Transcript
Kristian Petersen:
Welcome to Religious Studies News. I'm your host Kristian Petersen and today I'm here with Wallace Best, Professor of Religion and African American studies at Princeton university and winner of the AAR book award in textual studies. He's here to speak to us about his book, Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem published with NYU Press. Congratulations. Well awesome, and thanks for joining me.
Wallace Best:
Thank you very much, Kristian. This is... It's wonderful to talk to you and I'm just so deeply honored by the award from the AAR. I had very few or perhaps I had no expectations in writing this book. It was something that I felt deeply about and I felt passionate about. I tried to give very little thought to its reception, but when I got word that it had been awarded this particular award from the AAR, I was just so thrilled and so happy and so deeply honored by a book that I thought perhaps few people would understand. It turns out that quite a few people did understand it and the AAR seemed to understand what I was up to. So I feel really good about it and I'm happy to speak to you about the book.
Kristian Petersen:
Yeah, well it is a wonderful book and a very interesting topic in terms of your take on it. So could you tell us perhaps a little bit about... Perhaps just briefly introduce us to Langston Hughes, for those who may not be as familiar with him. But then, really what brought you to this project? How did it emerge for you?
Wallace Best:
All right. Well first thing to say is that Langston Hughes, is perhaps one of the most important American poets or writers of the 20th century. He was certainly one of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. And he's much... He's most known for that. He was one of the first and primary voices of that literary movement of the 1920s. And a has been dubbed the Bard of Harlem in the sense that... Or the Shakespeare of Harlem in the sense that he spoke so eloquently on the behalf of that great movement, which he had some doubts about and on the behalf of black people in general.
And so his work over the years has been so important to black literary studies, to black literature. He has been so important. He seemed to have such a clear and concise cultural and political voice that his work has been used to articulate, I would say, some of our country's highest hopes and some of our deepest fears.
He's widely quoted and widely used across a vast array of political and cultural and even religious perspectives. And so everybody seems to have a piece of him. But that's just how far reaching and how far reaching his work has been and how deeply it has reached into our own cultural understanding. Seems that Langston Hughes is America's poet to some degree. I think there are other poets about whom we could say that, but Langston Hughes is certainly one of the... He's America's poet.
Kristian Petersen:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Wallace Best:
And how I came about this project as most, as some books do, one book comes out of another. And it was during the research for my first book on Chicago, Passionately Human, No Less Divine, where I was trying to do my... I was doing my best to explain some of the wonderful and wondrous transformations in the African American religious culture in Chicago during the great migration. The roughly, the first, half century of the 20th century.
I kept coming across Hughes's name. Langston Hughes was there in the archive and I thought this was strange. Because why would Langston Hughes show up in the archives as I'm looking at documents, referencing religion, referencing church life, referencing theology and so forth. And this became... Was curious to me because like many other people, I came across Langston Hughes or [inaudible 00:04:49] Langston Hughes was introduced to me as someone who had very little interest in religion. Had very little to say about it. In fact, he was antagonistic to religion.
So finding him in archives on religion was a surprise to me. And what I found was that Hughes had a lot to say about religion. That the depiction of him as having little to say about religion was just clearly wrong. So I began to look deeper into this, particularly after that first book came out, as I was beginning to develop my second project.
I thought it was going to be a quick book because even I was still convinced that perhaps maybe if Hughes had something to say about religion, it wouldn't be a lot. Well, I was wrong. Hughes had a lot to say about religion and in fact, as I argued in the book, he wrote as much about religion as he did about any other topic. And boy did he ever.
It was just an overwhelming archive, of material in its own right on religion from Hughes's work. And so this book is my, I would say, modest attempt to explain the project, Hughes's theological religious project. And I say modestly because I think I got close to it but Hughes is evasive. And that's part of the theme of the book too. It's his evasiveness.
But Even amid that evasiveness, Hughes was quite clear that religion was very, very important to him. And he wrote quite a lot about it. And so the book Langston's Salvation, is my way of first arguing that Hughes thought about religion quite a lot. And it's an explication of some of his thinking about religion.
Kristian Petersen:
Now perhaps we could start with a kind of wider view in terms of kind of thinking about Hughes's early life and even, his relationship with the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. You, talk about his early life but you also kind of place him within the religious world of Harlem.
Wallace Best:
Yes.
Kristian Petersen:
So, can you kind of outline this just for, so we have a context to think about the kind of deeper readings you do, some of his work.
Wallace Best:
Right. Well, Langston Hughes had a fascinating upbringing. Being raised by his grandmother after his father left the US for Mexico. And he had an estranged relationship with his father. And his mother was respectfully, I say rather flighty. And she was artistic in her own sensibilities and moved around a lot. And, in one of those moves, she simply left Hughes with his grandmother, Mary [Lily 00:07:56] Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas.
