from The Big Sea

Hughes, Langston. "From The Big Sea." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 77-95. Print.

Although there is a lot that could be discussed from this reading, I want to focus on the idea that the blacks that populated Harlem and became so famous were not in any way representative of African Americans as a whole. It is a kind of simple truth that is obvious once stated, but can easily be ignored until brought up to eye-level. Naturally, the black individuals that are known and remembered today are the ones who were exemplary for one reason or another – the same goes for any one of any race. And, as history buffs always proclaim, history is written by the winners. In the case of the Harlem Renaissance, we remember the “winners” of life; that is, the blacks who made themselves into something more than their majority. Does this demean the efforts of the Harlem artists? No, but it does put what we’re reading on and studying in this class into an altered light. Instead of assuming that the famous men and women are speaking for their race, it is much safer to assume that they are speaking for those who are like them in Harlem. Even this may be a stretch, for some of these writers are clearly only speaking for themselves. I once studied Frederick Douglass’ autobiography, and I wonder how a comparative lecture between the works produced by Harlem blacks would compare to Douglass’ writings. The thoughts are in the same place, yet I can’t help but feel that Douglass’ own life experience produced a more honest document than some of the flowery and supercilious works of Harlem writers.

I also was interested in the notion that the blacks who populated Harlem were (or quickly became) reflections of what their white contemporaries wished to see. As Hughes points out, many of the blacks in Harlem would do things that would never have dreamed of had whites not arrived and expected to see certain things. In a way, it seems like it is being more black than, perhaps, one is. Rather than acting in a common, day-to-day style, you put on a show. I think that this, again, alters how we should view the works of the Renaissance. There is a law in science that states that you cannot observe something without fundamentally changing it; the same applies here, especially since the blacks of Harlem knew that they were being watched by their white visitors.

I was also curious about the notion of the mountain black writers have to face concerning their blackness – that is, how they must either write as if they were black or not write at all. It saddens me to think that everything these men and women wrote had to relate in some way to racial epithets. What if, say, a talented writer in Harlem wanted to write a work of science fiction in the vein of Wells. I doubt that they would have had any success, since the topic is not one that is, as Hughes puts it, part of the fad of Negro-isms. Being a writer, I try my hardest not to be bound by my station in life, but rather to view life from different angles. The characters I produce are inherently part of myself, but people are multifaceted; if I chose to repeatedly focus on one aspect of myself and reproduce it over and over in different works, I believe that I would become bored and move on to other forms of expression. There are only so many ways to say the same thing. My sympathies go out to writers who did not have that freedom.