by Yuval Taylor
In 1950, Langston transformed his successful play Mulatto, which he had written in the months after Zora had absconded with Mule Bone, into an opera entitled The Barrier, with music composed by Jan Meyerowitz. Before it opened on Broadway (for an extremely short run), it was given a two-week tryout at a seedy theater in Washington, D.C., the New Gayety. According to a letter Zora wrote four years later, she attended a performance (though she was living in Florida at the time), and Langston asked her, along with some other African American theatergoers, to help explain to him why it was “getting such a poor reception.” Zora, who was puzzled by Langston wanting her advice after what they’d been through, told him the main fault was in the character of the protagonist: “There was nothing about the hero to inspire admiration and induce sorrow at his lynching. In fact, one might be tempted to go forth and help do the job.” Zora’s frankness was appreciated neither by Langston nor by the others at the meeting, all of them “upper-class,” as Zora categorized them. The entire story seems somewhat apocryphal, however.
Zora had become increasingly conservative over the years. Estranged from the African American community by the attacks on her and her writing in the black press and from black intellectuals, she had few black friends and lived mostly among Southern whites. Langston, meanwhile, was under continual fire for his former association with Communism, being put under surveillance by the FBI, denounced in the US Senate, and forced to testify before Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee on investigations about his radical past. His career, however—as a poet, Broadway lyricist, newspaper columnist, translator, librettist, and anthologist—was at its peak.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that Zora would join in attacking Langston for his politics. In 1951, she published a rabidly anticommunist article in the American Legion Magazine in which she mentioned Langston and Louise’s 1932 trip to Russia. One of the illustrations was a box whose heading read “NO DISCUSSION OF COMMUNISM AND THE NEGRO IS COMPLETE WITHOUT MENTION OF THESE CHARACTERS,” and one of the six pictured was Langston, “Author of ‘Goodbye Christ.’ ” Three years later Zora wrote, in an unpublished letter to the Saturday Evening Post, that she had learned all about Communism from Langston. “I had known him since I came to New York in 1925,” she explained. “I thought him very innocent-like and full of simplicity and virtues. I was to discover later that his shy-looking mein [sic] covered a sly opportunism that was utterly revolting.”
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When I was in Savannah, retracing Zora’s and Langston’s 1927 road trip, I had a long conversation with the storyteller Imani Mtendaji, who lives and practices there. As soon as I told her about my project, she brought up The Book of Negro Folklore. That book is practically her Bible, the primary source of her tales.
Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps had assembled it in 1958. A 624-page collection of folktales, songs, and other material, it could very well have fulfilled Zora’s contractual obligation to Charlotte Mason (to compile “the music, poetry, folk-lore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art and kindred subjects relating to and existing among the North American negroes”), but it also met her own definition of folklore: “the boiled-down juice of human living.”
It was not the first anthology that Hughes and Bontemps had put together: they had published The Poetry of the Negro in 1949. But The Book of Negro Folklore was more ambitious. The final manuscript, as Langston commented to Van Vechten, was nearly a foot and a half tall and weighed ten pounds; it was the first comprehensive anthology of its kind. In it, Zora was more heavily represented than any other single author, with twenty-six tales and sermons, mostly from Mules and Men, but also from Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Dust Tracks on a Road. The Book of Negro Folklore was modeled largely after folklorist Benjamin Botkin’s monumental 1944 volume A Treasury of American Folklore, which had included twenty-one of Zora’s tales.
All of Zora’s books, by this time, were out of print. Zora didn’t fit into the now prescribed role of a black writer: to speak truth to power. The rise of writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin had changed what African Americans were expected to write. For them, Zora Neale Hurston, who had, in 1955, written a widely distributed letter condemning court-ordered desegregation, was as passé as a minstrel show.
But now, finally, twenty-seven years after the Mule Bone controversy, a Langston-Zora collaboration of sorts had been published—this time without Zora’s name on the cover. It’s a shame that Langston didn’t ask Zora to participate in the project—she would probably have made some significant improvements.
Regardless, The Book of Negro Folklore was—with the exception of an uninspiring introduction by Bontemps, a condescending essay on street cries by a white Southern newspaper writer, and an atrociously clueless painting on the jacket by pulp artist Everett Kinstler—a triumphal representation of everything both Zora and Langston had stood for. For it was not, despite its title, limited to material gathered from the folk. It included plenty of literary interpretations of folk material, by authors ranging from Langston and Zora to Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Walker. Much of it was solidly in the vein of Fine Clothes to the Jew, Mules and Men, and Mule Bone. It represented African American culture in much the same way Zora, Langston, and Godmother had envisioned it in the 1920s—free from politics, free from white folks, free from pretentiousness or middle-class values. Zora had written Langston back in 1928, “I am getting inside of Negro art and lore. I am beginning to see really and when you join me I shall point things out and see if you see them as I do.” That same year she had written Locke, “I am using the vacuum method, grabbing everything I see. Langston is responsible for that to a great extent.” In other words, Zora’s and Langston’s vision coincided: both to get inside the folkways of the African American community and to encompass them in all their variety. With this volume, the ideals the two writers had aspired to back when their friendship was strong were largely fulfilled.
