Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 6 - Harlem - full transcript
"Harlem" by Langston Hughes, featuring Herbie Hancock, Bill Clinton, Sonia Sanchez, and a chorus of kids at the Harlem Children's Zone
What happens
to a dream deferred?
What happens
to a dream deferred?
What happens to a dream
deferred?
What happens
to a dream deferred?
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin
in the sun?
Or fester like a sore...
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over,
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
When, in 1951,
Langston Hughes published
his book-length jazz poem
"Montage of a Dream Deferred,"
it had been 30 years
since he'd arrived in Harlem
from Joplin, Missouri.
1920s Harlem was
a capital of black culture,
young with possibility.
From Harlem, journalists and
poets, painters and sculptors,
musicians, actors, and activists
broadcast their confidence
in the future
in print and song and spectacle.
But 30 years later,
in a seven-line poem
that has come
to be known as "Harlem,"
Hughes tells of hopes still
unrealized, of souls parched.
"What happens
to a dream deferred?"
That's where we started
when I met with
President Bill Clinton
in his offices in Harlem
to discuss a poem
he'd chosen for us
to read together.
Have you ever wondered
about the word "deferred"?
Seems to me such a formal word.
- No, I think
it's the perfect word for him,
because what he's saying is,
it didn't go away,
the dream didn't die.
You just kept putting it off,
or it was put off
by circumstances
beyond your control.
And that's where I started, too,
with some students at the Harlem
Children's Zone Promise Academy.
So, Elijah,
what does "deferred" mean?
- Deferred is, like,
to put on hold.
Like, you're going to keep it
away for a little bit of time,
but you might come back into,
like, in a little while
in your life.
Like, your dream, like,
you can't make it to your dream,
even though you want to,
but things are in the way of it,
or just, just not meant to be.
I have made every single
high school reunion,
and I've noticed
that the classmates I had
who are happy with their lives
have not lived uneventful lives.
That is, many of them have had
family problems
or businesses failed,
all kinds of things happen,
but they just kept going.
- Mm-hmm.
The ones that were most unhappy,
that seemed to age the most,
were the ones who never
looked themselves in the eye
and said, "What do I want
to do with my life?"
- Go for it, do it.
- And were willing
to risk failure to do it.
So I think there's
a personal message.
And I was wondering
about the imagery of the poem.
I mean, it doesn't just describe
people who have let
their lives go by, precisely.
It's more visceral,
more physical than that.
- Yeah, you can
feel it when you read this.
After speaking to the president,
I asked the jazz pianist
and composer Herbie Hancock
if he would improvise some music
to Hughes' poem,
and talk to me
about what the poem says to him.
What happens to a dream
deferred?
The first sentence,
the first question
has a bit of sadness
attached to it.
It's a dream deferred.
I mean, a dream is, like,
a goal,
what you reach for, you know?
What you aspire to, you know?
And you want to go for it.
- And you want to go for it.
"Deferred" means it's been
deflected some kind of way.
- Yeah.
- Which is a disappointment,
so there's disappointment
involved.
And this is Langston Hughes,
the title is "Harlem."
And then, because
Langston Hughes was in Harlem,
and because he was well aware
of the continuing challenges
of African-Americans,
and of poor people generally,
he knew that there was
a social dimension
to dreams deferred,
that if you deferred dreams
for a whole class of people,
a definable group,
that in the end
it could compromise
everybody else's dreams, too.
- Mm-hmm.
His ashes are buried
in a place of honor:
beneath the lobby
of Harlem's Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture.
I asked the poet Sonia Sanchez
to read from her poem
about Langston Hughes,
and to tell me about the time
she met him.
When I was very young,
I went to see Langston Hughes
read in Harlem.
I had to have been
about 12 or 13,
and I got in line,
and I got up in front of him,
and he said, "Yes?"
You know, and I said,
"Uh, uh, uh..."
I'm a stutterer.
