Melvin B. Tolson, Langston
Hughes, and Theories of the Archive

Kathy Lou
Schultz

   
    The importance of archives lies
not only in the ways in which their contents can
be used physically to mark history; as Jacques
Derrida shows, the archive also creates within it
implications extending to the exercise of power
and social control. In Archive Fever: A
Freudian Impression, he explains that the
term archive “coordinates two principles
in one”: “commencement” and “commandment.”
Beginning with the Greek arkhē,
Derrida joins the first principle, “there where
things commence,” the “physical,
historical, ontological principle,” with the
second, the legal valence “there where men
and gods command,” which is also
importantly “there where authority, social
order are exercised, in this place from
which order is given” (1). The historical
and social implications of the making of the
archive are thus always contested. In their work
of the 1950s, African American poets Langston
Hughes and Melvin B. Tolson
intervene into the construction of the archive of
U.S.
history, using their poems to comment upon the
making of national identity. As African Americans
situated under the historical weight of the state
using the entire force of its various
apparatuses—religious, economic, and legal—to
destroy the history and culture of people of
African descent in order to preserve the
institution of slavery, Hughes, in “Prelude to Our
Age: A Negro History Poem” (1951), and Tolson, in Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia (1953), “write
back” by using the poem form to archive African
American accomplishment. Hughes and Tolson write into the
voids in official records, making their own
histories, highlighting the fact that the
construction of the archive—of memory—must
constantly be tended. “There is no political power
without control of the archive, if not of memory,”
Derrida reminds us; “[e]ffective
democratization can always be measured by this
essential criterion: the participation in and the
access to the archive, its constitution, and its
interpretation” (Archive 4n1). Combating
potential effacement by the social and legal
conditions of daily life for black men in
mid-twentieth-century America, Hughes and Tolson present a
revisionist agenda constituted not only by the
conscious, assertive action of writing people of
African descent into the historical record, but
also by a palimpsestic
writing onto, an action of overwriting. In doing
so, each overwrites accepted narratives of
American nationhood.

Exploring
further the origins of the meanings of the archive
(or the archive of meaning), Derrida asserts that
the initial meaning of archive derives
from the Greek arkheion:
“a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of
the superior magistrates, the archons,
those who commanded.” The archons are not
only entrusted with guarding the documents in the
archive; they are also charged with interpreting
them: “Entrusted to such archons, these documents
in effect speak the law” (Archive 2). The
“dwelling” of the archons and the archive
importantly “marks this institutional passage from
the private to the public, which does not always
mean from the secret to the nonsecret,”
a process that has significant implications for
assigning and consolidating meaning (2-3). “By
consignation,” Derrida writes, “we do not only
mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act
of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to
put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a
place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning
through gathering together signs” (3).
Further, “[c]onsignation
aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or
a synchrony in which all the elements articulate
the unity of an ideal configuration.” Centering
African American history within the narrative of
an American history that ignored people of African
descent, as both Tolson
and Hughes do in their poems, disrupts the unitary
system of belief necessary to cohere
national identity in the 1950s.

The
process of gathering and classifying that Derrida
describes is not neutral; it contains—and
conceals—within it the power to assign and
interpret meaning, to “speak the law” (Archive
2). This power is played out in the
institutionalization of the archive: “A science of
the archive must include the theory of this
institutionalization, that is to say, the theory
both of the law which begins by inscribing itself
there and of the right which authorizes it” (4).
The implication of archive as law has particular
import for African American poets Tolson and Hughes writing
in pre-civil rights America, as I shall
demonstrate by taking Derrida’s theory of the
archive—and its Freudian underpinnings—and moving
African American experience to the center.[1]

 Using
African American theorists to engage Freud
requires that the psychoanalytic paradigm be
redrawn. Derrida’s psychoanalytic frame—an
analysis of the Freudian “death drive”—exposes the “fever” of the
unconscious to both save and destroy. Also called
the “destruction drive” or the “aggression drive,”
the death drive is, for Freud, originally a
process working within (and upon) the individual.
When African Americans are brought into this
psychoanalytic context, however, it becomes
apparent that one significant manifestation of the
death drive is the death drive that comes from
without, not from within, the self. Freud himself
suggests a mirroring of the processes of the
individual unconscious in group dynamics in his
assertion in Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego that “[t]he contrast between
individual psychology and social or group
psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be
full of significance, loses a great deal of its
sharpness when it is examined more closely” (627).
In fact, Freud found individual and group
psychology to be essentially the same. Published
in 1921, Freud’s comments on group psychology,
which he defines as being “concerned with the
individual man as a member of a race, of a nation,
of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or
as a component part of a crowd of people who have
been organized into a group at some particular
time for some definite purpose” (627-28), provide
a useful follow-up to his postulations on the
death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
published in 1920.

What I am
terming a culture of the death drive works to
strip African Americans of humanity, language, and
lineage.[2] In
reordering the focus of death-drive theory to
include the specific circumstances of African
American life, we can begin to see the
significance of the archive as law for African
American poets—particularly those living and
writing in the Jim Crow era. In “Prelude to Our
Age” and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia,
Hughes and Tolson not
only address their contemporary moment but also
confront the weight of the effacement of black
people’s agency that was initiated in America’s
pre-national period even as the colonists spoke
out for autonomy from Great Britain. In a letter
to Samson Occum
published in 1774, Phillis
Wheatley elegantly analyzes the multiple
hypocrisies of colonists who fought for their own
freedom while holding slaves, decrying the
“strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words
and Actions are so diametrically opposite.” She
wryly concludes, “How well the Cry for Liberty,
and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of
oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think
it does not require the Penetration of a
Philosopher to determine” (225).

Furthermore,
both Hughes and Tolson
rigorously challenge the construction of
Eurocentric historical philosophies that in
various ways conflate blackness with absence. In
addition to the impact of G. W. F. Hegel’s broad
pronouncement that the entire continent of Africa
existed outside of history, a viewpoint mirrored
by Europe’s colonialist programs, Hughes and Tolson wrote in a context
within which the racial politics of some white
modernist writers reinforced ideologies such as
Hegel’s.[3] White
modernists working in a variety of styles employed
the metaphor of blackness to express such themes
as silence and abjection. These metaphors traverse
both unconscious and conscious states. Consider
Laura (Riding) Jackson’s “O Vocables
of Love”:

O vocables
of love,

O zones of dreamt responses

Where wing on wing folds in

The negro centuries of sleep

And the thick lips compress

Compendiums of silence—

In a poem struggling to express “the
last crushed vocable,”
blackness performs the act of silencing: “the
thick lips compress / Compendiums of silence—.”
Inside “the negro centuries of sleep,” there is no
history, no language (97).[4]

Working
against such multiple forms of erasure, Hughes and
Tolson produce
accounts of the accomplishments of people of
African descent not only in America
, but also throughout the diaspora. The flowering
of global diasporic
consciousness evident in their poems is informed
by an understanding that the flow and collision of
peoples and cultures result in identities that are
in flux, rather than fixed.[5] In “Prelude
to Our Age,” Hughes writes and unwrites history,
reflecting the mobility and stasis, the starts and
stops, on the path toward achievement of modern
selfhood in a culture determined to defer
indefinitely African Americans’ freedoms. In Turning South
Again (2001), Houston A. Baker,
Jr., “re-thinks” his own theory of black
modernism, pointing out: “Primarily, black
modernism signifies the achievement of a
life-enhancing and empowering public sphere
mobility and the economic solvency of the black
majority…. black modernism is coextensive
with a black citizenship that entails documented
mobility (driver’s license, passport, green card,
social security card) and access to a decent job
at a decent rate of pay” (33). Baker also
highlights the achievement of voting rights as
evidence of black modernism. It is important to
note that in order to become “modern,” African
Americans needed to secure rights that were
already given to the white majority. These
public-sphere rights are under investigation in
“Prelude to Our Age.” Without these legal rights,
African Americans’ history in Hughes’s poem
“shadows” the narrative of American nationhood, as
a ghost whose silhouette is cast from the margins.

