by Carla Kaplan
In addition to African-American history and literature, Meyer studied white authors’ plays about black life. On the whole, she felt that they failed to move beyond minstrelsy. She was particularly disdainful of the self-satisfied sincerity of Paul Green and Eugene O’Neill. To her they were fatuous. “I was not writing as Paul Green did. And that was that.” Unlike them or Carl Van Vechten, she would depict the middle-class, educated sectors of black life. “This [Black Souls] was a play that, for the first time, pictured ladies and gentlemen, college professors,” she remarked. Her black characters would not mispronounce their words, use the wrong fork, dance, or roll their eyes. None of what Hurston called “margarine Negroes” for her. This is “the first play of Negro life that doesn’t take the Negro as a naïve child or make fun of him or show him incompetent or second rate,” she wrote to Grace Nail Johnson.
In late July 1924, as part of her self-education, Meyer made the long trek from Woods Hole, where she summered, to O’Neill’s “deserted lighthouse . . . a wild and dreary spot,” in Provincetown. Riding in a horse-drawn carriage from town, she shared a bumpy, broken seat with a dripping oil can and rode over the dunes—“sand, sand, sand”—to tell the distracted O’Neill, “still in his swimming trunks,” why it was that “the Negroes had not cared for his play.” “What do you think you know of Negroes anyway?” she asked a surprised O’Neill. “You make your Negro hero flunk his examinations for becoming a physician time after time. . . . And you expect Negroes to like and enjoy your play!”
Rather than model her play on anything whites were writing, Meyer made the unusual decision to mimic the black antilynching theater tradition, the least professionalized form of American drama then existing, almost always “presented in societies, schools,” colleges, churches and amateur theatres. A “distinct genre of American drama,” the antilynching tradition had begun in 1916 with Angelina Grimké’s Rachel, a play addressed to white women in the hope that they could sympathize with a black mother so agonized over the lynchings of blacks that she wonders if it wouldn’t be “more merciful to strangle the little things at birth.” Mary White Ovington published an unusual antilynching play in 1923 to which Black Souls clearly responded. The Awakening depicts young members of a northern black social club who come to a growing awareness of lynching as they harbor a young southern fugitive falsely accused of raping a white woman and succeed in securing his safety. In the process they grasp the importance of the NAACP’s fight against lynching and join the cause by turning their social club into a local NAACP chapter. Very few antilynching plays end that happily. The black plays in this tradition are mostly tragedies in which lives are “blighted” and “accursed” by racism, by lynching, and especially by the complicity of white women in those wrongs. In small but significant ways, Meyer signaled her desire to be thought of as one of those black playwrights. Like their plays, hers used black music, poetry, prayers and sermons, speeches, and other kinds of dialogue within the body of the play, including a quartet of “colored singers” identified as “Zora Hurston’s Choral Group.” Most white authors’ antilynching plays, however, such as The Forfeit and Ann Seymour’s Lawd Does You Undastahn, used dialect.
Black Souls was also collaborative. In the early stages of the play, particularly, Meyer was experimenting with the idea of a multiracial dramatic voice. She was particularly taken by the idea of black-white literary collaboration between women, which was extremely rare, if not unheard of, in the Harlem Renaissance and which she had attempted with Hurston.
Black Souls makes its central problem white women’s responsibility for racial violence. What Cunard called “the lynch machinery” was for Meyer a moral dilemma every white woman needed to face.
Hence she refused to give up. She turned her bitter disappointment about the unexpected closing of Black Souls into a massive advertising campaign, printing a brochure that invited the public to “find out for yourself why the dramatic critics, with significant unanimity, distorted its message and ignored its path-breaking originality, pretending that it was only the same old black and white stuff. The truth is, never before has a playwright dared to utter certain truths.” Using the interest her campaign helped create, she tried again to get a publisher for the play. None was interested. She appealed to H. L. Mencken; Eugene O’Neill’s German translator, Rita Matthias; Edward Goodman of the Washington Square Players; the publishing houses Boni & Liveright, Macmillan, Harcourt Brace & Company, and Brentano’s; Carl Van Vechten; black composer Flournoy Miller; the agency Brandt & Brandt; and renowned black actor Charles Gilpin. Nothing. “I have great faith that my play will stir people greatly once I can only get some one with courage to put it on,” she lamented.