"Uh, uh, uh, uh... thank you."
You know, and I extended my hand
and he shook it,
and that was it.
And I thought, as I walked away,
"Oh, why didn't you say,
'I write poetry, I love poetry,
I love your poetry, '
all those things?"
But I was actually dumbfounded.
And you know why?
Sometimes we like poets,
but people loved Langston,
because they knew
that they would hear the truth.
They knew that he would talk
about their lives
with empathy, with sympathy,
with love, with respect.
They knew that
he would say, simply,
"Whatever you have experienced,
I, too, have experienced.
"I will chronicle you,
I will tell your story
here in a place called Harlem."
And he made Harlem
go far beyond this Harlem,
the Harlems of the world,
and that's why I loved him
so much.
It was written in the '50s,
and so this particular
time period,
discrimination against black
people was much more extreme,
but it still exists
in Harlem today.
And then, in, you know,
black neighborhoods
throughout the United States,
you know,
almost no matter what...
- Where dreams are...
Where dreams are being deferred.
- Deferred, yeah.
'Cause it still ain't right.
What I felt from my reading
of it
was that blues is kind of
the spirit of the poem.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like
a raisin in the sun,
or fester like a sore...
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat
or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
was heavily influenced by music,
so there's a rhythm,
there's a musical rhythm
in this poetry.
It's a lot like jazz.
It's clearly one melody...
- Yes.
- But there's some ad-libbing,
some improvisation
as you go along.
So the lines rhyme.
It's a different rhyming scheme,
but it's enough to remind you
that it's a poem,
just like it'd
be enough to remind you
that it was a jazz song.
This whole piece,
that, when you do it,
you hear the jazz and blues,
you know?
So you have
to then take your mouth
and make your tongue
begin and respond.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore, sore,
sore, sore, sore, sore.
Does it stink like rotten meat
or crust and sugar over like
a syrupy sweet...
Maybe it just sags like a heavy
- He gives you...
- Well, you just
sang this all as bebop, right?
With some scat. - Yeah.
I hear in "maybe it just sags
like a heavy load"
an older country blues.
An enormous number
of African-Americans
had roots in the South,
picking cotton, or doing
some other kind of manual labor.
Which didn't change much
after slavery was abolished.
The roots of the blues,
you know, from the South,
black people that migrated
from the South
kind of went
through Chicago, first,
because of the Mississippi
River.
You talked about
the migration and, you know,
I think you're referring
to the Great Migration.
- Yes.
- You know, coming up
the Mississippi River,
and I hear that migration
in this poem, too.
I hear a little bit
of the South.
But that's
in every black neighborhood.
There's a bit of that
in every black neighborhood.
The joy about a poem,
my dear sister,
is that, I always say,
it's not just what is written
and what is read out loud,
but the silences.
The first line is, "What happens
to a dream deferred?"
Then, there's a big space.
In poetry, you know,
you have, like, a little space,
but there's this big space,
which means that,
if you're going to answer it,
you got to come up
with some answers, right?
Because, you know, this is
no little question, you know.
And so, when you teach it,
you go,
"What happens
to a dream deferred?"
And you look up
at the students, right?
And they look up at you, like,
"Whoa," you know,
"What does happen
to a dream deferred?"
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
It's, like, the raisin
is the dream,
and the sun is, like,
taking the dream away from it.
Mm-hmm... how does
the sun take a dream away?
- By drying up the raisin.
When a raisin dries up,
it gets, probably smaller.
It began as a grape,
but as it was being deferred,
it became a raisin over time,
just sitting out in the sun,
and it was maybe forgotten.
You know, raisins were
very interesting things
for people like my generation,
you know, growing up.
They were these simple little
things
that you could take to school
with you.
That was your dessert,
that little tiny box of raisins,
you know?
I hated raisins after a point,
you know.
I really did.
It took me years to adjust
to eat raisins again
because I had
so many bloody raisins.
