by Yuval Taylor
The Jelliffes then set up a meeting for the following day. But that meeting ended up taking place at Langston’s mother’s house, since Langston was now under his doctor’s orders to remain in bed there, ill with what was diagnosed as influenza and tonsillitis.
Meanwhile, Zora had discovered that Louise had been in Cleveland before her (on January 17), that she had spoken to the Jelliffes, and that she knew them personally. The only full accounts we have of Zora’s wild reaction to this news are Langston’s, and the harsh light they shine on Zora may well be distorting—or not. At any rate, in his letters to Spingarn and Van Vechten, Langston told his version of what transpired on February 3.
Early in the morning, Zora phoned Rowena Jelliffe and accused her of conspiring with Langston before contacting her. Jelliffe pointed out that this wasn’t going to get settled over a phone call and suggested that they all get together again. So at five in the afternoon, in Langston’s room, Zora, the Jelliffes, Paul Banks, and Langston all gathered.
“She made such a scene as you cannot possibly imagine,” Langston wrote to Van Vechten after the meeting.
It was mostly about Miss Thompson. Zora laid her out. Also laid out the Jelliffe’s [sic]. Also me. She pushed her hat back, bucked her eyes, ground her teeth, and shook manuscripts in my face, particularly the third act which she claims she wrote alone by herself while Miss Thompson and I were off doing Spanish together. (And the way she said Spanish meant something else). [Most likely, Langston had been teaching Spanish to Louise, since he was fluent and she wasn’t.] She admitted that we had worked jointly, and that certain characterizations were mine, but she dared and defied me to put my finger on a line that was my own. One line at the end of the 1st act had been mine, but she took that out, she said. Anyway, she had written a “new” play by herself; she hadn’t come to Cleveland to be made a fool of, nor to submit to any sly tricks such as she felt Mrs. Jelliffe had pulled by having the nerve to put my name with hers on the play. Her agent had said the Jelliffes were honorable people—but now—why she couldn’t even bear the sight of their Settlement House, it was so muddy and dirty in the yard, etc! etc! in an absolutely crazy vein, until Mr. Jelliffe asked his wife to no longer remain to be further insulted—whereupon they all left, Zora in a rage without even saying Goodbye to me or mother. I haven’t told you the half of it. . . . But nine-tenths of Zora’s talk here was not about the play at all, but Madame Thurman [Louise was still married to Wallace Thurman]—the very thought of whom seemed to infuriate Zora. The play was a mere side-issue. . . . And in all cases the stenographer was a hussy! . . . Do you think she is crazy, Carlo?
Carrie Clark, Langston’s mother, followed Zora into the hallway to give her a piece of her mind, and Langston had to get out of bed to restrain his mother. Zora was undeterred. She sent a telegram to Mason that evening: “DARLING GODMOTHER ARRIVED SAFELY HAVE PUT THE PERSON [Langston] ON THE RUN PLAY STOPPED LOUISE THOMPSON HAD BEEN SENT FOR TO BOLSTER CASE I SMASHED THEM ALL BE HOME BY WEEKEND ALL MY LOVE ZORA.”
Two nights later, Zora went to a dance in Langston’s honor at the prestigious Omega Psi Phi Fraternity in Cleveland while he remained in bed because of his throat. In a letter to Louise, Langston wrote,
There Zora, I understand, told everyone that I was stealing her work, as well as saying some very unpleasant things about you. She has started a great swirl of malicious gossip here about all of us, the Jelliffes as well. The Gilpins have split up into groups some for the Jelliffes, some against, and the whole thing has developed into the most amazing mess I ever heard of. . . . Certainly none of us expected such a performance from the lady! It seems that now Zora chooses to be not only contrary and untruthful, but malicious and hurtful as well. (I have received the most insulting note I have ever heard tell of from 399 [Godmother’s Park Avenue address]. How she thinks of such ungodly things to say I don’t know.) . . .
We all feel that you must be warned against her in New York. . . .
Find yourself a mule-bone because the free-for-all is on.
Langston also sent a telegram to Locke, asking for his “SLANT ON THINGS.” Locke did not reply.
