The famous poet Langston Hughes was a young man when he and Zora met in New York. The two became best friends—for a while.
There was one big difference in their personalities, however. Zora generally felt "drenched in light" and approached life cheerfully. Langston lacked confidence and was insecure about himself.
Because Zora and Langston grew so fond of each other, many people have assumed that there must have been a romance between them. That appears not to have been the case. The two up-and-coming writers seem to have limited their relationship to being close friends—what we might call "soul mates."
Like all writers, Zora, Langston, and their friends received a lot of rejection slips for their work. In the summer of 1926 they did what many aspiring writers have attempted. They began their own magazine. Called Fire!!, it claimed to be "devoted to the younger Negro artists"—meaning that it would publish its founders' work as well as that of other new black writers. The founders of Fire!! were Zora, Langston, Wallace Thurman, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bruce Nugent, and the artist Aaron Douglas. Each of the founders of Fire!! agreed to contribute fifty dollars (equal to $750 today) toward establishing the magazine. Only three of them actually scraped up the money they had promised. Zora was not one of them.
Some of the material for the magazine was stored in Zora's apartment. At the time, Zora's youngest brother, Everett, was staying with her. Just two days before Fire!! was to go to the printer, Everett Hurston searched his sister's apartment for some paper with which to start the fireplace. He found a pile of what he thought were old, discarded papers and used them to kindle the fire.
It turned out that the papers were the only copy of a short story Bruce Nugent had written for Fire!! When he learned that his story had gone up in flames, Nugent was very upset and angry at Everett. Since he didn't even have paper with which to rewrite the story, Nugent, in his own words, "took a roll of toilet paper and several paper bags and got on the subway and wrote the thing over again." Years later when the episode no longer stung so badly, Nugent said that he admired how Zora handled the situation. "She never made that boy feel bad about it," he explained, yet "she never made me think she was minimizing the loss."
The first issue of Fire!! was finally published in November 1926. Among its outstanding pieces were Zora's story "Sweat" and two Langston Hughes poems. Despite its fine writing, Fire!! was a financial disaster. For one thing, its one-dollar price was too steep for most Harlemites. Also, the creators of Fire!! stored hundreds of copies of the November issue in the basement of an apartment building in hope of selling them later. As fate would have it, a fire in the basement destroyed those remaining copies. A full year later, Zora was still trying to revive the magazine. "Fire has gone to ashes, but I still think the idea is good," she wrote to Alain Locke, whom she had affectionately nicknamed "Old Cabbage." Her efforts were in vain, however, and the November 1926 issue proved to be both the first and last appearance of Fire!!.
Some great news helped Zora get through the Fire!! disaster. Around the tail end of 1926 her anthropology professor, Franz Boas, called Zora into his office. "Papa Franz," as she called Dr. Boas behind his back, had arranged a much more appealing project for Zora than measuring heads on the streets of Harlem.
Recently Dr. Boas had written to Dr. Carter Woodson, an African American historian who earlier in 1926 had begun Negro History Week (now Black History Month). Boas had requested that the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which Woodson directed, make a large contribution for a special project to be conducted by his student, Zora Neale Hurston.
Pistol-packin' Zora brought a gun along on her 1927 Florida folklore journey.
Dr. Woodson granted $700 toward the project. The news got even better. The American Folklore Society had agreed to match Woodson's contribution. In today's money, the $1,400 Dr. Boas had obtained for Zora would amount to more than $20,000—quite a large sum.
And what was the special project Dr. Boas expected Zora to conduct? She was to travel through the South between February and August of 1927. During those seven months she would visit black communities, where she would collect old folktales, songs, sayings, and jokes.
Zora viewed this as a wonderful opportunity to accomplish several goals at once. By collecting African American folklore, she might make a name for herself in the field of anthropology. The material she gathered might go into a book on folklore, and might even be of use to her in writing stories and plays. Besides, she still had an untapped supply of "travel dust" that made her feet itch to return to her native South. Being in a warm climate instead of frigid New York City during the winter was also a pleasant prospect.
Zora decided to begin her journey in the state she knew best. Shortly after her thirty-sixth birthday in 1927, she went by train to Jacksonville, Florida, to start a new chapter of her life.
6. 1927
ZORA DEPARTED FOR THE SOUTH at the beginning of a memorable year for Americans. In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge announced that he wasn't running for reelection, Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean, and The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, ushered in the age of "talking" pictures. It was a big year for sports, too. In 1927 "the Bambino," Babe Ruth, slammed a record sixty home runs, and Gene Tunney retained the heavyweight crown by defeating Jack Dempsey in a bout that boxing fans still argue over today.
