by Yuval Taylor
In the end, only $150 was collected (none coming from Zora, who was broke), and Fire!!, subtitled “A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists,” was finally published in November, costing Thurman $1,000, for which he was dunned on his subsequent earnings. “We got carried away with ourselves,” Langston wrote, “and our taste proved extremely expensive”—the issue was printed on “the best cream white paper” with “a rich crimson jacket on de luxe stock.” Zora’s work was more heavily represented in the journal than that of any other writer; Thurman had even considered putting a pseudonym in place of her name at the top of her play Color Struck so that Fire!! wouldn’t seem too “Zora-ish.” The magazine only lasted one issue due to lack of funds, and hundreds of unsold copies would literally go up in flames; but it was one of the most exciting publications of the Harlem Renaissance.
For in Fire!! the Niggerati were showcasing their literary innovations, which followed Langston’s and Zora’s lead. Indeed, Bruce Nugent believed that of all the magazine’s contributors, only Zora and Langston had a sense of its historical importance. For them, black language, whether derived from traditional dialect or urban slang, was no longer to be used only for local color, humor, and stagy effects. It could be the foundation of a new art, a way to express the most profound visions. By basing their art on black folklore and music, Zora and Langston were reinventing black culture on their own terms, avoiding dependence on white literary models. Certainly not all the Niggerati followed this impulse—Countee Cullen’s prosody and vocabulary were practically indistinguishable from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s (he wrote his master’s thesis on her work and called her his “goddess”). But Langston and Zora were leading the charge toward change.
Fire!!’s value, however, lay not only in its prosody, but in its subject matter. The journal opened with a foreword penned by Langston and Thurman (though unsigned) that ran, in part, “FIRE . . . weaving vivid, hot designs upon an ebon bordered loom and satisfying pagan thirst for beauty unadorned . . . the flesh is sweet and real” (ellipses in original). Immediately following the table of contents was Nugent’s drawing of a nude black woman leaning against a palm tree; facing it was Thurman’s story “Cordelia the Crude,” about a licentious sixteen-year-old would-be prostitute. Nugent’s “novel” “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” the very long prose poem that he wrote on toilet paper and paper bags, describes in part the physical ecstasy enjoyed by two male lovers, and quotes eight lines from a poem about a mercurial and attractive man that he attributes to Langston (if Langston indeed wrote it, it would be his most openly homosexual poem). Bennett’s story “Wedding Day” was about a black man in Paris who hated white Americans and habitually beat and shot them, but was then seduced by a heartless white American girl. Zora’s chilling story “Sweat” was about the revenge of a mistreated wife, and was as earthy as its title.
In other words, Fire!! was mainly about black sex and black sin. Steven Watson, one of the most perceptive of Harlem Renaissance historians, puts it this way: “It celebrated jazz, paganism, blues, androgyny, unassimilated black beauty, free-form verse, homosexuality—precisely the ‘uncivilized’ features of Harlem proletarian culture that the Talented Tenth propagandists preferred to ignore. Fire!! offered an alternative manifesto to The New Negro, undiluted by sociopolitical issues and race-building efforts.”
As Nugent would later testify, its editors aimed to get Fire!! banned in Boston. “Wally and I sat around figuring out,” Nugent told Hemenway, “what two things just will not take. Well, we’ll write about a street walker or a whore, and we’ll write a homosexual story. . . . So we flipped a coin to see which one of us would do which.”
As for Zora’s contributions, Color Struck was less incendiary than “Sweat.” The story centers around a married couple, Delia and Sykes, who have come to hate each other; after Sykes brings home a rattlesnake to torture Delia, she gets her deadly revenge when she leaves the escaped snake in the bed. Delia’s murderous inaction is fully justified by her mistreatment; indeed, though she may not know it, the whole town has taken her side. Women, this chilling tale seems to say, are better off without men around.
