“(Hollywood / laughs at me, / black –  / so I laugh / back.)”

–Langston Hughes, “Movies,” from Montage of a Dream Deferred

Written in 1961, only six years before its author’s passing, Langston Hughes’s woefully- understudied poetic suite, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, has earned the privilege of being the Harlem Renaissance poet’s most formally experimental work. Inspired by a 12-bar blues tune: “the traditional folk melody” of “The Hesitation Blues” (475), which Hughes reprints in notated form at the beginning of his suite, and consisting of two equally-privileged “voices”: the all-caps narrative of the poem and its italicized musical cues, Ask Your Mama deploys a polyphonic mode of poetics, a manner of artistic expression in which narrative, sonic, and visual elements simultaneously and spatially combine in the form of a poem. This unique style of composition, as well as the suite’s suggestive subtitle, indicates that Ask Your Mama is a work informed by and indebted to African-American musical traditions, among them gospel, the blues, bebop, and, of course, of jazz. As the handful of scholars who have written about the poetic suite point out, Hughes deploys Ask Your Mama’s musically-inspired form as a means of voicing his poems’ disruptive political agenda. For instance, in his essay “Framing and Framed Languages in Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” R. Baxton Miller writes that through its seemingly confounding structure, Ask Your Mama “calls into question the boundaries between poetry and music as well as those between literature and politics,” signifying a “human structure that transcends easy formulae” and working to “reconstitute racial and modern awareness” (5). Through its ability to blur the borders between music and language, and to rupture linear narration, Ask Your Mama loudly challenges Western modes of storytelling, while vocally condemning anti-Blackness.

This essay expands upon efforts to illuminate the political significance of Ask Your Mama’s musically-indebted formal structure by assessing Hughes’s poetic suite’s engagements with cinema. While it may initially seem counterintuitive to place such a sharp focus on the cinematic elements of a jazz poem, I maintain that highlighting Ask Your Mama’s cinematic elements is a productive endeavor, one that amplifies Hughes’s attempts to expose the dominant “tone deafness” of much Hollywood cinema and its somewhat paradoxical history of both silencing and appropriating Black music, subjectivity, and culture.1 In his essay “Movies, Modernity, and All that Jazz: Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred,” Bartholomew Brinkman praises scholastic efforts to underscore the political nature of Hughes’s jazz poems while lamenting the field’s tendencies to neglect this poetry’s engagements with other mediums. He writes, “considering these approaches to Hughes’s poetic appropriation of African-American musical forms, in conjunction with a surging interest in the intersection of modern poetry and mass culture, it is somewhat surprising that so little attention has been given to the various mechanisms – the phonograph, the radio, and, above all, the sound film –  through which this music was often and heard which are so prominently depicted in Hughes’s work” (85). As Brinkman contends, it is often through Hughes’s “multimedial” that we can hear his most “radical” political thinking, including his “anticapitalist” sentiments and ambivalent feelings toward American progress narratives. Within Ask Your Mama, six out of twelve “moods for jazz” feature overt references to film or to other forms of audio-visual entertainment such as television. Specifically, both “Shades of Pigmeat” and “Ask Your Mama” allude to Otto Preminger’s adaptation of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess (1959). In the penultimate stanza of “Is It True,” Hughes’s speaker laments the unrecorded nature of “Negro” history by writing, “BUT SCRIPT-WRITERS WHO KNOW BETTER / WOULD HARDLY WRITE IT IN THE SCRIPT – ” (509). In “Blues in Stereo,” a speaker undergoes a search to find “A NEW ANTENNA” (496) for his broken TV set. And in “Ode to Dinah” and “Show Fare, Please,” a child repeatedly asks his mother for money to go to the movies, pleading: “I WANT TO GO TO THE SHOW, MAMA” (492) and “THE TV’S STILL NOT WORKING” (525).