For black southerners, the year 1927 saw the continuation of a shameful practice. The U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans the right to a fair trial. However, from time to time black people accused of wrongdoing were murdered by white mobs, often by hanging, without benefit of a trial. This practice was called lynching. Some lynching victims were accused of nothing more serious than "talking sassy to white folks." This was why Grandma Potts had worried so much about Zora asking white people for rides when she had been a child. From 1920 to 1926, more than 250 African Americans were lynched, most of them in the southern states. Before 1927 ended, sixteen more blacks would be lynched. A black woman traveling alone through remote areas of the South was in real danger of running into trouble from groups of whites. For this reason, after her arrival in Florida, Zora carried a handgun in her purse for protection.
In Jacksonville, Zora stayed at the home of her older brother John Cornelius, who operated a meat market in that city. John Cornelius advised Zora against traveling by public transportation from town to town. Bus and train seating in the South was segregated, and someone with Zora's proud temperament might very well experience difficulties. Travel about by automobile, Zora's brother advised. With John Cornelius's help, Zora spent $300 of her $1,400 on a car that she named "Sassy Susie."
Zora sits on the running board of the used 1927 Nash she bought for a folklore-collecting expedition.
Zora drove Sassy Susie 135 miles to her hometown, Eatonville, which she expected would be a treasure trove of folklore. Although twenty-two years had passed since she had left home in 1905, many families Zora had known as a child still lived in the town. She was invited to stay in the home of a childhood friend, and Zora was soon frequenting Joe Clarke's store and other places in town to do her collecting.
People were cordial to her, but Zora had little success at first. In fact, during the entire seven-month period in 1927 that she traveled about trying to gather stories, songs, jokes, and sayings, she obtained little more material than what she had heard as a child at Joe Clarke's store.
The fault was all hers, Zora later admitted. With her New York clothes, newly acquired New York accent, and notebook in hand, she made people feel that she was no longer one of them. They weren't enough at ease with her to tell her what she wanted. Sometimes they weren't even sure what she was after. In her autobiography, Zora explained:
I did not have the right approach. The glamor of Barnard College was still upon me. I dwelt in marble halls. I knew where the material was, all right. But, I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, "Pardon me, but do you know any folk tales or
folk songs?" The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores, looked at me and shook their heads. No, they never heard of anything like that around there. Oh, I got a few little items. But compared with what I did later, not enough to make a flea a waltzing jacket.
"Papa Franz" wanted periodic reports from her, so she copied segments of her notebook and mailed them to him. On May 3, 1927, Dr. Boas criticized her with the comment: "I find that what you obtained is very largely repetition of the kind of material that has been collected so much." Zora was crushed that her anthropology professor was disappointed in her work, yet she knew that he was right.
Just sixteen days after Dr. Boas wrote that stinging note, Zora did something that surprised nearly everyone who knew her. After seven years of mostly long-distance courtship by letter, Zora and Herbert Sheen met in St. Augustine, Florida. There, the two were married on May 19, 1927. The groom was thirty years old and completing his last year at Chicago's Rush Medical College. The bride was thirty-six but probably had convinced Herbert that she was about ten years younger.
Zora was not enthusiastic about marriage. She wrote about her wedding day in her autobiography: "It was not my happiest day. I was assailed by doubts. For the first time since I met him, I asked myself if I really were in love, or if this had been a habit." Three days after her wedding, Zora informed two writer friends about her marriage. "Dear Little Sisters D H," she began her letter to the cousins Dorothy West and Helene Johnson. "Yes, I'm married now, Mrs. Herbert Arnold Sheen, if you please." She told them that she was retaining her maiden name, then changed the subject, asking whether either of them could lend her a certain book.
Following a brief honeymoon, Zora resumed her folklore-collecting travels, with Herbert accompanying her for several days before returning to medical school in Chicago. Their marriage was a disaster. Over the next few months Zora and Herbert saw each other sporadically before deciding to separate permanently near the end of 1927. After a few years of total separation and little if any communication, their divorce became final in 1931.
Everyone who knew Zora or who has studied her life has wrestled with these questions: Why did her marriage to Herbert Sheen end so quickly? Why did she marry him in the first place if she had so little interest in being with him? Zora never offered an explanation except to tell Langston Hughes that being married "held back" her career. Herbert later claimed that their interests were far too different for them to be compatible. "Zora was full of her work, and I was full of mine," he said.
These explanations don't exactly ring true, however. After all, Zora had had seven years to decide whether or not to marry Herbert. Not only that, but she later married twice more, and each of those marriages also lasted less than a year. Perhaps all we can say about Zora and marriage is that part of her wanted to live a conventional life, but a bigger part of her rebelled against responsibilities and needed to feel completely free to do what she wanted.
In July of 1927, Zora drove Sassy Susie to Mobile, Alabama, for what promised to be the highlight of her folklore-collecting trip. Near Mobile lived an elderly man who was a piece of living history. His name was Cudjo Lewis, and he was the only remaining survivor of the Clotilde, which in 1859 had delivered the last known cargo of slaves to the United States. Cudjo had been a slave for six years until the end of the Civil War.
