The poet Langston Hughes. Photograph by Robert W. Kelley / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

A conversation with Arnold Rampersad, the author of “The Life of Langston Hughes” and editor of “Collected Poems of Langston Hughes.”

“Seven People Dancing” is a story by Langston Hughes that was written, most likely, in the early sixties, but was never published. Can you tell me what you know about its history?

I found the story in the voluminous Langston Hughes Papers at Yale in the course of researching my two-volume biography of Hughes. About thirty years later, David Roessel, of Stockton University, co-editor with me of “Selected Letters of Langston Hughes” (2014), came upon the story in the Hughes papers and thought it should be published.

Aware that it was a compelling if unusual piece, I had discussed it at the start of what turned out to be an eight-page treatment (Vol. II, pp. 333-340) of Hughes’s attitudes to sex, especially homosexuality and interracial sex, at a time of unprecedented freedom of expression in American writing on the subjects of sex and race. The story, which is undated, was probably written around 1961, when James Baldwin’s sensational, bestselling novel about race and sex, “Another Country” (1962), was about to appear. (Hughes reviewed that novel anonymously but masterfully for the Kirkus book review service.)

Do you think Hughes tried to publish the story at the time?

As far as I know, Hughes never tried to publish “Seven People Dancing,” although he might have done so eventually, after revisions. However, at about this time, he published the mordantly comic story “Blessed Assurance,” which I call in my biography “the only story he ever published explicitly on the theme of homosexuality.” (Hughes included the story in his collection “Something in Common,” which Hill and Wang published in 1963.) Hughes also began to make notes for “a book about sex,” as he described it, to be called “Sex Silly Season.” (One episode involves the sexual initiation of a black boy by a slightly older white girl.) Nothing came of this project, but writing frankly about sex was obviously on Hughes’s mind, as it was on the minds of many American writers at a time when the idea of freedom was rapidly expanding across the nation on various fronts.

Hughes would have been close to sixty when he wrote this. Do you think there were particular circumstances in his life that led him to this narrative?

Although Hughes remained sexually closeted to the end of his life, the widespread perception in Harlem, where he lived, was that he was gay. I heard a few things about him after my biography appeared to suggest that at about this time (around 1961) he began to let down his guard in certain private ways—including purchasing popular gay magazines—while living in an otherwise circumspect way, deceptive but not necessarily hypocritical. I think he probably became intimately familiar with a certain slice of New York gay culture, although his central impulse seems to have been voyeuristic.

Of the main character in the story, Marcel, Hughes writes, “His dancing was too fanciful to be masculine and too grotesque to be feminine. But everything that he did was like that, so it was very easy to tell that he was a fairy.” Obviously, Hughes’s language dates to its time and perhaps sounds more judgmental now than it did then. Do you think of this as an affectionate portrait of the character?

Not in any traditional sense of the word “affectionate.” (Of course, one must not confuse the narrator of a story with the author of that story.) But there was an almost heartless, mocking aspect to Hughes’s view of life at this time (and perhaps even earlier). I think that his cruelly comic, or comically cruel, vision of humanity is at play here in a dominant way. Hughes has a measure of sympathy for his characters, but his clinical and yet satirical instinct takes over and asserts itself, in a mixture of near-bitterness and humor that speaks perhaps to a profound sense of loneliness, isolation, and possible impotence on his part. This was a major element in Hughes’s psychology, starting in his earlier years but becoming much more apparent near the end of what was a tough life, despite his (relatively modest) professional success and his constant recourse to laughter in order to numb his pain. See the titles of his books, such as his novel “Not Without Laughter” (1930) and his book of stories “Laughing to Keep from Crying” (1952).

Marcel hosts “parties” for paying guests at his home in Harlem, and also rents rooms to couples, including mixed-race couples. In the story, a young black man has brought a wealthy white girl to Marcel’s place to dance. How shocking would this have been in Harlem in the early sixties?

Not too shocking, I think. Harlem had seen all sorts of odd social arrangements in the years since 1910 and its evolution from a new real-estate venture intended for upper-income whites into a haven for desperate black Southerners in search of a better life. As it grew poorer over the decades, the core values of its shrinking middle-class leadership became devalued and distressed, though without disappearing completely. Harlem was a speakeasy for many whites during the Roaring Twenties, and remained a marginal, somewhat outlawed space for them thereafter. Meanwhile, most black people in Harlem tried to make do with the little they had, and Marcel’s neighbors would probably have looked the other way as he tried to survive in an essentially hostile racial and economic environment.

The story has a first-person narrator, an “I” who claims, for instance, to “know all about that girl except ‘why.’ ” Is Hughes that narrator?

One must always resist, of course, the temptation to identify the “I” in a poem or a story with the author of that poem or story. The basic rules of creativity, of the art of making poetry or fiction, prohibit such an easy identification. Nevertheless, one must admit that the narrator of “Seven People Dancing” sure does sound like that man Langston Hughes!!

The narrator claims not to know why the white girl, Joan, is at Marcel’s—and then proceeds to give us a paragraph from her point of view, which tells us exactly why. What do you make of the several perspective shifts in the story?

Hughes’s art became more “modernistic,” less bound by conventions, from around 1960 on. He was taking his cues both from modernist literature and from contemporary jazz, a source of ultra-modernist values and practices that mattered at least as much to him; the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who is mentioned in this piece, was a personal favorite and a friend of Hughes. “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” Hughes’s book-length poem, published by Knopf, in 1962, with musical cues throughout and also liner notes, epitomizes his embrace of a new poetic freedom and a continuing respect for improvisation in art.

What is going on in the intense moment at the end of the story? The white girl announces to the room that she has money. One of the black men—not the man she came with—asks to dance with her. The black women become angry and one of them makes him sit down. Hughes describes the mood in the room as akin to atomic energy, the music as uranium. What boundaries are being crossed here?

I suppose one can say that the ending brings together a combustible mixture of lust, materialism, black poverty, white affluence, racist assumptions of control, largely ineffective and thus dangerous expressions of black pride, an objectification of black male sexuality, and a commanding center (to borrow a notion from Henry James) that mocks all of the above, including the combustibility of the mixture. There is a deadening nihilism at play here, at once sad and hysterical, as well as an identification of certain elements in the American condition that need to be faced and resolved, if indeed they can be.