by Yuval Taylor
61all in greased curls Hurst to Van Vechten, April 1926, quoted in Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 121.
61She drove with a sure Hurst, “Zora Hurston,” 17.
61with my foot in the gas Hurston, “Fannie Hurst,” 16.
62a period of solitary wandering Hughes to Mason, February 23, 1929, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.
62Hughes ought to stop Hurston to Cullen, March 11, [1926], in Kaplan, Letters, 84.
63the Aframerican is merely George Schuyler, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” Nation 122 (June 16, 1926), 662–63.
63urge within the race Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation 122 (June 23, 1926), 692–94, in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 32.
63Negroes should be concerned Countee Cullen, “The Dark Tower,” Opportunity 6, no. 3 (March 1928), 90.
63I would like to be white Hughes, “Negro Artist,” 31.
63the Negro middle class Ibid.
63Nordicized Negro intelligentsia Ibid.
64I am not tragically colored Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” The World Tomorrow 11 (May 1928), 215–16, in Folklore, Memoirs, 827.
64All art is propaganda W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32 (October 1926), 290–97, quoted in Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 214.
65the folk temperament Alain Locke, “Beauty Instead of Ashes,” The Nation 126, no. 3276 (April 18, 1928), 434.
65genius and talent Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda?,” Harlem 1, no. 1 (November 1928), 12.
65We do not hate white people Zora Neale Hurston, “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism,” American Legion Magazine, June 1951, 59.
65It was, Zora knew Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 145–46.
65Only now am I Hughes to Mason, February 23, 1929, in The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 84.
66Yo quisiera ser Negro Nicolás Guillén, “Conversación con Langston Hughes,” El Diario de la Marina, March 2, 1930, in Prosa de Prisa (1929–1985) (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 2002), 19.
66a song to the morning Hurston, “Art and Such,” in Folklore, Memoirs, 908.
66This is the way it is Hurst, “Zora Hurston,” 20.
67Sometimes, I feel discriminated Hurston, “How It Feels,” 829.
68lacking in bitterness Hurston, Mules and Men, 230.
68naive, quaint, complaisant Sterling A. Brown, “Old Time Tales,” New Masses 18, no. 9 (February 25, 1936), 25.
68there are no bitter Hurston, “High John de Conquer,” in Folklore, Memoirs, 927.
68the blues are not Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 257.
68Bitterness . . . is the graceless Hurston, Dust Tracks, 765.
69Why dont I put Hurston to Cullen, March 5, 1943, in Kaplan, Letters, 481–482.
70The game of keeping Hurston, “How It Feels,” 828.
70accepted the notion Arnold Rampersad, Introduction, The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), xvi.
70the poor Negro Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, October 15, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 234.
71there is no fundamental Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1938), v.
72Primitivism was the avant-garde Emily Bernard, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 70–71.
72This orchestra grows rambunctious Hurston, “How It Feels,” 828.
73All the tom-toms Langston Hughes, “Poem,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 32.
73the eternal tom-tom Hughes, “Negro Artist,” 35.
73a sanctified church Carl Van Vechten, The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922–30, ed. Bruce Kellner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 120.
74‘The Crisis’ is the house Hurston to Locke, October 11, 1927, in Kaplan, Letters, 109.
74Always guiding unobtrusively Richard Bruce Nugent, “Lighting FIRE!!,” insert in reprint of Fire!! 1, no. 1 (1982).
74sweltering summer evenings Hughes, Big Sea, 236.
75colored people can’t help Hughes to Locke, August 12, 1926, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
75our people to a ‘T’ Carrie Hughes to Langston Hughes, November 3, 1926, in Carmaletta M. Williams and John Edgar Tidwell, eds., My Dear Boy: Carrie Hughes’s Letters to Langston Hughes, 1926–1938 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 28.
75Life to [Van Vechten] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Books,” Crisis (December 1926), 81–82, quoted in Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), 212.
75As many black people White, Tastemaker, 210.
76unmistakable message Lewis, When Harlem, 188.
76Negroes aren’t any worse Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 235.
76blacks must hold on Bernard, Carl Van Vechten, 72.
76a birthright that all Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, 89.
77a Negro quarterly of the arts Langston Hughes, “The Twenties: Harlem and Its Negritude,” African Forum I (1966), 11–20, in Collected Works 9, 473.
77Strangely brilliant Hughes, Big Sea, 234.
77Over collards and black-eyed peas Bruce Nugent, interview by Robert E. Hemenway, n.d., Robert E. Hemenway Personal Papers, PP487, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.
78We got carried away with ourselves Hughes, “The Twenties,” 473.
79FIRE . . . weaving vivid “Foreword,” Fire!!, 1, no. 1 (November, 1926), i.
79It celebrated jazz Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 91.
