by Yuval Taylor
And years later, the great writer Arthur Koestler, who came to know Langston in Turkestan, of all places, wrote, “Behind the warm smile of his dark eyes there was a grave dignity, and a polite reserve which communicated itself at once. He was very likeable and easy to get on with, but at the same time one felt an impenetrable, elusive remoteness which warded off all undue familiarity.”
Zora seems to have shared Langston’s sexual and emotional solitude. During those first few years in New York City she apparently cultivated no romantic ties. Her biographer Robert Hemenway relates a characteristic story: “Once, dressed for a party in a flowing white dress and a wide-brimmed hat, she found herself sharing an elevator with a would-be Casanova. As they approached the first floor, he made his pass, and Zora responded with a roundhouse right that put him flat on the floor. She stepped out of the elevator, never looking back at the man laid out behind her.”
But there was one thing about which neither Langston nor Zora would ever be elusive. Their identities as African Americans were unshakable, as was their devotion to the race.
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Zora had begun studying anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia in the fall of 1925, which involved a momentous shift of perspective. All her life Zora had been immersed in black folkways and had never even thought of separating her identity from those of the folk. She used to tell this story: when a policeman stopped her from crossing on a red light, she told him that since she saw all the white people crossing on green, she thought the red light was for colored folks. Here, as she often did, she was taking a common black folktale and applying it to herself. Zora defined folklore as “the arts of the people before they find out that there is any such thing as art, and they make it out of whatever they find at hand”; as a corollary, the folklore that Zora had always drawn on was suddenly art to her: it had changed its nature.
Therefore, now that she was embarking on a course of studying the folk, she could no longer be one of them. As she would write at the beginning of Mules and Men, “From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.” Suddenly African American culture was a thing to research rather than to roll around in and play with.
In this new endeavor she could not have asked for a better guide than Franz Boas, whom she idolized, calling him “the greatest anthropologist alive” and “the king of kings.” She even convinced Bruce Nugent, who hated schools, to attend Boas’s classes. Boas was sixty-seven at the time and had been at Columbia since 1899. He was without doubt America’s preeminent anthropologist, almost singlehandedly responsible for debunking scientific racism, defining cultural relativism, and establishing folklore as a subject worthy of scientific study. He unflaggingly encouraged Zora’s work, and urged her to become a professional anthropologist herself; undoubtedly he recognized that Zora could well become America’s foremost authority on black folkways.
But that would never do for Zora—her creative urges were too strong for her to deny them in favor of the pursuit of scientific objectivity. She was simply too ambitious and imaginative, and she recognized it. In a letter to Annie Nathan Meyer written in January 1926, she exclaimed,
Oh, if you knew my dreams! my vaulting ambition! How I constantly live in fancy in seven league boots, taking mighty strides across the world, but conscious all the time of being a mouse on a treadmill. . . . The eagerness, the burning within, I wonder the actual sparks do not fly so that they be seen by all men. Prometheus on his rock with his liver being continually consumed as fast as he grows another, is nothing to my dreams. I dream such wonderfully complete ones, so radiant in astral beauty. I have not the power yet to make them come true. They always die. But even as they fade, I have others.
Zora’s unstated goal was not the study of folklore but its conversion into a creative form that could appeal to the general public without losing its essential character. One of her first attempts to do this was the publication of “The Eatonville Anthology” in three parts in the September, October, and November 1926 issues of The Messenger. This miscellany of fourteen short sketches of Eatonville life and “lies” introduced many of the characters and tales that would appear in Zora’s later works, including Mule Bone, Mules and Men, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. And they were all strongly based both on Zora’s observations of her hometown and on its folklore. In these sketches Eatonville becomes not just an all-black Southern town but a repository of legends and traditions, as rich in its own way as the Arthurian Camelot.
Zora realized what so many people forget: that folkways are not simply tales and songs and sayings that can be easily jotted down and reproduced. Instead they inform every aspect of daily life—they make up the warp and woof of deed and doer.
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In late 1925, while studying with Boas, Zora also worked as a secretary (or amanuensis) for Fannie Hurst, who lived at 1 West 67th Street. Hurst had by then published five collections of short stories and two novels and was one of the most highly paid writers in the country. She had scandalized New York by living in a separate apartment from her husband, maintaining her own name, making her marriage contract renewable every five years, and allowing him to see her only three nights a week. Four years Zora’s junior, she was, in Zora’s own word, a “stunning” woman; Zora wrote a profile of her for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1937 in which she called her “a person of the most contradictory moods and statements of anyone in public life” and “a little girl who is tall for her age.” Zora suspected that one reason Hurst liked her so much was because the contrast between their skin colors drew attention to Hurst’s fair complexion.
