Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  224 She had a remarkable command: Indeed, her psychic hold was so strong that to this day some people who knew her well are still nervous about talking of her. “When I interviewed Langston Hughes (only a few weeks before his death),” Nathan Huggins wrote, “he was still quite upset by the memory of his experience with this lady patron; he still honored his trust not to divulge her name.” Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 315. Hughes died in 1967. When I interviewed a member of the Chapin family, Schuyler Chapin, in 2005, he was still uncomfortable talking about Mason and repeatedly mentioned her unusual personal powers. An extremely cosmopolitan man and New York City’s “culture czar” for a dozen years, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and former Columbia University dean of the arts, Chapin was still shaking his head decades later about how intimidating he had found Mason and how impossible it seemed to him to so much as disagree with her. Author’s interview with Schuyler Chapin, New York, October 13, 2005.

  224 She could be generous: “Godmother could be as tender as mother-love when she felt you had been right spiritually,” Zora Neale Hurston said. Hurston, Dust Tracks, 129.

  224 One of her laws: Mason to Hughes, July 26, 1927, MSS 26, Series 1, Box 111, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke; Charlotte Osgood Mason to Alain Locke, June 17, 1928, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC. Mason’s notions about what should be left to silence baffled many of her protégés. All things financial, domestic, nutritional, and digestive were to be recorded in painstaking detail: every penny spent, every piece of linen purchased, every calorie consumed, each bodily waste emitted. She kept voluminous journals and housekeeping records (no longer extant) and encouraged all of her protégés and godchildren to do the same. Indeed, she blamed her inability to write in later years—most of her extant letters are dictated to Cornelia and Katherine—on excessive writing in her youth: “Having written so incessantly all my life, the neuritis in my arm has become so paralyzing that I cannot use it now even to write short letters.” Draft of a letter to her cousin Will, n.d., Quakertown. In her lifetime, she published only one short essay, about the death of her husband, “The Passing of a Prophet.”

  225 “Our engagement”: Katherine Garrison Chapin, “Secret Diary,” August 13, 1918, Quakertown.

  225 “delicious” . . . “a great happiness to us both”: Katherine Garrison Chapin, “Secret Diary,” Quakertown, 1919.

  226 “The Negro, in spite”: Hurston, Mules and Men, 4–5. The “feather-bed resistance” passage repeats, almost verbatim, in Hurston’s “You Don’t Know Us Negroes.”

  226 “goes to Whiteland”: Hurston to Hughes, April 12, 1928, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 115–16.

  227 But such collecting: See Stewart, On Longing; Elsner and Cardinal, eds., The Cultures of Collecting.

  227 They were hence: Locke and Hughes were both better at the “present company excepted” game than Hurston. She bashed other whites with gusto in Mason’s company, as Mason encouraged her to do. But she too often failed to notice that most of them were Jews, whom Mason—along with much of the rest of the nation—did not consider fully white. Frequently impulsive and overeager, Hurston often failed to give Mason the reassurance of her racial exceptionalism that Mason craved:

  About a month ago I wrote a short criticism of “Negro workaday songs” to Godmother in which I said that white people could not be trusted to collect the lore of others, and that the Indians were right. I was quoting Godmother’s words, but somehow she felt that I included her in that category. I hurriedly explained to her and she said she was satisfied. I was so sure we understood each other that I didn’t say present company excepted.

  Hurston to Hughes, July 10, 1928, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 121.

  227 “dry & long winded writing” . . . “instrument to do it with”: Mason notebook “A.L., 1929,” Mason to Locke, September 27, 1929, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC; Mason to Hurston, August 21, 1929, Quakertown; Mason notebook “A.L., 1929,” MSRC; Mason to Locke, May 4, 1928, MSRC; Mason to Locke, January 26, 1929, MSRC; Mason to Locke, January 26, 1929, MSRC; Mason to Locke, February 10, 1929, MSRC.

  228 “Things do not live”: Mason to Locke, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  228 “Such a pity your tongue”: Mason to Locke, May 21, 1930, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  228 “sometimes a whip”: Matthias, “Unknown Great Ones.” The essay does not mention Mason—“the godmother”—by name.

