by Yuval Taylor
For both of Godmother’s new devotees, a life very different from their formerly impecunious one had begun.
7
WINTER 1928–WINTER 1930
This Is Going to Be Big
For close to three years, Langston and Zora saw little of each other, though they kept up a constant and fond correspondence. Langston was working on his novel, Not Without Laughter, under Mason’s close watch; Hurston was in the South and the Bahamas, collecting folklore, also under Mason’s scrutiny. Zora entertained Langston with spicy tales of her adventures; in turn, Langston gave Zora invaluable advice on how to deal with Mason, telling her to write and send little gifts to Godmother more often, and to be more discreet with the “intellectually dishonest” (in Zora’s words) Alain Locke, who was apt to betray her confidences to Mason.
For her part, Zora was anxious to continue to collaborate with Langston. In an October 1927 letter to Locke, she had written, “Why can’t our triangle—Locke—Hughes—Hurston do something with you at the apex?”; and in March 1928 she wrote Langston concerning their folk opera, “I am truly dedicated to the work at hand. . . . We want to do this tremendous thing with all the fire that genius can bring. I need your hand.” The “opera” was to be entitled Jook, and she ended up writing nine skits for it (copyrighted as Cold Keener in 1930). It would have been more in the nature of a musical revue than a unified opera—Zora envisioned it as a vehicle for “all of the songs and gags I have.” Unfortunately, Mason’s initial enthusiasm for the project quickly evaporated. At one point, Zora even proposed to Langston that the whole be done in his name since she knew Mason would never allow her to do it herself.
In that March letter, Zora told Langston that she was going to divorce Herbert, then said, “Langston, Langston, this is going to be big. Most gorgeous possibilities are showing themselves constantly.” Langston suggested that they collect Negro love letters, and Zora quickly began to do so, obtaining some from people she met on trips to Mobile, Eatonville, and New Orleans. A few weeks later, she asked him, “Are you planning to join my vacation?” (She was being ironic—she was working hard.) “I hope so. I promise you one saw-mill and one phosphate mine as special added attractions.” In the same letter she sketched the outline of her later essay “The Characteristics of Negro Expression,” then laid bare her ideas for the “real Negro art theatre” she was planning, which would be a collaborative effort to dramatize short folktales with “the abrupt angularity and naivete of the primitive ’bama nigger.”
The central question guiding both of their ideas, even if it wasn’t made explicit, was how to best popularize African American folklore. “To create a Negro culture in America—a real, solid, sane, racial something growing out of the folk life, not copied from another, even though surrounding, race,” reads the entirety of a journal entry Langston would pen on August 1, 1929.
Langston had made a valiant attempt to make the blues into a popular literature in Fine Clothes to the Jew, but he had now turned his back on poetry altogether. In September 1928, he wrote to Claude McKay, with whom he’d begun a scintillating correspondence, that after reading his poems to ladies’ clubs and literary societies, “I began to hate my own stuff as much as I do Browning or Longfellow.” The following June he added, “I’ve never felt so unpoetic in my life. I think I shall write no more poems”—he simply wasn’t feeling miserable enough. Zora had been turning folktales into short stories, but she was prohibited, by contract, from publishing the tales she was now collecting, not to mention any fiction based on them. Both thus felt stymied, for very different reasons, in their primary mediums—poetry for Langston, storytelling for Zora.
However, both of them knew that a different medium presented a far better opportunity for realizing their shared goal. As Zora would later write, “It is almost useless to collect material to lie upon the shelves of scientific societies. It should be used for the purpose to which it is best suited. The Negro material is eminently suited to drama and music. In fact it is drama and music[,] and the world and America in particular needs what this folk material holds.” Theatrical presentation was not just the ultimate solution to their frustration; it was what their material demanded. They had to write a play together.
