It’s been a mixed bag today.

It was warm out and the sky was blue this morning, and then it grew colder and gray as the afternoon advanced.

I came home from work and turned on the gas fireplace so the cats could curl up in front of it, and then I sat down in the recliner by it to take some time to read, and I quickly fell asleep.

Forty minutes later I woke up and worked to get up, my arms and legs heavy weights.

I warmed up some leftovers and ate them watching Andy Griffith figuring out how to get his gruff uncle and blustery aunt to leave his house. He finally did, that sly man.

And then I read several more stories this evening in the volume I am currently pacing through, “Short Stories” by Langston Hughes.

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I knew nothing about Langston Hughes until I ran across a post on Facebook that pointed to this article, “Why Christians Should Read the Short Stories of Langston Hughes”, which was on the Gospel Coalition website. On the strength of Hughes being mentioned by that website, and on the suggestion that he wrote collections of really good short stories, I went and found and checked out the book I am reading at the local library.

Hughes (1902-1967) is from another time, but not a time so removed from our own. Heck, I was born but a year after he passed away. Hughes is also from another place, though, which is very far away from my own experience.

Langston Hughes was perhaps the biggest voice of the “Harlem Renaissance” that exploded in New York from the early 1920’s through the early 1930’s. Perhaps the zenith for black cultural expression in America, that period witnessed a tremendous stream of artists entering Harlem to create and produce, and a voluminous stream of works leaving Harlem to give voice to the black experience in America- a subject that was usually too easily buried beneath other lighter and more fashionable topics vogue in the national consciousness.

Hughes as a writer was, and remains lauded principally as a poet, I read, and I know nothing of his verses, but meeting him through his stories, I am amazed both by his command of language and of plot in storytelling, and by the breadth of experiences he addresses in his stories, which speaks to the breadth of experiences he had in his own life. He was well-traveled and well-connected, and immensely productive wherever he went.

And he was an African American describing what it was like being an African American during the era that he lived- an experience then which is probably not much different from that known today.

His stories have been educational to me about the insipid entrenchment of prejudice in countries and cultures which, like a quiet drug-resistant virus, has no intent on ever going away.

Hughes writes richly and colorfully. His stories are not necessarily happily ending stories. But I find them moving attempts to reconcile oppression with fulfillment, unfairness with justice, and despair with hope.

And I am reminded of how little, perhaps, I think or have thought about that aspect of my nation’s history.

Maybe, due to the fact I grew up in a different part of the country, where Anglos, Hispanics, and Native Americans mix and mingle pretty freely, I just didn’t have enough exposure to poisonous prejudice.

Or, I’ve just been lucky.