by Yuval Taylor
On June 15, Langston wrote Godmother again, still trying to appease her.
I love you, Godmother. I need you. You can help me more than anyone on earth. Forgive me for the things I do not know, the things I cannot fight alone, the things I haven’t understood. You know better than anyone else how stupid and unwise I am, how I must battle the darkness within myself. No one else would help me. No one else would care as you care. No one else would even try to understand. The door is never closed between us, Godmother. Only the shadow of my self stands in the way now. May the sea, the summer, the sun, and my new realization of what goodness means (through your ever generous kindness and your dear letters) sweep the path clean again.
I shall save twenty-five dollars a month from what you have given me for the summer. The remainder I shall use as wisely as I know how. It will last me until October. Forgive me, but I cannot keep any more accounts. The harder I try, the less I can bear it. I can’t get rid of the feeling of my father and his eternal bookkeeping—for he had nothing that anybody would want except money and land—nothing else at all to make him happy—and nothing worth giving to those he wanted to love.
But the door was closed between them. Mason refused to see him. She sent him a telegram that month: “UNDER PRESENT CONDITIONS IT IS USELESS FOR ME TO UNDERTAKE ANY MORE THAN I HAVE PROMISED.”
Langston tried yet again. He sent her the first copy of Not Without Laughter with a note that read, “For the beauty of your eyes that first night at Carnegie Hall when I looked down on you; for the love of your hands on my own; for the strength of your voice; for the truth of soul, and the great freedom of your heart—I send you today my love to greet you.”
Godmother’s response was equally emotional, but dark (referring to herself in the third person was typical of her letters). “As the sun sets on the western slopes of Godmother’s life her spirit holds in its eternal belief the morning star that Sandy [the protagonist of Not Without Laughter, based on Langston as a child] was destined to carry into the hearts of his people.” A long metaphorical passage ensues in which Godmother urges “Sandy” to “cling close to the parapet and watch day and night for Alamari’s spear to catch the light of the Great Spirit” (Godmother often called Langston “Alamari”—the name of a Guinean war drum and also of the dance around it—in her letters) and to “call him higher and higher until he hears your whole race and feels them standing in that mountain of Transfiguration.” And then she adds, “Dear Little Sandy, I feel so badly that you should be hampered in any way through the lack of vision of those who have the privilege of opening the door of your material appearance in this world. I can not bear the disfigurement of your ‘new suit of clothes.’ ”
David Levering Lewis has written of Not Without Laughter, “Since Toomer, no Harlem writer had written as beautifully about the vices and virtues of ordinary Afro-Americans and the truths governing their lives; (except for [Nella Larsen’s] Quicksand) it would not be equalled or surpassed until Zora Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine four years later.” Yet neither Langston nor contemporaneous critics (with a few exceptions) held it in high regard—as he later wrote in The Big Sea, “I had wanted [my characters’] novel to be better than the published one I had given them; I hated to let them down.” And indeed, the novel seems to lack an emotional core, a driving spirit. It reads almost as if it were written out of obligation. Novelist Angela Flournoy hints at this when she writes that Not Without Laughter was “the novel both Hughes and his readers knew he had to write, coming as it did on the heels of Hughes’s two well-received poetry collections” and that “Hughes takes an anthropological approach to setting and character development.”
Meanwhile, Langston had heard that Mason had been spending time with Zora and Alain Locke. What he didn’t hear was how they had been talking about him—in no flattering terms.
Langston continued going through withdrawal. He wrote to Mason on August 15:
I ask you to help the gods to make me good, to make me clean, to make me strong and fine that I might stand aflame before my people, powerful and wise, with eyes that can discern the ways of truth. I am nothing now—no more than a body of dust without wisdom, having no right to see. Physically and spiritually I pass through the dark valley, a dryness in my throat, a weariness in my eyes, fingers twisted into strange numb shapes when I wake up at night, the mind troubled in the face of things it does not understand, the mouth silent because there is no one to talk to, the sweet air burning the lungs, the hot sun cold to the body. Too far away the spear of Alamari. Too far away the gentle hands of Sandy’s faith. If you understand, perhaps it will not be so hard to climb toward the hills again. . . . You have been continually in my thoughts this summer, and continually I’ve been trying to puzzle out what happened between us, and what I must do to keep it from ever happening again. We could not bear it. Love has no armor against itself.
