Dream lives on
Words of poet Hughes still resonate

A month after his high school graduation, Langston Hughes boarded a train in Cleveland to visit his father in Mexico.

He brooded about his unhappy relationship with his parents, but he also pondered his future. He wanted not only to be a writer, but in particular "to write stories about Negroes, so true that people in far-away lands would read them - even after I was dead," he would write later in an autobiography.

When the train reached the Mississippi River at St. Louis, the beauty of the great big muddy waters touched something in him. According to biographer Arnold Rampersad, Hughes pulled an envelope from his pocket and began to write. Soon he had a poem. It began:

"I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young,
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep . . .

At 18, Hughes (1902-'67) had written "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," one of the signature poems of a career during which, despite spells of poverty, loneliness and other woes, some self-inflicted, he accomplished nearly everything he dreamed of doing.
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many thanks to Higgy's page

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

James Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) Teacher Resource File