by Carla Kaplan
182 “a great deal of earnest talk”: Waldorf, New-York Evening Post.
182 “The play fails”: Barnes, New York Herald Tribune.
183 “has no authentic tang”: Eaton, “Printed Drama in Review.” Eaton’s review referred both to the later book version of the play and to its staged production in 1932.
183 “What a pity it is”: Arthur Huff Fauset to Annie Nathan Meyer, n.d., n.y., Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, Barnard.
183 “in advance”: Josephine Cogdell Schuyler to Annie Nathan Meyer, January 4, 1933, Box 6, Folder 2, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
183 “I always felt”: Annie Nathan Meyer to Margaret Christie, August 24 [n.y.], Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, Barnard.
183 “press storm”: Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan, January 12, 1934, in Bryer, ed., The Theatre We Worked For, 207.
183 “more publicity before production”: Macgowan, “O’Neill’s Play Again,” X2.
183 “A romantic scene”: Frank, “Tempest in Black and White,” 77.
183 “doomed passion”: Frank, “Tempest in Black and White,” 77.
183 “tragically brief run”: Arthur Huff Fauset, unpublished review of Black Souls, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, Barnard.
183 “ever narrowing band”: Arthur Huff Fauset, quoted in Annie Nathan Meyer to John Hope, July 14, 1932.
184 “brilliant and peppery”: George Schuyler, Black and Conservative, 213.
184 “landmark”: Arthur Huff Fauset, unpublished review of Black Souls, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, Barnard.
184 “some white educator of colored people”: Annie Nathan Meyer to Nicholas Murray Butler, June 4, 1924, Box 1, Folder 6, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
184 “When persons didn’t know”: Meyer, It’s Been Fun, 268.
184 “It is the biggest piece of work”: Annie Nathan Meyer to Rita Matthias, September 25, 1924, Box 6, Folder 1, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
184 “wonderful letters of appreciation”: Annie Nathan Meyer to James Weldon Johnson, July 14, 1932, Box 6, Folder 1, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
184 “the Negroes should raise the money”: Promotional materials for Black Souls, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
184 “Zora Hurston said I really penetrated”: Annie Nathan Meyer to “Miss [Margaret] Christie,” August 24 [1943], Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
185 “Mammies”: Meyer, It’s Been Fun, 268.
185 “happy-go-lucky”: Johnson, “Preface,” in The Book of American Negro Poetry.
185 “I studied and read”: Annie Nathan Meyer to Miss [Margaret] Christie, August 24 [1943], Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
185 His relations with white liberals: Davis, “John Hope.”
185 “Your visit with my wife”: John Hope to Annie Nathan Meyer, October 18, 1924, Box 6, Folder 1, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
185 “returned from Atlanta Ga.”: Annie Nathan Meyer, journal entry, May 14 [1924], Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
186 “I was not writing”: Meyer, It’s Been Fun, 4.
186 “This [Black Souls]”: Meyer, It’s Been Fun, 268.
186 “the first play”: Annie Nathan Meyer to Grace Nail Johnson, August 7, 1931, James Weldon Johnson, MSS Johnson, Series II, Box 33, Folder 152, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. (hereafter abbreviated Beinecke).
186 “deserted lighthouse”: Meyer, It’s Been Fun, 260–61.
186 “presented in societies”: Meyer, It’s Been Fun, 270.
186 “distinct genre of American drama”: Perkins and Stephens, Strange Fruit, 4.
187 Very few antilynching plays: Ovington’s biographer does not even call The Awakening an antilynching play; she calls it an “NAACP recruitment play.” Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit, 182.
187 The black plays in this tradition: See Johnson, A Sunday Morning in the South; Miller, Nails and Thorns; and Livingston, For Unborn Children. See also Howell, The Forfeit, the first white-authored play in the tradition, and also Link, Lawd Does You Undastahn. Perkins and Stephens provide an excellent overview of the tradition.
187 “find out for yourself”: Advertising brochure for Black Souls, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
188 “I have great faith”: Annie Nathan Meyer to James Weldon Johnson, June 17, 1934, JWJ MSS Johnson, Series II, Box 33, Folder 152, Beinecke.
188 By mid-July: Her contract specified 112 5-by-7½-inch pages, printed in Bodoni—a very modern typeface—on Flemish Book White Dove paper. It also specified stitched bindings, a red-and-black paper cover, and a green cloth cover.
188 town house neighborhood: See Gross, 740 Park.
189 “rehearsed devotedly”: Meyer, It’s Been Fun, 270.