All that was missing was the popular success that both craved. Although the book was well received and went through several printings, it never made the kind of splash that the two of them had envisioned for Mule Bone, and it has long been out of print.
Zora died penniless two years later, on January 28, 1960, at the age of sixty-nine. She had been living in a segregated nursing home in Fort Pierce, Florida, after suffering a stroke the previous October; a second stroke killed her. She most likely never saw The Book of Negro Folklore. Laudatory obituaries ran in all the major papers and magazines. Carl Van Vechten remembered her fondly, and wired money to help pay for her funeral. There is no record of Langston mentioning her death.
However, four years later, Langston sent the draft of Mule Bone that he had prepared for the Gilpin Players to the magazine Drama Critique. They published act three of the play under both his name and Zora’s. A portion of the legendary collaboration between Zora and Langston had finally seen the light.
Winold Reiss, Miss Hurston (Zora Neale Hurston), 1925, pastel on Whatman board. Gift of the artist. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo: Jerry Atnip.)
© Estate of Winold Reiss. Used by permission of Fisk University Galleries.
Winold Reiss, Langston Hughes, c. 1925, pastel on illustration board. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of W. Tjark Reiss, in memory of his father, Winold Reiss.
© Estate of Winold Reiss. Used by permission of the National Portrait Gallery.
Carl Van Vechten (undated). Photograph by Nickolas Muray.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives. Used by permission of the Nickolas Muray Photo Archives.
Fannie Hurst, 1932. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. © Van Vechten Trust. Used by permission of the Van Vechten Trust.
The only issue of Fire!!, published in October 1926.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscrip
t Library, Yale University.
Zora in 1927. Photographer unknown.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Langston in 1927. Photographer unknown.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Jessie Fauset, Langston, and Zora, Tuskegee, Alabama, July 1927. Photographer unknown.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Zora and Langston outside the Veterans Administration Hospital at Tuskegee, Alabama, July 1927. In the top picture is Sadie Delaney, the hospital’s librarian. The man on the left in the bottom picture is Colonel Joseph Henry Ward, who ran the hospital. One of the men in these two photos is likely Dr. Jesse Jerome Peters; the others have not been identified. Photographer unknown.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Charlotte Mason. Photographer unknown.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Alain Locke, 1926. Photographer unknown.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Louise Thompson, likely late 1920s. Photograph by James Latimer Allen.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Langston in 1930, likely after his breakup with Charlotte Mason. Photographer unknown.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Langston and Louise on the boat to Russia, May 1932. Photographer unknown.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Zora Neale Hurston, November 1934. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. © Van Vechten Trust. Used by permission of the Van Vechten Trust.
CONCLUSION
The Legacy
Many writers have characterized Langston as a naïf. Zora is usually either a madwoman (as Louise Thompson and a number of African American men saw her) or a stereotypical strong black woman (as many contemporary women portray her). These represent the extremes of their characters. At the time of their final falling out, Zora represented Langston as a cunning liar, Locke concurred, and Mason was convinced. Almost everyone else who wrote about him said he was scrupulously honest. But nobody was scrupulously honest in this affair. Langston lied to his own lawyer about Mule Bone’s composition, Zora exaggerated Langston’s actions to Mason, and both of their autobiographies are studded with falsehoods and omissions.
Langston’s pattern of sudden and almost violent breaks with close friends (Locke, Cullen, Mason, Zora) is notable, for few of them ever got over their resentment of him, regardless of who instigated the rupture. Did each of these men and women fall in love with him in some way or another, only to find their affection unreturned? That is the impression one gets from Arnold Rampersad’s biography, and it makes perfect sense given Langston’s tendency to shy away from emotional attachments. Zora had another explanation for these breaks: that “his shy-looking mein covered a sly opportunism that was utterly revolting.” But that seems far too harsh a judgment.
Given the fact that Langston never let anyone get too close to him, I would venture that his defense against the threat of excessive intimacy that his best friends posed consisted in varying degrees of evasiveness, condescension, and turning his charm onto others. Although we have no evidence of it, it’s possible that while working with Zora, Langston felt threatened by how close she felt to him, and as a defense exaggerated his feelings for Louise in Zora’s presence.
