by Yuval Taylor
Langston teased Locke in his letters, pretending not to understand Locke’s “infatuation with Greek ideals of life,” asking him if he liked the (homosexual) poems in the Calamus section of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, then sighing, “how wonderful it would be to come surprisingly upon one another in some Old World street! Delightful and too romantic!” Meanwhile he asked Cullen if Locke was married, likely just to confirm Locke’s homosexuality. But Langston backed off when Locke pressed harder. Their relationship was conducted entirely through the mail; Langston was curious about the professor, but refused to meet him in person. He would later write that he was “afraid of learned people in those days”; doubtless the confessional nature of Locke’s letters increased his own shyness. Locke was wounded, and Cullen let Langston know this; Langston didn’t care and pretended not to understand. Locke swore he would have nothing more to do with Langston, only to melt when Cullen encouraged him and Langston approached him—Langston was anxious to attend Howard, and knew that Locke could get him a place. But after sending a telegram reading “MAY I COME NOW PLEASE,” Langston backed off two days later with an apology, explaining, “I had been reading all your letters that day and a sudden desire came over me to come to you then, right then, to stay with you and know you. I need to know you. But I am so stupid sometimes.” The next day he sailed for Europe, and soon settled in Paris. Locke was heartbroken, accusing Langston of “whoredom,” writing him, “I do not recognize myself in the broken figure that says ‘come,—come when you can, come soon.’ . . . I cannot describe what I have been going through . . . it has felt like death.”
One day in July 1924, around noon, Langston was awoken by a gentle knock on his Paris door. It was Locke. Eighteen months after their correspondence had begun, they had finally met in person, and they were both charmed. “We’ve been having a jolly time,” Langston wrote his friend Harold Jackman, Countee Cullen’s gay soulmate. “I like him immensely.” Locke took Langston everywhere: the Louvre, the Opéra-Comique, a ballet, gardens. And after spending a few weeks with Langston, Locke wrote Cullen, “See Paris and die. Meet Langston and be damned.” He was deeply in love. He wrote Langston about two days in which “every breath has the soothe of a kiss and every step the thrill of an embrace. . . . I needed one such day and one such night to tell you how much I love you in which to see soul-deep and be satisfied.” It seems as though Langston had granted Locke some measure of sexual intimacy, and Locke was hungry for more.
They came to a compromise of sorts. Locke would help Langston get into Howard and help pay his tuition; Langston would live in Locke’s house. Then Langston left for Italy, where, a few days later, a letter from Locke reached him. It was a love letter, but it amounted to an ultimatum. It suggested that if Langston did not gratify Locke’s desire for intimacy, the Howard promise would be rescinded. So they spent five days in Venice, where Langston got fed up with Locke’s touristic proclivities and pontifications on high culture. He started wandering the back alleys, looking for signs of poverty. They had planned to sail back to the United States together, but Langston was robbed of his passport and all his money on the way to Genoa, and Locke had to abandon him in order to catch the ship—or so Langston believed. In fact, Locke spent the next few weeks in a tiny town on the seaside, San Remo. He could have asked Langston—who was sleeping in a flophouse, roaming the Genoa waterfront, and starving—to join him there. But things had soured between them, and he would never show much kindness to Langston again.
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Langston arrived in New York in November 1924, almost a year after he’d left. He immediately became enmeshed again in Harlem. His first day back he spent with Countee Cullen, who wrote, dressed, and spoke in a Victorian manner; Harlem’s best-known poet, he represented the aspirations of the cultured black bourgeoisie. Langston then went to an NAACP benefit dance at Happy Rhone’s nightclub on 143rd and Lenox, featuring performances by Florence Mills, Alberta Hunter, Noble Sissle, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Fletcher Henderson and his orchestra—definitely the leading lights of New York’s black music scene. There he was introduced to Walter White, future head of the NAACP and a published novelist; James Weldon Johnson; W. E. B. Du Bois (although it’s possible that they had already met); and, most importantly, Carl Van Vechten. Just a few days later Cullen introduced him to Arna Bontemps, who would in time become his best friend and closest collaborator, at a soiree on Edgecomb Avenue also attended by Jessie Fauset, Charles Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eric Walrond. There Langston, looking dapper in a plaid mackinaw, “galvanized” the gathering, according to Bontemps, reading his latest poems and accounts of his voyages from his pocket notebook.
Shortly thereafter, Cullen and Langston made a decisive break. Langston later wrote elliptically that something had happened to make him “lose my boyish faith in friendship and learn one of the peculiar prices a friend can ask for favors.” His biographer Arnold Rampersad surmises that Cullen propositioned Langston, then revealed that he knew about the intimacy Locke had enjoyed with Langston in Europe, which knowledge Langston was unable to forgive.
