by Yuval Taylor
215shameful—or rather Locke to Mason, March 20, 1931, Locke Papers.
215Why can’t he die! Locke to Mason, March 29, 1931, Locke Papers.
215malicious, spiteful Hurston to James Weldon Johnson, February 1938, in Kaplan, Letters, 413.
215the Guard-mother who sits Hurston to Mason, March 10, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 212.
216Devotedly, your pickaninny Hurston to Mason, July 23, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 223.
216I am calm again Hurston to Hughes, March 18, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 213.
216repeated that you had Spingarn to Hughes, March 25, 1931, Hughes Papers.
216I find that Langston Hurston to Mason, March 25, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 214.
217I think it would be lovely Hurston to Spingarn, March 25, 1931, Hughes Papers.
217I know that Langston says Hurston to Mason, April 18, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 218.
217I just love fights Hughes to Spingarn, August 14, 1931, in Hurston, Mule Bone, 274.
217a person of no honor Hurston to Mason, August 14, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 224–25.
218his place was an office Ibid.
218violent disposition Ibid.
218It no longer even Ibid.
10: THE AFTERMATH
219the end of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 331, 334.
219You know there comes a time Bruce Nugent, interview by Robert E. Hemenway, n.d., Robert E. Hemenway Personal Papers, PP487, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries.
220entertained him magnificently Hurston to Mason, January 21, 1932, in Carla Kaplan, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 242.
220polite and rather cordial Hurston to Mason, March 27, 1932, in Kaplan, Letters, 247.
220It is one of the most unworthy Hurston to Mason, May 17, 1932, in Kaplan, Letters, 255–56.
221Sweetie Mae was Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York: Macaulay, 1932), 142.
222coarsened and aged considerably Quoted in Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 269.
223I only hope L—— Quoted in Harris, Alain L. Locke, 270.
223Mrs. Ellsworth Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 113.
224much improved Hurston to Van Vechten, January 22, 1934, in Kaplan, Letters, 288.
225kiss and make up Van Vechten to Hughes [n.d.], in Emily Bernard, ed., Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (New York: Knopf, 2001), 119.
225Awfully glad about Hughes to Van Vechten, March 5, 1934, in Bernard, Remember Me, 121.
225I don’t see how Van Vechten to Hughes, March 20, 1934, in Bernard, Remember Me, 121.
225One night, Alan Hurston to Robeson, April 18, 1934, in Kaplan, Letters, 299.
225I am very busy Hurston to Locke, October 8, 1934, in Kaplan, Letters, 312.
226I have taken form Hurston to Mason, May 10, 1931, in Kaplan, Letters, 219.
226the Park Avenue dragon Hurston to Ruth Benedict, December 4, 1933, in Kaplan, Letters, 284.
226when Godmother fell ill Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977), 108.
227Up to now, Dr. Locke Zora Neale Hurston, “The Chick with One Hen,” Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.
227try to patch up Arna Bontemps, interview by Robert E. Hemenway, November 18, 1970, Hemenway Papers.
227Zora is really a changed Bontemps to Hughes, November 24, 1939, in Charles H. Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters 1925–1967 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), 44.
228the muse of black-face Bontemps to Hughes [n.d., 1943], in Nichols, Bontemps, 128.
228was probably waiting Bontemps, interview.
229Of this ‘niggerati’ Hughes, Big Sea, 238–39.
229Her characters eat and laugh Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” New Masses 25 (October 5, 1937), 22.
229To many of her white friends Hughes, Big Sea, 239.
230‘hand-chicken’ Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 799.
230authenticated and flavored Hughes, Big Sea, 320, 332.
231very good Hurston to Hurst, August 4, 1940, in Kaplan, Letters, 461.
231As soon as I came Nugent, interview.
231one of the most un-self-revealing Kaplan, Letters, 436.
231rings false Alice Walker, Foreword, Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, xvii.
232A real guy named Langston Hughes, “Goodbye Christ,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 166.
232They tell me Zora Hughes to Still, May 27, 1941, quoted in Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 2: 1941–1967, I Dream a World, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9.
232village youth Hurston to Van Vechten, September 12, 1945, in Kaplan, Letters, 529.
233getting such a poor Hurston to William Bradford Huie, September 6, 1954, in Kaplan, Letters, 720.
234NO DISCUSSION OF COMMUNISM Zora Neale Hurston, “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism,” American Legion Magazine, June 1951, 14.
234I had known him since Hurston to Saturday Evening Post, September 2, 1954, in Kaplan, Letters, 718.
235the music, poetry, folk-lore Agreement between Charlotte L. Mason and Zora Hurston, December 1, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
235the boiled-down juice Zora Neale Hurston, “Folklore and Music,” in Folklore, Memoirs, 875.
236I am getting inside Hurston to Hughes, March 8, 1928, Hughes Papers.
236I am using the vacuum Hurston to Locke, October 15, 1928, in Kaplan, Letters, 129.
CONCLUSION: THE LEGACY
240lonesome-looking old red Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 785–87.
241I loved my friend Langston Hughes, “Poem,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 52.
241a madman who believes Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Finding Time Again (New York: Penguin, 2003), 184.
241roam the night together Langston Hughes, “Harlem Night Song,” in Collected Poems, 94–95.
242The most heartening thing Langston Hughes, “Some Practical Observations: A Colloquy,” Phylon 11 (Winter, 1950), 307–11, in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 310.
242Negroes are just like Hurston, Dust Tracks, 785–87.
243the quality I feel Alice Walker, Foreword, Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977), xii.
243a miscegenated affair Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), 340.
READINGS
PRIMARY SOURCES
Most of Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction can be found in Novels & Stories, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995) and The Complete Stories (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). The latter is not actually complete: four additional stories set in Harlem, including “The Back Room,” can be found in Amerikastudien 55, no. 4 (2010), and another one, “Under the Bridge,” in American Visions (December/January 1997). Zora’s unfinished novel about Herod the Great remains unpublished, and a number of her other novels have been lost.
Most of Hurston’s nonfiction can be found in Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: The Library of America, 1995), which also includes the previously unpublished portions of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. This volume does not, however, include a larg
e number of her essays. Two of these were especially important to my work: “The Chick with One Hen” (her unpublished attack on Alain Locke), Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven; and “Fannie Hurst,” Saturday Review of Literature (October 9, 1937). It also does not include her book on Cudjo Lewis, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). In addition, some of her work of the 1940s that is not in Folklore, Memoirs can be found in Go Gator and Muddy the Waters: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers Project, Pamela Bordelon, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
All but one of Hurston’s surviving plays can be found in Collected Plays, ed. Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U. Press, 2008). (The sole omission is a brief one-act set in Harlem entitled “The Funeral of Harlem’s Sheik” or “The Death of Sugarfoot,” Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.) Most significantly, this volume includes De Turkey and de Law, Hurston’s copyrighted version of Mule Bone. Zora subsequently made extensive revisions to Mule Bone; she sent the rewritten play to Elizabeth Shaffer Hull, Carl Van Vechten’s niece, in 1934, but I have not been able to trace its present whereabouts, if it still exists.
Practically all of Hurston’s surviving correspondence has been collected in Carla Kaplan, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2002). Unfortunately, one of the most important of Hurston’s letters to Langston Hughes, dated January 20, 1931 (one of two written that day), appears to have been lost; it is quoted extensively in Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977), 143, and in Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem, 2nd ed. (New York: Citadel, 1992), 112.
Almost all of Langston Hughes’s important works have been published in eighteen volumes in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001–2004). The first volume includes Hughes’s first books of poetry organized as he meant them to be, whereas in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), the poems are arranged in order of first publication. The fourth volume consists of Not Without Laughter. The fifth volume includes Mulatto, Mule Bone, and other plays. The ninth volume includes Hughes’s most important essays. The thirteenth volume comprises his first autobiography, The Big Sea. And the fifteenth includes The Ways of White Folks and other short stories.
Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, The Book of Negro Folklore (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958) is one of many anthologies they published, but it represents, in many ways, a fulfillment of the wishes of Mason, Hurston, and Hughes during the period when their relationship was closest.
A small portion of Langston’s voluminous correspondence has been collected in the following books, among others: Charles H. Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters 1925–1967 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980); Emily Bernard, ed., Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); and Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro, eds., The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).
