Langston Hughes: “Harlem”

In “Harlem,” Langston Hughes asks one of American poetry’s most famous questions: what happens to a dream deferred? This question echoes throughout American culture, from Broadway to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches. It would not be an exaggeration to say that every time the “American dream” is invoked, Hughes’s question is there, asking what that dream is, what conditions make it possible, and why for so many it seems little more than a trap, or an illusion, or a promise that no longer meaningfully obtains. Today, Americans can hear the question in the political language of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the DREAM Act. More basically, it resounds in the stories of people who, by accident of birth or fate, find themselves thrust onto a precarious margin. For many who struggle daily toward a more livable life, the question persists.

The composition and reception of “Harlem” suggest it is no accident that dreaming and deferral are so entwined in the civic discourse of the contemporary American moment. In fact, though readers now tend to consider “Harlem” as an isolated, standalone anthology piece, Hughes initially conceived it as one part of a longer, book-length sequence of poems exploring black life in Harlem. Hughes eventually titled this book Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). In addition to “Harlem,” Montage contains several of Hughes’s most well-known poems, including “Ballad of the Landlord” and “Theme for English B.” But the sum is greater than the parts. In all, Montage is made up of more than 90 poems across six sections that continually return to, riff on, and worry the question of what happens to a dream deferred. “Harlem” is the first of six poems in the final section, “Lenox Avenue Mural,” after the main north-south thoroughfare that runs through upper Manhattan. By reading “Harlem” back into Montage of a Dream Deferred, we can appreciate the full measure and range of its possible meanings.

In his prefatory note to Montage, Hughes prepares readers for the book’s volatile shifts in theme and style:

In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition.

The sections of Montage chart various aspects of this “community in transition” through the intimate spaces of cafés, dives, cabarets, stoops, rooms, subway cars, and corners of Hughes’s beloved city.

Here is the entirety of “Harlem,” as it originally appeared in 1951:

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore—
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over—
      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

If “Harlem” begins with a big question—“What happens to a dream deferred?”—the rest of the poem speculates on how best to answer that question. Hughes’s “answer” takes the form of five questions and one conjecture. These are urgent, embodied questions. Each directs attention to the material costs of neglect and provokes the senses in the process: the withering of the grape (rather than the lush, intoxicating poetry of wine); the uncared-for sore, an open wound now infected and oozing; the butchered meat fetid and putrefying; the candy, left out, abandoned, hardening into an inedible, oversweet, unshapely mass; the body bending, unfree, under a burden. Dreams here are not these overexposed things per se but are imagined to be like them and subject to the same forces—they are both visceral and vulnerable, and altogether too much. Dreams, like history, hurt. By implication, they demand care—and all the work that care entails.

After all these sensory experiences, the poem ends abruptly and dramatically in a way that demands consideration. One of the most ready-to-hand interpretations of that final line—“Or does it explode?”—is to think of the explosion as a riot, a reflection of the possibility that the oppressive conditions marginalized communities in Harlem and across Jim Crow America face might lead to open rebellion. In James Smethurst’s words, Hughes’s poem “both psychologically contextualizes the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943 and predicts future unrest.” In the larger context of the book, however, two other meanings of explosion are in play—the rapid growth of a population and the breakdown of a misconception, as when someone or something “explodes” a cultural myth, fantasy, or deeply held assumption.

Of course, these meanings are interrelated. Several great migrations transformed northern US cities in the first half of the 20th century. The explosion that “Harlem” anticipates, then, might also be imagined in relation to the dizzying wave of languages and cultures that transformed midcentury New York City. At the end of the 1920s, one-quarter of the Harlem population was of West Indian origin. According to some accounts, by 1940, Harlem had the largest West Indian urban population outside of Kingston, Jamaica. And despite a spate of increasingly restrictive immigration laws, Harlem’s immigrant population continued to grow. Citizens migrated as well: in the 1940s, in the wake of the Great Depression and Operation Bootstrap, Puerto Ricans became the city’s second-largest minority after African Americans.

