A Dream Still Deferred: On Langston Hughes’ ‘Harlem’
Titles matter. They provide context and information to poems and allow us to understand the “argument” they might be making. I use the…
Titles matter. They provide context and information to poems and allow us to understand the “argument” they might be making. I use the word “argument” advisedly, because it is unfair to say definitively that a poem has an argument. But poems do have rhetorical elements, and are designed to influence their readers. In that way, they make arguments, and their titles are an integral element of how that argument is to be understood.
“Harlem,” by Langston Hughes, is a poem whose meaning resides in its title. I’ve taught the poem often over the last decade, and the importance of the title to understanding not just the context of the poem but its essential theme has been underscored by this teaching experience. It often is misunderstood, its “argument” about the failed progress toward civil rights lost to a generic reading based on its opening line.
So, when I say that titles matter, therefore, I mean they are not incidental to the understanding of a poem. Before I focus more directly on Hughes, I want to consider several other works about race that rely on their titles for necessary context. When you read “To America” by James Weldon Johnson, for instance, the title tells you that the questions posed by the poem are posed to “America” as an audience, which helps the reader make sense of the second-person used in the poem. “How would you have us,”the speaker asks, the answer implied in the prepositional phrase “as we are?” and reinforced with the follow-up question, which implies a limited choice, an either/or: “as we are? / Or sinking ‘neath the load we bear?” America, what is your answer? Do you want “Our eyes fixed forward on a star? / Or gazing empty at despair?” There is a demand buried in these questions, explained by the title’s direct address.
In contrast, Claude McKay’s poem “America” lands its punch very differently because, unlike Johnson’s poem, it is not addressed to America but is about it; America is the love-hate object of the poem, the party gazed upon by the speaker, and the poem’s metaphors of rulers and monuments and their ultimate collapse into sand are to be taken as prophecy, the love interest doomed to collapse because of its viciousness and cruelty.
Both poems are arguments about race, but they are arguments constructed in very different ways. They offer the same conclusion about — that race’s use by the white majority has weakened the nation by forcing a minority, by virtue of its skin color and recent past as slaves, into various forms of subjugation (slavery, Jim Crow, ghettoes, etc.), and that this effort by the majority is weighing down the nation, acting as “chains” at nation’s feet.
There is a long history of poems of this nature. In “A Small Needful Fact,” Gay explores the humanity of Eric Garner, killed by New York City Police in Staten Island during a decidedly one-sided confrontation over Garner’s selling of loose cigarettes. Garner, who was a physically large black man was portrayed as black men often are in the media: as a petty criminal, as shiftless and as representative of all the stereotypes American culture has used against African Americans in its ugly racial history.
Gay, however, offers a different view. The poem’s speaker offers what the title wants us to understand is necessary perspective, “A Small Needful Fact”: Garner worked for the city in its parks department’s horticultural division. He then makes use of what I’ll call conditional language — “perhaps,” “maybe,” “likely” — that is repeated, until the exact mid-point of the poem, which is when he makes clear that the fact, this necessary piece of information, that Garner likely made things grow. The plants and trees he placed in the ground would “house / and feed small and necessary creatures,” turn “sunlight / into food,” and, quoting and recontextualizing Garner’s final words, “mak(e) it easier / for us to breathe.” Again, it’s the title that sets this up, reminds us that there are facts we need to know that may be unknown, that alter our vision of the world.
Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” must be read through the same lens, not just because it is a poem about civil rights and inequality — it is — but because Hughes tells us through the poem’s title how we should read it. There is no way you can fully understand the anger at the heart of the poem without factoring in why the poem takes as its name of the historically black northern section of Manhattan.
The poem is relatively simple, though in my experience teaching the poem, it often is misunderstood by students. That’s because it often is presented to them without its official title and instead uses its first line — “What happens to a dream deferred?” — in its place. Students, therefore, tend to read the poem as being about personal dreams, a paean to following your bliss that makes its point through a series of negative images — dried raisins, festering sores, rotting meat, and so on.
This reading ignores the poem’s context — which is provided by the title. Harlem World Magazine described the area, in an undated post as “a large neighborhood within the northern section of the New York City borough of Manhattan” that “has been known as a major African-American residential, cultural and business center” since at least the 1920s.
Black residents began to arrive en masse in 1905, with numbers fed by the Great Migration. In the 1920s and 1930s, Central and West Harlem were the focus of the “ Harlem Renaissance “, an outpouring of artistic work without precedent in the American black community. However, with job losses in the time of the Great Depression and the deindustrialization of New York City after World War II, rates of crime and poverty increased significantly.
“Harlem” was written in the 1940s and was published in Montage of a Dream Deferred in 1951. Hughes was writing political commentary and had witnessed riots that shook the large, segregated neighborhood toward the end of World War II. In a piece in the New Republic ( https://newrepublic.com/article/120101/harlem), he described two Harlems — one in which the so-called “Talented Tenth” (see W.E.B. Dubois) live and another in which the people are destitute, sagging, and on edge — one spark from the explosion on which he closes his poem.
He writes that “the people who live in the riot area don’t make enough money really to afford the high rents and the high prices merchants and landlords charge in Harlem,” and they have no connection to the Harlem power-brokers who hobnob with those in power. “(T)he average Harlemite’s impression of white folks, democracy and life in general is rather bad.” He describes these “Harlemites” as “not criminal or low by nature,” but desperate and poor. They are “Slum-shocked,” he writes. A sign at a barbecue — “WE CAN’T PAY OUR BILLS WITH TRUST!CAN YOU?” — a reference to “credit for sandwiches” and that had “nothing to do with the democratic system.” But, he reminds us, it does — “a sort of permanent scarcity of quarters in Harlem” that may very well represent the poverty of trust that left Harlem a potential tinderbox.
