by Yuval Taylor
The farce that ensued in Moscow and Odessa could be the basis for a terrific Coen Brothers movie, featuring a scheming US colonel, an incompetent Soviet screenwriter, rebellious black New Yorkers frolicking nude on a Black Sea beach, and perhaps the involvement of Stalin himself. In all, the episode was a complete fiasco; the troupe ended up turning on Langston, calling him a “Communist Uncle Tom.” And indeed, Langston was writing poem after poem of Communist propaganda. Charlotte Mason was moved to comment sarcastically to Locke, “I only hope L—— was not weaving some of Zora’s play that she took to Cleveland into this Negro film from Russia.”
When he finally returned to the United States after spending time in Turkestan, Uzbekistan, China, and Japan (from where the government expelled him as an “undesirable”), Langston, ensconced in a cottage in Carmel, California, finished a spate of bitter short stories that he would publish as The Ways of White Folks; in them, he took revenge upon Godmother. The protagonist of “The Blues I’m Playing” was a black pianist named Oceola Jones, who appears to have been modeled somewhat on Zora—she even marries a medical student. Her wealthy white patron, the demanding and condescending Dora Ellsworth, is very clearly based on Charlotte Mason. Another story, “Rejuvenation Through Joy,” parodies Mason’s teachings in its tale of a charlatan who starts a health colony for the wealthy using primitivist philosophy and Harlem jazz. The stories are cutting. “The Blues I’m Playing” was published in Scribner’s Magazine; it wouldn’t be surprising if Mason read it. One passage seems drawn directly from life: “Mrs. Ellsworth . . . never made uncomplimentary remarks about Negroes, but frequently did about Jews. Of little [Yehudi] Menuhin she would say, for instance, ‘He’s a genius—not a Jew,’ hating to admit his ancestry.”
As for Louise, she would continue to be very close to Langston, founding with him the Harlem Suitcase Theater in 1938, while continuing her political activism. Having been widowed in 1934, she married, in 1940, William L. Patterson, head of the International Labor Defense and a leading Communist.
▼ ▼ ▼
Zora had been writing furiously. In 1931 she finished Barracoon, wrote sketches for two theatrical reviews, published the long essay “Hoodoo in America” in the Journal of American Folklore, and wrote and organized a folk concert called The Great Day. In 1933 she wrote her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and revised Mules and Men; the former came out in 1934 and the latter in 1935 with a foreword by Franz Boas. Both were published by Lippincott, a major publisher, and were very well received in the mainstream press. In December 1933, Zora decided to rewrite Mule Bone, as she now called it, and spent about six weeks doing so. She wrote Carl Van Vechten that it was “much improved.” Tragically, the revision, which she sent to Van Vechten’s niece Elizabeth Hull, has not come to light. Then, in 1936, she wrote her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in the space of seven weeks.
Langston, by contrast, was writing comparatively little. His play Mulatto was enjoying a huge success on Broadway—it would be the most-performed African American–authored play until Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun eclipsed its record over twenty years later. But it had been completed in 1930, and the version presented on Broadway had been heavily rewritten by its producer—so much so that Langston felt ashamed of it. Besides The Ways of White Folks (1934), Langston would hardly write anything of real consequence until 1940, when he finished his autobiography. He appeared to many to have lost his way and become a minor figure.
▼ ▼ ▼
In February or March 1934, Carl Van Vechten wrote to Langston, who was now living in Carmel, California, about how good Zora’s novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine was and suggested that he and Zora “kiss and make up.” Langston replied, “Awfully glad about her novel! Is she still mad at me?” Van Vechten responded evasively: “I don’t see how Zora or anybody else can be mad with you.” And there the matter rested.
