The Big Sea

The memoir runs in three parts and seventy-one short chapters. Part I, "Twenty-One", is childhood and youth: Kansas, Cleveland, the unhappy year with his father in Mexico, and the single year at Columbia that ended when he chose the sea over the lecture hall. Part II, "Big Sea", holds the adventures the book is loved for — the 1923 voyage down the West African coast as a mess boy, and the 1924 Paris year, arriving at the Gare du Nord with seven dollars and washing dishes at Le Grand Duc in Montmartre for fifteen francs a night, in a kitchen ruled by a one-eyed cook named Bruce. The Montmartre chapters are the fullest firsthand account of the district's Black American jazz world that anyone wrote: Florence Embry Jones singing at three in the morning, Bricktop stepping off the boat train, and the after-hours sessions that did not yet have the name jam session.

Part III, "Black Renaissance", is the inside history of the Harlem Renaissance — the parties, the patrons, the literati, the Van Vechten controversy, and the famous verdict that "the ordinary Negroes hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn't raised their wages any." It ends in 1931, with the break from his patron and the Depression closing the party down.

Published in August 1940, the book had the misfortune of arriving in the same season as the sensation of Richard Wright's Native Son, and its early sales suffered in that shadow. Its standing has only risen since; Arnold Rampersad, Hughes's biographer, introduces the current edition. The sequel, I Wonder as I Wander, picks up in 1931 exactly where this book stops.

The book opens on the rail of the S.S. Malone in 1923: Hughes, twenty-one, throws every book he owned at Columbia into the sea off Sandy Hook and sails for Africa. Part I then backtracks through the childhood that got him there — Lawrence, Kansas, with his grandmother; Cleveland's Central High; the miserable Mexican interlude with his father, a man who despised the poor and his own people; the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" written on a train crossing the Mississippi at nineteen; a year at Columbia he never wanted, endured for his father's tuition money, and abandoned for jobs and Harlem.

Part II is motion: the African ports, a monkey named Jocko brought aboard, the winter crossing to Rotterdam, and Paris — seven dollars at the Gare du Nord, a doorman's job on the rue Fontaine paying five francs a night and dinner, then the Grand Duc's kitchen. Summer 1924 takes him to Italy with the club's waiters; his passport and money are stolen on the train, and he works his way home from Genoa as a workaway. Washington follows: menial jobs, his mother's household, and in December 1925 the night he laid three poems beside Vachel Lindsay's plate at the Wardman Park Hotel, where he was busing tables. The papers announced Lindsay's discovery of a busboy poet; Knopf had in fact already taken his first book, thanks to the Opportunity banquet where "The Weary Blues" won its forty-dollar prize and Carl Van Vechten asked to see a manuscript.

Part III settles into Harlem for the Renaissance years: Lincoln University, the parties of A'Lelia Walker, the writers and editors of the movement, the controversy over Van Vechten's novel, and the wealthy patron — never named in the text — whose generosity came with demands that finally broke the relationship and, for a while, Hughes's health. The book closes in 1931 with Hughes turning to the thing he had decided to be all along: a writer who lived by writing.