jimmy Baldwin threw a BIG spare-ribs party for the
Amen Corner
cast last night all
night. (I were there). Fate and deadlines are catching up with me, so guess I better come home. Oh, Gawd! L. H.”

Truth is, Mr. Hughes was Night People, that odd and perhaps lonely breed of humankind who are most vividly alive and at their best creatively during the hours between midnight and dawn. Aware that I was not of the breed and needed my sleep, most evenings my tour guide would faithfully escort me back to the Hotel California at a reasonable hour. Ever the gentleman, he would
see me safely up the unreliable elevator, after which the poet “open to people and parties” would then once again vanish into the Parisian night, not to reappear until morning and his breakfast of coffee and croissant in the California’s lobby.

“Paris,” he once wrote. “There you can be whatever you want to be. Totally yourself.”

Copenhagen was next on the itinerary with another full schedule of readings and talks. Copenhagen was no gay Paree. After the City of Light, the Danish capital appeared somber and stone-gray, a heavily medieval architectural gray. What distinguished it, of course, were its white nights, the sky above the city remaining the clear translucent blue of a freshwater lake from sunset until sunrise and then all through the day.

Mr. Hughes took advantage of those pale-blue Scandinavian nights to indulge another of his pastimes: reminiscing, reliving his youth. Once the official day was over and we had had our leisurely dinner with wine, part of the night was then spent in his suite at the hotel, with Mr. Hughes, a brilliant raconteur, re-creating for me the glory days
of the Harlem Renaissance: the writers, musicians, painters, philosophers et al. who were among his circle of friends; the small magazines in which he first started to publish—one called
Fire
that lasted all of one issue, and
The Crisis,
the magazine of the NAACP, which is still in existence today. He told riotous stories about the Harlem literati and “niggerati” (those pretentious black folk who loved to put on the dog). “The poet open to people and parties” described for me the rent parties he attended during the Great Depression. (A quarter or fifty cents at the door helped your host pay the rent.)

Moreover, Mr. Hughes clarified for me the ideological war during that period between the politically radical but aristocratic W. E. B. Du Bois and the flamboyant populist Marcus Garvey—with Du Bois calling for the creation of a “Talented Tenth” of intellectuals to lead the struggle for full citizenship, and Garvey placing the working class, the masses in the vanguard. “Rise up, you mighty race!” he exhorted them.

My benefactor often spent the better part of the night educating the fledgling about a period of
our history that had been all but omitted in the standard textbooks of my day.

Then there were the stories from his travels around the world. The poet had been “a travelin’ man” ever since he dropped out of Columbia University at age nineteen and signed on as a mess boy on a freighter bound for Africa. And, yes, he did actually throw his textbooks overboard as he set sail.

Those were his two travel memoirs. I had read
The Big Sea
as a teenager and had privately vowed, even back then, to follow the example of its author. Not only would I become a writer, but a travelin’ woman as well.

During those Copenhagen nights, Mr. Hughes became a kind of West African griot, a tribal elder passing down black American culture and history in an endless wreath of cigarette smoke while nursing a shot glass of gin at his side, taken straight, no chaser.

Berlin, along with any number of other cities in Germany, was next on the itinerary; then it
would be back to Paris again. I would not, though, be accompanying Mr. Hughes on this leg of the tour. It was time for me to return home. There was my son’s increasingly unhappy six-year-old voice over the phone. (He was being taken care of by my sister.) There was, as well, the increasingly nagging thought of the novel I had put aside. Also, I had heard from friends that massive demonstrations were being planned to once again pressure Congress and the president to pass the voting rights bill before the year ended. I definitely wanted to be home for that also.

Mr. Hughes understood. His generation had done its part, as he had pointed out at Africa House in London. The ongoing Struggle was continuing with mine.
“La lutta continua!”
The poet understood as much and would complete the State Department tour on his own. Keeping to the schedule, he flew to Germany at dawn one morning, hours before my flight back to the States was due to depart. Ever thoughtful, ever the gentleman, Mr. Hughes left not one, but two parting gifts for me at the hotel’s reception desk. The note
that accompanied them, written in his large hand, in his signature green ink, on the hotel’s stationery, is another precious memento.

He had not forgotten our aborted steak dinner on the train to Oxford.

I
never had the opportunity to travel with Mr. Hughes again. He nonetheless continued to befriend me and to support my work. Along with the notes and postcards he sent from his travels, he also telephoned from time to time whenever he was in New York. My phone would ring around 11 P.M., and right away I’d know: Mr. Hughes, Night People. Ostensibly, he was calling simply to chat before settling down to work for the night. Actually, the calls had more to do with checking on my output for the day. “How did it go today, Paul-e?” (Still insisting on the feminizing “e” to my name.) “How many pages did you get done?” He was not pleased when all I might have to report for the day was a short paragraph or two that in all likelihood had ended up in the wastepaper basket after being revised to death. A highly prolific, seemingly effortless writer such as Mr. Hughes could not understand a slowpoke like myself who could spend hours laboring over a single sentence. Moreover, as someone who thoroughly enjoyed being famous, he was concerned about the effect of my snail’s pace on my career. Publish
or perish wasn’t only true of the academy. The literary establishment could be equally cruel. My benefactor tried warning me in so many words of the obscurity I might be courting in taking so long to produce so little.

