by Yuval Taylor
Van Vechten meanwhile wrote to Langston that he was not surprised by Zora’s behavior. “Even if she has entirely rewritten the play in a version of her own,” he argued, “she had no moral right to do so without getting your permission.” The next day (January 20), Zora came for a visit, where, as he wrote Langston, she “cried and carried on no end about how fond she was of you, and how she wouldn’t have had this misunderstanding for the world.” (Van Vechten may have exaggerated Zora’s contrition in order to help heal a rift he saw himself as having helped cause; twelve years later he remembered Zora’s display of emotion quite differently—“She had a tantrum in my library,” he wrote Langston, “and threw herself on the floor and screamed and yelled! Bit the dust in fact.”) Carl communicated Zora’s reservations about having the play produced in Cleveland and strongly advised Langston not to do so: “A stock production will be very dangerous and might kill the chances of the play completely. . . . I have an excellent opportunity to get this play into the hands of [Herman] Shumlin, the producer of Grand Hotel [a successful Broadway play of 1930]. . . . [He] would be furious about a stock production unless he had authorized it.”
▼ ▼ ▼
Back on January 15, Godmother had given Zora a dressing down. According to Mason’s notes, first she grilled Zora—“Have you heard from Langston at all[?] Were you satisfied with Alain about your work[?] . . . Did you have a Christmas party at your own place[?]” They then had an argument about money, which concluded with Godmother telling her, “This is the reason the whole white world says[,] ‘[Y]ou can’t do anything with Negroes. They are unreliable[.]’ ” It’s hard to imagine any words more insulting.
Zora had gotten used to being demeaned by Godmother. But being demeaned by Langston was something else. On the evening of January 20, Zora phoned Godmother and told her everything. According to Mason’s notes, Zora said that Langston and Louise had been having an affair. In addition, Langston had taken her ideas in the past and sold them to Caroline Dudley Reagan for La Révue Negre, the vaudeville show of nine theatrical sketches that introduced Josephine Baker to Paris; he had met with Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild and offered her the play; Louise had demanded a third of the play’s royalties for the typing she’d done; and Langston had been smoking and drinking and spending nights at Louise’s. No evidence exists for any of these complaints; Zora was making things up.
After Langston had fallen out with Mason, Zora, who was utterly dependent on Godmother, may have had no choice but to insist that Langston had nothing to do with the latest version of the play. But Zora’s suggestion of an affair between Louise and Langston, who would remain friends for decades, seems truly improbable, even if Zora believed it. As Louise later said, “If Langston had approached me in another way, I might have been receptive, but he never did. I accepted Langston on that plane, that we were the best of friends and comrades.”
Mason advised Zora to wire Cleveland that the play was in the hands of her literary agent. Zora promised to write Godmother a letter.
Then Langston’s apologetic letter arrived, and suddenly everything changed.
Zora had directed the Samuel French agency to wire the Jelliffes that she had denied them permission to stage The Mule-Bone, and the agency did so that day. But that evening Zora wired her own approval of the performance to the Jelliffes three times, just to be sure. Once they’d received the wires, the Gilpin Players went into production mode.
She also sat down and wrote Langston two letters. “I am in fault in the end and you were in fault in the beginning. I shall freely acknowledge my share at anytime and place. Somehow I don’t mind re-versing myself, especially when it moves me towards pleasanter relationships.” She promised to “write Godmother a letter leaving you in a white light. Not that you have been slandered, but she dotes so on our rock-bottom sincerity that she would be upset to know of a spat, however trivial it might turn out for us.” Of course, she didn’t tell Langston that she had already “slandered” Langston to Mason and told her about the “spat,” and that Godmother was indeed “upset.” Zora also promised to go to Cleveland in a few days, a course of action which the Samuel French editor Barrett Clark had advised her to take, explaining that the play was “so exotic” that a non-New York production was essential to see how well it would work.