They were cheap,
it was cheap food.
- You pointed out that raisins
are the food of poverty.
- Yeah, but also,
it's a visual thing, too.
- Yes.
- It is the drying up
of that grape,
and it, you know,
it is that drying up
of that black face,
right there, that raisin...
- That wizened...
- Yeah, so,
it really is very much an image
of blacks that,
you know, that raisin...
- Who are aged and dry.
- That's right,
that's right, yeah.
And dried up, at some point.
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun,
or fester like a sore...
And then run?
You have to ask the question:
why so close,
the raisin and sore?
Because that raisin
can look like a sore.
I think when a sore festers,
it's, like...
It can only fester
if it has been neglected
or if it wasn't treated for.
And I think that's really
what happens to the dream
if it's delayed
and you don't keep on trying
to pursue the dream.
If you don't take care of it,
it starts to become ugly
and leaves a scar.
Does it stink like rotten meat?
I wondered, when I was
reading this all over again,
whether young people would catch
the imagery as easily
as somebody my age who grew up
in a Southern town would.
You know, it's just...
It was so natural,
it was so vivid, you know,
you immediately know exactly
what he's talking about.
Does it stink like rotten meat?
I can still remember
when refrigerators
were called "ice boxes"
because they were cooled
with big blocks of ice.
My grandfather,
when I was a little boy,
made a living carrying
those heavy blocks of ice
on his back
to stick in ice boxes.
And there was... rotten
meat was not a rare thing.
- And it's part of
the world of poverty, right?
- Yeah.
- The very imagery here
that we're given in a simile.
The dream is like rotten meat
that stinks, and yet,
an actual physical world
of meat that's gone bad
is conjured here.
I grew up in Harlem,
I saw a lot of rotten meat
along the way.
It wasn't...
It didn't look rotten.
It was stuck full of red dye,
you know, that stuff
to make it look good?
A rotten meat gets, like...
It decays over time,
so, like, if you're holding
onto a dream for a long time,
you start to give up
and believe you can't
accomplish that dream.
It stinks if it's
a dream deferred, that stinks.
Wow, that just stinks.
Oh, I didn't even think of that.
- Yeah.
- You know, that it just,
it refers to the idiomatic
or the slang, "That stinks."
- Yeah, exactly.
- That stinks.
- And we didn't
say anything about the crusting
and sugar sweet,
like, what that means.
Does it stink like rotten meat,
or crust and sugar over...
Like a syrupy sweet?
For Langston Hughes, "sweet"
was a noun, it could be,
you know, a piece of cake,
a piece of pie.
So he wasn't using this...
We're not getting
two adjectives there.
No, no, that's a noun for him.
- I see, "Like a syrupy sweet."
- It's a sweet.
That's, like,
sugarcoating it, you know.
Doesn't feel good,
but, you know,
put on your...
Put on your smile, anyway,
even though you feel like crap.
It's an over-sweetness,
it's false sweetness.
It isn't helped that it comes
right after, "Does it stink
like rotten meat?"
- Oh, right, right,
it's, like, the opposite.
But it also comes back
to the raisin.
- Mm-hmm.
- One of the reasons
why I didn't like the raisin,
it was so bloody sweet.
It was so much concentration
of sugar, there,
and you really,
at some point, you know,
that is a dangerous thing
to take in all that sugar.
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Hughes was talking about
carrying disappointment
with you.
And, do you just carry it
till you die, like a heavy load?
When you carry a heavy load
for the first half-hour,
it feels one way.
What about when
you've carried it
for another half an hour,
and another half an hour?
- It gets heavier and heavier
each time you walk.
When I hear, when he says,
"Like a heavy load,"
I hear that your dream
is too much on you
and you really want
to just give up.
I think of it
as, like, a burden.
Your dream is like a burden
that sags like a heavy load.
We have "does it," "or does it,"
then there's a break.