Hurst seems to have hired Zora partly out of pity; Zora was barely making do. At first, as Hurst wrote in 1960, Zora’s “shorthand was short on legibility, her typing hit-or-miss, mostly the latter, her filing, a game of find-the-thimble.” She would interrupt Hurst’s dictation with interjections, suggestions, and clarifications. When she got bored, she would yawn and say, “Let’s get out the car, I’ll drive you up to the Harlem bad-lands or down to the wharves where men go down to the sea in ships.” Soon Hurst had had enough. One morning when Zora said she’d rather take a drive through the countryside than dictation, Hurst lost her temper, called her “the world’s worst secretary,” and fired her.
Zora’s employment had only lasted a few weeks. But Hurst kept her on as her sometime chauffeur for years, and saw her frequently. Zora was “all in greased curls, bangles, and slashes of red,” as Hurst wrote to Van Vechten in April 1926. “She drove with a sure relaxed skill”—once taking her employer all the way down to Eatonville. In 1937, Zora wrote an amusing sketch of a 1931 road trip they took together, setting out in Hurst’s “little Chevrolet” for Maine, “with my foot in the gas tank splitting the wind,” stopping in Saratoga Springs to drink the water and take Hurst’s two-pound Pekingese for a brisk walk of five feet, changing course and driving to Niagara Falls, then touring Ontario, where they met up with Hurst’s lover, the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
Hurst became one of Zora’s greatest friends and benefactors, introducing her to a host of writers and other people in the arts, helping her to get through the exigencies and expense of Barnard (other students became much friendlier to Zora because of her friendship with the famous novelist), and penning the foreword to her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine.
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That summer of 1926, Zora and Langston planned their first collaboration—an opera based on black popular music. This was hardly unprecedented: a number of black writers and composers, including Scott Joplin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Will Marion Cook, had already created black culture–inspired
operas. But Langston thought Zora’s knowledge of Southern folklore would immeasurably enrich the form. Zora had a composer in mind too—Clarence Cameron White, director of music at West Virginia State College. When he came to New York in August, Zora introduced him to Langston and Van Vechten, who wholeheartedly supported the project.
Not much came of this effort—except, perhaps, for a few of the blues-based poems that would soon be published in Langston’s second book. Langston would explain to Charlotte Mason in 1929 that The Weary Blues had belonged to “a period of solitary wandering, looking out of myself at the rest of the world, but touching no one, nothing”; in Fine Clothes to the Jew “many of the poems are outward, rather than inward, trying to catch the moods of individuals other than myself.”
In March 1926, Zora had commented to Countee Cullen, “Hughes ought to stop publishing all those secular folk-songs as his poetry. Now when he got off the ‘Weary Blues[’] (most of it a song I and most southerners have known all our lives) I said nothing for I knew I’d never be forgiven by certain people for crying down what the ‘white folks had exalted’, but when he gets off another ‘Me and mah honey got two mo’ days tuh do de buck’ [from Langston’s ‘Negro Dancers’] I dont see how I can refrain from speaking.” Now, however, Zora was fully aiding Langston’s efforts. And by the end of the summer, the two friends had turned to a new collaboration.
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In a June issue of The Nation, Langston published the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a polemic decrying the staid, middle-class values of the black bourgeoisie and proposing that black art should never be beholden to white cultural norms. The Nation had commissioned it in response to black critic George Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum,” which had been published in the same magazine a week earlier, and which had argued that “the Aframerican is merely a lamp-blacked Anglo-Saxon.” The “racial mountain” of Langston’s title was one which stood in the way of the Negro artist—the “urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible,” much as Schuyler had advised. To avoid this, Langston urged artists to ask, “Why should I want to be white?” and to answer, “I am a Negro—and beautiful.”
“I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet.” These words, which we still often hear today with “black,” “Hispanic,” “Jewish,” or “woman” in place of “Negro” and a variety of career choices in place of “poet,” formed the opening quotation of the essay, put in the mouth of “one of the most promising young Negro poets”—quite transparently Countee Cullen, who had complained about Langston’s preoccupation with race in his review of The Weary Blues for Opportunity, and who would soon write that “Negroes should be concerned with making good impressions.” Langston argued that “I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet” was the equivalent of saying, “I would like to be white.” This poet, Langston wrote, came from “the Negro middle class,” which Langston contrasted to “the low-down folks,” whose “joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. . . . Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance! . . . Perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.”
Langston praised writers who truly wrote in the Negro idiom—Charles Chesnutt, Paul Dunbar, Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rudolph Fisher—along with blues singers and jazz musicians. These writers were producing an honest African American body of literature despite the efforts of white editors and “Nordicized Negro intelligentsia” to make them conform. Negro art, dance, and music was either on the cusp or thriving. But still to come was “the rise of the Negro theater.” The essay ended, “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” Langston’s call to arms helped energize the Niggerati.
Zora would echo “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” in one of her finest essays, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” which was published in the progressive Christian magazine The World Tomorrow (edited by Wallace Thurman) in 1928, but was likely written a year or more earlier, as well as in her 1934 essay “The Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talents.” These essays, published for a wide audience, defended black comic and “low” culture and provided a kind of blueprint for Zora and Langston’s shared vision of black art and identity.
Yet their points of attack were different. Langston scorned black artists who tried to imitate whites. Zora, on the other hand, scorned black artists who wrote about racial injustice: “I am not tragically colored. . . . I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. . . . No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
Zora was hardly the only writer concerned with this issue. In 1926, The Crisis devoted many of its pages to a symposium run by W. E. B. Du Bois dedicated to the questions of “propaganda” and “decadence,” the former term connoting literature devoted to racial uplift and the latter a more art-focused depiction of Negro life. In “Criteria of Negro Art,” Du Bois wrote, “All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. . . . I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” Du Bois even looked down his nose at jazz, blues, and black dance—unless they were transformed into serious art.
Alain Locke took the other side in the debate, publishing three responses in 1927 and 1928 that defended the kind of nonpropaganda work that Langston and Zora were publishing. In “Beauty Instead of Ashes” he argued that “the folk temperament raised to the levels of conscious art promises more originality and beauty” than any sort of group psychology. And in “Art or Propaganda?” he answered Du Bois directly: black “genius and talent . . . must choose art and put aside propaganda.”
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“We do not hate white people,” Zora once wrote. “We certainly have no wish and desire to kill off the pink-toed rascals. Even if they were not useful as they are, we’d keep ’em for pets.” Throughout her life, Zora largely shunned public display of resentment of white folks (her resentment of certain black folks she readily flaunted). The one unforgivable sin for her was self-pity. As her biographer Valerie Boyd points out, “It was, Zora knew, like drinking poison and expecting the other person—the resented one—to die.”
Langston, on the other hand, never shrank from writing about racial injustice, and had by this time devoted a number of poems to the subject—“The Little Frightened Child,” “The White Ones,” “Lament for Dark Peoples,” and “I, Too”; in fact, this may have been the biggest ideological difference between the two friends. At the root of this difference was an important difference in their experiences. Zora was very comfortable around those of both races; Langston, however, would admit in 1929, “Only now am I beginning to be at all at ease and without any self-consciousness in meeting my own people.” His defense of African Americans against racial injustice stemmed, perhaps, from his own discomfort around them—his fear that he wasn’t black enough, and his envy of those who were. As he told the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén in 1930, “Yo quisiera ser Negro. Bien Negro. ¡Negro de verdad!” (“I’d like to be black. Really black. Truly black!”)
By contrast, Zora roundly condemned black writers who wrote about the suffering of their race. Her essay “Art and Such” paints a satirical portrait of a black poet who wants to write “a song to the morning” but can’t, because what is expected of him, the “one subject for a Negro,” is “the Race and its sufferings.” Instead, he writes a poem about a lynching.
A story that both Zora and Fannie Hurst told exemplifies Zora’s attitude toward white race prejudice. On their road trips together, they frequently encountered discrimination. Zora was often directed to the servants’ quarters at hotels—on the occasions when she wasn’t told that there were no vacancies. If Hurst
responded that she would also forgo accommodations, Zora quickly responded that it would be impossible for them to travel together if Hurst took that stand. “This is the way it is and I can take care of myself as I have all my life,” she told Hurst. “I will find my own lodging and be around with the car in the morning.” Hurst later confessed that she was puzzled by Zora’s “lack of indignation.” So she determined to do something about it.
One day, the two of them stopped at a well-known Westchester County hotel and Hurst, discombobulating the headwaiter, introduced her colorfully dressed companion as “Princess Zora.” They were shown to the best seats in the place and given an excellent meal. But later, Zora turned to her companion and said, “Who would think that a good meal could be so bitter.”
Telling this tale after an interval of over thirty years, Hurst still failed to grasp the humiliating nature of what she had done. There was, perhaps, little Zora was prouder of than being an African American woman. To pretend, even for the space of a meal, that she was an African princess so that she could obtain the privileges of a white American was decidedly worse than going hungry because of racial discrimination. Being subject to the injustices perpetrated by white folks did not require Zora to change her identity—in fact, it reinforced it. Her acceptance of separate accommodations, like her proclivity for playing up racial distinctions for white people, was not just second nature to her, but a strategy she employed to hew close to and affirm those distinctions.
One of the main reasons Zora’s writing was so savagely criticized by African Americans during her lifetime was the perception that she deliberately avoided anything that smacked of resentment against whites in her published work. In fact, however, each of her first three novels include instances of whites acting superior to African Americans or treating them unjustly and the latter recognizing their mistreatment and dealing with it in their own ways. In addition, Zora contributed three strongly worded essays against discrimination to Negro Digest: “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” (1944); “Crazy for This Democracy” (a forthright and highly sarcastic attack on US imperialism and Jim Crow laws, 1945); and “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (1950). If, on the whole, white oppression makes few appearances in Zora’s published work, whenever it does she views it through the lenses of humor and protest rather than self-pity, bitterness, or resentment. As she wrote in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It’s beyond me.”