Don't You Turn Back by Langston Hughes

First published: 1969; illustrated

Subjects: Coming-of-age, education, family, race and ethnicity, and social issues

Type of work: Poetry

Recommended Ages: 10-18

Form and Content

Edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins and illustrated by Ann Grifalconi, Don’t You Turn Back is a collection of most of the best-known poems by the best-known African American poet of the twentieth century. It contains a nostalgic introduction by Langston Hughes’s good friend, the scholar Arna Bontemps, a note on the selections by the editor, thirteen woodcut illustrations by Grifalconi, and indexes of titles and first lines. The poems are arranged in four sections: “My People,” “Prayers and Dreams,” “Out to Sea,” and “I Am a Negro.” Hughes’s earliest poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is included, as are his most famous pieces. The title, Don’t You Turn Back, is a line from “Mother to Son”:

So, boy, don’t you turn back.Don’t you set down on the steps’Cause you finds it kinder hard.Don’t you fall now—For I’se still goin’, honey,I’se still climbin’,And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

These lines capture well the range of themes and forms in the volume: love, hate, hope, despair, and family piety and devotion. The language is familiar, often colloquial, always accessible.

“Aunt Sue’s Stories” tells of a gentle woman who, like Hughes, weaves stories for her favorite children of times from slavery days to the present. “Sun Song” likewise joins the sunbaked roads of Africa to those of Georgia. “Troubled Woman” asks readers to honor the wisdom sometimes discovered through pain. A mother’s gifts to her children are recounted in “April Rain Song,” “Lullaby,” and “Stars.” Friendship and inspiration are the refrains of “Hope,” “Alabama Earth,” “Poem,” “Youth,” and “Walkers with the Dawn.” The section “Prayers and Dreams” possesses the greatest concentration of poems with the characteristic Hughes touch—a distinctive blend of joie de vivre and clear-sighted realism. The conclusion of “Dream Variation” evokes “Rest at pale evening . . . / A tall, slim tree . . . / Night coming tenderly/ Black like me.” “Dream Dust” and “Dreams” speak to what is most important in life, the latter opening “Hold fast to dreams/ For if dreams die/ Life is a broken-winged bird/ That cannot fly.”

The section “Out to Sea” includes ten poems recalling Hughes’s lifelong love of rivers and oceans, using the metaphor of the sea to suggest the danger and glory of all life. “Long Trip” casts life in the guise of a sea voyage, the traveler surrounded by a wilderness of waves and deserts of water. “Moonlight Night: Carmel” is an impressionistic glimpse of the California coast, while “Sea Calm” and “Suicide’s Note” paint word pictures of a threatening stillness. That theme is carried into “Island,” where, recalling John Donne, the poet says no one need be an island. “Seascape” carries images from as far as England and Ireland. In the final section, “I Am a Negro,” all these themes and images are brought to bear upon growing up black in America, a land of “black and white black white black people.”

The volume had its origin in a poetry memorial held in June, 1967, one month after Hughes’s death. Lee Bennett Hopkins, who had served as consultant to the Bank Street College of Education’s Harlem Center, asked fourth-graders to choose their favorites among the poet’s works. Their choices were read at the service and became the basis of Don’t You Turn Back. The book’s layout and design are particularly effective. In almost all instances, a full page is devoted to each poem, with the title in a different and complementary size and color from the text. Grifalconi’s evocative woodcuts heighten the effect of the verse. Most appear opposite a single poem—two complementary works of art facing each other in admiration.

Poems by Langston Hughes were read at the funerals of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., jazz great Duke Ellington, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. That height and range of celebrity suggest how deeply loved his verse has been—as one critic put it, “from kindergarten to the offices of Presidents.” It is fitting that, although the arrangement of poems was by Hopkins, the selection was made by schoolchildren.

Critical Context

Before Hughes, few African American authors wrote for a juvenile or young adult audience. After his decisive influence, many did. A significant portion, perhaps as large as a quarter, of his many volumes of prose and poetry was written for young people. Walt Whitman, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar were among his own distant influences, and all wished directly to address and teach a younger generation. Yet Hughes’s most immediate influence was the milieu of the Harlem Renaissance, that period between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression when black writers and artists called for aesthetic opportunities unknown to previous ages. Novelists, biographers, playwrights, and sculptors were among the figures seeking newer, larger audiences. Poets were their acknowledged leaders, and Hughes, although young, captured the heady mix of ancestral obligations and newfound privileges in his 1926 essay “The Negro and the Racial Mountain.” He used his connections within the world of publishing to obtain contracts for a score of writers of young adult literature.

Hughes also provided an important example for handling content. He was as honestly straightforward as his famous character Jesse B. Semple, the Harlem philosopher from newspaper columns and short stories. Simple, as he is also known, is the soul of home-grown simplicity, common sense, and innocence. He calls fraud and propaganda for what it is. He does not court the painful, but he does not run from it either. Although at times indignant at racial injustice, he is guided not by fear or paranoia but by a wise tolerance. Just so, Hughes said, did young people need an introduction to the world that they shall inherit—-without cynicism or psychological inhibition. The lessons that he would teach were those most easily ignored: the strength of love, a salutary optimism, and the simple joy of being alive.

Don’t You Turn Back is unusual among Hughes’s works because its shape and structure were determined by people other than the poet himself, yet it is also a measure of his success. It represents the happy but uncommon circumstance of a work compiled posthumously by others fulfilling the poet’s intentions. Few have been so lucky.

Bibliography

Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. New York: Wings Books, 1995.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.

Chinitz, David. “Rejuvenation Through Joy: Langston Hughes, Primitivism, and Jazz.” American Literary History 9 (Spring, 1997): 60-78.

Cooper, Floyd. Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes. New York: Philomel Books, 1994.

Harper, Donna Sullivan. Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

Haskins, James. Always Movin’ On: The Life of Langston Hughes. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1993.

Hokanson, Robert O’Brien. “Jazzing It Up: The Be-bop Modernism of Langston Hughes.” Mosaic 31 (December, 1998): 61-82.

Leach, Laurie F. Langston Hughes: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Mullen, Edward J., ed. Critical Essays on Langston Hughes. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

Ostrum, Hans A. A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Tracy, Steven C., ed. A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.