Langston Hughes’ ‘First Book of Negroes’

The cover of the book was so marred by water damage that I could only make out the word “Negroes.” Instantly, I knew it was something I had to examine a little closer.

It was lying on top of a stack of other books on a tray at one of my favorite auction houses. Its cloth cover was a faded green and a dark circle had made a spot in the center. The fabric had pulled away slightly from the lower right corner, the spine was split in several places, and the book smelled of stale water and cardboard.

I opened it to the inside front cover pages, and the drawings that leaped out at me had surprisingly little damage. In fact, as I flipped through the rest of the book, I saw that they, too, were in remarkably good condition but a little wavy. Two of the pages had an embossed stamp from a library in Lambertville, NJ.

There were two drawings on the inside cover pages: on the left were dancing African men in native dress; on the other was a swinging jazz trio. Icould almost hear them jamming. I just had to know the “who” and the “what” of this book in my hand.

On the next page was the answer:

“The First Book of Negroes” by Langston Hughes. Pictures by Ursula Koering. Copyright 1952.

I was wowed. Langston Hughes was one of my favorite writers of the Harlem Renaissance and to have an early first edition book by him was a wonderful find. He was a prolific writer whose talents included poetry, fiction, plays, operas, essays and movie scripts. He explored the injustices poured on the black populace through the personal but humorous tales of a man named Jesse B. Semple. He wrote about the beauty of black folks and the ways of white folks (the title of a collection of his short stories).

As I flipped through the book, I realized that it was a children’s book that traced the history of Africans from their own county to North America. The story began with an explorer named Estevanico – who was a “strong, very dark Negro born in Morocco” – who traveled from Spain in search of the Seven Cities of the Indians that he heard were made of gold. He and his crew landed on the coast of Florida and lived among the Native Americans. He did not find the land of gold, but did come upon a great tribe living in an area that would become Arizona and New Mexico.

The second chapter told of the hunting down of Africans in their country and their enslavement in America. The book completed the history story through a boy named Terry who lived in Harlem with his father and mother, and who visited his grandparents in the restricted South of the 1950s.

The book was described as “another crammed-with-interest first book about the world and its people.” Were there others, I wondered. So I Googled.

According to “Children’s Books and their Creators” edited by Anita Silvey, the market for juvenile and children’s books boomed in the 1950s, with publishing houses looking for new people to write and new markets to tap them into. One of those was Franklin Watts, a New York company that started a “First Book” series for schools. The books were on such subjects as space travel, bees, rivers, airplanes, the Supreme Court, Eskimos and cowboys.

One of its writers was Hughes, whom the company hired at a time when his sources of income were drying up. He was the subject of a smear campaign by right-wingers hyped on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s witch hunt for people whom he dubbed Communists or Communist sympathizers, according to the book “Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature” by Philip Nel.

Hughes was hauled before the committee in 1953 to explain his beliefs (starting on page 973), badgered by a committee that pinpointed lines from his poems or zeroed in on Communist meetings he may have attended. Hughes denied to the committee that he was a Communist (if he had any such leanings, he was moving away from them), but he continued to be dogged by those who were convinced that he was.

He wrote several books in the series, including “The First Book of Rhythms (1954),” “The First Book of Jazz (1955),” “The First Book of the West Indies (1956)” and “The First Book of Africa (1960).” I have a 1995 reprint of “The Book of Rhythms,” with an introduction by Wynton Marsalis.

In the book from the auction, Hughes wrote about Jim Crow laws and separate facilities for blacks and whites in the grandparents’ South, but he also pointed out that some whites believed that blacks were equal (He would make the same comments during the McCarthy interrogation – a belief that apparently sprang from a childhood incident).

Hughes ended the book on a note of hope: “Our country has many problems still to solve, but America is young, big, strong, and beautiful. And we are trying very hard to be, as the flag says, ‘one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'”

Before this book came up for auction, I had asked an auctioneer to sell it separately because I was not interested in the others in the lot. When the time came, I was one of two bidders. I got the book for $30 in its water-worn, ragged, but in my view, “prized” state.