Sharpening the Saw: Mind
I can’t remember when I first became acquainted with the poet Langston Hughes, but I remember reading at Bus Boy and Poets in Washington DC. It was warm summer evening in August 2006. I had received a scholarship in the creative non-fiction category for the Flanked Women’s Conference. I was excited. I was excited to be with other women writers. I was excited to stand before an audience on a stage and read. I was holding fast to dreams, because I’ve dreamed of being a writer since fourth grade. Standing on the stage, reading an essay illustrated I was living my dream. More importantly I inhabited a creative space that reflected the American poet Langston Hughes. Hughes had worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in 1920s before his luminary status as poet.
The next time Hughes entered my life I was searching for poem about Alabama by a black poet to include in a novel I was writing set in Alabama. I found his poem “Daybreak in Alabama.”
When I get to be a composer
I’m gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I’m gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.
Once again Hughes brings me to my creative self with goals and objectives and dreams. In the poem, the speaker wants to compose music with a song, a pure song that rises from the least expected “swamp mist” and the aroma of “pine needles” and “red clay after rain.” The composer will write a song that touches everybody with kindness and harmony. As a southern Black woman who grew up in Alabama, buried her hands in red clay dirt, and heard the ugly whispers about “black and white black white black people,” Hughes’ poem reminded me of my dreams to inspire with words that are aromatic and encouraging.
Hughes became a part of my academic space in the classroom semester after semester. I paired “Dream Deferred” with Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, used “Mother to a Son” as an example of an extended metaphor and discussed identity in America through a comparison of Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America” and Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” When I introduced the project Ongoing Diaries, Journals and Notebooks into the classroom, I mimicked the beginning of “Theme for English B” telling students to
Go home and write
A page tonight.
And let that page come out of you
Then, it will be true.
A mantra I lived by for myself with proof inside eighty diaries over a course of three decades. I was connected to Hughes, learning that my dreams will not be deferred. I was connected to Hughes understanding that what I write “will not be white. But it will be a part of” me because we can learn from each other despite race, creed, color or age.
So, when my writing buddy informed me about the i, too, arts collective held in Langston Hughes home in Harlem, I immediately applied for five hours of space to write. Hughes lived in the brownstone during the 1950s and 1960s. His poems reflect Harlem. The house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982; in 2007 a group of artists turned the building into a performing arts space, which didn’t succeed as planned. However bestselling children’s author Renee Watson transformed the space into a non-profit, I, Too Arts Collective, to fund renting and restoring the space as a cultural center.
On Friday, a cold day in December 2018, I inhabited a creative space that reflected Hughes. I didn’t think I needed space to sit and write, but the space was quiet with no distractions unlike my home office when I’m distracted by prepping dinner, tossing in a load of laundry, scanning my book shelf, or searching the web. I sat. I wrote. I focused. I looked around the room to see other writers reading, tapping keyboards, scribbling notes, pondering the next word, phrase or sentence. We were all living the creative life of Langston Hughes, crafting dreams as African American writers composing music by letting one page at a time come out of us.