He once lost patience with me. “Paul-e,” he cried over the phone. “Do you realize that I have a book out for every year that you’ve been alive?”(I was in my mid-thirties at the time.) “You better get busy.”

He certainly kept busy. It’s said—and this might well be apocryphal—that up to the moment of his death in the PolyClinic Hospital in New York he had been at work on a new poem. It must not have been going well, because with the last of his strength Mr. Hughes is supposed to have flung his writing pad and pencil across the room.

James Mercer Langston Hughes. Mr. Hughes. For me, he was a loving taskmaster, mentor, teacher, griot, literary sponsor and treasured elder friend. I miss him. Decades have passed since his death in 1967 and I still miss him. A poem of his speaks to that continuing sense of loss.

I’ve KNOWN Rivers: The JAMES River

. . . where the water falleth so rudely and with such violence, as not any boat can pass.

—CAPTAIN JOHN Smith, MAY 1607

 

 

 

R
ichmond, Virginia. Labor Day, 1998. It’s a near ninety-degree September morning, summer still very much in force, but without the dog-day heat and humidity that descends like judgment on this capital city of 200,000 during July and August.

A friend and I have decided to spend part of the holiday on the north bank of the James River,
close to where it flows through the heart of Richmond—or River City, as the Virginian capital is called due to the importance of the James in its creation. Spawned in the Allegheny Mountains to the west,
“the ri-vah,”
as the local folk call the James in an affectionate drawl, courses east some three hundred miles across the state until it reaches Jamestown, the museum of a town that was the first permanent English settlement in America. And after Jamestown, the Atlantic Ocean.

The James. It’s America’s most historic river.

This is the first time my friend and I have visited this particular stretch of the north bank. To reach the water, we find we will have to negotiate a riverbank that at first glance looks as high and steep and thickly forested as the side of a mountain. There’s a crude pathway of log steps to help facilitate the descent. Yet even with the logs, I’m finding the going difficult. Not so my friend, whose name happens to be Virginia, in keeping with the part of her family history that is linked to the Old Dominion. An energetic octogenarian, Virginia is managing the treacherous climb down
with all the aplomb of a seasoned outdoorsman. Small-built and sinewy, my friend seems blessed with a constitution that will permit her to reach the age of a hundred and beyond still fit in body, clear in mind and undaunted in spirit.

Taking heart from her confidence, I follow her down.

The old-growth forest of trees is so thick we can neither glimpse nor hear the river, and only intermittently make out the sky. Then, perhaps ten minutes into our descent, a pair of railroad tracks abruptly brings the log stairway to an end. This section of the riverbank had long been leveled and graded to accommodate yet another branch of the southland’s vast CSX Railway System that had once had its hub in Richmond.

During its ascendancy the capital city had been both a river
and
a railroad town.

A raised and enclosed metal platform takes us safely over the CSX tracks to the lower portion of the riverbank. Here, there’s no log pathway, only the narrowest of trails that seems to drop straight as a plumb line down through the trees and thick
underbrush. We’re willing to risk it, though, because now, suddenly, we hear the river. Slowly, Virginia in the lead, we inch our way down the trail until it finally, unceremoniously, deposits us on a hot, deserted little sandspit of a beach with the James River at its feet.

First thing is to find someplace to sit that’s out of the sun. A quick search turns up a large, somewhat flat stone that calls to mind the oversized ottoman to an easy chair. Best of all, the ottoman stone is lodged near the water’s edge under a tall, canopy-wide willow oak tree that with each breeze seems to transform itself into a huge East Indian punkah fan over our heads.

An ideal spot. And, it turns out, we will have it all to ourselves for the entire morning. The rest of Richmond has chosen to spend the holiday elsewhere.

Recovering from the climb down, we simply sit for a time quietly taking in the river—the rock-bound river. This stretch of the James is a veritable minefield of boulder-size antediluvian rocks that might have been flung there millennia ago by the quick-to-anger God of the Old Testament.
Another one of his commandments might have been broken and, in a tantrum, he had rained down rocks instead of his usual fire. Indeed, the Old Fellow can still be heard fulminating those times when the James at floodtide comes roaring downstream in a whitewater chaos of uprooted trees, hurtling rocks, unmoored boats, drowned dogs, cats, cows and even the occasional human.