  228 “I see all my terrible weakness”: Hurston to Mason, April 18, 1931, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 217–18.

  228 Mason’s legal “agent”: Contract between Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Osgood Mason, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  228 Mason made her document: Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 48.

  229 “the Negro farthest down”: Hurston, Dust Tracks, 129.

  229 “not to make known”: Contract, Hurston and Mason, Alain Locke Papers. MSRC; dated December 1, 1927, and updated to 1932.

  229 “You should not rob”: Mason to Hurston, January 18, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  229 “I am so reluctant”: Hurston to Mason, September 25, 1931, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 227–28.

  229 “merciless”: Hurston, Dust Tracks, 129.

  230 “The whole movement”: Mason to Locke, April 11, 1928, Mason’s notebook, “A.L.: Letters to Him,” Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  230 “I am deeply troubled”: Mason to Locke, January 26, 1929, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  230 “better Negro”: Mason to Claude McKay, October 19, 1929, “Drafts of Letters,” Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  230 “I am a Black God”: Mason to Locke, April 1, 1928, draft 2, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  230 “true to any ideal”: Mason to Locke, January 6 and 12, 1930, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  230 “discouraging things”: Mason to Locke, August 8, 1930, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  231 “What am I to do”: Mason notebook “A.L., Letters to Him,” Mason to Locke, October 30, 1928, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC. Remarkably, Locke’s most recent biographers write that there were only “rare times when she [Mason] scolded Locke.” See Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 237.

  231 “half my capital”: Mason to Locke, February 28, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC. Beliefs that “the crash of Wall Street . . . barely rattled the exquisite china at 399 Park Avenue and touched Mrs. Mason’s godchildren not at all” and that “the stock market crash apparently had little immediate effect on Mason” are probably based on Harlem’s myths about Mason. Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 174; Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 244.

  231 “to succeed in my ideal”: Mason to Locke, December 6, 1931, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  231 “Alain you know perfectly well”: Mason to Locke, January 25, 1931, Mason’s notebook “Alain. 1931. Memorandum and Letters,” Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  231 “The discouragement of all”: Mason to Locke, July 11, 1930, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  232 “great adventures”: Mason to Hughes, December 1, 1927, Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  232 “Big Indian”: Mason to Hughes, June 29, 1928, Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  232 “Langston, Langston”: Hurston to Hughes, March 8, 1928, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 114.

  232 “real Negro art theater”: Hurston to Hughes, April 12, 1928, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Huston, 116.

  232 “born in Philadelphia”: Hurston, “Concert,” 806.

  232 “I love you”: Hughes to Mason, February 23, 1929, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  233 “So long”: Hughes, “Afro-American Fragment,” 235.

  234 “sorrowful misguided way” . . . “drum is stilled”: Mason to Hughes, June 6, 1930; July 10, 1930; October 30, 1930; December 25, 1930; February 12, 1931; March 1, 1931, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  234 “violently and physically ill”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 327, 326.

  234 “a result of Godmother’s disp
leasure”: Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 185.

  234 “the facts . . . reveal”: Berry, Langston Hughes, 106.

  235 “the most notorious literary quarrel”: Bass and Gates, eds., Mule Bone, 5.

  235 Locke had let the museum project drop: According to Jeffrey Ferguson, “the museum continued haphazardly until 1928, when organizational problems ended it. The permanent collection is installed in the 135th St. Branch of the New York Public Library.” Ferguson, “The Newest Negro.”

  235 “earth path even harder”: Undated letters from “The Friends,” Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle Papers, Biddle Family Letters, Georgetown. All subsequent references to the letters from “The Friends” are from those files.

  235 “shameful” . . . “lost their heads”: Locke to Mason, May 7, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  235 He was left with “shattered” health: Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 185.

  236 “I cannot write here”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 325.

  236 “abstifically a fraud” . . . “malicious”: Hurston, “The Chick with One Hen”; Hurston to James Weldon Johnson, February 1938, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  236 “the tragedy”: Dictated “Langston Hughes” notes, Mason, September 5, 1930, Quakertown.