So that automatically emphasizes
what's going to be said next.
It's not a desert anymore.
Then it's, "Maybe it
just sags like a heavy load."
As though that's a conclusion.
Is it this? Is it this?
Is it this?
Maybe it's just this.
And then another idea appeared.
There could be
another conclusion.
- And a more
dangerous one, perhaps.
- That's... yeah.
- Maybe you weren't
thinking about this.
You thought it would just get
heavier and heavier and heavier.
And it has some
of the power of a warning.
Yeah, yeah, yeah...
Maybe it's worse than that.
- Right, maybe it's worse than
sagging like a heavy load.
- Worse than sagging
like a heavy load.
Or maybe it will sag
like a heavy load
for only so long before...
significant pause.
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode?
When it says,
"Or does it explode?",
there's anger.
The other statements
are almost resigning oneself
to the sadness.
The anger is a reaction to it.
It is much more than
these few lines that are here,
and it's more, much more
of, "Does it explode," you know?
You know, it's more than
just that, you know?
Because you and I understand
if a dream is deferred,
it explodes
sometimes immediately,
but also, it's a slow burn,
quite often, too.
- Tick, tick, tick...
- It's, like, tick-tock,
that's right, yeah.
And it, maybe it will be,
you know, years later,
maybe it will be
in many kinds of ways.
Langston Hughes sees it
as both personal
and a social matter.
The beginning
you could read either way.
In the end,
there's no ambiguity at all.
In the end, he's saying these
people's dreams are deferred
because of things
other people did
to keep them
from pursuing their dreams.
I grew up
at 152nd Street in Harlem,
and I used
to babysit for a woman.
She got pregnant
and her husband said,
"We cannot afford
another child, we have four."
This dream deferred
is that at some point,
you don't make enough money,
so you cannot have that child.
And one day,
when I come home from school,
my stepmother says,
"Miss Jones is dead."
And all the women gather,
all the people gather
in that building, you know,
in order to prepare her, you
know, to be taken out, whatever.
And, you know, and I think,
this husband
who had said to her, "We cannot
afford another child,"
what really happens
to a dream deferred?
What happened to that man,
that husband,
those four children?
The thing I remember...
Those women gathering together.
I should never forget them
coming up and down the stairs.
It allows us,
as you've been saying,
to think about
the whole community.
Yeah, yeah. - Part of this poem.
But also, is this about
one person's experience
in one place
and about how different
generations
process their disappointment
differently?
- Right, they do.
- And I wonder
if we can see any of that
in this poem.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like
a raisin in the sun?
Or fester
like a sore... and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over...
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Imagine this poem
being spoken
by multiple speakers in a play.
- Yeah, I think so.
- Where a young person
says, "What happens
to a dream deferred?"
And then somebody says,
"Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?"
Someone else says,
someone else says...
You can imagine this...
It almost...
If it weren't naturally
a series of one-liners
spoken by different people,
it's almost like...
You could imagine
a Greek chorus saying it.
I absolutely agree.
I also think it's almost
as though the separate stanzas
function
as separate instruments.
Oh, I mean, we could talk hours,
because at some point,
you need to do a dirge
with this, you know?
You need classical music
behind it to read it, you know?
You need to have a violin,
the jazz violin behind it,
you know?
You need all of that behind
reading this poem.
The tragic thing about this poem
is that it's not just situated
in one little period.
For many of the
African-Americans
living in Harlem,
it was generation
after generation
after generation
after generation
after generation.
Boom!
And it will change.
And it will change, right.
It will change
every time you read it,
with every performance,
and that it's meant
to be warm in that way,
and changed by the human voice.
Exactly, exactly.
And community that receives it.
It's a fabulous poem.
It is a fabulous poem.
- In a few lines,
it captures the landscape
of a person's mind and spirit.
It captures the experience...
- Of a people.
- Of millions of people.
And it poses a question
about what happens next.
