“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes as it appeared in Opportunity Magazine
Something striking about Opportunity Magazine is the way that it is formatted. Poems, essays, and illustrations all follow one another throughout the magazine to create a seamless archive of Black achievements. One of those illustrations that seemed particularly significant appeared in the September 1925 issue of Opportunity. The illustration was drawn by Charles Robinson, and it is an artistic depiction of a Langston Hughes poem called, “The Weary Blues.” The Hughes poem had appeared in an earlier 1925 edition of Opportunity and it had won a literary contest deeming it the best poem of the year. The Robinson drawing is interesting not just for the poem that it is representing, but also for where it is placed within the context of the magazine.
Opportunity Magazine was normally split into several sections. The most common of which was, “Editorials,” “Articles,” “Poetry,” and “Social Progress.” The social progress section was the one that hit most directly with the purpose of Opportunity. The purpose of the magazine, according to Gloria Grant Roberson author of The World of Toni Morrison: A Guide to Characters and Places in Her Novels, was to “combat inferiority by bringing positive news to and about black people.” (101) The social progress section of Opportunity directly addresses this goal. The September 1925 issue where the Robinson illustration appears features Black social progress stories within the world of agriculture, education, and segregation. These positive stories however seem in sharp contrast to the Robison illustration that directly follows these achievements in the magazine.
Illustration by Charles Robinson
The drawing features a completely blacked-out background which places the focus on a blues pianist who is hunched over a piano with the only light in the image coming from a single lamp cast directly over the man and the piano. Even without knowing the context of the poem, it was inspired by, the image is not a particularly joyous one. The overall darkness of the drawing creates feelings of despair and loneliness. These feelings are only heightened when compared to Hughes’ writing. The poem, “The Weary Blues,” is written from the point of view of a piano player who is singing a blues song in a Harlem nightclub. Hughes writes that the player was able to make “that poor piano moan with melody.” Later on, Hughes provides some of the lyrics of the song the old musician was singing:
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Set right in the middle of the Harlem Renniansse the song helps to contextualize some of the feelings behind the movement. While the period was one of great social strides and progress it was also a time where Black people found new ways to display their suffering brought on by their treatment by white society. When the piano player sings that he has to “quit ma frowin’” he speaks on the suppression of Black pain in a way that can be digested by everyone, which is through song. This reckoning makes the placement of the Robinson drawing even more impactful. While Opportunity Magazine understood the importance of highlighting Black achievements and progress, it also provided ample space to remind readers of the realities of the Black experience in the United States. The juxtaposition of the image and the text is almost relaying the message that while having Black social progress is important it must always be understood that this progress is happening within a white world that does not put any stake into the achievements of Black people.
This understanding of the need to create a space where Black people could unabashedly celebrate their achievements while simultaneously acknowledging the social conditions that made that space necessary to begin with, makes the context surrounding “The Weary Blues” poem even more significant. In a chapter from a larger work entitled, Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes is described as being “the brightest and most-recognized star of the Harlem Renaissance.” (56) This recognition was born out of Hughes’ ability to both creatively and authentically highlight various and complex facets of Black life in the United States. Something interesting however comes with the reactions to Hughes’ poem. “The Weary Blues” is one of Hughes’ earlier and more recognizable works. His intention with the poem according to Harlem Renaissance was to, “write in an authentic, personal voice that also spoke for other African Americans, in whose varied lives he was intensely interested.” The reactions from the Black elite of the time, specifically what W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as the Talented Tenth, was of objection. Those Black people who were a part of the Black intellectual elite “complained that Hughes’s writing only reinforced white stereotypes about African American life.” This is particularly interesting when considering the goals of Du Bois’ own magazine, The Crisis. While Opportunity Magazine reveled at the chance to highlight the achievements, Crisis was more geared toward the reinvention of the Black experience with the advancements of the New Negro movement leading the way. This reinvention took great pains to separate anything negative or stereotypical about Black people away from the New Negro. The fact that the Hughes poem was published in Opportunity shows contention around the representation of Black people and their experiences at the time. The two contrasting viewpoints from the two most significant Black publications at the time highlight that there wasn’t just a single salient belief about how to represent the Black experience.