Interviewing a native African who had been a slave in America was an anthropologist's dream. Cudjo, who must have been in his eighties, told Zora about his childhood in Africa and about his people's folklore and customs. He also recalled how, nearly seventy years earlier, he and others in his village had been captured, taken on the ship to America, and sold into slavery in Mobile. Zora wrote an article about him called "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver," which she planned to send to the Journal of Negro History, edited by Dr. Carter Woodson. Zora was so eager to impress the man who was providing half the money for her trip that she committed the cardinal sin for an author.
Cudjo (Kossula) Lewis, whom Zora interviewed in Alabama, was a survivor of the Clotilde, the last ship to deliver a cargo of slaves to the United States. Lewis is shown with his twin great-granddaughters, Mary and Martha.
There was a little-known book in the Mobile Historical Society titled Historic Sketches of the Old South, by Emma Langdon Roche, which contained information about Cudjo Lewis. Figuring that nobody would notice, Zora copied whole passages from Roche's book into her article with only slight changes. Of course, nonfiction authors routinely gather information from other sources, but they use several books for research and transform the material into their own words. Zora lifted page after page almost word for word out of Roche's book. In fact, Zora's article was only about 25 percent original. The other 75 percent was plagiarized, or stolen, from Historic Sketches of the Old South.
Dr. Woodson published Zora's article in the October 1927 issue of the Journal of Negro History. Miss Roche's book was so obscure that Zora's theft wasn't discovered until 1972, by which time Dr. Boas, Dr. Woodson, Zora herself, and most other people connected with her career were no Ionger living. Had her plagiarism been revealed back in 1927, Zora might have been expelled from Barnard College, kicked out of Columbia University's Anthropology Department, lost whatever was left of her $1,400 grant, and had her reputation as a writer so badly tarnished that publishers would be reluctant to consider her work. It was good luck on Zora's part that her foolish decision to steal material from another author wasn't discovered for forty-five years.
While traveling, Zora had written letters to Langston Hughes, trying to persuade her best friend to come down south and join her in her quest for folklore. From time to time Zora and Langston had discussed writing a "folk opera" together. It would show scenes of black life and feature songs and dancing—a little like the operettas Miss M's troupe had performed, except with African American themes and Jazz and blues music. As part of her campaign to persuade Langston to join her, Zora exaggerated her accomplishments: "Getting some gorgeous material down here, verse and prose, magnificent. Shall save some juicy bits for you and me. Wish you could join me after school closes."
Langston, who now attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, had been spending his summer vacation on a southern tour of his own. In late July, just as Zora was finishing her interviews with Cudjo Lewis, Langston met her in Mobile, Alabama. He agreed to accompany Zora on the rest of her southern tour and then return north with her in Sassy Susie.
With Zora behind the wheel, the two writers toured Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina for a few weeks, collecting folklore. As they drove from town to town and then began the long trip back to New York, they discussed the folk opera they planned to write together and caught up on news and gossip. Zora confided to Lang something that she hadn't told Dr. Franz Boas or Annie Nathan Meyer: She was married, and her husband lived halfway across the country. Langston also had a bombshell for Zora. He had found a patron—a person who provided him with funds so that he could spend his time writing.
During their 1927 summer car trip from Florida to New York, Zora and Langston Hughes lectured at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute. There they met Jessie Fauset (left), former literary editor of the Crisis, which published Hughes's early poems.
When Zora asked about his patron's identity, Langston would only refer to her as "Godmother." One of Godmother's rules, he explained, was that he couldn't reveal her name. But the best news for Zora was that Langston thought Godmother would like her folklore work. Did Zora want him to help arrange for her to meet Godmother? Ofcourse she did!
Upon their arrival back in New York City in late August 1927, Zora showed Dr. Boas the folklore material she had collected. In her autobiography, she wrote: "I stood before Papa Franz and cried salty tears. He gave me a good going over, but later I found that he was not as disappointed as he let me think."
Nonetheless, Zora believed that if she could tour the South for another year or two, she would collect much better folklore than she
had the first time. Besides pleasing Dr. Boas, the new material would enhance the folk opera she and Lang planned to write together. But who would pay for another southern trip for Zora?
Thanks to Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, within a few days of her return to New York, Zora received an invitation to visit Godmother. On September 20, 1927, Zora rang the bell at Godmother's penthouse apartment at 399 Park Avenue. She was shown in to meet a seventy-three-year-old white-haired woman who would mean much to her writing career over the next few years.
That day, and in the weeks to come, Zora learned about Godmother's background. Her name was Charlotte Louise van der Veer Quick Mason—Mrs. Charlotte Mason for short. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1854, had married a wealthy physician. Mrs. Mason had a keen interest in anthropology, and, following her husband's death in 1903, she had traveled through the American West, living with Plains Indians for a time. She had become convinced that "primitives," as she called nonwhite people, had greater spirituality and a stronger feeling for the basics of life than white people. She began to use some of her wealth to help support creative artists who focused on the "primitives." She started by financing the musicologist Natalie Curtis's research into Native American songs and legends that went into Miss Curtis's The Indians' Book, published in 1907.
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