Zora and Langston Read online

  Zora and Langston

  A STORY OF FRIENDSHIP AND BETRAYAL

  YUVAL TAYLOR

  To my wife, editor, and best friend, Karen

  I think of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes as literary parents, or guardians. I am always amazed when I read of their arguments and fallings out, and the eternal blame for their difficulties that is heaped on one of them or the other.

  When I consider the ending of their friendship I am filled with sadness for them. It is so easy to see how and why they would love each other. Each was to the other an affirming example of what black people could be like: wild, crazy, creative, spontaneous, at ease with who they are, and funny. A lot of attention has been given to their breakup . . . but very little to the pleasure Zora and Langston must have felt in each other’s company. I like to think of them wandering about together in the early days, Zora showing Langston the close-up beauty of people in the deep South, and Langston returning the kindness, thoughtfulness and generosity that came easily to him with people he liked. I like to think of them telling each other jokes, eating fried chicken and watermelon, zooming about in Zora’s little car, laughing. Which I figure was one of the main things they did.

  In any event, I have drawn on these guardian spirits over the years, as I have drawn on my biological parents—who were also known to have a few fights and a royal falling-out or two—and I have never felt that they were fundamentally at odds. Or that their characters were particularly flawed. If anything, again like one’s parents, I feel that, spiritually, Langston and Zora resembled each other. And certainly . . . I have felt nurtured and nourished by both of them.

  ALICE WALKER,

  “Turning Into Love: Some Thoughts on Surviving and Meeting Langston Hughes” (1989)

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION ▼ Lovingly Yours

  1.

  SPRING 1925 ▼ Opportunity

  2.

  1891–1924 ▼ I Laugh, and Grow Strong

  3.

  SUMMER 1926 ▼ The Niggerati

  4.

  SPRING 1927 ▼ Enter Godmother

  5.

  SUMMER 1927 ▼ The Company of Good Things

  6.

  FALL 1927 ▼ A Deep Well of the Spirit

  7.

  WINTER 1928–WINTER 1930 ▼ This Is Going to Be Big

  8.

  SPRING 1930 ▼ The Bone of Contention

  9.

  WINTER 1931 ▼ A Miasma of Untruth

  10.

  1932–1960 ▼ The Aftermath

  CONCLUSION ▼ The Legacy

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Readings

  Credits

  Index

  Zora and Langston

  INTRODUCTION

  Lovingly Yours

  Collaborators, social and literary gadflies, and very close companions, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes enjoyed a fascinating friendship. They worked together on a magazine called Fire!! and a comedy called Mule Bone, wrote scores of letters to each other, and traveled together through the South. Yet they had a terribly bitter falling out; Langston would later describe Zora as “a perfect ‘darkie,’ ” while Zora would leave the friendship out of her autobiography altogether.

  Zora and Langston were not, as far as we know, sexually involved, but their relationship was loving. Zora signed her letters to Langston “love” or “lovingly yours”; she told him quite honestly that he was not only her “best friend” but “the nearest person to me on earth.” Their long and frank letters are suffused with warmth and feeling. This book explores their friendship from their first meeting in Harlem in 1925 to their final breakup in Cleveland in 1931—and beyond.

  ▼ ▼ ▼

  Zora’s 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God remains the single most widely read book ever written by an African American (it outsells even Invisible Man, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Color Purple, A Raisin in the Sun, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X). Scholar Charles H. Nichols rightly called Langston “the most prolific and influential Afro-American writer in our history.” Together Zora and Langston invigorated the Harlem Renaissance, promulgating ideas about African American expression that fundamentally changed the course of American letters.

  Their friendship—by turns warm, engaging, inspiring, intellectual, adoring, jealous, inflamed, and doomed—informed practically everything they wrote during those years, and to a great extent thereafter. They jointly brought to life a new conception of African American literature quite unlike any that had come before. Controversially, they celebrated Negroes as almost elemental beings, in touch with instincts that white culture had lost sight of. But this shared vision greatly enriched their work.

  Langston rarely engaged in physical relationships with people he knew well. Zora never admitted to having any sexual desire for him. Yet their relationship had all the hallmarks of a ménage à trois—or, more accurately, a ménage à cinq. For they shared the munificence of their wealthy white patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, who insisted on being called “Godmother,” but who in her caprice and impatience was more like the Godfather. Paying them lavishly and trying to control their output, she enlisted each of them in her pet cause: to advance the idea of the American Negro as the archetypal primitive, a bridge to an uncorrupted world. Besides Mason, whose relationship with Langston was the most passionate of his young life, two others were entangled with them: Louise Thompson, a lovely young black woman (for a short time married to the homosexual writer and editor Wallace Thurman) who helped them with Mule Bone and of whom Zora became wildly jealous; and Alain Locke, a black philosophy professor whose thwarted desire was likely one reason he turned against Langston in the end.

  Mason’s and Zora’s almost simultaneous betrayal of Langston absolutely devastated him. He reacted with claims of plagiarism and a threatened lawsuit. But it devastated Zora too. Eight years after their breakup, she asked Langston’s friend Arna Bontemps to tell him that “the cross of her life is the fact that there has been a gulf between you and her. She said she wakes up at night crying about it yet.”

