User:Eddie891/Jesse B. Semple

Jesse B. Semple (a.k.a. Simple) is a fictional character created by Langston Hughes. A Black man who lives in Harlem, New York City, Semple was a humorous figure. He first appeared in columns Hughes published in the weekly paper The Chicago Defender in the early 1940s. The character has since featured in hundreds of stories and five books.

Publication history
Langston Hughes was an American poet. Hughes was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote works that focused on the Black experience in America.

Jessie B. Semple created as a composite character mainly based upon a man he met in 1942 at Patsy's who worked in a factory making cranks for machines in World War II. According to Hughes, a conversation he had with this man was the genesis for his character. Hughes reportedly asked the man what the cranks were used for and he responded "I don't know what makes them cranks crank!" The man's girlfriend responded in part "you ought to know what them cranks crank!" and the worker replied "white folks don't tell colored folks what cranks crank!"

He first appeared in columns Hughes published in the weekly paper The Chicago Defender in the early 1940s. The first column featuring Semple, titled "Conversation at Midnight", was published on February 13, 1943. He continued to appear in works written by Hughes, for a total of five books and hundreds of stories, until Hughes died in 1967.

Character
The character Jesse B. Semple was supposedly born in Virginia. He lived in Harlem and was characterized as uneducated. The character developed as Hughes wrote more columns, gaining a girlfriend named Joyce and later one named Zarita.

In Hughes' stories, Semple always attributes negative things that happen to him to his race, because race is inescapable and unavoidable for a Black man living in Harlem. While he expresses sentiments that are anti-white, Davis considers these to be "not very deep[ly]" held.

Reception
Hughes's columns focused on racial issues but were also intended to be humorous and covered a wide variety of topics. In 1954 the professor Arthur P. Davis described Semple as "a black Pagliacci" and a Black figure about whom Black people "themselves can laugh without being ashamed." Davis characterized the Semple that Hughes developed as being well-thought out and a "three-dimensional and convincing" portrayal. He writes that Semple was similar to most people living in Harlem as a "plain, garden variety of untrained but honest and hard-working peasant from the South who has found a new and freer home in the North." According to Davis, Hughes used humor to make serious points

In 1988 the stories were developed into a two-man show.