Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes

First published: 1930

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: 1912-1918

Locale: Stanton, Kansas, and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• James (Sandy) Rogers, Sandy’s wandering father
• Annjee, Sandy’s mother and Hager’s dutiful daughter
• Harriett, Sandy’s lively aunt and Hager’s rebellious daughter
• Tempy, Hager’s proud middle-class daughter

The Novel

Not Without Laughter concentrates on the childhood and adolescent years of Sandy Rogers, a sensitive and highly intelligent black boy growing up in a small Kansas town. His grandmother, known to the community as Aunt Hager, is the center of his life. She washes clothes for the Reinharts, a white family, and she takes care of him while his mother works for Mrs. J. J. Rice, a snobbish upper-class white woman. Later, Hager becomes Sandy’s sole guardian after his mother, Annjee, leaves to join her husband in Detroit and Harriett, the last daughter to remain at home, runs away with the carnival that visits Stanton.

Sandy’s father, Jimboy, is rarely home and has trouble maintaining steady employment. Sandy adores his father’s lively personality and talent and loves to hear his Aunt Harriett and Jimboy sing the blues. Sandy is a gregarious boy and enjoys the usual pursuits of adolescents, but there is a studiousness in him and a sense of responsibility that his grandmother encourages. Indeed, he is deeply influenced by his grandmother, who praises the virtues of hard work and a religious life.

Hager expects Sandy to be a great man; she hopes that he will not disappoint her, as her daughters have. Harriett has forsaken the family’s Baptist beliefs, first for streetwalking and then for a career as a singer; Annjee has married a lazy man who cannot provide for his family; Tempy has become a middle-class black Episcopalian who is ashamed of her lower-class roots. While Sandy is most influenced by Hager, each one of his aunts also educates him to life’s different possibilities, so that he is the only character with a vision of the whole, of the different ways in which his people have reacted to being black in a white-dominated world.

Annjee copes with her irascible white employer by simply ignoring her constant criticism. Harriett, on the other hand, resorts to anger and prefers to lead a “life of sin” than to be beholden to white employers for the meager wages they offer. Tempy has remodeled herself along the lines of her white employer and learns to behave in refined ways that whites will admire. Hager apparently acquiesces to white dominance, but she passes on to Sandy an indomitable spirit that will ensure his integrity. When a white Southerner attempts to humiliate him, Sandy turns away and hurls his shoeshine equipment at the laughing whites in the hotel where he works. His anger, however, is momentary, and he does not let it poison his efforts to learn from everyone, white and black alike.

Although life in a small Kansas town on the eve of World War I is often grim for its black inhabitants, it is “not without laughter”—as the title of the novel suggests. It is a close-knit community in which people take care of one another when they are ill and share their food and hospitality when they are well. Hughes takes obvious delight in reporting everyday conversations, for the language of his characters demonstrates great verve and tenacity no matter how constrained their circumstances may be. The blues they sing may seem mournful, but the songs are also exciting and deeply passionate, so that Sandy is imbued with a hunger for experience and for a knowledge of life.

The Characters

In addition to the principal characters, there are numerous other figures who represent Hughes’s impressive command of a people and a period of time. The self-styled Madam de Carter, active in the Lodge; Brother Logan, who has been courting Hager for twenty years; and ninety-three-year-old Uncle Dan, who claims to have fathered more than forty children, are only three examples of the many interesting personalities in this novel. For the most part, they reveal themselves through dialogue and through what others say about them. As a result, Hughes is able to include an astonishing amount of sociological commentary on the community without ever employing an intrusive narrator.

Hughes generally saves his characters’ longer speeches for later parts of the novel when a certain amount of curiosity about them has been aroused. For example, although it is apparent that Hager’s identity has been formed by her experience of slavery, her own commentary on the past does not appear until the last third of Not Without Laughter, when she is alone with her grandson. She gives him what some might consider to be an apology for slavery, but her main point is that to ignore the positive aspects of the hard and unjust life of the slaves is to deny the humanity of all people, white and black alike.