And when it came to attacking the black Americans who had attacked Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, Fire!! minced no words. Its penultimate piece was Arthur Huff Fauset’s essay “Intelligentsia,” a frontal attack on that class. (Fauset, Jessie Fauset’s twenty-eight-year-old half-brother, had studied African American anthropology under Alain Locke and had collected animal tales in the Mississippi Delta; his scholarly work might have served as a model for Zora’s.) This was followed by Thurman’s “Fire Burns,” a sarcasm-laden dismissal of those who attacked the novel. As Emily Bernard writes, Nigger Heaven “had done more for [the writers of Fire!!] than it had done for its author. It enabled members of the younger generation to distinguish themselves from their predecessors. It had become their cackling chuckle of contempt.”
When the magazine was published at the end of October 1926, its reception was predictably mixed. Publicly, W. E. B. Du Bois said little about it, acknowledging its receipt and calling it “a beautiful piece of printing . . . strikingly illustrated”; privately, however, he took it as a personal attack (one journalist made the mistake of mentioning Fire!! first thing when he visited Du Bois, which “hurt his feelings so much that he would hardly talk to me”), and Langston was under the impression that he had “roasted it.” The Baltimore Afro-American began its review, entitled “Writer Brands ‘Fire’ as Effeminate Tommyrot,” “I have just tossed the first issue of Fire!!—into the fire and watched the crackling flames leap and snarl as though they were trying to swallow some repulsive dose,” and went on, “Langston Hughes displays his usual ability to say nothing in many words.” The Civic Club, on the other hand, invited Langston, Zora, Thurman, and Bennett to read from the magazine at a tea party. And Alain Locke published a largely positive review in The Survey: “A good deal of it is reflected Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Joyce and Cummings, recast in the context of Negro life and experience.”
All that would happen later. Back in September, Langston had to return to Pennsylvania for another year at college, but not before doing some serious partying. For example, on the 14th, Carl Van Vechten and his wife Fania Marinoff were dining at his friend Eddie Wasserman’s house when Zora dropped by, followed by Langston accompanied by the socialite and impresario Caroline Dudley Reagan. Van Vechten proceeded, in his words, to get “very drunk & abusive & finally I passed out.” Then they all went back to Van Vechten’s place and stayed until three.
Four days later, Zora cooked a dinner in Langston’s honor—and Zora was, in Bruce Nugent’s words, “a phenomenally good cook.” The guests included her brother Everett, a cousin of hers, Van Vechten, Marinoff, Reagan, and the composer J. Rosamond Johnson (James Weldon’s brother; he had set some of Langston’s songs to music, and they were planning to write a revue together). Then, two nights later, Langston and some classmates threw a party at Small’s to help raise funds for their tuition; Van Vechten was there, of course, as were Ethel Waters, Countee Cullen, and likely Zora.
Did they say goodbye that night? We don’t know. But Langston would come back to New York on weekends quite frequently. It would have been impossible for him to stay away.
4
SPRING 1927
Enter Godmother
Charlotte Osgood Mason seemed to strike almost everyone who met her as some sort of goddess. She instructed people to call her “Godmother,” and indeed, if one split that word into its constituent parts and joined them with an ampersand, it would describe well how her acolytes regarded her. (In fact, Zora once called her “My Mother-God,” and another time her “true conceptual Mother—not a biological accident.”) Zora was given to flattery in her letters, but her worshipful missives to Mason read as if they had been addressed to a pagan idol. “You renew your promise to the world,” she wrote her on Mason’s birthday in May 1930, and compared her to Persephone, the Greek goddess of
spring, not to mention Jesus:
May I, on your emergence day sing with my broken harp the small song of love that I am able to sing? . . . Oh, my lovely just-born flower, if back there when you fluttered pink into this drab world—if they had but known how much joy and love you would/should bring! How much of the white light of God you would diffuse into soft radiance for the eyes of the primitives, the wise ones would have stood awed before your cradle and brought great gifts from afar. I am not very wise but let me lay the gift of eternal devotion within your little manger. . . .
It is you who gives out life and light and we who receive. . . .
I wish I knew how many you have dragged from everlasting unseeing to heaven!