My analysis contextualizes Hughes’s cinematic references by reading Ask Your Mama within the context of Hollywood’s anti-Black history. While this includes drawing attention to Hollywood’s use of Blackface, its appropriation of Black musical forms, and its continuous efforts to malign Black subjects, it also entails taking a closer look at the anti-Black nature of the medium of film itself. Hughes’s meta- and sociopolitical engagements with film are dependent upon his ability to dismantle the cinema’s structural dichotomy – its binaristic system that favors visuals and narrative over sound and form in ways that signify a metaphorical desire to preserve the “stable” notion of whiteness. In addition to referencing film at the diegetic level, Ask Your Mama also mobilizes its unique structure to mimic it formally. By presenting us with a work that has sonic, narrative, and visual dimensions – Hughes’s poems not only consist of vivid images but are also arranged in visually provocative ways – and whose “production” is entirely dependent upon our ability to coordinate those elements into a composite whole, Hughes tacitly requires his readers to read, think, and act “cinematically.” For as we read Ask Your Mama – and perhaps grapple with the practical consequences of the text’s unusual arrangement (are we to read the poem’s narrative first followed by its musical cues, alternate between stanzas, attempt some other hermeneutical approach?) we have a firsthand encounter with its “moving” parts.

In his essay “The Seemingly Eclipsed Window of Form: James Weldon Johnson’s Prefaces,” Brent Edwards poses the question: “how does literature ‘write’ music?” (580). By assessing “trans-formal” phenomenon such as the blues poem, Edwards takes a closer look at the “poetics of transcription” and confronts what he calls the “problem” of “divergent mediums” (594-5). Edwards writes, “George Kent, among many others complained that Hughes’s blues poems are impoverished compared to the performed vernacular blues because Hughes makes no real innovation in the blues form when he uses it on the page” (595). Edwards counters these somewhat close-minded critiques of Hughes’s poetic engagements with music by writing, “formal mimicry is the innovation” and “it is possible that the specific effect of the blues poem is rooted precisely in its not being the ‘same’ as the vernacular blues” (585). In their instructional guide to cinema studies Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film, Richard Barsam and Dave Monahan define score as “music that is typically composed and recorded specifically for use in a particular film and is used to convey emotion or enhance meaning and emotion” (453). Thus, in the literal sense of the word, Hughes’s suite has no score. For while Ask Your Mama includes precise instructions on how and when music ought to be used specifically in relation to each of its poems, and live performers of the work have composed musical scores based on those very instructions, Hughes’s suite presents us with a description of a musical arrangement rather than an arrangement itself. But while the musical cues of Hughes’s poems may not constitute a “score” in the technical sense of the word, just as Hughes’s blues poems may not be blues music, I contend that Hughes’s “formal mimicry” of film, specifically of its structure and of its score, is his innovation. While Ask Your Mama is incapable of reproducing the cinema’s essential feature of simultaneity – as a result of its written rather than audiovisual form it is impossible for us to simultaneously read Hughes’s narrative and his musical cues in the way we are able to simultaneously encounter dialogue, sound, and images at the movies – Hughes’s poems’ ability to privilege two voices, what we might term its “score” and narrative, provides us with new ways of meditating upon the component part that constitute a film’s formal structure and of confronting two of its most understudied features: editing and sound. By formally mimicking and subverting filmic structure and critiquing the content of a commercialized Hollywood industry, Hughes problematizes the power dynamics that govern who gets to make and watch movies, identifying the cinema as a political weapon that Black Americans ought to take a “shot” at reclaiming.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Hughes’s Subversive Deployment of Cinematic Editing and Sound

