Langston’s Salvation

Winner of the American Academy of Religion’s 2018 Book Award for Textual Studies In viewing Langston Hughes’s reimagined 1961 play, Black Nativity, as a film (directed by the exceptional Kasi Lemmons), it is hard to believe that the Bard of Harlem had a distinct public and social image that was perceived to be anti-church and wholly disinterested in religiosity. The soul of the film was certainly Hughes. His characters bring to life the spiritual conditions of black people and their journey in these Americas through music and vocal mastery that alter the spirit and stimulate the soul. The timeliness of this work is bore out in its themes—themes as relevant now as they were in 1961: the need for communal reflection and rebirth; the necessity of redirecting the lost and healing the broken, and the desire for attenuating familial trauma. Black Nativity is revolutionary. Not only because it serves as one of four gospel librettos Hughes wrote in the 1960s (and arguably his most successful), but also because Black Nativity is extraordinary in the way it imagines humanity’s salvation story through black people—though black bodies. To imagine the Christ child born as a black child through black parents is ahead of its time, even for today’s standards. As Wallace D. Best argues convincingly in Langston’s Salvation, the very notion of this drama “sprang from Hughes’s ability to think expansively, creatively, and even subversively about religion, and American and African American religion in particular. . . . Indeed, Black Nativity constituted an interplay between religious modernism and the old-time religion he first confronted as a child in Lawrence, Kansas” (194). Black Nativity would serve as one of Hughes’s signature pieces in a long and distinguished literary career that spanned over four decades in every genre imaginable.

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