Triangular Road: A Memoir Read Online Free

Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, which is still in existence today. He told riotous stories about the Harlem literati and “niggerati” (those pretentious black folk who loved to put on the dog). “The poet open to people and parties” described for me the rent parties he attended during the Great Depression. (A quarter or fifty cents at the door helped your host pay the rent.)
    Moreover, Mr. Hughes clarified for me the ideological war during that period between the politically radical but aristocratic W. E. B. Du Bois and the flamboyant populist Marcus Garvey—with Du Bois calling for the creation of a “Talented Tenth” of intellectuals to lead the struggle for full citizenship, and Garvey placing the working class, the masses in the vanguard. “Rise up, you mighty race!” he exhorted them.
    My benefactor often spent the better part of the night educating the fledgling about a period of
our history that had been all but omitted in the standard textbooks of my day.
    Then there were the stories from his travels around the world. The poet had been “a travelin’ man” ever since he dropped out of Columbia University at age nineteen and signed on as a mess boy on a freighter bound for Africa. And, yes, he did actually throw his textbooks overboard as he set sail.
    The Big Sea.
    I Wonder as I Wander.
    Those were his two travel memoirs. I had read The Big Sea as a teenager and had privately vowed, even back then, to follow the example of its author. Not only would I become a writer, but a travelin’ woman as well.
    During those Copenhagen nights, Mr. Hughes became a kind of West African griot, a tribal elder passing down black American culture and history in an endless wreath of cigarette smoke while nursing a shot glass of gin at his side, taken straight, no chaser.
    Berlin, along with any number of other cities in Germany, was next on the itinerary; then it
would be back to Paris again. I would not, though, be accompanying Mr. Hughes on this leg of the tour. It was time for me to return home. There was my son’s increasingly unhappy six-year-old voice over the phone. (He was being taken care of by my sister.) There was, as well, the increasingly nagging thought of the novel I had put aside. Also, I had heard from friends that massive demonstrations were being planned to once again pressure Congress and the president to pass the voting rights bill before the year ended. I definitely wanted to be home for that also.
    Mr. Hughes understood. His generation had done its part, as he had pointed out at Africa House in London. The ongoing Struggle was continuing with mine. “La lutta continua!” The poet understood as much and would complete the State Department tour on his own. Keeping to the schedule, he flew to Germany at dawn one morning, hours before my flight back to the States was due to depart. Ever thoughtful, ever the gentleman, Mr. Hughes left not one, but two parting gifts for me at the hotel’s reception desk. The note
that accompanied them, written in his large hand, in his signature green ink, on the hotel’s stationery, is another precious memento.

    He had not forgotten our aborted steak dinner on the train to Oxford.

    I never had the opportunity to travel with Mr. Hughes again. He nonetheless continued to befriend me and to support my work. Along with the notes and postcards he sent from his travels, he also telephoned from time to time whenever he was in New York. My phone would ring around 11 P.M., and right away I’d know: Mr. Hughes, Night People. Ostensibly, he was calling simply to chat before settling down to work for the night. Actually, the calls had more to do with checking on my output for the day. “How did it go today, Paul-e?” (Still insisting on the feminizing “e” to my name.) “How many pages did you get done?” He was not pleased when all I might have to report for the day was a short paragraph or two that in all likelihood had ended up in the wastepaper basket after