by Yuval Taylor
Bruce Nugent, a flamboyant black teenager at the time, later described his first impression of Langston in Washington that year: “He had done everything—all the things young men dream of but never get done—worked on ships, gone to exotic places, known known people, written poetry that had appeared in print—everything. I suppose his looks contributed to the glamorous ideal, too . . . as did his voice and gentle manner.” Nugent, who bore a strong resemblance to Langston, is a perfect example of the kind of effect Langston could produce: after meeting Langston—the biggest thing that had ever happened to him—Nugent followed him to New York, got to know Van Vechten, and became close friends with both.
Both Zora and Langston were practically broke. Zora had arrived in New York in January with $1.50 in her purse, not knowing a soul. She had been employed as a manicurist in Washington, D.C., where she’d been a part-time student at Howard for the previous five years. Charles Johnson had helped her get by over the last few months with a series of odd jobs. Langston had been living with his mother in Washington, D.C., doing a variety of low-paying work. He had borrowed the train fare from Jessie Fauset, the first person to publish his poems. But their impecunious state, they both knew, was the price of their freedom. While Zora and Langston shared a willingness to work hard, they also shared a lifelong aversion to commitment—and to a “career.”
Their backgrounds, however, were quite different. Zora had grown up in an all-black Florida town named Eatonville, and had attended all-black schools all her life. She had traveled widely, but only in America. Langston, on the other hand, had grown up in mostly white Lawrence, Kansas, the product of a middle-class family with venerable roots, and had gone to mostly white schools. By this point he had traveled through much of the world, even visiting Africa as a crew member of a freighter. While Zora was solidly a product of black America, Langston had necessarily found himself at a distance from his people. However, he was beginning to bridge that distance.
And they were drawn to each other, despite—or perhaps because of—their differences. She “is a clever girl, isn’t she?” Langston wrote to Van Vechten in early June. “I would like to get to know her.” He certainly got his wish.
2
1891–1924
I Laugh, and Grow Strong
Zora Neale Hurston had lived a full life by the time she arrived in Harlem. She had been born on January 7, 1891, the fifth child of John Hurston and Lucy Potts. Zora would never admit to her birthdate, claiming at times to have been born in every year from 1899 to 1903, but the 1900 census gives her birth year as 1891, as does the Hurston family bible. Nor would she admit to having been born in Notasulga, Alabama, rather than in Eatonville, Florida, where her family moved when she was three.
Adjacent to Maitland and just six miles from bustling Orlando, Eatonville was, as Zora put it, a “city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jail-house.” According to census records, there were only 125 people in Eatonville in 1900, while Orlando’s population was near 2,500 (though these numbers have to be adjusted for the tendency of the US census to undercount black residents).
Eatonville was “a Negro town,” Zora emphasized, “a pure Negro town—charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all.” The black people in Maitland, under the leadership of “a muscular, dynamic Georgia Negro” named Joe Clarke, had left, with the backing of Maitland’s whites, to incorporate their own town next door in 1887. It was perhaps the nation’s first incorporated all-black town.
Maitland and Eatonville are contiguous; the eastern border is simply East Street, with the houses on each side belonging to different towns. Yet their character is strikingly different. Eatonville was, and remains, a town of inexpensive bungalows. Maitland was “a center of wealth and fashion,” as Zora put it—a vacation town of lakeside mansions with large lawns, spreading trees, and names like Pine Crest Villa and Chadbourne Hall. The streets in Eatonville are all north-south or east-west; the streets in Maitland curve luxuriously around its twenty-one lakes.
The Reverend John Hurston, Zora’s father, was one of Eatonville’s most prominent citizens; he would later be elected mayor. A strong, brave leader, he preached powerful sermons and wasn’t afraid to use his fists. He built a solid eight-room house for his family on five acres of land, and always managed to put food on the table. Zora’s mother Lucy was just as tough as her cheating husband—she once horsewhipped one of his female admirers. As for Zora, she was one of eight children (six boys and two girls), an “extra strong” child (in her words) who would rather play with boys than girls and spent hours in the woods. She would later call herself “the one girl who could take a good pummeling without running home to tell.”
The community was rich in stories. One of Zora’s earliest memories was being sent down to Joe Clarke’s store in the evening and staying as long as she could to hear the stories swapped on the front porch. The store “was the heart and spring of the town,” she wrote. “Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world and the next one right through their mouths.” What Zora enjoyed the most were the “lying sessions,” when “God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Tiger, Buzzard, and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men.”
But just as important were the stories Zora read: fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm; myths from Greek, Roman, and Norse antiquity; short stories by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson; and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Stories became, quite early, Zora’s raison d’être. Most people enjoy hearing, reading, and telling stories, but for Zora they became more important than anything else. She craved them, lived in them, and told them constantly. But she also learned that often she had to keep her stories secret, telling them only to herself.