Hager’s piety, however, cuts her off from other aspects of the world that Sandy must explore. His friends introduce him to the pool hall—one of the few places in Stanton where young black men can exercise their wit and relax, since institutions such as the YMCA are exclusively for whites. While working in a barbershop and hotel and when visiting his aunt in the Bottoms, where jazz, prostitution, and bootlegging thrive, Sandy is introduced to an intoxicating atmosphere that is much more appealing than the repressive propriety of his Aunt Tempy’s home, to which he is taken after Hager’s death.

Aunt Tempy corrects his English, sees that he reads the right literature, and attempts to get him to associate with a better class of people. Her idea of an education is to strip Sandy methodically of all the cultural traits that mark him as a lower-class black. Although he avidly reads her books, he is stubborn about not giving up his disreputable friends. They have much to teach him about the basics of life, as he realizes when he regrets giving up a girlfriend, Pansetta Young, to please his aunt.

In the last part of the novel, when Sandy rejoins his mother in Chicago and enjoys a brief reunion with his Aunt Harriett, now a successful singer, it is clear that he will continue his education in an urban setting away from Tempy’s small-town snobbery and will pursue an independent course in fulfilling his grandmother’s dreams for him.

Sandy, more than any of the other characters, inherits the whole of his people’s history. He is neither particularly rebellious nor docile; rather, he has an inquiring mind that resists any effort to restrict his access to the richness of his culture. In other words, Sandy is at the center of a debate in the novel about exactly what constitutes the black heritage. Hughes, through the impressionable Sandy, is able to dramatize a process of change in which there is plenty of room for both new and old elements.

Critical Context

Not Without Laughter appeared in 1930 at the height of what was called the Harlem Renaissance, a tremendous outpouring of black talent in the arts. Langston Hughes was the premier poet of this cultural movement, and throughout his long career he continued to reflect on and extend its themes. Of central concern was the whole question of black identity, and of how contemporary blacks should deal with the legacy of discrimination.

As Arna Bontemps, a black literary contemporary of Hughes, recalled in the Collier Books reprint of Not Without Laughter, the novel was eagerly awaited as an example of a new, aggressive definition of blackness. Hughes is quoted by Bontemps as saying that the new artists wrote to please themselves, to express an inner freedom that could not be affected by the criticisms of whites or blacks. “The poets had become bellweathers,” Bontemps remarks, and Hughes was the “happy prince” of a cultural movement.

Hughes had to be read because he was leading the way for other artists and followers of the Harlem Renaissance. His exuberance, especially evident in poetry that captures black colloquial speech, invigorated his readers by highlighting contemporary materials that had become suitable for art. Not Without Laughter, his only novel in a distinguished career as a poet, is complemented by several popular collections of short stories; in addition, Hughes edited some widely used anthologies. A scrupulous scholar and artist, Hughes remains one of the most significant figures in the development of Afro-American culture.

Bibliography

Dace, Letitia, and Tish Dace, eds. “Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Features chronological, critical essays on reviews by a wide range of scholars, including one on Not Without Laughter. An excellent source for putting Hughes’s works in context.

Shields, John P. “ Never Cross the Divide’: Reconstructing Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter.” African American Review 28 (Winter, 1994): 601-613. Shields offers a reconstruction of Hughes’s novel, focusing on the influence of patron Charlotte Mason and the early stages of the book’s development. Shields explores the degree to which Mason’s literary censorship forced Hughes to mute his left-wing political notions, as well as his use of graphic imagery.

Sundquist, Eric J. “Who Was Langston Hughes?” Commentary 102 (December, 1996): 55-59. Initially Hughes became well known for his role in the Harlem literary renaissance because of his ability to mix popular culture and politics with poetry. However, Sundquist shows that during the post-World War II era, Hughes was less overtly occupied with politics and more concerned with art.

Thomas, H. Nigel. “Patronage and the Writing of Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter: A Paradoxical Case.” CLA Journal 42 (September, 1998): 48-49. Traces the professional relationship between Hughes and his wealthy patroness Charlotte Mason. Thomas argues that their relationship ended because Mrs. Mason, despite her liberal leanings, was really part of the established intellectual superstructure which determined the worth of books by new authors.

Trotman, C. James, ed. Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence. New York: Garland, 1995. Presents a brief biography of Hughes, as well as critical articles by a variety of scholars. Offers a solid overview of his work. Includes a helpful index.