50 pages • 1 hour read
Lesa Cline-RansomeFinding Langston
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Conflict Between Inner Self and Outer Appearance
At age 11, Langston is big and strong, like his father. He resists the comparison, however, thinking, “‘Handsome just like his daddy,’ folks been saying since the day I was born, but I never took a liking to the work Daddy did in the fields. Or chopping firewood or toting heavy bundles” (25). Because he is a boy, and a sturdy one at that, people assume Langston is well-suited to strenuous outdoor work like farm labor. Henry also expects Langston to favor rigorous activities, but he is a sensitive, contemplative individual who prefers quietly reading. Langston’s mother recognized and accepted who he is, despite appearances, and allowed him to be himself. Following her death, Langston makes efforts to conceal his feelings from his father, who disapproves of Langston’s enthusiasm for reading and also encourages stoicism and the silent forbearance of suffering. At school, Langston finds himself equally misunderstood. His classmates point at his “run-over shoes” (8) and overalls and call him “country boy,” implying he is coarse and unsophisticated.
While Langston struggles with the tension between his inner and outer selves, he gradually recognizes that people are never entirely who they seem to be on the outside. Miss Fulton appears to be a demanding, uppity neighbor, but with time he sees her as someone who shares his passion for poetry. Likewise, Clem initially presents as a tough character but proves to be thoughtful and sensitive, like Langston. Even more eye-opening and instructive for Langston are the developments that force him to revise his understanding of his parents. Near the end of the novel, as they run their Saturday errands, Langston considers how much better he knows his father—and how to interpret his moods—since moving to Chicago and living in close quarters with him. Within minutes, however, Henry stuns Langston by asking to go to the library, and Langston reflects, “I can’t help but realize that two blocks back I thought I knew my Daddy. Now I’m back to not knowing him again” (104). Langston responds similarly when he unexpectedly finds lines of poetry in his mother’s letters to his father. Langston learns that he cannot presume to fully know anyone, even those closest to him, and that by reserving judgement, he can better appreciate the unexpected potential within everyone.
The novel’s title, Finding Langston, refers to finding Langston Hughes as much as it refers to Langston finding himself. Although Langston finally embraces aspects of himself he concealed from his father, and his father accepts them as well, the novel questions the possibility of grasping the true identity of anyone. Indeed, Langston notes that when he turns “to the first page” (63) of Hughes’s autobiography, he is “still thinking about how you could know someone so well but not know them at all” (63). While he is likely alluding to his newly complicated understanding of his mother, there is some ambiguity about it, which allows suspicion to fall, if briefly, on the reliability of Hughes’s autobiography. In the end, Langston doesn’t fully find himself or Langston Hughes; rather, he finds that knowing himself or anyone is an ongoing process that begins with looking beyond outer appearances.
Poetry as a Means of Self-Reflection
Although the novel ultimately upholds the power of poetry to reflect the inner self of individuals regardless of gender, race, or class, when Langston’s narrative begins, he is burdened by presumptions that books are off-limits to him because of his identity. Langston’s father objects to his son’s penchant for reading largely on the grounds that it’s a quiet indoor occupation, which codes it as traditionally feminine. Arguing the merits of reading with Langston’s mother, Henry declares, “Sitting in the house reading ain’t gonna help him grow into a man, Teena. There’s things a boy’s gotta learn” (20). While Langston’s mother contests the notion that reading is a gendered activity, she implies that books are a feature of White privilege when she tells Langston about libraries. He gapes at her description of a place brimming with books and eagerly asks if she’s been inside, but he is disappointed to hear her conclude, “They don’t let colored folks in libraries, baby” (19). Due to the messages he has internalized about gender, race, and reading, Langston represses his passion for books as well as his sensitive, reflective nature.
When Langston enters the Chicago Public Library’s George Cleveland Hall Branch, he is hoping someone can direct him home, and the librarian does, but not before setting him on his way to rediscovering himself. She assures Langston that the library serves all neighborhood residents, not just those who are White or Black. This revelation is the first of many that invite Langston to reclaim his love of reading. Upon his return visits to the library, he realizes that neither reading nor writing is the preserve of the White community and that among the “many esteemed Negro writers” (28) there are both men and women. The library becomes a sanctuary for Langston, a place where he feels free to indulge his contemplative, sensitive inner self, particularly after he discovers the poetry of Langston Hughes.