Mason did not reply.
▼ ▼ ▼
The breakup with Mason was likely the instigation for Langston’s burst of poetry in the second half of 1930. He had not published a single poem since November 1928; suddenly, starting in June and continuing through December, he published thirteen new poems, including some of his best yet. “Dear Lovely Death” and its sister poem “Tower” were perhaps the darkest poems of his career, treating death in one instance as an agent of change and in the other as a triumphant pause, and using elevated, archaic diction in doing so—it was as if Langston were condensing Shelley’s “Adonais” into just a few shattered phrases. “Afro-American Fragment” beautifully mourned his now discarded primitivism; it ends:
Subdued and time-lost
Are the drums—and yet
Through some vast mist of race
There comes this song
I do not understand
This song of atavistic land,
Of bitter yearnings lost
Without a place—
So long,
So far away
Is Africa’s
Dark face.
His first poetic foray into world politics, the radically scabrous “Merry Christmas,” followed soon thereafter, each tightly rhymed verse imparting ironic holiday cheer to a different locus of oppression, corruption, or war.
For over two months, from early July to late September, Langston did not hear from Mason. He worked on a tragedy, Cross (later called Mulatto), but he was miserable.
In 1929, the Communist Party had decided to prioritize the struggles of black Americans, and white organizers began to appear in Harlem and other black communities. As the activist Nancy Cunard put it in the early 1930s, “The Communists are the most militant defenders and organizers that the Negro race has ever had”; while that might be an overstatement considering the history of the abolitionist movement, it was certainly true of the era in which she wrote. The Party would be vigorous not just in defending the Scottsboro Boys (nine black teenagers from Alabama falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in 1931) but on all fronts: it organized workers, dealt with employment problems, prevented lynchings, and took Jim Crow laws to court. By comparison, the NAACP and the Urban League were diffident and/or ineffectual.
So it should not have surprised anyone when, late in 1930, Langston turned—perhaps for solace, perhaps out of pure anger not just at his fate but at that of his fellow workingmen—to Communism. In March and April 1925 he had published some poems about the plight of the black proletariat in the Communist publication Workers Monthly, but he had never before been affiliated with a Communist organization; now he joined the John Reed Club (a Communist Party–backed group of leftist artists, writers, and intellectuals) and, in September, the masthead (as one of many contributing editors) of New Masses, a CP-backed Marxist magazine. In December, New Masses published, along with his “Merry Christmas,” an open letter from Langston, “Greetings to Soviet Workers”: “I send my greetings to the great Soviet ideal, to its true realization in your own land, and to its sunrise hope for the downtrodden an
d oppressed everywhere on earth.”
▼ ▼ ▼
In August, Zora had sent Langston a postcard from Alabama that read, in part, “Dreamed last night that you were working on the play” (The Mule-Bone). She had kept to herself any reaction she might have had to his break with Mason, and this was her first note to him since then. Clearly she was having some mixed feelings about having left him two months before. But Langston wasn’t working on the play at all. Instead, he was trying to procure a production of it.
He had, in June, visited Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild, the woman who had first suggested that he write an African American comedy. He told her that as soon as the play was ready he’d send it to her.