What happens to a
society if it organizes itself
around making sure
people's dreams are deferred?
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore...
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over,
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
to a dream deferred?
What happens
to a dream deferred?
What happens to a dream
deferred?
What happens
to a dream deferred?
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin
in the sun?
Or fester like a sore...
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over,
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
When, in 1951,
Langston Hughes published
his book-length jazz poem
"Montage of a Dream Deferred,"
it had been 30 years
since he'd arrived in Harlem
from Joplin, Missouri.
1920s Harlem was
a capital of black culture,
young with possibility.
From Harlem, journalists and
poets, painters and sculptors,
musicians, actors, and activists
broadcast their confidence
in the future
in print and song and spectacle.
But 30 years later,
in a seven-line poem
that has come
to be known as "Harlem,"
Hughes tells of hopes still
unrealized, of souls parched.
"What happens
to a dream deferred?"
That's where we started
when I met with
President Bill Clinton
in his offices in Harlem
to discuss a poem
he'd chosen for us
to read together.
Have you ever wondered
about the word "deferred"?
Seems to me such a formal word.
- No, I think
it's the perfect word for him,
because what he's saying is,
it didn't go away,
the dream didn't die.
You just kept putting it off,
or it was put off
by circumstances
beyond your control.
And that's where I started, too,
with some students at the Harlem
Children's Zone Promise Academy.
So, Elijah,
what does "deferred" mean?
- Deferred is, like,
to put on hold.
Like, you're going to keep it
away for a little bit of time,
but you might come back into,
like, in a little while
in your life.
Like, your dream, like,
you can't make it to your dream,
even though you want to,
but things are in the way of it,
or just, just not meant to be.
I have made every single
high school reunion,
and I've noticed
that the classmates I had
who are happy with their lives
have not lived uneventful lives.
That is, many of them have had
family problems
or businesses failed,
all kinds of things happen,
but they just kept going.
- Mm-hmm.
The ones that were most unhappy,
that seemed to age the most,
were the ones who never
looked themselves in the eye
and said, "What do I want
to do with my life?"
- Go for it, do it.
- And were willing
to risk failure to do it.
So I think there's
a personal message.
And I was wondering
about the imagery of the poem.
I mean, it doesn't just describe
people who have let
their lives go by, precisely.
It's more visceral,
more physical than that.
- Yeah, you can
feel it when you read this.
After speaking to the president,
I asked the jazz pianist
and composer Herbie Hancock
if he would improvise some music
to Hughes' poem,
and talk to me
about what the poem says to him.
What happens to a dream
deferred?
The first sentence,
the first question
has a bit of sadness
attached to it.
It's a dream deferred.
I mean, a dream is, like,
a goal,
what you reach for, you know?
What you aspire to, you know?
And you want to go for it.
- And you want to go for it.
"Deferred" means it's been
deflected some kind of way.
- Yeah.
- Which is a disappointment,
so there's disappointment
involved.
And this is Langston Hughes,
the title is "Harlem."
And then, because
Langston Hughes was in Harlem,
and because he was well aware
of the continuing challenges
of African-Americans,
and of poor people generally,
he knew that there was
a social dimension
to dreams deferred,
that if you deferred dreams
for a whole class of people,
a definable group,
that in the end
it could compromise
everybody else's dreams, too.
- Mm-hmm.
His ashes are buried
in a place of honor:
beneath the lobby
of Harlem's Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture.
I asked the poet Sonia Sanchez
to read from her poem
about Langston Hughes,
and to tell me about the time
she met him.
When I was very young,
I went to see Langston Hughes
read in Harlem.
I had to have been
about 12 or 13,
and I got in line,
and I got up in front of him,
and he said, "Yes?"
You know, and I said,
"Uh, uh, uh..."
I'm a stutterer.
"Uh, uh, uh, uh... thank you."
You know, and I extended my hand
and he shook it,
and that was it.
