Zora and Langston

by Yuval Taylor

  In the day’s journal entry—it was August 17—Langston also noted, “Hubbard drove in from Forsyth.” Was this William Hubbard, then sixty-two years old, who had founded, in Forsyth, twenty-five years earlier, Georgia’s first vocational school for African Americans? His son Samuel, who would soon become principal of that school? His son Maceo, who would wind up working for the US Department of Justice? His son Clifton, who would become an electrician in Philadelphia? Considering it was a twenty-four-mile trip, it was either someone who had met Langston before or who was rather anxious to do so. The Hubbards undoubtedly knew the Hunts well, and perhaps this Hubbard had visited the Hunts in Fort Valley at the same time as Langston and Zora, or perhaps the Hunts had told him about their visit and he wanted to meet them in person.

  Zora and Langston were meeting a large number of African American educators; almost all of them were in what W. E. B. DuBois had called the “talented tenth,” the “best of this race,” “its exceptional men” and women. They were staying not in the traditionally black areas of the cities they visited, but instead in the homes (and hotels) of the black elite, which were located in the center. Interestingly, these were decidedly not the kinds of people Zora and Langston were writing about. Langston’s poems of the time focus on musicians, dancers, and low-wage workers, echoing blues lyrics about drunk women (“Ballad of Gin Mary”) and gambling men (“Crap Game”); Zora’s fiction and plays were mostly about relatively unsophisticated rural Southern black families and townspeople. There’s hardly an educator in the lot. Being college-educated themselves, Zora and Langston doubtless had great respect for teachers, but didn’t view them as suitable material for their creative efforts.

  The next day, August 18, Zora and Langston went to “Southern railroad shops,” probably the Norfolk Southern Railway’s Brosnan Yard just outside Macon, accompanied by “Henry,” probably Henry Hunt. Zora and Langston sat in the driver’s seat of an old locomotive. But where they spent the next three days is a mystery. They spent seven dollars on car repairs; Langston heard a song that ran, in part, “Nobody wants me—I don’t even want ma self”; and they visited a chain gang, giving three dollars to some prisoners. By the 22nd they were in Statesboro, and went from there to Savannah, meeting, en route, a 103-year-old root doctor, whom they paid a dollar for their fortune. Unfortunately, neither of them described the encounter.

  Savannah was then Georgia’s second largest city (after Atlanta), and boasted a thriving African American community not unlike Harlem’s, with plenty of speakeasies, cabarets, and venues for jazz and blues performances (one was even called the Harlem Club). But the nightlife didn’t interest our travelers as much as the folklife. When they arrived, they “met a little woman who was out shopping for a second-hand gun to ‘sting her husband up a bit.’ She told us where the turpentine workers and the dock workers hung out, and we got acquainted with some and had supper with them. We asked them to sing some songs, but the songs they sang we had heard before and they were not very good songs.” (Turpentine workers hacked the bark off pine trees, collected the resin, and distilled it to make a product with many industrial uses; they would prove an important source for Zora twelve years later, when she interviewed, for the Works Progress Administration, a large group of them being held in virtual slavery in Florida. She wrote a brief unpublished essay, “Turpentine,” about the experience.) They probably would have met these workers either on the eastern part of the riverbank or near Franklin Square, a green space dominated by First African Baptist Church, home of America’s oldest black congregation.

  One of the men they met was called Colonel Pinkney. He had been sent to a chain gang for nine years and seven months at the age of fifteen for striking his wife, was then “paroled” to a white planter (farm owners often took black inmates out of prison and enslaved them for the remainder of their term or longer, a practice called peonage), and finally ran away.

  Zora and Langston’s meetings with intellectuals and educators may have been supportive and convivial, but their encounters with blues singers, conjure men, turpentine workers, and chain-gang escapees were the ones that fed their imagination.