189 “Here is realism”: Ovington, scrapbook, Box 22, Folder 3, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
189 “Black Souls is so unusual”: George Schuyler, “Views and Reviews,” December 2, 1933.
189 In his yearly retrospective: Once they’d read what Locke had written about Annie, however, Mason and Hurston may both have felt relieved that he’d ignored them. He called Black Souls “a propaganda piece, of good intentions and laudable sympathy, but decidedly weak in dramatic conception and execution.” Locke, “Black Truth and Black Beauty,” 14. Predictably, Meyer was incensed. Next to her scrapbook copy of Locke’s review she wrote: “Zora Hurston told me Locke always sneered at people who didn’t kowtow to him. Mary White Ovington and George Schuyler confirm this.” Annie Nathan Meyer, scrapbook, Box 22, Folder 3, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA. Fortunately, Opportunity quickly assigned a second review of Black Souls to theater critic Montgomery Gregory. His opinion could hardly have been more different from Locke’s. Calling Meyer a “pioneer” (her favorite word), Gregory praised the play as “an important social document and a dramatic tour-de-force. . . . It is impossible,” he went on, “to do justice to ‘Black Souls’ in a review.” Gregory, Opportunity, May 1933, 155–56.
189 Gloss Edwards: Annie Nathan Meyer to Gloss Edwards, July [1946], Box 6, Folder 2, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
190 What she needed to be “happy”: Annie Nathan Meyer to Margaret Christie, November 3, 1943, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, Barnard.
190 “Negro student”: Meyer, “Negro Student Problems,” 145–46.
190 used her platform: Given her lifelong dedication, Rosenberg’s assertion that Meyer “abhorred politics” is surprising. Rosenberg, Changing the Subject, 52.
190 “broad-minded white women”: Annie Nathan Meyer, journal entry, April 6 [1924].
191 “The more I think of it”: Annie Nathan Meyer to Frank Shay [producer, Barnstormers’ Theatre, Provincetown, Mass.], May 6, 1926, carbon, Box 1, Folder 7, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
191 two-part profile: Taylor, “The Doctor, the Lady, and Columbia University.”
191 “Annie’s names, married and maiden”: Kendall, “Peculiar Institutions,” 81.
192 At one point she even developed: Clifford Mitchell, Los Angeles News Dispatch, November 18, 1932; Annie Nathan Meyer scrapbooks, Box 22, Folder 3, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
192 “worth living for”: Annie Nathan Meyer, journal entry dated April 6 [1924], Box 13, Folder 1, Annie Nathan Meyer Papers, AJA.
192 “I was always more of a pioneer”: Annie Nathan Meyer to Emma Bugbee, New York Herald Tribune, October 6, 1939.
192 “It is of no more use”: Meyer, It’s Been Fun, 3.
Chapter 6: Charlotte Osgood Mason: “Mother of the Primitives”
193 “Mother of the Primitives”: Zora Neale Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, March 10, 1931, Zora Neale Hurston to Cornelia Chapin, February 29, 1932; Zora Neale Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, September 28, 1932, all in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 212, 244, 273.
193 “I am eternally black”: Charlotte Osgood Mason to Alain Locke, December 10, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. (MSRC).
193 “I am a Black God”: Charlotte Osgood Mason
to Alain Locke, April 1, 1928, draft 2, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
193 “Mrs. Mason . . . is one of the mysteries”: Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 104.
193 “I saw Langston”: Harold Jackman to Countée Cullen, January 3, 1929, Countée Cullen Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, quoted in Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, 157.
194 There was her failed stint: Zora Neale Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, September 25, 1931, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 228–29.
195 “Harlem is an all-white”: McKay, A Long Way from Home, 133, 49.
195 “no dollars”: Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten, May 8, 1929, in Hughes and Van Vechten, Remember Me to Harlem, ed. Bernard, 64.
195 “I never expect”: Hurston, Dust Tracks, 155.
195 The most powerful publishers: Carl Van Vechten’s daybook, Wednesday, November 5, 1924, in Van Vechten, Splendid Drunken Twenties, ed. Kellner, 60.
195 Van Vechten recommended: For a few years knowing blacks was his passion: he ticked off the date he met each one with a carefully noted “met” after their names, with all the scrupulousness of a collector.
195 “bright pink, pale purple”: Van Vechten, Splendid Drunken Twenties, 213.
195 “the midtown branch”: Kellner, Carl Van Vechten, 162.
195 “I stir Blanche & Alfred”: Van Vechten, Splendid Drunken Twenties, 241.
196 Van Vechten’s “Negrophilia”: On Van Vechten’s love of blackness, see especially Bernard, Carl Van Vechten, 13.
196 “passion for blackness”: Bernard, Carl Van Vechten, 1.
