by Yuval Taylor
It wasn’t long before Mason would conceive of herself as black—“I am eternally black,” she would write to Locke, who couldn’t fulfill his potential unless he too could “slough off this weight of white culture.” Locke held whatever distaste he may have had for her pronouncements in reserve; he was unfailingly deferential, and his reverence for her—over the course of almost twenty years—was profound. He had, in Bruce Nugent’s words, an “almost arbitrary way . . . of selecting who was good and who wasn’t good” for Godmother. Among the Niggerati, Locke was called the “mother hen.”
And while Mason’s beneficiaries initially shared Locke’s reverence, Godmother would become an object of satire just a few years later, even among those who had loved her the most.
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Around the same time as Locke met Godmother, Zora was turning to a subject she had rarely before written about: Harlem. She composed four stories set there for the black weekly Pittsburgh Courier, one of the two leading black newspapers in the country (the other was the Chicago Defender), which were published in February and March 1927. And one of the stories, “The Back Room,” not only was a vivid portrait of Harlem high society but also, in part, seems like a self-portrait. It is one of her most revealing—and saddest—stories. (Unfortunately, it was inadvertently omitted from The Complete Stories by Zora Neale Hurston, and has never been republished in the United States.)
The Courier billed it as “A Gripping Story of the Life of New York Society from Twilight to Dawn and a Woman Who Had Reached the ‘Dangerous Age.’ ” This woman is named Lilya Barkman, “born Lillie Barker,” and these names, like her character and situation, clearly echo “Lily Bart,” the protagonist of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, whose fruitless attempts to get married end in tragedy. (Barkman was also the name of a friend Zora made in 1925.) “The Back Room” is very clearly fiction, not autobiography, but certain parallels between Lilya Barkman and Zora Hurston (such as the same last letters of their names) are telling. Lilya, like Zora, shaved years off her age—Lilya “was thirty-eight, though she never declared a day over twenty-five.” Both were unmarried, and Lilya, at least, was ready for that to change—she had waited long enough. Her plans, though, as developed over the course of the evening, come to nought but heartbreak. In the end, as she looks at a portrait of herself painted years before, it seems to say to her, “I am youth, and beauty. I know nothing, feel nothing, except the things that belong to me.” On the other hand, Lilya, now older, feels too much, and has lost too much.
Like Lilya, Zora rarely let her lonely side show; this story is one of the very few suggestions we have of it. But there is another suggestion too, from around the same time. In December 1926, Zora had sent Langston a Christmas card—her first correspondence with him. On it, she wrote, “Thank you, thank you dear Langston. You warmed me tremendously in my dark hour. I shall never forget.”
Was it that loneliness, that fear of ending up like Lilya Barkman, that prompted Zora in May 1927 to marry Herbert Sheen, the medical student she had dated when she attended Howard seven or eight years earlier? They tied the knot in St. Augustine, Florida, where she was attempting to collect folklore, and where Sheen joined her from Chicago, where he was studying. She immediately regretted it. As she wrote him years later, the night before he arrived a dream “cast a dark shadow” over her. “A dark barrier kept falling between us, and I sat up with the voice of your sister Mildred calling my name in most unfriendly terms commanding me to leave you alone. Leave you alone or suffer severe penalties. It was as vivid as noon, and it haunted me for a very long time. . . . We appeared like shadowy figures seen through an opal. It was terrible. Therefore, I was not surprised when something came between us.” According to her autobiography, she wondered on her wedding night, “Who had cancelled the well-advertised tour of the moon? . . . What I had taken for eternity turned out to be a moment walking in its sleep.” After a few days, Sheen, who had no taste for folklore collecting, went back to Rush Medical College. The marriage was all but over. Though he would visit her in September, and even played piano at Carl Van Vechten’s, by early January 1928, as she wrote to Langston, she had definitively broken off relations. And she told few people about the whole affair.
No evidence suggests that Langston played a part in Zora’s disappointment. But, given her Christmas card, it’s possible that at this point her emotional attachment to him was stronger than that to her husband. And only two or three months after her wedding, that attachment would be firmly cemented.
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Langston, meanwhile, was undergoing a whipping of sorts at the hands of the black intelligentsia. His Fine Clothes to the Jew had just been published in January; it was a collection of lyric poems, many of them straightforward blues lyrics, about lower- and working-class black men and women. The blues, as Langston knew very well, was one of the few unalloyed modes of African American expression. Spirituals were in part derived from Methodist hymns; ragtime owed a great deal to European pianism; jazz came, to some extent, out of military bands. But the blues owed next to nothing to white culture. In writing his blues-derived poetry, Langston was taking his own advice in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” as well as reenacting his symbolic action on board the boat to Africa—he was rejecting white conventions of literacy and creating a purely black art.
The book’s title, likely suggested by Van Vechten (the dedicatee of the volume), was unfortunate: the book’s second poem is a blues about a man who had to pawn his clothes, and in black parlance of the time a pawnbroker was “the Jew.” Samuel Knopf, publisher Alfred A. Knopf’s father, insisted in vain that it be changed, and Langston later regretted not doing so. (Langston was by no means anti-Semitic, and, as noted earlier, was part Jewish himself.) But the book itself was a triumph: beautifully organized, clear-eyed and empathetic, simple yet profound in its affirmation of the black volksgeist. As Arnold Rampersad writes, Fine Clothes “was Hughes’s poorest selling but perhaps most important single work, a breakthrough in black literary culture on a par, in its own way, with the effect of Whitman’s ‘scandalous’ Leaves of Grass of 1855.” The book remains largely ignored, though, and is currently out of print.
Predictably, the black, not the Jewish, press opened fire on Langston. The story in the New York Amsterdam News was headlined “LANGSTON HUGHES—THE SEWER DWELLER”; his book was “100 pages of trash.” The Chicago Whip called it “unsanitary, insipid and repulsing”; the Philadelphia Tribune called it “a study in the perversions of the Negro”; and it made the historian who reviewed it for the Pittsburgh Courier “positively sick.” Benjamin Brawley, perhaps the most respected black critic in America, would soon write, “It would have been just as well, perhaps better, if the book had never been published. No other ever issued reflects more fully the abandon and the vulgarity of its age.” There were exceptions: Locke published a rave in the Saturday Review of Literature, The Crisis called it “the outstanding book of the month,” and sympathetic reviews appeared in the Chicago Defender, Washington Eagle, New York Age, and Messenger. But the overall reception was hostile.
Langston was quick to respond, writing an essay entitled “These Bad New Negroes: A Critique on Critics.” In it he not only offered a point-by-point defense of his book, but also defended the work of Zora, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Eric Walrond, John F. Matheus, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, and poet Edward Silvera, along with Locke’s New Negro anthology, Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy. His argument was similar to the one he had made in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”: he called his critics nouveau riche and defended the New Negro writers as “humble people.” The essay would be published in the Pittsburgh Courier, which had labeled his poems “trash,” on March 22.
In the midst of such a shellacking, it’s no wonder Langston would be more receptive than ever to anyone who would defend his affinity for, as he would put it in The Big Sea, “the masses of our people.” Ten d
ays after Langston had first met Mason at Carnegie Hall, Alain Locke brought him up to her apartment, “with attendants in livery at the door and a private elevator-landing.” (Mason also had at least two maids and probably a butler too, all white.) “I found her instantly one of the most delightful women I had ever met, witty and charming, kind and sympathetic, very old and white-haired, but amazingly modern in her ideas, in her knowledge of books and the theater, of Harlem, and of everything then taking place in the world.” There, with a view of practically all of New York spread beneath them, she spoke to Langston about her project: “a mystical vision,” as she later wrote, “of a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa, across which the Negro world, that our white United States had done everything to annihilate, should see the flaming pathway . . . and recover the treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on the earth.”
The meeting was a success. Langston found himself just as spellbound as Locke had been. Mason showed him her art collection—“every piece was rare and beautiful”—then spoke of socialism, the Negro, American culture. And Langston impressed Mason too: his Native American lineage, inherited from his maternal grandparents; his innocence; his fine looks. As Langston was about to leave, she handed him a fifty-dollar bill, “a gift for a young poet.” He turned to Locke as they went out the door and asked him, “Who is this woman? How does she know so much about us?”
Langston came back to New York for the long Easter weekend and went to Mason’s apartment on April 16, again accompanied by Locke. As they left, Locke whispered to Langston, “Mask in one pocket, thick white envelope in another,” a cynical comment on the kind of hustle he believed he’d introduced Langston to. Mason—or, more likely, one of her companions, since she was somewhat deaf—overheard the remark, and she was rather upset with Locke. So the next time Langston visited, a month later, on May 22, he came alone. They dined on duck, wild rice, and ice cream with fresh strawberries; they talked for hours. Langston wrote that Mason asked him “about my plans for the future, my hopes, my ambitions, and my dreams. I told her I wanted to write a novel. She told me she would make it possible.”
Mason would later remember this visit as “our first real hours together,” doubtless since Locke wasn’t present. As she wrote in a letter to Langston on June 5 (her earliest dated letter to him), he was, for her, “my winged poet Child who as he flies through my mind is a noble silent Indian Chief—a shining messenger of hope for his people—and then again a precious simple little boy with his pocket full of bright colored marbles—looking up at me with his dear and blessing eyes.” She also wrote him an undated note, probably early in their relationship, that reads in full:
My precious Boy,
The holiness of that beautiful light you gave me so graciously and generously before you left the car still moves near me. Nothing touches its amazing beauty. But now—Dear Child—comes this magical wonder you wrought last night through the radiant sustaining force of your presence!!
What can “Godmother” say!
As Carla Kaplan has justly observed, “If Locke was her designated lieutenant, Langston Hughes was Mason’s first true black love. She considered him flawless.”
Godmother’s letters would continue to be just as effusive for years, and in exactly this vein. Langston was in every way her child, and she was full of motherly advice, including on how he could make time to write and on what he ate (plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables); but Godmother was even more given to high-flown praise. “The Gods be praised Langston your work is wonderful! . . . It is the same thing as when the Navajos induced the Colorado River to cut the Grand Canyon. And then it is made whole by the negro warmth and tenderness at the loves of your Precious Heart.” Occasionally her adoration of Langston would go far beyond her usual effusion: “You know your ‘Godmother’ becomes a very little girl when she listens to any [illegible] you may drift across the pages of your letters. Have you any idea how good Godmother is when she is so hungry? But all the hunger in the world cannot compare to my belief & hope in this precious Child of my old age.”
The letters are so numerous and so much in this vein that even when she opened a letter with “I greet thee Morning Star with a full heart of love & belief as you rise this morning still unknown in the hearts of your audience,” it could not have surprised him.
By the time her June 5 “winged poet Child” letter reached him, though, Langston was in the South.
5
SUMMER 1927
The Company of Good Things
Ornate and imposing, the century-old Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Passenger Terminal in downtown Mobile, Alabama, resembles a cross between a Venetian palace and a Spanish mission. Here, on St. Joseph Street, on July 23, 1927, one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history occurred, a chance incident that would seal the friendship of two of its most influential writers. “No sooner had I got off the train” from New Orleans, Langston wrote in The Big Sea, “than I ran into Zora Neale Hurston, walking intently down the main street. I didn’t know she was in the South [actually, he did, having received a letter from her in March, but he had no idea she was in Alabama], and she didn’t know I was either, so we were very glad to see each other.”
Zora was in town to interview Cudjo Lewis, purportedly the only person still living who had been born in Africa and enslaved in the United States. She then planned to drive back to New York, doing folklore research along the way. In late 1926, Franz Boas had recommended her to Carter Woodson, whose Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, together with Elsie Clews Parsons of the American Folklore Society, had decided to bankroll her to the tune of $1,400. With these funds, Zora had been gathering folklore in Florida all spring and summer. As the first Southern black to do this, her project was, even at this early stage, clearly of immense importance. It had, however, been frustrating. “I knew where the material was, all right,” she would later write. “But I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, ‘Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?’ The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores, looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn’t I try over there?”
Langston, meanwhile, had been touring the South for months, penniless as usual, making some public appearances and doing his own research. He read his poems at commencement for Nashville’s Fisk University in June; he visited refugees from the Mississippi flood in Baton Rouge; he strolled the streets alone in New Orleans, ducking into voodoo shops; he took a United Fruit boat to Havana and back; and his next stop was to be the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was his very first visit to the South.
When Zora invited him to join her expedition in her little old Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie,” Langston happily accepted. (The car looked a lot like a Model T Ford, and could only seat two.) Langston adored the company of entertainers, and Zora was as entertaining as they came. Langston did not know how to drive, but Zora loved driving and didn’t mind a whit. They decided to make a real trip of it, “stopping on the way to pick up folk-songs, conjur [sic], and big old lies,” as Langston wrote. “Blind guitar players, conjur men, and former slaves were her quarry, small town jooks and plantation churches, her haunts. I knew it would be fun traveling with her. It was.”
The road trip provided the perfect opportunity for Zora and Langston to compare notes from their Southern travels, exchange ideas, and explore, along the back roads, the characteristics of African American culture that informed their greatest work. They had both kept meticulous records of songs, sayings, turns of phrase; they related their impressions of conjure wisdom, including the names of potions and powders; they delighted in the cultural riches of their Southern black brethren. Zora told Langston all about her terribly disappointing marriage in St. Augustine two months earlier to her old flame Herbert Sheen; perhaps she also told Langston that her second th
oughts had begun the moment she said, “I do.” Langston told Zora all about his infatuation with Godmother. As they drew closer, the writers shared not only their knowledge, ideas, and feelings, but also their food and money. True traveling companions, they had the time of their lives.
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Misconceptions about the South of the 1920s come naturally to us. We imagine it strictly segregated; while that was true of schools, hotels, and practically everything to do with transportation, the races lived in much closer proximity to each other than in the North, and it was rare to find an all-white or all-black community. “Sundown towns,” where no black people were allowed after sundown, became increasingly common all over the United States between the end of Reconstruction and the end of segregation, but in the 1920s there weren’t yet many in the South. In general, black and white neighbors attended each others’ churches, played ball together, visited each others’ homes, and helped each other through crises of sickness and death—even as white southerners maintained political, social, and economic control over most black lives through lynchings, disenfranchisement, and unfair labor practices. We imagine black southerners as poor sharecroppers, chain-gang workers, and itinerant bluesmen, and certainly the disparity in income between the races was enormous—not to mention the constant threat of white-on-black violence. But the majority of black southerners, who comprised some eighty percent of the nation’s African American population, were not prisoners, fugitives, or roustabouts. They were churchgoing, upstanding citizens, as interested in their children’s education and the possibilities of economic advancement as any white person might be. In the 1930s, Zora would play a major role in canonizing black Southern folklore, and the picture she painted of rural Southern life would be reinforced by Hollywood’s image of Southern Negroes in rags, the rural focus of the Federal Works Progress Administration in the 1940s, the search for forgotten bluesmen in the 1950s, and the murders of civil rights workers in the 1960s. As a result of this focus on the rural and the downtrodden, we sometimes forget about the myriad black educators, businessmen, theatergoers, ministers, jazz musicians, doctors, dentists, carpenters, and skilled workers that filled Southern cities and towns.