Theater had long been a consuming passion for both of them. Zora listed it as her primary extracurricular interest when she began studying at Barnard, had been writing plays and theatrical sketches almost as long as she’d been writing stories, and apparently assisted W. E. B. Du Bois in his efforts to establish a black-focused theater in Harlem. Langston, whose mother had been an actress and who grew up worshipping the theater, dabbled in writing for the theater, and religiously attended New York theatrical productions. They had their differences, though. While Zora dismissed white-authored and -produced spectacles like Lew Leslie’s 1924 Dixie to Broadway, which introduced Florence Mills to the world, saying that the play might as well have been written in pre-Soviet Russia, Langston enjoyed practically any spectacle with black actors.
Zora wanted to make sure Langston thought she believed he would helm the project. In May 1928, she wrote him, “Of course, you know I didnt dream of that theatre as a one-man stunt. I had you helping 50-50 from the start. In fact, I am perfectly willing to be 40 to your 60 since you are always so much more practical than I. But I know it is going to be Glorious! A really new departure in the drama.” And in July, “Without flattery, Langston, you are the brains of this argosy. All the ideas have come out of your head.”
If only Godmother didn’t present such an obstacle. “She was very anxious,” Zora had written to Locke the previous December, “that I should say to you that the plans—rather the hazy dreams of the theatre that I talked to you about[—]should never be mentioned again. She trusts her three children [Zora, Langston, and Locke] to never let those words pass their lips again until the gods decree that they shall materialize.” The theater was vulgar, commercial, and inevitably compromised, and thus was not the format Godmother favored. In addition, Zora was enjoined from showing anything she wrote to anyone but Locke and Mason. She would soon apologize to Franz Boas: “I accepted the money on the condition that I should write no one” (though she promised to show him her material in secret nonetheless). To use any of the folklore she had collected for a play would not only defy her employer’s proscriptions against theater but would violate her contract with her. She was even forbidden to contribute to Wallace Thurman’s successor to Fire!!, a magazine called Harlem: “I’m heartbroken over being bound to silence,” she confessed to her housemate and literary companion, the future novelist Dorothy West.
Meanwhile, perhaps to assuage her disappointment that Langston hadn’t joined her “vacation,” Zora had been showing his book Fine Clothes to the Jew to black workers all over the South. “They got the point and enjoyed it immensely,” she wrote him, and called it the “party book.” One weekend, she wrote, “Two men came over with guitars and sang the whole book. Everybody joined in. It was the strangest & most thrilling thing.” (When Zora told Godmother about this, the latter wrote to Langston, “How gloriously primitive!”) “Oh, honey,” Zora wrote him in November 1928, “you ought to make a loafing tour of the South like the blind Homer, singing your songs. Not in auditoriums, but in camps, on water-fronts and the like. You are the poet of the people and your subjects are crazy about you. Why not? There never has been a poet who has been acceptable to His Majesty, the man in the gutter before, and laugh if you will, but that man in the gutter is the god-maker, the creator of everything that lasts.” Zora would later read the entire book at a talk on poetry she gave to students at the University of New Orleans. “My they liked it,” she wrote Langston in April 1929. “The boys et it up.”
Zora’s appreciation for Langston’s art is perfectly encapsulated in an observation Bruce Nugent made to Robert Hemenway. Speaking about Countee Cullen, he remarked, Zora “could admire his ability and talent, and his ability to use his tools, but I don’t think she had great respect for the
tools. And I think perhaps one of the things that she loved about Langston was that he didn’t have to use these tools. He made his own tools like any other good African.”
In the meantime, Langston had been sharpening those tools. He was listening to Charlotte Mason’s wonderful collection of blues records and reading Claude McKay’s bestseller Home to Harlem; Edward Adams’s Congaree Sketches, a collection of Negro folktales and scenes from the South Carolina swamps; and books on Africa. Of the latter, he wrote to Locke, “I discover therein that one had almost as well be civilized,—since primitiveness is nearly as complex.” In the same letter, he called Home to Harlem “the best low-life novel I’ve ever read,” implying that it was better than Nigger Heaven. Home to Harlem had been partly inspired by McKay’s hearing about Van Vechten’s forthcoming novel—he confessed to Langston that he had wanted to beat Van Vechten to the punch. And though he failed to do so, it was a singular work, vivid and complex, the best novel about Harlem yet. Unfortunately, the black press vilified it.
Zora was also sharpening her tools. Her adventures were both bringing her more success in gathering folklore and providing her with rich new stories to tell about her experiences. Having received her undergraduate degree from Barnard, she was no longer under the compulsion to produce the kind of academic presentations that Boas and Woodson would have required, which were unsuited for a mainstream audience. She was free to immerse herself in the social life of her subjects with the aim of gathering stories rather than studying lore. She knew that those stories would soon disappear if they were not harvested, and she went about doing so with tremendous enthusiasm—and considerable bravery.
Especially important was a sojourn at a lumber camp in Polk County, Florida, where she persuaded the laborers that she was a bootlegger wanted by the Jacksonville and Miami police, so she was hiding out there. “That sounded reasonable,” she wrote. “Bootleggers always have cars.” She swapped verses of “John Henry” at a juke joint, organized a lying (tall-tale) contest, and harvested a rich trove of stories, songs, and “dozens” (insults). But it all came to an end one Saturday night. She went to a wedding celebration at a pine mill when her sworn enemy Lucy (who was jealous of the time Zora was spending with Slim, an excellent storyteller) came after her with a knife; fortunately, her formidable friend “Big Sweet” stepped in and she escaped during the ensuing brawl.
Everything changed once she arrived in New Orleans in August 1928 and made contact with the voodoo practitioners whom Langston had met the previous summer. Soon she was undergoing an initiation into hoodoo that was unlike anything she—or anyone she knew—had undergone. She knew well that she was departing in a radical way not only from her previous folklore collecting, but also from the practice of any previous researcher, and though she’d had some experiences with hoodoo before, they could not have prepared her for what she went through.
The initiation ceremonies could be mind-numbingly complex. In one, she was required to bathe in a mix of scented liquids, utter various prayers, light special candles, cut her finger, wear new underwear, read the third chapter of Job at specified hours eighteen times, and talk to spirits with names like Great Moccasin and Kangaroo through candle flames. In the most terrifying ceremony, she had to catch a black cat, throw it in a pot of boiling water, take its bones out, and find the bitterest-tasting one. But her sojourn’s most arduous interval was when, under the tutelage of a hoodoo doctor named Samuel Thompson (called Luke Turner in Mules and Men), she lay face down on a sofa with her navel touching a snakeskin, in the nude, without food, for sixty-nine hours straight. Nothing could have been further from Zora’s life in Harlem than this, and it is impossible to imagine anyone else she knew—including Langston—taking part in such a ritual. This was not just a challenge, an adventure, a lark—it was a deadly serious religious rite, requiring Zora’s total immersion in practices of extraordinary strangeness and power.
She never spoke about the experience except for the sober sentence in her 1931 report on New Orleans hoodoo, repeated in Mules and Men—“I had five psychic experiences and awoke at last with no feeling of hunger, only one of exaltation”—and the comment in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road—“On the third night, I had dreams that seemed real for weeks. In one, I strode across the heavens with lightning flashing from under my feet, and grumbling thunder following in my wake.” Then she described what happened next: lightning symbols were painted on her back, a pair of eyes on her cheeks, a sun on her forehead; she drank her own blood mixed with wine, and a black sheep was sacrificed.
The five months Zora spent in New Orleans (she stayed until December), as Hemenway wrote, “transform[ed] her from an enthusiastic artist-folklorist into a mature, thoughtful scholar. . . . The quality of her enthusiasm changed; she began to see more serious implications in her research. . . . The New Orleans ceremonies marked her for the rest of her life.”
