A young girl’s gaze – curious, wary, but steadfast – looks back at you from the cover of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, the iconic collaboration by Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava, first published in 1955 and now lovingly re-issued in a new Heritage edition from First Print Press. Long overdue, it is the first authorized English-language edition since 1983, and includes an afterword by art historian Sherry Turner DeCarava on the ongoing significance of the work.
An inveterate champion of new talent, from Gwendolyn Brooks to Alice Walker and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Hughes responded enthusiastically when the then 35-year old photographer showed him over 2,000 images of the people and places that made up the tapestry of Harlem life. But DeCarava had been unable to find a venue for them until publishing scion Richard Simon suggested that he accompanying them with text.
“We agreed to a contract at once,’’ DeCarava remembered, as recounted in the second volume of Arnold Rampersad’s magisterial Hughes biography, I Dream A World. “I was happy beyond words to have a book coming out, when I never expected to have one. As for his story, Langston did not want to know any of the facts about the persons I had photographed on the street. He told me he knew them already, and of course he did! He said he would simply meditate on the pictures, and write what came into his head.’’
DeCarava (1919-2009) was the first black photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. The 1952 grant allowed him to devote all of his time to completing his trove of images, 141 of which Hughes selected for their collaborative book.
The result, an extended monologue by “Sister Mary Bradley,’’ a grandmother who refuses an offer – in the shape of a telegram delivered to her at her home on West 134th Street – to come home to Jesus, matches DeCarava’s evocative images like the hushed cymbals in a jazz combo. Hughes limns Mary’s affection for her ne’er-do-well grandson with tart simplicity — and his slim, acutely heard lines work efficiently in tandem with the images like Count Basie’s two-fingered approach to the piano: “That Rodney! The street’s done got Rodney! How his father and mother can wash their hands of Rodney, I do not know, when he is the spitting image of them both. But they done put him out, so they’se can keep on good-timing themselves, I reckon.”
The narrative reads somewhat in the style of the poet’s “Simple’’ stories, newspaper columns about Jesse B. Semple, the everyman of 125thStreet. Hughes and DeCarava show life in its complex, exuberant, and solitary moments — expressively intimate work that directed the attention of a suddenly appreciative white audience away from the stereotypes of slums, crime and poverty.
Mary celebrates the Saturday night parties thrown by her daughter Melinda, and her husband, Jerry, set against images of a refrigerator and kitchen table, set with drinks and a newspaper, as couples dance: “Just neighbors and home folks. But they balls back and stomps down.’’ And she describes the long subway ride back from work, presumably as a domestic, with weary pride:
Sometimes when a woman comes home in the twilight evening, she’s so tired she has to set down at the top of the steps to wait for the cross-town bus. Sometimes a woman goes to work all dressed up, carrying her work clothes in a bundle.
And sometimes they comes home, dressed up, too:
But some’s be too tired to make the change to come home, so they makes the trip in what they work in.
But me, I always tried to change clothes before I come home, so’s my grandchildren would see me fresh.’
If Mary Bradley is unconquerable, so are the urban tableaux DeCarava shoots: tenements being torn down and projects being built, men shoveling coal and delivering ice in summer, picket lines forming and a black nationalist preaching “Africa for the Africans.’’ The pictures and text together create a universal message, sweeter and more authentic, in my view, than the elegiac sadness of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, even the Sandburgian humanism of Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man’’ which included some of DeCarava’s work in its popular NYMOMA show the same year this book first appeared.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life was the most popular book Hughes ever published. Rampersad describes the critical reaction as “rhapsodic’’ (though there is but scant critical comment available about the work). Neither man earned much from it financially. “Unfortunately, although the first printing of 3,000 clothbound and 22,000 paperback copies sold out quickly, and a second printing of 10,000 copies was ordered, Hughes and DeCarava made little money from the book,” Rampersad writes. “At a dollar a copy, the paperback sales yielded slight royalties. Then a lawsuit devoured most of the authors’ profits. In the laborious process of gathering signed releases from everyone photographed in the book who was also mentioned in Langston’s tale, DeCarava had allowed one man to sign for his sister, an elusive person, without her consent. Her enterprising lawsuit for $10,000 was settled out of court – exclusively from the authors’ royalties – for $500.”
DeCarava was unhappy with the five-by-seven inch format – the new edition retains those dimensions – understandably concerned that they might give short shrift to the images. But the modesty, and lack of pretension, work charmingly. It’s more like an EP than an album, and the sounds and sights are that much more vivid.
Race matters, and not just as a tale of woe, but of redemption, tenacity and togetherness despite the obstacles put up by society. “Do you reckon I’m too old to get married again?’’ Mary Bradley wonders, noting new interest from her janitor neighbor. “When I were sick he come upstairs to see me, and he said, ‘Miss Mary, I hear tell you’se down – but with no intention of going out.’ I said, ‘You’re right! I done got my feet caught in the sweet flypaper of life – and I’ll be dogged if I want to get loose.’’’
[Published by First Print Press and David Zwirner Books, September 25, 2018. 108 pages, 141 black and white reproductions, $45.00 hardcover/$24.95 softcover]
Credits for artwork shown above:
- Cover of The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes published by First Print Press. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
- Roy DeCarava, “Joe and Julia Singing, 1953” © The Estate of Roy DeCarava, 2018. All rights reserved. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
- Spread from The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, published by First Print Press. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
- Roy DeCarava, “Julia Reading Newspaper, 1952” © The Estate of Roy DeCarava, 2018. All rights reserved. Courtesy of David Zwirner.