While Ask Your Mama’s cinematic elements have gone largely unremarked upon, critics have examined Langston Hughes’s vexed relationship with film. For example, writing about what it is perhaps Hughes’s most canonized work – his celebrated poetic sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred – Daniel C. Turner calls attention to Hughes’s use of montage, the cinematic “technique of superimposing various shots to create a single picture” (24). Brinkman writes that “the cinema would have a profound impact on Hughes’s poetry, influencing both its subject matter and form” (86). In fact, he reminds us that Hughes “was one of several African-American authors who attempted the transition to screenwriting in the 1930s” and “following the initial rejection by Paramount of a film adaptation of his short story ‘Rejuvenation through Joy,’ Hughes found some success with Way Down South (1939),” an American musical from RKO pictures (86). But while co-authoring a screenplay may have aided Hughes financially, Way Down South’s racially-insensitive depictions of plantation life caused him great embarrassment. According to Brinkman, it was this shame that Hughes experienced that would prevent him from “seriously pursuing a career in film,” a medium he came to identify “as a mass-cultural form inattentive to black experience” (86). As Manthia Diawara writes in “Black American Cinema: The New Realism,” the American cinema has racism in its DNA. He writes, films such as D.W. Griffith’s blockbuster hit The Birth of a Nation (1915) “defined for the first time the side that Hollywood was to take in the war to represent Black people in America” (3), and “in The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith, later a founding member of United Artists, created a fixed image of Blackness that was necessary for racist America’s fight against Black people” (3). As Diawara explains, Griffith’s epic drama constituted “the grammar book for Hollywood’s representation of Black manhood and womanhood,” instituting anti-Black standards that only began to receive serious pushback in the latter decades of the twentieth century and are still far from being completely unsettled. These included Hollywood’s “obsession with miscegenation, and its fixing of Black people within certain spaces such as kitchens and into certain supporting roles, such as criminals, on the screen” (3). Griffith’s film taught Hollywood that “white people must occupy the center” of the filmic universe, leaving Black people “with only one choice – to exit in relationship to Whiteness,” and to be misrepresented on “screens monopolized by the major motion picture companies of America” (3).

Brinkman contextualizes Hughes’s cynicism towards the cinema by alluding to these racist origins of Hollywood. He similarly writes, “from the early days of silent cinema, African-Americans have had a complex relationship with film. They were, not surprisingly, generally caricatured and ridiculed on the silver screen, often by white actors in blackface” (86) and adds, “as a coherent audience to which films were actually aimed, African-Americans were generally ignored” (86). While both white- and Black-owned production companies produced “race films” throughout the first half of the twentieth century, films that featured all Black casts and were played to all-Black audiences, these movies often featured characterizations of Black Americans that were no better than those seen in Hollywood pictures. For instance, as Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence observe, many race films “deflated the pretensions of the expanding black middle class by providing images of victimization and poverty too reminiscent of racist portrayals that were supposedly defining characteristics of the race and the essence of the African-American condition” (6). Thus, seeing Black actors on screen did not necessarily mean one was seeing Black representation.

Hollywood maligned Black Americans in films like The Birth of a Nation and Way Down South. It used the commercialized phenomenon of race films to bar Black folks’ faces from the screens of American pictures and their bodies from its theaters – a fact Hughes perhaps alludes to in his poem “Cultural Exchange” in which he locates “THE ENTRANCE TO THE MOVIE’S” in “THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES” in the inconvenient and obscured spot “UP AN ALLEY UP THE SIDE” (478). However, the American film industry also mobilized more subtle formal strategies to keep the idea of “Blackness” as invisible and inaudible as possible. As Brinkman astutely observes, “the very standard of Classical Hollywood structure – with its emphasis on the invisible continuity of image and sound – was deployed on a stable notion of whiteness” (86). The films of Classical Hollywood were especially dependent upon the practice of continuity editing – a style of cinematic suturing that seeks to achieve logic, smoothness, and sequential flow. Within this tradition, it is the editor’s responsibility to ensure that what happens on screen makes as much sense to the viewer as possible. For instance, continuity strategies such as the shot/reverse shot: an editing technique that is most often deployed to shoot a conversation or confrontation between different characters by providing viewers with an image of one subject followed by a corresponding image of another, or a graphic match cut: a transitional strategy that moves to a new shot by carrying a similar shape, color, or other element from the prior shot to the next, naturalize the process of suturing footage, making such acts as undetectable as possible. It is thus only fitting that Brinkman likens continuity editing to whiteness. For it too possesses what Richard Dyer has identified as whiteness’ essential trait: an “everything-and-nothing quality” (838).

Continuity editing practices in film are designed to uphold the illusion of verisimilitude. By keeping a film’s form as “invisible,” or, in other words, as undetectable to the average viewer as possible, filmmakers preserve the aura of “movie magic,” confining the film to the realm of entertainment rather than politics. Making the most essential feature of film – its structure – “invisible” is about more than hiding a film’s “sutures.” It is an aesthetic act that bears damaging sociopolitical implications. In his essay “News from Heaven: Vernacular Time in Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama,” Larry Scanlon writes that Hughes’s poetic suite is “particularly concerned with the ironies inherent in white culture’s profound and unacknowledged psychic dependence on blacks” (56). Miller similarly addresses the ways in which Hughes’s poems challenge “a cultural discourse that either made invisible the contributions of non-whites to world civilization or that supplanted with new distortions the true histories of aboriginal peoples” (11). Within Ask Your Mama, Hughes’s speakers are met with racist comments that position the Black being as an exoticized “other,” as a paradoxically unappealing yet fascinating object of interest. For example, in his first mood “Cultural Exchange,” Hughes’ speaker tells us, “AND THEY ASKED ME RIGHT AT CHRISTMAS / IF MY BLACKNESS, WOULD I RUB OFF?” (480). In “Horn of Plenty,” Hughes’s speaker describes the newfound attention he receives from his white neighbors in the suburbs: “ME WHO USED TO BE A NOBODY, / NOTHING BUT ANOTHER SHADOW / IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES / NOW A NAME! MY NAME – A NAME!” (499). In “Shades of Pigmeat,” Hughes’s speaker draws our attention to institutional and cultural conflations of whiteness and power and Blackness and absence by writing, “IN THE WHITE HOUSE / (AND AIN’T NEVER HAD A BLACK HOUSE)” (487). In “Ode to Dinah,” a poem in Hughes reflects on the unacknowledged financial hardships of Black Americans, his speaker writes, “IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES / WHERE WHITE SHADOWS PASS / DARK SHADOWS BECOME DARKER BY A SHADE” (490-1). And, finally, in “Blues in Stereo,” Hughes once again reflects on the “invisible” qualities of Black existence by having his speaker provide us with an image of a “WHITE GOD” who never visits “THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES” or its “HUTS THAT HOUSE A MILLION BLACKS” (495). Through each of these instances, Hughes reveals the ways in which ignoring Black life – and failing to see, understand, and hear Black people – is a political strategy that is designed to produce a more pleasant “picture” of America, one in which the “sutures” of racial injustice and exploitation remain conventionally unseen.

In her seminal work Unheard Melodies, Claudia Gorbman examines the ways in which the musical scores of the Hollywood studio era – the era of cinema more contemporary with Hughes’ most productive period of writing – was used in tandem with continuity editing as a means of ensuring that viewers remained immersed in rather than aware of a film’s formal properties.2 According to Gorbman, film music working within this continuity tradition was required to adhere to a specific set of principles. These included that the apparatus of nondiegetic music, simply defined as music that is not heard by the film’s characters and does not exist within their fictional world, “must remain unseen” (169) and that music itself must paradoxically remain “inaudible” (169) for it is not “meant to be heard consciously” and “should subordinate itself to dialogue, to visuals – i.e., to the primary vehicles of the narrative” (169). Gorbman also notes that within film music is expected to signify feeling – to bring a “necessary emotional, irrational, romantic, or intuitive dimension” (173) to the images and dialogue of the film and to assist a film’s story by providing us with “referential and narrative cues” (169), or information that somehow enhances our understanding of a particular setting or character. Lastly, Gorbman reminds us that music working within this system must always be deployed in the service of continuity and unity; it “fill[s] gaps,” “provides a film with formal and rhythmic cohesion” and “aids in the construction of formal and narrative unity” (169). In these ways, film music is much like the economically exploited Black workers waiting for the government to address their financial plight in Hughes’s mood “Ode to Dinah.” For it, too, works to support and uphold a system that provides it with no recognition in return.

