Finding Langston

Finding Langston, Lesa Cline-Ransome’s debut novel for middle-grade readers, is the story of an 11-year-old boy named Langston who loses his home but finds himself. The book received numerous accolades following its publication in 2018, including the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction. In 2020 Cline-Ransome published Leaving Lymon, a companion novel to Finding Langston that tells the story of Langston’s bully Lymon. This study guide refers to the 2018 Holiday House edition.

Plot Summary

Finding Langston begins in 1946 as Langston, the novel’s first-person narrator, is leaving school, careful to avoid classmates Lymon, Clem, and Erroll, who relentlessly bully him. Having left his rural Alabama home following his mother’s death a few months earlier, Langston now lives in a small, dingy apartment with his father Henry. He has no friends, and his father works long days at a paper factory. The only neighbor he knows is Miss Fulton, who lives across the hall and often requests his help with unpleasant tasks.

Langston is miserable in Chicago. His thoughts often stray from the present to dwell on the happy days of his recent past, when he lived on a small, Alabama farm with his parents and grandmother. To his father’s chagrin, Langston, an only child, prefers reading indoors to playing outdoors. Langston’s mother adored him and encouraged his love of books, but then she became gravely ill. After she died, Langston’s father chose to move to Chicago, taking Langston away from his Alabama home.

Langston’s life in Chicago takes a turn for the better when he stumbles upon the Chicago Public Library’s George Cleveland Hall Branch, which, to his surprise, is not racially segregated. Moreover, it features a portrait gallery of celebrated African American writers, including the poet Langston Hughes. Intrigued by Hughes because he shares the poet’s name, Langston opens one of his books and finds his own feelings of loneliness and loss reflected in the poems. Thereafter, Langston spends his after-school hours at the library reading Hughes’s poetry.

Fearing his father’s disapproval, Langston keeps his library visits a secret, and the rest of his life continues unchanged. On Saturdays, they run errands, and on Sundays, they go to church. Langston mostly eludes the bullies at school, but they waylay him one afternoon, and he returns home with a bloody lip. Although he usually hides his tears from his father, knowing they are unwelcome, Langston can’t contain them as he admits to Henry he wants to go back to Alabama.

Lymon’s sidekick, Clem, appears at the library one afternoon. Assuming Clem has followed him, Langston confronts him, but Clem says he regularly visits the library. When Langston returns home, his father shares the news that Langston’s grandmother has died. This blow is followed by another: Henry will depart immediately for Alabama, leaving Langston behind in Miss Fulton’s care. Langston takes advantage of his father’s absence to investigate a box he previously spotted under the bed. Inside are letters written by his mother to his father, and as Langston looks through them, his attention is caught by several lines of verse. Later, when Langston eats dinner with Miss Fulton, he’s pleasantly surprised by her good cooking and her admiration for Langston Hughes. Miss Fulton, who is a high school English teacher, introduces Langston to more Black poets.

The day after his father returns, Langston sits in the schoolyard, reading a book of Hughes’s poems he borrowed from the library. Just as he recognizes the lines of verse he read in his mother’s letters—and realizes she admired Hughes too—Lymon snatches the book away. When Lymon starts ripping out pages, Langston overpowers him and recovers the book, but the torn pages have disappeared. That night, Henry asks about the scuffle at school, and Langston reveals his clandestine library visits and his enthusiasm for Langston Hughes. Henry responds thoughtfully, admitting that Langston’s mother loved books too. The next day Langston receives another surprising show of support from Clem, who collected the library book’s torn pages and volunteers to help explain the damaged book to the librarian. As the boys leave the library, Langston decides Clem is his friend.

During their Saturday errands, Langston’s father suggests they visit the library. Elated by this sign of his father’s approval, Langston leads the way. Once inside the library, Langston feels certain his mother originally guided him there, then guided his hand to the book by Langston Hughes, the poet after whom she named her son.