by Yuval Taylor
Tonight, however, something new was in the air. A year earlier, the chief instigators of the Renaissance—Charles Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Alain Locke—had wanted “highly polished stuff,” according to historian David Levering Lewis, “preferably about polished people, but certainly untainted by racial stereotypes or embarrassing vulgarity. Too much blackness, too much street geist and folklore—nitty-gritty music, prose, and verse—were not welcome.” But now it was 1925, and the younger generation of black writers were up to something else. When elder statesman James Weldon Johnson read Langston’s “Weary Blues” to the assembled, they heard a more earthy, more genuinely vernacular literary voice than any they had yet encountered. Langston and Zora were the two new stars in the firmament and looked and sounded quite different from the others.
And they were drawn to each other, too.
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Opportunity’s contest had been announced the previous fall, and there had been over seven hundred submissions. Awards were given in five categories, and the judges comprised many of the greatest literary figures of the age, both black and white. The nine judges for the short stories included Carl Van Doren, editor of The Century magazine; Zona Gale, who had recently become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama; Fannie Hurst, one of the most famous fiction writers in the country; three other well-known female novelists; and Alain Locke, the Howard University professor who would play a major role in both Langston’s and Zora’s lives. First prize was given to John Matheus for his story “Fog,” in which a collection of stereotypes—white racist miners, money-grubbing Jews, dance-oriented African Americans, German and Slavic immigrants, a pair of young lovers—nearly meet their deaths on a train when a bridge over the Ohio almost gives way, and, in light of their survival, renounce their more evil urges. Third prize went to the Caribbean writer Eric Walrond, who would shortly publish a story collection, Tropic Death, one of the more florid productions of the era.
But Zora’s “Spunk,” which won second prize, put the others to shame. It tells a simple story. The large, handsome, and dashing Spunk has taken Lena from her husband Joe and openly belittles him. Joe tries to kill Spunk with a razor, but Spunk shoots and kills him first. He is haunted by Joe’s ghost, and two days later, the ghost pushes him in front of a circular saw and kills him. The artistry here is not so much in the story but in the telling—almost all of it through the words of the gossipy men who hang around the general store. Zora keeps her own narrative voice pithy, but vivid. The story ends thus: “The women ate heartily of the funeral baked meats and wondered who would be Lena’s next. The men whispered coarse conjectures between guzzles of whiskey.”
There were only four judges in the poetry category: Clement Wood, a prolific writer from Alabama whose works by then included two novels, Nigger and Mountain, three books of poetry, and a critical work entitled Poets of America; Witter Bynner, one of America’s best-known poets and former president of the Poetry Society of America; John C. Farrar, editor of The Bookman (he would soon found the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and two major publishing firms); and the great poet, novelist, historian, and anthologist James Weldon Johnson, author of the Negro national anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” They awarded first prize to Langston’s “The Weary Blues.” A sympathetic rhymed portrait of a blues singer written two years earlier, after a visit to a Harlem cabaret, it was the first of Langston’s poems—or, for that matter, perhaps anyone’s—to quote from the lyrics of a blues song. Rhythmic, taut, spontaneous, plainspoken, and utterly original, it heralded something new for Langston, and for American writing in general: the adaptation of the blues into literature.
While second prize went to Countee Cullen’s love poem “To One Who Said Me Nay,” with its nineteenth-century prosody and vocabulary, the third prize was split between Cullen’s “A Song of Sour Grapes,” an equally traditional hate poem, and Langston’s “America.” With its repeated assertions “You are America. / I am America,” “America” is about the kinship between Jewish and African Americans, and its affirmation of blackness as American was striking and important.
Langston’s two honorable mentions were “The Jester,” a brief but brilliant poem that tackles the prevailing view of black people as alternatingly comic and tragic (a view that black critics would later accuse Zora of encouraging), and “Songs to the Dark Virgin,” a clever, heartfelt, and effective love poem, but something of a departure for Langston, who rarely used archaisms like “thy,” “thou,” and “would that.”
