Twenty years later, Mrs. Mason had attended a lecture by Professor Alain Locke and concluded that African American creative artists were brimming over with spirituality but often needed financial help. In 1927 she began inviting black people involved in the creative arts to her elegant Park Avenue penthouse. She aided those who she felt had talent.
Alain Locke was the first African American writer she had decided to assist. In fact, Alain served as a kind of talent scout for Godmother, recommending other gifted but needy black writers, artists, and musicians. At Langston Hughes's urging, Alain Locke had brought up Zora's name to Godmother. Godmother asked Zora: What was the project for which she needed funds?
She wanted to collect black folklore in the South and then publish her findings, Zora explained. She had recently completed her first southern tour but had barely scratched the surface. The richest nuggets of songs, stories, and sayings were still waiting for her to dig them out.
Zora was so excited about her first interview with Godmother that the next day she sent Langston a note about it. "Dear Bambino," wrote Zora, "I went to see Mrs. Mason and I think we got on famously. God, I hope so!"
Mrs. Charlotte Mason, or "Godmother," supported the creative endeavors of such artists as Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Zora.
Over the next few weeks, Zora returned to 399 Park Avenue for more interviews. Zora knew that Godmother liked her. A big reason was that Godmother saw that Zora was true to her roots—an African American who was proud of being black. Godmother also thought that Zora's project had "soul," as she referred to ideas of which she approved. Godmother offered to pay Zora two hundred dollars a month so that she could spend 1928 collecting folklore in the South. Mrs. Mason also agreed to provide her with a car and a movie camera to help her pursue her project. In return for Mrs. Mason's support, Zora would have to obey three rules.
First, Zora must address Mrs. Mason as "Godmother." Second, Zora must keep Godmother's identity secret, for she didn't want every would-be painter, composer, or novelist camping on her doorstep, seeking money. Between 1927 and the early 1930s, Mrs. Mason gave a total of $75,000—equal to a million dollars today—to African American creative artists, all of whom agreed to these two rules. But in Zora's case there was a third rule. All of the folklore Zora collected was to be turned over to Godmother, who retained final say about what was to be done with it.
Godmother's first two rules were fine with Zora, but the third one disturbed. her. It meant that Godmother could decide whether Zora and Langston could use what she collected in their folk opera. It meant that Godmother could prevent Zora from showing the material to Dr. Boas. Furthermore, if she so chose, Godmother could hand over Zora's material to an established author and have him or her turn it into a book. In that case, Zora's role would be reduced to that of a researcher.
Mrs. Mason confided to Zora that she wanted to retain ownership of the material to make sure that it wouldn't be "commercialized"—turned into a cheap Hollywood movie or a sleazy magazine story about "Negro customs down south." She didn't really intend to prevent Zora from using the material in any reasonable way. Furthermore, Godmother promised Zora that if things went well, the contract would be extended through 1929. Godmother asked Zora to come to her penthouse on December 8 and sign a contract.
The decision was easy for Zora. She felt that Mrs. Mason was sincere, for her dear friend Langston Hughes had great respect for her, once calling her "an amazing, brilliant, powerful personality," adding that he "was fascinated by her, and loved her." Besides, without Godmother's assistance, Zora wouldn't be able to go on her folklore-collecting trip. There was another reason why Zora came to 399 Park Avenue to sign on the dotted line. If need be, she planned to defy the clause that granted Mrs. Mason the right to decide how the material would be used. Folklore was something that the people handed down generation after generation. It belonged to everyone, so how could anyone claim that he or she owned a folktale, saying, or song?
On December 14, 1927—six days after signing the contract with Godmother—Zora went to New York's Penn Station and boarded a southbound train. As she headed back to Mobile, Alabama, Zora felt confident that this trip would launch her career as a folklorist and writer.
