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Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
–“Dreams,” by Langston Hughes
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re aware that I recently tried to put some distance between myself and Writing – truly I did. But She declined to remove my shackles, choosing instead to perch nearby – a slightly ominous presence wielding a sharpened pen and proffering up a sacrificial cup of steaming joe. Honestly, sometimes She scares me a little.
But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about dreams.
I had forgotten this poem until one day last week when I stumbled across it in a far corner of the Internet; I was lurking there to avoid facing up to responsibility.
It’s what writers do.
Well, maybe with the exception of one. Langston Hughes would know about holding fast to dreams. He died the year I was born, but 16 years later I would discover him in Mr. Grove’s English class where his work was met with mixed reviews.
Growing up in a rural area of Appalachia, my instant connection to Hughes wasn’t shared by many. First and foremost, he was black, and successfully so. He may have also been homosexual, though reports are conflicted on this issue. But that possibility posed another strike against him in the eyes of those angsty teenage boys who sat next to me in English class. And I’m pretty sure Hughes only made it into the curriculum at all because those days were long before the Common Core, and because it was rumored that my favorite English teacher also shared Hughes’ affinity for an alternative lifestyle.
Black, possibly gay, gifted and successful, sadly Hughes occupied a mere mention in a scant semester of classic literature that was soon taken over by unbearably dry readings of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” And call it sacrilege, but I’d rather suffer a beating than be forced to relive those six weeks of drawn-out, Elizabethan torture ever again.
There was no Internet available to mountain schools in Pennsylvania in 1983, but there was still a Waldenbooks located 40 miles away in the thriving metropolis of Hagerstown, MD. There, I found a book on Langston Hughes and his causes – how he worked to raise money for the Scottsboro Boys, how he gave up an education at Columbia University to experience life instead, and how hard he worked throughout his life to remain busy in the literary arts. At one time or another, Hughes was a poet, a playwright, an editor, an essayist, a writer of short stories, a journalist and more. And he was one of the few writers of the time who actually managed to financially support himself entirely through his art. He was also an activist who cheered for the underdog and the misunderstood and the oppressed, and he was all about the working-class man – who couldn’t love that? He’d seen his horrors, and he’d had his moments of jaded epiphany. But God understood him in the end.
Throughout his life, Hughes was difficult to catalog. Some called him a communist, though he denied it. And despite his prowess at penning poetry and prose that cut right to the chase, some detractors pegged him as shallow. He was probably the first and only person to ever refer to the Nobel-Prize-winning writer William Faulkner as a “Southern Cracker Novelist,” like it didn’t take courage to voice that thought aloud back in the day. He wasn’t timid, for sure. He wasn’t pretentious. He believed what he believed and cared little who disagreed with him.
And in response to critics who thoroughly trashed his work as “misinformed” and “malicious” because poor offers up a different kind of provocative, he had this to say:
“I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren’t people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too.”
Damn straight they did.
I love the simplicity in Hughes’ work. I enjoy words that have rhyme and rhythm and purpose. I’ve always been drawn to the Masefields and the Frosts and the Tennysons of the world because they make such pretty, unaffected noises. And I’ve always wanted to be the type of person who could walk away from something as powerful as a Columbia education to pursue something more … meaningful.
But I know, in my heart, I would never have that courage.
I can, however, live vicariously through writers who did. That’s where reading should take you, isn’t it? And Langston Hughes fills that role nicely – especially for anyone who dabbles in the literary arts from time to time.
If he genuinely wasn’t a nice guy, I hope I never know it. I’d rather hold fast to the memory of a lost long-ago book, to hero worship, and to dreams …
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Sources:
Langston Hughes, Biography in Context, Retrieved November 18, 2015 from http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/bic1/person/actionWin?limiter=&displayGroups=&query=&prodId=BIC1&action=e&windowstate=normal&catId=GALE%7C00000000MPQT&scanId=&display-query=&mode=view&userGroupName=nypl&jsid=964b15aaa2bec8b2e9c143e67ebb91a0.
Dwight Garner, Dreams Deferred and Lived: Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, The New York Times, Feb 3 2015.
Image: Public Domain
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