The poems that appear before and after “Harlem” also address these meanings of explosion. “Good Morning,” the poem following “Harlem,” features a Harlemite reflecting on the changes in his city:

I was born here, he said,
watched Harlem grow
until colored folks spread
from river to river
across the middle of Manhattan
out of Penn Station
dark tenth of a nation,
planes from Puerto Rico,
and holds of boats, chico,
up from Cuba Haiti Jamaica …

There is more evidence to suggest these two poems are very closely related in subject matter. In earlier drafts, Hughes gave “Good Morning” the title “Harlem,” and the poem that readers now know as “Harlem” appeared embedded within it, like this:

                   I’ve seen them come,
                               Wondering, wide-eyed, dreaming and dark.
                               What happens to a dream deferred?
                   Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
                   Or fester like a sore—and then run?
                   Does it stink like rotten meat?
                   Or crust, and sugar over—
                   like a syrupy sweet?
                   Maybe it just sags
                   like a heavy load.
                   Or does it explode?
     Pouring out of Penn Station
     a new nation—
     but the trains are late.

This draft helps readers see that all three senses of explosion—riot or rebellion, rapid population growth, and myth-busting—go hand in hand. “Harlem” is not just a poem about the American dream or the dreams of African Americans. Rather, it reimagines the city at the center of “the long history in which black global dreams have foundered on the shoals of America’s racial dilemma,” in Nikhil Pal Singh’s memorable words. The trains in “Good Morning” are not just late: when the newly arrived people disembark, they discover that “there’re bars / on each gate.”

By placing the question of what happens to a dream deferred in the “wondering, wide-eyed, dreaming” mouths of migrants and refugees, Hughes builds on the antiracist and anti-imperialist project of his earlier poetry. By describing Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, and Jamaicans as part of a new “dark tenth,” he dispels once more the enduring notion, popularized by W.E.B. Du Bois nearly half a century earlier, of an elite, highly educated, “talented tenth” of “exceptional men” that would “save” “the Negro race.” From the vantage point of 1951, “Harlem” not only puts the question of a dream deferred in a decidedly internationalist light but also demands that people recognize and hear in it the everyday, lived histories that African America and the Americas share—histories of slavery, racial capitalism, colonialism, and the “unmitigated gall of white imperialism,” as Hughes once described it. These are the forces of relation that pulse and cut through Hughes’s jagged line of questions.

If readers consider “Harlem” apart from these contexts, the poem seems to withhold these histories. But look again: what kind of “answer” is a figurative question—or five of them? One question appears not to lead to the next—there’s no knowing in advance that the poem is heading toward explosion. Hughes’s questions are not especially Socratic or part of some elaborate rational argument or explanation. Yet they’re not evasive maneuvers. To wonder whether a dream might, like everything else, be subject to decay, is to pursue a distinctive thread of inquiry. The jeopardy to which every question points is there. Though readers might not immediately perceive what connects a “sore,” a “syrupy sweet,” and a “heavy load,” the poem’s broader Caribbean context makes the deep historical connections between sugar, slavery, and labor impossible to ignore.

At the same time, Hughes always stakes his poetry’s highest charge on a surviving wonder. His poems return again and again to that basic play of power and risk entailed in asking a question or hazarding a possibility.  If “Harlem” is a poem of questions, Montage is a book of them. Often the questions double as answers. As with filmic montage, in which one image often collides with another in suggestive, violent, and unpredictable ways, in Montage, questions jostle one another, becoming part a deeper interrogation of the rhythms and contradictions of black life in the United States.

“Island,” the last poem in the “Lenox Avenue Mural” section, ends with another question: “Ain’t you heard?” The final section of Montage is thus bookended with questions that insist that what happens depends not just on who is listening but also on what gets heard. What’s more, by ending his book with the question “Ain’t you heard?,” Hughes brings readers full circle, back to “Dream Boogie,” the first poem of Montage, which begins

Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:
You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a—

            You think
            It’s a happy beat?

Compare the questions Hughes poses here with the ones he tried out in earlier drafts of “Harlem”:

Has anybody heard
what happens to a dream deferred?
Does it just disappear in air
as might smoke anywhere?

Unlike “Has anybody heard,” “Ain’t you heard?” does not beseech—it demands. In contrast to anybody, Hughes’s you is more direct: it’s a gauntlet, thrown down, for readers and listeners to pick up. By insisting that readers “Listen closely” at the beginning of his book, Hughes ensures that we won’t take his question to mean “Haven’t you heard what happens to a dream deferred” or even “Can’t you hear what happens to dreams in Harlem?” Instead, urgency and need mix with disconsolation and desire. The question is more like “Why haven’t you heard?” and “Have you been listening at all?”

Hughes had a great ear: the loud, jaunty end rhymes—sun-run, meat-sweet, load-explode—propel the poem forward across lines and sentences that vary in length, rhythm, and stress. At the same time, internal echoes cut across and distort the poem’s emergent patterns: defer reverberates in fester and sugar; syrupy becomes oddly conjoined with maybe and heavy. The poem’s sounds make it possible to hear “the boogie-woogie rumble / of a dream deferred” right down to the phoneme. That first alliterative question, for example, asks readers to listen for the sound the letter d makes—from dream deferred to does and dry all the way to the load and the final “Or does it explode.” Try reading the poem out loud again, this time listening to the sibilant ess sounds as they rise and recede. All of “Harlem” seems to whisper of something else, some fugitive undercurrent, some other answer or meaning, just out of reach.

Meanwhile, the interrogative mood of the poem stays almost constant. Likewise, the basic underlying structure and parts of “Harlem” repeat (Does it … like … or), keeping readers focused on the ongoing, harmful effects of deferral. Yet within this structure, the question of likeness introduces uncertainty: the this-or-that pattern makes it seem as though there’s always an unwanted and unexpected alternative lying in wait.

Throughout Montage, the “dream” that’s deferred and the rumble of its beat are not named or explained in just one way. Instead, the meanings of a “dream deferred” unfold in “broken rhythms”: they’re plural, fragmentary, interrupted, and fugitive. In another poem in Montage, “Deferred,” the dreams that get put off are mostly those granted by upward mobility and access to the middle class. Low-wage work, debt, economic exploitation, and kids are what delay high school graduation, interfere with a happy marriage, make the ownership of luxury goods impossible, turn French lessons and playing Bach into distant wishes, and make the possibility of choosing a different means of employment hard to fathom. In Montage, these dreams quickly become punctuated by others. Throughout, Hughes insists on the underside—the more common and expansive yet less describable side—of such aspirations.

Tending to the deep connections between Hughes’s poem and his historical moment can help readers understand the longer history of the struggle for racial justice. The poem’s fame and enduring public life, for instance, owe much to the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose play A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway in 1959 and became an overnight success. Hansberry took the title of her play from Hughes’s poem and used it as an epigraph in the playbill and in the book version of the play as well. According to W. Jason Miller, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw a performance of A Raisin in the Sun, read “Harlem” in the playbill, and later wrote to Hughes, “I can no longer count the number of times and places … in which I have read your poems.” Three weeks later, “Harlem” made its way into King’s Easter sermon, “Shattered Dreams,” and after that into some of his most memorable speeches. In one, King remarked, “I am personally the victim of deferred dreams.” Even King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech plays on the strains of a deeply Hughesian vision of racial justice.

Throughout his life, Hughes never stopped listening to Harlem. In One-Way Ticket, the book he published just before Montage, a different poem called “Harlem” ends like this:

So we stand here
On the edge of hell
In Harlem
And look out on the world
And wonder
What we're gonna do
In the face of what
We remember.

Neither this earlier “Harlem” nor the poems of Montage offer pat, easy answers or fantastical solutions to the intractable problems Harlemites faced in 1951. But in the final poem of Montage, Hughes imagines Harlem not as a “dusky sash across Manhattan” but as itself an island. What if by this gesture Hughes means to invite readers to imagine the city not as a symbol of isolation, dispersal, or containment but as part of a vast pan-African archipelago stretching from New York to the Caribbean? In a late essay reflecting on his early days in Harlem, Hughes recalled “West Indian Harlem. … Haitian Harlem, Cuban Harlem, little pockets of tropical dreams in alien tongues.” Hughes never stopped listening to those dreams—or to the beat underneath them. In this way, “Harlem” reminds us not only of the kinds of questions that must be asked but also that their answers didn’t have to be determined or faced alone—or dreamed of in one language.