  236 “he has knocked her to pieces”: Dictated “Langston Hughes” notes, Mason, September 5, 1930, Quakertown.

  237 A group of spirits: Lack of awareness of these letters has led to misunderstandings about this break and its chronology. Rampersad accurately dates the rupture to spring 1930 but does not note that both of them attempted reconciliation up to a final break in the winter of 1930–31. Faith Berry dates the rupture to the later period but fails to note that it began months earlier, in the spring of 1930. Hughes himself was elusive about the exact date of his break with Mason, and, no doubt, each came to a sense of finality at different times between the spring of 1930 and early winter of 1931, by which time it was apparent that all attempts at reconciliation had failed.

  238 “This egotism”: Mason, “Langston Hughes” notes, September 2, 1930, Quakertown.

  238 “powerful” . . . “harmony”: Mason, “Genius and Primitive Man,” 1905 or 1906, unpublished essay. Quakertown and Bryn Mawr. A note in Katherine Chapin Biddle’s handwriting appended to the front of this manuscript reads, “This was written by Godmother in 1905 and 1906. Held by Harpers for a year then material stolen—Col. Harvey came out with it[.] End [of book] is the benediction of the Indians Book.” See also Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood.

  238 “Truly”: Mason, “Genius and Primitive Man,” 154.

  239 “who went in for Negroes”: Hughes, “Slave on the Block,” in Hughes, The Ways of White Folks, 19–20.

  239 “Poor dear lady”: Hughes, The Ways of White Folks, 99.

  239 “smart neurasthenics” . . . “Patron”: Hughes, “Rejuvenation Through Joy,” in Hughes, The Ways of White Folks, 99. Hughes, “Poet to Patron.”

  240 “the only man on earth”: Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon, unpublished book manuscript, 14, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC. Mason met Hurston, in fact, precisely as Hurston was just publishing her first major essay on Kossula, “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver,” in October 1927. Hurston, “Cudjo’s Own Story.” As it turned out, much of the article was plagiarized from Emma Langdon Roche’s book Historic Sketches of the Old South, which Mason certainly did not know. Robert Hemenway provides an excellent account of this odd case of plagiarism, Hurston’s only such case, as far as we know. See his Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston’s link to Kossula was probably the reason that Mason had been so eager to bring her into her fold. To Mason, Kossula was now the foundation of the “magic bridge” she still wanted to build between Africa and America. “I was sent by a woman of tremendous understanding of primitive peoples to get this story,” she wrote in Barracoon. I am indebted to JoEllen ElBashir for helping me obtain this copy of the manuscript.

  240 “without fail, that life”: Mason to Locke, June 7, 1931, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  241 “the future of the Negro”: Mason to Locke, June 7, 1931, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  241 “to succeed in my ideal”: Mason to Alain Locke, December 6, 1931, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  241 material in a 1914 book: Roche, Historic Sketches of the South. Roche spells Lewis’s name “Kazoola” and his ship’s name “Clotilde” a spelling Hurston sometimes adopted as well. Hurston, “Cudjo’s Own Story,” 648–63.

  241 “I am being urged”: Hurston to Franz Boas, April 16, 1930, and June 9 [1930], in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 187.

  242 “Do not despair of me”: Hurston to Mason, April 7, 1931, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 216–17.

  242 “I am at the end”: Mason to Locke, January 25, 1931, Mason’s notebook, “Alain. 1931. Memorandum and Letters,” Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  242 “Convince [the publishers]”: Mason to Locke, June 7, 1931, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  242 “Remember”: Mason to Hurston, draft, January 17, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  242 “the oleomargarine era”: Hurston, “You Don’t Know Us Negroes.”

  242 “Very worried”: Mason to Locke, in notes, January 10, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  243 “a Negro concert”: Hurston to Mason, September 25, 1931, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 228.

  243 “happy-go-lucky”: Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 207.

  243 “primitive and exciting”: Hurston, “The Fire Dance” program, Orlando, Florida, 1939, Zora Neale Hurston Collection, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

  243 “I am on fire”: Hurston to Mason, October 15, 1931, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 235, 233.

