Coming Home:  from the Life of Langston Hughes (Philomel, $15.95; ages 5 and up) is the first picture book Floyd Cooper has both illustrated and written.  The combined power of his two art forms is a perfect representation of the man he is writing about. Hughes and Cooper share a poetic soul and Cooper's voice is filled with a lyricism uncommon in most biographies.

Cooper credits his editor's guidance for some of this.  "She told me that I should always do things very personally, so in telling his story, I'd read about Langston Hughes and find things that I could relate to...things that would be close to me.  I saw the scenes, put the characters in a room, and captured their dialogue in my own words."

Hughes and Cooper grew up in the same part of the country, but most things in their lives were very different.  In his biography, Cooper focuses on Hughes' early life.  He writes of a boy lonely, dreaming, and only partially comforted by his storytelling grandmother who'd wrap him in a torn shawl  and "in family stories of pride and glory."  Cooper gently tells of Hughes' longing to be reunited with his mother and father and the occasional trips to visit his mother in Kansas City where he'd wander "riding his ears around the city", hearing "jazzy old blue music that drifted down the alleys and tickled his soul" with rhythms he never forgot.

Cooper himself grew up in a family that nurtured him.  His mother was a storyteller, his art was always supported, and he grew up to believe he was someone who could do anything.  "Growing up in the projects, feeling that you can be, rather than can't be was the kind of thing that only happened inside a house, because it wasn't modeled outside!"

"I understand Hughes because I know lots of kids from Oklahoma that grew up in the same circumstances.  My mother was there for me, but I had a lot of firsthand experience of dealing with people who had Langston's experience."  For many years, Floyd Cooper has created visual images for celebrated writers, strengthening their words with the power of his illustrations.  "I'm always a bridge.  I started out as a bridge, I started illustrating other people's stories and that's how I got into publishing."  This spring will also see the publication of several other stories he's illustrated including: Jaguarundi by Virginia Hamilton (Scholastic, $14.95; ages 5-12) Lion's Tale and Gerald Hausman's Coyote Walks on Two Legs (Philomel, $15.95; ages 4-8).

Cooper has now become a new kind of bridge, making a life from the past meaningful to today's children. "I think I had to have some idea of what home was to understand what Langston didn't have.  If I had no idea of what a home really was, it would have been a little bit more difficult trying to guide Langston through." Cooper had compassion for Hughes' difficulties, but he also saw Hughes fitting into a principal that he's seen proven again and again in the pages of history. "I knew from studying certain aspects of psychology that individuals who made a really big impact in the world, in almost every field, had some sort of dramatic event in their life that they had to overcome.  The struggle catapulted them farther than they would have gone had they not experienced any trauma. For Hughes, it was family.  He was driven to find a home.  It happened very early and that set the tone for his life.  Trying to find his place, he found a lot more."

Cooper thinks many of today's kids could be comforted by Hughes' example. He believes that "kids can turn the negative into the positive, if they realize that what they're experiencing is not the end of the world, it's just the beginning of what could be really great for them."

He's also wise enough to know that "with kids, you have to approach things in the right way.  I knew that there would be lots of kids that could learn from what Langston Hughes showed in his life, but if you told them the lessons, they'd tune you out right away.  What we do is just tell stories, keep telling stories like this and hopefully it will be implanted in a round about way."

Like Hughes, Cooper gets great pleasure from his art form.  "It was something Langston Hughes couldn't avoid.  I couldn't either, it was like walking and breathing, just a part of me."

"I started drawing when I was three years old.  My father had just built a house and I picked up a piece of sheet rock and started scratching a really cool picture of a bird on the side of the house. He didn't think it was too great, but I kept drawing because I couldn't stop.  I think if I'd had the materials, I probably would have painted pictures on the inside of my mother's stomach."

Both Hughes and Cooper have a dreamy quality to their work.  "The dreamy quality of my art has a lot to do with how I work and how I see.  I lean towards getting a certain atmosphere, rather than getting something very photographic.  I'm striving to reach the point that the viewer is touched more by a certain feeling than by seeing something really realistic."

Cooper leaves Hughes' racial struggles out the body of the book, mentioning these problems only in the afterword. Part of this was a conscious effort on his part to escape didacticism and "create a story that's open so that more people can come into it."

The other part of Cooper's decision was "almost subconscious, it's just how I vision life.  I'm a member of the human race, as we all are.  We don't need to be more divided.  Hopefully, we'll eventually see an end to all those divisions in life.  It helps if you step back and see the whole picture."

Cooper found this same sentiment in Hughes' life and ends the book with Hughes' discovery that "home was in him.  And it was about his black family that he wrote in words that reached his own people, and all kinds of people of different races and different countries, all over the world."

©Susie Wilde 1998