W. E. B. Du Bois famously placed two epigraphs at the start of every chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The first was a traditional epigraph from a well-known literary source, but the second was a musical phrase from an African American spiritual. Du Bois explained the appearance of the music in his last chapter, “The Sorrow Songs,” stating that in these works, passed down by word of mouth for generations, the slave spoke to the world of his or her spiritual strivings. For African American writers and artists, the spirituals were part, indeed the foundation, of the “usable past” out of which an authentic African American art and experience could be constructed, acknowledging that “authentic” has always been a contested word. Folklore and secular music, especially the blues, would also form part of that usable past, but, as the epigraphs of The Souls of Black Folk demonstrate, spirituals and African American religious traditions were a crucial element in the attempts both before and during the Harlem Renaissance to create African American art. As discussed in Wallace Best's Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem, many scholars, such as François Dodat, have read Hughes's poetry both as inspired by spirituals and as spirituals, “interchangeable and comparable” with them, as Best summarizes the argument (95). Dodat insisted that neither Hughes's verse nor the spiritual songs themselves had any real religious content. While many might dispute the latter assertion, most scholarship has agreed with the former. While Hughes may have used religious themes for literary, political, or cultural emphasis, they should not be taken seriously either in his art or in his life.

Best's volume forces us to confront the view that, just as spirituals themselves cannot be disentangled from the religious belief that inspired them, the use of religious content in Hughes's works as just another literary trope is no different than a reference to folktale or a blues song. Best offers “a work of intellectual and cultural history” that is “concerned with the history of ideas about religion as much as it is with the materiality of religion as an expression of culture” (18). And while he states at several points that the “book makes no claim that Hughes was himself religious or religiously observant,” he argues that the many connections between Hughes and religion have to be taken seriously. Like Best, I have no idea what exactly Hughes's beliefs might have been, for Hughes was notoriously silent about such personal issues. But after reading Best, one is much more aware that Hughes was a “spiritual” person, in all senses of what the word might mean. And, as Best notes, this spiritual quality led him to respect the religious faith and principles of others. Best brings that respect to his reading of Hughes's poems in new and insightful ways. This work is unique in that it is not simply a literary study, although at times it is that, or a study of the historical context of certain key works of Hughes, although it is that as well; at its core it is a challenge that religion is a central subject in Hughes because it was meaningful to him.

Langston's Salvation focusses on several key episodes and works in Hughes's life and career. In each of his five chapters, he uses archival material from the Langston Hughes Papers and other sources to deepen and broaden the literary and historical context. For this reader, Best's expansive discussion of the African American response to the poem “Goodbye Christ” is the best that we yet have. In another example, his investigation of the composition and first production of the plays Tambourines to Glory (1958) and Black Nativity (1961) is a masterful use of all the available material and has superseded other accounts. The combination of the history of storefront churches in Harlem and the class issues involved, and how that links to the plot of Tambourines to Glory, augmented by analysis of the drafts of the play and the production history, offers new insights on every page. The problem is that, as so often with the study of Hughes, and which Best (to his credit) confronts, there is simply, and “simply” is a loaded word in any discussion of Hughes, no way pin the elusive bard of Harlem down on religion and on so many other issues. For example, Best quotes the poem “Personal”:

Best agrees with Mary Beth Culp that this is “the only poem in which Hughes spoke of religion in his own voice and not that of the persona of his people” (14). But it is, after all, a poem, so no matter how sincere it seems, can we be sure the speaker is the poet? Best goes on to say that Hughes “did not intend to prevent a discussion about the existence of a personal faith” and that the letters in the poem are “best understood as prayers” (14, original emphasis). This depends on what the reader thinks Hughes's response was to God (the text does not preclude the following conversation: “I exist. / No you don't.”). And it does not address the fact that, in prayers, the human subject is usually seen as speaking first. But Best stresses that Hughes was “working out” his salvation over the course of his lifetime (5), primarily through poetry, and the discussion is made more valuable because he avoids a precise definition of what that salvation was but rather analyzes the process.

There are several key moments where religion has a prominent place in Hughes's work and Best discusses all of them with insightful acumen. The first is the famous passage in The Big Sea (1940), when Hughes was at a revival meeting and didn't see Jesus: “I wanted to see him, but nothing happened to me. Nothing, I wanted something to happen to me; but nothing happened.” Hughes eventually said that he had seen Jesus because he did not want to keep the whole group waiting on just him. Best says that this failed salvation experience started “his lifelong quest to understand the nature of ‘salvation’” and the role religion plays in daily life (3). Best has an important point, and he uses some of Hughes's own writings as support. There has always been one aspect of this passage that has puzzled me. It is one thing for a twelve-year-old at a revival meeting to expect to “see” Jesus, and then be disappointed, for the child is taking the phrase literally. When Hughes tells this story as a mature adult, we expect the adult voice to come in and correct and modify the adolescent interpretation and acknowledge that “seeing Jesus” can take many forms. But the adult Hughes does not do that; surprisingly he makes no attempt to distance himself from the perception of his younger self. In some ways, that response raises more questions about what the episode is supposed to mean than if there had been some sort of qualification by an adult persona. Best demonstrates throughout his volume that Hughes's attitude to religion and belief was far more nuanced than what he offers in this episode in The Big Sea. But when Hughes tells the story, he keeps it simple (again, “simple” is a loaded word in the work of Hughes, as Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper's Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories of Langston Hughes (1995) has shown).