“Now get this straight, Langston,” she wrote him in the second letter that evening. “You are still dear to me. I don’t care whom you love nor whom you marry, nor whom you bestow your worldly goods upon. I will never have any feeling about that part. I have always felt that if you had married anyone at all it would make no difference in our relationship. I know that no man on earth could change me towards you.” She then explained why she had left Westfield in June:
Langston, please believe me when I say that my thoughts were too painful to me for me to talk to you. I couldn’t hear myself saying certain unpleasant phrases to you. So I just went off to myself and tried to resolve to have no more friendships. Tears unceasing have poured down inside me.
So I just went off to work the play out alone—carefully not using what was yours. Please believe me when I say the money doesn’t matter. You can have anything I have at any time.
This may be the most loving—and saddest—letter Zora ever wrote to Langston.
But the very same evening, enclosing a copy of this sweet letter, Zora wrote to Mason, “Langston is weak. Weak as water. When he has a vile wretch [Louise] to push him, he gets vile.” She did concede that Langston had come around. “When he is under noble influences like yours, you know how fine he can be. Personally, I think that he has so much in him, that it is worth my swallowing and forgetting if by extending a friendly hand I can bring him back into the fold. I think we are in a spot now to make a grand slam. . . . I don’t want to be unjust to anyone ever. Especially Langston.” She acknowledged Langston’s apology, and said, “Godmother, I am so happy that Langston has taken an honorable view of the thing, that I would give him part.”
Carl Van Vechten was also trying to placate Langston. He wrote him that same day, “What you say about the stenographer . . . is very amusing and I am convinced that this whole situation arises out of some feeling on Zora’s part of which you are wholly unconscious.”
As for Langston, having received Zora’s letter of the 18th, he now (on January 20) replied to her accusations about Louise. He insisted that “Louise has been paid for her work and . . . has, of course, no other interest in the play,” and that he had early on cancelled the idea of Louise having anything to do with the handling of it. “Don’t be absurd about Louise—because you know better than that,” he admonished Zora. He once again offered “to do what I can to get the play in shape for presentation out here, and to work with you at any time or anywhere in the future that will be to the benefit of the play Mule-Bone. I think it would be a great shame for the first Negro comedy to go to pieces on account of selfish or foolish disagreement among us.” He then threatened legal action if Zora should proceed without him. “The play is ours, neither yours nor mine, and I feel it is too good to be lost. . . . You’re an awfully amusing person, Zora.”
The next day, not yet having received Zora’s conciliatory letter, still upset by her accusations about Louise, and acting upon a suggestion from Van Vechten, Langston drafted an eleven-page letter to his lawyer, Arthur Spingarn, offering a compromise: two-thirds of the royalties would go to Zora and one-third to himself. In it he told his version of the complete history of the collaboration between them, and attempted to decisively prove that Zora’s version could not have been entirely her own. (“Maybe she has lost her mind,” he suggested.) Most significantly, he outlined his contributions to the basic plot of the play. In doing so, he lied, claiming that it was he who made Jim a Baptist and Dave a Methodist and that it was he who had the idea of making the entire town split into two camps along religious lines. Those elements were in Zora’s original 1925 story. He asked Spingarn to collect all the evidence, to get in touch with Z
ora, and to ask her to accept his royalty offer.
But then, when Langston received Zora’s conciliatory letter, he was delighted, and told her so. He couldn’t wait to see her in Cleveland.
Meanwhile, Mason received a packet from Zora containing Zora’s “tears unceasing” letter to Langston, her accompanying letter to Mason, a registered letter from Cleveland saying that the Theatre Guild would be interested in a production of the play there as a tryout for a New York production, and Langston’s apologetic letter that, according to Godmother, “gave away his fear of Godmother’s psychic discernment if their storys [sic] about the progress of the play did not agree.” Godmother called Zora in the afternoon to ask if this letter had come after her phone conversation with Zora the previous evening. Zora told her that it had, and added, according to Mason, that Langston had now “threaten[ed] to have the law on” Zora.
This was indeed the case: Langston’s January 20 letter to Zora, the one which called her “an awfully amusing person,” had included the warning, “if you make any further attempts to dispose of any script based on the play which we did together and now called Mule-Bone, it will be a matter for my lawyers and The Author’s Guild, to both of whom I have written full details.” Zora’s receipt of this threat soured everything.
