Simple's Uncle Sam

by Langston Hughes, Akiba Sullivan Harper (Introduction)

Overview

The award-winning author's most beloved character comes back to life in this extraordinary collection.

With an Introduction by Akiba Sullivan Harper

Langston Hughes is best known as a poet, but he was also a prolific writer of theater, autobiography, and fiction. None of his creations won the hearts and minds of his readers as did Jesse B. Semple, better known as "Simple."

Simple speaks as an Everyman for African Americans in Uncle Sam's America. With great wit, he expounds on topics as varied as women, Gospel music, and sports heroes—but always keeps one foot planted in the realm of politics and race. In recent years, readers have been able to appreciate Simple's situational humor as well as his poignant questions about social injustice in The Best of Simple and The Return of Simple. Now they can, once again, enjoy the last of Hughes's original Simple books.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466894877
Publisher:	Hill and Wang
Publication date:	09/04/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	206
File size:	904 KB

About the Author

Langston Hughes (1902-67) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and long resided in New York City's Harlem.

Read an Excerpt

Simple's Uncle Sam

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By Langston Hughes

Hill and Wang

Copyright © 1993 Arnold Rampersad and Ramona Bass
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9487-7

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CHAPTER 1

CENSUS

"I have had so many hardships in this life," said Simple, "that it is a wonder I'll live until I die. I was born young, black, voteless, poor, and hungry, in a state where white folks did not even put Negroes on the census. My daddy said he were never counted in his life by the United States government. And nobody could find a birth certificate for me nowhere. It were not until I come to Harlem that one day a census taker dropped around to my house and asked me where were I born and why, also my age and if I was still living. I said, 'Yes, I am here, in spite of all.'

"'All of what?' asked the census taker. 'Give me the data.'

"'All my corns and bunions, for one,' I said. 'I were borned with corns. Most colored peoples get corns so young, they must be inherited. As for bunions, they seem to come natural, we stands on our feet so much. These feet of mine have stood in everything from soup lines to the draft board. They have supported everything from a packing trunk to a hongry woman. My feet have walked ten thousand miles running errands for white folks and another ten thousand trying to keep up with colored. My feet have stood before altars, at crap tables, bars, graves, kitchen doors, welfare windows, and social security railings. Be sure and include my feet on that census you are taking,' I told that man.

"Then I went on to tell him how my feet have helped to keep the American shoe industry going, due to the money I have spent on my feet. 'I have wore out seven hundred pairs of shoes, eighty-nine tennis shoes, forty-four summer sandals, and two hundred and two loafers. The socks my feet have bought could build a knitting mill. The razor blades I have used cutting away my corns could pay for a razor plant. Oh, my feet have helped to make America rich, and I am still standing on them.

"'I stepped on a rusty nail once, and mighty near had lockjaw. And from my feet up, so many other things have happened to me, since, it is a wonder I made it through this world. In my time, I have been cut, stabbed, run over, hit by a car, tromped by a horse, robbed, fooled, deceived, double-crossed, dealt seconds, and mighty near blackmailed — but I am still here! I have been laid off, fired and not rehired, Jim Crowed, segregated, insulted, eliminated, locked in, locked out, locked up, left holding the bag, and denied relief. I have been caught in the rain, caught in jails, caught short with my rent, and caught with the wrong woman — but I am still here!

"'My mama should have named me Job instead of Jesse B. Semple. I have been underfed, underpaid, undernourished, and everything but undertaken — yet I am still here. The only thing I am afraid of now — is that I will die before my time. So man, put me on your census now this year, because I may not be here when the next census comes around.'

"The census man said, 'What do you expect to die of — complaining?'

"'No,' I said, 'I expect to ugly away.' At which I thought the man would laugh. Instead you know he nodded his head, and wrote it down. He were white and did not know I was making a joke. Do you reckon that man really thought I am homely?"

CHAPTER 2

SWINGING HIGH

"A meat ball by any other name is still a meat ball just the same," said Simple. "My wife, Joyce, is a fiend for foreign foods. Almost every time she drags me downtown to a show, she wants to go eat in some new kind of restaurant, Spanish, French, Greek, or who knows what? Last night we had something writ on the menu in a Philippine restaurant in big letters as Bola-Bolas. They returned out to be nothing but meat balls."

"Bola probably means 'ball' in their language," I said. "But I am like Joyce. I sort of go for foreign foods, too — something different once in a while, you know."

"Me, I like plain old down-home victuals, soul food with corn bread," said Simple, "spare ribs, pork chops, and things like that. Ham hock, string beans, salt pork and cabbage."