In his autobiography, Langston claimed that after this he “never heard from Miss Hurston again.” But he certainly did, a number of times, and he even might have met with her years later. In fact, shortly after arriving back in New York, Zora wrote Langston a brief letter announcing her return and dealing with a few practical matters, including the fact that she was returning to Rowena Jelliffe a check she had sent Zora to cover half of her travel expenses to Cleveland. But her tone was cold. The sign-off that had been, in 1929, “Love and everything deep and fine, Honey / Lovingly, / Zora” had now turned into “Lots of luck. / Sincerely, / ZORA NEALE HURSTON.”
When Langston appealed to Mason, she rebuffed him in a short letter written on February 12.
Dear Langston,
What a sorrowful, misguided way to have come!
Has not the year spent in tarnishing the wings proved that “keeping accounts” had nothing to do with your failure to do creative writing. The great tragedy is, Langston, we cannot run away from Ourselves.
Child, why build a labyrinth about yourself that causes you to wander in a miasma of untruth?
Langston, you know by past experience I never judge anyone on hearsay or by their surface actions. I hope I have lived a true enough existence to prove that eternally.
Face yourself, Langston. Go forward and the Gods in space sustain you. May these three hundred dollars carry you over while you find the outdoor work you feel is necessary now for your health.
Faithfully,
“Godmother.”
Back in May, Langston had maintained that his failure to write anything of value since completing Not Without Laughter had been caused by his financial relationship with Godmother: that being paid to produce was inimical to the freedom he felt necessary to write from his heart. In fact, being freed from Mason’s surveillance had resulted in some of the best poems of his career. But if Mason was aware of this work, she certainly didn’t recognize it as such. Her assessment of his “failure to do creative writing”—combined with her certainty that he was lying to her and her condescending admonishment to “face yourself”—couldn’t have been more cruel.
On March 5, Zora went to see Spingarn. She told him she wanted to rewrite the play so that nothing of which Langston had claimed was his would appear in it, and asked for a release of Langston’s rights. Spingarn, of course, pleaded that he had to ask his client and couldn’t answer immediately. The next day, Langston replied, “I think it would be just as well to let Miss Hurston have the play, don’t you? Or at least her part of it.” He then asked Spingarn how they should handle the copyright issue.
Meanwhile, Alain Locke had been butting in again. In a late-January letter to Godmother he accused Langston of “false egotism” and in March he ridiculed Langston’s hopes to go to the Caribbean as “shameful—or rather shameless. Well—he’ll have a long rope—but eventually it will pull taut.” Locke seemed to be in a paroxysm of vindictiveness, writing Mason of Van Vechten, who was still friendly with both Langston and Zora and had just recovered from an episode of blood poisoning, “Why can’t he die! Nothing seems to kill him.” It was not for nothing that Zora would later describe Locke to James Weldon Johnson as a “malicious, spiteful litt[l]e snot.”
For her part, Zora was flattering Mason to the hilt, presumably worried that she would be the next person Godmother would abandon. And, indeed, in March Mason ended Zora’s employment and reduced her monthly stipend to $100. That month, Zora nevertheless called Mason “the Guard-mother who sits in the Twelfth Heaven and shapes the destinies of the primitives”; she would later compare her to the holy grail and Mahatma Gandhi; and she even signed one letter (which included a verse hymn to Mason’s godlike grace) “Devotedly, your pickaninny.” (She had already used this word to describe herself in correspondence with a previous white benefactor, Annie Nathan Meyer.) Her appar
ent dependence on and worship of Mason was, no doubt, rendered more satisfactory by the fact that Hughes had definitively fallen from Godmother’s graces.
In mid-March Langston sent Zora a clipping about another literary quarrel, comparing it to theirs and offering some sort of help (both the letter and clipping are lost). Zora responded perfunctorily, but not without irony, drawing an implicit comparison to her behavior in Cleveland: “I am calm again and went to a party and had a nice time.”