Hughes’s diaries, unfortunately, have not yet been published; they are a wonderful read, though, and are housed in the Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.
Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, ed. George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) includes most of the correspondence having to do with the play from all parties involved.
Charlotte Osgood Mason’s correspondence and diaries, Alain L. Locke’s voluminous correspondence, and Louise Thompson Patterson’s unfinished autobiography all remain unpublished. Mason’s and Locke’s work is in the Alain Locke Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Patterson’s is in the Louise Thompson Patterson Papers, 1909–1999, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
The best firsthand accounts of the Niggerati can be found in two novels: Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York: Macaulay, 1932) and Richard Bruce Nugent, Gentleman Jigger: A Novel, ed. Thomas H. Wirth (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2008). And the group’s full fruition is in Fire!! 1, no. 1 (reprint, 1982).
Carl Van Vechten, The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922–30, ed. Bruce Kellner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) is essentially a celebrity-filled list of parties, nightspots, and hangovers. It’s a wonderful resource, as is that landmark publication of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain L. Locke, The New Negro, 1st Touchstone ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
SECONDARY SOURCES
The best general book on the era is Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). My admiration for this volume knows no bounds.
Of the many books about the Harlem Renaissance, four are worth special mention: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997); Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995); George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997); and Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2004). While Lewis’s and Watson’s books are my favorites, all four are essential for a full understanding of the movement.
Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, and Alain Locke are the subjects of two full biographies each. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977) is a pioneering study and benefits from a number of interviews with people who knew Hurston well. Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003) is definitive and beautifully written. Faith Berry, Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem [2nd ed.] (New York: Citadel, 1992) suffers from limited information and occasional sloppiness, but remains the best one-volume account of Hughes’s life. Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002) and Vol. 2: 1941–1967, I Dream a World, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002) is a monumental and practically perfect achievement. Emily Bernard, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) is a particularly brilliant book, but Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) is more comprehensive. Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) has, I dare say, been supplanted by Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), though it does include some information that the latter omits.
Louise Thompson has been the subject of only one biography, but it’s succinct and invaluable: Keith Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson: A Struggle for Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). There has been no full-length biography of Charlotte Mason, but Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (New York: HarperCollins, 2013) includes a superlative brief one.
I also found Genevieve West, Zora Neale Hurston & American Literary Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005) helpful in contextualizing Hurston’s work, and Rachel A. Rosenberg, “Looking for Zora’s Mule Bone: The Battle for Artistic Authority in the Hurston-Hughes Collaboration,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (April 1999), 79–105, important for its close reading of the Mule Bone revisions.
I consulted a large number of other primary and secondary sources, but these are the ones I found most valuable, and the ones I would recommend the most highly to readers of this book.
CREDITS
Excerpts from Arna Bontemps’s correspondence are reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
&nb
sp; Excerpts from Robert Hemenway’s interviews with Arna Bontemps, Bruce Nugent, Herbert Sheen, and Louise Thompson are reprinted by permission of Leah Hattermer Hemenway.
Excerpts from “I, Too,” “Harlem Night Song,” and “Afro-American Fragment” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes, are reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from Langston Hughes’s other writings and correspondences, both previously published and unpublished, are reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. Copyright © 1994 by the Langston Hughes Estate.
Excerpts from Zora Neale Hurston’s correspondence and unpublished writings are reprinted by permission of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust.
Excerpts from Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, copyright © 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston, renewed © 1970 by John C. Hurston, are reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpts from Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, copyright © 1935 by Zora Neale Hurston, renewed © 1963 by John C. Hurston and Joel Hurston, are reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpts from Louise Thompson Patterson’s unpublished autobiography are reprinted by permission of MaryLouise Patterson.
Excerpt from Alice Walker’s essay “Turning Into Love” is reprinted by permission of the author.
INDEX
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
abolitionism, 35, 183
Adam, Jean, 131
Adams, Edward, 140
Africa, 16, 42–43, 92, 128, 170
African American culture, 4, 57–58, 64, 72–73, 92, 136–37, 236. See also black arts
reinvention of, 78–79
validity of, 76