"All good foods," I said, "but for a change, why not try chicken curry and rootie next time you take Joyce out."

"What is that?" asked Simple.

"An East Indian dish, chicken stewed in curry sauce."

"I am not West Indian nor East," said Simple.

"You don't have to be foreign to like foreign food," I said.

"Left to me, I would go to Jenny Lou's up yonder on Seventh Avenue across from Small's Paradise. Jenny Lou's is where all the down-home folks eat when they is visiting Harlem. They knows good home-like food a mile away by the way it smells."

"A restaurant is not supposed to smell," I said. "The scent of cooking is supposed to be kept in the kitchen."

"Jenny Lou's kitchen is in the dining room," said Simple. "'When I were a single man, I et there often. Them low prices suited my pocket."

"How about Frank's?" I asked. "Now Negro-owned."

"That's where Joyce takes her society friends like Mrs. Maxwell-Reeves," said Simple. "The menu is as big as newspaper. So many things on it, it is hard to know what to pick out. I like to just say 'pork chops' and be done with it. I don't want soup, neither salad. And who wants rice pudding for dessert? Leave off them things, also olives.

Just give me pork chops."

"Is that all?"

"I'll take the gravy," Simple said.

"Pork chops, bread, and gravy," I shook my head. "As country as you can be!"

"If that is what you call country," said Simple, "still gimme pork chops. Pork chops and fried apples maybe, if they is on the menu. I love fried apples, and my Uncle Tige had an apple tree in his back yard. When I was a little small boy, I used to set in a rope swing behind my Uncle Tige's house. The swing were attached to that apple tree which were a very old apple tree, and big for an apple tree, and a good tree for a swing for boys and girls. It were nice to set in this swing when I was yet a wee small boy and be pushed by the bigger children because I was still too small for my feet to touch the ground, and I did not know how to pump myself up into the air. Later I could. Later I could stand up in that swing and pump myself way up into the air, almost as high as the limb on which the swing were tied. Oh, I remember very well that swing and that apple tree when I were a child.

"It looks to me life is like a swing," continued Simple. "When young, somebody else must push you because your feet are too short to touch the ground and start the swing in motion. But later you go for yourself. By and by, you can stand up and swing high, swing high, way high up, and you are on your own. How wonderful it is to stand up in the swing, pumping all by yourself! But suppose the rope was to break, the tree limb snap off when you have pumped yourself up so high? Suppose it does? You will be the one to fall, nobody else, just you yourself. Yes, life is like a swing! But in spite of all and everything, it is good to swing. Oh, yes! The swing of life is wonderful, but if you are a colored swinger, you have to have a stout heart, pump hard, and hold tight to get even a few feet above the ground. And be careful that your neighbor next door, white, has not cut your rope, so that just when you are swinging highest, it will break and throw you to the ground. 'Look at that Negro swinging! But he done fell!' they say. But someday we gonna swing right up to the very top of the tree and not fall. Yes, someday we will."

"Integrated, I hope," I said.

"Yes, integrated, I reckon," said Simple. "But some folks is getting so wrapped up in this integration thing, white and colored, that I do believe some of them is going stone-cold crazy. You see how here in New York peoples is talking to themselves on busses and in the subways, whirling around in the middle of the street, mumbling and grumbling all by themselves to nobody on park benches, dumping garbage on bridges, slicing up subway seats with knives and nail files, running out of gas on crowded highways on purpose and liable to get smashed up in traffic jams. Oh, I do not know what has come over the human race — like that nice young white minister in Cleveland laying down behind a rolling bulldozer, not in front of it — where the driver could see him and maybe stop in time before the man got crushed to death. He were protesting Jim Crow — but sometimes the protest is worse than the Crow."

"That earnest white man, no doubt, was trying to call attention to the urgency of the civil rights," I said. "He wanted to keep the movement on the front pages of the newspapers."

"It has been on the front pages of the newspapers for ten years," said Simple, "and if everybody does not know by now something needs to be done about civil rights, they will never know. After so many Freedom Rides and sit-ins and picketings and head bustings and police dogs and bombings and little children blowed up, and teenagers in jail by the thousands up to now, and big headlines across the newspapers, colored and white, why did that good white minister in Cleveland with his glasses on have to lay down behind a bulldozer?"

"I gather there are some things you would not do for a cause," I said.

"I would not lay down behind a bulldozer going backwards. How would my dying help anything — and my wife, Joyce, would be left a widow? It is not that I might be dying in a good cause, but let me die on my own two feet, knowing where, when, and why, and maybe making a speech telling off the world — not in a wreck because somebody has stalled a car whilst traffic is speeding. To me that is crazy! Whoever drives them stalled cars might be smashed up and killed too."

"They would consider themselves martyrs," I said.

"They should not make a martyr out of me in another car who do not even know them," said Simple. "Let me make a martyr out of myself, if I want to, but don't make me one under other peoples' cars. I do not want to be a martyr on nobody else's time. And don't roll no bulldozer over me unless I am standing in front, not behind it when it rolls. If I have got to look death in the face ahead of time, at least let me know who is driving. Also don't take me by surprise before I have paid my next year's dues to the NAACP. Anyhow, a car or a bulldozer is a dangerous thing to fool around with, as is any kind of moving machinery. You remember that old joke about the washerwoman who bent over too far and got both her breasts caught in the wringer? There is such a thing as bending over too far — even to get your clothes clean. Certainly there is plenty of dirty linen in this U.S.A., but I do not advise nobody to get their breast caught in a wringer. Machines do not have no sense."

"A cynic might say the same thing about martyrs," I said. "Except sometimes it takes an awful lot of sense to have no sense."

"Maybe you are right," said Simple, "just like it takes a mighty lot of pumping to swing high in the swing of life."

CHAPTER 3

CONTEST

"They are always holding Beauty Contests all over America," said Simple. "Why don't nobody ever hold an Ugly Contest?"

"An Ugly Contest!" I cried. "For what reason?"

"For the same reasons folks hold a Beauty Contest," said Simple, "for fun. There are so many ugly womens in this world, it would be fun to see which one wins."

"Beauty is as beauty does," I reminded him, "not how it looks."

"Oh, no!" declared Simple. "Beauty is as beauty looks. You can't tell me an ugly chick, be she ever so nice, is going to look pretty, not even if she goes to church every day and three times on Sunday. She may look holy, but she cannot look pretty if her mama did not born her so."

"The Lord made everyone in God's image," I said.

"Don't bamboozle me like that," said Simple. "If God is bowlegged, sway-backed, merinery, and buck-toothed, skippy! That I do not believe. But some womens is all of them things — and wear slacks besides. There are more homely womens in the world than there are pretty womens. So it would be easy to hold an Ugly Contest every week-end. And at the end of the year I would have an Elimination Contest for the Ugliest Young Woman on Earth. I bet whoever won that Grand Prize would get all kinds of Hollywood, TV, radio, and movie contracts, not to mention a week at the Apollo."

"The winner might get all those things," I said, "but the poor girl would have a hard time finding a husband after so much 'ugly' publicity."

"With all the money that Ugly Champion would be making, she could not keep the men away from her," said Simple. "Facts is, if I was single, as much loot as the most famous ugly woman in the world would be making, I would marry her myself just to spend some of her cash. Ugly is as ugly does, and if that woman did me good, I would not care what she looked like. Then if she uglied away into paradise, died in due time, and willed me her fortunes, my memories of her would be beautiful. No rich woman can get too ugly to find a husband. Money talks."

"Perish the thought," I said, "that the winner of the Ugly Contest would have to pay a man to marry her. Poor girl! That would be a hollow triumph indeed for all her trophies and her scrolls. But tell me, since Beauty Contests have rules, you know, by which beauty is judged — measurements of busts, waists, hips, and thighs, tint of complexion and tone of hair — what rules would you set up for judging an Ugly Contest?"

"Busts the flattest, hips the barrelest, legs the thinnest, and the rest of it, come what may," said Simple. "Also I would give a prize for the tightest slacks on the biggest haunches, the highest heels on the longest feet, and the hair with the most colors in it. Just a two-tone hair job or a wig would not get nowhere in my contest. I would give a prize to the head of hair with a red streak, a yellow streak, a green streak, and a purple streak in it — and only then if it had an orange horsetail as well. Oh, my ugly woman winner would be a mad Myrtle without a girdle, I'm telling you! She would look like King Kong's daughter plus the niece of Balaam's off-ox. To win my contest, she would have to be a homely heifer, indeed.

"But I would give her a great big prize, then put her under contract for all personal appearances on stage, screen, or at Rockland Palace. I would charge one thousand dollars-a-day commission for the public to look at her — the Homeliest Woman in the Whole World. The Ugly Champion of the Universe! If ever she went up in a spaceship, she would scare the Man in the Moon to death before she had a chance to meet him. Miss Ugly would be so ugly she would be proud of herself, and her mama before her would be proud of her, as would her daddy when he learned how famous his daughter had got to be — pictured endorsing every filter-tipped cigarette, singing commercials for toothpaste, and posing for beer.

"Seriously, I believe I will start such a contest, get me maybe a thousand entries, hire a big hall, Count Basie's Band, and have me an Ugly Parade instead of a Beauty Parade, appoint Nipsey Russell and Jackie Moms Mabley as judges, and take a big pile of money. Besides, such a contest would make me famous, too — as the only man in the world with nerve enough to call a whole lot of women ugly! 'Jesse B. Semple, promoter of the Ugly Contest!' And if I found a woman uglier than I am a man, more homely than me, I would give her a special prize myself. A gold beer mug with my picture on it, engraved:

TO YOU FROM ME
YOUR UGLY DADDY
JESSE B. SEMPLE
CONGRATULATIONS

CHAPTER 4

EMPTY HOUSES

"Once when I was a wee small child in Virginia," said Simple, "I was walking down the street one real hot day when a white man patted me on the head and give me a dime.

"He said, 'Looks like you could stand an ice-cream cone,' to which I said, 'Yes, sir.'

"That cone I bought sure was good. I were staying with some of my mother's distant kinsfolks at the time and when I went home and told them I had bought an ice-cream cone they said, 'Where did you get the money?'

"I said, 'A white man give me a dime.'

"They said, 'What was you doing out in the street begging for a dime?'

"I explained to them that I had not begged, but they said, 'Don't lie to me, boy. Nobody is gonna walk up to you and just give you a dime without you asking for it.' So I got a whipping for lying.

"They could not understand that there is some few people in the world who do good without being asked. It were a hot day, I were a little boy, and ice-cream cones are always good. And that man just looked at me and thought I would like one — which I did. That is one reason why I do not hate all white folks today because some white folks will do good without being asked or hauled up before the Supreme Court to have a law promulgated against them.

"Not everybody has to be begged to do good, or sub-peanoed into it. Why, a cat in the bar the other night I hardly knowed offered me a beer, and when I said, 'Man, I'm sorry, but I am kinder short tonight and cannot buy you one back,' he said, 'Aw, forget it!' He bought me the beer anyway.

"Some folks think that everything in life has to balance up, turn out equal. If you buy a man a drink, he has to buy you one back. If you get invited to a party, then you have to give a party, too, and invite whoever invited you. My wife, Joyce, is like that — which makes folks end up having to give parties they do not want to give, and going to a lot of parties to which they do not want to go. Tit for tat — I give you this, you give me that. But me, I am not that way. If I was to give somebody I liked a million dollars, I would not expect them to give me a million dollars back. I would give a million like it warn't nothing. But even if you give a million and don't give it free-hearted, it is like nothing. Do you get what I am trying to say?"

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Simple's Uncle Sam by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1993 Arnold Rampersad and Ramona Bass. Excerpted by permission of Hill and Wang.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction by Akiba Sullivan Harper,
CENSUS,
SWINGING HIGH,
CONTEST,
EMPTY HOUSES,
THE BLUES,
GOD'S OTHER SIDE,
COLOR PROBLEMS,
THE MOON,
DOMESTICATED,
BOMB SHELTERS,
GOSPEL SINGERS,
NOTHING BUT A DOG,
ROOTS AND TREES,
FOR PRESIDENT,
ATOMIC DREAM,
LOST WIFE,
SELF-PROTECTION,
HAIRCUTS AND PARIS,
ADVENTURE,
MINNIE'S HYPE,
YACHTS,
LADYHOOD,
COFFEE BREAK,
LYNN CLARISSE,
INTERVIEW,
SIMPLY SIMPLE,
GOLDEN GATE,
JUNKIES,
DOG DAYS,
POSE-OUTS,
SOUL FOOD,
FLAY OR PRAY?,
NOT COLORED,
CRACKER PRAYER,
RUDE AWAKENING,
MISS BOSS,
DR. SIDESADDLE,
WIGS FOR FREEDOM,
CONCERNMENT,
STATUTES AND STATUES,
AMERICAN DILEMMA,
PROMULGATIONS,
HOW OLD IS OLD?,
WEIGHT IN GOLD,
SYMPATHY,
UNCLE SAM,
About the Author,
Also by Langston Hughes,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

If you haven't yet made Simple's acquaintance, I recommend that you do so through the medium of Simple's Uncle Sam. It is delightful reading.” —Robert Cromie, Chicago Tribune

“Mr. Hughes' Simple has delighted one generation and is now delighting another.” —The New York Times

“This book is loaded with chuckles—and with thought.” —The Los Angeles Herald Examiner

From the Publisher