80Wally and I Nugent, interview.
80had done more for Bernard, Carl Van Vechten, 176.
81a beautiful piece of printing “The Looking Glass,” The Crisis 33 (January 1927), 158, quoted in Lewis, When Harlem, 197.
81hurt his feelings Fred Bair to Countee Cullen, n.d., quoted in Eleonor Van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 151.
81roasted it Hughes, Big Sea, 237.
81Writer Brands ‘Fire’ Rean Graves, “Writer Brands ‘Fire’ as Effeminate Tommyrot,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 25, 1926, quoted in Bernard, Carl Van Vechten, 178; Kaplan, Letters, 793; and Hughes, Big Sea, 237.
81A good deal of it Alain Locke, untitled book review, The Survey, August 15–September 15, 1927, 563; quoted in Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem, 2nd ed. (New York: Citadel, 1992), 82.
81very drunk & abusive Van Vechten, Splendid Drunken, 123.
81a phenomenally good cook Nugent, Gentleman Jigger, 25.
4. ENTER GODMOTHER
83My Mother-God Hurston to Mason, October 15, 1931, in Carla Kaplan, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 231.
83true conceptual Mother Hurston to Mason, May 10, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 218.
83You renew your promise Hurston to Mason, May 18, 1930, in Kaplan, Letters, 187–89.
84The little figure Blanche Coates Matthias, “Unknown Great Ones,” The Woman Athletic (June 1923), 13.
85never forgetting a minutiae Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 221.
85younger races unspoiled Unsourced quotation in Aberjhani and Sandra L. West, eds., Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 211.
85used to secretly listen Louise Thompson Patterson, autobiography, Louise Thompson Patterson pap
ers, 1909–1999, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
86Let us recognize Natalie Curtis, The Indians’ Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907), 574.
86all things financial Ibid., 410.
86She craved people Kaplan, Miss Anne, 250.
87She hated to be separated Ibid., 212.
87unusual personal powers Ibid., 409–10.
87That is the reward Matthias, “Unknown Great Ones,” 13.
88rigid, controlled, disciplined Alain Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in The New Negro, 1st Touchstone ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 254, 266.
88tremendous rapport Mrs. R. O. Mason, notebooks, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, quoted in Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 147.
89flowing spirit . . . miraculous power Mason to Locke, August 1 and 16, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, quoted in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997), 152.
89I am eternally black Mason to Locke, December 10, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, quoted in Kaplan, Miss Anne, 193.
89slough off this weight Quoted in Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 242.
90almost arbitrary way Bruce Nugent, interview by Robert E. Hemenway, n.d., Robert E. Hemenway Personal Papers, PP487, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.
90A Gripping Story Zora Neale Hurston, “The Back Room,” Pittsburgh Courier (February 19, 1927), section 2, 1, quoted in Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollers, “Part One: ‘The Book of Harlem,’ ‘Monkey Junk,’ and ‘The Back Room,’ ” Amerikastudien 55, no. 4 (2010), 564.
90born Lillie Barker Hurston, “The Back Room,” reprinted in Amerikastudien 55 no. 4 (2010), 577–81.
91Thank you, thank you Hurston to Hughes, n.d. [December 1926], Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.
91cast a dark shadow Hurston to Sheen, January 7, 1955, in Kaplan, Letters, 725–26.
91Who had cancelled Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 744.
93was Hughes’s poorest Arnold Rampersad, Introduction, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1: The Poems, 1921–1940 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 9.
93LANGSTON HUGHES—THE SEWER DWELLER William M. Kelley, “Langston Hughes: The Sewer Dweller,” New York Amsterdam News (February 9, 1927), 22.
93unsanitary, insipid Chicago Whip (February 26, 1927), quoted in Rampersad, Life, 140.
93a study in the perversions Philadelphia Tribune (February 12, 1927), quoted in Rampersad, Life, 140.
93positively sick J. A. Rogers, untitled review of Fine Clothes to the Jew, Pittsburgh Courier (February 12, 1927), section 2, 4.
93It would have been just Benjamin Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Arts (New York: Mead & Co., 1937), 248.
93the outstanding book “What to Read,” The Crisis (March 1927), quoted in Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem, 2nd ed. (New York: Citadel, 1992), 84.
94humble people Langston Hughes, “These Bad New Negroes: A Critique on Critics,” in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 38.
94the masses of our people Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 267.
94with attendants in livery Ibid., 312.
94a mystical vision Mason, notebooks, quoted in Rampersad, Life, 147–48.
95every piece was rare Hughes, Big Sea, 312–13.
95Who is this woman? Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 548.
95Mask in one pocket Stewart, New Negro, 557.
95about my plans Hughes, Big Sea, 313.
95our first real hours Mason to Hughes [n.d.], Hughes Papers.
