Sing My America: Langston's Train Ride by Robert Burleigh

Poet Langston Hughes was eighteen when he took a long train ride from Harlem to Mexico. He was just the age when life flows deep and strong within and emotions overflow suddenly in a flood of feeling. Crossing the Mississippi, golden and wide in the late afternoon sun, his mind went back to the people who worked the lands fed by that river, the cotton workers, the boatmen, the field hands, and the slaves sold before Abraham Lincoln's appalled young eyes in the market at New Orleans.

Hughes hastily scribbled a poem on the back of an envelope he carried in his pocket, a poem in which rivers become the metaphor for the passage of humankind upon the river of time.

"Rivers. Maybe we're all part of a big river that flows from way back to here. And from here to--who knows where?"

Langston Hughes' poem, "A Negro Speaks of Rivers" begins

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world
and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Published in 1921 in W. E. B. DuBois' Crisis, it was the one of many works which made Langston Hughes one of the twentieth century's notable American poets. And it all began with a train ride and a crossing over a river.

Robert Burleigh's lyrical Langston's Train Ride reads like Hughes' blank verse and the metaphor of his journey south parallels the poet's river metaphor seamlessly. The poem Hughes wrote on this train ride is included withing the text of the book. For the most part, Leonard Jenkins' free-form illustrations frame and interpret the text beautifully, although a few of the more symbolic designs may confuse younger children. Still, this book is highly recommended for use with Black History month activities and poetry studies in the elementary grades. Langston's Train Ride is a 2008-2009 Tennessee State Book Award nominee.

A fine anthology to introduce Hughes' poetry to children is his The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, illustrated by Caldecott honor artist Brian Pinkney. For more about the early life of this prolific and popular poet, Floyd Cooper's Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes is a biography in picture book format which describes Hughes' lonely Kansas boyhood and the foster family who encouraged his talent with words.