by Yuval Taylor
We can imagine the performance. There are recordings from a few years later of Zora singing the songs she collected in a beautiful contralto; her distinctive voice radiates joy. There are three photographs of her doing the crow dance in 1935, and she looks lithe and nimble. The footage she filmed in the South survives. One sequence shows a boy performing a dance with cartwheels and splits surrounded by clapping children, next pans the faces of these children, going around the circle, and then focuses on their stomping feet.
Following this performance, and echoing the logic she’d used with Langston, Mason informed Zora about her new digs. The two writers would share Louise Thompson as a secretary; Mason had even briefed Louise on what to expect: “She used to talk about Zora,” Louise later said, “about this wonderful child of nature who was so unspoiled, and what a marvellous person she was. And Zora did not disappoint me. She was a grand storyteller.” The moment the two women first met “was quite a moment. Here came in this ‘professor,’ a woman full of energy and vitality and laughter and stories. And I just thought she was wonderful, as Mrs. Mason had said.”
Naturally, Zora and Langston were overjoyed to be together again. They talked nonstop and, faced with Zora’s task of editing down her piles of folklore, Langston gladly pitched in. Louise started typing for Zora too, often spending half the night preparing the folktale manuscript for Godmother, occasionally spending the entire night in Zora’s room, typing until her arm hurt from throwing the typewriter’s carriage so often.
“How do you like that one?” Zora would ask Louise about one of her folktales. “Fine,” Louise would answer. “I made that one up,” Zora would inform her. Mason would send Zora exotic dresses to wear and Zora would call her to tell her how stunning they looked. After hanging up she would tell Louise, laughingly, that she wouldn’t dream of wearing such a thing. One day Zora telephoned Godmother and said, “Godmother, were you at the window sending me signs at 5:00 a.m.? I got the vibrations.” Of course, Zora had been in bed asleep at the time, for she would habitually stay up half the night telling hoodoo stories.
And one night, while they were both in the only bed in Zora’s room, Zora asked Louise if she was interested in homosexuality. Louise didn’t sleep the entire night.
Is it possible that Zora fell in love with Louise during those long days and nights working, talking, and sleeping together? The outsize role that Louise would come to play in the breakup of Zora and Langston’s friendship might indicate that Zora’s jealousy may not have been caused as much by Langston favoring Louise as by Louise favoring Langston. Whether Zora had homosexual desires is a complicated question. In the 1930s she was close friends with the bisexual singer and actor Ethel Waters, and later wrote, “I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth. . . . She is shy and you must convince her that she is really wanted before she will open up her tender parts and show you.” Reading this literally, as some have done, as evidence of homosexual desires strikes me, however, as specious—the context of these words in Dust Tracks on a Road is not the least bit suggestive. More seriously, in 1940 she “fell in love with” the thirty-six-year-old white anthropologist Jane Belo—those are the words she used in the initial draft of her autobiography—and some of her letters to Belo are effusive love letters. Yet being “in love,” for Zora, did not necessarily imply sexual desire. When Belo fell in love with the man who would become her third husband, Zora told her that it didn’t change the way she felt, that she was happy for her, and that she had fallen in love with a man herself. Zora married three times but never lived with any of her husbands for more than a few weeks; like Langston, she had few long-term physical relationships. Unlike Langston, though, she did admit to a strong appetite for the opposite sex.
At any rate, Zora, Louise, and Langston spent many hours together, not only in Westfield, but at Louise’s Harlem apartment. They went to parties together, where Zora liked to “perform,” sometimes wearing a different shoe on each foot, and where Langston would tell shaggy-dog stories, fooling people with a long tale with no punch line.
But soon Godmother learned, probably from Locke, that the three were spending too much time having fun and not enough time working, even though, as Langston later wrote, Zora was arranging her “folk material, stacks and stacks of it,” and was planning to dedicate it all to Mason. (After all, it was Mason’s property, even if Zora would be allowed to publish it under her own name. The dedication ran, “This breath from the spiritual life of my people is dedicated to the Mother of the Primitives who, each morning at the coming of the yellow line, takes my people with her to meet the high gods in space.”)