And I thought, as I walked away,
"Oh, why didn't you say,
'I write poetry, I love poetry,
I love your poetry, '
all those things?"
But I was actually dumbfounded.
And you know why?
Sometimes we like poets,
but people loved Langston,
because they knew
that they would hear the truth.
They knew that he would talk
about their lives
with empathy, with sympathy,
with love, with respect.
They knew that
he would say, simply,
"Whatever you have experienced,
I, too, have experienced.
"I will chronicle you,
I will tell your story
here in a place called Harlem."
And he made Harlem
go far beyond this Harlem,
the Harlems of the world,
and that's why I loved him
so much.
It was written in the '50s,
and so this particular
time period,
discrimination against black
people was much more extreme,
but it still exists
in Harlem today.
And then, in, you know,
black neighborhoods
throughout the United States,
you know,
almost no matter what...
- Where dreams are...
Where dreams are being deferred.
- Deferred, yeah.
'Cause it still ain't right.
What I felt from my reading
of it
was that blues is kind of
the spirit of the poem.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like
a raisin in the sun,
or fester like a sore...
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat
or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
was heavily influenced by music,
so there's a rhythm,
there's a musical rhythm
in this poetry.
It's a lot like jazz.
It's clearly one melody...
- Yes.
- But there's some ad-libbing,
some improvisation
as you go along.
So the lines rhyme.
It's a different rhyming scheme,
but it's enough to remind you
that it's a poem,
just like it'd
be enough to remind you
that it was a jazz song.
This whole piece,
that, when you do it,
you hear the jazz and blues,
you know?
So you have
to then take your mouth
and make your tongue
begin and respond.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore, sore,
sore, sore, sore, sore.
Does it stink like rotten meat
or crust and sugar over like
a syrupy sweet...
Maybe it just sags like a heavy
- He gives you...
- Well, you just
sang this all as bebop, right?
With some scat. - Yeah.
I hear in "maybe it just sags
like a heavy load"
an older country blues.
An enormous number
of African-Americans
had roots in the South,
picking cotton, or doing
some other kind of manual labor.
Which didn't change much
after slavery was abolished.
The roots of the blues,
you know, from the South,
black people that migrated
from the South
kind of went
through Chicago, first,
because of the Mississippi
River.
You talked about
the migration and, you know,
I think you're referring
to the Great Migration.
- Yes.
- You know, coming up
the Mississippi River,
and I hear that migration
in this poem, too.
I hear a little bit
of the South.
But that's
in every black neighborhood.
There's a bit of that
in every black neighborhood.
The joy about a poem,
my dear sister,
is that, I always say,
it's not just what is written
and what is read out loud,
but the silences.
The first line is, "What happens
to a dream deferred?"
Then, there's a big space.
In poetry, you know,
you have, like, a little space,
but there's this big space,
which means that,
if you're going to answer it,
you got to come up
with some answers, right?
Because, you know, this is
no little question, you know.
And so, when you teach it,
you go,
"What happens
to a dream deferred?"
And you look up
at the students, right?
And they look up at you, like,
"Whoa," you know,
"What does happen
to a dream deferred?"
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
It's, like, the raisin
is the dream,
and the sun is, like,
taking the dream away from it.
Mm-hmm... how does
the sun take a dream away?
- By drying up the raisin.
When a raisin dries up,
it gets, probably smaller.
It began as a grape,
but as it was being deferred,
it became a raisin over time,
just sitting out in the sun,
and it was maybe forgotten.
You know, raisins were
very interesting things
for people like my generation,
you know, growing up.
They were these simple little
things
that you could take to school
with you.
That was your dessert,
that little tiny box of raisins,
you know?
I hated raisins after a point,
you know.
I really did.
It took me years to adjust
to eat raisins again
because I had
so many bloody raisins.
They were cheap,
it was cheap food.
- You pointed out that raisins
are the food of poverty.