Zora, however, still felt as though she were in competition with Langston. In April 1934 she told Eslanda Robeson (Paul Robeson’s wife and manager, and an anthropology student in London at the time), “One night, Alan [sic] Locke, Langston Hughes and Louise Thompson wrassled with me nearly all night long that folk sources were no[t] important, nobody was interested, waste of time, it wasnt art or even necessary thereto, ought to be suppressed, etc. etc., but I stuck to my guns.” This appears to be a rather curious fiction—Langston and Locke certainly held no such beliefs during the time they knew Zora well, and encouraged Zora’s research. Perhaps she was trying to ingratiate herself with the Robesons at Langston and Locke’s expense.
Then, in July, Zora wrote a strange letter to Walter White, accusing him of spreading word that Langston had written a play with her. White denied doing so, and there is no evidence of it. In an October letter to Locke, Zora wrote, “I am very busy earning a living. But I am earning it, not chiseling as our friend Langston is doing.” Zora might have been referring to the fact that the San Francisco arts patron Noël Sullivan was paying a stipend to Langston, much as Mason had done, while Mason had stopped paying Zora in 1932. “They tell a lurid tale of his brazen antics at Fisk,” she continued. Langston did not visit Fisk, and it’s not clear what were the “brazen antics” Zora referred to. But evidently Langston was still very much on her mind.
Also in October, the Little Theatre in New York asked to read Mule Bone for a possible production. Nothing came of it.
The rebellious British heiress Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology was published in London that year. The 854-page folio-size volume opened with Langston’s “I, Too”; it included seven pieces by Zora and six poems and a short article by Langston. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Zora spoke well of Langston’s work, but it is possible that she had written the essay in 1930 or earlier, prior to their breakup, and given it to Cunard in 1931 without revising it.
Then, in December 1934, both Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman died. The only bright lights of the Niggerati still active and publishing were now Zora and Langston.
Zora had remained in close contact with Charlotte Mason, writing a song for her seventy-seventh birthday: “I have taken form from the breath of your mouth / From the vapor of your soul am I made to be.” But she eventually loosened her ties to Mason—she began to refer to her as “the Park Avenue dragon” as early as 1933. She never resented her, though; Hemenway attests that “when Godmother fell ill, Zora would light hoodoo candles and commune with Mrs. Mason’s spirit, successfully praying her back to health.”
In 1937, though, Zora finally turned on Alain Locke. In response to a review in Opportunity that slammed Their Eyes Were Watching God for not being concerned enough with racism and class struggle, she wrote, “Up to now, Dr. Locke has not produced one single idea, or suggestion of an idea that he can call his own. . . . Dr. Locke is abstifically [sic] a fraud, both as a leader and as a critic. He knows less about Negro life than anyone in America. And if what he did in The New Negro is a sample, he does not know anything about editing and criticism either.” Fortunately for her, Opportunity magazine refused to publish her response. And a few years later, Zora was just as friendly with Locke as she had ever been, if not more so.
Zora mostly remained in the South, with sojourns in the Caribbean, though she occasionally came back to Harlem. Both she and Langston attended the June 1938 funeral of James Weldon Johnson there; his car had been hit by a train. There is no record of whether they acknowledged each other.
A year later, Langston published “Poet to Patron,” a cutting poem about his relationship with Godmother. The bitterness had not diminished.
▼ ▼ ▼
In November 1939, Arna Bontemps visited North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, where Zora was now on the faculty. According to Bontemps, Zora prevailed on him to write a letter to Langston to “try to patch up their quarrel,” and told him what she wanted him to say. Bontemps wrote Langston,
Zora is really a changed woman, still her old humorous self, but more level and poised.
She told me that the cross of her life is the fact that there has been a gulf between you and her. She said she wakes up at night crying about it even yet. I told her not to be ridiculous, that you have never ceased to insist that she is wonderful. After that she could not do too much for me. When I told her that I was going to tell you what she said, she even promised to try to get me a job in the South someplace. So, in order that she won’t change her mind, I hope you’ll write her a sweet letter, or at least send a nice Christmas card. She also said another thing that sounds reasonable to me. She said her hysterics, etc. were not provoked by you at all, and I believe it. She said, or intimated, that the whole thing could be traced to old-fashioned female jealousy between her and Louise, jealousy over the matter of influence over you. When you look at it this way, it is hard to blame poor Zora. She can’t help it if she’s a woman. Anyhow, she’s sure she’s never been so well despite her sins of the past, and if I had a bigger sheet of paper, I could give a lot of reasons why it would be grand if you’ll recognize her flag of truce.