To top it all, the same evening that Mason received Zora’s package, January 21, Langston and a couple of friends were arrested on false pretenses (a cab driver accused them of denting his car) and spent the night in a “bitter cold” jail cell with steel walls and nothing to sleep on or cover themselves with. It was no secret at that time that the Cleveland police had been hassling and arresting African Americans and making them pay fines for no reason.
The following day, Langston wrote to Zora, calling her “my darling,” and opening, “Brazzle’s mule is one ungodly beast. He’s done a mean piece of kicking lately, but I trust once more that the ghost of his dead carcass is ready to repose in piece [sic]! We’re all sorry! Last night in jail with my back turned to the wall, I thought deeply on the subject.” He outlined the royalty arrangement he had suggested to Spingarn and asked her to call him, then concluded, “It’ll be great to see you. Maybe you’ll like this big old dirty town. I hope so. There’s a low-down night club that almost equals the Sugar Cane” (a Harlem joint famous for its narrow, underground entrance and great entertainment).
On January 24, Zora had a meeting with Spingarn. As previously noted, Spingarn had been an NAACP official since 1911; he had defended falsely accused African Americans, expanded voting rights, and worked closely with W. E. B. Du Bois. He showed her the eleven-page letter Langston had written him. She was newly infuriated, and quite rightly so. Spingarn wrote Hughes in her presence, telling him that Zora insisted that he had “grossly exaggerated” his role in the collaboration and that “virtually all” of the play had been her work. Spingarn reminded Langston that Zora had shown Langston the same script as the one that came to Cleveland the previous fall, with her name on it as the sole author, “and that you made no comment on it at the time, except to say, couldn’t there be two versions.” The implication was clear: Langston had already admitted that Zora’s version was hers alone. Zora also told Spingarn forthrightly that Langston’s threat of a lawsuit had “aroused her ire.”
In reply, Langston suggested to Spingarn that he get in touch with Louise to ascertain the facts of the play’s composition. Spingarn then wrote to Langston, “I am sure that [Zora] is at bottom very friendly disposed toward you and that she really has been more hurt by what she thinks is an ungenerous attitude on your part than by anything else.” Louise Thompson, however, had a very different view of the matter, and wrote to Langston, “The only thing I can say is that Zora is crazy, but unfortunately maliciously so.”
One thing that especially hurt Langston was that, according to Spingarn, Alain Locke was now taking Zora’s side, even though he knew nothing whatsoever about the matter—he visited Spingarn on the evening of the 25th and expatiated at length on his belief that Zora was in the right and Langston in the wrong. He also suggested to Mason that Langston was trying to “blackmail” Zora. Locke had been running hot and cold about Langston ever since their dalliance in Italy; most recently, he had visited Langston at Lincoln in April 1929 and had come away full of praise for the way Langston had been handling his controversial senior project on the students’ apathy about the all-white faculty. So Locke’s interference in the matter was quite a surprise, especially because Langston was unaware that Locke even knew that he and Zora had worked on a play together. He wired the professor as soon as he received Spingarn’s letter: “PLEASE PUT ME STRAIGHT ON ZORAS ATTITUDE AND YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF MATTER BY RETURN WIRE COLLECT I AM AFRAID I DON’T UNDERSTAND” and Locke wired back, “CONGRATULATIONS ON THE HARMON AWARD BUT WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT.” (Langston had just received the Federated Council of Churches’ Harmon Gold Award for Literature for Not Without Laughter, which came with a check for four hundred dollars; Locke had nominated him for it.) Langston never forgave him.
On January 26, Langston attended the Gilpin Players’ reading of the first act of The Mule-Bone, and was favorably impressed. “They are mostly working people,” he would write to Zora, “and not many high-hats, as their theatre is located in the heart of the low-down colored district right on Central Avenue.” With the play about to be produced, Langston was getting desperate to patch things up. He wrote two letters to Zora on the 27th. In one, he begged, “Zo darling, whatever your personal feeling toward me may be, let’s not break up what promises to be a good play.” Alluding to Zora’s anger over Louise, he told her that there were plenty of typists in Cleveland, including some male ones (among them likely those who had worked for Langston preparing The Mule-Bone for the Library of Congress and for the Gilpin Players). “I’m not mad. Are you? I’m perfectly willing to be friends again, and awfully sorry about anything I might have done to make you angry.”
