Langston Hughes

Dec. 20,
1954.

WALT WHITMAN AND THE NEGRO

by
Langston Hughes

Louis Untermeyer in his preface to "Modern American Poetry" terms Walt Whitman "the Lincoln of our literature." And, although not usually classified among the Abolitionist poets, there is as clear a call for Negro freedom and equality in Whitman's poetry as in that of Lowell or Whittier or Longfellow.

Because of the deeply human or broadly universal qualities of Whitman's poems or passages about the Negro, his words possess, as of today, a lasting rather than merely an historical value. Very simply Whitman wrote:

> .....all the men ever
> born are also my brothers,
> and the women my sisters.....

And these words might well be a part of a United Nations speech today: "I say man shall not hold property in man; I say the least developed person on earth is just as important and sacred to himself or herself, as the most developed person is to himself or herself. I say where liberty draws not the blood out of slavery, there slavery draws the blood out of liberty.....With one man or woman (no matter which one---I even pick out the lowest) with him or her I now illustrate the whole law; I say that every right, in politics or what-not, shall be eligible to that man or woman on the same terms as any."

Specifically, concerning Negro slavery in the American South, in "By Blue On Shore" Walt Whitman wrote, "Slavery---the muderous, treacherous conspiracy to r it upon the ruins of all the rest, On and on, to grapple with it---Assassin! then your life or ours be the stake, and respite no more." In his great "Son Myself" he pictures a wounded runaway slave, and himself becomes that slave, runaway, am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs....my gore drips...

AND THE NEGRO—2

on the weeds and stones..... Agonies are one of my changes of garments. I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person." And in another passage of the same poem, he aids a runaway who "staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd North. I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean'd in the corner." In "By the Roadside" Whitman wrote, "Not a grave of the murdered for freedom but grows seed for freedom, in its turn to bear seed which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.....Liberty, let others despair of you— I never despair of you."

Of two slaves at auction in "I Sing the Body Electric" Whitman writes: "A man's body at auction..... Gentlemen, look on this wonder..... This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, in him the start of populous states and rich republics, of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments. How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?..... A woman's body at auction..... Have you ever loved the body of a woman? Have you ever loved the body of a man? Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?" Not only does Whitman make it very clear in his poems that he did not believe in slavery, but that he believes in human equality as well: "Whoever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is said or done returns at last to me..... I give the sign of democracy. By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms." Whitman says, "I observe the slight and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon Negroes, and the like," but for him the grass is "growing among black folks as among white," and as for himself, "Neither a servant nor a master I......I will be even with you and you shall be even with me."

The power to create human oneness Whitman ascribes to poetry in his "Song of the Answerer" where he writes: "The words of true poems give you more than poems, give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, lives, essays, daily life, and everything else. They balance ranks, colors,

MAN AND THE NEGRO 3

races, creeds, and the sexes... Whom they take they take into space to behold
the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings, to launch off with absolute
faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again." These
"ceaseless rings" of Walt Whitman's poems embrace us all and, in the clearest of
terms, project the issues of today and the concepts upon which they must be solved.
"Leaves of Grass" is as contemporary as tomorrow's newspaper.

Especially for NOCTURNE,
New York, December 18, 1954.