On March 25, Spingarn wrote Langston, who was back in Westfield, that he had phoned Zora that morning, and that she had “repeated that you had practically nothing to do with the play and that rather than give you an interest, she would tear it up.” Spingarn had told Zora that the manuscript showed that Langston had done a considerable amount of work on it. Zora replied that if Langston wanted to meet her at Spingarn’s office to go over the manuscript, and that if he could show her that he had done this work, she would then enter into an arrangement. But then, after speaking to her agent, Raymond Crossett, who worked in Elizabeth Marbury’s agency, she phoned Spingarn again and said she thought it was best not to have such a meeting after all. Zora wrote Godmother that day, “I find that Langston is in town, and that he copied whole hunks out of my play in Cleveland and NOW tries to say that while he didn’t write the thing in the beginning, he made all those ‘emendations’ on the play last Fall. I can’t conceive of such lying and falsehood. . . . [But] I have even learned to live above Langston’s vileness.” She added a postscript: “I’d love for Langston to face me in your presence.” She wrote to Spingarn at the same time, and enclosed a copy of that letter with her letter to Mason: “I think it would be lovely for your client to be a play-wright but I’m afraid that I am too tight to make him one at my expense. You have written plays, why not do him one yourself? Or perhaps a nice box of apples and a well chosen corner. But never no play of mine. / Most emphatically yours.” And on April 18, Zora wrote Mason, “I know that Langston says he was going to Cuba, but I suspect he is really gone to hunt up Eatonville to pretend that he knew about it all along.”
When Langston returned to New York City in early August, he made no attempt to contact Zora, Mason, or Locke. Until, that is, he learned that the Marbury agency had hired Wallace Thurman to revise De Turkey and de Law, and that Langston’s name was nowhere on the script. (Thurman had done no work on it and, not wanting to be involved in the controversy, never would.) Langston went to the agency, accompanied by a close family friend, Ethel Harper. Zora and Langston wrote quite different accounts of what happened next, but it appears that Crossett asked Harper to keep her mouth shut or get out of his office, called Langston a liar, and told him he had no rights at all in the play and was free to hire any lawyer he chose. “I just love fights,” Crossett said. Langston tried to be nice, saying he was collaborating with Wallace Thurman on a play and wanted the Marbury office to handle it, but Crossett replied that although he handled Thurman’s affairs he would refuse to touch anything to do with Langston, since he had shown himself to be “a person of no honor.” When Langston tried to explain that Zora was just jealous of Louise, Crossett replied that he was only interested in the authorship of the play and that “his place was an office and not a clearing house for Harlem gossip.” When Langston complained of Zora’s “violent disposition” and the way she had called him and the Jelliffes liars and crooks, Crossett replied that if Langston’s tactics in Cleveland had been the same as those he was employing now, in his office, Zora was more than justified in her accusations. “It no longer even annoys me,” Zora wrote to Mason. “Give a calf enough rope—”
Hughes wrote a long complaint to the Dramatists Guild. Thurman, who claimed to still love his wife Louise, said he didn’t know whom to believe. The play was, for now, abandoned.
And for the rest of his long life, Langston had almost no contact with the two women who had meant the most to him in that decade in which he was at the height of his career and the toast of the town.
10
1932–1960
The Aftermath
Langston dated “the end of the Harlem Renaissance” to the “literary quarrel” he’d had with Zora in the spring of 1931. “We were no longer in vogue. . . . Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money.” Many of the participants dispersed. Charles Johnson and James Weldon Johnson had taken positions at Fisk University in Nashville; Jessie Fauset had left The Crisis; and in August A’Lelia Walker died.
The rest of the story is aftermath: thirty years of acrimony between Langston and Zora, broken only by occasional moments of regret.
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“You know there comes a time when you have to sort of take sides,” said Bruce Nugent years later. “Sometimes between people that you love very much. And I didn’t realize how important Zora was to me until that upsetting thing of Langston’s. And I thought, Oh, I hope that Langston isn’t going to be hurt if I go over to Zora. So I ran over to Zora. . . . She was so pleased to see me run away from Langston and come up to her, because Zora was one of the few people that knew how close Langston and I were.”
