Finding Langston

Until a few months before the beginning of the novel, Henry had lived in Alabama with his wife Teena and his son Langston. When he first saw Teena, “she was reading” (88), but after they married and became sharecroppers, there was no time for anything but work. Henry and Teena had a loving marriage and rarely argued, except when they disagreed over their expectations for their only child. While Teena encouraged Langston’s fondness for reading, Henry objected, believing a boy “should be outside playing” (20) and helping around the farm. Despite their hard work, Henry and his wife only fell deeper into debt. As they began to understand that the structural racism in the South would always prevent them from rising above poverty, Henry and Teena made plans to move north, but then Teena became ill and died. Because Alabama had nothing more to offer him, Henry moved with Langston to Chicago.

Henry is a proud man. When Langston asks if he is angered by city folks calling him “country,” Henry insists, “Ain’t no shame in being from the country” (37), but he has no wish to move back there. He explains to Langston that, as a worker at a paper factory, “I ain’t gotta spend my days yessiring and nosiring. Just do the work, and collect my check […]. Helps me hold my head just a little bit higher” (52). He also takes pride in sending some of his earnings back home to his sister, who is caring for Langston’s ailing grandmother. Although Henry does not often share his thoughts and feelings, it is clear he values the greater (though still limited) freedom he has in the North to achieve an identity that aligns with traditional masculinity. Langston is surprised when Henry ultimately accepts that his son’s interests do not match his own (or those of traditional masculinity), but given Henry’s own experiences with oppression, perhaps it is not unexpected that he supports Langston’s pursuit of his dreams.

Because the novel’s characters and events are filtered through Langston’s perception, the reader’s first impression of Miss Fulton is not flattering. Miss Fulton, a schoolteacher whose likely age is about 30, lives across the hall from Langston, on the top floor of the apartment building. Although Langston doesn’t know his other neighbors by name, Miss Fulton did not hesitate to introduce herself and begin asking Langston for help with chores and errands. As Langton sees it, the “only time she talks to me is when she’s asking for my help. More like telling me to help. Get over here and I need you” (3). Langston concedes that she’s pretty, like his mother, “but she’s as wide as my mama was narrow. [… And] mean as my mama was kind” (3). Langston decides that folks in Alabama would call her “uppity.”

As the novel unfolds, however, Langston learns that Miss Fulton has much more in common with his mother than he initially suspected. When she cooks for him during his father’s absence, Langston marvels, “She can put together some dinner. I ain’t had a meal this good since I left home” (60). Moreover, Langston discovers that Miss Fulton loves reading, as did his mother, and that both women had aunts who encouraged their interests in books and learning. Following the advice of her aunt, a Chicago schoolteacher, Miss Fulton earned an education degree and is now marking her 10th year as a high school English teacher. When circumstances allow her to discern Langston’s concealed passion for poetry, Miss Fulton assumes the role of the mentoring aunt in his life. She introduces him to the names of “colored poets” from the Harlem Renaissance, lends him a poetry collection, and tells Langston, “There is no shame in being a reader. And being someone who loves poetry” (79). Miss Fulton also nudges Langston to tell his father about his secret outings to the library. While Miss Fulton is genuinely interested in growing Langston’s appetite for poetry, he wonders if there are other motives behind her attentiveness, particularly when his father starts calling her Pearl.

Teena was Langston’s mother and Henry’s wife. Her recent death from an undisclosed illness preceded Langston and Henry’s move from Alabama to Chicago. As he (unfavorably) compares Miss Fulton to his mother, Langston creates a picture of Teena as attractive, slim, and kind, with “nut-brown” skin and a “gap-toothed smile” (3). Langston knows from overheard whispers at church that his mother couldn’t have more children after his birth, but he was pleased to have her to himself, and she “always made it seem like [he] was all she ever wanted” (13).

