by Yuval Taylor
It was my hope that the New Year would open for you with Alamari in the lead. No weakness making shadows on your life and activities.
Of course you have realized why I did not send the check as by mere accident it came to me that you had gone and where you were.
Dear child, what am I to believe, what am I to think under these circumstances?
By now, though, Langston was resigned to his fate. His friendship with Godmother appeared to be over.
His friendship with Zora, though, was about to take center stage in a remarkably dramatic turn.
9
WINTER 1931
A Miasma of Untruth
Henry Louis Gates Jr. has described the contretemps that occurred over the course of nineteen days in late January and early February 1931 as “the most notorious literary quarrel in African-American cultural history.” But part of its notoriety may be due to how baffling the sequence of events can appear. The “quarrel” ended up involving literary agents and lawyers and theater impresarios; Louise Thompson, Alain Locke, and Charlotte Mason; criss-crossing cross-country correspondence; a play with three different names and two different copyrights; police misconduct, a jail visit, and threats of legal action; numerous attempts at reconciliation; and a final scene of such drama it could be the basis of a play fully the equal of the one its protagonists had written. If The Mule-Bone was Zora and Langston’s child, the fight over its fate was their epic custody battle.
But there’s also a truly simple version of this terribly complex tale. It appears in Zora’s folklore collection, Mules and Men, published three years later. Imagine Langston as a dog whose bark sounds like “ours,” Zora as a cat whose meow sounds like “my ham,” and The Mule-Bone as the leg of a pig . . .
De dog and de cat used to live next door to one ’nother and both of ’em loved ham. Every time they git a chance they’d buy a slice of ham.
One time both of ’em got holt of a li’l extry change so de dog said to de cat, “Sis Cat, we both got a li’l money, and it would be fine if bofe of us could buy a ham apiece. But neither one of us ain’t got enough money to buy a whole ham by ourselves. Why don’t we put our money together and buy us a ham together?”
“Aw right, Brer Dawg. T’morrer bein’ Sat’day, le’s we go to town and git ourselves a ham.”
So de next day they went to town and bought de ham. They didn’t have no convenience so they had to walk and tote it. De dawg toted it first and he said as he walked up de road wid de ham over his shoulder, “Ours! Ours! Ours! Our ham!”
After a while it was the cat’s time to tote de meat. She said, “My ham, my ham, my ham.” Dawg heard her but he didn’t say nothin’.
When de dawg took it agin he says, “Ours, ours, our ham!” Cat toted it and says, “My ham, my ham.”
Dawg says, “Sis Cat, how come you keep on sayin’ ‘My ham’ when you totes our meat. Ah always say, ‘Our ham.’ ”
De Cat didn’t turn him no answer, but every time she toted de ham she’d say “My ham” and ever time de dawg toted it he’d say “Ours.”
When they was almost home, de cat was carryin’ de ham and all of a sudden she sprung up a tree and set up there eatin’ up de ham. De dawg did all he could to stop her, but he couldn’t clim’ and so he couldn’t do nothin’ but bark. But he tole de cat, “You up dat tree eatin’ all de ham, and Ah can’t git to you. But when you come down ahm gointer make you take dis Indian River for uh dusty road.”
Perhaps, like the dog and the cat, Langston and Zora were never meant to be friends, being of fundamentally different species . . .
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In early January 1931, Langston attended a performance of a play put on by his old friends Rowena and Russell Jelliffe, a white couple who ran the Karamu Theatre in Cleveland and directed an amateur black theatrical troupe called the Gilpin Players. Langston had known them from his high-school days; the Jelliffes had taken him in for a period when his mother had left town, and he had shared his first poems with them. After the performance at their Little Theatre, Mrs. Jelliffe told Langston that the Players were considering a new play called The Mule-Bone written by a New York woman. Mrs. Jelliffe had not yet seen the script, but the Samuel French agency had offered it to the Players for the annual downtown production.
