I: Twenty-One
Abrupt Encounter
Eleven years had gone by and I had not seen my father. Suddenly, one day in the spring of 1919, a letter came from Mexico saying:
My Dear Langston:
I am going to New York for a few days on a business trip in June. On the way back I will send you a wire to be ready to meet me as the train comes through Cleveland. You are to accompany me to Mexico for the summer.
Affectionately,
your father,
James N. Hughes.
This letter made my mother very angry. She said it was just like my devilish, evil father—when I got big enough to work and help her earn a living, he wanted to come and take me off to Mexico. Then she began to cry. She said after all she had done for me, if I wanted to go away and leave her, to go ahead, go ahead!
I said I wanted to go to Mexico for the summer to see what the country was like—and my father. Then I would be back in the fall.
My mother was a waitress in a restaurant on Central Avenue, and she and my step-father were back together. My mother wouldn’t be alone if I went to Mexico, so I began to get ready to go. My step-father thought it would be a good thing and said: “Sure, go on.”
That spring I had got my track letter for the high-jump and the 440-relays, but I didn’t have the money to buy a new sweater, so I packed the track letter away in my suitcase to show to my father.
James N. Hughes, my father! I vaguely remembered him carrying me in his arms the night of the big earthquake in Mexico City, when I was six years old. Since then he had always been in Mexico and I had been in the States growing up while my grandmother died and the house went to the mortgage man, my mother traveled about the country looking for my step-father or for a better job, always moving from one house to another, where the rent was cheaper or there was at least a bathroom or a backyard to hang out clothes. And me growing up living with my grandmother, with aunts who were really no relation, with my mother in rented rooms, or alone trying to get through high school—always some kind of crisis in our lives. My father, permanently in Mexico during all those turbulent years, represented for me the one stable factor in my life. He at least stayed put.
“Your father is a devil on wheels,” my mother said. “As mean and evil a Negro as ever lived!”
And when I displeased her, she declared I was just like my father.
I didn’t believe her. In my mind I pictured my father as a kind of strong, bronze cowboy, in a big Mexican hat, going back and forth from his business in the city to his ranch in the mountains, free—in a land where there were no white folks to draw the color line, and no tenements with rent always due—just mountains and sun and cacti: Mexico!
That spring, I was anxious to see my father.
Then an unfortunate thing happened in Cleveland. We moved on the first of June. But I left word with the landlady, that, should any messages come for me, she should send them directly to the new place where we lived. And every morning, to ma