On January 29, Rowena Jelliffe received a letter from one of the Gilpin Players, Paul Banks, who was in New York and had called on Zora. Apparently Zora told Banks that Langston had lied about the play, that she had convinced Spingarn of this, that he would no longer represent Langston, that she had Locke on her side, and that she was coming soon to Cleveland but would under no circumstances give Langston any credit for the play. The letter upset Mrs. Jelliffe, who tried to call both Zora and Spingarn, but failed to reach either one. The next day, Jelliffe wrote Spingarn a long letter telling him about the evidence that the play had been cowritten: Louise Thompson’s account of the play’s composition and the work notes for the play in Langston’s handwriting. She told him straight out that she would not produce the play under Zora’s name alone, and emphasized her strong belief in Louise’s integrity. In the meantime, the Plain Dealer announced the forthcoming production of a Negro comedy by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.
Also on January 29, Charlotte Mason wrote a full account of the Mule-Bone contretemps in her journal, almost entirely dependent on the account Zora had given her. As a precis of Zora’s point of view, it’s unmatched. It reveals that Zora had gotten Langston to tell Mason and Cornelia Chapin the plot of the play, but Zora insisted that Langston’s only real contribution to it was the idea of setting the last act on a railroad track. The actual writing of the play, Zora told Godmother, “consisted in her [Zora] staying at her place and doing the work while L. and Louise T. went off to his rooms. When they’d come back L. would say [‘]lets see how much you got done then—that’s fine we’re getting along splendidly.’ ” This contradicts Louise’s account, and is unlikely to be accurate. “This went on for a few days and then Z and L. phoned Godmother and she told them not to go on with the play[,] to put it aside as it would conflict with Zora’s completing the real work she was doing[,] that her book must get ahead. The play was then dropped.” Or so Godmother thought at the time. She went on to describe the rest of the events: Langston’s visit to the Theatre Guild and the Hedgerow Players, his supposed affair
with the still-married Louise Thompson, the contretemps in Cleveland, and Langston’s continual “contrivings and plottings.”
▼ ▼ ▼
Zora arrived in Cleveland on the evening of February 1, Langston’s twenty-ninth birthday (or so he thought). She brought a letter of introduction that Alain Locke had written to Rowena Jelliffe expressing his absolute confidence in Zora and his trust that Jelliffe would share it once she had heard Zora’s story. Locke, who was sure that Louise had been sleeping with Langston and doubtless shared Zora’s jealousy, had promised Mason he would take Zora’s side in any dispute with Langston, and he backed her fully in his letter.
That same evening, the Gilpin Players decided not to perform The Mule-Bone, having heard nothing further from Zora on the matter, and Zora having failed to sign an agreement regarding credit and royalty terms. (In its place, they would shortly stage another of those too-rare beasts—a full-length African American–authored nonmusical comedy—Andrew Burris’s You Mus’ Be Bo’n Ag’in, giving it its final performance.) But they were open to reconsidering their decision.
Langston and Zora met the following day, February 2, at Karamu House. Langston described the meeting to Spingarn the next day.
Miss Hurston’s main grievance seemed to be Miss Thompson. She seemed to feel that by taking the play alone and go[ing] off with it she was thus protecting me and herself from what she chose to call “a gold digger.” I asked her why she did not tell me of her ill feeling in the fall when I tried to resume work with her, and she said she could not bear to tell me. As to the play itself, Miss Hurston agreed that I had some part in its making, and she said she would sign an agreement to work together again jointly with me. . . . [But] Miss Hurston insisted that the play which had been sent to Cleveland under her name had been a “new” play, anyhow, and that “there wasn’t an idea of mine left in it.” . . . Miss Hurston was very nice at this first conference, though, and we agreed that it was all over and settled and that we would sign together for a Gilpin production, should they re-decide to do it.