As for the plays, the four judges were Montgomery Gregory, who directed the drama department at Howard; Alexander Woollcott, drama critic for the New York Times; Robert Benchley, theater reviewer for Life magazine; and Edith Isaacs, the editor of Theatre Arts magazine. Zora again won second prize, here for Color Struck. The play’s main character is Emma, whose paranoid jealousy destroys her life, as well as her boyfriend’s and daughter’s; her constant and obsessive worry is that her boyfriend John would prefer practically any lighter-skinned woman to her. Although overwrought and melodramatic, it showcases Zora’s skill in writing comic badinage, especially in the opening scene, set on a train from Jacksonville to St. Augustine. Joe Clarke, the mayor of Eatonville (Zora’s hometown), makes his first appearance here, though a minor one, at the cakewalking contest around which the play revolves; he would reappear in Zora’s fiction sporadically for the next dozen years, playing major parts in her play Mule Bone and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (as Jody Starks).
Spears, for which Zora received an honorable mention, is a two-scene sketch about an African tribe facing both famine and war. In it, the young warrior Uledi incurs the wrath of a neighboring tribe by stealing its food and killing its fighters; he successfully argues against the advice of the cowardly elder, a councilor named Bombay, and leads the hungry warriors of his tribe to victory. Although the costumes and setting are stereotypical of contemporaneous imaginings of Africa, the message is one of uncompromising defiance, quite unlike the ridiculous Africa portrayed in most Broadway musicals of the day (and in Zora’s own play Meet the Momma, which she copyrighted two months later).
Africa also figures in “Black Death,” one of Zora’s early Eatonville stories and another honorable mention, which centers around the killing power of Old Man Morgan, the town’s hoodoo man. When Mrs. Boger goes to hire Morgan to kill Beau Diddely, who had seduced and abandoned her daughter, “all Africa awoke in her blood. . . . Africa reached out its dark hand and claimed its own. Drums, tom, tom, tom, tom, tom, beat her ears. Strange demons seized her. Witch doctors danced before her, laid hands upon her alternately freezing and burning her flesh. . . .” Zora’s visions of savage Africa seem to have come straight out of comic books; thankfully, neither Spears nor “Black Death” saw publication in her lifetime.
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Of all of the prizewinning works of that night, only Zora’s short story “Spunk” would reappear in The New Negro, a landmark anthology edited by Alain Locke and published seven months later, but whose contents were already mostly in place. A large number of the most important writings of the era also appeared in it, including eleven of Langston’s poems.
The son of a teacher at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, Alain Locke had grown up in high Victorian surroundings, and had inherited their fastidiousness. He wore bespoke suits, spoke in a high pitch, and walked quickly, despite his seeming frailty. He graduated from Harvard in 1907 and was the first African American Rhodes scholar, studying first in Oxford and then in Berlin. He received a PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1918, after which he was chair of the Department of Philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1924 he first met Zora, who was a student there. They were quite a contrast. “Zora was patronizingly fond of him,” Bruce Nugent told Zora’s biographer Robert Hemenway, because “he was small and she was large. He was a man with rather effete gestures and a quiet way of speaking and she was robust and you know she could have snapped him in half.”
Locke intently promoted black writers, artists, and musicians, encouraging them to depict African and African American people and history. The New Negro has defined the Harlem Renaissance ever since. Yet he was a pompous, supercilious, and frustrated man, holding himself above the rest of his race. His pontifications on the “peasant mind and imagination” of black spirituals, for example, or his effusions on what he found “primitive in the American Negro—his naïveté, his sentimentalism, his exuberance and his improvizing spontaneity,” are condescending, reminiscent of the kind of whites who considered a visit to Harlem an expedition into an uptown jungle.