- Yeah, but also,
it's a visual thing, too.
- Yes.
- It is the drying up
of that grape,
and it, you know,
it is that drying up
of that black face,
right there, that raisin...
- That wizened...
- Yeah, so,
it really is very much an image
of blacks that,
you know, that raisin...
- Who are aged and dry.
- That's right,
that's right, yeah.
And dried up, at some point.
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun,
or fester like a sore...
And then run?
You have to ask the question:
why so close,
the raisin and sore?
Because that raisin
can look like a sore.
I think when a sore festers,
it's, like...
It can only fester
if it has been neglected
or if it wasn't treated for.
And I think that's really
what happens to the dream
if it's delayed
and you don't keep on trying
to pursue the dream.
If you don't take care of it,
it starts to become ugly
and leaves a scar.
Does it stink like rotten meat?
I wondered, when I was
reading this all over again,
whether young people would catch
the imagery as easily
as somebody my age who grew up
in a Southern town would.
You know, it's just...
It was so natural,
it was so vivid, you know,
you immediately know exactly
what he's talking about.
Does it stink like rotten meat?
I can still remember
when refrigerators
were called "ice boxes"
because they were cooled
with big blocks of ice.
My grandfather,
when I was a little boy,
made a living carrying
those heavy blocks of ice
on his back
to stick in ice boxes.
And there was... rotten
meat was not a rare thing.
- And it's part of
the world of poverty, right?
- Yeah.
- The very imagery here
that we're given in a simile.
The dream is like rotten meat
that stinks, and yet,
an actual physical world
of meat that's gone bad
is conjured here.
I grew up in Harlem,
I saw a lot of rotten meat
along the way.
It wasn't...
It didn't look rotten.
It was stuck full of red dye,
you know, that stuff
to make it look good?
A rotten meat gets, like...
It decays over time,
so, like, if you're holding
onto a dream for a long time,
you start to give up
and believe you can't
accomplish that dream.
It stinks if it's
a dream deferred, that stinks.
Wow, that just stinks.
Oh, I didn't even think of that.
- Yeah.
- You know, that it just,
it refers to the idiomatic
or the slang, "That stinks."
- Yeah, exactly.
- That stinks.
- And we didn't
say anything about the crusting
and sugar sweet,
like, what that means.
Does it stink like rotten meat,
or crust and sugar over...
Like a syrupy sweet?
For Langston Hughes, "sweet"
was a noun, it could be,
you know, a piece of cake,
a piece of pie.
So he wasn't using this...
We're not getting
two adjectives there.
No, no, that's a noun for him.
- I see, "Like a syrupy sweet."
- It's a sweet.
That's, like,
sugarcoating it, you know.
Doesn't feel good,
but, you know,
put on your...
Put on your smile, anyway,
even though you feel like crap.
It's an over-sweetness,
it's false sweetness.
It isn't helped that it comes
right after, "Does it stink
like rotten meat?"
- Oh, right, right,
it's, like, the opposite.
But it also comes back
to the raisin.
- Mm-hmm.
- One of the reasons
why I didn't like the raisin,
it was so bloody sweet.
It was so much concentration
of sugar, there,
and you really,
at some point, you know,
that is a dangerous thing
to take in all that sugar.
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Hughes was talking about
carrying disappointment
with you.
And, do you just carry it
till you die, like a heavy load?
When you carry a heavy load
for the first half-hour,
it feels one way.
What about when
you've carried it
for another half an hour,
and another half an hour?
- It gets heavier and heavier
each time you walk.
When I hear, when he says,
"Like a heavy load,"
I hear that your dream
is too much on you
and you really want
to just give up.
I think of it
as, like, a burden.
Your dream is like a burden
that sags like a heavy load.
We have "does it," "or does it,"
then there's a break.
So that automatically emphasizes
what's going to be said next.
It's not a desert anymore.
Then it's, "Maybe it
just sags like a heavy load."