Zora was hardly alone in her effusions; numerous beneficiaries of Godmother’s generosity shared Zora’s sense of devotion to a miraculous presence.
Even back in 1923, before Mason began bankrolling the major black writers and artists of her time, the white Chicago writer Blanche Matthias described their first encounter like this:
The little figure of ivory face and white, white hair with lilac dress and softest film of lace about the throat was very exquisite, very serene and outpouring. . . . Gently she stroked my hand and face and then our eyes met and I saw the flame leap up, blue as the mysterious color which springs first from the burning log before it changes to violet and orange and then vanishes up the chimney to be lost in a gray wandering wraith of spent energy. That blue flame is the Godmother. . . . I was fortified and inspired when I left, and . . . I carried the thought of her sweetness and strength with me like a magic talisman which I could touch at will, and with it open the door to some of life’s great visions and activities.
But this devotion wasn’t just what Mason inspired—it was what she demanded. If they treated her like a god, she behaved like one too. She was not just a god of love, “never forgetting a minutiae of their daily lives and . . . interesting herself fully in every detail of their struggles,” as Carla Kaplan, whose Miss Anne in Harlem includes the fullest depiction of Mason’s extraordinary career, puts it. She was also a jealous god, controlling and wrathful.
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Mason was born Charlotte van der Veer Quick in 1854, the product of a wealthy family. In 1886, she married Rufus Osgood Mason, a famous physician twenty-four years her senior. He practiced parapsychology and hypnotherapy; his books include Telepathy and the Subliminal Self. Many of his patients believed he had cured them through psychic healing, and his wife adopted his beliefs and practices. Moreover, she viewed him, especially after his death in 1905, as a messianic figure, and published an allegorical, religious, and lyrical essay about him, “The Passing of a Prophet,” two years later.
She also believed that American Negroes and Indians were “younger races unspoiled by white civilization” whose primitive creativity and spirituality would energize and renew America. After Dr. Mason died, leaving to her his vast wealth, she spent months traveling the Southwest and living with Native Americans. One acolyte, Louise Thompson (who would play a major role in Zora and Langston’s lives) wrote that Mason “used to secretly listen to some of the rituals and ceremonies that no outsiders were supposed to witness[;] she told me about crawling through the shrubbery . . . and listening to these ancient rites.” Mason also helped Natalie Curtis publish The Indians’ Book, a groundbreaking and enduring study of Native American culture and music, in 1907. The book concludes with a paragraph that Mason wrote herself; it encapsulates her philosophy perfectly.
Let us recognize in all things the value of our opposites. Old age seems justly to be the summing-time of life, the only philosophic decade; yet should we never forget the child nor the child-race who live so near to God that truth flows to them from a still untainted channel. For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Do we tend to become a people continually busy with the world’s affairs, let us remember that the sources of spiritual truth have arisen oftenest among the contemplative peoples of the Orient, and let us then turn to the contemplative dark-skinned natives of our own land. If not in the hope and expectancy that are born of friendship, at least with tolerance and without scepticism let us stop long enough to hear the broken fragments of a message which they might have brought in its entirety to all their brethren in the world.
Primitivism, the cure for the ills of civilization, was one of Mason’s passions; the other was controlling the lives of her “godchildren.” She even went so far as to ask them to record, in intimate detail, “all things financial, domestic, nutritional, and digestive . . . every penny spent, every piece of linen purchased, every calorie consumed, each bodily waste emitted.” As Kaplan writes, “She craved people. She lived for the moments when she could see into someone’s soul and divine just how his or her life should be lived.”
After The Indians’ Book, Mason dedicated herself for a time to the education of Katherine and Cornelia Chapin, sisters of eighteen and fifteen when Mason entered their lives in 1908. The three would live together for the next thirty years, with occasional separations. Cornelia was a sculptor and Katherine a poet; Katherine’s husband, Francis Biddle, whom Mason introduced to her, would soon be chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, and in 1941 would become US Attorney General. The Chapins and the Biddles were from the old Philadelphia aristocracy. They were so close to Charlotte Mason that she even accompanied Katherine and Francis on their honeymoon in 1918 and wore a matching third ring. Katherine and Cornelia behaved around Mason like cultists behave around their messiah figure. All of Katherine’s friends had to listen to the advice of Godmother, whom she nicknamed “Precious.” Kaplan writes, “She hated to be separated from ‘Precious’ even for a night. They often shared a bed, lying awake for hours to talk, read, and plan Katherine’s life, down to the last detail of the linen she would order and how it would be stored.” When Kaplan interviewed their relative Schuyler Chapin, who had been the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager and Columbia University’s dean of the arts, he repeatedly mentioned Godmother’s “unusual personal powers” and “how intimidating he had found [her] and how impossible it seemed to him to so much as disagree with her.”
Mason told Matthias in 1923, “That is the reward of being a godmother, to share the ecstasy of first moments with her children.” Apparently, Mason had cultivated numerous godchildren by then—“lovely brown-eyed Cornelia [Chapin], and the artist who paints bashful fancies which come to him in the candle light; there is a handsome African of royal family, a full-blooded Indian from some place in Arizona, and before her death, there was Natalie Curtis”—each earning her trust and financial support through their hard work and seeking spirit, each the recipient, one supposes, of florid letters and telegrams like those Mason sent Matthias and, later, Langston.
By 1927, she was ready for a new avenue for her philanthropy—she had for the past few years been sending money to black schools in the South, but that was without personal connections. She was craving more godchildren. And that was when Alain Locke entered her life.
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On February 6, 1927, Charlotte Mason attended a lecture Locke was giving to open an exhibit of African art in a gallery on West 57th Street. Locke’s views on this art were quite different from those of most white patrons, who had for decades been excited about its capacity to evoke a savage, jungle race. For Locke, there was nothing “primitive” about African art—it was “rigid, controlled, disciplined, abstract, heavily conventionalized, . . . sophisticated, laconic and fatalistic.” The American Negro, he wrote, was a different beast altogether: “free, exuberant, emotional, sentimental and human.” Locke believed that African American artists had a great deal to learn from African art, and thought they should “move in the direction of a racial school of art.”
Mason was by then a major collector of African art. In her apartment were weapons, masks, drinking vessels, and headdresses; other artworks were in her safe-deposit box. That day—which they would both celebrate as their anniversary—she was introduced
to Locke after his lecture. Immediately she felt a “tremendous rapport.” Locke asked Mason for permission to call on her and, a few days later, on February 16, had tea with her in her twelve-room apartment at 399 Park Avenue. There, after inviting him to sit in a chair that belonged to her great-great-grandfather and giving him a $500 check so that he could start working on opening a museum of African art in Harlem, she asked him to introduce her to some of the young black artists and writers he was telling her about.
He did so immediately. At Carnegie Hall, where Langston and Carl Van Vechten were attending a performance of Negro spirituals that day, Locke presented Langston to this short, elderly, white-haired, beautifully dressed white woman.
Mason and Locke quickly developed a long list of African Americans to rescue. Jean Toomer, the author of Cane, was one prospect (Toomer had by then turned his back on both literature and his race and was now on a quest for a higher state of consciousness via methods taught by the mystic George Gurdjieff, but Mason thought it her duty to bring him back to his true “flowing spirit” and “miraculous power”). Locke was to offer assistance to actor Paul Robeson and tenor Roland Hayes, though they hardly needed it, considering their success (both steadily resisted receiving any assistance from Mason, Robeson rightly thinking she wanted to control his career). Other choices, however, came to fruition, among them the anthropologist Arthur Huff Fauset, the composer Hall Johnson, the illustrator Miguel Covarrubias, and the writer Claude McKay, all of whom came to see her—and accepted her checks. Altogether, Mason would end up giving between $50,000 and $75,000 to her black protégés (multiply that by ten to get today’s equivalent). Mason did not, however, approve of all of Harlem’s black literati. James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and sculptor Richmond Barthé were all too closely allied to the white world for her taste.