By this time Locke was thirty-nine years old, but had published relatively little. At the 1924 Civic Club dinner, Paul Kellogg, the editor of the monthly magazines Survey Midmonthly and Survey Graphic, which were dedicated to social causes, had called for a special issue of the latter devoted to the “New Negro”; Charles Johnson regarded Alain Locke, who was master of ceremonies at the dinner, as “a sort of ‘Dean’ of this younger group,” and asked him to edit it. (According to Jessie Fauset, the dinner had been planned in honor of the publication of her novel There Is Confusion, and that is certainly how the press treated it. But one could hardly have expected Opportunity to honor its competitor, and scholar George Hutchinson has shown that the honor was only an initial suggestion. Fauset was understandably furious that she had been passed over in favor of Locke—he had published less and was less acquainted with the current crop of Harlem writers. Moreover, Locke despised her, and she knew it.) Fortunately, Locke embarked upon his task with an assiduousness and energy he had rarely displayed before, traveling to New York frequently not just for meetings with established writers like James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois, but to make friends with the younger generation as well. The special issue was published in March 1925, entitled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro”; 42,000 copies were printed—double its normal circulation. Locke then expanded it into what he would view as the definitive anthology of the movement. Although it has ever since been cited as the landmark publication of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro, unlike the Survey Graphic issue, was not specifically focused on Harlem; Locke himself had never lived there, nor did many of the contributors, and the book included a great deal of material from and about other places (as well as a truly out-of-place reiteration of hoary stereotypes of black people in an essay ostensibly on Negro art penned by the white collector Albert Barnes). Instead it focused on what Locke—and many others—called the “Negro Renaissance,” taking a more or less middle-class approach (for example, it devoted a great deal of space to spirituals and none at all to blues). The book, which came out from a major publisher, Albert and Charles Boni, put Locke on the map, as it were, despite his own voluminous and condescending essays in it (Fauset would aptly describe them as “stuffed with a pedantry which fails to conceal their poverty of thought”).
Zora and Langston were singular contributors to the volume, their rhythms and prose far more vernacular than most of the rest. By comparison, the other writers (with the exceptions of poet Angelina Grimké, James Weldon Johnson, Bruce Nugent, and playwright Willis Richardson) aimed for a sophisticated, complex style either indebted to traditional poetic forms or in a more modernist mode. They all aspired to elevated diction; they all used vocabulary or syntax the man in the street might find difficult to understand. Zora and Langston eschewed this, sticking to words and rhythms more typical of everyday African American usage.
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During the hubbub of the Opportunity dinner, Carl Van Vechten came up to congratulate Langston. Van Vechten was not only an important modernist literary critic and novelist, but was the former music critic at the New York Times, a friend and publisher of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, an early proponent of modern music, purportedly the first New York man to wear a wristwatch, and the first American dance critic. Largely inspired by that night’s dinner, he would soon become the most vital white abettor of the Harlem Renaissance, a champion of the blues, Langston’s steadfast patron, and one of his and Zora’s closest friends.
Van Vechten asked Langston, whom he had met before, if he had written enough poetry to make a book. Langston told him he had. Van Vechten then apparently invited him to join him in Harlem that evening. After leaving the Fifth Avenue that night, Van Vechten and his entourage stopped in at the heiress A’Lelia Walker’s residence on West 136th Street, then went to the Manhattan Casino on Eighth Avenue and West 155th Street, where the YMCA was sponsoring a dance, and where, according to Arnold Rampersad, Langston joined him. The next stop was the Bamville Club on West 125th, where they saw some of the performers from the whites-only Cotton Club, and at 4:30 a.m. they adjourned to a party at the exclusive Vaudeville Comedy Club in the basement of the palatial Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue.
On each of the next two days, Langston visited Van Vechten, who lived in a large, elegant apartment at 150 West 55th Street. Practically every inch of the entrance hall, drawing room, and dining room was covered with art and artifacts, from first editions crowding the towering bookcases to modernist oil paintings. The vases were full of lilies, carnations, and roses, and the oriental rugs were even more colorful. Langston gave Van Vechten his poems on May 2, Van Vechten secured him a contract on May 19, and the result would be published as The Weary Blues the following January. Van Vechten would also see to it that Vanity Fair purchased prepublication rights to some of the book’s poems.