7. "Most Gorgeous Possibilities"
ZORA EVIDENTLY FELT GUILTY about the Cudjo Lewis episode, for the first thing she did upon arriving in Mobile was to arrange for more meetings with the elderly ex-slave. She spent much of January interviewing Lewis and was particularly moved by how, seventy years after being taken into slavery, the old man still missed his people in Africa and cried as he spoke about them. Out of respect for his roots, Zora usually called him by his African name, Kossula. A few years later she would write a book about him, The Life of Kossula (also called Barracoon), but it was never published in her lifetime.
By late January, Zora had finished her interviews with Cudjo Lewis and was ready to move on. She had sold Sassy Susie back in New York, so she now bought another car—a shiny gray Chevy—and drove it to Florida to begin what would turn out to be two straight years of collecting folklore.
One of her first stops was the town of Loughman in the woods of central Florida. There she rented a room at a boardinghouse owned by the Everglades Cypress Lumber Company and tried to befriend the workers who cut down the trees and processed the wood in the sawmill. The men and women employed by the lumber company were a tough bunch, and at first they were wary of the stranger with the flashy car. They suspected that she might be some kind of government agent or even a private detective looking for a wrongdoer. Convincing them that she had traveled more than 1,100 miles to collect folklore would be difficult, Zora knew, so she concocted a lie to explain her appearance out of nowhere in her fancy car.
Early in 1928, Zora lived in the "quarters" of the Everglades Cypress Lumber Company.
At the time, Prohibition, a period from 1920 to 1933 when alcoholic drinks were outlawed throughout the country, was in full swing. During Prohibition, bootleggers broke the law by manufacturing or smuggling alcoholic drinks into the country and selling them. Zora told the lumber workers that she was a bootlegger hiding out from government agents in Miami and Jacksonville.
The lumber workers believed Zora's tall tale and began to invite her to their "payday parties," held every other Saturday night. As she ate, drank, and danced with them, Zora was gradually accepted into the group. She had brought a guitar along on the trip, and she would sing "John Henry" or another African American folk song and then lend her guitar to anyone who wanted to sing. "Big Sweet," who was considered the lumber camp's toughest woman, especially befriended her. Big Sweet enjoyed riding around in Zora's car, and promised Zora that she would "do [her] fighting for [her]" if anyone started trouble with her.
These lumbermen were returning from a day's work in the cypress mill.
After a while, Zora confided the truth to Big Sweet: She had come to Loughman to collect "lies" and old songs and sayings. With Big Sweet's help, Zora put up signs at the post office and the lumber camp store. On a certain date there was to be a "lying contest," with cash awards given out for the four best "lies."
On contest day, there was a big turnout. To make sure there would be no arguing over who was worthy of the prizes, Zora appointed Big Sweet as the judge. The event was so successful that Zora held another lying contest a week or so later.
"I believe I have almost as many stories now as I got on my entire trip last year," she wrote to Langston Hughes. Regarding their folk opera, she added, "Langston, Langston, this is going to be big. Most gorgeous possibilities are showing themselves constantly."
Several people who were too shy to enter the lying contests visited Zora privately to tell her a story or joke, or to sing a song that had been handed down in their family since slavery days. This nearly cost Zora her life.
Zora became friendly with a lumber worker called Slim who was a store' house of old folktales. She let Slim ride in her car and spent a lot of time writing down his "l
ies." Zora's friendliness with Slim angered a woman named Lucy who had once been his girlfriend and who hoped to win him back. Lucy grew so jealous of Zora that at the next "payday party" she rushed at Zora with a knife, attempting to stab her.
Zora either didn't have her handgun with her or she was too terrified to find it. Later she wrote about this incident: "I saw sudden death very near. I was paralyzed with fear." Fortunately, before Lucy could stab Zora, Big Sweet appeared. She dove at Lucy and began fighting her, yelling for Zora to get out of there. "I ran to my room, threw my things in the car and left the place," Zora wrote in her autobiography. "When the sun came up I was a hundred miles up the road, headed for New Orleans."