She decided to get her play back before the public by publishing it herself, although she and her husband were feeling the Depression’s pinch. By mid-July she had signed a contract with Reynolds Printing, which specialized in the new field of direct-mail advertising, to bring out 250 paperback copies and 200 clothbound copies and hold an additional 550 copies in flat sheets for instructions. Meyer was sure she would need them once the book caught on. She gave William Rossi of Reynolds an initial payment of more than $400, with author’s revisions to cost extra, the equivalent of many thousands of dollars today. What she did next must have rocked her genteel upper-class marriage. So determined was she to disseminate Black Souls that she took out expensive ads in magazines and newspapers, printing her home address (1225 Park Avenue) and selling copies (75 cents for paper, $1.25 for cloth) from her home—something almost unthinkable for a member of her social class and probably unheard of in their upscale town house neighborhood.
Eschewing her milieu’s edict to avoid publicity at all costs, she next entered into a massive letter-writing campaign. In a world without computers or photocopiers and without a secretary or assistant, she mass-marketed to black colleges, movie producers, churches, political and civic organizations, philanthropic foundations, influential individuals, university presidents, literary and dramatic agents, newspapers, reading clubs and literary societies, actors, producers, and theater managers. Every letter was a personal appeal. She drew on her name and family connections. She “guilt-tripped” shamelessly. At the same time, she angled for a movie version of her play and, simultaneously, a Broadway version. There was brief interest from the WPA, which “rehearsed devotedly for fully six weeks” and then got cold feet. Nothing came of it.
Her Reynolds Press version of the play did garner many reviews, some of them excellent. As she had from day one, Mary White Ovington applauded Meyer’s bravery for sticking with such a “daring” story. Ovington remarked on how different it was from other plays of the day. “Here is realism, not folk lore, not slap-stick humor,” she wrote. George Schuyler, with whom Meyer was growing increasingly close, reviewed the book twice for The Pittsburgh Courier. He wrote: “Black Souls is so unusual as to be breath-taking. . . . Few white people would have had the nerve or honesty to write a play like that. . . . It should come as a welcome relief . . . [from] the Emperor Jones—Florian Slappey—Green Pastures bunk.” Opportunity also reviewed it twice. In his yearly retrospective for 1932, Alain Locke discussed no other play, risking Charlotte Mason’s ire by not even mentioning The Great Day.
Meyer even tried to work with Gloss Edwards, an aspiring theater producer who proposed turning Black Souls into a musical with a happy ending. I am “immensely interested,” she wrote Edwards. “I don’t mind changes,” she continued, trying to hold both his interest and her ground simultaneously,
but frankly, I cannot see how the tragedy can mean anything if it has a happy ending. It seems to me the whole basic idea of the play would simply disappear. . . . Yet please don’t think that I shall be difficult with changes. I pride myself on being the reverse. As to musical comedy (or tragedy) Personally I hate it. . . . Nevertheless I am interested. . . . I should rejoice with all my heart to see my play on, but wouldn’t care a bit about it being put to music. . . . However I won’t stand
in the way if people who know really think Black souls would make a good Musical Show. Do I make myself clear?
She ended her letter with an invitation to Edwards to motor up to Maine for more discussion and promised to provide him with all of his meals. Nothing came of that either.
