Not Without Laughter

Race and racism are ubiquitous parts of the cultural context for the novel. As African Americans, the characters in the novel come up with varying responses to racism and the strictures it imposes on their lives.

Hager represents the generation that was born into slavery but gained freedom during Emancipation at the end of the Civil War. Her stance towards whites is that they are "like spoilt chillens" with too much; they need African Americans, who have nothing(129). She refuses to hate whites, instead urging her children to treat whites with love, tolerance, and Christian charity, no matter how severe the racism. Her heroes are people like former slave Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, who advised African Americans to accept restrictions on civil rights and to focus on economic advancement during the harrowing years of the late nineteenth century. This attitude of accommodation was increasingly discredited during the historical moment when Hughes wrote the novel.

Annjee, Hager's oldest daughter, is the Williams daughter who most resembles her mother in terms of her ability and willingness to tolerate racism without striking back. Unlike her mother, however, Annjee is willing to move elsewhere, not only because of her love for Jimboy, but also to pursue economic opportunities. In Chicago, Annjee retrains as a hairdresser to support herself. She nevertheless maintains a meek attitude when it comes to whites. Caught up in the effort to survive, however, Annjee has little interest in agitating for racial equality or supporting her son in his efforts to advance.

Hager's other two daughters belong to a different generation and accordingly have different approaches to dealing with racism. Tempy, Hager's upwardly mobile and property-owning daughter, exemplifies the ideology of racial uplift. African Americans who embraced racial uplift during the early twentieth century usually believed that African Americans could progress and gain the respect of whites by focusing on intellectual attainments and showing whites that they could behave in ways associated with the white middle class. Tempy's belief in being respectable leads her to reject her working-class mother and anything that is associated with black folk culture, including music. Hughes's decision to portray her as snobbish and at times self-hating illustrates one of the major critiques of this approach to responding to racism. 

Harriet, the youngest of Hager's children, represents what at the time of the publication of the novel would have been the most modern response to racism. Harriet is sensitive to the injustice of racism and how it limits her opportunities early on. Having grown up in an age when there are more opportunities, especially for those who are willing to leave rural towns and the South, Harriet wants more. As a woman, Harriet has additional burdens such as how to make a living without becoming a domestic and how to become mobile in an age when women still face pressures to stay put. Her militant hatred of whites and her rejection of her mother's ideas about race and sex lead her down a dangerous path when she runs away to the carnival and later becomes a sex worker. Like Hughes and other artists of the Harlem Renaissance, however, her appreciation for black folk and popular music is her salvation. She is identified as a "princess of the blues" (212) in the final chapter of the novel.

Sandy, the protagonist of the novel, draws on elements of all of the previous generations by embracing African American culture (including the blues), exhibiting a willingness to work hard, and striving to grow in terms of his education, creativity, and intellect. Sandy ultimately represents the New Negro—the modern African American who commits to making something of him- or herself—by leaving home and embracing the possibilities in African American culture.

Although much of Hughes's work is associated with the sights and sounds of the Harlem Renaissance, this particular work focuses on African-American life in the years before that period. One of the contributing causes of the burst of African-American creativity that was the Harlem Renaissance was the period of massive movement of African Americans from rural America to the great cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and (to a lesser extent) the West Coast in the years leading up to the 1920s. The Great Migration, as this movement was known, is an important element of the novel. Hughes portrays the reasons for African-American flight from their hometowns and the difficulties they encounter once they arrive to the city.

Hughes, a native of Kansas, paints a detailed portrait of the pushes that lead these characters to flee Stanton and places like it. Although Stanton certainly is not the South represented by the racist Mississippian who accosts Sandy in Drummer's Hotel, it does exist in a state with a history of racial violence, including lynchings and the white destruction of entire towns dominated by African Americans. Creeping segregation, illustrated by the refusal of the amusement park owners to allow black children to enter on opening day, and lack of employment opportunities, especially for African American men like Jimboy, were also important pushes that led to the Great Migration.

The pull of places such as Chicago was grounded in idealization of the city and more opportunities for employment. The Black Belt that Sandy encounters on Chicago's State Street was just one of many black enclaves within major cities that allowed African Americans to have their own theaters, stores, and communities. All was not rosy in the city, however. As Annjee notes in her letters and complaints about her financial situation in the cities she lives in after leaving to join Jimboy, the advantages of greater access to jobs and greater freedom were frequently undercut by the higher cost of living, loss of some social support networks (including family and church), and greater exposure to the vice that sometimes plagued cities of the period. Sandy's encounter with the pedophile on his first night in Chicago is a case in point.

Despite the perils and challenges of trying to make it in the city after migrating, the possibilities that open up for Harriet and Sandy show that such moves became the foundation for African Americans' movement into modernity.

Hughes's writing shows the significant influence of African-American music on his writing. In this novel in particular, he uses African-American music to represent African-American identity with a great deal of complexity. Negro spirituals, ragtime, the blues, and early jazz are presented directly as lyrics and as stylistic influences in key passages in the novel.

Negro spirituals appear in the novel as a representation of African-American spirituality and as the specific heritage of the world the slaves made. Hager, for example, not only shares stories of her life on the plantation before and after the Civil War, but she also spends nights with Sandy "singing generations of toil-worn Negroes" (143). These stories help Sandy understand his history, the remarkable nature of African-Americans' faith, and its role in their survival of the brutality of slavery. Considering that African Americans were forbidden to be literate, the spirituals serve as testimony documenting this history.

Although Hager rejects more modern and popular music as sinful, the blues and ragtime are important presences and inspirations in the lives of younger African American people like Harriet. This music serves as a solace to people who, like Jimboy, constantly run into roadblocks posed by racism. Jimboy's sometimes-explicit blues lyrics and Harriet's singing and dancing are also expressions of a younger generation's desire for more freedom.

Hughes not only recreates the lyrics to standards such as "Easy Rider," he also uses highly descriptive passages laden with repetition and onomatopoeia to recreate for his readers the sound and experience of listening to the blues, ragtime, and jazz. The description in Chapter 8 of Benbow's Kansas City Band is just one example of his use of music in the novel to create a mood and provide cultural context related to African American culture.