Then, in September, he visited Moylan, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles from Philadelphia, where a former actor and theatrical impresario named Jasper Deeter had invited him to be a playwright in residence for his troupe, the Hedgerow Players. Deeter, a white man, had played Smithers in the original production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in Provincetown, and it was he who had convinced O’Neill to cast a black actor in the title role rather than a white actor wearing blackface. He formed the Hedgerow Theater Company, America’s first repertory theater, in 1923. Langston showed act one of The Mule-Bone to Deeter, who “seemed to think it would be a grand play, and gave me a little advice on some bits of dialog, etc.” Langston then contacted Zora by telephone to share the good news and to ask about act two. According to an account that Zora gave Godmother at the end of January, it was at this point that she told Langston that the play was hers now, that he had contributed no dialogue to it, that she had thrown out the one suggestion he had made—that of setting act three on a railroad track—had finished the play herself, and would not be sending him any of it (in fact, at this point the third act was still set on a railroad track). Again according to Zora, Langston replied that his friend Mr. Spingarn was a lawyer, and a good one. Given Langston’s apparent bafflement over subsequent events, though, I seriously doubt that Zora staked out her claim to the play at this point; more likely, she kept her feelings about Langston’s initiative to herself and evaded his request.
Ever since she’d left Westfield in June, Langston had been trying to talk with Zora about the play, but to no avail. In October, he asked Louise to try to get in touch with her, but Zora’s line was disconnected. In November, Zora told Godmother that she would be returning to Manhattan to “see what a certain person has to say to me,” and finally consented to meet him. But she failed to show up—more than once. Langston may have been exaggerating when he related his frustration to his lawyer Arthur Spingarn in January, but these are the (self-serving) details he offered, which were almost the same as those he offered Van Vechten around the same time:
When I came back to New York in November and attempted to work with Miss Hurston, saying that we should put the play together and type out the final version, she gave me an appointment for work, but when I came, was not at home. Other appointments followed, but always she either was not home or had to go out at once as soon as I arrived; had no copies of the play in the house to work on; said she was terribly busy and terribly nervous and couldn’t work anyway; said she thought we ought to put the turkey back in the story and cut down on the girl-interest; finally gave me a copy of what she had done in the South, but demanded it back almost at once before I could make a copy of it for myself; said she had to go back South again almost at once; was not home for the last appointment that she gave me—and I have not seen her since. (That I believe was early December.)
Langston professed to be baffled by her coldness, though it’s hard to believe he had no inkling of the reason. He did not tell Spingarn that he’d shown the play to Deeter without first asking for her permission to do so, which was likely one reason for Zora’s evasiveness. She may have decided that he had tried to steal her play. Nor did he reveal that the copy of the play that Zora showed him had her name on it alone, which prompted him to sheepishly ask her why there couldn’t be two versions of it.
When Zora decided to deny Langston’s authorship, sometime in September or early October, she may have been mulling it over for months. Perhaps it had occurred to her as early as May, when Langston had suggested that Louise should be entitled to some of the proceeds. Or it may have been the Hedgerow offer, which has been downplayed in subsequent accounts of the Mule-Bone affair, that inspired her.
For some time now, Zora had, with the support of Langston and Carl Van Vechten, envisioned The Mule-Bone as her big act, her first grand work of real consequence. Until that point, her work had been published mainly in black newspapers and magazines, and her contract with Mason prevented her from publishing any of the folklore research she’d been collecting the last few years. Since her theatrical work had never been produced, a staging could be her opportunity to make a real name for herself. For Langston to have shown this work with so much commercial potential to a small troupe in Moylan, Pennsylvania, without even asking her may have seemed like a slap in the face—or worse, an attempt at sabotage.
▼ ▼ ▼
Meanwhile Louise, despite doing no work for Mason, Langston, or Zora, kept getting her monthly $150 checks. Finally she found a job with the Congregational Education Society, handling race and labor relations for the Congregational Church. She wrote to Godmother, remarking that her contracted year was almost over and that she had another job, and wanted to know what Godmother had in mind for her.
