There Was a Party for Langston

There Was a Party for Langston explores the legacy of Langston Hughes and the celebratory opening of the Langston Hughes Center at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library system. Authors Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka attend the event. As a picture book, this work has no formal part or chapter divisions. However, structurally, it has three main sections: one about Langston, one about Maya, and one about Amiri, who the text refers to by their first names. Each section has two timelines: a contemporary frame narrative at the party at the Schomburg Center and a flashback or series of flashbacks that explain the author’s relationship with words. The flashbacks in Langston’s section show him dreaming as a child, how his dreams inspired thinkers like Martin Luther King, Jr., and how Black musical genres influenced his poetry. The flashbacks in Maya’s and Amiri’s sections show how, following Langston’s legacy, they also used poetry to transform words.

Within these sections, the words and illustrations coalesce in a unique combination of multimedia storytelling. The Pumphrey brothers use their illustrations not only to create visual accompaniment for Reynolds’s words but also to add content to the story that the written text alone cannot create or that is potentially too heavy for a children’s book—like the legacies of chattel enslavement implied by their illustration of the shackled arms of a Black person.

Throughout the book, the text stylizes and colors illustrated words to create images and pictures. Early in the book, the narrator says that Langston’s “ABCs became drums, bumping jumping thumping like a heart the size of the whole world” (10). This quotation emphasizes how words are almost living things. The rhyme between the words “bumping jumping thumping” has an onomatopoeic quality, sounding like the repetitive beating of a heart, which is imagery then invoked in the following line.

Not only do Langston’s words animate people, including fellow authors—introducing the theme of Artistic Inspiration and Its Influence Across Generations—but the words themselves are also animated into the forms of people and objects throughout the book, literalizing this liveliness. The text accompanies the “ABCs” quotation with an illustration of a Black man playing drums on the left. The capitalized word “THUMP” forms each of his three drums. Floating in yellow-gold letters across two facing pages is the word “RHYTHM.” Next to the drummer on the righthand page is a trio of Black musicians: a bassist, pianist, and saxophonist, all in a row. The bass is formed by the letter “B,” the piano by the letters “LUE,” and the saxophone by the letter “S,” spelling “BLUES.” Rhythm and blues is a music genre that began in Black American communities in the 1940s and was heavily influenced by the blues and jazz movements of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston helped innovate a genre of poetry called “jazz poetry,” a genre that is “necessarily informed by jazz music” in that it discusses jazz. It uses the rhythms of jazz and blues sounds to inform its narrative rhythm (“A Brief Guide to Jazz Poetry.” Academy of American Poets, 17 May 2004).

In the illustration below the musicians, Langston is speaking into a microphone, showing his involvement with jazz poetry. The illustrated words that form the drums, “THUMP THUMP THUMP,” are an allusion to Langston’s poem “The Weary Blues,” in which he discusses “Sweet Blues! / Coming from a black man’s soul” (Hughes, Langston. “The Weary Blues.” Poetry Foundation). When describing the musician in the poem, Langston writes, “Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor” (“The Weary Blues”). The Pumphrey brothers bring Langston’s “Thump, thump, thump” to life by integrating it into the illustrations, while Reynolds has explained how these lines have animated the book’s illustrations—his “ABCs became drums”—and he has mimicked Langston’s line’s onomatopoeic quality by describing how the words were “bumping jumping thumping like a heart” (10). In this way, Reynolds’s written word and the Pumphrey brothers’ illustrations interact with, mediate, and transform Hughes’s poetry into an accessible format for young readers.

The way that words make pictures in the book also shows how words can become whole worlds. This manipulation of word-into-image draws out how Langston—and, following him, Maya and Amiri—are “word-makers.” The narrator never calls them “authors.” One of the repeating techniques of the book is to describe how Langston, Maya, and Amiri transform regular words into something bigger than the word itself. Like the words that form the blues band’s instruments, these important words that the “word-makers” transform are often stylized to form illustrations. For instance, the narrator describes how Langston “could make the word MOTHER feel like real warm arms wrapped around you, giving a snug hug” (12). In the accompanying illustration, the word “MOTHER” is in yellow-gold letters and forms the silhouette of a woman sitting in a rocking chair, embracing her young son. The shadow she casts forms the words “to son,” referencing Langston’s poem “Mother to Son.” This is the specific poem that transforms the word “mother” to feel like a warm hug, as the narrator describes. This establishes the theme of Learning About Cultural History and Heritage, as the work references Langston’s unique ability to move people with shared experiences through his writing. The poem describes the struggles of a Black mother in America: how she kept persevering and now encourages her young son to also persevere and fight for his equality and place in the world—something Langston also experienced growing up. The narration, the illustration, and the poem they reference show how a simple word like “mother” can embody bigger and more complex topics.

Importantly, the book stresses how Langston’s poetry touches the hearts of real people. When the narrator describes how the “laughter” that resulted from Langston’s poetry “r[i]ng[s] out for years and years” (26), accompanying illustrations show six people all enjoying Langston’s poetry. They are all Black individuals of varying ages, genders, skin tones, and professions, from children reading at home to poetry teachers, porters, and farmers. This is important because it shows how, while Langston certainly did influence Maya and Amiri and the other authors in the library books listening to the party, his words can transform worlds for everyone, further contributing to the theme of Artistic Inspiration and Its Influence Across Generations.

Similarly, the people at the party for Langston show the diversity in the Black experience: The attendees are people of many body shapes and sizes, genders, skin tones, and hairstyles. They are all there to “lif[t] their heads to the word-making boy” (50). In addition to celebrating Langston’s legacy, the attendees—including Maya and Amiri—are there to dance and “let laughter fill the library” (52). Though the book uses images of cages and manacles to allude to enslavement and references how Langston’s writing received criticism for its discussions of freedom and equity, There Was a Party for Langston always comes back to the positive legacy of Langston, emphasizing The Importance of Black Joy. The last lines of the book say that the “books [a]re listening” to the party, “just like you” (53). This second-person address personally invites the reader, no matter who they may be, into the celebration and to be a part of the cycle of artistic influence across generations, emphasizing the indelible, joyful mark that Langston had on his contemporaries and continuing today.