In
contrast, Tolson’s
experimental forms produce a fluidity that allows
his poem to flow both backward and forward in
historical time, and in and through a multiplicity
of identities, reflecting a futuristic, global
understanding of the construction of the self.
“Globe-traversing influences, energies, and
resistances—far from being minor deviations from
nation-based fundamentals,” Jahan
Ramazani asserts,
“have arguably styled and shaped poetry in English
from the modernist era to the present” (332). Transnationality takes on
particular importance for mid-century African
American poets whose
agency as “Americans” was still subjected to legal
restriction, putting the very notion of nationhood
into flux, and under critique. The literal and imagined
“globe-traversing” that Hughes and Tolson undertook in
their lives and writing was rooted in their
historical understanding of the conditions of
slavery and the international slave trade.[6] Hughes’s
“Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem”
produces a kind of stasis in which the traumas of
slavery, both those of the past and those
reverberating into the present, do not allow the
future to be imagined. The contrasting movement in
Tolson’s Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia is generated
formally, in part through the intertextual project
enacted by his own style of modernist endnotes.

Tolson’s Afro-Modernist Epic
Interventions

For Tolson, the manifestations
of what I am calling “poem as archive,” as site of
preservation, work on multiple levels. First, Tolson utilized the poem
itself as a receptacle, or archive, consciously
constructing his poems for the preservation of
African and African American history through the
use of African and African American vernacular
forms, including blues lyrics. Indeed, he saw the
role of the poet as that of a collector of the
idioms of the people: “I like to go about places,
hobnob with people, gather rich epithets and
proverbs in churches and taverns, in cotton fields
and dance halls, in streets and toilets” (“Poet’s
Odyssey” 184). (Hughes’s archival drive is also
evident: his many blues poems serve to preserve
the unique formal structure of this African
American musical form.) Tolson
continues to use the poem as a site of collection
with the many African proverbs included in Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia. His last work,
Harlem Gallery (1965), takes this process even further,
utilizing vernacular forms as a
compositional structure. Rather than simply
narrating history, then, Tolson
encodes history through the form of the poem
itself.

Second, Tolson was concerned with
the placement of the poem as object within
literature’s definitive archive, the canon of
so-called great works. In this respect, Tolson had faith in
history as the ultimate adjudicator. In
anticipation of that judgment, in “The Poet,” a
poem from Rendezvous with America (1944)
that announces Tolson’s
transition to modernist method, the poet prepares
to endure “the wormwood of anonymous years” (Harlem
Gallery 28). Tolson
had a sense of writing for what John Ciardi in
1958 termed “the vertical audience” (as opposed to
“the horizontal audience”): “The horizontal
audience consists of everybody who is alive at
this moment. The vertical audience consists of
everyone, vertically through time, who will ever
read a given poem…. All good poets write for the
vertical audience. The vertical audience for
Dante, for example, is now six centuries old. And
it is growing” (35). (Nonetheless, the relation of
Tolson’s work to the
modernist canon continues to be problematic for
many.)[7]

Tolson’s
self-conscious immersion in modernism in the 1950s
is evident in his highly imbricated allusions in Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia. Libretto
is an eight-section, serial epic structured on the
do-re-mi diatonic musical scale. Completing the
octave, the poem ascends to a final futuristic,
utopian vision displaying an optimism that
distinguishes it from Hughes’s work of the same
decade. Tolson’s
vision of Liberia
is constructed through both imaginative flights
and extensive research. An article in the
Washington, D.C., newspaper Evening Star
announcing the upcoming release of Libretto
declares, “After five years of work, which
included the reading of 500 books, the poem, an
epic, is ready” (“Liberian Laureate”). The sixteen
pages of notes to the poem contain ample evidence
of that research, though no firsthand observations
of the country itself. In fact, Tolson may never have
visited Liberia
. The writer of the Evening Star article
conjectures, “surely he is the first poet laureate
of a country he has never seen.” Tolson’s papers at the
Library of Congress contain invitations to attend
events in Liberia, January 1-9, 1956, celebrating
the inauguration of Liberian president-elect
William V.S. Tubman, but there is no evidence that
Tolson actually went
(“Programme of
Ceremonies”).[8] This
circumstance becomes important as we consider the
ways in which in the making of his poem Tolson constructed ” Liberia
” out of texts.

Tolson was given the
honorary title “Poet Laureate of the Liberian
Centennial and Peace Exposition” at a ceremony at
the Liberian Embassy in Washington,
D.C., in July 1947 (Farnsworth 108). His
unusual journey toward becoming poet
laureate of Liberia and writing Libretto
for that country’s centennial reflects the
conflicts and complexities contained within
diasporic
identities. The Evening Star
proclaims that Tolson
achieved his laureate status “by virtue of
having won in 1947 the National Poetry Prize
of the American Negro Exposition” (“Liberian
Laureate”). This detail is likewise included
in a Washington Post article taped
to the same piece of paper in Tolson’s archive in
the Library of Congress, hand-dated January
17, 1954. The reference may be to Tolson’s first-prize
award for “Dark Symphony,” which he won at
the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, an
event that took place in 1940, not 1947.[9] Tolson biographer
Robert M. Farnsworth speculates that the
critical and popular success of Rendezvous
with America, of which the
award-winning poem “Dark Symphony” is a
part, played a major role in Tolson being named
poet laureate of Liberia
. Farnsworth remarks upon two aspects of the
Rendezvous collection: “the strong
assertion that Tolson
makes for black Americans being a part of a
national American identity from its
beginning,” and Tolson’s
“view of America
… playing a part in the worldwide movement
toward democratic self-realization,” an
important issue in colonial Africa following World War II
(108). The Liberian centennial was of
great interest to many African Americans.
The centennial commission, based in Washington, D.C., distributed a reprint
of an editorial from the Oklahoma newspaper The
Black Dispatch dated December
28, 1946, which states: “All of the
13 million Negroes in the United States
should be intensely interested in
the Liberian Centennial which will
be celebrated by the Republic of Liberia July 26,
1947. Founded by ex-slaves 100
years ago, Liberia
is today the only republic in
Africa
in which Negroes control
their own government”
(“Liberian Centennial”).

