Hughes, Langston

New York. 1965. October 1965. Hill & Wang. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket With Some Tears. 180 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Saul Lambert. keywords: Literature African American America . FROM THE PUBLISHER - In this new collection of forty-six stories, all of them appearing in book form for the first time, Jesse B. Semple of Harlem, U.S.A., comments wisely and wittily on American life today as seen through his eyes. Typical of the delightful insight with with which Langston Hughes has endowed his creation, Simple wryly remarks: ‘Uncle Sam. if you is really my blood uncle, prove it. Are we is or are we ain't related? If so, how come you are so white and I am so black?' Simple discusses the law: ‘When it is not on the side of civil rights, then the law is not right, it is white'; haircuts: ‘If white Americans can learn how to fly past Venus, go into orbit and make Telestar, it looks to me like white barbers in Ohio could learn how to cut colored hair': beatniks: ‘Go south, my boy, go south. Let the fiery cross singe the beard off your beatnik chin'; miscegenation (as seen by his wife Joyce): ‘To me it is living in sin for a colored person to marry anybody related to Talmadge, Wallace, Eastland, Sheriff Clark.' Simple invites his white boss, who is sympathetic toward Negroes, to ‘come Uptown with me and reintegrate.' He dreams of a South in which ‘Mammy Faubus' serves him mint juleps on his plantation veranda and where crackers like ‘Mammv Eastland' know their place; of sailing clown the Harlem River in his yacht and throwing a party for all his friends. inventory #35266