THE BLUES I'M PLAYING
by Langston Hughes, 1934

Although it is less well known and less often anthologized than "On the Road," "The Blues I'm Playing" is arguably Langston Hughes's most resonant, effective short story. It is one of 14 stories appearing in The Ways of White Folks (1934). This was Hughes's first short story collection, and it brought together stories he had written between 1931 and 1934. In the narrative Hughes deftly represents many complex racial, social, artistic, and sexual issues.

The stock market crash of 1929 and the economic havoc that ensued helped kill the Harlem Renaissance, the period of astonishing achievements in African American art, literature, drama, dance, and music that had begun in 1918. The Harlem Renaissance was preceded by the great northern migration of African Americans from the Deep South as they sought better economic conditions. More specifically, it sprang from the development of a substantial African American middle class in New York City. When economic crisis struck in the 1930s, it struck African Americans hardest. The African American middle class was new and its wealthy class minute, and deep, blatant, brutal racism in the North and South created economic obstacles even before the Great Depression. Thus the decade-long flowering of African American culture in Harlem encountered a deadly blight in the form of economic crisis.

Familiar with Marxist economic notions and a shrewd analyst of connections among race, class, and power in the United States, Hughes understood the socioeconomic reasons for the death of the Harlem Renaissance. Moreover, when he threw himself into writing short fiction in 1931, his social analysis, as well as his literary talents, had matured. He was 29, had traveled the world (mostly on freighters), and had published poetry widely. He also had recently discovered and become enthralled by the short fiction of D. H. Lawrence, who in a British context had linked the art of fiction with socioeconomic critique in forceful, fully developed, even daring ways. Although "The Blues I'm Playing" should not be reduced to socioeconomic dimensions, the story can be approached as an intellectual and literary product of the historical time through which Hughes lived. It should also be noted that during the Harlem Renaissance Hughes briefly enjoyed the patronage of a wealthy white New York socialite, Charlotte Osgood Mason. She withdrew her support because she did not like the earthy, politically alert directions in which Hughes's poetry was moving.

In "The Blues I'm Playing" a white New York City widow and patron of the arts, Dora Ellsworth, becomes enchanted with a young African American pianist, Oceola Jones, and decides to underwrite her musical education. She specifically wants Oceola to pursue classical training. All goes smoothly until Oceola becomes involved with a young man. At first subtly and then more firmly, Dora suggests to Oceola that she must choose between her art and her love life. Like Oceola, however, the reader cannot help but see that Dora really wants Oceola to choose between Dora and the man, between loving the man and remaining the object of Dora's repressed but powerful feelings toward her. These tensions are further complicated by Oceola's talent and predilection for "playing the blues," "blues" in this instance referring more broadly to blues and jazz. Dora finds this genre of music "low," associates it with impurity, and sets it in opposition to classical music, which is implicitly "high" and "pure."

As in several stories from The Ways of White Folks, including "Slave on the Block" and "Poor Little Black Fellow," "The Blues I'm Playing" focuses on the "ways" of the superficially well-meaning white liberals who attached themselves to the Harlem Renaissance. It depicts them as people who, in theory at least, liked the idea of supporting Negro art and Negro progress, who often eroticized and otherwise objectified African Americans, and who often recoiled from specific and therefore unmanageable, unpredictable relationships with them. Patronage emerged in the Harlem Renaissance, and emerges in "The Blues I'm Playing," as a weapon of power and as a camouflage for sexual exploitation.

As represented in Dora Ellsworth, this exploitation is sublimated. The narrative traces Dora's desire as expressed in her discovery of Oceola's talents, her programming of Oceola's musical training, and her protection of Oceola from an ordinary love affair. The narrative simultaneously exposes Dora's fear of desire—Oceola's for the man, hers for Oceola—as expressed by her reaction against blues, jazz, and spirituals, which variously represent such elements as earthiness, suggestive dance, emotional abandon, folk rhythms, Negro sensuality, and nightlife. Through it all Dora likes to watch Oceola play the piano, so that Oceola's body itself becomes a site of conflict—of Dora's conflicted feelings and of the conflict over who shall control the destiny of that body, the patroness or the patronized.

When Oceola decides that she will control her own destiny, she performs her decision. She plays for Dora in the regal but cold living room one last time. She plays "the soft and lazy syncopation of a Negro blues, a blues that deepened and grew into rollicking jazz." After Oceola plays, Dora remarks, "Is this what I spent thousands of dollars to teach you?" Thus the patronage ends. As the critic Steven C. Tracy has observed, "Oceola demonstrates her brilliant technique in the classical idiom and even achieves some success in it, but ultimately rejects Mrs. Ellsworth's insistence on Oceola's sublimating her emotions in order to live life as it ought to be lived. The blues lyric, then, is her emancipation proclamation, her break with attempts to 'train' her too far away from her roots."

One might interpret the story in part as the working out in fiction of Hughes's own troubled experience with patronage and of his attitudes toward the Harlem Renaissance. The story shows how alert he was to the destructive conflicts of race, power, privilege, and sex. Although Dora Ellsworth is not a reductive symbol of capitalism, she is in a position to patronize (a loaded word), to bring Manhattan wealth to Harlem art, for she possesses capital. And while she may at first believe that she is doing good, helping sincerely to "cultivate" Oceola, ultimately even she reduces the relationship to business: "Is this what I spent … ?" Moreover, by writing "The Blues I'm Playing" Hughes proclaimed his own emancipation. In "The Blues I'm Playing" and with The Ways of White Folks, Hughes emancipated himself from a liberal, optimistic, perhaps naive view of race and embraced a more radical, hard-nosed, sometimes pessimistic view.

Some readers may agree with Sherwood Anderson's view of The Ways of White Folks and, by implication, of "The Blues I'm Playing." In a review of Hughes's book in The Nation in 1934, Anderson accused Hughes of "getting even" in the book. He advised Hughes that in fiction there is a "plane" of objectivity toward which the writer should aspire. In other words Anderson recoiled from the direct, Lawrence-like treatment of social issues. Many readers, however, may allow for a greater range of approaches in fiction. They may see that, for the history and biography it reflects and refines, for the narrative maturity it embodies, and in and of itself, "The Blues I'm Playing" remains an important, supple American short story.

—Hans Ostrom