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  After Savannah, Langston and Zora were intent on getting back to New York City, and spent little time exploring. They arrived in Charleston on August 24. Then, instead of going directly north to Cheraw, they went northwest to Columbia, where they had a puncture repaired on the 25th, and where, as Zora wrote to Van Vechten the next day, “Somehow all the back of my skirt got torn away, so that my little panties were panting right out in public. I suppose this accident will be classed as more tire trouble.” She added that the bottle of “Chinese whiskey” that Langston had bought for Carl in Cuba was “no longer among the living.” The reason for the detour was likely that they wanted to get on US 1 instead of navigating the smaller roads to Cheraw, which would have been rougher on the car. The US Highway System had been established in 1925 and the kinks ironed out in 1926: US 1 was less than a year old, though for almost all of its route it was simply the Atlantic Highway renamed. But since it was a major throughway, much of it paved, they trusted it. Almost as soon as they got on it, though, Zora got a five-dollar speeding ticket.

  From Cheraw, they remained on Route 1 the rest of the way, rolling through the North Carolina towns of Rockingham, Southern Pines, and Raleigh, arriving in Richmond on the 27th, Baltimore on the 28th, Lincoln University and Philadelphia (where the car had some expensive brake work and where Langston bought a Vanity Fair) on the 29th, and New York (via ferry) on the 30th. Since leaving Tuskegee, they had put 1,128 miles on Sassy Susie, and spent over fifty dollars on gas, oil, repairs, parts, and speeding tickets.

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  From the perspective of ninety years later, Zora and Langston’s Southern road trip seems a halcyon journey of bonhomie, adventure, creativity, discovery, and intellectual challenge. It was certainly an eye-opening experience for Langston, who had learned of the South primarily through books and through talking to others who had been there. What surprised him most was the happiness of its inhabitants: “Most of the Negroes seemed to be having a grand time and one couldn’t help but like them,” he wrote in his characteristically naive manner. I doubt that Zora, on the other hand, saw anything very different from what she’d already seen on her journeys. And the trip had also “worn [her] down,” as she later wrote: she only weighed 124 pounds by the end of it. For her, the grandest thing must have been cementing her friendship with Langston—and being “fed on the company of good things.”

  6

  FALL 1927

  A Deep Well of the Spirit

  Langston was anxious to return to Manhattan and see Godmother, who had written him a letter that read like a love letter. It began, “Can you guess, dear Langston, what a warm welcome waits [sic] the fresh young soul who left me early in June?” and ended, “Remember with what spirit I wait [sic] you Langston!” Since Mason’s Park Avenue home wasn’t quite ready after her months in her summer home in Connecticut, they met instead in a suite at the swanky Barclay Hotel at 48th and Lexington. There Langston not only gave Godmother a full report of his adventures, but also put in a very good word for Zora, urging Mason to get to know her.

  Mason, though, had plans for Langston, taking up a suggestion Langston had made earlier. He was to turn his attention to a novel, making full use of his experiences in the South, and drawing on black folk art as much as he was able. The long form was foreign to Langston; he was a master of brevity. But Mason cared little. He should leave the distractions of Manhattan and let the power of Africa inspire him.

  Characteristically, Langston did nothing of the kind. He and Zora remained in the city. On September 6, they dined with the great singer and actress Ethel Waters, the future novelist Nella Larsen and her husband physicist Elmer Imes, and Van Vechten and his lover Donald Angus at a party hosted by Eddie Wasserman. Zora brought her visiting husband, who played piano, and Van Vechten screeched out his impression of t
he congregants at a sanctified church.

  Soon Zora and Langston were working on their “opera” again, which was more in the nature of a blues revue. Langston didn’t return to Lincoln until registration started on September 19.

  That week, Zora and Mason finally met—in Mason’s Park Avenue penthouse. It was the precise fulfillment of the twelfth and last of Zora’s childhood visions: “I would come to a big house. Two women waited there for me. I could not see their faces, but I knew one to be young and one to be old. One of them was arranging some queer-shaped flowers such as I had never seen [Cornelia Chapin was arranging a bowl of calla lilies]. When I had come to these women, then I would be at the end of my pilgrimage, but not the end of my life. Then I would know peace and love and what goes with those things, and not before.”

  Zora told Langston that she thought she and Mason had “got on famously.” This turned out to be an understatement. Both felt that they had a psychic connection, that they could read each other’s mind. “It was decreed in the beginning of things that I should meet Mrs. R. Osgood Mason,” Zora wrote in the initial draft of her autobiography (in a section that was unpublished until 1995). “The moment I walked into the room, I knew that this was the end.”

  Zora spoke to Mason about the opera she and Langston were working on. She relayed to Langston that Mason told her, “We must do it with so much power that it will halt all these spurious efforts on the part of white writers. . . . She does not believe that any one but us could do it.” Then Zora promised to take her to her church.

  Zora’s fawning letters to Mason are quite unlike any others she wrote, but perhaps that’s because she really did view Mason as a kind of goddess, directing her work through invisible channels, enabling her to plumb the depths of the Negro soul and thus contribute to saving the world from the artificiality of white folks. Their relationship was complicated—pitting intellectual surrender against innate creativity, financial concerns against a spiritual bond—but it gave Zora a feeling of connection such as she had never before experienced.

  Zora was fearless in defense of this connection. As late as 1941, in her autobiography, she could write, “My relations with Godmother were curious. Laugh if you will, but there was and is a psychic bond between us. She could read my mind, not only when I was in her presence, but thousands of miles away. . . . The thing that delighted her was the fact that I was her only Godchild who could read her thoughts at a distance.” As evidence, Zora attested that Mason’s letters would “lay me by the heels for what I was thinking.” (Zora wrote that the black sculptor Richmond Barthé also believed in and experienced Mason’s telepathic abilities, as did Max Eastman, the prominent white Manhattan intellectual whom Mason had hired to educate Katherine Chapin in 1911. According to Harlem Renaissance scholar Cheryl Wall, the African American composer Hall Johnson testified to them too, as did Alain Locke.) Moreover, Zora wrote, “She was just as pagan as I.”

  When Zora would go to Mason’s Park Avenue apartment for dinner, Cornelia Chapin and Katherine Garrison Biddle would be there too. The three white women would admonish Zora—in her words, they would “hem me up and give me what for.” Then “the sternness would vanish, and I would be wrapped in love. A present of money from Godmother, a coat from Miss Chapin, a dress from Mrs. Biddle.” Sometimes Langston would be there too, sometimes one of Godmother’s other godchildren—the artist Miguel Covarrubias, perhaps, or Paul Chapin (the young women’s brother). On occasion, Godmother would open The Indians’ Book and read passages from it for her appreciative audience.

  As they all knew, Godmother could be fierce when she chose. If she detected insincerity or cunning, she would call out, “That is nothing! It has no soul in it. You have broken the law!” Perceived ingratitude prompted even worse tirades. Her comments could be withering; as Zora attested, “Her tongue was a knout, cutting off your outer pretenses, and bleeding your vanity like a rusty nail.”

  Despite the intensity of the relationship, Mason’s immense wealth never receded into the background for Zora. “There she was sitting up there at the table over capon, caviar and gleaming silver, eager to hear every word on every phase of life on a sawmill ‘job.’ ” The disparity between them perhaps increased Zora’s worship of her patron. For truly, Charlotte Mason had all the attributes of a pagan goddess: she could read minds, she judged untruthfulness harshly, she was stern one moment and accepting the next, she had a whole group of disciples, and she lived on an altogether higher plane, perhaps spiritually, but most certainly materially.

  A month after Langston had left New York, he came back to the city for a visit. According to his diary, he had dinner (lunch) at Zora’s on October 21 and spoke some French there with a French professor, Jean Adam, whom he’d met in Paris. (Barnard College required Zora to be fluent in either French or German, and she’d chosen the former; Locke had connected her with Adam, with whom he had traveled in North Africa.) In the evening Langston went backstage at a performance of the play Porgy to see Wallace Thurman and Bruce Nugent (both had minor roles in the cast). The next day he spent “seven hours that went like one” with Godmother, eating venison and doubtless talking to her about his and Zora’s plans. It was at that point that Mason made him her great offer: to pay him a monthly stipend of $150 to free him to focus on his art. To Langston, it was a windfall, a sum that would take care of all his obligations. The only strings attached were that he must report his expenses and he must never tell anyone, except for a certain circle of intimates, where the money came from. He kept both promises faithfully.

  If Zora’s connection with Mason was strong, with Langston it turned into his great passion, and the feeling was reciprocated. Mason told Langston he was “a golden star in the Firmament of Primitive Peoples,” and Langston later wrote, “I loved her. No one else had ever been so thoughtful of me, or as interested in the things I wanted to do, or so kind and generous to me. . . . Those months when I lived by and through her were the most fascinating and fantastic I have ever known.”

  As for her ideas, Langston and Zora embraced them with fervor. Langston’s summary of them seems on the mark:

  Concerning Negroes, she felt that they were America’s great link with the primitive, and that they had something very precious to give to the Western World. She felt that there was mystery and mysticism and spontaneous harmony in their souls, but that many of them had let the white world pollute and contaminate that mystery and harmony, and make of it something cheap and ugly, commercial and, as she said, “white.” She felt that we had a deep well of the spirit within us and that we should keep it pure and deep.

  While this is not the phrasing Langston would have used about his own thoughts, he expressed many of the same general sentiments in his writings of the era.

  On November 5, Langston and Mason entered into a formal agreement; on December 8, Zora did the same. Zora was to receive $200 a month, in addition to a car (a Ford in the contract, a shiny gray Chevrolet in reality) and a movie camera. Making no secret of the difference, Zora asked Langston to let her know if he were “strapped” and she’d send him some money. But Langston would soon have a full-time secretary, monogrammed stationery, and an open account with New York’s best tailors, all courtesy of Godmother; in addition, she would pay for the schooling of Langston’s foster brother Gwyn, anonymously, via Alain Locke.

  A more important difference in the contracts was that Langston’s writing was to be his own property but Zora’s would belong to Godmother—and wasn’t even to be shown to anyone else without Mason’s consent. This would prove a terrible burden upon Zora, preventing her from working with scholars she highly respected, and she would nervously find ways around it, requesting secrecy from Langston and Franz Boas when she showed them her work without Godmother’s permission. Zora was to collect Negro folklore because Mrs. Mason was “unable” to do so herself; she was to “collect all information possible, both written and oral, concerning the music, poetry, folk-lore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestati
ons of art and kindred subjects relating to and existing among the North American negroes.” While Langston was being paid to create, Zora was being paid to collect. Mason probably thought Zora’s study of African American folklore would parallel Natalie Curtis’s study of Native American folklore, and envisioned them as similar projects to support; it seems to have been tacitly understood that once Zora’s collecting was over, the result would be published in book form. But in essence Mason was expropriating the black folklore of the South in the manner of a white colonizer (abetted by Alain Locke, with whom she consulted before drawing up the contracts, and who would oversee their implementation).

  Both agreements stipulated that Mason would be consulted regularly about practically everything important and supplied with a monthly itemized account of expenses; both stipulated that the recipients were never to reveal the name of their benefactor. This latter promise, among others, Zora would signally fail to keep; she named Mason in her autobiography while Mason was still alive, and was the only one of Godmother’s disciples to do so.

  Suddenly both Langston and Zora were living in luxury. Their Harlemite neighbors, who paid higher rents and earned lower wages than any other ethnic group in the city, could not help but notice the sudden change in the spending habits of the formerly penniless writers, and soon other beneficiaries of Mason’s generosity displayed the same extravagances. Zora obtained full support for expeditions to the South, though she tried to keep her expenses modest. For his part, Langston wore “new suits of dinner clothes from Fifth Avenue shops,” ate fine food, wrote on “fine bond paper,” and obtained the best seats for the theater; he went to and from Mason’s Park Avenue apartment in Mason’s private limousine, driven by her white chauffeur. He spent countless hours with Mason, accompanying her to shows, concerts, and lectures, driving with her through Central Park, or simply sitting on a stool in front of her throne-like ancestral chair, with her servants ready to attend to their every wish.