Mason was angry about what Locke told her. She scolded Zora and, in response to a phone call from Langston, sent him a simple note that read, “Dear Boy, What is the Matter? Love, ‘Godmother.’ ”
Langston replied with a long letter that began, “It was immensely cheering to have your little note—and very kind of you to write me—especially when I know how difficult it is physically for you to write.” (Langston seems to be referring to a longer note than the eight-word one just quoted, but no such note from early 1930 is in Langston’s papers, and he was assiduous about keeping her correspondence.) It was clear, however, that despite his profuse apologies he wasn’t quite sure what he was apologizing for.
I had been terribly worried because Zora and I both felt that you had been displeased, or hurt in some way about her work. . . . I do care for you, and when I hurt you through stupidity or error, I cannot bear it. . . . Whatever happened last week to make you unhappy must have been my fault—not Zora’s—because it was I who called you by phone. But maybe I’m all wrong—all tangled up. You will forgive me if I do not understand. Perhaps it is all “nerves” on my part. “Emotional instability” or whatever they call it. But now I feel physically better, a little rested, and it was good to have your dear letter. . . . But, for a week, I had never been more miserable in my life—except after that unfortunate Christmas when you gave me the bag—and I didn’t know how to say thanks—and you were unhappy. That’s why it makes me afraid when you are displeased, because I couldn’t bear for anything like that to happen to you again. I’d rather go back to the hotel kitchens or the freight steamers—and let go of my dreams. But I am not always wise—too often wrong—and I am sorry.
Considering his hurt, it’s not surprising that Langston told neither Mason nor Locke when, in April, a month after he had come back from Cuba, he began to work in earnest with Zora on a play. Indeed, Locke wrote Zora at the end of that month that he was looking forward to working with her to wrap up her folklore manuscript, advising her that Mason “thinks it would be a mistake even to have a scientific tone to the book, so soft pedal all notion of too specific documentation and let loose on the things that you are really best equipped to give—a vivid dramatizing of your material and the personalities back of it.” Zora was also writing to Franz Boas how hard she was working to finish the folklore project. Nobody but Langston expected that at this point, so close to completion, she would turn her attention to the theater.
One impetus for the Hurston-Hughes collaboration was a conversation Langston had had in February with Theresa Helburn, executive director of the Theatre Guild, who complained to him that most of the plays about black people were serious problem dramas, and what was needed was a comedy (but not, of course, of the minstrel-show variety). This echoed a lament common among the black and white literati of the era, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Eugene O’Neill: whites were writing most of the good dramas with African Americans in them because black playwrights were afraid that black audiences wouldn’t appreciate nonminstrelish theater. So Langston and Zora decided to write a folk comedy based on Zora’s story “The Bone of Contention,” written late in 1925 but unpublished until after her death, which was based in turn on a tale she had heard in Eatonville and had often retold during her Harlem days. Mason would later attest that “it was the regular thing for people to ask her for that story.”
A full-length African American nonmusical nonminstrel comedy was not unprecedented: the actor Frank Wilson had written two, Pa Williams’ Gal and Meek Mose, the first having a successful run at the Lafayette Theater on 132nd Street, one of the largest theaters in Harlem, in 1923, and the second having a short run at the Princess Theater on Broadway in 1928. In addition, there was a tradition of “folk plays” performed at churches and small theaters like the Harlem Experimental Theatre, which featured another full-length black-authored comedy in 1929 or 1930, Andrew M. Burris’s You Mus’ Be Bo’n Ag’in. But Zora and Langston felt that the commercial potential for their venture was large in comparison. Theirs was not to be a folk play to be performed on a basement stage or for a short run at the Lafayette, but was aimed squarely at Broadway, where African American musicals had enjoyed huge success, where at least five black-authored nonmusical dramas (not comedies) had already been performed (including the wildly successful Appearances in 1925, the first Broadway play with a mixed-race cast), and where the white playwright Marc Connelly’s all-black drama The Green Pastures was the biggest hit of the era, winning the 1930 Pulitzer Prize.