Zora would soon follow Langston’s example, visiting Van Vechten later that May and impressing him with her “bright, rangy, intelligent Negro personality”; she immediately became one of his frequent companions on his all-night visits to Harlem parties and nightclubs.
Zora’s introductions to white novelists the night of the Opportunity dinner were no less consequential. She met Annie Nathan Meyer for the first time there, and Meyer would quickly secure Zora a scholarship to Barnard College, which she had founded, and where Zora would be the only black student. Zora also met the bestselling writer Fannie Hurst at the banquet when she handed Zora her second-place prize; Hurst soon engaged Zora as a personal secretary at Meyer’s urging.
Zora, with her distinctively high cheekbones and colorful clothes, radiated energy and insouciance—she loved nothing better than telling stories and putting on a show. Her accent was deeply Southern—like many Georgians and northern Floridians, she never pronounced her r’s or the final g of gerunds, and dead and can’t often had two syllables—and her voice was deep-toned, like a blueswoman’s; when she sang she sounded like a contralto Bessie Smith. Langston, equally at ease with uneducated workers, intellectuals, and Manhattan socialites, was tall, thin, muscled, and enviably handsome in his dark suit and vest, even though he had barely recovered from a bout of malaria contracted in Washington. His English was impeccable, his accent generic. They were each inimitable characters and terribly attractive, especially to certain wealthy white Negrophiles. And both of them had been writing almost exclusively about the Negro, drawing heavily on black folk tales and popular music not just for the rhythm but for the content of their work.
Zora’s flamboyance would soon become legendary. After the Opportunity dinner she arrived at a party wearing a long, brightly colored scarf. As soon as she’d been noticed, she flung the end of the scarf around her neck and declaimed the title of her second-prize play in loud, long tones: “Color Struck!” She smoked Pall Malls in public, a rare sight for a woman; wore “lots of bangles and beads,” according to a friend; and sang spirituals, played harmonica, and told racy stories of Southern life. Unlike most of the prominent artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora not only hailed from the Deep South but had spent substantial time there; compared to the rest of the crowd, she embodied the “folk.” The black writer Arna Bontemps later recalled of Zora at that time, “She was really not a showoff but she just drew attention in that way. In appearance, Zora was a pleasant, ordinary, brown-skinned young woman; not stunning, . . . a little abov
e average in appearance, but she had an ease and somehow projected herself very well orally, and almost before you knew it, she had gotten into a story. She had a wealth of them.” She possessed “the gift,” or so Fannie Hurst said, “of walking into hearts.” In short, she was not only the object of considerable attention, and the life of every party, but a woman who inspired great fondness—especially among her white admirers.
Carl Van Vechten was one of them. He would later write, “Zora is picturesque, witty, electric, indiscreet, and unreliable. The latter quality offers material for discussion; the former qualities induce her friends to forgive and love her.” He insisted that Zora regarded appointments as provisional at best. And Zora showcased her disregard for convention by coming to one of Van Vechten’s parties in a Seminole Indian skirt made entirely of patches, and to another in a Norwegian skiing outfit.
As for Langston, he had, perhaps, an impact upon black youth in Manhattan similar to that Bob Dylan would have on white youth there thirty-odd years later. (The parallels are striking: both were very young when they arrived from the Midwest, handsome, intense, and penniless. Both generated immense attention and precocious adulation. Both were elusive characters prone to shifting gears. The literati regarded both as outside the bounds of American literary poetry—their verse, it was said, was better listened to than read. Both worshipped Carl Sandburg. Both shifted from folk-based material to political diatribe, and then back again. Both suffered hiatuses in which they produced work of negligible quality. And both became elder statesmen who led long, productive lives.)