Farnsworth
surmises that Tolson’s
appointment to the poet laureate position was also
facilitated by Tolson’s
connections at historically black Lincoln
University, the school established for African
American men in Pennsylvania from which both Tolson and Hughes
graduated (108). Horace Mann Bond, a Lincoln
alumnus and member of the Lincoln debate team
along with Tolson,
served on the Liberian Centennial Commission and
was named president of Lincoln in 1945 (107-8).
Farnsworth conjectures: “Bond’s appointment as
president of Lincoln
University unquestionably enhanced his
position as a member of the Liberian
Centennial Commission. It seems reasonable
to assume that he thus played a key role in
the appointment of Tolson”
to the position of poet laureate of Liberia
(108).[10]
Lincoln University had a strong historical
connection to Liberia: both the university,
originally called Ashmun
Institute in honor of Jehudi
Ashmun, a
founder of the nation of Liberia, and the
Liberian venture itself were sponsored by
the American Colonization Society (ACS)
(Farnsworth 108).[11] (Ashmun
Institute was renamed Lincoln University
in 1866, after President Abraham Lincoln.)
Illustrating the Lincoln University-Liberia
connection, Tolson
writes in endnote 245 to Libretto,
“The memory of the white pilgrim [Jehudi Ashmun] survives in
old Ashmun Hall
and in the Greek and Latin inscriptions cut
in stones sacred to Lincoln men.”

The
missionary aspects of the ACS (with their
attendant problematics)
mirror those of Lincoln
University, examples of which are praised in
a 1928 issue of Lincoln University
Herald:

When the
dedicatory sermon was preached at the
founding of Lincoln University (then Ashmun
Institute), Rev. C. Van Rensselaer, D.D.,
the preacher, took as his theme, “God will
be glorified in Africa.” The missionary
purpose in the founding of the institution
has been carried out not only by its first
graduate, but by some thirty others who have
gone as missionaries to South Africa ,
Liberia , Nigeria , and during the war to
the native troops in East Africa.

                                                                 
  
                                                  
(Johnson 5)

Although the
“back to Africa” movement in its various forms—from
the ACS to Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro
Improvement Association—appeared to contain
liberating potential, one also recognizes the
oppressive influence of the goal of “Christianizing
and civilizing” Africans, as missionaries from
Lincoln University sought to do, a justification
that had been used for the continuation of slavery
in North America (“Colonization”). Frederick
Douglass had clearly recognized the ways in which
the colonization project could be used to extend the
reach of slavery throughout the U.S.
In a column in The North Star dated January
26, 1849, he calls the Liberian venture the
“wrinkled old ‘red herring’ of colonization” and “a
ruse to divert the attention of the people
from the foul abomination which is sought to be
forced upon the free soil of California and New
Mexico, and which is now struggling for existence in
Kentucky, Virginia and the District of Columbia”
(“Colonization”).[12]

William
Lloyd Garrison, while initially a supporter of the
ACS’s mandates, finally came out in strong
opposition to them, recognizing, as William E.
Cain shows, that “Some members [of the ACS] did
promote emancipation and the return of slaves to
their own continent. But the overriding desire in
the society was to siphon off free blacks who
jeopardized Southern slavery and white supremacy”
(9). In a strongly worded letter dated July 30,
1831, Garrison explains his moral objections to
colonization:

[T]he moving and controlling
incentives of the friends of African Colonization
may be summed up in a single sentence: they
have an antipathy against the blacks. They
do not wish to admit them to an equality. They can
tolerate them only as servants and slaves, but
never as brethren and friends. They can love and
benefit them four thousand miles off, but not at
home.

 
                                                                                                    
(qtd. in Cain 10)

In addition,
Garrison recognized the potential for calamity in U.S. colonization
of the west coast of Africa.
In “Exposure of the American Colonization
Society”(1832), Garrison presciently notes: “I
avow it—the natural tendency of the colony at
Liberia excites the most melancholy apprehensions
in my mind. Its birth was conceived in blood, and
its footsteps will be marked with blood down to
old age—the blood of the poor natives—unless a
special interposition of Divine Providence prevent
such a calamity” (24-25). Indeed, the importation
of European American culture by blacks from America to Liberia
resulted in strange confluences:

In many respects, emigrants to
Liberia
re-created an American society there. The
colonists spoke English and retained American
manners, dress, and housing styles. Affluent
citizens constructed two-story houses composed of
a stone basement and a wood-framed body with a
portico on both the front and rear, a style copied
from buildings in the southern American states
from which most of the emigrants came. Liberia
‘s president lived in a handsome stone mansion
that resembled a southern plantation house.

(” Liberia
“)

Surely there is something bizarre about
a freed American black building “a southern
plantation house” in which to reside while ruling
over indigenous Africans. The colonizers’
influence produced tensions between the immigrants
and indigenous Africans that put in motion the
strife we still see in Liberia.[13] Although
descendants of freed slaves from the Americas
constitute only about 5 percent of Liberia
‘s current population, members of this group have
continued to rule the country (“Liberia Country
Profile”).

As
Garrison predicted,
Liberia
‘s history does continue to be marked in blood,
the blood of indigenous Africans in particular. In
2007, warlord-turned-president Charles G. Taylor
was brought before a United Nations-backed
tribunal at The Hague on charges of war crimes. [14] “A
descendant of the freed slaves who returned from
North America to found Liberia in the 19th
century, Mr. Taylor became notorious during his
years in power for the treatment of the children
who were pressed into the armies he raised”
(“Charles G. Taylor”).[15] In contrast
to the historical consequences of the colonization
project that we must consider from the vantage
point of the present, the text Tolson produced for the
Liberian Centennial Commission enacts a
celebration of modern diasporic
identity as imagined by him in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, when there was optimistic news coming
from Liberia heralding “progress,” on which Tolson chose to focus.

Headlines
in the magazine Liberia Today, published
by the Liberian Embassy in
Washington, D.C., and found in Tolson’s archive,
tout “Liberian progress in agriculture” and
“democracy at work.” Following up on Liberia ‘s
contributions to the Allies’ efforts in
World War II, the journal also highlights
progress in rubber production, including
photos from the Firestone plant in
Monrovia. The mood surrounding the 1956
inauguration of President William V. S.
Tubman is likewise celebratory. The
January 1956 issue of Liberia Today
opens with a story, “12 Years of
Progress,” on Tubman’s leadership: “The
most outstanding feature about
Liberia
today is the effectiveness of the
Development Program initiated and
carried out by the Tubman
Administration” (2). This celebration of
Liberia’s potential is reflected in Tolson’s Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia
through the utopian vision of the final
section of the poem, “Do,” and is
represented by a series of futuristic
vehicles: “The Futurafrique,
the chef d’oeuvre of Liberian /
Motors” (lines 575-76); “The United
Nations Limited,” a train (635); “The Bula Matadi,” an
ocean liner “diesel-engined,
fourfold-decked, / swan-sleek” that
“glides like an ice- / ballet skater out
of the Bight of / Benin” (663-66); and
finally an airplane, “Le Premier des
Noirs, of Pan-African Airways”
(680).[16]
This section is composed of a series of
long, proselike
lines, the final portion of which forms
a visual tower, with flush-left lines
balanced on top of shorter, centered
lines that are both left and right
justified. This visual representation of
balance contrasts with the way in which
cars, for some white modernists,
represent an American culture out of
control: in Spring and All XVIII
(“To Elsie”), William Carlos Williams
writes, “The pure products of America /
go crazy—” (217), and there is “No one /
to witness / and adjust, no one to drive
the car” (219), while in Tolson’s Libretto,
“The Futurafrique,
the chef d’oeuvre of Liberian /
Motors slips through the traffic / swirl
of axial Parsifal-Feirefiz”
(575-77).

The
settlers of Liberia
, freed slaves who reversed the trajectory of the
Middle Passage, are represented in Tolson’s Libretto for
the Republic of Liberia by the glittering
modern vehicle, driving toward a future that Tolson predicts will be
bright. Tolson’s
pyrotechnic vehicle, with an optimistic “accent on
youth and speed / and beauty” (581-82),
“challenges the snow-lily / diadem of the Europa”
(614-15). Tolson thus
arrives at different conclusions than Williams as
to the uses and effects of modernity’s products.
Furthermore, for Tolson,
his interest in the “Negro kinsmen” for whom
“America is my mother, / Liberia is my wife, / And
Africa my brother” lies at the heart of his
representation of modern black identity, one in
which people of African descent throughout the
world share intimate familial connections
(251-54).

The
celebratory tone begins in “Do,” section 1, which
is formed of seven centered stanzas, each opening
with a negation. This section forms a kind of
backward call and response, telling first what
Liberia is not and then what it is, while
disposing of stereotypes applied to Africa,
including “the Dark Continent” (12), a “Question
Mark” (41), and (signifying on T. S. Eliot) a
“waste land” (50).[17] The poem
opens as follows:

                       
Liberia
?

No micro-footnote in a bunioned
book

                Homed
by a pedant

                With a gelded look:

                                                                           
    
                  
             
       (1-4)

Right away the reader is confronted with
unusual images—”bunioned
book,” “gelded look”—and an unusual verb usage,
“homed,” which is an example of what Zora Neale Hurston, in
“Characteristics of Negro Expression,” calls
“verbal nouns” (1043). In colloquial language, the
gloss of this passage might go something like
this: Liberia is not a mere footnote to history in
an old book obsessed over by a castrated (or
barren-looking) teacher overly interested in
parading his (or her) academic learning.[18] Instead, we
are told of Liberia
:

                         You
are

The ladder of survival
dawn men saw

  In the quicksilver sparrow that slips

                  The
eagle’s claw!

                                                                           
    
                      
             
   (5-8)

Liberia
is a way up
for those on the bottom (“[t]he ladder of
survival”), represented by a tiny but clever sparrow
who eludes an eagle’s grasp. “Eagle’s claw” might
also represent American imperialism. Dan McCall
writes: ” Liberia
is a symbol of the slave slipping the claws of the
American eagle. In his opening image Tolson defines Liberia in
terms of flight; the image continues throughout the
poem” (540).

The
second stanza’s negation to the repeated question
” Liberia
?” uses more straightforward language but,
at the same time, perhaps more unusual images: “No
side-show barker’s bioaccident,
/ No corpse of a soul’s errand / To the Dark
Continent” (10-12). Liberia
is not a sideshow to history, nor is it simply the
detritus of European exploration of the ” Dark Continent.” Instead, Liberia is a
promised land that lights the way for Africa’s
future: “The lightning rod of Europe, Canaan’s key, / The rope across the
abyss, / Mehr
licht for
the Africa-To-Be!” (14-16). Tolson draws attention
to the intentionality of Liberia ‘s
founders, for
Liberia
is “No haply black man’s X / Fixed to a Magna
Charta without a magic-square” (18-19). No
black man was forced by circumstance to sign
on to a document that ultimately does not add
up. Instead, Tolson
celebrates Liberia
among the great civilizations of Africa: “The oasis of Tahoua, the salt bar
of Harrar”
(23).

Stanza 6
begins, ” Liberia
? / No Cobra Pirate of the Question Mark”
(41-42). An endnote tells us, “I now know that the
Question Mark is rough water between Scylla and
Charybdis,” a recognition of the conflicts arising
from European colonization of Africa (n42). The Scylla and
Charybdis are a favorite Tolson
allusion, representing the danger of
encountering one evil while seeking to avoid its
opposite. A literal dissection of binary
oppositions is evident in section “Ti” with the
image of Siamese twins Chang and Eng:

  O East, O West,

on tenotomy bent,

  Chang’s tissue is

  Eng’s
ligament!

          Selah!

(457-61)

Though the surgeon seeks to cut the
tendons, Chang’s and Eng’s
bodies are part of the same whole, just as East
cannot be separated from West, black cannot be
separated from white, and Africa and America
are brought together in African American identity,
an experience constructed from the materials of
diaspora and made anew in this poem. Throughout
the poem, Tolson
deconstructs and reenvisions
binary oppositions, displaying a break from what
Mark A. Sanders calls a “Victorian epistemology …
ill-equipped for the twentieth century,” a
hallmark of which is “dichotomous reasoning”
(130). Sanders asserts that
such a break is the point of departure for what
he terms “heterodox modernism,” such as
“‘native’ modernism and Afro-modernism” (130).
Although Tolson’s
work falls historically outside of Sanders’s focus
on the New Negro Renaissance, Tolson clearly typifies
the method of Afro-modernism that Sanders
describes.

“Re,”
section 2, is framed by a series of sayings that
“The Good Gray Bard in Timbuktu chanted” (57). Here, Tolson transports Walt
Whitman to Africa.
Drawing evidence from the Tolson papers housed
at the Library of Congress, Aldon L. Nielsen
shows that “[w]hat Tolson
came to attempt was a decolonizing of
American letters, a task which he saw as
linking him to Whitman” (244). “I had
deserted the great Romantics and
Victorians,” Tolson
states; “Walt Whitman’s exuberance was in
the marrow of my bones” (“Poet’s Odyssey”
195). Tolson’s
reenvisioning of
Whitman epitomizes his ideology of the
African American poet’s position, one that
is formed from all the available materials
of the poet’s heritages. Libretto for
the Republic of Liberia, therefore, is
a representation of modern diasporic identity,
as well as an ode to the African nation of Liberia
. As Keith D. Leonard explains, “Tolson validates his
own epic imagination as a component of these
nonbinary,
Pan-African values of heroism and freedom”
(219).

Tolson utilizes
section 2 to tell of the greatness of African
kingdoms, including Songai.
In addition, “Re” highlights successful African
educational systems of the past, such as the University of Sankoré
and the “Footloose professors,” or “[t]he
nomadic pedagogues gathered at Timbuktu”
(line 81; note 81). Nielsen points out
that “[o]n draft pages of the Libretto
[Tolson] notes, ‘Culture of 14th Century Africa
equal to Europe’s’ (cont. 9), and in the
final version of the poem he transforms
his historical researches into lyric
genealogy” (249). “The Good Gray Bard in Timbuktu” also warns against
the threat of European aggression: “‘ Europe is an empty python
in hiding grass'” (86). “Mi,” one of
the shorter sections at six quatrains,
tells the story of the founding of
Liberia, “Black Pilgrim Fathers to
Cape Mesurado”
(116), and the American Colonization
Society. “Fa”
celebrates an “interlude of peace”
(139) from predators, including a boa
constrictor (“the Bola boa lies /
gorged to the hinges of his jaws”)
(126-27), a vulture or “beaked and
pouched assassin” (130), and a “tawny
typhoon striped with black / torpors
in grasses tan” (135-36).

Encoding
and recording history, section 5, “Sol,” relates
the horror of the Middle Passage and slavery that
the emigrants sailing to Liberia leave behind—”The
brig Elizabeth flaunts her stern / At
auction blocks with the eyes of Cain / And
down-the-river sjamboks“—and
tells the story of Liberian colonist Elijah
Johnson, who was on board that ship (146-48).
“Sol” rises elegantly into a series of African
proverbs formed into tercets,
such as “‘ Africa is a
rubber ball; / the harder you dash it to the
ground, / the higher it will rise‘” (173-75). At
times, multiple proverbs are wedded together to
sculpt the tercet
form:

“It is the grass that suffers
when

two elephants fight. The white man solves

between white sheets his black

“problem. Where would
the rich cream be

without skim milk? The eye can cross

the river in a flood.

(206-11)

“La,” section 6, relates the story of
“Prophet Jehudi Ashmun” (245), “A white
man spined with
dreams” (240) who contributed to the founding of Liberia and of Lincoln University. “Ti,” an extended
section employing centered lines, enacts a
series of blessings:

        O
Calendar of the Century,

       red-letter
the Republic’s birth!

                     O
Hallelujah,

                 oh,
let no Miserere

venom the spinal cord of Afric
earth!

                       Selah!

(255-60)

The 1953 Twyane
edition ends with sixteen pages of endnotes. The
endnotes function as their own canto, a kind of
section 9 that the reader can read straight
through to interesting effect or choose to flip to
while reading the poem proper. However, there are
no indications within the poem as to what lines
lead to endnotes—no endnote numbers are printed in
the poem’s text—lessening the decoding and
authorizing function of Tolson’s
notes. The reader cannot presume that he or she
will be led to the “correct” answer. In addition,
the endnotes enact the poem’s intertextual project,
leading the reader not to explanations but to
other texts, particularly primary texts, as Jon
Woodson has pointed out.[19] For
example, the endnote to line 11, “No corpse of a
soul’s errand,” reads simply, “Cf. Raleigh, The
Soul’s Errand.” The endnote to line 15, “The
rope across the abyss,” states, “V. Nietzsche, Thus
Spake Zarathustra.”
The notes do not tell us why these texts are
important, or what relationship the texts have to
the poem or the individual lines to which they are
linked, but instead, in effect, direct the reader
to a library, with the name of an author and a
title. Thus Libretto for the Republic of
Liberia is like a web that reaches out ever
fuller and wider if the reader takes on the
challenge of study and investigation that the poem
requires. Libretto leads readers back to
the archive.

In
contrast to the notes that simply list a title,
others contain extended anecdotes or quotations
linked to a single word in the poem. There appear
to be two kinds of notes, then, one that opens out
onto an entire text or texts and another that
closes down into a singular quotation. Both types,
however, are “open,” in that each leads out into
an ever more intricate web of knowledge. The poem
becomes, then, less a singular narrative or
“necessary communication” and more a collaborative
learning event, in part because of the
astonishingly diverse array of allusions drawn
from multiple intellectual traditions.[20] Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia
is more of a task than a text. It is an
ongoing conversation, ready to be reentered
whenever the reader chooses to pick up the text
again, like a telephone line that stays
perpetually open. The reader who wants to keep up
his or her end must have an array of foreign
language dictionaries; reference books; and
literary, philosophical, and historical texts at
the ready on the telephone table. The task is one
that may continue days, months, or years, for this
is not a text to be mastered. Tolson consciously resists
mastery. He is the professor who has lain out a
syllabus for students who are eager to learn but
will never master the master himself, Tolson.

Bound by Law:

Hughes’s “Prelude to Our
Age: A Negro History Poem”

Despite
the warnings he outlines, Derrida sounds a
positive note toward the end of Archive Fever:
“The archontic is at
best the takeover of the archive by the brothers.
The equality and the liberty
of brothers. A
certain, still vivacious idea of democracy”
(95). Noting Freud’s illumination of “the
archontic principle of
the archive,” Derrida writes: “No one has
analyzed, that is also to say, deconstructed, the
authority of the archontic
principle better than he.” Perhaps unsurprisingly,
given Freud’s legacies, it is through the lens of
gender that Derrida’s optimistic view of the
potential effects of “the takeover of the archive”
begins to unravel. Derrida admits that “in
[Freud’s] theoretical theses as in the compulsion
of his institutionalizing strategy, Freud repeated
the patriarchal logic” by naming “the patriarchal
right (Vaterrecht)”
as “the civilizing progress of reason.” This Vaterrecht has been
so successful “that certain people can wonder if,
decades after his death, his sons, so many
brothers, can yet speak in their own name.” And,
finally, Derrida wonders what would happen “if
[Freud’s] daughter ever came to life,” if she “was
ever anything other than a phantasm or a specter.”
So too is the black man’s hand in Hughes’s
“Prelude to Our Age” cast in shadow, a specter
haunting recorded history: “The shadow of my hand
/ Across the printed
word” (379).

In a time
out of joint, American history as portrayed in
“Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History Poem” is also
haunted, but by both past and then-present African
American figures. The presence of these specters
represents an “incomplete mourning” of racial
traumas, and without an
incorporation (a “successful mourning”)
of that material, the path to the future remains
forever unseen.[21] Thus in
“Prelude to Our Age,” Hughes writes, “On all these
rolls landmarking
man, / The shadow of
my hand: / Negro” (379). Here the black
man’s hand remains but a shadow, a ghost haunting
recorded history: “The shadow of my hand / Across the printed word.”
According to Jean-Michel Rabaté,
“To haunt signifies to ‘frequent’ a place, to
inhabit it frequently, but to do so in the mode of
an obsessive absence, of nameless remorse” (4).
The shadow in “Prelude to Our Age” exists in a
state of being and not being, as implied in the
term “obsessive absence.” Further, the history of
slavery and the histories of black people’s
triumphs “shadow” American history, and the
remorse for slavery’s impacts is indeed
“nameless.” Thus “Prelude to Our Age” is “A Negro
History Poem,” illustrating that “our age”—that of
the American empire—is built upon the backs of
black people. In addition, as Hughes’s title
illustrates, this poem is a “preface,” which is
further defined as a precursor, or a
representation of a preliminary condition.[22] Thus the
entire poem is a prelude to another age gestured
toward but never realized in the poem. The poem
illustrates what has come before, the preliminary
conditions of slavery and lack of legal
citizenship. However, the new age of achievement
of modern selfhood cannot be conjured because the
narrative of nationhood that defines the citizenry
still excludes African Americans.

The
“rolls landmarking
man” in Hughes’s “Prelude to Our Age” are official
histories that exclude black people’s
accomplishments, and despite the shadow that the
Negro’s hand casts over the printed word, the
“rolls” are still visible, readable. The African
American body is twice disembodied here: first,
the hand is separate from the body that animates
it, and, second, the hand itself is invisible; we
see only its shadow. That shadow, or haunt,
indicates an unseen body and, importantly, a body
without language. The histories of these bodies
are absent, then, not represented in the record.
In contrast, the struggle that Rabaté outlines in
his study of what he terms “Anglo-Saxon ‘high
modernism'” is an internal one: “the haunted poet
struggles against the commonplaces of a
‘quotidian’ that appears all the more evanescent
as it expects the return of the anguishing spirit”
(x). Indeed, Rabaté’s
“central metaphor” is “the transformation of the
writer into a specter, because his own past
returns whenever he imagines that he can predict,
arrange, or control the future” (3). In the world
conjured by Hughes, however, the dramatization of
this conflict occurs in the social, rather than in
the individual, realm. The ghost in Hughes’s
poem—of black peoples’ histories and the black
body itself—is both dead and undead, yet never
alive, and haunts presently from its place within
the shadows, casting itself as palimpsest on the
“rolls landmarking
man.”

Emphasizing
the motif of written and unwritten histories,
Hughes initiates a mini-tour of the move from oral
to written forms of communication in the third
stanza of the poem:

At first only

The spoken word of bard or chief,

And the beaten drum

That carried instant history

Across the night,

Or linked man with the mystery

Of powers beyond sight.

Pictures on stone, hieroglyphics,

Parchment, illuminated scrolls.

(379)

Hughes begins this stanza within an
Africanist context, taking note of “[t]he spoken
word of bard or chief” and the beating of the drum
that carries “instant history.” Significantly, the
bard and the chief play the same role here,
signaling the African griot,
the public singer who carries his or her people’s
history. Hughes acknowledges “the mystery / Of
powers beyond sight” held by the spoken word and
beating drum—forms of history not written, not
“seen”—but moves quickly in the last two lines of
the stanza through technologies of writing, from
hieroglyphics found on stone to illuminated
scrolls.[23] At the end
of this history, the poem (and the reader’s eye)
lands upon an indented couplet: “Homer’s /
‘Blameless Ethiopians'” (379). Hughes thus moves
smoothly from an Africanist context, out to a
Western one, and back to an Africanist context,
drawing attention to the presence of African
people in two foundational Western texts, The
Iliad and The Odyssey, and thus to
Africans’ repressed placement at the center of
Western culture.[24] This move
early in the poem helps to lay the foundation for
the development of a diasporic
consciousness. In the notes to the poem, editor
Arnold Rampersad
asserts, “The reputation of the Ethiopians for
piety was established by the time of composition
of the Homeric epic poems (around 800 b.c.e.)”; in
addition, such information was in circulation
among black intellectuals during the 1940s and
1950s. “Hughes probably found this information,” Rampersad continues, “as
well as other material in the poem, in Arna Bontemps’s The
Story of the Negro (1948), a volume
dedicated to Langston Hughes” (Hughes, Collected
Poems 669).

In
beginning the poem with Homer’s Ethiopians, Hughes
draws the reader’s attention to the fact that in The
Iliad and The Odyssey, the
Ethiopians are in a position of high privilege:
they are visited by both gods and kings. In book 1
of The Iliad, Zeus and the other gods
feast with the “Aithiopians“:
“For Zeus went to the blameless Aithiopians at the Ocean /
yesterday to feast, and the rest of the gods went
with him” (lines 423-24). At the outset of The
Odyssey, the god Poseidon visits the “Aithiopians” as well: “But
Poseidon was gone now to visit the far Aithiopians, / Aithiopians, most distant
of men” (lines 22-23). He returns from Ethiopia
in book 5 (282). King Menelaos
also visits the Ethiopians. Describing his
sufferings in book 4, Menelaos
recounts: “I wandered to Cyprus and Phoenicia , to
the Egyptians, / I reached the Aithiopians, Eremboi, Sidonians, / and Libya
where the rams grow their horns quickly” (83-85).
Although J. W. Gardner notes, “There is general
agreement that from Homer onwards references in
Classical writers to Ethiopia and the Ethiopians
are almost never to modern Ethiopia or to the
highland peoples who were the ancestors or
predecessors of present-day inhabitants of the
Ethiopian plateau” (185), he points out that for
classical authors, “one area in particular came to
be thought of as the land of the Ethiopians—Nubia,
now part of the Sudan.” The Ethiopians assume a
status in Homer’s texts that is both mythic and
actual. The interventions of “Prelude to Our Age”
are thus literary and historical, textually
grounded and historically instructive.

Lorenzo
Thomas notes, “The assertion of the Negro’s
eternal presence—and participation in the great
works of many civilizations—is one of the
arguments put forward by black nationalists to
counter the racist charge that people of African
ancestry have had no significant role in history”
(185). However, the ideology operating within
“Prelude to Our Age” is not Afrocentric; neither
does the poet seek to raise the status of Africans
by privileging their relation to the classics.
Rather, Hughes displays a diasporic
consciousness that operates dialectically between
these two poles. The ideological position that the
poem assumes allows for a fluidity that
encompasses the range of experiences, and
historical contributions, of people of African
descent around the globe. The poem says, in
effect, we (people of African descent) are here
(and here and here) and always have been. The poem
does, then, emphasize “the Negro’s eternal
presence”; the poem also demonstrates that “the
movements of groups always necessarily intersect,
leading to exchange, assimilation, expropriation,
coalition, or dissension,” as Brent Hayes Edwards
posits in his theorizing of the term “diaspora”
(“Practice” 3). African cultures have affected,
and been affected by, the cultures encountered
through the movements of people under
globalization, or, in an illustration from the
poem itself, “Arab and African; the Moors / Gave
Spain her castanets / And Senegal her prayers”
(379). Thus Hughes’s diasporic
consciousness operates across national boundaries,
displaying in the poem an understanding of the
development of cultures within diaspora that
foreshadows the development of critical theory in
the twenty-first century.

Drawing
on the Jewish tradition’s linking of the term
“diaspora” with the concepts of “redemption” and
“return,” Edwards explains in his reading of
Hughes’s Spanish civil war-era works that “we are
often told that it is exactly the sort of
internationalism at stake in the 1930s that has
been superseded by the globalization of the
contemporary period” (“Langston Hughes” 691).
Edwards argues that “the archives of
internationalism can be read for a sensibility—or
more precisely, a poetics—that allows diaspora to
serve as a critique of the totalizing pretensions
of globalization” (691). Edwards shows, finally,
the ways that one can read Hughes’s work “as a writerly engagement in the
politics of capitalist globalization” (691-92).
Hughes’s work of the 1950s shows not only
engagement but also sustained critique.

Significantly,
Hughes’s global consciousness in “Prelude to Our
Age” allows him to demonstrate that blackness is
not an unchanging, ahistorical identity. Instead,
the “exchange, assimilation, expropriation,
coalition, or dissension” brought about through
diaspora creates multiple black identities that
are dependent, in part, upon local historical and
political conditions. This understanding of the
multiplicity within diasporic
“blackness” becomes important because Hughes
distinguishes between “Negro” (African American)
identity and those subject-positions available
elsewhere throughout the world. This emphasis on
the construction of African American identity is
emphasized by the fact that Hughes italicizes
“Negro” throughout the poem. The only other words
italicized in the work are lyrics from spirituals.
But while Jeff Westover argues that Hughes is
seeking in this poem to “imaginatively realiz[e] an ideal diasporan unity” between
America and Africa, my view is that Hughes
purposely upholds the contrast between African
American identity and other national identities in
order to highlight the devastating effects of
slavery on African American culture (1221).

In order
to highlight this contrast in “Prelude to Our
Age,” Hughes compares people of African descent in
America
with those throughout Europe and Asia. In a parallel move, he
highlights the contrast of the written and the
unwritten, noting in his Pan-Africanist vision
of history that “In other lands Dumas and
Pushkin wrote,” while in America, under
conditions of chattel slavery, “we, / Who could
not write, made songs”:[25]

Swing low, sweet chariot,

Coming for to carry me home …

Oh, I looked over
Jordan


And what did I see—

Who one sees in
the poem follows in the next verse: “Phillis, Crispus, Toussaint, /
Banneker, Dumas, Pushkin” (380). The linking of
these historical figures highlights Hughes’s
global consciousness:

All of these were me—

           Not
free:

  As long as one

  Man is in chains,

  No man is free.

(381)

Hughes recognizes the connection of the
Negro’s struggles in America
with those of people of African descent worldwide.
The difference in America
, Hughes stresses, is that due to the history of
slavery, blacks in the U.S.
must first find their voices through song—through
the unwritten. And although Hughes does draw
attention to the soundings of black culture with
his inclusion of what W. E. B. Du Bois calls the
sorrow songs, in this poem silence is specifically
marked by exclusion from written history.

Hughes
deepens this contrast by punning on “right” and
“write” when introducing verses of the songs. Here
we see his understanding of archive as law: in
order to achieve legal rights, one must first be
written into the record. Thus the first spiritual
is introduced with, “those of us who had no rights
/ made an unwritten song”:

Go down, Moses,

Way down in Egypt
land,

And tell old Pharaoh

To let my people go …

(380)

The second (“Swing low, sweet chariot,”)
is introduced with “we, / Who could not write,
made songs.” Thus Hughes visually and aurally
links the acquisition of rights with the act of
writing—”those of us who had no rights” and “we, /
Who could not write”—while also showing that
African Americans during slavery rebelled through
making unwritten songs. With the gesture linking
rights with writing, Hughes aligns himself with
the themes of the classic slave narrative, such as
Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave (1845), which demonstrates that
literacy is the first step toward both mental and
physical freedom.[26]

Hughes is
careful to make clear that the silent, or
unlettered, status of the African American is not
race-specific. By drawing the reader’s attention
to the accomplishments of Alexandre
Dumas and Aleksandr
Pushkin, for example, “Prelude to Our Age”
illustrates that the silence of African Americans
is a country-specific predicament brought about by
the historical conditions of slavery, and not an
inherent feature of the supposed racial
inferiority of people of African descent. Thus the
United States is specifically indicted for its
repression of black history and culture through
outlawing, and in other ways impeding, African
Americans’ acquisition of literacy.[27] The poem
teaches us that elsewhere throughout the diaspora
(in France, in Russia), writers of African descent
contribute to great national literatures.

Hughes
makes clear throughout the poem that the politics
of the written page are always at stake, as
“Prelude to Our Age” assumes the task of filling
in those pages previously left blank in the
historical record. As the poem develops, the
reader is instructed that the Negro’s hand is in
shadow not only in contrast to official,
dominant-culture versions of history. The Negro is
also in the shadow of global diasporic
histories: for example, the Ethiopians in the
Homeric epics; “Aesop, Antar,
Terence, / Various Pharaohs, / Sheba
, too”; and the Moors (379), in addition to the
previous examples of Dumas and Pushkin. Writing
onto America
‘s (literal and figurative) blank page, Hughes
uses “Prelude to Our Age” to record the
contributions of African Americans to the “ever
growing history of man.” As African American
intellectuals and African American publications
come onto the scene, the speaker in “Prelude”
notes that “All the time the written record grows”
(383). With the advent of The Afro-American,
The Black Dispatch, The Crisis, Phylon, Opportunity, and Native
Son,

Papers, stories, poems the
whole world knows—

The ever growing history of man

Shadowed by my hand:

            Negro.

(383)

Although the speaker asserts that these
are publications “the whole world knows,” it as if
they are struggling to “catch up” to the advancing
historical record in America, as the black hand
that wrote them remains in shadow. The official
American historical record does not recognize or
include these black-authored publications. The
“Negro” sees but is not seen, despite the prestige
of the black historical figures whom Hughes
catalogues. The men mentioned in just one stanza
(listed in the poem by last name only) include W.
E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, E. Franklin
Frazier, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg,
Claude McKay, and Countee
Cullen. For those perhaps lesser-known figures
here, Hughes includes full names: Robert S.
Abbott, T. Thomas Fortune. Hughes makes sure that
these men are seen, while at the same time
illustrating their invisibility.

In Specters
of Marx, Derrida writes of “the visor
effect” (7), “the power to see without being
seen” (8). The specter that Derrida theorizes,
however, is quite different from that of the
disembodied hand conjured by Hughes: Derrida
writes of Hamlet’s father. The “visor effect” of
the King’s armor when he reappears as a ghost
creates “the basis [from] which we inherit the
law” (7). Even when the visor is raised, “its
possibility continues to signify that someone,
beneath the armor, can safely see without being
seen or without being identified” (8). Yet African
Americans do not represent law in Hughes’s
poem—quite the opposite. “Even when it is raised,”
Derrida writes, “the visor remains, an available
resource and structure … [which] distinguishes a
visor from the mask with which, nevertheless, it
shares this incomparable power, perhaps the
supreme insignia of power: the power to see
without being seen” (8). The African mask,
however—what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., terms “the
mask-in-motion”—is inseparable from its performative functions,
and “with its immobilized features all the while
mobile, itself is a metaphor for
dialectic—specifically, a dialectic or binary
opposition embracing unresolved or potentially
unresolvable social forms, notions of origins, or
complex issues of value” (168). The mask contains,
as well as reflects, “a coded, secret, hermetic
world, a world discovered only by the initiate”
(167).

This
reference to a “coded, secret, hermetic world”
leads us to Du Bois’s
metaphor of the veil, which further elucidates the
African American experience of seeing without
being seen. Though the veil obstructs, shutting
the young Du Bois out of the white children’s
world (4), there is movement within the veil:
“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and
Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son,
born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in
this American world” (5). Like the baby born with
a caul, the Negro is “gifted with second-sight,”
special knowledge, prescience. Within the veil
there is knowledge of the “deeper recesses” of
Negro life, “the meaning of its religion, the
passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of
its greater souls” (2), the information that
Hughes archives in “Prelude to Our Age.” Although
the placement of the veil “only lets [the Negro] see himself through the revelation of the other
world,” creating the condition of double
consciousness (5), it is important to remember
that Du Bois leaves open the possibility for
movement and self-possession, for the African
American sees both within and through the
veil. This possession of second sight differs from
that of a white American who, without recognizing
it, sees only the veil or, in the words of Paul
Laurence Dunbar, “the mask that grins and lies”
(71). Within Hughes’s poem, the Negro sees his own
history and that of the larger, white-dominated
American historical record, but the official
record does not see or recognize him. The poem
represents the movement of Negro history within
the veil, detailed by Hughes’s many lists, which
are starkly contrasted with an inertia and lack of
progress outside, where the official “rolls landmarking man” ignore
African Americans’ contributions.

Significantly,
the final enactments in the poem of this
contrasting mobility and inertia occur in the
legal realm, for the African American subject
cannot speak the law but is, instead, subject to
it. Even by the end of the poem, when it seems
that Hughes has succeeded in displaying African
Americans’ contributions to democracy, written
them into his own archive, the black man still
remains in shadow:

Thus I help to build democracy

For our nation.

Thus by decree across the history of our land—

The shadow of my hand:

            Negro

(384)

The opening two lines here illustrate
that African Americans’ contributions to democracy
necessitate a legal claim for inclusion in
American history. By this same “decree,” however,
the Negro is in shadow, and he is placed there by
legal requirement. The word “decree” is crucially
located in the center of this section so that it
is possible to interpret the stanza in these two
ways simultaneously: the Negro helps to build
democracy for our nation, showing his
foundational contributions to American nationhood,
yet at the same time he is decreed to be outside
of the legal privileges of that nationhood.
“Decree” works to link the content of the first
three lines, thus legislating the inclusion of
blacks “across the history of our land.” In
addition, “decree” links the last three lines
together: “Thus by decree across the history of
our land— / The shadow of my hand: / Negro.”
The dash also does essential work, underscoring
the linkage of the first three lines, while
setting off the last two. The line preceding the
dash— “Thus by decree across the history of our
land”—thus works as a kind of toggle, linking up
or linking down. The court cases that Hughes cites
at the end of the poem mirror this action.
Although blacks are decreed equal “All the way
from a Jim Crow dining car / To the United States
Supreme Court” (383-84), they also remain
immobilized because “[a]lthough
the Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that a Virginia
statute requiring segregated seating interfered
with interstate commerce and was thus invalid, …
Jim Crow travel laws remained in force in 1954″
(“Digest”). Thus blacks are immobilized within the
mobilization of the train, moving and yet not
moving.

