Langston Hughes...and all that jazz

As I was reading on Langston Hughes I couldn’t help but recall studying him in, well, I believe it must have been AP English in high school. Honestly, all I really remembered was that he wrote a lot about jazz music, or in relation to jazz music. Hmmm…jazz music. When I was young my parents had a nanny, as in a paid child caregiver, not a grandmother, (although she did come to fill that type of role and even more in my life) for me and my siblings. Anyway, I spent a lot of my childhood days/nights etc. at her home and she and her husband were HUGE jazz music fans (for lack of better terms). For this reason I came to appreciate jazz music at a young age, it kind of seemed as though I was forced to. She frequently took my siblings and I to jazz concerts, and when she vacationed with our family, at our beach house in RI, she always took us to hear jazz musicians in Newport. Kind of strange when I think back on it and realize how young I was when I began listening to such music, not the typical music selection for a young child. Mind you, I listened to plenty of Psalty the Singing Songbook and his pal charity church mouse (they were def. my favorite musicians) and little did they know they had plenty of dances choreographed to their music. I guess I was simply unknowingly preparing myself for the day that I would begin choreographing and teaching for the Acclamation Dance Ministry- haha. Basically I went from teaching stuffed dolls to eventually teaching real live college students the amazing art of dance. Anyway, I am majorly off on a tangent- sorry for the reminiscing.

Back to jazz and Hughes…I realize that with the death of my nanny some years ago went the death of my listening to jazz music. Langston Hughes almost made me want to retry the appreciation of such music. Onward to his essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain. Perhaps the thing I most appreciate about this essay is his call to people to take a stand unashamedly for who they are. Something that bothers me perhaps more than most things is people who aren’t willing to take a stand for what they believe, and essentially who they are in the face of tension. It was interesting to me how Hughes brought to attention the tension that comes even from within the same ethnic class- namely, the tension between the higher class African Americans and the lower class African Americans. This is not to say that Caucasians aren’t blame for probing this tension. However, I think that often when we think of the struggle that comes with ethnicity we think of it as being among those of different ethnic backgrounds. Hughes welcomes us into the reality that there are struggles even amongst those of the same ethnic backgrounds. Hughes is to be upheld for the call he gives to everyone to be who they are in the place they are. For the Christian scholar at a secular institution this might be a call to not shy away from one’s faith even in the midst of secular tension. Really this takes on all kinds of tensions, but the Christian scholar was simply one that came to my mind while I was reading the article. Ok, I really could write more, but actually I am off to teach my tap dance class, go figure =)!