  In the aftermath, Langston abandoned the primitivist ideology that had fed much of his most enduring work and turned instead to Communism. Zora, on the other hand, added more nuance to her primitivism and shaped it into a novel whose Shakespearean power remains unabated over eighty years after its creation. Yet Langston, whose capacity for adaptation seemed limitless, remained at the center of the African American literary scene, while Zora was pushed to its margins. The entire literary establishment, black and white, abandoned her, and she died forgotten, even by the man who was once her closest friend.

  Despite a wealth of literature about the Harlem Renaissance, including excellent biographies of both Langston and Zora, until now their relationship has never been explored at length and in depth. Both distorted the facts in their autobiographies, and neither admitted therein how valuable their friendship had been. The truly religious devotion of Mason’s disciples has been given short shrift, as has Zora’s deep commitment to playwriting. Zora’s rewrite of Mule Bone has never received the plaudits it deserves. The memoirs of Louise Thompson Patterson, the extensive interviews Hurston biographer Robert E. Hemenway did with many of the people who knew Zora best, and Langston’s own notebooks and journals all remain unpublished. And The Book of Negro Folklore, edited by Langston and Bontemps, which was, at the time of Zora’s death, one of the only books in print that included her work, has been almost completely forgotten.

  In writing this book I have drawn on these and other unpublished papers and interviews (especially those in the James Weldon Johnson papers at Yale, the Alain Locke papers at Howard, the Louise Thompson Patterson papers at
Emory, and the Robert E. Hemenway Collection at the University of Kansas). I have followed Zora and Langston’s Southern road trip step by step, gone to the places they lived in and visited, and dug deep for the dramatic details. I have also, of course, consulted scores of previously published works.

  Zora and Langston’s position in American literary history is by now firmly established. But by going back to a time when it wasn’t, a time when they were just forming their ideas, sharing them with each other and with their friends and benefactors, I hope to illuminate how deeply they shaped American literature and culture—and each other.

  1

  SPRING 1925

  Opportunity

  May 1, 1925, was a stormy day.

  That afternoon, lightning struck the copper ball on top of the conservatory in the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, shattering the ninety-foot-high glass dome that protected the plants inside; the thunderclap was so loud it broke hundreds of windows, leading local residents to wonder if there had been an earthquake.

  That evening, in the convivial confines of one of the city’s most elegant establishments, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes met for the first time, embarking on an epochal friendship that would produce a few thunderclaps of its own.

  ▼ ▼ ▼

  Not many restaurants in Manhattan were as big or as magnificent as the Fifth Avenue. It took up much of the first floor of the Fifth Avenue Building, 200 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of 23rd Street, which was built in 1909 and still stands. Fronted by a huge Romanesque arch and covering over 60,000 square feet, it stretches to fourteen stories in height; in front stands an ornate cast-iron sidewalk clock, also dating from 1909, judged by some to be the most splendid such clock in the world. Remnants of the restaurant’s interior can still be seen—marble semidomes and arches with recessed lighting, notched lintels, plaster ornaments on the ceilings, bronze ornaments on the doorframes, mosaic floors. The restaurant had opened in 1918 and was advertised as one of the largest and most scientifically equipped catering establishments in America, hosting, at night, “banquets, after-lodge suppers, business gatherings, dinner dances, smokers and beefsteak dinners,” with a seating capacity of one thousand. The atmosphere was semiformal, with long tables and high-backed chairs; the walls were mirrored, and painted white and gold. No alcohol was served, of course—it was Prohibition—but, as the Harlem writer Bruce Nugent said, “if you had a pocket flask, that was your to-do.”

  The occasion that evening was the presentation of prizes by Opportunity magazine, the voice of the National Urban League, founded in 1910 to help black migrants in the North. Subheaded A Journal of Negro Life, and edited by Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Opportunity showcased African American arts to a greater extent than its competitors, The Crisis, the NAACP’s more political publication, helmed by W. E. B. Du Bois, and The Messenger, a socialist journal launched by A. Philip Randolph. Opportunity was by no means apolitical, but it emphasized diplomacy rather than fiery rhetoric—it was the kind of magazine in which white critics reviewed black authors and vice versa. Its goal was the improvement of race relations, and nothing could have been more conducive to that goal than the Opportunity Awards Dinner of 1925.

  Except for the judges (most of them white men), attendees paid $2.75 for their dinner, a rather exorbitant price at the time. But, as Nugent explained, since most of the contributors couldn’t pay, “something was always arranged in a pleasant fashion so that you wouldn’t feel like you were a charity patient to get there.” I have not found the menu for that night, but the third annual Opportunity awards dinner two years later began with soup and hard rolls followed by a plate of broiled spring chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas and concluded with dessert and coffee—rather plain fare for the Fifth Avenue, which usually served dishes like vermicelli croquettes, chiffonade salad, or potage à la reine. The awards presentation followed the dinner, and didn’t conclude until eleven o’clock.

