Writing Race: Hughes' "The Weary Blues"

In James Weldon Johnson’s preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry he writes, “often [Paul Dunbar] said to me: ‘I’ve got to write dialect poetry; it’s the only way I can get them to listen to me.’” In other words, Dunbar holds that his poetry would not be read unless it contained a mark of difference, since dialect, as Charles Bernstein notes in “Poetics of the Americas,” “becomes the verbal equivalent of skin color: an ‘objective’ mark of alterity.” What does it mean for language to have race? What happens when a poem marks its difference with every word? And furthermore, what are we to make of the fact that minority poetry that makes its way into the canon is almost inevitably “white, but not quite” in that it often works within historically white male genres and forms while simultaneously marking its own difference? The issues are sticky and provocative, as evident in the relatively new and bustling various fields surrounding identity politics, but I would like to examine these questions a bit more closely in regards to Langston’s Hughes’ “The Weary Blues.”

The first point of interest is that the speaker of the poem does not speak in dialect, but the piano player does. The poem presents us with two types of black voices: one in dialect and one in “regular” English. However, this speaker too identifies as black through the association in form with blues and jazz. In other words, both speakers announce their “blackness,” although in different ways. Hughes’ poem thus is completely written in a kind of dialect but complicates the notion that there is only one dialect, which Johnson sees as “a medium that is not capable of giving expression to the varied conditions of Negro life in America.” Hughes’ poem then becomes ideal in that, à la Dunbar, it will be acknowledged since it announces its difference while simultaneously disrupting any hegemonic notions of Negro dialect.

Hughes, as evidenced by “The Weary Blues,” is aware of the issues surrounding blacks speaking through historically “white” forms or language. He writes, “With his ebony hands on each ivory key / He made that poor piano moan with melody” (l. 9-10). The piano player uses “white” forms—“each ivory key”—to his own ends, making or forcing that “poor piano” to play his song. A similar line follows later in the poem: “I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan” (l.18). The choice of “moan” in both instances is telling since it carries at once a tone of violence and of sexual gratification. Hughes presents an image of a black man using white words—“ivory key[s]”—as an occasion to make music, and this act simultaneously disrupts that “white” language and makes it pleasurable, a site of jouissance. Yet this reading too seems to erase a uniquely black identity that so many writers seemed to be striving for during the Harlem Renaissance since the piano player seems only to imbue “white” language with a new sense of vitality. Perhaps this explains the poignant last line of the poem: “He slept like a rock, or a man that’s dead,” lamenting the impossible task of writing a completely “black” poem in English (or any language for that matter).

Returning to the questions that began this paper (ultimately unanswerable I think), when one overtly marks language with a particular ethnic or cultural category the consequences are two-fold. On the one hand, it reveals the extent to which what we think of as unmarked language is actually marked. On the other, it opens up that language to new possibilities. Although a literature of “white, but not quite” may be lamentable, at least it attempts a poetry that, according to Bernstein, “is impossible and for that reason takes place.”