As though that's a conclusion.
Is it this? Is it this?
Is it this?
Maybe it's just this.
And then another idea appeared.
There could be
another conclusion.
- And a more
dangerous one, perhaps.
- That's... yeah.
- Maybe you weren't
thinking about this.
You thought it would just get
heavier and heavier and heavier.
And it has some
of the power of a warning.
Yeah, yeah, yeah...
Maybe it's worse than that.
- Right, maybe it's worse than
sagging like a heavy load.
- Worse than sagging
like a heavy load.
Or maybe it will sag
like a heavy load
for only so long before...
significant pause.
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode?
Or does it explode?
When it says,
"Or does it explode?",
there's anger.
The other statements
are almost resigning oneself
to the sadness.
The anger is a reaction to it.
It is much more than
these few lines that are here,
and it's more, much more
of, "Does it explode," you know?
You know, it's more than
just that, you know?
Because you and I understand
if a dream is deferred,
it explodes
sometimes immediately,
but also, it's a slow burn,
quite often, too.
- Tick, tick, tick...
- It's, like, tick-tock,
that's right, yeah.
And it, maybe it will be,
you know, years later,
maybe it will be
in many kinds of ways.
Langston Hughes sees it
as both personal
and a social matter.
The beginning
you could read either way.
In the end,
there's no ambiguity at all.
In the end, he's saying these
people's dreams are deferred
because of things
other people did
to keep them
from pursuing their dreams.
I grew up
at 152nd Street in Harlem,
and I used
to babysit for a woman.
She got pregnant
and her husband said,
"We cannot afford
another child, we have four."
This dream deferred
is that at some point,
you don't make enough money,
so you cannot have that child.
And one day,
when I come home from school,
my stepmother says,
"Miss Jones is dead."
And all the women gather,
all the people gather
in that building, you know,
in order to prepare her, you
know, to be taken out, whatever.
And, you know, and I think,
this husband
who had said to her, "We cannot
afford another child,"
what really happens
to a dream deferred?
What happened to that man,
that husband,
those four children?
The thing I remember...
Those women gathering together.
I should never forget them
coming up and down the stairs.
It allows us,
as you've been saying,
to think about
the whole community.
Yeah, yeah. - Part of this poem.
But also, is this about
one person's experience
in one place
and about how different
generations
process their disappointment
differently?
- Right, they do.
- And I wonder
if we can see any of that
in this poem.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like
a raisin in the sun?
Or fester
like a sore... and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over...
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Imagine this poem
being spoken
by multiple speakers in a play.
- Yeah, I think so.
- Where a young person
says, "What happens
to a dream deferred?"
And then somebody says,
"Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?"
Someone else says,
someone else says...
You can imagine this...
It almost...
If it weren't naturally
a series of one-liners
spoken by different people,
it's almost like...
You could imagine
a Greek chorus saying it.
I absolutely agree.
I also think it's almost
as though the separate stanzas
function
as separate instruments.
Oh, I mean, we could talk hours,
because at some point,
you need to do a dirge
with this, you know?
You need classical music
behind it to read it, you know?
You need to have a violin,
the jazz violin behind it,
you know?
You need all of that behind
reading this poem.
The tragic thing about this poem
is that it's not just situated
in one little period.
For many of the
African-Americans
living in Harlem,
it was generation
after generation
after generation
after generation
after generation.
Boom!
And it will change.
And it will change, right.
It will change
every time you read it,
with every performance,
and that it's meant
to be warm in that way,
and changed by the human voice.
Exactly, exactly.
And community that receives it.
It's a fabulous poem.
It is a fabulous poem.
- In a few lines,
it captures the landscape
of a person's mind and spirit.
It captures the experience...
- Of a people.
- Of millions of people.
And it poses a question
about what happens next.
What happens to a
society if it organizes itself
around making sure
people's dreams are deferred?
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore...
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over,
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?