Historical Period of 1800 Flashcards
HISTORICAL PERIOD 1800
The making of American literature and culture could not be separated from the
making of the Nation itself founded on the principles of equalities, like it’s proclaimed
in the Declaration of Independence. During the civil war period, the vast majority of
the writers such as: Frederick Douglass, Peter Stone (?), William Wells Brown and so
on, dealt in their works with issues such as slavery and race. For them slavery became
“the topic”, while other writers had a peripheral interest for slavery and race relations,
but it couldn’t be ignored the tensions between the realities of slavery and the ideals of
freedom that were so much present in the writing of that time.
Since 1661 slavery was formally accepted in the United States, it was legal, in that
period people were brought to the Continent as slaves. The slave trade was formally
abolished only in 1808/1809, however we have to wait for the Civil War in 1865 to
end slavery formerly. So, a tension in the United States was present at least since the
Declaration of independence composed by Jefferson to celebrate the democratic
ideals of the Enlightenment period. However, he regarded to the ideals as best realized
by whites in the very specific and hierarchical mode of the Enlightenment period. He
presented black people as inferior to white people and even though he left the question
of race open to further analysis, his observations helped give rise to the racial
ethnography: the ethnological science of the 19th century, which invariably and
continuously presented whites as superior to blacks.
The role of American writer against slavery
Many of the African American writers and also many of antislavery writers of that
period was white, they tried to abolish slavery and improve the conditions of the free
blacks, by challenging the hierarchical claims that race and ethnology were diffusing
and imposing outside. Many of important writers of American literature were against
slavery, for example: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman.
They used literature as a way to make the readers understand that enslavement was a
bad thing. Slavery became more and more also a theme that interested woman activity,
many women writers of that period, like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Sojourner
Truth, compared the slavery to the issues of women’s rights and the condition of being
a slave to the conditions of women under patriarchy
NOVEL ABOUT SLAVER
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
- Herman Melville, Benito Cereno The story talks about a slave revolt aboard
a Spanish merchant ship that actually took place in 1799. - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself He imagines himself offering help to fugitive
slaves. - Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts.
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, it was sold
around 1,000,000 copies by the end of the first decade of its publication, at that time it
was a best seller. The book was inspired by feminists like the Grimké sisters, in the
novel, Harriet Stowe emphasized the importance of women to after slavery reform and
she lamented the unfinished work of the American Revolution that had freed men, but
a lot remain to be done. In her novel she seems to accept notions of racial difference,
so her being anti-slavery does not mean that she believed that white and black people
were equal, she still presented white as in charge and black as domestic and religious
to an extreme level. She just believed that slavery as an institution was wrong and that
was a very common idea of the time. Many writers, especially in the South, reacted
against her novel, while many others, especially in the North, tried to imitate it.
Thoreau wrote an essay named Slavery in Massachusetts that contests the fugitive
slave act of 1850 and he discussed the rule of the northern stage in the support or in the
fight to this law
HISTORICAL EVENTS
The fugitive Slave Act provided that the slaves who tried to escape from one State
into another or into a federal territory had to be captured and returned to their masters.
For example, in Mark Twain novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim was
forced to return to his master.
For many white writers blackness became a threat, the Lullaby song “I give you to
the black man” it’s a precise example of this threat. The worst that can happen is that
“I give you the black/white (?) man” and children tend to think of a monster or a black
shadow, this is a cultural reference
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Another important step in slavery and in the legislation of the United States to regulate
the relations between black and white is the case of Trance Card. We know that many
laws in the United States are the result of a Supreme Court cases.
In 1857 the Supreme Court established that the Constitution of the United States was
not meant to include American citizenship for black people regardless of whether they
were enslaved or free.
Therefore, the rights and privileges the Constitution confers upon American citizens
could not apply to black people, it means that the Supreme Court established that blacks
could never become citizens because they were inferior to whites.
About this concept, Werner Sollors in his essay American Culture talked about
consent and dissent. Sollors has always described the United States as a “Nation of
consent” based on the laws, however, he recognizes the problem of segregation and
slavery in the Nation.
Black people cannot be citizens, so most African American leaders committed
themselves to counteract the laws, that was one of the reasons why the civil war
exploded. Anyways with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the political
power was transferred to the industrial class of the North and slavery was not an
economic necessity and it was not anymore a form worth to be pursued in terms of
national image.
At the end of the war, the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution
abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime, that’s
still possible in some States of the United States.
In 1866 the Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which defined citizenship and
affirms that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It mainly intended to protect
the civil rights of the person of African descent born in the United State, but not the
newly arrived. What the law established did not become a permanent consequence,
because all the subsequent local legislation restricted the civil rights.
In 1868 the 14th amendment to the Constitution trusts citizenship and gives adult
men black people the right to vote, but not adult women. It was basically the only
amendment to the constitution that explicitly discriminate on the basis of sex.
During segregation things got more and more complicated because as a matter of fact
the 14th amendment was often made ineffective by “complications”. Very often black
citizens cannot vote because they are simply deleted from an electoral list, or because
they are improperly inserted in the list of criminals, or simply because their votes were
not counted.
Between 1865 and 1895 there were over 4000 mentions and acts of individual violence
riots such as the Ku Klux Klan and this violence was endemic. In the South, during
the Reconstruction Era in 1866/1876, ten years after the civil war, there was the Jim
Crow legislation that established the black people and white people have like different
spaces: they were separated in schools, in public places, in means of transportations
and even in the bathrooms, so basically it was a segregation. Jim Crow is a fictional
character of a type of theater where white actors were painting their faces in black and
performing the Jim Crow character as a caricature, he is a stupid Black who sings songs
and dances. Jim Crow laws confirmed racial segregation in all public spaces and
facilities and, as a body of laws, Jim Crow has institutionalized economic, educational
and social disadvantages probably in Americans and this was all granted by the
Supreme Court that often limited the application of the 14th amendment on a local or
State level.
There was another very famous case: Plessy versus Ferguson (1896) in which the
Court ruled that racially segregated public facilities did not violate the equal protection
clause of the 14th amendment.
So, even if black people had gained with the Civil Rights Act and the 14th and 15th
amendment their freedom and their rights, they were gradually dismantled very
legislation, while their right to vote was very often prevented and violence as said was
very strong
W.E.B. DUBOIS
DuBois was an intellectual and political figure, he wrote many books, essays, novels
and speeches, he was very prolific, and he increased a wide ranging in literature,
philosophy political and music.
His full name is William Edward Burghardt DuBois but he is known as W.E.B DuBois.
He was born in 1868 in Massachusetts, he grew up in a community because he was
raised by his father with the help of his extended family.
He did not experience discrimination as a child since he grew up in a place where there
were no particular pressure, in his town there were 53 blacks.
DuBois attended white schools and churches as a child, he studied at a small, poor and
black College in in Nashville (Tennessee), even though he was a very good student and
he had all the possibilities and the credentials to attend Harvard, but because he was
black he was not mentioned and so he had to be content with this small college, where,
for the first time, he really experienced the Jim Crow system.
During the College he expired life among blacks as a black, he realized how slavery
end racial conditions had affected his people, he also became aware of the fact that not
all blacks are the same, the different depends on where they have been born. He realized
that racial characteristics are the result of historical circumstances and social dynamics,
not a natural fact.
He got a second bachelor’s degree in history, he graduated in sociology he got
fellowship and so he could be going to Harvard where he was influenced by the
teaching of William James, a philosophy and a sociology. After the Harvard Steven
fellowship he went to study at the University of Berlin and there he got in touch with
most prominent social scientists of those days.
He traveled through Europe, and he started to gain an international idea of racial
relationship. In the end of 18th/19th century he was the first African American to earn a
Doctoral Degree Porgram from Harvard, his dissertation about the African slaves was
published as the number one the first book in the new Harvard historical studies series,
which is still going on today and still like a super prestigious avenue to be published.
At that point he was able to move to the University of Pennsylvania and to the
University of Atlanta, where he had his Pentecostal career. In Philadelphia he carried
out his most famous sociological research that became his pioneering study called The
Philadelphia Negro, which is the first sociological study of a black community in the
United States, the book explores the impact of segregation on poverty and crime.
After traveling through Europe and going back to the US and working on in his book
in sociology field, he was more and more turning to Africa, partly as because Africa is
the origin of the black people, but also because it is a source of historical sense
awareness and pride. DuBois attended the First Pan-African conference in 1900, which
was held in London, he urged the Nations to the world respect the black people and
fight racism and imperialism on a global level. DuBois had a very important role in
coordinating a global discussion, he thought that it must not just an American issue,
but an international and general issue.
In 1905 DuBois met other activists near Niagara Falls and he started the Niagara
movement, which was a movement that viewed the African American question as part
of the question of exploited work. Dubois bought up a press and started the publications
of magazines and journals where circulated the ideas and principles of the movement.
In 1910 he was among the founders of the NAACP, National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the most important and powerful association for
colored people. Dubois was in charge of publicity, and he was the editor of the NAACP
journal called The crisis which began publications as a monthly and it had extremely
successful to the point that, by the end of the 1910s, it became a journal of over 100,000
copies per month. The journal was also a vehicle of anti-racism and soon it become the
official journal of what is called the Harlem Renaissance.
He also worked on the project of Encyclopedia Africana, designed as historical study
of Africans in the world, not only in the United States. He published some novels, like
The question of the Golden Fleece and a play called The Start Ethiopia.
However, DuBois felt that their association (NAACP) were not making any progress,
they were exercising some power but not enough to radically change the situation.
He was impressed more and more towards the global lack question and towards
communism as a way to ensure global social justice. He was frustrated by the lack of
fundamental change and progress in the condition of African Americans, and he shifted
his attention to the racial relations in America. He moved to the search for worldwide
economic solutions to the international problems of inequality among the races, not
just the black community. So, he began a steady movement toward Pan-African and
socialism that led him to join the US Communist Party in 1961.
His interest in Africa induced him to move permanently to Ghana where he lived until
his death in 1963, when he was 95.
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
The Souls of Black Folk is a modernist text, the modernism has posed itself as a
normative canonical form of art.
The source of Black Folk is a collection of essays, it includes narratives of African
American lives and musical scores, music is a very powerful element of the identity
and coherence of the book that recurs at the beginning of each chapter, the three
chapters started with an epigraph.
The goal of the entire book is to reclaim the African American full human stature by
recounting his African American life, he analyzed the African American condition both
historically and sociologically.
Summary of THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
Chapter 1 begins with Arthur Symons’ poem “The Crying of Water.”
Du Bois explains that people in “the other world”, the world of white people, seem
perpetually curious about what it feels like to be “a problem”, he explains that he first
became aware of being “a problem” as a child in Massachusetts.
One day, all the children in his class at school exchanged greeting cards, and one girl
refused to accept Du Bois’card. It was this experience that made him realize he was
different, and was excluded from the world of white people by “a vast veil.”
Du Bois didn’t immediately feel the need to destroy the veil, but instead dedicated
himself to working hard in the hope of excelling in the future as a doctor, lawyer, or
writer. He notes that this reaction differs from that of other young black boys, many of
whom grew bitter at the idea that God made them outsiders within their own country.
Du Bois emphasizes that all young black men felt the pressure of prison walls around
them as they grew up, and that they were forced to choose between grimly accepting
their fate or hopelessly attempting to overcome it.
Du Bois characterizes black people as “a sort of seventh son,” cursed to live behind
the veil. At the same time, this veil produces a “second-sight” that means black people
are forced to view themselves through the hostile perspective of whites. Du Bois calls
this “double-consciousness,” and suggests that it is both a burden and a kind of skill.
Double-consciousness can leave African Americans feeling filled with internal
conflict; yet it is a testament to their strength that they are still able to conduct their
lives in this state of duality.
African American history has been shaped by the struggle to overcome the state
of double consciousness. Du Bois emphasizes that this does not mean eradicating
either the African or American side of black American identity, but rather insisting that
these two sides can exist harmoniously instead of being in conflict. This task is so
difficult that it can appear as though black people are weak, when in fact they are
simply faced with an almost impossible burden—the “contradiction of double aims.”
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was born in the second part of the 19th century. His writing
activity is also part of general modernism, even though different kind of modernist. He
was born in Ohio (we are away from the East Coast and New York City), his father
was a small merchant. Since he was 14 traveled a lot and participated in the Spanish
American war in 1898, when the main issue of the world was Cuban independence,
in fact, the revolves had occurred for some years in Cuba against the Spanish rule,
officially the main objective was to defeat Spain e to close empire. Anderson
participates in Spanish American war and afterwards he got married and moved to
Chicago where he worked as a copywriter in an advertisement company and met with
American poet, Carl Sandburg. Sandburg was also a biography a journalist and an
editor and thank to him Anderson was introduced to the Chicago renaissance, when
Chicago was flourishing of literary activity, but at moment it was considered just a
frontier city and not very well versed in literature and the period is approximately 1912
-1925. The leading figures of writers of Chicago renaissance are many and these picked
to talked about the contemporary urban environment, lamenting the loss of traditional
rural values, in what they perceived as an increasingly industrialized and materialistic
of American Society, through the failure of the romantic promise, the hard work that
would automatically bring material and spiritual rewards which is not only romantic
ideal but also puritan. Most of these writers were originally from small Midwestern
towns and they deeply affected by the regionalism of the 1890s, which is the
movement date or the style that anticipated the realness of the 20th century literature.
They also were mainly preoccupied with the transformation of rural and European
Midwestern towns, of Midwestern life that was getting away from traditional craft,
manual labor, local community and was becoming more and more a fragmented,
machine driven and intensely capitalistic, model of existence. Basically, the culture of
Midwestern villages, small towns, did it only just begun to take a shape, it was all of a
sudden swept away and what was perceive as a fruitful and promising region then it
was sacrificed to commercialism, this is the moment when Detroit, Chicago,
Pittsburgh became industrialized city.
Sherwood and Fitzgerald turned to potential sources programmed into regional and
national life, authentically one is nature, in particularly that super abundant nature, the
one confined in Midwestern states with lakes, forests, rivers; and the second one is the
model provided by the traditional culture of medieval Europe. So, when they had
the sense of their feeling of losing their culture, they retreated to nature in the past, and
the result was a new sacramental vision of how life in the Midwest and by extension
life in modern America might be lived differently.
In each other’s works, there are the characters encounters the Midwestern land and
made the description of the land as reluctant, objective reality refuses to yield to the
wrong kinds of modernity, it’s a resisting land and the characters are genuinely open
toward their engagement with land that must teach them generally find some personal
blessing and to learn how to claim a truly human place in their life. Another feature of
this Chicago renaissance is the reputation of journalists is a literary medium and writers
such as Andersen, Sandburg were all associated with Chicago newspapers and made
on journalism literary activity. In fact, in this environment Anderson published his
first short stories, in 1969 his first novel and a book where reveals three themes to
patients of Henderson public park: the individual quest for self in social improvement,
the small-town environment and the distrust of modern industrial society. We cannot
find in the novel the interest in human psychology, in the sense of conflict between
inner and outer worlds, that appears in later works and in the story. His most
successful work is the short story collection called Winesburg Ohio and that’s the
collection that launched his career as a writer in 1919 when Anderson was 43 years
old. In the 1920s Anderson published several novels, mostly inspired tourist trips, and
two shorts story collections, one is horses and men, and it was published in 1923, then
a memoirs books of essays and a book of poetry.
Stylistically Anderson used brief or at least uncomplex sentences, unsophisticated
vocabulary, appropriate to the dull awareness and limited resources of this typical
characters.
Anderson’s works were important influences on other writers, because he encouraged
the simplicity, the directness and he made attractive the use of the POV of outsider
characters, this is a way of criticizing conventional society; he also promoted the short
story as a narrative form, or better presented as a slice of life or a significant moment,
it is opposed to the panoramic and summary mode of novel as a model, as a medium
and that’s something we can find also for example in Hemingway
The man who became a woman
It’s kind of interesting, there are many themes, like for example the fact that he doesn’t
know how to speak with girls, he doesn’t know what to say, and also for example a
struggle with the identity because for example, when he is in the salon and he is looking
in the mirror, he sees a girl’s face, he doesn’t see himself and for this reason we can see
a sexual theme in the story.
