Just finished Langston Hughes' brilliant book, Not Without Laughter, written in 1930. It's the coming of age story of Sandy, a black youngster being raised in Kansas poverty mostly by grandma, who is called Aunt Hager. The book climbs to this passage, "But was that why Negroes were poor, because they were dancers, jazzers, clowns? . . . The other way round would be better: dancers because of their poverty; singers because they suffered; laughing all the time because they must forget. . . . It's more like that, thought Sandy.
A band of dancers. . . . Black dancers-captured in a white world. . . . Dancers of the spirit, too. Each black dreamer a captured dancer of the spirit. . . . Aunt Hager's dreams for Sandy dancing far beyond the limitations of their poverty, of their humble station in life, of their dark skins.
"I wants you to be a great man, son," she often told him, sitting on the porch in the darkness, singing, dreaming, calling up the deep past, creating dreams within the child. "I wants you to be a great man."
"And I won't disappoint you!" Sandy said that hot Chicago summer, just as though Hager were still there, planning for him.
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