This letter clearly flatters Langston. It paints Zora and Louise as his acolytes, struggling over his favor. Perhaps this is indeed what Zora wanted Langston to believe at this point, but it seems uncharacteristic of her, to say the least. Bontemps would soon share the attitude of most male black writers towards Zora: a few years later he would call her, in another letter to Langston, “the muse of black-face comedy” and her books “the products of reactionary thinking.”
Langston did not respond to Bontemps’s plea. Bontemps was puzzled as to why. Zora “was probably waiting for a response, having more than nudged me in exacting this promise from me that I would write it,” he later recounted. Instead, a couple of weeks later, Langston made a joke about Zora’s recent marriage to—and forthcoming divorce from—a young man named Albert Price in a letter to Van Vechten.
▼ ▼ ▼
Langston devoted half a dozen pages of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, to his friendship with Zora; his portrayal of her dripped with condescension. “Of this ‘niggerati,’ ” Langston wrote, “Zora Neale Hurston was certainly the most amusing. Only to reach a wider audience, need she ever write books”—this was written after Zora had published three novels and two collections of folklore—“because she is a perfect book of entertainment in herself. In her youth she was always getting scholarships and things from wealthy white people, some of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the Negro race for them, she did it in such a racy fashion.” This, of course, is nonsense.
“She was full of side-splitting anecdotes, humorous tales, and tragicomic stories, remembered out of her life in the South as a daughter of a travelling minister of God. She could make you laugh one minute and cry the next.” Langston here echoes Richard Wright’s damning 1937 review of Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.”
Langston continued: “To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect ‘darkie,’ in the nice meaning they give the term—that is a naïve, childlike, sweet, humorous, and highly colored Negro.” He could have added that, until his adoption of Communism in the 1930s, most whites regarded him as the same, except for the “highly colored” part.
Even in praising Zora’s anthropological gifts, Langston made her look silly. “But Miss Hurston was clever, too,” he wrote, praising her as “a fine folk-lore collector,” then describing her ability to “stop the average Harlemite on Lenox Avenue and measure his head with a strange-looking, anthropological device and not get bawled out for the attempt.” Rather than engaging in some antiquated phrenological experiment, as Langston here implied, Zora was, under the direction of her teacher and advisor Franz Boas, attempting to disprove phrenological theories of racial inequality. Langston emphasized her frivolousness—the only things in her West 66th Street apartment he mentions are her “decorative silver birds, perched atop the linen cabinet” and a footstool; he tells how she once served “a hand-chicken dinner, since she [had no] forks.” But as Zora pointed out in an initial draft of her autobiography, “ ‘hand chicken’ [is] jointed fried chicken to be eaten with the hand”—it has nothing to do with not having cutlery. Finally, Langston related a tale Zora apparently told him of how she once “borrowed” a nickel from a poor blind beggar’s cup. And it is with this vile anecdote that Langston closed his humorous but malicious portrait.
Fifty pages later Langston detailed, with less condescension, his Southern road trip with Zora. But then, when he described their falling out over The Mule-Bone, he cruelly distorted the facts so as to take credit for its creation and to blame Zora for acting as if it were her own work on the pretext of foolish jealousy. He inaccurately claimed to have based the play on Zora’s story, while she had only “authenticated and flavored the dialogue and added highly humorous details”; he had done the typing (no mention is made of Louise’s involvement); Zora had left the play with him to polish off. Zora then sent the play, unrevised, to her agent, claiming it as her own, and explaining to Langston that if she had included his name on it he would have simply spent any money he earned from it “on a girl she didn’t like” (who was apparently not Louise, since Langston had discussed her by name earlier in the book). This agent then, presumably under Zora’s direction, sent the play to the Jelliffes. Langston belittled Zora again here, remarking, “Girls are funny creatures!”