As for Zora, she was passionate, jealous, headstrong, and never shrank from saying what was on her mind, regardless of the consequences. Wildly inconsistent; prone to sycophancy, flights of fancy, and dangerous rages; unscrupulous and backstabbing; and unshakeable in her belief in her own powers, she was a force to be reckoned with. She was by no means a madwoman, but neither was she a woman of integrity and backbone.
Langston was not the only naïf. They both believed in Charlotte Mason, each other, their common goal of a real Negro folk drama, and the basic generosity of human beings. In the end, all their beliefs came to naught.
Zora never again found a friend as close, constant, and true as Langston had been. Langston did—his friendships with Arna Bontemps and Carl Van Vechten were at least as intimate and productive as that with Zora. Yet he had to have missed Zora’s passion, joie de vivre, and insouciance. It would have been hard not to miss such an extraordinary presence in his life.
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In “The Inside Light—Being a Salute to Friendship,” a chapter Zora’s publisher convinced her to exclude from her autobiography, Zora gave a curious metaphor for friendship. She described “lonesome-looking old red hills . . . lying there looking useless.” But in the twilight, a “herd of friendly shadows” gambols happily at the foot of those hills, and one can see “the departing sun, all colored-up with its feelings, saying a sweet good night to those lonesome hills, and making them a promise that he will never forget them. . . . ‘I will visit you with my love,’ says the sun.” It is a strikingly one-sided relationship.
“I have never been as good a friend as I meant to be,” she continued. “I keep seeing new heights and depths of possibilities which ought to be reached, only to be frustrated by the press of life which is no friend to grace.” She thanks her friends who “have flown into that awful place west and south of old original Hell and, with great compassion, lifted me off of the blistering coals and showed me trees and flowers.” There is no hint of reciprocity from her here. Of course, the chapter functions as a kind of acknowledgment, but as the only thing she wrote on the subject of friendship, it’s striking how lonely it feels.
In keeping with this metaphor, Zora’s letters to Langston are full of what he did for her and what he meant to her. But what did she do for him, and what did she mean to him? Was their friendship only a one-way street, with Langston smiling upon Zora, giving her his encouragement, and getting nothing in return?
I doubt it. Perhaps Zora forgot what she had done for Langston; perhaps she never knew. Most of Langston’s letters to Zora are lost, so it can appear that Langston never admitted how valuable their friendship had been for him. Perhaps, even without her, he might have still coedited Fire!!, written “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and put together The Book of Negro Folklore. Perhaps for Langston, having a friend like Zora didn’t really matter in the long run. But I find that impossible to believe from the joy he expressed during their road trip, the fact that he continually encouraged her writing, his sage advice regarding Locke and Godmother, and his passion for what she had done in Mule Bone.
On the other hand, by pointedly excluding him from “The Inside Light,” Zora certainly tried to pretend that Langston had never mattered to her.
“I loved my friend,” begins and ends one of Langston’s best-known poems, first published in May 1925, the month he met Zora. The equivalence of love and friendship is at the heart of not just this poem, but of Langston’s entire mode of existence. His letters to Charlotte Mason are full of this equation, as was his relationship with Louise Thompson.
And this equivalence applies to his feeling for Zora. Theirs wasn’t the friendship of the lonely red hill and the sun, or, in Marcel Proust’s simile, “a madman who believes the furniture is alive and talks to it.” Theirs was the friendship of those who, as Langston wrote in his 1926 poem “Harlem Night Song,” “roam the night together / Singing. / I love you.”
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Langston would continue to enjoy success as a writer, and remained more or less at the center of Harlem literature and culture until his death in 1967. But he realized quite soon after his breakup with Zora and Mason that he had to base his writing on something other than Negro folk traditions. He found that something in a passion for social and racial justice. His compassionate portrayals of the problematic relationships between black and white people would energize his best fiction, poetry, and plays from th
is time on. He emerged from the darkness and torment of 1930 and 1931 a fundamentally changed man. He even went so far as to implicitly repudiate “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” saying, in 1950, “The most heartening thing for me is to see Negroes writing works in the general American field, rather than dwelling on Negro themes solely.”
Zora, on the other hand, continued for a time to believe in the singular traditions of African Americans. She produced plays and fictions of all sorts and, in 1936, wrote perhaps the greatest American novel of the twentieth century. And underlying all her best work was her firm faith in the singularity of her people. They were, she felt, fundamentally different from white folks—a belief Langston too continued to share. Her writing, however, would quickly be condemned in no uncertain terms by the majority of the black literati—all men, of course—including Richard Wright, Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, and Ralph Ellison. They all said that she paid too little attention to the myriad injustices inflicted upon black people; that she glorified the aspects of black life that whites ridiculed; that she was playing to the white folks’ visions, and “making the white folks laugh,” in Wright’s words.