For a woman of Meyer’s background and personality, the fact that many of the most interesting avenues of work were open only to men must have been galling. What she needed to be “happy,” she wrote to her friend and agent Margaret Christie, was the ability “to plunge into work” of significance. In fact, she was able to parlay the notoriety of Black Souls into a place of honor in the black community, though not nearly as extensively as her friend Fannie Hurst was able to do, for writing that was not nearly so bold. In May 1933, advertised prominently as the author of Black Souls, Meyer appeared in Opportunity as a featured reporter on black life, providing a firsthand account, with analysis, of “Negro student” attitudes toward American communism. She used her platform similarly throughout the 1930s and 1940s, giving addresses on a range of race-related issues at churches, black schools and colleges, and institutions from the Urban League to the historian Carter Woodson’s highly regarded black research organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Excepting her good friend Mary White Ovington, no white woman (except Hurst)—at least none whom Meyer knew—could boast as long or as distinguished a New York career as an expert on race. When possible, she combined her standing as a Nathan with her status as a racial expert. In 1935, for example, she started a campaign in Opinion, a Jewish intellectual journal, to expose the notorious racist Madison Grant and oust him from his positions with the Zoological Society and the Museum of Natural History. She was especially delighted when she could use her new social power to help her Harlem friends. In the mid-1930s she helped underwrite a yearly salary for George Schuyler so that the NAACP could hire him to press for passage of the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill.
Unlike most other white women in Harlem, Meyer liked the company of other “broad-minded white women who are working for the Negroes . . . charming women.” Black Souls helped her build a network of such women. “The more I think of it the more I believe in it,” she said. Being well liked in the black community was also deeply gratifying. Achieving that goal gave her a sense of freedom, as well as a sense of accomplishment and the first experience of comfortable community she’d attained. Meyer found it nearly impossible to be a feminist among women or a Jew among Jews. But advocating for black civil rights allowed her to give expression to both identities. Ill at ease and often bitter among those designated as her “own” people, she was able to do her best work when she was among those whose expectations weighed least heavily on her. In Harlem, she was free to be as contrary as she liked. That worked to her advantage. But it also helped ensure her obscurity.
Like many of the women whose stories this book tells, Meyer’s involvement in Harlem was once extraordinary enough to earn her coverage in such prestigious venues as The New Yorker, which ran a two-part profile on her and her husband. (She hated the fourteen-page illustrated profile, which caricatured her to the point of cartoonishness, painting her as a crabby, self-congratulatory eccentric who careened from crusade to crusade and was lucky not to have ended up a spinster.) Yet, like those other once-famous women, she vanished from Harlem Renaissance histories almost without a trace. If she is remembered at all, it is for founding Barnard College. As one Barnard historian put it, “Annie’s names, married and maiden, have been dropped entirely” from history. Meyer died in 1951, still fighting for the recognition she felt was her due.
Black Souls did help Annie Nathan Meyer “get out.” It gave her meaningful work that combined her two passions. It opened an alternative world for her; helped her to set herself apart from her family; and gave her the recognition she had long craved, a sense of community, and the special freedom that comes from being an outsider on the inside of a social movement. It deepened her relationships with other white women, such as Mary White Ovington and Fannie Hurst. And it made possible intimate interracial friendships with James Weldon Johnson, George and Josephine Schuyler, and Zora Neale Hurston. At one point she even developed a most unlikely friendship with one Clifford C. Mitchell, a syndicated columnist, reviewer, and admirer of Black Souls, who also happened to be inmate no. 30667 of the Michigan State Prison in Jackson, Michigan. She often described Black Souls as the most important thing that had ever happened to her. Sometimes she said that the play, and the ways it had changed her life, had given her something “worth living for.” “I was always more of a pioneer than people realize,” she peevishly remarked once to an interviewer. “It is of no more use to be ahead of your time than behind it,” she added.
Chapter 6
Charlotte Osgood Mason: “Mother of the Primitives”
I am eternally black.
—Charlotte Osgood Mason
I am a Black God.
—Charlotte Osgood Mason
Mrs. Mason . . . is one of the mysteries of the Harlem Renaissance.
