Entertainment Weekly - El Paso
By Dan Lambert

Poet and prose writer Langston Hughes, who died in 1967, is having a new, “Boy of the Border,” published from a manuscript that sat for nearly three quarters of a century among his papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

How did it get unearthed and published by El Paso’s Sweet Earth Flying Press?

The book is a collaboration between Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes – both prolific black writers and good friends.

Hughes, born in 1902, is famous for his part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The duo teamed up to do a number of children’s books during the first half of the 20th century. Part of “Boy of the Border” had seen the light of day in July of 1956 in Jack and Jill magazine as a 10-page, condensed “Broncos over the Border.”

Sweet Earth Flying Press is co-owned by writers Sondra Banfield Dailey and Dr. Maceo Dailey. She is the publisher; he is the editor.

Dr. Dailey – history professor, director of African American Studies at UTEP, and Sondra’s husband – was going over letters exchanged between Hughes and Bontemps, one in particular from an August 1955 letter in which Bontemps was reminding Hughes of the “Boy of the Border” manuscript, which never got published.

“My husband contacted Dr. Arnold Rampersad, the principal biographer of Langston Hughes, who confirmed that the unpublished manuscript was among the Langston Hughes papers at Yale,” Sondra Dailey says.

Why wasn’t this book by two famous authors published all those years ago? Sondra Dailey explains that there is not much documented evidence to answer the question, but “given the traditions and trends of the 1930s, it is not a stretch to assume that publishers were not interested in a positive story about Mexicans.”

Hughes was introduced to Mexico while visiting his father there as a child. Hughes and Bontemps wrote two books featuring Mexican characters: “The Pasteboard Bandit,” published posthumously in 1997, and “Boy of the Border.” They wrote books for children – children of color in particular – that exposed them to the positive aspects of new lands and new peoples.

“I think that it is significant to note that during the early 20th century, when American society was so segregated, you had two brilliant black writers whose vision for children’s literature was so universal, not limited to the American black community,” Sondra Dailey says.

So what was it like coming face to face with this long-in-hiding manuscript?

Sondra Dailey, on her first of two research trips to Yale, was given a box of Langston Hughes papers, which she had to dig through to find the manuscript.

“Finding and holding the manuscript was thrilling, like uncovering a treasure,” she says. “It was typed, but it was exciting to see the actual handwritten notes by the two authors in the margins.”

She says many revered these two writers, including her parents, who introduced her to their work when she was a young girl.

Two well-known El Paso artists worked on the book, the father/son team of Antonio Castro L., who did the illustrations, and his son Antonio Castro H., a UTEP graphics design professor. Through sepia-toned drawings and a period-looking layout, you feel like you’re holding a treasure from the 1930s.

The first printing of 2,500 copies of Boy of the Border is almost depleted, and the publisher will be scheduling a second run soon, Dailey says

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