[75 years ago this week, operator-assisted toll dialing was introduced to make long-distance phone calls much easier. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some classic phone calls in American culture, leading up to a special tribute to what phones mean in my own 21st century life!]
On a funny
and fun poetic voice and character, and the layers of meaning she reveals.
Across his
nearly 50 years
writing and publishing poetry (among other genres), American treasure Langston
Hughes went through a number of different stages and series. One of the
more unique were the Madam
Alberta K. Johnson poems—originally created by Hughes in “Madam and
the Number Runner” (later revised to “Number Writer”),
published in the Autumn 1943 issue of Contemporary
Poetry, Johnson would go to serve as the speaker/persona for nearly 20 more
of his poems (all titled in that same “Madam and the” style) over the next few
years. Johnson was a confident, no-nonsense Harlem matriarch, a woman
navigating with humor, resilience, and serious attitude both contemporary and
universal challenges of economics and survival, gender and relationships, race
and community, and many more. As with almost all of Hughes’ works, the Madam
poems are deceptively straightforward, highly readable and engaging but with
significant layers and depth (of literary elements and cultural/historical
contexts alike) that reward our close readings.
The one
that I’ve close read the most often, as I teach it in my American Literature II
course alongside a couple other Hughes poems, is “Madam and the Phone Bill” (1944).
Like most of the Madam poems, this one is presented as part of a dialogue, but
with the reader only getting Johnson’s half of the conversation. In this case
that conversation is with a representative of the “Central” phone company who
has contacted Johnson to make her pay for a long-distance call from her
wandering (in both senses) significant other Roscoe. The first stanza
immediately establishes every aspect of that situation along with Johnson’s
unique and witty voice and perspective: “You say I O.K.ed/LONG DISTANCE?/O.K.ed
it when?/My goodness, Central/That was then!”
Effortlessly using poetic elements like rhythm and rhyme, as well as
typographical ones like capitalization, italics, and punctuation, Hughes
locates us within his speaker’s voice, in the middle of this phone conversation
(or rather argument) in progress, and with an immediate sense of the problem
facing our put-upon heroine. The voice and humor only deepen from there, as in
the poem’s middle stanza (the 5th of 10): “If I ever catch
him,/Lawd, have pity!/Calling me up/From Kansas City.”
But like
all the Madam poems, and as I said all of Hughes’ poems and works period,
there’s a lot more to “Phone Bill” than just that fun and funny feel. Certainly
the poem offers a glimpse into Johnson’s fraught negotiation of gender
dynamics, such as the contradictions between her desire to maintain her status
as an independent woman and her worries about what “them other girls” might
offer Roscoe (perhaps especially while he’s hundreds of miles away in KC).
Written in the shadow of the recently ended Great Depression (a frequent Hughes topic), the
poem likewise reflects the fraught dynamics of an individual’s conversations
with the corporations who could with a single bill (or instead with an
understanding waiving of that bill) profoundly change their economic
situations. And I would say that it’s particularly relevant that the bill in
question is a phone bill—the period’s increasingly ubiquitous telephones, and
more exactly evolving technological possibilities like long-distance calling,
symbolized at once greater social and communal connections and yet another way
in which individuals were beholden, to grasping corporations and distant but
still needy significant others alike. Like it or not, Alberta, those are debts
we’re all “gonna pay!”
Last
famous phone call tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?
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