The Collected Works of Langston Hughes Volume 8

University of Missouri Press

Chapter One

"I am standing on my own," said Simple.

"Your own what?" I asked.

"My own two feet of space," said Simple. "The President can stand on the whole United States, because he is President. Ralph Bunche can stand on the United Nations. But I can only stand on what my two feet will cover when I am where I am at the time. So that is what I am standing on-me-where I is."

"In other words, your political platform is yourself. What you stand for is you?"

"Right," said Simple.

"Now that we have got that straight, what do you stand for?"

"Equal Rights for All," said Simple. "I also stand for Africa for the Africans."

"So do the Africans," I said. "But since you are not African, why stick your neck out for them?"

"Because my neck is black, too," said Simple. "Also, I stand for no more lynchings in Mississippi."

"Now you are getting nearer home."

"Mississippi ain't nowhere near Harlem," said Simple. "But I am tired of reading about killing Negroes, I am tired! So I stand for no more lynchings in Mississippi."

"I suggest you go to Mississippi and make your stand," I said.

"I am not running for office yet," said Simple.

"If you were in Mississippi, you would be runningfor something."

"For safety," stated Simple. "But once I got back to Harlem, I would again speak my platform: Equal Rights, Africa for the Africans, and No More Lynchings. I'll bet you I would get plenty of votes."

"What party banner do you intend to run under?" I asked.

"My own party, then I would not have to cut nobody in on my graft."

"Graft?" I said. "I thought you were an honest man."

"I would be a politicianer," said Simple.

"Politicians are not all grafters."

"I thought that's what politicianer meant," said Simple.

"You know better than that," I said. "If you are intending to run for public office, you should run on an honest ticket for an honest purpose."

"Equal Rights, Africa for the Africans, and Nary Lynching More is what I would be running on."

"Would you expect to achieve those results for the voters?"

"If I did not get them, I would raise sand whilst in office and before I got voted out for not getting them, everybody would know I had been in Washington, particularly white folks. I would leave my mark on politics forever ... and I would be writ up in books, put down in history, and raised up on monuments. My name would go down with Booker T. Washington, George Washington and Dinah Washington. I would be one politicianer people would remember. Grandfathers would tell their children's children about how they voted for me, Jesse B.-how I won and lost, and how my head were bloody but unbowed. Equal Rights, Africa for the-"

"I know your platform by heart," I said. "But what results would you achieve?"

"Results?" repeated Simple. "Man, if everything a politicianer puts in his platform resulted in results, there would be no need to hold any more elections. Results has nothing to do with politics. It's the platform! I stand on my platform, not the results."

"I give up," I said.

"Not me," said Simple, "I will stand and run."

"You can't stand still, can you, and run at the same time?"

"A politicianer can," declared Simple.

Chapter Two

"I wonder how come they don't have lady pallbearers?" asked my friend.

"Lady pallbearers?"

"Yes," said Simple, "at funerals. I have never yet seen a lady carrying a coffin. Women do everything else these days from flying airplanes and driving taxis to fighting bulls. They might as well be pallbearers, too."

"Maybe it's because women are more emotional than men," I said. "They might break down from sorrow and drop the corpse."

"Whooping and hollering and fainting and falling out like they used to do at the old time funerals," said Simple, "has gone out of style now, leastwise in Harlem where the best undertakers has a nurse in attendance. If anybody faints at a funeral now, the nurses stick so much smelling salts up to your nose that you sneeze and come to right away. You better come to-else that ammonia will blow your wig off. They say undertakers' helpers get paid by the hour now, too. They are very busy people, also expensive, so they have no time for nobody holding up a funeral by fainting. And these modern educated ministers do not like their sermons interrupted by people screaming and yelling. Modern ministers is all Doctors of Divinities and such, so too cultured for hollering. But I remember a funeral I went to once down in Virginia where all the mourners delivered sermons, too, and talked and hollered louder than the preacher. And the widow of the deceased asked the dead man why did he leave her.

"`Why did you leave me, Thomas?' she cried. `Why?'

"She knew darned well the man drunk himself to death, also that she had put him out of the house more than once, and quit him twice. Yet there she was crying because he had relieved her of his burden once and for all. You could hardly hear the minister who was preaching the corpse to heaven instead of hell, so much racket did his wife and relatives keep up."

"Ways of grieving vary," I said. "In India, for example, the widow in some communities throws herself onto a flaming bier and perishes with her husband."

