[August 2nd marks the 100th anniversary of inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s death. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some famous phones in American culture, leading up to a special weekend post on AGB’s life and legacies!]
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 tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?
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