In January 1932, Langston visited Jacksonville, Florida, on a book tour, and Zora’s brother John “entertained him magnificently,” or so Zora wrote to Godmother. It’s unlikely that John and Langston had previously been in contact, but, as Langston and Zora had found on their 1927 road trip, African Americans in the South were happy to welcome African American visitors from the North. Langston thanked her in a letter. She probably did not respond. He also visited Eatonville, the home of Mule Bone.
That March, Langston once again had a tiff with a collaborator—this time with a playwright named Kaj Gynt, with whom he had written a musical called Cock o’ the World. Gynt, who knew Zora, told her that Langston had been rather harsh to her on the phone, so Zora called him to intervene on her behalf. Langston was “polite and rather cordial” about the whole thing, and asked Zora to send Mason his regards.
In May, Zora moved back to Eatonville, which proved to be a more conducive place to finish Mules and Men than New York City. Langston wrote her there to renounce his claim upon The Mule-Bone; Zora subsequently learned that he wanted “some material” from her, but it’s unclear exactly what. Rather than receiving Langston’s offer graciously, Zora wrote to Mason,
It is one of the most unworthy things he ever did. His manner of doing so. What moved him to do so, I dont know, but it is certain he hopes to gain something from me or from some one connected with me. . . . I have been wondering if you had brought pressure to bear upon him. . . . I can see by Langston’s letter that he thinks it expedient to placate me. On the back of the envelope he wrote a conciliatory phrase, but in the letter he “regrets that I dont choose to tell the truth about the matter.” Honest Godmother it requires all my self-restraint to keep from tearing the gin-hound to pieces. If I followed my emotions I’d take a weapon and go around the ham-bone looking for meat. . . . He has nothing, nothing there except the suggestion “Zora, let’s write a play.” If that is the way to become co-author I shall write to [George Bernard] Shaw, [Eugene] O’Neil [sic] and [J. M.] Barry [sic] at once and horn in on all that they do.
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In February 1932, Wallace Thurman published his caustic roman à clef about the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring. While practically all the Niggerati came in for a drubbing, few were attacked as mercilessly as Zora, who appeared as Sweetie May Carr:
Sweetie May was a short story writer, more noted for her ribald wit and personal effervescence than for any actual literary work. She was a great favorite among those whites who went in for Negro prodigies. Mainly because she lived up to their conception of what a typical Negro should be. . . . Her repertoire of tales was earthy, vulgar and funny. Her darkies always smiled through their tears, sang spirituals on the slightest provocation, and performed buck dances when they should have been working. Sweetie May was a
master of southern dialect, and an able raconteur, but she was too indifferent to literary creation to transfer to paper that which she told so well. The intricacies of writing bored her, and her written work was for the most part turgid and unpolished. But Sweetie May knew her white folks.
“It’s like this,” she had told Raymond [a character based on Thurman himself]. “I have to eat. I also wish to finish my education. Being a Negro writer these days is a racket and I’m going to make the most of it while it lasts. . . . And the only way I can live easily until I have the requisite training [to be an anthropologist] is to pose as a writer of potential ability. Voila! I get my tuition paid at Columbia. I rent an apartment and have all the furniture contributed by kind-hearted o’fays [white people]. . . . About twice a year I manage to sell a story. It is acclaimed. I am a genius in the making. . . .”
Zora had never before received such an assault in print. But it set the tone for future critiques by black male writers, especially the one that Langston would pen eight years later.
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In June 1932, Langston, together with a group of twenty other African Americans under the leadership of Louise Thompson, boarded the SS Europa in New York City to journey to Moscow, where they’d been promised contracts to make Black and White, a Communist Party–backed movie about black life in the United States set in Birmingham, Alabama. Coincidentally, Alain Locke was on the boat too, en route to a European spa, boarding with a young political scientist he was in love with named Ralph Bunche, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize just eight years later. Locke did his best to avoid Langston and Louise, though he didn’t fail to disparage them in letters to Godmother: Langston had “coarsened and aged considerably” and was completely under the thumb of Louise, who “was bloated with drink.” Zora, hearing of all this, also got a few digs in. As for Langston, he pointedly refused to shake Locke’s hand when they met.