Then there is the poem “Goodbye Christ,” with its companion poem, “Good Morning, Revolution,” written in 1932 while Hughes was in the Soviet Union. If I have one serious quibble with Best, it is that he tries too hard to argue that the poem is not “antireligious,” to use his term, but rather an attack against established churches. For this argument, Best cites the statements Hughes made between 1940 and 1953 when he was trying to disavow “Goodbye Christ” in every possible way that he could think of out of concern that it might ruin his career. As Hughes's biographer Arnold Rampersad has said, “Goodbye Christ” “would haunt him for the rest of his life.”Footnote ¹ Best's account underscores the deep reasons why Hughes had to regret this poem. As stated above, Best provides a thorough and insightful account of the response of African Americans to the publication of the poem in the African American newspapers in 1933. But as Hughes was still in the Soviet Union, he did not have to address the issue himself until several years had passed and the poem gained attention in 1940. The discussion of “Goodbye Christ” inevitably leads best to Hughes's testimony in 1953 in front of the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations, whose best-known member was Joseph McCarthy, an incident discussed recently by David Chinitz in Which Sin to Bear: Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes (2016). At one moment in the transcript Roy Cohn directly challenged Hughes: “Mr. Hughes, you can surely tell us simply whether or no you ever desired the Soviet form of government in this country?” Hughes answered, “Yes, I did.”Footnote ² Hughes went on to stress that he never wanted this to happen by violent means, and he no longer held this view. So Hughes did not argue that “Good Morning, Revolution” was satirical in nature, but rather, from this evidence, what he thought at the time of composition. Yet Hughes provided no such clarity when it came to the discussion of “Goodbye Christ.” This poem, he claimed, was satirical, and the voice in the poem did not represent the voice of the poet. Best argues that on a personal level Hughes might not have intended the poem literally, but as a statement about how Christians and churches did not live up to their creed. This can seem at times like special pleading. But what Best does do, and I think coherently, is make a good argument that Hughes had actually changed his mind. That is, Hughes did not reject “Goodbye Christ” in an abject submission to outside pressure, but because his engagement with churches and people of faith made him realize an error. When Hughes was under attack in 1940 for writing “Goodbye Christ,” it was the very pious Catholic Noel Sullivan who not only offered him a place to stay in Carmel, but built a cottage for him. Sullivan would have had no patience for “Goodbye Christ,” but he did have patience for Hughes. Best does not deal at length with the relationship of Hughes and Sullivan, but his account of Hughes and religion allows us to understand this friendship and others like it at a deeper level.

With an adept use of sources, Best offers a discussion of how Hughes highlighted religious poems and poems of the “spirit” in his communications with Jean Wagner and François Dodat, two French scholars writing works on Hughes from 1958 to 1963. Best demonstrates definitively that, by means of the material that he sent to the two scholars, Hughes pointed them to look at aspects of religion in his work. Both scholars, however, concluded that there was little if any religious meaning in Hughes. Again, some of the best moments of this volume, particularly for Hughes scholars, are when Best uses the archival sources in the Langston Hughes Papers to deeply explore an issue, such as his interaction and communication with Wagner and Dodat.

Hughes embraced gospel music in this same period, the late 1950s into the early 1960s. Here Best, for this reader, is at his most convincing. While one could argue that Tambourines to Glory led Hughes to bring the theatricality of the African American church to the stage for commercial purposes, and further acknowledging that Black Nativity was indeed Hughes's most commercially successful play, it is still hard for anyone who has seen the latter play not to feel that it is a celebration of religious faith. Best gives a full account of the initial tepid reaction of African American churches to the play, and he would be the person to tell us how that perception changed over decades; I hope that he does so in the future. Best mentions Hughes's civil rights gospel play, Jerico-Jim Crow, written in 1964 with William Hairston. It would have been nice have a bit more on this often overlooked piece, but an author cannot do everything in a single book. Best's argument that Hughes has moved closer to the church and religion, if not actually joining either, is convincing. And, to this reader, Best signals why in his account. The church and religion had become far more active in the causes that were most important to him. The 1938 play Don't You Want to Be Free used blues songs and poems in a play that ended with black and white workers joining together for a better life. Jerico-Jim Crow used African American spirituals in a play that celebrates the young people challenging segregation fifteen years later. Best shows that Hughes moved closer to the religion and religious practices of churches and church leaders and religious institutions took the lead in the causes that he supported.

In sum, Best's work is of importance to all Hughes scholars as well as those who are interested in the intersections of art and religion in African American culture. Whether we end up agreeing with the argument or not, we have to take it seriously. Best deserves credit for reminding us that African American spiritual and religious traditions are more than literary tropes when used in art, but retain their potency as cries of the “spiritual strivings” of which Du Bois spoke. Best has let us hear those cries of spiritual striving in Hughes, and that religion, faith, and freedom are interconnected and entangled with great meaning. It was important for Best to remind us that it might be possible to say that Hughes was simply not interested in religion. But that would be too simple, and nothing is simple with Langston Hughes.