When Langton slips into reveries about his home in Alabama, he recalls the clean smell of “wood polish and soap” (36), his mother’s delicious cooking, and, perhaps most significantly, the way she cherished him for who he was. In contrast to Henry, Teena approved of Langston’s fondness for quiet reading, and “[s]he never worried about [him] being a ‘mama’s boy’ like some folks said” (13). It had been her dream to move north, where she believed Langston would have the opportunity to be more than a poor farmer. Throughout the novel Langston learns that his mother not only loved books, but she also admired Langston Hughes and “named her baby boy after the poet” (93). In giving Langston his name, Teena gave him her blessing to follow his heart wherever it leads him—to poetry and the truths it reflects about himself.

Clem first appears in Chapter 2 as one of the three classmates who routinely harass Langston at his new school. A “small and skinny” (65) boy, Clem is not the ringleader of the trio, but rather, along with another boy named Erroll, plays a supporting role to the leading bully Lymon. As Langston notes, Clem and Erroll aren’t “as mean as Lymon, but they’re tryin’. Lymon does the talkin’, they do the laughin’” (9). Because Langston counts Clem among his enemies, it vexes him to see Clem at the library, and he assumes the bullies have breached his refuge. Clem is equally startled to see Langston, however, and explains that he visits the library every Thursday afternoon, when his mother works late keeping house for a White family. Although Clem cannot suddenly dispel Langston’s misgivings about him, he actually does not consider himself Lymon’s friend. Lymon is notorious for his cruelty, so Clem’s seeming alliance with him is more a matter of self-protection than admiration. Like Langston, Clem is sensitive and curious.

When they meet again at the library, Clem and Langston establish their mutual fondness for reading and settle into an uneasy truce. Clem distances himself from Lymon and finally gains Langston’s trust when he rescues the pages Lymon tears from the library book. After helping Langston explain the damaged book to Miss Cook, Clem further proves himself a supportive ally by expressing interest in Langston’s affinity for poetry. Langston responds by talking about not just poetry but also his mother, and Clem shares that his father has died. As Langston walks home alone, he decides that Clem is his first friend in Chicago.

Lymon is a notorious bully at Haines Junior High School and “once bothered a boy so bad, he left Haines and started in a school ’cross town” (9). Now he is bothering Langston and has recruited two other boys, Clem and Erroll, to join him. According to Langston, Lymon is not “quite tall as me, but thin as a rail” (9) and mean. He mocks Langston with the name “country boy,” although Langston suspects he’s also from the South, and amuses himself by pushing and shoving Langston whenever possible. When Lymon directs his malice at Langston’s library book, Langston finally pushes back and exposes how defenseless Lymon really is. Langston’s popularity at school improves after he trounces Lymon, making it apparent that the bully is widely disliked. Finding Langston figures Lymon as unrepentantly mean, but a companion novel, Leaving Lymon (2020), revisits this character, showing him to be a boy from a broken family who is angry at the world.

Born in 1902, Langston Hughes wrote novels, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. After leaving his hometown of Joplin, Missouri, he became a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic movement of the 1920s that embraced African American culture and was centered in New York City. As Lesa Cline-Ransome writes in her author’s note, Hughes made important contributions to the Chicago Black Renaissance as well. According to Cline-Ransome, Hughes lived near George Cleveland Hall Branch Library in the spring of 1939. He drafted his autobiography at the library and was a guest speaker in the library’s series of lectures by “esteemed Negro writers” (28). Hughes pioneered a form of poetry known as “jazz poetry,” so called because the poems’ rhythms emulate those of jazz. After Langston reads a Hughes poem aloud, his father acknowledges its musical style, saying, “Sounds a lot like the blues” (87).

Gwendolyn Brooks was an African American poet. She was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, but shortly thereafter her family moved to Chicago, where she lived for the rest of her life. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for her poetry collection Annie Allen, thus becoming the first African American to receive that award. In 1968 she was named the Poet Laureate of Illinois and held that title until her death in 2000.

Born in 1903, Countee Cullen was an African American writer and a notable figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Best known for his poetry, which uses traditional forms to explore racial themes, Cullen also wrote fiction and published two children’s books before his death in 1946.