And Hughes by his own account, had a wonderful upbringing to some... In some respects but it was a lonely up bringing, despite the love and care of his grandmother. And when she died, he came to live with some family friends, the Reed family on New York Avenue in Lawrence, Kansas. And they were very, very religious. Hughes at that point had not been raised in a religious home. His grandmother was a skeptic and that seemingly had no relationship to religion or to the church.
But when he came to the home of Mary and James Reed, that was, that was a very different story. They had a strong connection. Well at least Mary Reed did, had strong connection to the Methodist church in town and was keen on bringing Hughes into that world of religion. Well, it didn't quite work out that way. Hughes had a very dramatic experience of actually not finding salvation, and I can talk to you about that in a minute.
But that early experience with religion was foundational to him as it turns out. And he remembered that time in Lawrence, Kansas, and the event of which led to his reckoning with religion as one of the most important moments. One of the three most important moments of his life. So that by the time that he is a young man who had moved to Harlem, of course he becomes a part of all the important literary circles and makes friends with some of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance.
But what even they didn't know at the time, that Hughes was also becoming very much involved in the world of... In Harlem's world of religion in churches. He was an avid and an eclectic churchgoer. And this is actually one of the... One of my... I have to say, one of my proudest, one of the findings that I'm most proud of. Because that really did counter a lot of people's depiction of Hughes and it did confuse people. It confused me for a while.
But Hughes went to church all the time. To Catholic mass, to Pentecostal churches, to mainstream churches. He was very, very much involved in these churches. He went to one church in Harlem so often that I interviewed some people who were convinced that he was a member and I happened to know that he wasn't. It's just that he went all the time and I can explain why he did this.
I think he found churches to be fascinating and he also found them to be important. But he also relished in his insider, outsider position vis-à-vis churches as well though. So he would go but he would be very much the outsider inside. And so as he's maneuvering his way through this vibrant world of, writers and artists and just the world of parties and you know, literary events. And just having as it would seem a grand old time in Harlem during the heyday of the Renaissance, on Sundays, he's in somebody's church.
And it's remarkable because he found it important enough to write about those experiences. The experiences that he had in those churches in Harlem but also in Chicago where I found them in the archives. So, that's an aspect of Hughes's time during the Renaissance that was incredibly important to him. That was in some way shielded from view for the longest time until I was able uncover that this aspect of his life. He considered it just as important as other aspects of his literary career, those early days in the Harlem Renaissance. During the Harlem Renaissance.
Kristian Petersen:
Now, this social context and his particular life informs the, kind of religious nature of both his poetry. Where a lot of what you look at very closely and then also productions, right?
Wallace Best:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Kristian Petersen:
The plays that he wrote. So-
Wallace Best:
Yes.
Kristian Petersen:
You go into these in great detail and of course we don't have time to go into everything. But perhaps you could just talk about, what were your objectives in trying to go through his poetry and these kind of larger projects of his? What was the kind of... What was the type of engagement he had with religion through these materials?
Wallace Best:
Well, I depicted in the book, drawing on that great passage in the Gospel of Matthew, that Hughes's work on religion was his way of working out his salvation. And what that means for Hughes... What that meant for Hughes, as best as I understand it and I tried to explain this in the book, is that, when Hughes was 12 years old he had this fail to salvation experience where he was taken to church by his auntie Reed.
And he was told that he would see, hear and feel Jesus and it didn't happen. He sat there on the mourners bench waiting for Jesus to appear. Jesus never appears. So rather than keeping... Rather than keep the congregation there, who were wailing and lamenting on his behalf because he was the last of the quote, young lambs to go up and be saved. Hughes went forward and made a false profession of faith and never got over it.
He writes about this in a vignette in his 1940 autobiography. Where the vignette is called Salvation. And so in a sense, the title of my book, Langston's Salvation is meant to be ironic because in that particular way of salvation, Hughes never found that the type of conventional salvation. So his life as a scholar, his life, as an urbanite, as a sophisticated writer and as a human being was a search to understand what didn't happen that night.
And so everything that he writes about religion, and I tried to show this in the book, in some way in one form, in some way points back to that night. That night when he failed to see Jesus. So that early work in the 1920s. Even that work which becomes much more critical of religion in the 1930s, is Hughes using his literary voice to try to work out that notion of salvation.
What does it mean to be saved? And so he no longer is asking the question, what is salvation? He's asking the question, what does it mean to be saved? He wants to know about this experience that's so integral to African American life, both aspects of African American life and he didn't have it. It was something beyond him, right?
So all of this poetry in even the work in the latter part of his life when he's writing the Gospel Song plays. The way I read it you could almost hear him and feel him trying to reckon with that moment. So he never becomes religious. I make it very clear in the book that I have after all of these years, I cannot say that Langston Hughes was religious. Well in one way I cannot say that and one reason I can not say that is because he never did.