Hughes’s poetry inspires Langston to nostalgically reflect on his life in Alabama. The imagery in the poems transports Langston to “Daybreak in Alabama” (30), and he recalls the “tall tall trees” (31), and “the smell of red clay after rain” (31). Attempting to explain the appeal of Hughes’s poetry to his father, Langston says, “These books by Langston Hughes remind me… of home and Mama” (86). For Langston—who has repressed his sensitive, emotional nature—even more significant than poetry’s ability to evoke his past is its power to pull “words from [his] heart [he] never knew [he] had” (32). Poetry serves as a mirror in which Langston perceives not just the boy from Alabama he knows himself to be but also aspects of his inner self he has never fully acknowledged or admitted. He recognizes in Hughes’s poems his own feelings of loneliness, grief, and alienation. As Clem articulates when Langston is at a loss for words, “So the poetry you read is a way of putting all the things you feel inside on the outside” (99). Poetry is thus Langston’s medium for self-reflection, for reviving his memories of the past even as he discovers who he is, deep within, in the present.
The Connection Between Home and Acceptance
Langston’s struggle to affirm his inner self is inseparable from his feelings of homelessness, and the novel grapples with the question of what makes a place a home. From the outset of his narrative, Langston expresses a sense of alienation in his Chicago neighborhood, which he compares unfavorably with the home he left behind in Alabama. His new apartment is “nothing but a room tucked in between and on top of a lot of other rooms” (2). Outside his door is a hallway “smelling like two-day-old garbage” (2) leading to “broke-down stairs” (2) that end up on a loud, bustling city street. Finding himself in this bewildering new environment, Langston admits he “[n]ever really thought much about Alabama’s red dirt roads, but now, all I can think about is kicking up their dust” (1). He longs to return to his rural home, where the days were peaceful and the nights quiet. Langston’s thoughts also continually turn to his mother, and it’s clear that she is synonymous with his idea of home. He remembers her delicious cooking and her attentive housekeeping, but most of all, he remembers how she “made it seem like [he] was all she ever wanted” (13). Langston’s mother loved him unconditionally and celebrated every aspect of him, as if he exceeded all her expectations.
Living with his father in Chicago, Langston reflects, “Daddy ain’t the best company, but ain’t nothing worse than being alone” (2). Henry is not talkative and keeps his thoughts largely to himself, but Langston knows his father’s expectations and how he disappoints them. In Alabama Langston always preferred staying inside and reading with his mother, which sparked conflict between his parents. He recalls when he helped Henry with outdoor chores: “Working and sweating side by side, Daddy didn’t say it, but I could feel his pride in me then” (20). Henry also frowns on emotional displays, so Langston hides his feelings of grief and loneliness, reasoning that the “[o]nly thing worse than crying in front of Daddy is hearing Daddy fuss when I do” (14). There is no one at school with whom Langston can share his inner self, either, as his classmates mock him for his “country boy” appearance, or worse, bully him.
Langston begins to find his way home when he goes through the doors of the George Cleveland Hall Library Branch. In this “house just for books” (19) he is welcome to read as much as he likes, free from any judgment or disapproval. His discovery of Langston Hughes’s poetry opens yet another door for Langston. Although he continues to conceal his feelings—and his reading—from his father, in Hughes’s poems Langston recognizes his own feelings of “missing the South and feeling lonely” (86) and secures validation for them. Moreover, with his realization that his mother named him after Hughes, Langston gains affirmation for his sense of affinity with the poet. His confidence in himself grows, and he shares his true feelings with others, notably his father, who signals his acceptance of Langston by visiting the library with him. As Langston sees it, because his mother guided him to the library, to Hughes’s poetry, “Mama, all the way up in heaven, helped me along the way to finding home” (104). Home is where Langston can be true to himself, and Chicago finally becomes that place.
