Gerald Early

It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.

I heard several black men on a local black radio call-in program complain rather vociferously the Monday following the Miss American pageant. One caller, who writes for the local black newspaper, thought Ms. Williams to be “politically unaware” because she refused to be a spokesperson for her race, and he considered her “ a liability to the black community.” Another caller voiced the opinion that the selection of Williams as Miss America was further proof that white America wished to denigrate black men by promoting black women. It is with a great degree of dire anticipation that I await the response from these quarters once it becomes generally known that Ms. Williams has a white boyfriend. She will no longer be simply “politically unaware” or “an insulting hindrance to the ascendancy of black men”; she will be a traitor, “sleeping with the white boy just like the slave women used to do on the plantation.”

If he had written nothing but poetry he would have been one of the most renowned writers in twentieth-century America. But Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, travel pieces, translations, plays, scripts, song lyrics, and journalism. And he managed this kind of productivity while still maintaining an extremely energetic social life and conducting extensive lecture tours. Hughes almost never refused to read his poetry at any sort of institution, a college, an elementary school, a retirement home, a cocktail party, on a street corner. And he did not let a little matter like someone’s inability to pay his fee stop him from appearing. He was virtually a literary Johnny Appleseed, dropping poems on the public as if, when he awoke every morning, he could comb them out of his hair.