In 1929, Langston read a good deal of the material that Hurston had been collecting. She asked him to “make plenty of suggestions. You know I depend on you so much.” He wrote her that he liked her material a great deal. But he warned her against sharing too much of it with Locke, and cautioned her about Godmother’s jealousy. The material, according to their contract, was Mason’s, not Zora’s, and even in showing it to Langston first, Zora was going against her patron’s wishes. Showing it to Locke, on the other hand, seemed to be part of the deal—the man Godmother called her “precious Brown Boy” (echoing Cullen’s poem “To a Brown Boy”) was acting as a kind of go-between, and Godmother had told Zora quite clearly to consult with him often. Locke read each manuscript that Zora sent to New York; he made copious notes on them too, which both Zora and Langston saw. After Langston’s warning, though, Zora promised, “I’ll be even more reticent from now on. I’ll keep my big mouf shut.” She added in a postscript, “The trouble with Locke is that he is intellectually dishonest. He is too eager to be with the winner.” Not only that, but he continually addressed her in the condescending tones a teacher uses to his students, as if he were the expert in Southern folklore. Mason later recognized this, writing to him about his superior attitude to Zora, “Such a pity your tongue couldn’t be hung front to back so you could preach to yourself and not to the world!” In the end, all three of them were quite right to distrust the mercurial professor.
Zora’s folktales were not the only thing she sent Mason from her travels. Langston let her know that Godmother particularly liked a woodcarving Zora had sent her; more carvings followed. She sent orange blossoms from Florida, a piece of the ship Clotilda from Mobile, melons from New Orleans, and her transcriptions of humorous tales and sayings from all over the South.
And all the time, Zora continued to write sweetly to Langston, who responded in kind. She disclosed to him that she had discovered one of the last living African slaves, a woman even older than Cudjo Lewis, who was the oldest known at the time; but she had decided to keep her existence a secret from everyone but Langston. At another point, she envisioned Langston, herself, Thurman, Nugent, Aaron Douglas, other Niggerati, and even A’Lelia Walker all working together in “a neat little colony of kindred souls” near Eau Gallie, Florida. Her plan for creating this artists’ colony was very specific, from the location (between a river and the ocean) to the price of the land ($4,000, or $57,000 in today’s dollars); she even suggested that they have their own railroad station there and start their own town, “a lovely place to retire and write on occasion.”
She also flattered him about his poems, perhaps unaware that he had stopped writing them:
Langston, really, MULATTO is superb. I have read it about the hundredth time and it is so good. So truly negroid. Little bits of drama thrust in without notice. Pictures. I don’t want to be sloppy, but the tears come every time I read “MOTHER TO SON”. You are a great poet. May I dedicate one of my volumes to you? I hope they will rate it.
Give me a picture, old thing. I’d like to gaze upon thy pan.
By October 192
9, Zora’s collection of folktales was complete and in Godmother’s hands. She was now working on volumes about religion, from evangelical preachers to hoodoo spiritualists, and a book of folksongs, blues, and work songs, from “John Henry” to “Don’t Let the Deal Go Down.” Zora seemed to be everywhere during the second half of 1929: St. Augustine and Miami, Nassau and New Orleans. She was avidly collecting as much material as possible, convinced that she could further link African American with Afro-Caribbean folklore, amassing over 100,000 words of stories, games, and spiritual material, all the while barely scraping by on Godmother’s stipend.
Godmother, however, decided that the book of folktales needed more work. The news was a blow. Zora wrote Langston that month, “Gee, I felt forlorn. Too tired. Been working two years without rest, & behind all that my school life with no rest, no peace of mind.” But Langston helped keep her courage up. “Well, honey, your wire did me so much good. . . . No flattery, though. You are my mainstay in all crises. No matter what may happen, I feel you can fix it. Let me hear soon, honey.” Then, in December, “Your last letter comforted my soul like dreamless sleep. . . . Well, I tell you, Langston, I am nothing without you. That’s no flattery either.” She concluded with “Love and everything deep and fine, Honey.” (Langston was the only correspondent she addressed as “Honey” until much later in her life.)
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Langston, meanwhile, was expressing the same sorts of sentiments toward Godmother. None of his letters to her survive in their final form, but he kept a number of drafts, including two dated February 23, 1929. The first begins,