Back in October 1930, not long after the Hedgerow Players incident, and perhaps inspired by it, Zora had copyrighted the play under the title De Turkey and de Law in her name alone. (This version would not see print until 2008, when it was included in Zora’s Collected Plays.) Even after copyrighting it, Zora continued to work on it, excising, as best she could, whatever she considered Langston’s contributions.
De Turkey and de Law was Zora’s first full-length dramatic work; she had written a large number of short plays and sketches and one musical comedy (Meet the Momma, an immature effort). It is a fully fledged, well-rounded, and effective drama, by far her most mature theatrical opus thus far. The story is simple: Jim and Dave, long-time friends, are competing for the attention of Daisy, and each promises to shoot her a turkey; Dave kills it but Jim knocks him on the head with a bone of old man Brazzle’s dead mule, the orneriest animal in local history; Jim takes the turkey, and tells Daisy that he shot it; a trial follows, in which Jim is sentenced to be run out of town; and finally the two friends are reconciled. The first act, digressive and casual, takes place on Joe Clarke’s store porch in Eatonville; it consists of a series of games: first a children’s game, chick mah chick mah craney crow, a Southern variation of the widespread hawk-and-chickens counting game; then checkers; a card game resembling whist; the game-like pursuit of buying treats for women; and, through it all, variations on what Zora always called “lying,” or telling tall tales. Even its climactic moment—Dave’s return from his turkey hunt without a turkey but with a head wound—is underplayed, Zora eschewing the melodrama in which she had indulged in Color Struck, Spears, and her dramatization of the story of Ham, The First One. The second act is a showcase for the dozens: most of it consists of squabbling between the town’s Baptists and Methodists. Set outside of and then inside the Baptist church, which doubles as the courthouse, the act is dominated by the women on opposing sides challenging each other to fight. The trial finally gets moving, but is repeatedly interrupted by more insults; at its crux, as it turns out, is the technical question of whether a mule bone is a weapon or not. Reverend Simms, the Methodist, claims it isn’t, but Reverend Singletary, the Baptist, proves it is from the fact that Samson killed three thousand people with the jawbone of an ass. Jim is convicted of using a deadly weapon on Dave and sentenced to exile. In the third act, Jim meets Daisy as he’s leaving town and Daisy tells him she’ll go with him if he’ll find himself a job, Dave appears as well, both agree that they’d rather live without her than work for white folks like she does, and they go back to town together. In comparison with the first two acts, the third is somewhat tame because only three people are on stage rather than the whole town. Yet there’s not a dull line in the entire play, and it is, in my opinion, despite the stereotypes and stock characters, the closest Zora ever came to writing a dramatic masterpiece, outshining not only her earlier efforts but her later plays Spunk and Polk County. It’s a shame that Zora’s copyrighted version has never been staged, and that her subsequent revisions to it have been lost.
Zora had rewritten this October version before giving it to Mason and Van Vechten for their opinion in November. Zora wrote Van Vechten, “Langston and I started out together on the idea of the story I used to tell you about in Eatonville, but being so much apart from rush of business, I started all over again while in Mobile and this is the result of my work alone.” Van Vechten, believing her, and liking the play, had given it to Lawrence Langner, head of the Theatre Guild in New York, without telling her. The Guild turned it down, but an official there, Barrett Clark, who was an employee of Samuel French, a theatrical rights and publication company, had then sent it, on his own initiative and without consulting Van
Vechten or Zora, to the Gilpin Players. It was no longer called De Turkey and de Law, though. Either Zora or someone else had changed the title back to The Mule-Bone.
Langston was astonished to hear of the play. Before the script actually arrived in Cleveland, he wrote to Zora, but didn’t send the letter. Then, after seeing the script on January 16, he wrote to Van Vechten, asking his advice. “Is there something about the very word theatre that turns people into thieves?” he asked him.
The next day, completely coincidentally, Louise Thompson arrived in Cleveland, having been employed by the American Interracial Seminar to improve relations between the races. The reason for her visit had nothing to do with Langston, but she visited him anyway. She then met with the Jelliffes, with whom she was already friendly, and backed up Langston’s assertion of authorship. The same day, the Gilpin Players received the play, and Langston saw it. It was apparently Zora’s version of all three acts (the first act had two different endings to choose from), along with an earlier version of the third act. Langston thought Zora’s improvements to the first act were ill-considered, and called her version, in a letter to Van Vechten, “messed-up . . . a grand tangle . . . an amusing comedy spoiled.”
The following day, January 18, Langston talked to Zora on the phone. She told Langston truthfully that she had no idea the manuscript had ever left Van Vechten’s hands, did not know how it had arrived in Cleveland, and was not at all enthusiastic about the Gilpin Players putting it on, since they were an amateur troupe. But she wouldn’t talk about the authorship question on the phone. Instead she wrote him a long letter that day, in which she explained why she had broken with him:
Now Langston, let us have a heart to heart chat about this play business. Please believe that what I am saying is absolutely sincere. I mean every word, so that you can bank on it.
In the beginning, Langston, I was very eager to do the play with you. ANYthing you said would go over big with me. But scarcely had we gotten under way before you made three propositions that shook me to the foundation of myself. First: That three-way split with Louise. No Langston, nobody has in the history of the world given a typist an interest in a work for typing it. . . . I do object to having my work hi-jacked. There is no other word for it. I don’t see how, even if in your magnificent gallantry you had offered it, she could have accepted it. . . .
Then your argument that if we paid her money, that it ought to be something fancy. I still don’t follow your reasoning. First you give me no credit for intelligence at all. Knowing the current prices for typists, you must despise my mental processes to have broached the subject at all. You know what you said, so I don’t need to go into that.
Then when these had failed you come forward with the Louise-for-business-manager plan. . . .
Now about the play itself. It was my story from beginning to end. It is my dialogue; my situations. But I am not concerned about that. Langston, with God as my judge, I don’t care anything about the money it might make nor the glory. I’d be willing to give it all to you off hand. But the idea of you, LANGSTON HUGHES, trying to use the tremendous influence that you knew you had with me that some one else might exploit me cut me to the quick. . . .
I told Godmother that I had done my play all by myself, and so I did, and for the reasons stated before. . . . [But] I realized that I could expect you to be promising many things that wouldn’t do me a bit of good [perhaps a reference to Louise, or perhaps to the Hedgerow offer]. That and that only is my reason for going it alone. I haven’t gone happily. Just felt obliged to. I didn’t intend to be evasive. With anyone else but you I could have said a plenty. Would have done so long ago but I have been thinking of you as my best friend for so long, and as I am not in love with anyone, that naturally made you the nearest person to me on earth, and the things I had in mind seemed too awful to say to you, I just couldn’t say them. I tried for a long time to bring the subject up with you, but I just couldn’t. I just kept trying to make a joke of it to myself, but somehow the sentences in my mind wouldn’t laugh themselves off. So now, it is all said.
Zora divulged that she had recently rewritten the first act (again), and asked for some time to think things over. In a postscript, she added, regarding the version she had given Van Vechten, “I don’t think that you can point out any situations or dialogue that are yours. You made some suggestions, but they are not incorporated in the play.”
Langston sent his letter to Zora on the same day and they crossed each other. Only the end of it survives: “I’d also immensely like to know your attitude about our collaboration on the play. You were so strange and evasive the last time I saw you that I didn’t know what you were about. Would you mind explaining it all to me?” Then, on the 19th, without consulting his coauthor, and before receiving her letter, Langston copied his versions of acts one and three and Zora’s version of act two and sent it to the US Copyright office to be copyrighted in his name, although he acknowledged Zora’s coauthorship on the title page, which read, “THE MULE-BONE / A COMEDY OF NEGRO LIFE IN / THREE ACTS / BY / LANGSTON HUGHES and ZORA HURSTON.” He received a copyright, despite the fact that the entire play had already been copyrighted by Zora alone, perhaps because the different titles of the two versions gave the registrar no indication that the work had been copyrighted earlier. At some point over the next few days, Langston prepared an edition for the Gilpin Players that lightly revised his version of the play but excised the street scene that opened act two, and this is the version that would, in 1991, be published and produced as Mule Bone.