95my winged poet Child Mason to Hughes, June 5, 1927, Hughes Papers.
96My precious Boy Mason to Hughes [n.d.], Hughes Papers.
96If Locke was her Kaplan, Miss Anne, 222.
96The Gods be praised Mason to Hughes, June 29, 1928, Hughes Papers.
96You know your ‘Godmother’ Mason to Hughes, July 22, 1928, Hughes Papers.
97I greet thee Morning Star Mason to Hughes, September 23, 1928, Hughes Papers.
5. THE COMPANY OF GOOD THINGS
98No sooner had I Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 296.
99I knew where the material was Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 687.
99stopping on the way Hughes, Big Sea, 296.
101through grandiose promises “South Now Trying to Stop Migration by Legislation,” Chicago Defender, June 25, 1927, 1.
102Do what they would Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, in Novels & Stories, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 128.
103The palm trees Langston Hughes, notebooks, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.
103we went to eat Hughes, Big Sea, 296.
103Once, at a ritzy Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003), 277.
104a talented pianist and poet Hughes, Big Sea, 296.
104Mobile, July 23 Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
105We’re still burying Karen Savage, “In Alabama, Community Founded by Former Slaves Now Under Siege by Tar Sands,” Bridge the Gulf (August 20, 2013), http://bridgethegulfproject.org/blog/2013/alabama-community-founded-former-slaves-now-under-siege-tar-sands.
107Distance from station Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
108my own brown goddess Hughes to Harold Jackman, quoted in Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 434.
109pilgrimage through the South Mason to Hughes, July 26, 1927, Hughes Papers.
109I am having the time Gwendolyn Bennett, “The Ebony Flute,” Opportunity (September 1927), 276.
111How wide open Mason to Hughes, August 3, 1927, Hughes Papers.
112Out of death and darkness Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
112There is no weakness here Ibid.
112rather mixed audience Mayme V. Holmes, “Hughes Reads Poems to Summer Students,” The Tuskegee Messenger 3, no. 17 (September 10, 1927), 3.
113Dear Langston—Finished Hurston to Hughes [n.d.], Hughes Papers.
114Saw man driving Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
114to show that good feeling “Barbecue in Georgia,” Chicago Defender, August 20, 1927, A2.
115Passed a town last night Hughes to Van Vechten, August 15, 1927, in Emily Bernard, ed., Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (New York: Knopf, 2001), 59.
115advancing . . . the vanguard Frank Horne, “Henry A. Hunt, Sixteenth Spingarn Medallist,” The Crisis 37, no. 8 (August 1930), 261.
116marvelous Hughes to Van Vechten, August 15, 1927, in Bernard, Remember Me, 58.
116backwoods church entertainment Ibid., 58–59.
117a marvelous patchwork Hughes, Big Sea, 299.
117Homestead now occupied Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
118We are charging home Hughes and Hurston to Van Vechten, August 17, 1927, Hughes Papers, quoted in Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 152.
118famous conjur-man Hughes, Big Sea, 297.
119a tall, red-skinned Ibid.
119but we had to have a victim Hurston to Van Vechten, August 26, 1927, in Kaplan, Letters, 106.
119Zora and Langston had to conjure
Imani Mtendaji, discussion with author, Savannah, Georgia, July 2015.
119huge apocryphal Bible Hughes, Big Sea, 298.
119if the devil or an evil spirit Tobit 6:5–7.
119darkened the room Hughes, Big Sea, 298.
119Palm of Gilead Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
119mumbled an incantation Hughes, Big Sea, 298.
119Burning of hell fire Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
119After the stones Hughes, Big Sea, 298.
120was a poor one Ibid.
120A black woman so evil Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
121Don’t let nobody tell you Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 101.
121Get the fuck away Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), 180.
121You didn’t have to go Hughes, Big Sea, 296.
121The trouble with white folks Ibid.
122Hubbard drove in Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
123talented tenth W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day (New York: James Pott & Co., 1903), 33.
123Southern railroad shops Hughes, notebooks, Hughes Papers.
123Nobody wants me Ibid.
124met a little woman Ibid.
125Somehow all the back Hurston to Van Vechten, August 26, 1927, in Kaplan, Letters, 105–6.
126Most of the Negroes Hughes to Locke, October 8, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
126worn [her] down Hurston to Annie Nathan Meyer, October 7, 1927, in Kaplan, Letters, 108.
6. A DEEP WELL OF THE SPIRIT
127Can you guess Mason to Hughes [n.d.], Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.
128I would come to Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 597.
128got on famously Hurston to Hughes, September 21, 1927, Hughes Papers.
128It was decreed Hurston, Dust Tracks, 797.
129We must do it with Hurston to Hughes, September 21, 1927, Hughes Papers.
129My relations with Godmother Hurston, Dust Tracks, 688.