She received a “curt note” from Godmother in reply, who was in a “very secluded” posh Lexington Avenue hotel. She went to see her there on September 22. Cornelia Chapin answered the door and showed her in. “I went into the room where Mrs. Mason was sitting in the corner like Queen Victoria. She even had on purple velvet. She beckoned to me, and I went over and said, ‘How do you do, Mrs. Mason,’ and I reached over, and took her hand—and this infuriated her. She didn’t even ask me to sit down. As I stood there before her, she went into a tirade. She called me everything but a child of God. She didn’t swear, but her words were even more insulting. She said I wasn’t a ‘true Negro’ and that I had betrayed her.”
Louise offered additional details about this “short but excruciating” meeting in a letter she wrote Langston a week later. As Mason told her, “I had failed utterly, all Negroes had failed utterly and she was through with us. . . . Miss Chapin threw in her rather nasty amens to everything Mrs. Mason said.”
When Godmother stopped for breath, Louise asked her, “Well, what do you want me to do with the typewriter and desk, Mrs. Mason?”
Mason responded, “You don’t mean that. You have no intention of giving that back to me.” Then she seemed to get a second wind, and lit into her again.
Louise answered, “Is that what you really think of me? If you have nothing further to say, I’ll bid you good afternoon.”
“I had never had such a humiliating experience,” Louise wrote. “All of the name-calling in my childhood had not prepared me for this debasing moment. I walked around the block; I didn’t know where I was.”
Louise had no idea why Godmother had disparaged her, though she suspected Zora was somehow involved. She probably did not know, either, that Alain Locke had recently scuttled an appointment for her as a secretary to a new Howard University research council on the grounds of her supposed “disloyalty” to Mason, “especially about the acceptance of four months’ checks without even offering to do any work.” She would later characterize Mason as racist, “indulging her fantasies of Negroes,” and lashing out at anyone who acted “white.” (Aaron Douglas would report similar experiences.)
▼ ▼ ▼
Mason, who was now seventy-six years old, was on the verge of giving up not just on Langston and Louise but on her entire Negro project. She had written to Locke in August, “I am helping myself forget the discouraging things that have fallen on me from the Negroes by talking about my Indian days.” Even though she had read Zora’s latest draft of her folklore manuscript an
d called it “excellent,” she soon started talking with her about reducing her monthly salary from $200 to $100, and told Zora to sell her car. And she was not at all pleased with Langston’s latest political poems.
On November 11, Zora wrote to Godmother, “I am beginning to feel fagged. The weariness is beginning to break thru my subconsciousness & call itself to my attention.” She sent the latest version of The Mule-Bone to Carl Van Vechten on November 14, calling it her “first serious whack at the play business,” and telling him that she had discarded Langston’s work on it and that it was now her work alone. Even after sending it to Van Vechten, she worked on it some more; in late November she rewrote and polished the first act. She also finally showed the play to Godmother, who commented that “the play has great wit and great possibilities of local color. . . . Perfect Negro!”
Low on funds because of the reduction of her stipend, Zora was now living in her sister Sarah’s home in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where she continued to write: besides her new version of The Mule-Bone, she would work over the next two years on a collection of Caribbean folktales, Barracoon (her book about Cudjo Lewis, which would not be published until 2018), and Mules and Men, her folklore manuscript. Godmother was gradually loosening her grip on Zora’s writing, and Knopf editor Harry Block wanted to see something more creative than simply transcribed folktales.
Mason’s generosity increased around Christmas, when she raised Zora’s stipend to $150, but the two of them continued to exchange complaints and hurt feelings mingled with Zora’s sycophancy and Mason’s mean-spiritedness. Mason even asked Zora if she’d spent Christmas with Langston; it’s unlikely that she was being sarcastic.
Mason wrote to Langston several times in December, warm and friendly letters, as if nothing had happened between them; perhaps she missed his company. But Langston then left the New York area and settled with his mother in Cleveland without telling Godmother, which she of course regarded as another slap in the face. She wrote him on January 10: