THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408230631
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines
Back in 1964, sixth-grader Donna Sullivan and two other African-American girls were the first to integrate Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Suffolk.
``I was called `nigger' occasionally,'' she recalls today, ``but I was not attacked or hit by rocks, nor were any crosses burned in my yard. Suffolkians handled integration very politely. There was very little hostility.''
An only child, the daughter of a dentist and a guidance counselor, Donna Sullivan still felt a certain isolation from the mainstream. She was drawn inexorably into books. She loved the likes of Lorna Doone and The Secret Garden, but books by and about African-Americans would capture her completely.
Sullivan became sixth-grade treasurer. In 1971 she became valedictorian of the Suffolk High School senior class. In 1988, after many years of learning and teaching, she received her Ph.D. in American studies from Emory University in Atlanta.
By then, she was a specialist in African-American literature, with an emphasis on the writings of Langston Hughes, the black author whose extraordinarily versatile work electrified her as a young reader in Hampton Roads. He also became the focus of her honors paper as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Oberlin University in Ohio and was the subject of her doctoral dissertation.
``The night is beautiful,'' Hughes wrote; ``so are the faces of my people.''
``He celebrated blackness,'' explains the scholarly woman who still admires him, ``and he did it so well.''
Today Akiba Sullivan Harper, 40, married and a mother, is an enthusiastic associate professor at Spelman College in Decatur, Ga. Donna became Akiba during her ``black radical days at Oberlin.''
`` `Akiba' is Swahili for `precious,' '' she explains, ``or `something stored until it is needed.' ''
The name proved prophetic. Her expertise on Hughes contributed to Harper's subsequent election as president of the international Langston Hughes Society. Now, after years of research, Harper's pet literary enthusiasm culminates in the compilation and editing of The Return of Simple (Hill and Wang, 218 pp., $20), a volume that restores some fine Hughes writing formerly out of print.
Hughes (1902-1967) excelled at fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, drama, poetry and works for children, among other things.
``He was the second African-American to make a career as a writer, after Paul Laurence Dunbar,'' Harper notes. ``It was that determination to make a living as a literary man that drove him to work in so many genres. He was committed to so many writing projects simultaneously that it makes me tired just reading his correspondence.''
Hughes had a lightning touch with language, and nowhere is that more evident than in his stories about Virginia-born Jesse B. Semple, nicknamed ``Simple'' - an ironic touch, because, of course, he wasn't.
``Simple's appeal is that he refuses to sit down, put his hand on his chin and mope,'' says Harper. ``He wins our hearts.''
Simple was a sort of black Everyman who revealed his world, and the controlling white world that circumscribed it, with wry wit and sometimes outright rage, usually in conversation with a college-educated pal over a few beers at Patsy's Bar and Grill.
``Love,'' he observed acutely, ``is a many-splintered thing.''
Harper's dissertation, titled ``The Complex Process of Crafting Langston Hughes' Simple Stories,'' attracted the interest of some who had forgotten these sweet-tart, funny-angry slices of life.
``The book was publisher Arthur Wang's idea,'' says Harper. ``He approached me because I'm a Simple scholar. I say that with tongue in cheek.''
Half the selections in Harper's compilation have never appeared in book form. Harper unearthed them from weekly columns that Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post, syndicated in the Pittsburgh Courier, Muhammad Speaks and Norfolk's own Journal and Guide. Though Simple comments on the pre- and post-civil rights eras of the 1940s through the 1960s, many of his observations on prejudice and social hypocrisy don't date.
The Simple stories have been translated and admired all over the world. Why are they so popular? And not just among African-Americans, but also among Danes, Czechoslovakians and Japanese?
``Every nation, every ethnic group, every neighborhood includes privileged and oppressed people,'' Harper points out. ``And, because Simple is oppressed but victorious, he gives us all hope.''
Next year the University of Missouri will publish another volume of Harper's commentary, Not So Simple: The Langston Hughes Simple Stories.
``I feel blessed to have fallen in love so early with Langston Hughes' writing,'' says Akiba Sullivan Harper. ``I got older. But his writing never did.'' MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
ISAAC CORKER
Akiba Sullivan Harper
Langston Hughes
by CNB