Langston Hughes: Working Toward Salvation

In conjunction with a fantastic new exhibit opening May 9th, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, this film combines Hughes' writings with interviews about his life, work, and impact. As described by Kate A. Baldwin (Northwestern University):

Working Toward Salvation brings together a fictionalized account of Langston Hughes's autobiographical sketch "Salvation" and interviews with Arnold Rampersad and Alice Walker about Hughes's life and life's work. The first part, "Salvation," is based on the vignette of the same name that appears in the first volume of Hughes's autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). "Salvation" describes a young Langston's agonizing decision to be "saved" at the urging of his adoptive aunt Mary Reed. The second part, "His Life and Times" contains the interviews that succinctly offer a series of frames for "Salvation." Those frames include not only the autobiographical but also Hughes's aesthetics, the impact of the Harlem Renaissance on his work, his sense of community, and, perhaps most important for the purposes of this film, his place in the American literary canon.

Walker offers a striking parallel that helps us understand this scene when she describes her own youthful belief in the literal existence of an "iron curtain" between the Soviet Union and the West. "Imagine" her surprise, she muses, when she arrived at the border between Finland and the Soviet Union and discovered that there was no wall. "What an awakening!" she declares. "Plus, the Soviet soldiers were nicer to us than the people in Georgia." What may seem like an erroneous comparison is revealing, given Hughes' own positive experiences in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and his lifelong bent toward radicalism. Walker's commentary thus summons Hughes's controversial poem "Goodbye, Christ" (1932), a poem that brings together the charlatanry of storefront redemption and the appeal of the proletarian revolution to poor blacks in the 1930s. That Schwartz permits Walker to dwell on this point drives home Hughes' message in "Salvation": religion is a powerful force, but rather than offering the revelation of faith, it can offer a very different kind of awakening (to the powers of language, myth, and belief).

Dir. and prod. by Bruce R. Schwartz, 2003. 57 mins.