Langston Hughes Part of New Yorker Summer Fiction

A WRITER'S WIT
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Born June 13, 1893

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Langston Hughes's previously unpublished story is the third in a series of four. —RJ

Illustration by Noé Sandas

June 6 and 13, 2016, Langston Hughes, “Seven People Dancing”: Written in 1961 and found among Hughes’s papers at Yale University, this sort of prose poem spins like an LP, the story of an evening at a fairy’s apartment. ¶ Marcel rents out his place in Harlem to couples who wish to dance (and apparently more). For a price he provides the music of twelve stacked records plus liquor. The phrase “seven people dancing” becomes a refrain throughout the story, signifying that Marcel, the fairy, is always dancing alone. One of the couples is “mixed,” the girl white. When a tall, dark man indicates he doesn’t have the money to take advantage of the use of Marcel’s tastefully decorated bedroom, “the white girl” says, “Oh, but I do.” The next record falls onto the turntable and places the story in a definite era:

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“It was a Dizzy Gillespie record, and what it said without words summed up the situation pretty well. It was not that room but the world in that room that was in the record. The music was uranium, and those seven people, had they been super-duper spies, could not have known more about atomic energy—that is, its reason for being a mighty way of dying, “Oh, but I do” being a component” (61).

This piece may once again demonstrate why unpublished works of dead authors should not necessarily be unveiled in this fashion. Did the story receive the same number of cuts or edits that the stories of living authors receive? There may have been a very good reason that Hughes’s story went unpublished until now. Was it because he didn’t wish for people to speculate on his sexuality? Was it because the piece was a work-in-progress? Was it because it somehow lacked the luster of his important works? The editor always must ask herself, “If I could contact the author in the hereafter, would he want this story to appear in The New Yorker in 2016?” Of course, there is no definitive answer. The questions is the answer.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016