196 “not worth knowing”: Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future, 74.
196 “Every porter in the country”: Van Vechten, Splendid Drunken Twenties, 200; Kellner, Carl Van Vechten, 214; see also Hughes, The Big Sea.
196 He thrilled to being: Bernard, Carl Van Vechten, 217.
196 Although blacks were anxious: Kellner, Carl Van Vechten, 200.
196 In 1929, when Essie Robeson: Carl Van Vechten to Alfred Knopf, June 25, 1929, Box 728, Folder 9, Knopf Papers, HRC.
196 “frightful anger”: Carl Van Vechten, daybook entry, Thursday, December 19, 1929, in Van Vechten, Splendid Drunken Twenties, 269.
197 Park Avenue, by the time: Trager, Park Avenue, 105.
197 “sedate gentility”: Ferber, A Kind of Magic, 91.
197 Apartments such as Mason’s: www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm.
198 “one of the two dearest”: Alain Locke to Charlotte Osgood Mason, July 26, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
198 “true conceptual mother”: Zora Neale Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, May 10, 1931, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 218.
198 “It was all very wonderful”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 312ff.; 315.
198 “shadowy” . . . cash: Kellner, ed., Harlem Renaissance, 237; Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 151, 154, 155.
198 “The purse strings”: Kellner, “Refined Racism,” in The Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined, ed. Kramer, 96.
199 “So little is known today”: Kellner, The Harlem Renaissance, 237. See also Stewart, “A Biography of Alain Locke,” 323, unpublished; Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 151.
200 “The Angel in the House”: Woolf, “The Professions of Women.” From The Death of the Moth. Reprinted in Barrett, ed. Virginia Woolf, 59.
200 There was railroad and industrial: Sarah Joris Rapalje was born on June 9, 1625, in Albany, New York. See also census records, Franklin Township, 1860, Schedule 1, p. 85: census records, Borough of Princeton, 1870, Schedule 1, p. 64; census records Somerville, Somerset County, New Jersey, 1880, Schedule I, p. 5 (for Charlotte’s brother, Peter); census records, Borough of Princeton, 1880, Schedule I, p. 26; census records, Borough of Manhattan, 1920, District 1, Sheet 16A, 6901 (Charlotte is listed as living with her maid Mary Beggans), with the Chapins on West 51st Street in 1920—she frequently stayed elsewhere while her apartment at 399 Park Avenue was being packed, readied after a trip, or worked on; census records, Borough of Manhattan, 1930, District 21574, p. 5643 (she is not listed at 399 Park Avenue in the 1930 census even though she was living there at the time; most likely she was out when the census taker came by or, even more likely, refused to answer his questions).
200 As was common: Quick, A Genealogy of the Quick Family.
200 Her great-great-grandfather: Charlotte Mason’s 1927 “Alain Locke” notebook, April 19, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
200 “old doctrine”: Howe, “Introduction,” in Woman’s Work in America, ed., Meyer, 1.
200 “More dangerous”: Meyer, “Editor’s Preface,” in Woman’s Work in America, iv.
201 roughly six hundred: The census counted 610 families in 1870. Students who boarded with families were not part of the count. United States Census, Borough of Princeton, June 27, 1870, 68.
201 They lived in a neighborhood: United States Census, Borough of Princeton, June 27, 1870, 64.
201 “a suitable school”: Peterson, “As Princeton Changes a Black Community Fears for Future,” B2. “The top religious leaders in the Confederacy” were all Princeton students. Twenty-two Southern senators were educated at Princeton before the war. Maynard, in Princeton Alumni Weekly.
202 “Indeed, as many Princetonians died”: Maynard, in Princeton Alumni Weekly 111.
202 She was left mostly on her own: All around her, the college students were gearing up for leading the nation, the civic mission that was central to their education, while young women like herself were being raised to become wives and mothers, “angels in the house.” Kemeny, Princeton in the Nation’s Service, 10–11 and passim.
203 Members of the Chapin family: Author’s interviews with Schuyler Chapin, Frances Biddle, and Stephen Biddle.
203 One day, at the height: “James C. Johnson,” Princeton Press, Saturday, May 16, 1896. Hageman’s history identifies the woman as Theodosia Prevost, probably an error.
203 Johnson paid Provost back: Hageman, History of Princeton, 269.
203 According to one family member: His first wife, Marianne Goodwin, died of pneumonia in 1880.
203 Such addictions were fairly common: Author’s interview with Phoebe Eaton, Mason’s step-granddaughter, May 2, 2005. I am deeply grateful to the Biddles, Steve and Frances, for accompanying me on this interview.
