Finding Langston

Henry has left for work, and Langston is anxious to leave for school but can’t find his apartment key. Searching under his father’s bed, he discovers the key as well as a shoebox full of letters. Curiosity overpowers Langston’s respect for privacy, and he opens the letter addressed in big handwriting that his father recently received. Henry’s sister Lena writes that she needs money for the doctor because their mother—Langston’s grandmother—is very ill. Langston can’t remember his strong, indominable grandmother ever being sick. The news troubles Langston and triggers memories of his grandmother caring tenderly for his mother throughout the duration of her terminal illness.

After school, Langston walks to the library and notices the trees turning yellow. He thinks of the Magnolia trees in Alabama. At the library, he checks out another Langston Hughes book and a book about trees.

When Lymon hounds Langston after school the next day, Langston explodes with anger and Lymon punches his face. A teacher quickly intervenes, and Langston hurries home but isn’t stealthy enough to dodge Miss Fulton, who notices his swollen lip. Inside his apartment, Langston is too distracted to read. He hears his father’s footsteps outside, then Miss Fulton’s door opening and their hushed voices in conversation. Henry comes in the apartment and asks Langston what happened. Langston can no longer hold back his pent-up tears.

Henry sits beside Langston. After an awkward silence, Langston says he wants to go back home to Alabama. Henry explains why Alabama has nothing to offer them. Henry and his wife Teena worked tirelessly on their small farm there, but they seemed to fall deeper into debt each year. They heard that in the North, “a man can provide for his family without always scrapping and bowing” (52) within the White ruling structure. Langston’s mother died before they had the means to move North, but it was her dream to do so, to provide Langston with a future other than “working a plot” (52) like his parents. Langston nods, understanding that his father takes pride in the money he now earns at the paper factory.

As they begin dinner, Henry asks about the scuffle Langston got into at school. Certain this question follows from his father’s talk with Miss Fulton, Langston silently curses her but tells his father about Lymon and his accomplices. Henry, who attends church regularly but is less devout after losing his wife, reminds Langston that the “Bible says turn the other cheek” (53). A knock at the door interrupts them. It’s Miss Fulton with a fresh-baked pie, and to Langston’s surprise, his father calls her Pearl.

Instead of going straight to work the next morning, Henry walks Langston to school and talks with the principal.

Langston routinely fills his satchel with books at the library, and Miss Cook sets aside those she thinks he’ll like, especially titles by Langston Hughes. Her habit of referring to Hughes as Langston’s namesake pleases Langston, although he’s convinced “there ain’t no chance Mama named me for a poet who wrote pretty words” (56). The words and imagery in Hughes’s poems speak to Langston, evoking the essence of Alabama so intensely he wonders if Hughes lived there.

When Langston gets home from the library, his father tells him his grandmother has died. This blow is compounded by the news that Henry will go to the funeral in Alabama alone, leaving Langston in the apartment. Miss Fulton has agreed to cook for Langston and check on him. The grief Langston feels over his grandmother’s death reminds him of the day his mother died. His grandmother had sent him to school, assuring him his mother would want him to go, and when he returned, she was gone.

Shortly after Henry leaves for the train, Miss Fulton knocks on the door and invites Langston for dinner. Having endured his father’s bad cooking for so long, Langston relishes the food Miss Fulton has prepared, thinking, “I ain’t had a meal this good since I left home” (60).

Langston takes advantage of his father’s absence to look in the shoebox under his bed. It contains letters Teena wrote to Henry, and although he feels guilty for “stealing secrets” from his parents, Langston reads them. He is surprised to find a short poem in one of his mother’s letters and thinks there “ain’t no way she sat and wrote poetry” (62) after a long day of exhausting housework. After tucking the shoebox back under the bed, Langston opens the autobiography of Langston Hughes that Miss Cook selected for him. A photograph reveals that Hughes was African American too, and Langston—still reflecting on the poem in his mother’s letters—ponders “how you could know someone so well but not know them at all” (63).

When Langston arrives at the library the next day, he is stunned to see Clem talking with Miss Cook. Assuming the school bullies have followed him, Langston confronts Clem after he leaves the children’s area, but Clem denies Langston’s accusations. As Clem explains that he visits the library every Thursday while his mother is working, Langston notes how “small and skinny” (65) he looks compared to Langston’s own solid build. The boys reach an uneasy truce as they talk briefly about books before Clem leaves. Hoping to find Langton Hughes’s portrait, Langston walks by the picture gallery of African American authors and is met with another surprising sight: photographs of several women, one of whom is named Gwendolyn Brooks.

Meals with Miss Fulton are unexpectedly enjoyable. She cooks very well and talks readily, unlike Langston’s brooding father. With her pearl earrings and tidy hairdo, Miss Fulton impresses Langston as “a real lady” (67). It so happens she is a high school English teacher, and when she mentions that her class is studying poetry, Langston doesn’t disguise his interest. She shows him a book containing the works of many different “colored poets” (69), including Langston Hughes. After volunteering that Hughes is one of her favorite poets, Miss Fulton reads aloud his poem, “The Negro Mother.” Langston closes his eyes, reveling in the beauty of the words. When the poem ends, he asks Miss Fulton to read it again.