Like Gorbman, the Russian musicologist Leonid Sabaneev explains that “in general, music should understand that in cinema it should nearly always remain in the background; it is, so to speak, a tonal figuration; the ‘left hand’ of the melody on the screen, and it is bad business when this left hand begins to creep into the foreground and obscure the melody” (171). Sabaneev’s diction – his use of the terms “right hand” and “left hand” – conflate the cinema’s continuity strategies to the musical term homophonic texture: a compositional form in which one main part, that is, the melody, is supported by some type of harmonic background accompaniment. As a result of their existing in textual rather than audible form, we “hear” Hughes’s “melodies” in the same way that we see his poem’s formal structure. And, if we are to consider the metaphorical implications of the film industry’s continuity strategies, we are reminded that Hughes’s subversive techniques allow us to hear more than music – they allow us to listen to the traditionally muted sound of Blackness.

Within Ask Your Mama,Hughes’s poems do not feature ancillary musical accompaniments; they instead consist of two equally-privileged poetic voices. And while we might be inclined to label one of those “voices” lyrical and the other musical, Hughes reminds us that such binaristic categories do not hold within the world of his poems. In fact, Hughes perhaps even consciously challenges the categories that govern homophonic structure by placing his poem’s narrative dimension on the left side of the page (i.e. the hand that is less privileged in a homophonic piano composition) and his musical “score” on the right (i.e. the hand that plays a piece’s melody). Hughes further complicates the cinematic dichotomy between music and narrative by granting the sonic dimension of his poem narrative agency. In this regard, he reimagines the cinema’s binaristic system and envisions what a filmic formal structure that amplified sound, and amplified Black subjectivity, could accomplish.

While Ask Your Mama features explicit musical directives such as “When the Saints / Go Marching In / joyously for two / full choruses / with maracas” (“Cultural Exchange” 481); “Loud and / lively / up-tempo / Dixieland / jazz for / full chorus / to end” (“Ride, Red, Ride” 484); and “Traditional / blues / in gospel / tempo / à la Ray / Charles / to fade / out” (“Ode to Dinah” 489), it also presents us with samples in which music does more than make noise. For example, in “Ode to Dinah,” Hughes provides us with an instance in which the “score” of his poem is as lyrical as its narrative: “drums / alone / softly / merging / into / the ever- / questioning / “Hesitation / Blues” / beginning /slowly/ but / gradually / building to / up-tempo / as the / metronome / of / fate/ begins / to / tick / faster / and / faster // as the / music // dies” (493). In his first mood ‘Cultural Exchange,” Hughes even has the “Hesitation Blues,” the melodic leitmotif around which his entire suite is constructed, perform an action – it asks the “haunting / question” (479): “how long / must I / wait / can I / get it now – or / must I hesitate?” (480). By providing music with a literal poetic voice – something of which the cinema is not necessarily capable – Hughes not only reveals the ways in which a score is capable of speaking but also exemplifies why it is worth listening to.