204 In New York, he was the darling: On how the Civil War changed national understandings of death, grief, mourning, and the afterlife, see Faust, This Republic of Suffering.
204 “born sensitive”: Mason, Hypnotism and Suggestion, 10. In her husband’s view, “sensitives” were to be found not only among many different people and sometimes even “very young children” but also among “animals, especially horses and dogs.” Mason, Telepathy and the Subliminal Self, 302–3; 283.
204 “divine energy”: Mason, Hypnotism and Suggestion, 288.
204 Dr. Mason could now devote: Mason’s particular specialty was hypnosis. He claimed, through hypnotic therapy, to have cured an extraordinary array of ailments in children and adults. He boasted of such pediatric successes as relieving a five-year-old girl of persistent nightmares about a black man; giving strength and courage to a seven-year-old “cry baby”; and curing a number of adolescent epileptics of all seizures and symptoms. His adult success stories were even more varied. They included a male homosexual who reversed his preference for men; a chronic masturbator and smoker who gave up “self abuse” altogether and also cut back on his smoking; a young mother whose breast milk would not come in; a hypochondriac; a paranoid with persecution hallucinations; various melancholics, drunks, addicts, neurasthenics, and patients with paralysis, stage fright, hallucinations, and insanity. See also Mason, Telepathy and the Subliminal Self; Mason, Hypnotism and Suggestion; Mason, “Duplex Personality”; Mason, “Alternating Personalities”; Mason, “Educational Uses of Hypnotism”; Mason, “Educational Uses of Hypnotism”; Mason, “Forms of Suggestion Useful in the Treatment of Inebriety”; Mason, “The Influence of Hypnotic Suggest
ion upon Physiological Processes”; Mason, “The Genesis of Genius”; Mason, “Some Cases Treated by Hypnosis and Suggestion”; Mason, “The Educational and Therapeutic Value of Hypnotism”; Mason, “What Is Genius?”; Mason, “Professor Fiske and the New Thought”; Mason, “Is It Wise for the Regular Practising Physician to Spend Time to Investigate Psychic Therapeutics?”; Mason, “Typical Cases of Clairvoyance”; “Dr. Mason on Telepathy”; Mason, “Some Facts Concerning Hypnotism”; Mason, “Drink”; Mason, “A Life of Pasteur”; Mason, “Concerning Supernormal Perception”; Mason, “William Blake: Artist, Poet, Visionary”; Mason, “Value of Psychical Research”; Mason, “Character”; Mason, “Telepathy”; Mason, “Life After Death”; Mason, “Hypnotism: The Attitude of Physicians Toward It from Mesmer to Charcot.” See also his newspaper series, cited in the bibliography.
205 Among the cases he claimed to have cured: Mason, Hypnotism and Suggestion.
205 If the “ego”: Mason, Telepathy and the Subliminal Self, 143; Mason, Hypnotism and Suggestion, 290.
205 “the most important work”: Mason, quoting William E. Gladstone on the overall efforts of the Society for Psychical Research, Hypnotism and Suggestion, 305.
205 In a series of newspaper stories: The series, entitled “In the Field of Psychology: Reports of the Scouts Who Have Been Exploring,” was published in The New York Times on October 22, 1893; November 5, 1893 November 12, 1893; November 19, 1893; and December 3, 1893.
205 “Our western civilization”: Mason, Telepathy and the Subliminal Self, 255.
205 “materialistic, hard, mechanical”: Mason, Telepathy and the Subliminal Self, v.
205 “standing apart and singing”: Mason, Hypnotism and Suggestion, 272.
205 His wife agreed: Spiritualism’s American origins, in the spring of 1848, were tailor-made for divided opinion. On March 31, in Hydesville, New York, Catherine and Margaretta Fox, Methodist adolescents, reported a rapping noise with which they could—they said—communicate by finger clicks and knocks. They claimed to be in touch with the spirit of one Charles B. Rosna, a murdered peddler buried in their farmhouse basement. Igniting a national craze for all forms of communicating with the dead, from automatic writing with planchettes and Ouija boards to séances and mediums, the Fox sisters gave rise to hundreds of self-declared mediums in the Finger Lakes region of New York alone, thousands of national spiritualist societies, and perhaps millions of adherents to spiritualism by the 1850s—in short, a “full-scale cultural fad.” P. T. Barnum even exhibited the sisters in his New York museum, adding to their renown. In 1888, however, the Foxes exposed their own psychic powers as an elaborate hoax, produced by making popping noises with their toes: