The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander by Langston Hughes

First published:The Big Sea: An Autobiography, 1940; I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, 1956

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1902-1938

Locale: United States; Mexico; Africa; France; Haiti; Soviet Union; Spain

Principal Personages:

• Langston Hughes, an acclaimed poet, novelist, and short-story writer
• Mary Sampson Langston, Hughes’s maternal grandmother, with whom he lived until he was twelve years old
• James Nathaniel Hughes, Langston’s father, who abandoned his family to live in Mexico
• Carrie Langston Hughes, Langston’s mother, who often left him while she looked for work
• Vachel Lindsay, a noted poet who “discovered” Hughes
• Carl Van Vechten, a critic and novelist who submitted Hughes’s first book of poems for publication
• The Anonymous Patron, a wealthy New York woman who supported Hughes
• Noel Sullivan, another wealthy patron

Form and Content

Langston Hughes began his writing career in Lincoln, Illinois, when, as the poet of his eighth grade class, he delivered a sixteen-stanza poem for a graduation exercise in 1916. He was elected class poet, he writes in The Big Sea, because no one in his class looked like a poet, or had ever written a poem; his white classmates, knowing that poetry had to have rhythm, elected him, since they believed that all African Americans had rhythm. Thus Hughes began a writing career that continued for nearly half a century.

The two autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, cover roughly the first thirty-five years of his life, from his birth in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902 to his return to America after he had served as a war correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American. He prefaces The Big Sea with a description of his departure from New York at the age of twenty-one on board a freighter bound for Africa. The first part of The Big Sea, “Twenty-One,” then relates the events of his life from his birth to his departure from New York Harbor. The second part, “Big Sea,” follows him to Africa and recounts his adventures in Europe. Finally, “Black Renaissance” covers the years from 1925 to 1930.

I Wonder as I Wander begins where The Big Sea left off in 1930 and details Hughes’s experiences in Haiti, Russia, California, Mexico, and Spain as he searches for a way “to turn poetry into bread.”

The Big Sea begins with Hughes throwing all of the books that he had read while studying at Columbia University into the sea. He wrote that although throwing his books into the sea may have been a little melodramatic, he felt as though he had thrown “a million bricks” out of his heart. Hughes was twenty-one years old and going to sea for the first time, and the tossing of the books was symbolic of his break with his past: He felt he had rid himself of the memory of his father, the stupidities of color prejudice, the fear of not finding a job, and the feeling of always being controlled by someone other than himself. He wrote that he felt like a man, and that henceforth nothing would happen to him that he did not want to happen.

He recounts how his father, James Hughes, had left Langston and his mother for Mexico, where he could practice law and escape the prejudice and poverty he so hated. As a result, Langston’s mother, Carrie Hughes, seemed continually to be on the move, going from job to job, searching for better employment. Consequently, until he was twelve, Hughes was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston. Hughes was graduated from grammar school in Lincoln, Illinois, and from Central High School in Cleveland, where the family had relocated.

Hughes discovered that he hated his father when he spent the summer of 1919 with him in Mexico, but he returned to discuss his future with his father in 1921. That same summer, he made his publishing debut in The Crisis with his meditative poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Although his father wanted him to attend European universities to become an engineer, Langston persuaded him to finance an education at Columbia. After a year, he quit and broke with his father completely.

The second section, “The Big Sea,” chronicles the years 1923 and 1924. Hughes continued writing while working on ships traveling to Africa and to Holland; he spent time working in nightclubs in France and combing beaches in Italy. When he returned home, he worked in the Wardman Park Hotel; there, in December of 1925, he slipped three of his poems on the table of the poet Vachel Lindsay, who announced the next day the discovery of a “bus boy poet.” This was an important break for Hughes, since it gave his work considerable publicity. He won first prize in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity magazine with his poem “The Weary Blues.”

“Harlem Renaissance,” the last section of the book, covers the years from 1925 to 1930. Four important events occurred in Hughes’s life during this period. First, although he lived in Washington, D.C., Hughes went often to New York, where the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing and where he met many black writers who were to become important literary figures, including Jean Toomer, Countée Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, and Wallace Thurman.

Second, he met Carl Van Vechten at the awards party for winning the Opportunity poetry prize, and Vechten offered to submit Hughes’s poetry to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Shortly thereafter followed a letter from Blanche Knopf saying the poems were to be accepted for publication. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926.

Hughes won a scholarship to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1929. During his final years at Lincoln, he was introduced to an elderly lady in New York who became his patron and who assured him of an income and a place to work.

The result was that Hughes was able to complete his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. In December of 1930, however, he became alienated from his patron, and their relationship dissolved. Hughes, however, became more determined than ever to make his living from writing. He closes The Big Sea this way: “Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I’m still pulling.”

I Wonder as I Wander picks up where The Big Sea leaves off. Increasingly, Hughes had become disenchanted with the hypocrisy of his being chauffeured about New York while he saw his fellow African Americans sleeping in subways and going hungry. The stock market had crashed; the Depression was beginning; Harlem and black culture were no longer in vogue. Hughes asked to withdraw from the patronage extended him. As he tells it, his problems were two: He was “ill in my soul,” and he needed to discover how to make a living from writing.

He had given his mother one hundred dollars of the four-hundred-dollar Harmon prize; with the remaining three hundred, he and a friend traveled first to Cuba and then to Haiti to escape the damp and dreary Cleveland winter. After several months, he returned to New York, where in 1931, with a grant from the Rosenwald Fund, he set out to tour the South reading his poetry. While he was in Arkansas, some friends, learning that he was going to California, offered to introduce him to Noel Sullivan, who would later become a patron. Hughes was in San Francisco when he learned of an opportunity to go to Russia to work on a film.

Of the four hundred pages of I Wonder as I Wander, roughly half are devoted to Hughes’s journeys and adventures in Russia: the ponderous and unbelievably slow workings of the political system; the improbable and naïve plot of Black and White, the film on which he was to work (eventually the production was canceled); shortages of food; the primitive and unsanitary living conditions of Soviet Central Asia; the absence of prejudice and discrimination wherever he went; the bizarre lovemaking rituals of Tatar women; and his love affair with Natasha, the wife of a Soviet bureaucrat.

In the spring of 1933, he boarded the Trans-Siberian express for Vladivistok. Hughes had it in mind to see China before going home via Hawaii. Because Japan had just invaded China, however, he found traveling difficult. From Vladivistok he sailed to Korea, then to Japan. He visited Shanghai, where he met Madame Sun Yat-sen, the wife of the founder of the Chinese Republic and the sister-in-law of Chiang Kaishek, and he was able to see a small part of the interior of China.

En route home, his ship stopped at Tokyo again, and he went ashore to stay a few days in the city’s Imperial Hotel. The Japanese police interrogated him about his meeting with Madame Sun Yat-sen and presumably thought him to be carrying messages from China to Japan. He was declared persona non grata in Japan—an event that caused a stir in the newspapers—but he was released to return home.

Noel Sullivan’s cream-colored limousine picked Hughes up at the dock in San Francisco in the summer of 1933. Over lunch, Hughes told Sullivan of his adventures. He had become interested in writing short stories while reading the works of D. H. Lawrence, and Sullivan generously offered Hughes his cottage in Carmel, California, for a year rent-free.

In 1934 and 1935, he lived and wrote in Carmel, in Mexico, and in Oberlin, Ohio, where his mother had taken ill with cancer. His play Mulatto, which had gone unproduced for five years, began a successful Broadway run. In 1937, Hughes went to Madrid, where he was the war correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War for the Baltimore Afro-American.

The closing scene of I Wonder as I Wander is vivid and memorable. As the bells of Paris toll in 1938, Langston Hughes sits in a small café; he is on his way home and worried about his mother, who is terminally ill. In the first hours of the New Year, he muses on the fate of civilization; he does not think his world would end, but he is not sure.

Critical Context

In August of 1940, The Saturday Review of Literature characterized The Big Sea as “a most valuable contribution to the struggle of the Negro for life and justice and freedom and intellectual liberty in America.” This critical statement summarizes the importance and value of Hughes’s two autobiographies. Although the autobiographies document Hughes’s own struggle against bigotry, prejudice, racial hatred, and intellectual racism, they also document the same struggle for all people of color in the United States. Moreover, because of Hughes’s interest in people of color all over the world, and because of his wide travels, the autobiographies provide important insights into global attitudes toward people of differing color and race.

In addition, Langston Hughes was an important member of the group of “New Negro” writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The Big Sea, in particular, is an important document of the literary history of the United States, and sheds much light on the lives and struggles of those writers.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes. New ed. New York: Blooms Literary Criticism, 2008. Collection of essays on Hughes’s life and work by notable scholars in the field.

Emanuel, James A. Langston Hughes. New York: Twayne, 1967. Among the best introductory studies of Hughes.

Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Imagination of Langston Hughes. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. This reconsideration of the entire body of Hughes’s work begins with a rereading of the author’s autobiographies and uses them as a key to reinterpreting the rest of his writing.

O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. Langston Hughes, Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation. New York: William Morrow, 1971. Contains a brief biography, an excellent bibliography, and twelve critical essays covering the various genres of Hughes’s work.

Scott, Jonathan. Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Insists on the importance of the author’s visceral socialist imagination in shaping the course of his work.