I Wonder as I Wander

I took a long, unscheduled break from this newsletter. Among other things, my dear old cat, Connor, got sick and died - he is pictured here. Not to mention the distraction of the election, which feels both critical and inexplicable. I keep trying to understand why it is at all close, and failing. My current view is that apart from the roughly third of the country with outright authoritarian views and preferences, a lot of people in the middle simply see it as an ordinary election where they can express their displeasure with inflation or whatever with no adverse consequences. They don’t seem to understand that even in purely economic terms, Trump’s stated policy goals would be a disaster of immense proportions.

***Does breathing exercises***

There has been another issue for me these past few weeks, which is that after the last couple of posts about the Civil War era, I started reading a bunch more books about the time, but had very little to say about them. It’s really not my era in the way the twentieth century interwar period is. Reconstruction and its legacy are interesting to me, but I don’t immediately turn around and pour out my thoughts about them after imbibing a lot of facts. Reading about W.E.B. DuBois and the thesis of Black Reconstruction got me a bit closer, since DuBois is a twentieth century figure. But the figure who hits my writing frequency to a greater degree is Langston Hughes. He wrote a couple of memoirs, but the one chronicling his travels in the 1930s spoke to me. It is called I Wonder as I Wander.

In general, I am interested in Black writers who were attracted to Communism, because it dovetails with an old thesis of mine that British or American communists were for the most part idealists who were led astray rather than hardcore ideologues. An attraction of the Communist Party - as Doris Lessing pointed out in her own memoir - was that it was one of the few fully integrated social groups one could belong to in the 1930s.

Hughes was investigated by Senator McCarthy in the 1950s for his communist sympathies, but it’s not clear to me how committed he was to them. His memoirs suggest he viewed the Soviet Union with some skepticism, as with most other places he visited. He has a wonderful eye for detail and for stories that capture the absurdity of life. The main theme of the Russian episode in I Wonder as I Wander is the utter shambles of the movie project that brought him to Moscow. The script - about labor relations in the American South - was written by a Russian who had never been to the U.S. and had no idea what he was talking about. At first, Hughes had been asked to read the script, to give his opinion. When he said it was wholly unworkable, he was asked to rewrite it. But the thing was so ridiculous that he didn’t know where to begin. Since twenty other Black Americans had been brought over to Moscow to star in the ill-fated picture, which had no functioning script, the trip soon descended into farce.

Similarly, while Hughes is in Spain during the Civil War, what he remarks on are the strange circumstances created by the conflict, such as the fact that he missed breakfast his first day in Madrid and had to wander the besieged city in search of something to eat. At that point, in the summer of 1937, there was only one road supplying Madrid, and food was scarce. He ended up at a bar known for opening a barrel of beer every day at noon - where he could also get a couple of handfuls of steamed snails. That was his breakfast. He and the photographer Harry Dunham shared a room at the top of a glorious mansion owned by a marquis who had fled to Franco’s territory. The only drawback with the place being that it was routinely shelled by the rebels circling Madrid. The residents of the mansion often retreated to a more protected game room at the back, where they would play Hughes’ recordings of Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington to drown out the noise of the bombardment.

The most poignant part of the memoir was the description of his earlier travels, within the States. Having become famous for his poems, Hughes was invited all over the South, and he visited many Black colleges there. During his time at Hampton University, in Virginia, two separate tragedies occurred. A well-known Black educator, Juliette Derricote—dean at a different HBCU—was killed in a car accident in Georgia. She was refused entry to the local hospital because of her race, and died in a nearby private house. On the same weekend, a former Hampton athlete was beaten to death by a Southern mob for accidentally parking in the white lot instead of the “colored” one at a football stadium. The whole campus was in mourning for both people, one loss compounding the other.

Hughes was clearly deeply affected by both deaths, but some of his gallows humor creeps into a description of a different incident in the South:

Dr. Moten thought he might have been lynched for trying to help the woman. For Hughes, the incident highlighted the sick joke quality of Jim Crow. If the powers that be really preferred that white women crack their heads on platforms rather than be touched by people of the wrong color, that sort of thing was bound to happen.

I started reading Hughes’ memoir curious about the link between fascism abroad and in the American south, to his mind. I was a little surprised at this vein of dark humor. But I suppose it’s one of the more obvious points about ideology replacing natural or straightforward behavior. This election season has not lacked for absurdity either.