  It’s impossible to overestimate Charles Johnson’s role in the Harlem Renaissance. Zora would call his work “the root of the so-called Negro Renaissance” and Langston would write that he “did more to encourage and develop Negro writers during the 1920’s than anyone else in America.” Johnson’s goal in organizing the contest and dinner was to form a partnership between the leading lights of the white and black communities; the opinion of the judges that black arts mattered was the most important product of the event for him. At the end of the evening he announced that funds for a second annual contest were already in hand—Casper Holstein, king of Harlem’s numbers racket, had promised Johnson the money.

  This was, at the time, the largest gathering of African American writers in history. Almost all the young bloods and many of the established figures of Manhattan’s black intellectual world were there, including the poets Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer, the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, the writer and politician James Weldon Johnson, the philosopher Alain Locke, and the actor Paul Robeson. But also among the 316 guests were representatives of practically every major New York publisher and such white literary luminaries as humorist Robert Benchley, poet Witter Bynner, playwright Eugene O’Neill, theater critic Alexander Woollcott, literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, bestselling writer and activist Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and the Van Doren clan (Carl, Dorothy, and Mark, all prominent writers). The scholar Arnold Rampersad has gone so far as to call it “the greatest gathering of black and white literati ever assembled in one room.”

  It could be said, however, that the real stars of the evening were Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. For they won two prizes and two honorable mentions each, an achievement unequaled by any of the others. Zora was thirty-four but passing for twenty-four; Langston was actually twenty-four. Newcomers to the Manhattan literary scene, they were taking it by storm.

  ▼ ▼ ▼

  By 1925, the “Harlem Renaissance” (then known as the “Negro Renaissance”)—a flourishing of African American art and writing that would soon reach its peak—was already well underway.

  This renaissance—which might be more properly called a naissance, since it really represents the birth of a conception of black American literary culture as fundamentally different from its white counterpart, as well as the first time the black influence on American culture became a widely recognized fact—offered African Americans a venue for social advancement theretofore denied to them. By the end of World War I, African Americans were suffering from appalling political, economic, and social conditions. The triumphant return of black soldiers from the war in Europe had been followed by a Ku Klux Klan resurgence, widespread antiblack riots, brutal lynchings, and general xenophobia. Since progress in race relations had been stymied for so long, and since it was so difficult for black people to get respectable positions, a number of black progressive thinkers suggested that if black Americans could prove themselves in the arts, it could have a radical impact on the way whites thought of them, and that this in turn would lead to increased political, economic, and social power. Chief among these progressives was sociologist, publisher, and organizer Charles S. Johnson; he was joined by James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Crisis editor Jessie Fauset, W. E. B. Du Bois, librarian and socialite Regina Anderson, and writer Gwendolyn Bennett, and was abetted by prominent white intellectuals, including Carl Van Doren, publishers Horace Liveright and Alfred and Blanche Knopf, and art collector Albert C. Barnes. So the press, cultural institutions, white philanthropists, and black leaders all actively encouraged the development of black arts. (While this effort did indeed put black arts on the map, as it were, the hoped-for increase in political and economic power would not take place. The Great Depression would wipe out any gains that black people may have made.)

  African American music and theater was in its heyday in 1925, and New York City was its epicenter. Shuffle Along, the all-black musical that opened in 1921, had been a runaway success among both races, and had helped propel the careers of choir director Hall Johnson; composers William Grant Still, Eu
bie Blake, and Noble Sissle; comics Miller and Lyles; and actors Florence Mills and Josephine Baker. Singers Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters were becoming stars. The jazz of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington was beginning to electrify the nation.

  In literature, poems by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen had been published in The Crisis, Opportunity, and the Marxist magazine The Liberator. James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man had predated the era by a decade, but showed the way; in 1922 Johnson edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first anthology of African American literature. Claude McKay’s first book of poems about black life in the United States, Harlem Shadows, had also come out in 1922, followed closely by his essay collection Negroes in America. Several important African American novels had been published in the last two years: Jean Toomer’s Cane, which consisted of a series of vignettes and poems set in the Deep South; Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint, about the lynching of a black physician, a veteran of World War I; and Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion, about middle-class black families in New York and Philadelphia.

  To put this in perspective, probably only seven novels by African Americans had been published in the United States between 1910 and 1920—Johnson’s Autobiography, two by W. E. B. Du Bois, three by Oscar Micheaux (self-published), and Joel Augustus Rogers’s From “Superman” to Man (also self-published). The explosion of black writing that began around 1922 was truly a renaissance in the making.

  The 1925 Opportunity contest was not the first major event celebrating these young writers—that had been the Civic Club dinner, also organized by Charles Johnson, on March 21, 1924. (The Civic Club was one of the few New York City social clubs that welcomed both black and white members.) If the Harlem Renaissance had needed an official launching, the Civic Club dinner would have been it. Many, if somewhat fewer, of the great names of the Renaissance had attended that dinner too, though not Langston, who was in Europe, and not Zora, who was in Washington, D.C., and had barely begun to publish.