Zora read The Big Sea. When halfway through it, before she got to the part about herself, she called it “very good” in a letter to Fannie Hurst, and said she hoped to write a review of it. And when Langston gave a talk publicizing the book in September 1940 at the 135th Street Branch Library, Zora attended. Bruce Nugent did too: “As soon as I came into the library I knew Zora was there. Of course, there was a crush of people, and this was Zora’s doing. . . . Langston was very elated that she had come to it.” Langston may have been unconscious of how much he had belittled Zora in his book. There’s no record of whether they exchanged greetings.
Upon finishing the book, Zora changed her mind about reviewing it. At the time, she was writing her own autobiography, albeit reluctantly, at the request of her publisher. As if it were the opposite of Langston’s The Big Sea, she titled it Dust Tracks on a Road, and in it, she mentioned Langston only once, in passing, in a passage about Mason.
Zora wrote a chapter for Dust Tracks on friendship, which was later cut from the book; in it, she named a host of her friends, past and present—forty in all. She started with Charlotte Mason, then moved to Carl Van Vechten and Fannie Hurst; Langston was conspicuously absent.
A problematic book, Dust Tracks has been called “one of the most un-self-revealing autobiographies ever written.” Alice Walker says it “rings false”; she calls it “the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote.” This is a sharp contrast to the opinions of white reviewers of its time, several of whom called it the best thing she’d yet written. Whatever its merits (which are considerable), at least Zora abstained from putting down Langston in it. In this aspect, it was quite unlike the book that had inspired it.
▼ ▼ ▼
Shortly after The Big Sea, in which Langston carefully omitted any mention of his communist poems or the Communists he knew so well, was published, the Saturday Evening Post reprinted, without permission, Hughes’s 1932 poem “Goodbye Christ,” a poem he had written in the Soviet Union which proposed replacing Jesus with “A real guy named / Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME.” The storm of negative publicity that followed may have enticed Zora, who was in California at the time, to attack Langston. He laughed it off, remarking to the composer William Grant Still, “They tell me Zora laid me low in Pasadena.”
Despite having gotten nowhere with Mule Bone so often, Zora had not given up on it. In 1945, she repurposed some of its material for a novel set in Eatonville. The plot centered around a “village y
outh” expelled from town, as Jim had been in Mule Bone. In the novel he travels around, having adventures, visits heaven and hell, and after seven years returns as the town hero. Rejected by her publisher because it seemed both sloppy and strained, it has since been lost. Zora confessed to Van Vechten that her dream project was to write a history of Herod the Great. In the end, that was the project to which she would devote most of her remaining energy.
The next year, Charlotte Mason died at the age of ninety-two, having spent her last thirteen years in New York Hospital. She had broken her hip in 1933, fell in love with the view from her hospital room, adored being waited on hand and foot, and—mostly deaf, partially blind, arthritic, and unable to walk—refused to go home. Of all her acolytes, Alain Locke was the only one who kept faithfully in touch; Langston and Zora had not seen her since her accident, and by the end she had even alienated Cornelia and Katherine Chapin, who nonetheless received the bulk of her million-dollar estate. Doubtless because of her desire to remain anonymous, no obituary announced her death, and none of her former beneficiaries made any public comment on it.
In 1948, Zora was arrested, charged with abusing a ten-year-old boy in Harlem. The black world was scandalized; Zora’s name was on the front page of practically every black newspaper. The charges were patently false—Zora had not even been in the United States during the period the abuse was supposed to have taken place—but that did not prevent the scandal from humiliating her, paining her more than any other event of her life. Many of her old friends offered support, but Langston sniggered about the scandal in a letter to Bontemps. Zora’s attorneys, however, subpoenaed Langston, asking him to testify about her good character; he agreed to do so. The case was mercifully dropped, and Langston did not have to see his former collaborator in court. Zora moved to Florida.