Mule Bone’s second and third acts are quite similar to those of De Turkey and de Law. Zora had changed the first act to conform more closely to her 1925 short story “The Bone of Contention,” reintroducing the turkey, which had been absent from the original first act, having the fight take place offstage rather than in front of Joe Clarke’s store, and more richly characterizing the female characters. In attempting to excise Langston’s contributions, Zora had transformed it from a somewhat aimless cacophony into a tightly structured presentation. But Langston went back to what must have been the original version, with no turkey in sight, and scrubbed all mention of the turkey from the second and third acts. It seems that Zora had not yet gotten around to changing her version of the third act from the original very much when she filed for copyright the previous October, but by the time she sent the play to Van Vechten in November, the third act was quite different (according to both Langston and Zora)—and is now lost. At any rate, the second and third acts of Mule Bone were lightly rewritten—by either Zora, Langston, or both—after the October version (De Turkey and de Law), since the few differences between them appear to be polishing rather than revision.
Why was Langston so eager to protect his authorship of a play that he probably had little to do with, that he hadn’t worked on in months, and that conflicted in a fundamental manner with his present political and social concerns? While he may have felt that the play was an unparalleled theatrical introduction to black folklore, his overriding motive seems to have been his intense devotion to theatrical performance—and its potential financial rewards. Langston had not yet had any success in the theatrical world, but ever since he was little he had constantly dreamed of it, and would remain devoted to the theater for the rest of his life. His longtime friends the Jelliffes were planning to produce a play he had had a hand in, which would be his first produced play. He was not going to give up that chance without a fight. Moreover, he had worked on it for months, and the play would probably not have been written without his efforts. He must have felt proud of it, despite his turn away from this sort of subject matter.
The same day he applied for his copyright, January 19, he made an attempt to patch things up with Zora. He argued that the production wouldn’t be some no-name amateur production but instead would garner significant publicity, appropriate to “the first Negro folk-comedy ever written.” (Langston likely wasn’t aware of You Mus’ Be Bo’n Ag’in, though he would shortly l
earn all about it.) He argued that the Gilpin Players were a well-established and highly regarded troupe whose performances were attended by “New York scouts and agents.” “Let’s not be niggers about the thing, and fall out before we’ve even gotten started,” he wrote to Zora. (Zora wrote back jestingly, “How dare you use the word ‘nigger’ to me. You know I don’t use such a nasty word. I’m a refined lady and such a word simply upsets my conglomeration.” The sarcasm is clear—she used the word frequently, even in a letter she wrote to Mason the same day as her reply to Langston.)
Langston also wrote to Van Vechten that day, outlining the situation as he saw it, and adding, “This morning I got some legal advice on the matter and with all the proof I have: a file of notes in my own handwriting, pages of constructions and situations, carbons of the first draft, and the testimony of the stenographer who worked with us for three or four weeks, Zora can certainly do nothing with MULE-BONE without my permission. Why she should have set out to do so is beyond me.” (It seems not to have occurred to Langston that he had done the same thing in showing the play to Jasper Deeter the previous September, nor that he had just copyrighted the work without asking his coauthor.) He begged Van Vechten to see Zora and to talk with the Guild, explaining that time was of the essence as the Gilpin Players had a two-week season of performances beginning February 15 and wanted to put on some version of the play on that date. (To be specific, the Players planned to open the play under the auspices of the Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer at a downtown theater for two performances and then move to the Karamu Theatre on Central Avenue for five nights; there would be other performances for special groups like librarians or art museum patrons; and then there would possibly have been a week at the prestigious Ohio Theatre downtown.)