Hughes
first read “Prelude to Our Age: A Negro History
Poem” on October 15, 1950, at the twenty-fifth Schomburg Collection
dedication exercises (Hughes, Collected Poems
669)—an archive begun in 1926, when the personal
collection of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
was added to the Division of Negro Literature,
History and Prints of the New York Public Library.
Notably, given the poem’s content, the collection
(renamed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture in 1972) endures as one of the most
significant African American archives (” Schomberg Center”). Around the time
Hughes presented “Prelude to Our Age,”
“the NAACP was beginning to support
challenges to segregation at the
elementary school level. Five separate
cases were filed in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia,
and Delaware”
(“Teaching with Documents”).
The final decision in Brown
v. Board of Education
declaring “separate but
equal” public schools
unconstitutional was handed
down in 1954, three years
after “Prelude” was first
published. The time of the
poem’s publication thus
represents a tipping point
when African Americans were
on the verge of achieving
legal victories but still
subject to the tyrannies of
Jim Crow.

Hughes
demonstrates in other poems from the early 1950s
that the black man is still “Caught in a crack,”
as in the poem “Consider Me.” The “colored boy”
who is “Downtown at eight / Sometimes working
late,” apologizes to his “Sugar” because “One
don’t make enough / For all the stuff / It takes
to live”:

Forgive me

What I lack,

Black,

Caught in a crack

That splits the world in two

(386)

Significantly, there is no way out of
the polarizing oppositions of black and white,
rich and poor in this poem. The inertia present in
“Prelude to Our Age” (one which will be freed up
in the movement of Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for
Jazz, a decade later) is given an image in
“Consider Me,” that of being caught and
immobilized by hierarchies of power, a state of
being subject to dominant-culture, death-drive
violence, rather than modern, self-owning subject.
Thus Hughes does not anticipate what will be
written upon the page of tomorrow. Bound in the
restrictions of Jim Crow America, it is as if the
imagination cannot move forward; the song we
anticipate to follow the “Prelude” cannot be
written until the conditions of today are
recognized and rectified:

All this

A prelude to our age:

Today.

Tomorrow

Is another

Page.

(384)

Toward an Afro-Modernist
Future

It was
not until the jazz poems of the 1960s that
Hughes’s use of the page as a field allowed for
visual and verbal play, noise rather than silence,
bringing the movement of performativity into and
onto the former immobility of the black-and-white
page. In Ask Your Mama, the “Cultural
Exchange” section enacts diasporic
identity through the musical scoring that is
written down the right-hand side of the page in
italics that play off the left-justified “poem”
printed in all capital letters. Here, “[t]he
rhythmically rough scraping of a guira,” a West
Indian percussion instrument, is followed by “a
lonely flute call” that “merges into
piano variations on German lieder” all
played against a scene where “amorphous Jack-o‘-Lanterns caper” “in the quarter of the Negroes” (477). This
scene, where “boundaries” both “bind” and “unbind[ ]” (477),
gradually changes into “old-time traditional
12-bar blues up strong between verses until
African drums throb against blues” (478).
Hughes’s attention to visual placement is so exact
at this point, that the phrase “between verses”
in the right-hand column is placed beside a stanza
break in the left. Moving from the blues to
African drums and back again, Hughes creates a diasporic modernist form
that performs a modern diasporic
identity crossing both racial and national
borders.

In
contrast, Tolson, in
“A Song for Myself,” which appeared in Phylon in 1945, was
already beginning to imagine a way out of what
Hughes describes as the “crack / That splits the
world in two,” prefiguring the dialectical
recombination that is so much a part of Tolson’s later works. At
this point, that space is a “moat,” a body of
water designed to keep others out, but the
possibility remains that the moat can be filled
and become animated rather than inert. “Who filled
/ The moat / ‘Twixt sheep / And goat?” the speaker
asks. It seems that it will be Tolson’s “I,” the one who
sings not a song “of” myself but a song “for”
(him)self. The poem begins:

I judge

My soul

Eagle

Nor mole:

A man

Is what

He saves

From rot.

(“Harlem
Gallery” 45)

The speaker neither flies above the
earth nor burrows below it: “Eagle / Nor mole,”
his measure is instead what he “saves / From rot,”
just as Tolson
collects and archives proverbs in this poem and
others. Tolson’s
poems highlight a concern with the role of the
poet as preservationist, pointing both back and
forward in historical time. The poem is less
lyrical subject and more archaeological strata.

In
another poem from the 1940s, “Dark Symphony”
(1941), Tolson
animates the past while constructing a path to the
future, employing a form that mirrors the
historical cataloguing also present in Hughes’s
“Prelude to Our Age,” connecting both poets to
Whitman. Tolson
writes of the “history-moulding
ancestors” of the New Negro who modernized culture
and praises the intellectual and cultural
accomplishments of the New Negro who “Strides in
seven-league boots / Along the Highway of Today /
Toward the Promised Land of Tomorrow!” (“Harlem
Gallery” 40). The New Negro is depicted as
both modern superhero and model citizen: “The New
Negro, / Hard-muscled, Fascist-hating, Democracy-ensouled.” There is
physicality here, a presence and movement along
the “Highway of Today” that will lead us to the
“Promised Land of Tomorrow.” Rather than waiting
to turn to a blank page, the unwritten, the
highway lays out a path to what Tolson believes will be
the “Promised Land” of the future. Tolson’s new forms conjure
alternative visions of past, present, and future,
while Hughes pauses to redress the injustices that
have been carried forward into the 1950s in
standard narratives of American nationhood. While
whites may use metaphors of racialization to
express subjective feeling—blackness as “absence,”
or as a target toward which to cast off the
interior violence of the death drive—Hughes and Tolson address the
violence, both figurative and literal, of such
effacement through the creative act of writing
into the record. Their work of the mid twentieth
century provides a crucial example of what
“archive as law” may mean in the African American
context.

__________________________________________________________________________

This article
first appeared in:

Contemporary
Literature. March 20, 2011
52:108-145

  

Kathy Lou
Schultz, assistant professor of English at the
University of Memphis, has published a volume of
poetry, Some Vague Wife (Atelos, 2002); a
collection of prose works, Biting Midge
(Belladonna, 2008); and articles on Muriel
Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, and Myung Mi Kim. She is
writing a book on Melvin B. Tolson,
Langston Hughes, and Amiri
Baraka, titled “‘In the Modern Vein’: The
Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History.” ISBN-13: 978-0230338739

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Footnotes

Research for this article was supported
in part by a faculty research grant from the College of
Arts and Sciences at the
University of Memphis. I also wish to thank
Rachel Blau
DuPlessis,
Jeremy Braddock, Leigh Anne Duck, Bob
Perelman, Dahlia Porter, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, and Contemporary
Literature‘s anonymous readers for
their generous feedback at various
stages of this project.