The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Works for Children and Young Adults: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Writing.(Book Review)

The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Works for Children and Young Adults: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Writing. Vol. 11. Ed. Dianne Johnson. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2003. 393 pages. $44.95 cloth.

In the 1990s, Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel researched a chronological Collected Poems (1994); Akiba Sullivan Harper complemented their fine detective work with Langston Hughes: Short Stories (1996). Christopher D. De Santis edited the collection of essays, Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender (1995). In the new century, Susan Duffy has contributed The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (2000), and Emily Bernard a comparative edition, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964 (2001). Altogether, they make for probably the most significant outpouring of basic research on Hughes since his death on May 22, 1967.

The artistry and historicity of this current volume of the Langston Hughes collections make it especially appealing. Children in particular would enjoy such rich morsels, but for both adults and children, Works for Children as a whole provides two symbolic stories across all the others. One becomes Hughes's hyper tale about the variously innocent and experienced world of the child and of the maturely detached narrator telling the tale; a complementary story reveals a rhythm that informs all Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

In addition to an informative introduction of eleven pages, a one-page note on the texts provides a useful context, as does another about the illustrations. As true for all volumes in the Missouri series, a six-page chronology about the writer's life and work is included. Four primary sections in the omnibus volume include contributions from the Brownie's Book (1921), which was the children's insert into The Crisis; The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932), at least fifteen memorable poems of which at least twelve are actually reprinted from Hughes's first volume, The Weary Blues (1926); and Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti (1932) along with stories from Black Misery (1969) and The Pasteboard Bandit (1935; 1997). Rounding out the children's literary world are five juvenile histories by Hughes: The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Rhythms (1954), The First Book of Jazz (1955), The First Book of the West Indies (1956), and The First Book of Africa (1960). Especially for those of us who often privilege his poetry--while wondering exactly what he was doing between Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and Ask Your Mama (1961)--his juvenilia and stories account for his sustained work during this decade.

Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti (1932) is a unified narrative infused with various motifs of childhood adventure: delightful dances on tropical nights, flying a kite in tricky winds, producing and polishing woodwork, or simply taking a swim to the local lighthouse. More subtly, the collection depicts the artist as a young man. Early on the brother Popo and sister Fifina walk barefoot between the two long-eared burros ("Going to Town") down a high road to the sea coast, the peasant parents Papa Jean and Mamma Anna happily at their sides. Eventually the path leads from the grandmother's home in the country to a new location in town. There, standing at the apex on the hillside, the father holds his hands on his hips while spying the point at which the mountain would seem to touch the sky. Slowly the family descends to the new home in the valley below. Returned to the heights crossed previously by them, "All the way up the hill under the banana trees, and across the gurgling brook, they could hear the drums beating happily ("Drums at Night"). When a hawk subsequently attacks the child's toy ("The New Kite"), the boy's jerking string grounds the predator, "Like an evil bird with a broken wing." If the Hughes wording sounds familiar, it is--even on Hallmark greeting cards. In The Dream Keeper the soaring bird's wings must never be clipped, for the hawk threatens ...