"Them widows must be right simple," said Simple.

"In some countries widows wear black all the rest of their lives after the husband dies."

"Which saves them cleaning bills," said Simple. "Dirt does not show on black."

"In Ireland they have wonderful wakes the night before a funeral and eat and drink all night."

"I wish I was in Ireland," said Simple. "I could really help drain a bottle."

"And in Haiti they play cards at the wake."

"No," said Simple, "no cards! I would not want to lose my money gambling, not even for my best friend. I would not play no cards at nobody's wake."

"In some parts of Asia, they bury the dead standing up."

"Which is better than being buried upside down," said Simple, "or cremated-burnt up before you gets to hell."

"Cremation is a sanitary process, I think. Besides, ashes takes up very little space. Just imagine all the acres and acres of land nowadays taken up by cemeteries. A person's ashes in a jar can be kept on the mantelpiece."

"What old mantelpiece? Where?" cried Simple. "Never no ashes of no deceased on my mantelpiece. Oh, no! When a person is dead and gone they should be where they belong, in the ground."

"Pure custom," I said. "In some countries folks are not buried in the ground at all. In certain primitive communities the dead are put on a mountaintop and left there. At sea you're dropped in the water. It's all according to what you are accustomed."

"Well, I have not been buried yet," said Simple, "but when the end comes and I am, I want to be decent buried, not dropped in no water, nor left on no mountain, neither burnt up. Also I want plenty of whooping and hollering and crying over me so the world will know I have been here and gone-a bang-up big end. I do not want no quiet funeral like white folks. I want people to hear my funeral through the windows. If not, I am liable to rise up in my coffin myself and holler and cry. I demand excitement when I leave this earth. Whoever inherits my insurance money, I want 'em to holler, moan, weep and cry for it. If they don't, I dead sure will come back and cut 'em out of my will. Negroes don't have much in this world, so we might as well have a good funeral."

Chapter Three

"The other day a white man asked where is my home," said Simple. "I said, `What do you mean, where is my home-as big and round as the world is? Do you mean where I live now? Or where I did live? Or where I was born?'

"`I mean, where you did live,' the white man said.

"`I did live every-which-a-where,' I told him.

"`I mean, where was you born-North or South?' the white man said.

"`I knowed that's what you mean,' I said, `so why didn't you say so? I were born where you was born.'

"`No, you weren't,' he declared, `because I was born in Germany.'

"`Some Negroes was born as far away as Africa,' I said.

"`You weren't, were you?' he asked.

"`Do I look like a Mau Mau?' I said.

"`You look African, but you speak our language,' that white man told me.

"`Your language,' I hollered, `and you was born in Germany! You are speaking my language.'

"`Then you are an American?'

"`I are,' I said.

"`From what parts?' he kept on.

"`All parts,' I said.

"`North or South?' he asked me.

"`I knowed you'd get down to that again,' I said. `why?'

"`Curiosity,' he says.

"`If I told you I was born in the South,' I said, `you would believe me. But if I told you I was born in the North, you wouldn't. So I ain't going to say where I was born. I was just borned, that's all, and my middle name is Harlem.' That is what I told that white man. And that is all he found out about where I was horned," said Simple.

"Why did you make it so hard on him?" I asked. "I see no reason why you should not tell the man you were born in Virginia."

"Why should I tell him that? White folks think all Negroes should be born in the South," said Simple.

"There is nothing to be ashamed of about being born down South," I said.

"Neither about eating watermelon or singing spirituals," said Simple. "I like watermelon and I love `Go Down, Moses,' but I do not like no white man to ask me do I like watermelon or can I sing spirituals."

"I would say you are racially supersensitive," I said. "I am not ashamed of where I was born."

"Where was you horned?" asked Simple.

"Out West," I said.

"West of Georgia?" asked Simple.

"No," I said, "west of the Mississippi."

"I knowed there was something Southern about it," said Simple.

"You are just like that white man," I said. "Just because I am colored, too, do I have to be born down South?"

"I expect you was," said Simple. "And even if you wasn't, if that white man was to see you, he would think you was. They think all of us are from down in `Bam."

"So what? Why are you so sensitive about the place of your birth certificate?"

"What old birth certificate? Where I was born they didn't even have no birth certificates."

"Then you could claim any nationality," I said, "East Indian, West Indian, Egyptian, German."

"I could even claim to be French," said Simple.

"Yes," I said, "or Swiss."

"No, no!" said Simple. "Not Swiss! Somebody might put chitterling in front of it. And I am not from Chitterling-Swiss! No, I am not from Georgia! And I have not traveled much, but I have been a few places. And one thing I do know is that if you go around the world, in the end you get right back to where you started from-which is really going around in circles. I wish the world was flat so a man could travel straight on forever to different places and not come back to the same place."

"In that case it would have to stretch to infinity," I said, "since nothing is endless except eternity. There the spirit lives and grows forever."

"Suppose man was like the spirit," said Simple, "and not only lived forever but kept on growing, too. How long do you suppose my hair would get?"

"Don't ask foolish questions," I said.

"Negroes who claim to have Indian grandmas always swear their grandma's hair was so long she could set on it. My grandma did not have so much hair in this world. But, no doubt, in the spirit world that is changed, also her complexion, since they say that up there we shall be whiter than snow."

"That, I think, refers to the spirit, not the body. You change and grow in holiness, not in flesh."

"I would also like to grow in the flesh," said Simple. "I would like to be bigger than Joe Louis in the spirit world. In fact, I would like to be a giant, a great big black giant, so I could look down on Dixie and say, `Don't you dare talk back to me!' I would like to have hands so big I could pick up Georgia in one and Mississippi in the other, and butt them together, bam! And say, `Now you-all get rid of this prejudice stuff.' I would also like to slap Alabama on the backsides just once, and shake Florida so bad until her teeth would rattle and she would abolish separate schools.

"As I grew taller, I would look over the edge of the big round world and grab England and shake her till she turns the Mau Maus free, and any other black parts of the world in her possession. I would also reach down in South Africa and grab that man, Malan, and roll him in mulberry juice until he is as dark as me. Then I would say, `Now see how you like to be segregated your own self. Apart your own hide!'

"As I keep on growing bigger and taller I'll lean over the earth and blow my breath on Australia and turn them all Chinese-yellow and Japanese-brown, so they won't have a lily-white Australia any more. Then some of them other folks from Asia can get in there where there is plenty of room and settle down, too. Right now I hear Australia is like Levittown-NO COLORED ADMITTED. I would not harm a hair of Australian heads. I would just maybe kink their hair up a little like mine. Oh, if I was a giant in the spirit world, I would really play around!"

"You have an imagination par excellence," I said, "which is French for great."

"Great is right," said Simple. "I would be the coolest, craziest, maddest, baddest giant in the universe. I would sneeze-and blow the Klu Klux Klan plumb out of Dixie. I would clap my hands-and mash Jim Crow like a mosquito. I would go to Washington and rename the town-the same name-but after Booker T., not after George, because by that time segregation would be plumb and completely gone in the capital of the U.S.A. and Sarah Vaughan would be singing like a bird in Constitution Hall. With me the great American giant, a few changes would be made. Of course, there would be some folks who would not like me, but they would be so small I would shake them off my shoe tops like ants. I would take one stop and be in California, another step to Honolulu, and one more to Japan, shaking a few ants off into the ocean each time I stepped. And wherever there was fighting and war, I would say, `I don't care who started this battle, stop! But right now! Be at peace, so folks can settle down and plant something to eat again, particularly greens.' Then I would step on a little further to wherever else they are fighting and do the same. And anybody in this world who looked like they wanted to fight or drop atom bombs, I would snatch them up by their collars and say, `Behave yourselves! Talk things out. Buy yourselves a glass of beer and argue. But he who fights will have me to lick!' Which I bet would calm them down, because I would be a real giant, the champeen, the Joe Louis of the universe, the cool kid of all time. This world would just be a marble in my pocket, that's all. I would not let nobody nick my marble with shells, bombs, nor rifle fire. I would say, `Pay some attention to your religion, peoples, also to Father Divine, and shake hands. If you has no slogan of your own, take Father's, Peace! It's truly wonderful!'"

Chapter Four

"I remember one time you told me that you thought that if white people who say they love Negroes really do love them, then they ought to live like Negroes live. Didn't you say that?"

"I did," said Simple, "especially when they go down South."

"That means then that our white friends should ride in Jim Crow cars, too?"

"It does," said Simple.

"Why?" I asked.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes Volume 8 Copyright © 2002 by Ramona Bass and Arnold Rampersad
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

---