In kind of in city black people like animals, strong image because animals are
fundamental to this story. It’s Saturday night, in the full season, in a salon, in the
minor’s town in the United States, the protagonist Herman who is 19 years old looking
at himself in a mirror, he sees the face of a woman in the place of himself, running back
and stalls in shock after this experience. He is assaulted by two drunk negro man who
believe is a girl, it is fright to death, and he run away enters in hold slaughterhouse,
here stumble over the skeleton of a horse in the night. In the very next day, now sure
enough identity as a man, he leaves the environment of the horse races.
Who narrates this story of The man who became a woman?
The protagonist. He talks before about some things then
he describes another thing and then he goes back, for this it’s not very linear because
also the time is not linear. The narrator tries to make a sense of it, by narrating the
story. The story has been read through the lens to the man of the initiation story (storie
di iniziazione), which is specifically American nearly and here we can observe the
aspect of the regional modernism in characters, the perspective of the town. We have
an aspect of gender: it’s sexuality and homosexuality. The story focus is on the
writing activity, act of narrating is very important in this story. In theory there is an
evolution, and an evolution implies that there isn’t circularity.
The main theme of the story is clearly otherness, and otherness that is in James, for
example, is inside the protagonist, the ego is perceived in this story as well as a monster
whose alterity it’s mainly expressed in terms of gender internalized of the protagonist,
instead of denying and projecting the alterity outside. The narrator constantly accepts
the disturbing experience, after Herman seems to accept his experience as a sort of as
the unresolved and unsolvable object with narration. In the narration there is a
therapeutic confession that the protagonist needs, even more than in James, here
everything is conceptualized in binary terms, there are many doubles which call these
binaries. The main experience is clearly a male protagonist becoming a woman, we
have Herman as a man and Herman as a woman. Herman is all, is the protagonist, is
the point of view, is the narrator in the fictional author, the one who writes the story.
The story does say that he’s in love with Tom Means, but he also says that the love
does not mean what others think, he says “I’m not a fairy waiting for truth”, it is explicit
his pain, but apparently explicitly he says that he is not homosexual.
What is Anderson’s narrative style?
It’s full of colloquium forms, there are very
strong images but at the end we can understand be the text simple. The narrative pace
is dead, narration with its colloquial forms and the frequent phrases involve the readers,
and in the story there’s a sort of confession to readers. However, while the narrative
situation foregrounds the necessity narrator of narrating this still unsettling experience,
but it’s still difficult to narrate. We can see this in the style, where we encounter a lot
of hesitations, digressions, which become to us the style of Herman narration, the signs
of a disturbing and still unresolved experience, despite he repeatedly reassures us.
What do we know about Jesse, his wife? Not much, only the name and she is more
than a character, she is the function of confirming identity and then she embodies a
stereotypical female role, because another thing we know about her is that she’s in the
kitchen making pie. The story presents a completely divided binary, double
masculinity, and femininity as a biological as well as a social fact, but the rules are
very clear and distinct
What about role models for Herman?
He examines different male role models and
end up being all equally inadequate, constricted and even the humanizing. Tom and
Bert are only positive role models. In the other men he finds another type of
masculinity, the sexual promiscuity, their brutality in their homosocial
relationships as shown in the attempted double rape in the final scene when Herman
is publicly mocked. Then we have the miners that have a rat life. Characters are
described with animal characteristics; the man is described as an unnatural monster or
as an animal in a sort of projection. Tom and Bart, in particularly Bart represents a final
figure as a father protective, he recognizes when Herman is having a moment when he
feels lonely, however he is racially marked and therefore he becomes an impossible
role model to be a positive one, because it is rational
Analysis of The man who became a woman
That’s where Herman explains our talks about his relationship with part in
the racial tension. It tells us of this home erotically tension with which doesn’t mean
sexuality, doesn’t mean the day where active, but there is almost social tension. They
could have done things for each other. Herman is only positive model and the last figure
of reference which is reactivated when Herman narrates the story. It is brought back as
an ideal model and as an interpreter.
One of the lenses usually apply chosen to interpret this story is the initiation story
breeding tips, so the initiation is an anthropological structure.
In all right of passage as a moment of transition between states of being there could be
a personal states person in between personal conditions or between social and culturally
recognized conditions.
So, in the general anthropological model funded by bank in the transition undergoes 3
stages:
* there is a first stage of this model named separation.
* the second is called a liminality or margin.
* and the third is incorporationIn the first phase people, usually young boys, or girls, withdraw from their current state
and prepare to move from one place to or one status to another. So, the first phase of
separation implies that an individual, usually I am one, leaves he’s always row in
original society and then dunce is previous status.
This middle phase is something difficult to define because it’s not yet the future so it’s
difficult to describe according to any recognized cultural category, so it becomes the
condition of invisibility or ambiguity: “you’re not what you wear, you’re not yet what
you will be”. This liminal stage is a definition fluid and dynamic, it is the real name of
cure possibilities in which new configurations, new ideas, new relationships can
arise from this state
His original condition is a condition of normality, being a son living with his parents,
working in a store, so it is a socially normal life. It is known as adventure’s Herman
because he chooses to abandon just normality to start an adventure.
The beginning and the ending constitute the two apparently stable and
unproblematic poles: we had his previous state and at the end we have a sort of present
moment in which he is a married man and starts not constrained life. He is afraid of
going to jail, which means entering one of the most oppressive structures of society, so
he refuses that option. This little detail is useful to establish an opposition between
inside and outside, which is fundamental in this story: inside and outside the family,
inside of that the job market and outside it, society outside, inside jail and outside it.
We have two phases:
* the first phase when he’s friends with Tom
* the second phase when he’s friend with Bart.
Tom is the central because he constitutes the first part of this longer experience. So,
the first phase shows why Tom is so important for Herman, they get along well, they’re
friends and he loves him so much. They used to go out and work together until night,
they used to talk a lot and they never go to town. What Herman tells us is that they talk
about writing and horses. Tom instructs Herman about horses, but also makes him feel
something for horses. Tom’s way of talking and narrating through his stories that will
continue to affect Herman. The term “inning” in the end is decision to write the story
in the same page. Tom is the guide who teaches the newcomer, but he’s also the model
who Herman mirrors in the end the standard, on which Herman tries to conform to him.
In the end, what Tom wanted to do is precisely what Herman does, Herman ends up
leading the horse races and Tom gets married and write this story acquiring the final
status of husband writer.
Herman starts to see women, their bodies, and lips. He wants to speak with girls, but
he can’t, his life becomes difficult to understand. He feels physically tired and obsessed
by the family. Some perceptions that Herman show before Tom left, for example his
love for Tom, his passion for horses, his fear women are not entirely new but radically
intensify. They are central problems of Herman, but his central problem is the pursuit
of his own identity, he needs to understand who he is. So, in this middle phase, being
a period of lacking, they don’t see much cultural qualities, lies becomes for Herman an
extreme opportunity to define oneself.
HARLEM RENAISSANCE
In the early 1900s, Harlem, a neighborhood in Manhattan, was the center of
aggregation of African Americans who emigrated from rural areas of the South to the
urbanized areas; this big movement of people is known as The Great Migration.
At that time, a cultural and political movement called “The Harlem Renaissence”
arose and pushed American Black people to express their identity, without fear of racial
discrimination because of the color of their skin. The Harlem Renaissance helped
African American writers and artists gain more control over the representation of Black
culture and experience, and it provided them a place in Western high culture.
This movement also laid the groundwork for all later African American literature,
and it had an enormous impact on Black consciousness worldwide.
However, the movement’s vitality suffered because of the Great Depression (1929–
39) that began in the United States in 1929 and spread worldwide. It was the longest
and most severe economic downturn in modern history. It was marked by steep
declines in industrial production and in prices (deflation), mass unemployment,
banking panics, and sharp increases in rates of poverty and homelessness.
LANGSTONE HUGHES
Langston Hughes was born in Missouri in 1901/1902. His parents divorced when he
was a child and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother and her
husband, they moved to Lincoln (Nebraska), where Hughes began writing poetry, then
to Illinois and at the end they settled in Cleveland, Ohio.
After graduating from High School, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at
Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he worked as an assistant
cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a
seaman and in 1924 he returned to America in Washington D.C.
Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer in New York City in 1967.