On the way to New Orleans, Zora stopped in the community of Magazine, Alabama, where she held more lying contests. From there she drove to some undisclosed location on Alabama's Tombigbee River to interview an exslave woman who was "older than Cudjo" and "a better talker," as she confided to Langston Hughes. By early August she had arrived in New Orleans, where she learned about voodoo and the nineteenth-century "voodoo priestess" Marie Leveau.
Voodoo, also known as hoodoo, is a set of beliefs that scholars trace to traditional African religious practices. Followers of voodoo claim that through magic spells and help from the spirit world, people can control various aspects of their lives such as curing illnesses, sparking romances, and placing curses on enemies. Although New Orleans had been home to many voodoo practioners, the most famous was the legendary Marie Leveau. Among her supernatural abilities, Leveau could supposedly rise out of Lake Pontchartrain holding burning candles and then walk on top of the water to shore. Such stories fascinated Zora, who as a child had told her mother that she had walked on a lake and spoken with the fish. Zora decided to do an in-depth study of voodoo in New Orleans.
Few anthropologists would have attempted what Zora did. Instead of studying voodoo as an outsider, she apprenticed herself to a series of the city's best-known voodoo priests and priestesses over a period of several months. One of her teachers was Luke Turner, who was reputedly Marie Leveau's grandnephew. Turner put Zora through a ritual for which she had to lie, silent and alone, on a couch for three days and three nights. All that time she was forbidden food, but she was allowed to drink water from a pitcher.
"On the third night, I had dreams that seemed real," she later wrote. "In one, I strode across the heavens with lightning flashing from under my feet, and grumbling thunder following in my wake." Luke Turner gave her some instructions based on these dreams: "I was to walk with the storm, and get my answers to life in storms." Turner also gave Zora her voodoo name, the Rain-Bringer, and painted a yellow and red lightning bolt on her back as her special symbol.
At the end of 1928, Zora returned to New York for a visit. Godmother was so pleased with the material Zora had collected that she renewed her contract for another year. Godmother would continue her financial support for Zora for a total of nearly five years.
The new year, 1929, brought two close calls for Zora. In July, while collecting folklore in St. Augustine, Florida, she suffered terrible abdominal pains. She knew the problem couldn't be her appendix, for it had been removed more than ten years earlier when she had vowed to "find the road that [she] must follow" if she survived. She rushed to a hospital in St. Augustine, where doctors concluded that something was wrong with her liver, an extremely vital organ. Either the doctors were mistaken or Zora had amazing recuperative powers, for after only a few days she was out of the hospital and back on the road. She temporarily kicked off the travel dust, however, and decided to spend all of August and September in Miami, Florida.
While a stenographer typed her folklore notes, Zora began a forbidden project. Without asking Godmother's permission, Zora used some of her collected material to start writing the folk opera she and Langston Hughes had planned to do together. By August 17 she had completed seven skits, and she wrote Langston, "I am now writing music, and if I do say so I have one or two snappy airs." When two authors collaborate on a project, they usually divide up the work to make the most of their talents. Zora and Langston may have decided that she would write the rough draft and he would do much of the rewriting and polishing. Or perhaps Zora was so eager that she just went ahead and began their folk opera on her own.
While in Miami, Zora saw a performance by some dancers from the Bahamas. "I just had to know more," she wrote in her autobiography. "So without giving Godmother a chance to object, I sailed for Nassau," the island country's capital.
After arriving in the Bahamas, Zora collected folk songs, took movies of Bahamian dancers with the camera Godmother had bought for her, and learned to do the native dances herself. She also had another brush with death. In late September a powerful hurricane struck the Bahamas. Its winds, which reached 150 miles per hour, blew down more than three hundred homes in Nassau, including the house where Zora was staying with a Bahamian family. On this occasion, Zora truly did get her "answers to life in storms," for she had a feeling of impending doom and led everyone out of the house before the wind destroyed it. Years later, Zora's hurricane experience in the Bahamas would inspire a memorable scene in her most famous book, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
In letters to Langston Hughes, her best friend, Zora related the details about the hurricane and the highlights of the places she visited. She confessed to Lang that when she left Nassau to return to Florida, she had "only [her] return ticket and 24 cents." At the end of the same letter she told him, "You are my mainstay in all crises. No matter what may happen, I feel you can fix it."
Two months later, while back in New Orleans, she wrote, "Well, I tell you, Langston, I am nothing without you." Around New Year's Day of 1930, while on a return trip to the Bahamas, she closed a postcard to Langston with the words, "See you soon, Love everything." Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes seemed to have forged a friendship that would last a lifetime. Who could have guessed that in a few months they would be engaged in one of the fiercest literary battles of the century?
Zora made two trips to the Bahamas.
8. "You, LANGSTON HUGHES, Cut Me to the Quick"
ZORA ARRIVED IN NEW YORK in March 1930 with two manuscripts in hand. One was the rough draft of the folklore project for which she had been collecting material for more than two years. It would eventually appear as Mules and Men, but more than five years would pass before a publisher would accept and print the book. The other manuscript was the beginning of the folk opera Zora intended to co-write with Langston Hughes. This project would bring misery to just about everyone connected with it.
Soon after Zora's return, Godmother informed her that she didn't want her living in the big city. New York offered too many distractions for Zora to do her best at revising the folklore manuscript. Instead, Godmother rented an apartment for Zora twenty-five miles from New York in Westfield, New Jersey. Zora was pleased, for she would be living just a few doors from Langston Hughes, whom Godmother had already established in an apartment there.
Godmother had more good news for Zora. She had hired a secretary to type manuscripts for Langston, who was finishing his first novel, Not Without Laughter. The secretary, Louise Thompson, was a bright young woman who had formerly taught at Hampton Institute, an African American college in Virginia. Now that Zora was moving to Westfield, Miss Thompson was to split her time doing work for both writers.
At first, the arrangement in Westfield worked beautifully. Langston, Zora, and Louise liked one another and were together much of the day. Langston helped Zora edit her folklore manuscript, and Louise worked late into the night typing the daily revisions. Lang and Zora also found time to work together on their secret project, which had undergone a big change.
Langston told Zora that, while talking to theater people, he had been advised that what was needed was a comedy about African Americans. He had become convinced that a play about the humor in black life had a good chance of becoming a Broadway hit and perhaps even a Hollywood movie. Although she had put in many
hours writing skits and music for the folk opera they had planned, Zora was tempted by the prospect of a big hit. She agreed to discard the folk opera idea and start over from scratch on the comedy.
The two writers decided to base their comedy on Zora's story "The Bone of Contention." Set in Eatonville, the story involves two hunters who shoot at a wild turkey at the same moment and then argue over who killed the bird. The dispute becomes so heated that one man picks up a bone from a dead mule and uses it to knock the other man unconscious, leading to his arrest and trial for assault and battery. The story includes a lot of amusing events as the townspeople side with one or the other of the hunters.
Zora and Langston created most of their play in Westfield between March and June 1930. They named it Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. As they composed, they dictated to Louise, who typed it up. Since Zora and Langston didn't want Godmother to know about their play, Louise was not paid by Mrs. Mason for typing Mule Bone. Instead, the two coauthors agreed to pay Louise to type their project—which didn't remain secret for long.
Somehow Godmother found out that instead of devoting all their time to their serious writing, Zora and Langston were working on a slapstick comedy. Possibly she was informed of this by Alain Locke, who helped Godmother keep tabs on Langston's and Zora's activities. Godmother was furious. She felt that a Broadway and Hollywood slapstick comedy was a waste of her "godchildren's" talents. It was just the kind of thing she didn't want them to do.
There was another reason for Godmother's anger. Had they spoken with her about wanting to work on a comedy together, she might have reluctantly given Zora and Langston her blessing to go ahead and have a little fun. But instead of discussing it, they had tried to keep it a secret from her.
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