This was even truer of Zora’s visions. A series of twelve scenes came to her one day when she was six or seven years old. “Like clearcut stereopticon slides, I saw twelve scenes flash before me, each one held until I had seen it well in every detail, and then be replaced by another. There was no continuity as in an average dream. Just disconnected scene after scene with blank spaces in between. I knew that they were all true, a preview of things to come, and my soul writhed in agony and shrank away. But I knew that there was no shrinking. These things had to be.” The visions came back to her again and again until each one came to pass, at which point it vanished. “As this happened, I counted them off one by one and took consolation in the fact that one more station was past, thus bringing me nearer the end of my trials.” They darkened the remainder of Zora’s childhood. “I consider that my real childhood ended with the coming of the pronouncements. True, I played, fought and studied with other children, but always I stood apart within. Often I was in some lonesome wilderness, suffering strange things and agonies while other children in the same yard played without a care. I asked myself why me? Why? Why? A cosmic loneliness was my shadow.”
Throughout her life, Zora continued to exhibit tremendous faith in the supernatural. Ghosts, superstitions, prophecies, conjuration, visions, possession by spirits, and telepathy were all fundamental to her beliefs and her art.
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Lucy Hurston died in September 1904. Before she passed, she gave Zora “certain instructions,” Zora wrote in her autobiography, rejecting Eatonville’s superstitions and folkways. Zora was to make sure that the pillow under her mother’s head was not removed until after her death, and to see that nobody covered the clock or the mirror. But the child’s pleas were ignored by the adults.
Papa held me tight and the others frowned me down. . . .
I was to agonize over that moment for years to come. . . . I was old before my time with grief of loss, of failure, of remorse of failure. No matter what the others did, my mother had put her trust in me. She had felt that I could and would carry out her wishes, and I had not. And then in that sunset time, I failed her. . . .
That hour began my wanderings.
Zora’s father soon remarried, and her dislike of her stepmother, who was only six or seven years older than she was, loosened her ties to her father—as did being sent to school in Jacksonville, where she found out for the first time what it meant to be “colored” in America. For the next ten or twelve years, her life became peripatetic—in and out of school; living now with her father and now with an older brother or other relatives, even going as far away as Memphis; working for white people as a maid, but unable to retain such a subservient position very long. She learned what real solitude meant, with its pleasures and pains; she began to know poverty, and to get used to it.
During one of Zora’s sojourns in Eatonville, she had a near-fatal fight with her stepmother. Zora wrote,
She called me a sassy, impudent heifer, announced that she was going to take me down a buttonhole lower, and threw a bottle at my head. The bottle came sailing slowly through the air and missed me easily. She never should have missed.
The primeval in me leaped to life. . . . I looked at her hard. . . . I didn’t have any thoughts to speak of. Just the fierce instinct of flesh on flesh—me kicking and beating on her pudgy self—those two ugly false teeth in front—her dead on the floor—grinning like a dead dog in the sun. Consequences be damned! If I died, let me die with my hands soaked in her blood. I wanted her blood, and plenty of it. That is the way I went into the fight, and that is the way I fought it.
Soon Zora pinned her against the wall and pummeled her with her fists, ignoring the scratching of her stepmother’s fingernails. “In a few seconds, she gave up. I could see her face when she realized that I meant to kill her. She spat on my dress, then, and did what she could to cover up from my renewed fury.” Zora’s father, in response to his wife’s cries, asked Zora to stop, but Zora kept going: “Her head was traveling between my fist and the wall, and I wished that my fist had weighed a ton.” The Reverend’s pistol was kept in the dresser drawer, but Zora stopped her stepmother from reaching it. “I was so mad when I saw my adversary sagging to the floor I didn’t know what to do. I began to scream with rage. I had not beaten more than two years out of her yet. I made up my mind to stomp her, but at last, Papa came to, and pulled me away.”
Zora’s revenge wasn’t over. She later portrayed her stepmother, in her novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine, as a slut who had only convinced John Hurston to marry her by using conjure. And in her autobiography, she wrote that she paid her a visit in the 1930s in order “to finish the job, only to find out she was a chronic invalid. . . . I couldn’t tackle her under such circumstances.”
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Zora claimed to have often gone hungry during those years of wandering. As a result she developed a lifelong voracious appetite. Fannie Hurst would testify that Zora always snacked between meals and got so impatient waiting for dinner that she would eat it off the stove or out of the refrigerator. “I was hungry for so many years of my life,” Zora told her, “I get going nowadays and can’t stop.”
Those years were often nightmarish. In the seventh of her visions she had seen a shotgun house with peeling white paint; despite knowing that torture awaited her, she felt she had to go in. Zora never described what actually happened in that house, admitting in her autobiography only that this one vision, which was so painful she used to wake up drenched in sweat, had come true, and that she had then run away.
Soon afterwards, she applied for a job that finally gave her what she was looking for: she became a wardrobe girl in a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory theater company sometime around 1915 or 1916, when she was in her mid-twenties. With that position came the chance to travel the country. During the eighteen months she spent with the troupe, Zora’s eyes were opened to “the ways of white folks,” as Langston Hughes would later phrase it—as well as to the opportunities a decent education could present. She read book after book loaned to her by the company’s tenor, a Harvard graduate who had been to Europe. She learned a lot about music and theater, lessons that would prove invaluable much later when she staged her own musical and theatrical events. She later reflected on those months, “I had been in school all that time.”
Zora began to hunger for more schooling, but she had no money. After she left the troupe, she moved to Baltimore, where she worked as a waitress and ran a confectionery. But she could never save much. She took a few night classes, including a particularly inspirational one in which the teacher’s reading of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” inspired her to decide that literature was her calling. Finally she figured out how to get into school without funding: lie about her age. The Maryland Code specified that admission to public schools be free for anyone between six and twenty years of age. Zora shaved ten years off her age and, in 1917, pretended to be sixteen years old. She enrolled at Morgan Academy, a high school in Baltimore. Zora was so poor that she had only one dress and one pair of shoes, but school officials offered her jobs. In class, she memorized poems, took exams to get credit for two years of schooling, and then took college preparatory courses.
That summer, her father, who had just moved to Memphis, was struck by a train and died. Zora didn’t react, not even attending the funeral. Perhaps it was liberating to be an orphan.
Instead she moved to Washington to attend Howard University, which was to black students what Harvard was to whites. She supported herself as a manicurist, waitress, and maid; during her first year there she took courses at Howard Prep to fill in the areas her unconventional education had omitted, and earned her high-school degree in May 1919. In her second year she found a beau, Herbert Sheen, who had come to Washington from Decatur, Illinois, planning to be a congressional page, but who instead became a hotel waiter and a Howard student. Zora and Herbert were both children of ministers. “He could stomp a piano out of this world, sing a fair baritone and dance beautifully.” Sheen later told Robert Hemenway, “At the time I was going around with Zora I had so many other girlfriends that it was almost confusing. It was just, you might say, too hard to turn them down. . . . I don’t remember having any difficulties with Zora about this. Zora was always magnanimous—whatever pleased me was alright with her.” Their open relationship became a long-distance one after Sheen moved to New York in 1921 to work for a physician. In 1922, Sheen’s sister Genevieve, who lived in Washington and was a close friend of Zora’s, was murdered by her husband. Zora took on the responsibility of handling a lot of the necessary legal arrangements while Herbert took the body back to Decatur; in doing so, she made a positive impression on the whole family. Sheen then went to the University of Chicago to complete his BS and entered medical school, but he would, much later, play an important part in Zora’s romantic history.
Zora could probably have joined him if she’d so desired. Largely due to health and money troubles, she completed only eighteen months of college coursework at Howard between 1919 and 1924, with wildly inconsistent grades. She left with only an associate’s degree, granted in 1920. But she was one of the few students professors Montgomery Gregory and Alain Locke selected for Howard’s literary club, the Stylus, whose membership was granted via writing competitions; Locke would write to Charles Johnson that Zora was the best and brightest student he’d had in years. And in 1921 she published her first short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” in the Stylus’s literary magazine.
Zora fit into the black Washington literary community well. She attended a literary salon hosted by poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, which is likely where she first met such Harlem Renaissance luminaries as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Grimké, Bruce Nugent, Jean Toomer, and the scholar and poet Sterling A. Brown. (Coincidentally, Langston Hughes would also attend Johnson’s literary salon, but probably not until early 1925, after Zora had moved to New York; it was likely there that he too first met Bruce Nugent.) And she began writing poems, publishing a half dozen of them in 1922 in Negro World, a newspaper put out by the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Associati
on. The 1923 Howard University yearbook stated that Zora’s “greatest ambition is to establish herself in Greenwich Village where she may write stories and poems and live an unrestrained Bohemian.”
Those stories the yearbook referred to were being read. Locke recommended them to Charles Johnson, who asked Zora to submit her work to Opportunity. In December 1924, that magazine published “Drenched in Light,” an autobiographical story that showcased one of Zora’s attitudes toward race relations. In it, the protagonist, a little girl named Isis, finds true joy when she performs for white folks. She feels no self-consciousness or shame until her grandmother appears, and the kindness of white folks is the only form of approbation she gets. Zora had long perfected the art of “making the white folks laugh,” to quote Richard Wright’s derisive critique, and playing to white folks’ expectations would be a constant throughout her life.
Then, in January 1925, with Charles Johnson’s encouragement, Zora Hurston moved to Harlem and very quickly became the center of attention of not only the white folks, but also the black literary world.
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James Langston Hughes was, mathematically speaking, an American of approximately three-eighths European descent, three-eighths African, one-eighth Jewish, and one-eighth American Indian. Such an accounting appears reductive, but it was important to Langston, who never tried to hide his complicated racial makeup. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, he wrote, “I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. . . . I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow.” Nevertheless, like Frederick Douglass before him and Amiri Baraka after, Langston tried to establish himself in his writing as the voice of his people, a sort of African American everyman, even though he was acutely conscious that his genetic heritage was quite different from that of his African brethren. His statement “I am not black” can be read as “I am not African: I am an American Negro.”