Hughes was not the only one to see the potential for cataclysm. James Baldwin wrote in The Nation in the early 1960s that Harlem was “occupied territory,” returning again and again to the levels of anger and despair that he saw as threatening to ignite. This is the context through which we need to read Hughes’ poem.
Let’s go back to the poem’s opening line: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Absent the title, it is a straightforward question. We all have dreams, and all of us likely wonder what might happen were we to put them off. Hughes’ answers, however, set down as a series of questions designed, I think, to leave the outcome in question, might seem extreme if all we are considering is a personal goal.
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?
The title positions the poem in the political realm, transforms the individual into a collective question. What happens when a dream is deferred in Harlem, pushed off to an unstated date in the future for the people of Harlem, a primarily African American population?
That dream is left unidentified, unstated, but we know what it is. It is the dream of equal rights and full access to democracy for African Americans, a dream deferred from the end of slavery until well after this poem was published and only partially fulfilled today.
So what happens when one’s democratic rights are denied, when one is told to wait, when that is the dream being deferred? Hughes makes a sudden shift from question to statement, though he qualifies it — “Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load.” “Maybe,” as though he’s unsure, or not so much unsure as waiting. There’s an anticipation, a subtle pause generated by the stanza break. “Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load.” Stop. Exhale. And then the final question, set off by itself, in italics: “ Or does it explode? “
This is the same question Baldwin imagines being asked to ponder in “A Report from Occupied Territory,” his essay in The Nation. Baldwin imagines being summoned to meet with friends over dinner in Washington and being asked “what’s going to happen this summer?”
This question, translated, meant: Do you think that any of those unemployed, unemployable Negroes who are going to be on the streets all summer will cause us any trouble? What do you think we should do about it? But, later on, I concluded that I had got the second part of the question wrong, they really meant, what was I going to do about it?
The issue is an estrangement from broader American society, he says, that can be addressed, were the government and the white majority willing to do so. Instead, it abdicates its responsibility and forfeits its legitimacy within the black community.
(T)he government which can force me to pay my taxes and force me to fight in its defense anywhere in the world does not have the authority to say that it cannot protect my right to vote or my right to earn a living or my right to live anywhere I choose. Furthermore, no nation, wishing to call itself free, can possibly survive so massive a defection.
The government has chosen historically not to address this, preferring to leave a mass of people suffering at their wit’s end as they are forced to navigate systems of oppression that extend beyond the South’s Jim Crow laws to include employment, housing, and financial discrimination in the North. They are the unheard that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described to Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, who have turned to violence as the only way to cut through their cloak of invisibility.
Baldwin called it a powder keg. King raises the specter of an “extremism for hate” (he describes nonviolent direct action as being extremism “for love”) in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and numerous sermons, that it was past time for change, that discontent was growing in the black community and the emotional pressure had to be released (King 138).
“Maybe it just sags / like a heavy load.” But we know it doesn’t. We know that we are beyond the sagging, that, to paraphrase Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, the the dream becomes sick and tired of being sick and tired.
We know that the violence continues, even as those in power — now white and black — call for calm, call for restraint. The reality is that the dream for too many remains deferred and that the systemic racism and structured violence continues to act as a catalyst, a spark. The racism is the fuel, and the practiced response, the tactics relied on by black and brown people to survive, have allowed the anger over the deferral to fester like a sore.
So, when Walter Scott flees a traffic stop and killed by police in North Charleston, S.C The response is anger, as it was anger when Trayvon Martin was killed, and Michael Brown was killed, and Eric Garner, Tamil Rice, and so many others. Scott — like so many black men and women — was unarmed and shot in the back as he ran, the officer planting a taser on his prone body. Kamilah Aisha Moon, in “Perfect Form,” reminds us that there was nothing new in the Scott shooting, that the muscle memory that led him to run and led the officer to shoot is ingrained in our collective American psyche.
Scott, a man in his 50, shows “perfect form,” as the title indicates. He “must have been a track athlete,” a runner, who had “Too much majesty in his last strides” to be anything else. For Scott, for all African Americans, “So much depends on instinct, ingrained / legacies and American pastimes.” There are no winners in this race, she writes, just
black men chased for sport-
heat after heat
of longstanding, savage races
that always finish the same way.
Perfect Form — which the title demands we acknowledge — is developed by, is earned by, is demanded of black men by our culture, and “the body remembers what it has been / taught, keeping perfect form.” Running on a treadmill, sagging under a heavy load.
So, yes, it does explode — in Harlem and Watts, in Newark and Chicago, in Los Angeles and in Los Angeles again later, and later still in Ferguson and Baltimore. Not because a generic dream has been dashed, but because the real dreams of Harlem and Harlemites have been and continue to be suffocated.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “A Report from Occupied Territory.” The Nation (online). 11 July 1966. https://www.thenation.com/article/report-occupied-territory/ Accessed 18 April 2019.
Gay, Ross. “A Small Needful Fact.” https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/small-needful-fact
Hughes, Langston. “Harlem.” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad. Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, p. 426.
Johnson, James Weldon. “To America.”
King Jr., The Rev. Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Radical King, ed by Cornel West. Beacon Press 2015. Pp. 125–145.
McKay, Claude. “America.”
Moon, Kamilah Aisha. “Perfect Form.” https://m.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/perfect-form
“Harlem History.” Harlem World. N.d. https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/harlem-history/ Accessed 18 April 2019.
Originally published at http://kaletblog.wordpress.com on October 30, 2019.