; Cleveland; Lawrence, Kansas; Mexico City; Topeka, Kansas; Colorado Springs; Kansas City; and Lincoln, Illinois. In 1915, he was class poet of his grammar-school graduating class in Lincoln. From 1916 to 1920, he attended Central High School in Cleveland, where he was a star athlete, wrote poetry and short stories (and published many of them in the Central High Monthly), and on his own read such modern poets as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg. His classmates were for the most part the children of European immigrants, who treated him largely without discrimination and introduced him to leftist political ideas.After graduation in 1920, he went to Mexico to teach English for a year. While on the train to Mexico, he wrote the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which was published in the June 1921 issue of The Crisis, a leading black publication. After his academic year at Columbia, he lived for a year in Harlem, where he supported himself by an assortment of odd jobs. In June 1923, he embarked on a six-month voyage as a cabin boy on a merchant freighter bound for West Africa. After its return, he took a job on a ship sailing to Holland. In the middle of his second round trip to Holland, he quit the job in Rotterdam and caught a train to Paris. where he lived for the better part of a year, working as a nightclub doorman and a dishwasher. He also became emotionally close to Mary Coussey, the daughter of a Nigerian-born businessman. Throughout his life, for all his personal warmth and friendliness, Hughes was an intensely private person, and no aspect of his life was more closely guarded than his sexuality: different friends and acquaintances were equally certain that he was heterosexual, homosexual, and asexual. The author of an exhaustively researched, two-volume chronicle of his life could discover no independent evidence to verify any of these conclusions, and remains convinced that the truth abo...
