Editor's Note: "Not Without Laughter" (1930)
Not Without Laughter is Langston Hughes’ first novel. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1930, and Hughes indicates it is largely autobiographical. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes describes writing most of the text of the novel while studying at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He was, admittedly, somewhat disappointed in the initial reception of the book, though it did win the Harmon Gold Award for Literature from the Federated Council of Churches – which came with a $400 honorarium. (A non-trivial sum of money at the time; Hughes used it to travel to the Caribbean.)
Today, the novel is especially worth revisiting for its rich and affectionate account of blues music in the Black community, especially the sections related to the protagonist's father Jimboy. (Jimboy first appears in Chapter 5.) This was a topic Hughes had already been writing about as a poet in collections published in the late 1920s like Fine Clothes to the Jew.
In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes introduced Not Without Laughter as follows:
Maybe everybody is sentimental about his college days. Certainly I loved Lincoln. My years there were happy years, jolly and full of fun. Besides I learned a few things. And I wrote Not Without Laughter.
The ideas for my first novel had been in my head for a long time. I wanted to write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West, about people like those I had known in Kansas. But mine was not a typical Negro family. My grandmother never took in washing or worked in service or went much to church. She had lived in Oberlin and spoke perfect English, without a trace of dialect. She looked like an Indian. My mother was a newspaper woman and a stenographer then. My father lived in Mexico City. My granduncle had been a congressman. And there were heroic memories of John Brown’s raid and the underground railroad in the family storehouse.
But I thought maybe I had been a typical Negro boy. I grew up with the other Negro children of Lawrence, sons and daughters of family friends. I had an uncle of sorts who ran a barber shop in Kansas City. And later I had a stepfather who was a wanderer. We were poor—but different. For purposes of the novel, however, I created around myself what seemed to me a family more typical of Negro life in Kansas than my own had been. I gave myself aunts that I didn’t have, modeled after other children’s aunts whom I had known. But I put in a real cyclone that had blown my grandmother’s front porch away. And I added dances and songs I remembered. I brought the boy to Chicago in his teens, as I had come to Chicago—but I did not leave behind a well-fixed aunt whose husband was a mail clerk.
One piece of Hughes’ account here that might be especially notable is his attempt to render a version of his life story that feels more ‘typical’ than his actual family life had been. (One does wonder what the result might have been if he had drawn his grandmother and mother true to life.)
Brief summary
Not Without Laughter is set in the racially segregated small town of Stanton, Kansas. Hughes’ novel follows the coming-of-age of James "Sandy" Rogers as he navigates issues related to family, race, and identity.
The novel opens with a cyclone that rips the porch off the family home, introducing the resilience of Sandy's grandmother, Aunt Hager Williams. Hager is a former slave who makes a living as a washerwoman. She is the central moral force in Sandy's life, determined to raise him to be a "credit to his race" through hard work and faith.
Sandy grows up in a household dominated by women. His mother, Annjee, works as a domestic for a wealthy white family and spends much of her time pining for his absent father, Jimboy, a traveling guitar player who rarely stays in one place for long.
Sandy’s worldview is shaped by his three aunts, each representing a different response to racial oppression:
Harriett: The rebellious youngest sister who rejects her mother’s religion and the drudgery of domestic work to become a blues singer.
Tempy: The eldest sister who has moved into the black middle class, joined the Episcopal church, and tries to "act white" while looking down on her family's lower-class roots.
Annjee: Who remains trapped in low-paying domestic labor, seeking solace in her love for Jimboy.
After Hager dies from overwork, Sandy is sent to live with his well-off Aunt, Aunt Tempy. While Tempy provides him with a vast library and pushes him toward a "refined" education, her strict rules and rejection of his heritage alienate him.
Sandy eventually joins his mother in Chicago, where he works as an elevator attendant to help support her. Just as he fears he must abandon his education, he reunites with Aunt Harriett, now a successful stage performer. Harriet offers to fund his schooling, enabling him to fulfill Hager’s dream of becoming an educated leader while staying true to his cultural roots in the Black community.