Listening to Film: Sounding Out Ask Your Mama’s Cinematic References

Considering Hughes’s emphasis on Hollywood’s structural silencing of Black culture – on its strategic use of continuity editing and privileging of visual and narrative elements over sonic ones – it is essential to explore the types of music to which his poems grant voice. By vocally challenging the homophonic worldview of classical cinema through a jazz poem, one that also includes references to gospel, blues, and bebop, Hughes not only critiques the continuity practices of a film industry interested in erasing and silencing Blackness, but also exposes that very same industry’s appropriation of Black musical traditions. When Hughes introduced Montage of a Dream Deferred in 1951, he likened what would become his most-celebrated poetic sequence to bebop by writing: “this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes in the manner of the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition” (qtd. in Lowney 357). Writing Ask Your Mama ten years later, Scanlon notes the ways in which Hughes was now “inspired by free jazz and other ‘post-bop’ developments” and uses his poem to “return to the peculiar temporal predicaments of a community whose political operations are still deferred, and even more frustrated” (49). Within Ask Your Mama, music once again becomes the means through which Hughes amplifies Black subjectivity and calls his readers to tune into the supposedly inaudible frequencies of Black life.

Brinkman writes that Hughes’s “assistance on the authenticity of jazz as an African-American art form as well as a form of social critique…is asserted against the standardization of jazz by a (white U.S.) culture industry, whose ‘most powerful agent,’ Walter Benjamin reminds us, ‘is the film’” (85). In his essay “On Jazz” (1936), Theodor Adorno presents the cinema, and its musical scores, as a commercialized industry designed to distract and entertain capitalism’s passive victims. Adorno even goes on to critique cinema’s exploitative use of jazz, writing, “its over-powering propaganda apparatus hammers the hits into the masses for as long as it sees fit” and “this is all mere decorum; the only melodies that find their way into public memory are the melodies which are the most easily understood and the most rhythmically trivial” (51). Adorno writes, “in film, jazz is best suited to accompany contingent actions which are prosaic in a double sense: people promenading and chatting along a beach, a woman busying herself with her shoe. In such moments, jazz is so appealing to the situation that we are hardly conscious of it anymore” (62). In these contexts, jazz working within the commercialized continuity traditions of Hollywood may be audible but it not understood. It becomes like the “SHOUTS” Hughes describes emerging from “THE QUARTER” of the Negroes in his mood “Is It True?”: sounds that are UNDECIPHERED / AND / UNLETTERED / UNCODIFIED UNPARSED / IN TONGUES UNALYZED UNECHOED/ UNTAKEN DOWN ON TAPE – ” (507).

But while Adorno critiques Hollywood’s commodification of jazz, he fails to identify this commodification as a violation of Black culture. In fact, according to Adorno’s white-washed history of the genre, jazz owes its origins to Bizet, Berlioz, and military music more than it does to blues, spirituals, or ragtime. He even writes, “the extent to which jazz has anything at all to do with genuinely black music is highly questionable; the fact that it is frequently performed by blacks and that the public clamors for ‘black jazz’ as a sort of brand-name doesn’t say much about it, even if folkloric research should confirm the African origin of many of its practices” (52). Adorno’s analysis also fails to address the despicable casting and production practices that Hollywood deployed in its appropriation of a traditionally African-American musical genre. For example, films such as John Murray Anderson’s musical revue King of Jazz (1930) and Allan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927), Hollywood’s first feature film with synchronous sound, depended upon the minstrel tradition. The latter film even famously features its starring actor performing jazz in blackface, a performance technique explicitly designed to exclude “African-Americans from their own representation” and “replace African-American performance” (Rogin 37). As Ruth Johnston writes in her essay “The Construction of Whiteness in The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer, “blackface conventions did not just exclude blacks; they also functioned to construct the audience as white” (383). Eric Lott also observes that “the central component of mimicry in minstrelsy…masked an intimate but no less objectifying affair of two…blackface and comic and white spectator shar[ing] jokes about an absent (Black) third party” (142).