  243 “Locke made periodic trips”: Kraut, Choreographing the Folk, 100.

  243 “I wrote it freshly”: Locke to Mason, December 31, 1931, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  243 “Zora was awfully hurt”: Mason, “A.L.” Notes, January 10, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  244 “never before”: Hurston, announcement, “The Great Day,” James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  244 “where Truth in the Negro world”: Mason to Locke, February 1, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  244 “original and unusual songs”: Hurston, announcement, “The Great Day,” James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  244 “unusual Negro performance”: Mason, notes, January 5, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  245 “squeezed all the Negro-ness”: Hurston to Mason, September 25, 1931, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 226.

  245 “awfully bad colored shows”: Hughes to McKay, June 27, 1929, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson, Beinecke, as quoted by Rampersad, 172.

  246 “faultless tails”: Hurston, “Concert,” 808.

  246 “Godmother had meant”: Hurston, “Concert,” 808.

  246 “the concert achieved its purpose”: Hurston, Dust Tracks, 141.

  246 and so did the reviewers: See Illidge, “‘The Great Day’ Heartily Received”; “Rare Negro Songs Given”; Ruhl, “Second Nights.”

  246 But Mason judged it a “failure”: Mason to Locke, April 8, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  246 “About the concert”: Hurston to Mason, January 21, 1932, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 242.

  247 “polite and rather cordial”: Hurston to Mason, March 27, 1932, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 247.

  247 “I understand”: Hurston to Mason, April 4, 1932, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 249.

  247 “none of the other data”: Contract, Hurston and Mason, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC; dated December 1, 1927, and updated to 1932.

  247 “Park Avenue dragon”: Hurston to Ruth Benedict, December 4, 1933, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 284.

  248 “I have sent his money”: Mason to Hurston, May 22, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  248 luncheons and teas: Mason’s teas were elaborate and carefully planned. A spring tea for Hall
Johnson, for example, served at a fashionably late hour, included “sandwiches of chicken, tomato, or crabmeat; little cakes with dry icing, orangeade, lemonade, and gingerale (‘little lemonade glasses for orangeade—tumblers for gingerale’); two dishes of candy, yellow candles, and decorations of yellow roses and larkspurs in a green bowl.”

  249 “You have don more”: Cudjo Lewis (Kossula) to Mason, March 29, 1929, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  250 “always yearned for”: Charlotte Osgood Mason to Langston Hughes, July 11, 1929, MSS 26, Box 111, Folder 2084, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  250 “raise the fires of hell”: Author’s interview with Schuyler Chapin, New York, October 13, 2005.

  251 “I am very changed”: Mason to Locke, December 11, 1943, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  251 “She was only awful”: Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle to Francis Biddle, November 11, 1945, Biddle Family Letters, Katherine Chapin Biddle Papers, Georgetown.

  251 “with her strong heart”: Cornelia Chapin to Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle, March 12, 1946, Biddle Family Letters, Katherine Chapin Biddle Papers, Georgetown.

  251 At 9 p.m. on a blustery: Certificate of death for Charlotte L. Mason, no. 9082, April 16, 1946, Bureau of Records and Statistics, Department of Health, City of New York.

  252 The big story that day: There were stories about more than three dozen men but only a few about women: the “wife of a well-known physician,” the “mother of the North Shore Chapter of the American Red Cross,” and “the wife of James F. Dewey, former United States Department of Labor Conciliator.” Only two women were mentioned for their own accomplishments: Mrs. Jay K. Bowman, “one of the founders of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs,” and Dr. Katharine Munhall, “one of Buffalo’s earliest women physicians.”

  252 “a friend of presidents”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 315.

  252 “Mason’s bad effect”: Katherine Chapin to Francis Biddle, May 1946 [date illegible], Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle Letters, Biddle Family Letters, Georgetown.

  252 “slowly destroying much”: Katherine Chapin to Francis Biddle, July 4, 1946, Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle Letters, Biddle Family Letters, Georgetown. Fortunately, some of these did survive. My gratitude, again, goes to Frances Biddle for her generosity, hospitality, and humor.