Cristina Reitz-Krueger, artist
By Carol Howard
On his way to speak at Asheville’s Allen High School for African American girls in 1949, the great Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes stayed overnight at Black Mountain College, which he described in a letter to the writer Carl Van Vechten as “just about the most amazing campus I have ever seen in my natural life – and interracial, too!”
The next day, he performed selections from his jazz- and blues-inspired poetry twice at the Allen School, first for the students and then for the general public. The matinee performance for students was organized by the school’s NAACP chapter, whose treasurer, 11th grader Eunice Waymon, later became the celebrated jazz and blues musician and civil rights activist known as Nina Simone.
In a newspaper column about the experimental college’s efforts to integrate racially, Hughes would amend his description of the Lake Eden setting: “Black Mountain College, about 20 miles from Asheville, does not have a campus. It has a landscape. Its rustic buildings sprawl along one side of a lake with the wooded mountains for a backdrop. In the spring it sits in a bowl of lush green cooled by the lake waters.”
Hughes’ descriptions of such spring landscapes in his poetry tend to be both hopeful and community-oriented. In an early poem, “April Rain Song,” published in a Harlem-based magazine for children in 1921, he welcomes the calming effect of “silver liquid drops” on young city dwellers at night. In “An Earth Song” (1925), Hughes’ speaker has “been waiting long for a spring song / strong as the shoots of a new plant.” Here, the celebration of the season’s long-anticipated arrival reflects the mood of cautious optimism in Harlem that accompanied the ongoing renaissance in African American arts, culture and political life. (Later, he famously captured a different mood in the 1951 poem “Harlem”—the sober despair of “a dream deferred.”)
Hughes reprises the theme of springtime renewal and its healthy effects on children in a 1947 poem, “In Time of Silver Rain”: “flowers lift their heads” while “down the roadway / Passing boys and girls / Go singing.” Nineteen forty-seven was also the year that Hughes moved into two rooms on the third floor of a newly renovated rooming house in Harlem. He was delighted with the Victorian brownstone and with what he described to a friend as its “beautiful lawn in the back garden under tall trees.” He requested that Boston ivy be planted in front of the house, and, to this day, visitors to 20 East 127th Street may still see ivy vines snaking up the facade of the building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
It was on a tiny plot of earth beside the front steps of this home that Hughes established “Our Block’s Children’s Garden,” a flower garden enclosed by a white picket fence, where he taught neighborhood children how to plant and tend nasturtiums, asters and marigolds. A 1955 photo records the poet happily crouching next to the plot, surrounded by youngsters, one of whom is demonstrating the use of a watering can as others look on. Twenty-eight children signed their names on the round placard proudly displayed in front of what had once been a trampled patch of city mud, now transformed into a community garden oasis.
To learn more about Langston Hughes’ visit to North Carolina, visit WesternRegionalArchives.wordpress.com. Carol Howard is associate provost at Warren Wilson College.