During their work together, Langston and Louise would be convulsed with laughter as Zora acted out the scenes, using different voices for each character. Louise transcribed, Zora and Langston invented, and the pages flowed—Louise typed around the clock and got so tired she couldn’t lift her arms.
Whether intentionally or not, Zora and Langston ignored Helburn’s advice about steering clear of minstrel tropes. At the center of “The Bone of Contention” was a courtroom scene that could have come straight out of a minstrel-show afterpiece: Jim is accused of stealing a turkey and hitting Dave over the head with a mule bone, and the Baptist and Methodist reverends (acting the part of lawyers) get into a ridiculous argument about whether or not a mule bone is a weapon, invoking the story of Samson using the jawbone of an ass to slaughter the Philistines. Four of the all-black musicals of the 1920s—Darktown Jubilee, Africana, His Honery, and The Judge—had also featured comic courtroom scenes with malaprop-spouting judges like Hurston’s Eatonville mayor Joe Clarke.
The play, at first entitled The Mule-Bone, added several more scenes that did not appear in the story, with less of a minstrel flavor. But with nineteen “principal characters” and another thirty or so “minor characters,” there was little opportunity for an exploration of any of them in depth. While it succeeded in breaking from many of the stereotypes that urban black drama had indulged in for the past few decades, it replaced them with equally hoary stereotypes of Southern folk: Jim and Dave are too lazy to lift anything heavier than a guitar; the women are all either arguing shrews or coquettes; the mayor-cum-judge is a pompous fool and his deputy incompetent and clumsy.
By this point Zora had written at least five other plays, three of which had been published, as well as a number of theatrical sketches; she had seen her work staged on several occasions. She had been a member of W. E. B. Du Bois’s theater company, the Crigwa Players (Crigwa stood for Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists; its spelling was later changed to Krigwa), and apparently helped establish its Little Negro Theatre in Harlem (which was where the Harlem Experimental Theatre, a successor to the Krigwa Players, would stage its plays). Langston had had little experience writing for the theater: he had written only a three-page drama for children called “The Gold Piece” and the beginning of a musical play called The Emperor of Haiti. Zora had long considered herself a playwright, and her output in the genre almost equaled that of her fiction. By this point in his career, Langston, despite his lifelong adoration of the theater, had preferred, in his writing, the solitude of poetry and fiction.
The play itself seemed to draw on all of Zora’s strengths and few of Langston’s. The setting was one she had been immersed in and had written about extensively: an all-black community in the backwoods South; the scenes were full of the kinds of “lies” (tall tales) that fill the pages of her work; the comedy in it is completely characteristic of her writing at the time. Langston would later describe to his lawyer the composition of the play as follows: “I would do the construction, plot, whatever characterization I could, and guide the dialog. Miss Hurston was to put in the authentic Florida color, give the dialog a true Southern flavor, and insert many excellent turns of phrase and ‘wise-cracks’ which she had in her mind and among her collections.” Given that the plot and dramatis personae are almost completely derived from Zora’s stories—not only “The Bone of Contention,” but also the 1926 “Eatonville Anthology,” a group of very brief sketches whose characters included Joe Clarke, the mayor and store owner; Daisy Taylor, the town vamp; Mrs. Roberts, the “pleading woman”; Lum Boger, the marshall; Elijah Mosely and Walter Thomas, two “village wags”; and a few others, all of them real Eatonville residents—the first part of Langston’s description seems disingenuous at best. Langston claimed to have suggested, over Hurston’s objections, changing the main cause of the dispute between Dave and Jim from an argument over who shot a turkey to a fight over Daisy, thus providing the occasion for the third act, in which Dave, Jim, and Daisy are the only characters on stage. But even if that were the case, Daisy herself was a real person Zora had known in Eatonville, whose persona she had already established in “Eatonville Anthology.” The dialogue, all in dialect, is completely characteristic of Zora: while in Langston’s novel Not Without Laughter and his play Mulatto (written a few months later), the characters speak in minstrel-derived dialect like “I’s gwine,” in The Mule-Bone they say “I’m goin’.” Zora admitted that Langston had come up with the idea of setting the third act on a railroad track. It’s also easy to believe his assertion that he suggested making Dave and Jim best friends, Dave a dancer and Jim a guitarist, and eliminating the turkey from the plot. But what else he contributed is an open question. The early notes for the play are in Langston’s handwriting, but many of his ideas (such as having Daisy Taylor be a new woman in town) were not used in later drafts. (In one draft, Daisy has been to Harlem and comes back to Eatonville to a warm welcome, thus linking her experience with Zora’s; but subsequent drafts bring her back to the original portrayal in “Eatonville Anthology.”) In The Big Sea, Langston stated, “I plotted out and typed the play based on her story, while she authenticated and flavored the dialogue and added highly humorous details.” Zora’s recollection would turn out to be quite different.
Much later, Langston remembered, “Zora, a very gay and lively girl [she was hardly a girl, even if Langston believed she was only thirty], was seriously hemmed in in village-like Westfield. . . . She was restless and moody, working in a nervous manner. And we were both distressed at the growing depression—hearing of more and more friends and relatives losing jobs and becoming desperate for lack of work.” Indeed, when Zora finally visited her old haunts in Harlem at the end of May, she wrote her old friend Larry Jordan, “Some of my friends are all tired and worn out—looking like death eating crackers.”
Langston, Zora, and Louise were much better off than most, with stipends from Mason continuing to flow at $150 per month for Langston and Louise and $200 for Zora. They often borrowed money from each other: on May 4, Langston lent fifteen dollars to Zora, who paid it back five days later, and on May 20, Zora bought Louise dinner, typing paper, and a new typewriter ribbon.
Louise was being paid by Mason for typing Zora’s folklore manuscript, not for typing a play, so Langston felt that she should get some additional recompense for her stenographic contributions and proposed that they split the royalties three ways. Zora objected, and the next day offered to pay Louise five dollars a day—a generous amount for the era. According to Zora, Louise responded to Langston, as if the suggestion was his, “Pay me, Langston! No, I don’t want a thing now, but when it goes over, then you all can take care of me then”; Louise later confirmed that she had indeed offered to wait for payment until the play should be produced. Perhaps this was merely a way for Louise to pleasantly delay compensation, but Zora took it as a
clear sign that Langston and Louise had come to an agreement that, in principle, Louise should be financially rewarded for her work if the play took off. Zora could not wrap her head around this principle. After all, she reasoned, has a typist ever shared in the proceeds of a creative work? Zora had already signed away her authorial rights to Godmother; now Langston was proposing to sign some more away to Louise. Langston then came up with the idea of having Louise act as their business manager. “That struck me as merely funny,” Zora would write to Langston the following January. “With all the experienced and capable agents on Broadway, I should put my business in the hands of some one who knows less about the subject than I.”
The matter was soon settled, however. Zora and Langston phoned Godmother and told her about the play in order to clear up the question of Louise’s compensation. She asked them, as she later wrote in her notebook, “not to go on with the play[,] to put it aside as it would conflict and interfere with Zora’s completing the real work she was doing[,] that her book must get ahead.” They could have expected such a reply, given Mason’s objections to their earlier plan to write an opera.
Somehow that phone conversation with Godmother solved the problem of compensating Louise—most likely, Godmother increased Louise’s allowance. As a result, Louise would no longer have anything to do with handling the play’s production. That would be left up to its authors, who were anxious to make of it a grand success.
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Shortly afterwards, in late May 1930, Langston visited Godmother. He wrote in The Big Sea, “I knew that my friend and benefactor was not happy because, for months now, I had written nothing beautiful.” In fact, with the exception of his contributions to The Mule-Bone, he had written nothing since he’d completed Not Without Laughter in February, and during the years he’d been working on the novel, he had written very little poetry. “So I asked kindly to be released from any further obligations to her, and that she give me no more money, but simply let me retain her friendship and good will that had been so dear to me. That I asked to keep. But there must have been only the one thread binding us together. When that thread broke, it was the end.”