In the decades following the release of The Jazz Singer, King of Jazz, and Adorno’s essay, Hollywood saw and heard less overtly white-washed and white-filtered presentations of the genre. But while films such as Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959) or the French feature Elevator to the Gallows (1958) featured scores respectively written by Black jazz legends Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, these movies, with nearly all-white creative teams and casts, worked to mute Blackness in different ways. By alluding to Otto Preminger’s musical drama Porgy and Bess (1959), Ask Your Mama provides us with a specific example of Hollywood’s appropriation of Black musical traditions. While Porgy and Bess may have had an almost entirely-Black cast, centered its narrative around Black characters, and included a score that foregrounded African-American musical forms such as jazz, blues, and gospel, its entire creative team: its director, producer, and screenwriter, as well as its parent texts’ creators, novelist Dubose Heyward and composer George Gershwin, were all white. Thus, Porgy and Bess, a supposedly “Black story,” was not only filtered through the white gaze but also produced to fill the pockets of white people. In his titular mood “Ask Your Mama,” Hughes’s speaker alludes to the film’s commodification of Blackness through the telling lines: “PORGY AND BESS / AT THE PICTURE SHOW. / I NEVER SEEN IT. / BUT I WILL YOU KNOW / IF I HAVE / THE MONEY / TO GO (512). Hughes’s Black speaker’s not having seen Porgy perhaps alludes to the fact that he, and those like him, played no active role in the film’s production, while the financial fee deferring this speaker’s entry to the cinema reveals for whom Preminger’s was truly made. Ask Your Mama’s third mood “Shades of Pigmeat,” puts forth a similar critique of both Porgy and Bess and the commercialized Hollywood industry from which it emerges. Here, Hughes’s speaker adopts and mimics a white audience’s attitude towards Black musical artists by repeating the phrase: “NEGROES SING SO WELL” (486). As Hughes’s speaker asks “WAS PORGY EVER MARRIED / BEFORE TAKING BESS TO WIFE?” (486), he underscores Hollywood’s half-formed characterizations of its Black subjects. For, as this question reminds us, the white creative team behind Porgy and Bess was clearly more invested in crafting catchy musical numbers for its eponymous male protagonist than it was in developing his backstory. At the same time that Hughes’s speaker delivers his critique of Hollywood’s appropriation of Blackness in “Shades of Pigmeat,” he is joined by the poem’s musical cues – a hummed performance of “All God’s Chillun Got Shoes,” a Negro spiritual that the white composers Walter Jurmann, Gus Kahn, and Bronisław Kaper adapted into a jazz standard for Black singer Ivie Anderson to sing to a white couple in the Marx Brothers’ film A Day at the Races (1937). Here, Hughes’ speaker and his poem’s “score” contrapuntally amplify white Hollywood’s bastardization of Black music and culture. Here, Hughes provides us with an instance of the ultimate subversion of cinematic structure – an instance in which the traditionally subjugated feature of “score” and the traditionally favored feature of narrative work together to tell a story: the story of the American film industry’s reliance on Black exploitation.  

In his liner notes to Ask Your Mama’s final mood, “Show Fare Please,” a poem centered around a Black child’s repeated and unfulfilled request to go to the cinema – “THE TV’S STILL NOT WORKING / SHOW FARE, MAMA… / SHOW FARE!” (525) – Hughes writes: “if the answers were on tickets like those that come from slots inside the cashier’s booth at the movies, and if I had the money for a ticket – like the man who owns all tickets, all booths, and all movies and who pays the ticket seller who in turn charges me – would I, with answer in my hand, become one of the three – the man, the ticket seller, me?” (531). While Hughes defers answering the question of whether a film ticket, whether a disposable stub of paper printed from a cashier’s slot, has the ability to provide its recipients with “answers,” his musings on the power dynamics that govern movie making and watching nonetheless depict the cinema as a place one wants to enter. At the same time, Hughes’s poems themselves – poems that subvert cinematic form in order to expose Hollywood for its multi-faceted exploitation of Blackness – remind the young Black speaker looking for show-fare that while a ticket to the movies might let him into a theater, it will also let him in on the tacit secret that lurks amongst the sound waves and amidst the sutures of every Hollywood picture: that the American cinema is as in need of fixing as his broken television set.