Hughes and Baldwin

Black intellectuals such as the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin were more foreign to their parents for uprooting their lives and moving to a different country without money. For their sons to do so, while they themselves were not so distant from their ex-slave relatives. Coupled with being the recipients of racism, thoughts like leaving the country in pursuit of a career that is not promised not crossed their minds. Sets of dissimilar circumstances, assured that they were just as removed from their peers as they were from their parents.  

For these men, Paris was a land of opportunity. With a reputation for a lack of racism and a growing population of American artists, Paris was not a far fetched idea for these aspiring writers. Despite not having sufficient funds to live there comfortably they believed in themselves, or Paris or both enough to uproot their lives to relocate there.

Keeping in line with what usually happens with expectations, they were not wholly correct. James Baldwin learns first hand, injustices that existed even in Paris. After being informed upon to the police, Baldwin is allowed to experience such indecencies personally. Sentenced to prison simply for unintentionally owning a stolen hotel blanket. He goes through the slow moving process of bureaucracy. In jail for many days and even past Christmas. This short episode erased any illusions of grandeur that Paris may have had the potential of holding for him.

While Langston Hughes did not encounter a cell during his time in Paris, he did learn poverty in a new country. After he had to settle for the cheapest room, he could find which did not even include heat. Hughes shared a room with a Russian ballet dancer on the first night he met her. Living from bread roll to bread roll and most times only eating twice a day. He would have been hard put to support himself had it not been for his needy partner since it took him only three weeks from the point they moved in together.

These men were members of what was known as the “lost generation,” A time known for indulgence, wildness, rebellion and excess. While the two men did not heavily partake in what characterized the reputation of this generation but they were lost in different ways. Being black, poor and very far from their families they were both physically and mentally separated from both the people they left as well as the new ones they chose to surround themselves with. Their parents did not understand their choices to move to a far away. The French, their new co-habitators simply did not understand them. They were young men lost in two worlds, yet they still found the resolve to become successful and influential through the power of their pens.