—Robert Hemenway
By late September 1927, it was clear to Harlem that something was up. Alain Locke typically played things close to the vest, but word had spread about hushed consultations with an unnamed East Side individual to launch an extravagant new Harlem museum of African art. Instead of being fidgety, defensive, and self-conscious, he seemed calm and self-assured. Langston Hughes was sporting a handsome leather briefcase and elegant new clothes, and was spotted squiring an impeccable, lace-collared, white-haired elderly white lady to concerts, plays, and lectures, showing her the sights of Harlem, and traveling in a large chauffeur-driven car. “I saw Langston,” Harold Jackman wrote to Countée Cullen, “escorting a dowager (white) of ninety-eight. She must have been that or at least an octogenarian—no kidding, she was really very old. Langston was all properly ‘tuxed’ and the old lady handed him the carriage check and the last I saw of him he was getting into the automobile.” Suddenly Hughes had seemingly limitless spending money and was able to pick up the tab for friends who’d come to take his charming freeloading for granted.
Charlotte Osgood Mason looking grandmotherly.
Zora Neale Hurston was even more notorious for being broke. Many Harlemites winked at her strategies for making ends meet. There was her failed stint as Fannie Hurst’s secretary and personal assistant (Hurston could not type and was allergic to organization) quickly followed by her determination to “set up as a chicken specialist . . . fried chicken at a moment’s notice to the carriage trade” to bring in extra cash. But now she was paying her own way and also flaunting new clothes, even giving some away. She claimed to have access to expensive equipment, such as tape recorders and movie cameras, and there was talk here and there that she might have a car. Tongues wagged when other formerly penniless black writers, artists, and musicians suddenly appeared flush as well.
This evidence of money—from somewhere—was especially noticeable given that the Harlem “vogue,” as Hughes drily called it, had not translated into much cash for black artists. “Harlem is an all-white picnic ground and with no apparent gain to the blacks. . . . The saloons were run by the Irish, the restaurants by the Greeks, the ice and fruit stands by the Italians, the grocery and haberdashery stores by the Jews. The only Negro business, excepting barber shops,” Claude McKay complained, “were the churches and cabarets.” Many black Harlemites found themselves receiving welcome attention but “no dollars.”
Of course, Harlem’s writers welcomed the notice of publishers. Coming after long years of neglect, the interest of the Knopfs, Horace Liveright, and Albert Boni felt like vindication. “I never expect to have a greater thrill,” Hurston declared after being published for the first time. “You know the feeling when you found your first pubic hair. Greater than that.” But, as with every aspect of the Harlem “vogue,” there was a catch: white publishers depended heavily on white intermediaries to tell them which black writers to pursue. The
most powerful publishers of black literature, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, never took a step in a black direction without first consulting Carl Van Vechten, who also acted as their white tour guide to what they still, in 1924, called Harlem’s “Nigger joints” (i.e., its nightclubs). Van Vechten recommended only writers he knew personally. Attendance at the drinking parties at his 55th Street apartment—a riot of color with walls painted in “bright pink, pale purple, and bright turquoise”—thus became a necessary rite of passage for Harlem’s black writers. So many of Harlem’s writers were vetted there that Walter White dubbed it “the midtown branch of the NAACP.”
Van Vechten was a prodigious reader and a dogged tastemaker. If a book moved him, he was inconsolable until he badgered all those around him into liking it as well. After reading Nella Larsen’s manuscript—an “extraordinary story, extraordinarily told”—in one sitting, for example, he marched straight to the Knopf office. “I stir Blanche & Alfred up about Nella Larsen’s Passing, making quite a scene,” he admitted. At the Knopfs’ anniversary party he promoted the book relentlessly. By the next day, Nella Larsen had a contract and a marketing plan. “Alfred Knopf tells me they are instituting a selling campaign for [Larsen’s] book,” he noted happily. Publishing then was hardly the corporate enterprise it has now become; personal influence could make or break a career.