He dodged every opportunity he was given to be clear about his own personal faith. He dodged it and I think there's a reason for that because he never could claim to be conventionally religious in the way that Mary Reed back in 1914 wanted him to be. So all of that work on religion is a struggle or not a struggle, maybe it's an attempt. A literary attempt. An honest literary attempt to try to understand the notion of salvation.
And not just salvation, all the other ways, all the other terms that we attribute to... Particularly to Christian... To Protestant Christianity, in terms of atonement. He was fascinated by the notion of atonement by the way. He was fascinated, by the story of the Nativity and one of his most successful works ever was Black Nativity. It was his way of explaining the story of Christ's birth as a theatrical production.
It was an all black cast which made it quite unique for the day and quite controversial. He was enormously proud of Black Nativity. As you read into the various parts of the script though, you can see and that same attempt to try to work this out. And so I think it was deeply personal for him when he failed to see Jesus that night in 1914.
Well failing to see Jesus that night, shapes everything, almost everything he has to say about religion, up until the 1920s, thirties, forties. I mean entire... His entire life, in fact. I think there's very little of his writing over religion that doesn't in some way show Hughes trying to deal with that formative experience or non-experience, as I describe it in the book. It was, an incredible, incredible, incredibly shaping moment for him.
Kristian Petersen:
And you reflect this through your kind of close reading of many of these poems and then these productions.
Wallace Best:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kristian Petersen:
We'll have to hope the listener's inspired to read the books, find out more-
Wallace Best:
I hope so. I hope so, yes.
Kristian Petersen:
I'm wondering if though before I let you go, if you could just... How do you imagine that other folks working in religious studies, perhaps in other sub-fields, how might they benefit from your work? Either from your methods or in some of your conclusions? What might your book say to them
Wallace Best:
Thank you for that question. Because I'm very happy to answer that question in particular, because I did have something to say with this book beyond the story of Hughes's journey as it were on the margins of religion. Which is fascinating in itself. But if there was a point to be made, I think the point is this, Langston Hughes shows us clearly that one need not be religious, to have religious practices or to be interested in religion.
And that is why very deliberately describe him as someone who is not so much religious or a religious thinker. But he's a thinker about religion and I think that's quite important. Because in the past, those who've written on Hughes, they've either ignored this work on religion because they knew it was there. Or they didn't think it was important or they didn't think it was religious.
My book calls us back to take this work seriously on its own terms. What would it mean to read Hughes religiously? I asked myself that question and it opened up a whole new world, and opened up a whole new Langston Hughes. When we read Langston Hughes religiously, I think we come to understand his politics better.
I think we come to understand his blues poems better, because they're infused with religious terminology. We come to understand Langston Hughes better, if we don't read this work on religion from Hughes and if we don't get a clearer understanding of Hughes was. It was just that important to Hughes. And so what I am suggesting we as scholars should do, first of all, let's open up the archive of those materials that we consider to be available to us for the study of religion. I think Hughes has not been taken seriously by scholars of religion because it's poetry or because there are gospel plays or you know there are other kinds of works of art.
And so this book challenges us to expand the archive and to recognize that few things are unavailable to us, for the exploration of religious analysis or for religious analysis. And so Hughes is a way, his life is a model for religious studies. But I actually think the methodologies that he opens up to us are a model for religious scholars as well.
And so what I'm hoping is that people would use this book to find out something fascinating. A Langston Hughes they did not know, who was there all the time. And in fact, Hughes was quite frustrated throughout his life as I show in the book that people didn't understand how important religion was to him. So now I hope there would be no one who could say that Langston Hughes was anti religious or that he didn't write anything about religion or that religion was not important to Langston Hughes.
I mean those things... Religion was incredibly important to Langston Hughes. And I think when we take that seriously, that opens up the entire whole Renaissance. You know, in a way now we begin to take this, we can take this religious analysis back to the Harlem Renaissance and take it beyond Hughes. What if there are others who are just sitting there right for religious analysis.
So reading Hughes religiously enables us to go back and to read the Harlem Renaissance religiously. And I'm excited about what that might mean for that rich productive period of American history. Reading Hughes religiously is important because not only because of the Hughes it reveals. But because of the way it opens up a whole new understanding of a movement that we thought we knew so well.
So I'm hoping that people will be inspired by the story that I've told in this book because I still find it incredibly fascinating. But also I hope they get the implications of what this may mean for the way that we do works on religion. It really opens up everything and it changes a great many things.
Kristian Petersen:
Yes, I think you certainly accomplished establishing a model for us all to follow. And I hope that you're right, that hopefully people will use this. So congratulations on a wonderful book [inaudible 00:23:47].
Wallace Best:
Thank you.
Kristian Petersen:
Thanks for spending some time talking about it.
Wallace Best:
Thank you. It has been a joy. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this.