Anyway, Langston couldn’t afford to stay in New York. His mother had been begging him to visit her in Washington, D.C., where he still hoped to attend Howard University with Alain Locke’s help.
But that help didn’t come through, and Howard was beyond his means. Surrounded by wealthy and snobbish relatives of his late great-uncle, the congressman John Mercer Langston, he felt ill at ease and out of place with the crème de la crème of Washington black society. “Never before,” he wrote, “had I seen persons . . . quite so audibly sure of their own importance and their high place in the community. So many pompous gentlemen never before did I meet. Nor so many ladies with chests swelled like pouter-pigeons whose mouths uttered formal sentences in frightfully correct English.”
He found a job in a laundry, but was able to save nothing towards college, and couldn’t find a scholarship. His mother worked as a domestic. They lived in an unheated tenement through a harsh winter, barely making ends meet.
In March 1925, Dr. Carter G. Woodson offered Langston a job as his personal assistant. Woodson was a well-known scholar, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and editor of the Journal of Negro History. Among other duties, Langston alphabetized the thirty thousand slips of paper that would make up Woodson’s book Thirty Thousand Free Negro Heads of Families and checked the proofs. The work was long and dreary.
It was only a few weeks later that Langston received the invitation to the Opportunity magazine banquet that would literally change his life. For one thing, it was there that he met the woman who became his very best friend.
3
SUMMER 1926
The Niggerati
By the summer of 1926, a year after the Opportunity dinner, Zora had helped organize a Harlem-based group she jokingly named the “Niggerati,” composed of an accomplished group of young writers and artists who were by and large opposed to the literary conventions of the older generation of the black elite. Among them were Gwendolyn Bennett, poet, art teacher, and the assistant editor of Opportunity; John P. Davis, who would soon be an editor at The Crisis; Aaron Douglas, whose illustrations and paintings were just beginning to be celebrated; and Wallace Thurman, editor of The Messenger (Thurman would soon leave this position in order to take one as editor at the pacifist Christian journal The World Tomorrow). A half-dozen others also partook in the group’s social and literary activities, including Countee Cullen and Dorothy Peterson, a teacher and arts patron who held a literary salon in her father’s house in Brooklyn. Except for Zora and sculptor Augusta Savage, all of them were in their late teens or twenties, but Zora can’t really be considered an exception since everyone thought she was just as young.
Iolanthe Sydney, a successful black employment agent, had offered a house she owned rent-free to Thurman, Nugent, and a graduate student at Columbia named Harcourt Tynes (Thurman’s white male lover also lived there for
a time). It was to be the center of activity for the Niggerati. At 267 West 136th Street, a block from the steep hill of St. Nicholas Park, it was within two blocks of the offices of the New York Age, Messenger, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and National Urban League; the swanky apartments of musicians Eubie Blake, Will Marion Cook, W. C. Handy, Fletcher Henderson, Noble Sissle, and Ethel Waters, most of whom lived in the elegant townhouses known as “Striver’s Row”; and the huge new nightclub Small’s Paradise, where the waitresses glided from table to table on roller skates, singing, dancing, and spinning their trays. Within five blocks lived James Weldon Johnson, Fats Waller, and A’Lelia Walker (Harlem’s richest woman and the president of the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company). Langston moved into this “Niggerati Manor” in July, along with Bruce Nugent, and immediately joined the group. The shared artists’ house was unprepossessing from the outside, but on the inside—at least, according to Thurman’s roman à clef Infants of the Spring—the draperies and bed covers were red and black and Nugent painted the walls with brightly colored phalluses.
Langston had returned to Washington after the Opportunity banquet and proved himself a master of self-promotion. He was working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel when, in December, perhaps America’s most famous poet, the white Midwesterner Vachel Lindsay (his signature poem was the primitivist paean “The Congo”), visited. Langston placed a few of his poems next to Lindsay’s dinner plate and, at the reading in the hotel auditorium that night, Lindsay read the poems to the whites-only audience. The next day Langston was besieged by all the newspapers—the “bus boy poet” who had been “discovered” by Vachel Lindsay. It was Langston’s “first publicity break,” as he called it. But even better fortune quickly followed. In January, his first book, the overtly romantic Weary Blues, was published to widespread acclaim—that is, acclaim by white critics (black critics were not quite so kind). Then Amy Spingarn, a poet, painter, and heiress who was married to the treasurer of the NAACP, Joel Elias Spingarn, agreed to loan Langston money to pay for his college education. Although he could have gone back to Columbia or transferred to Harvard (a potential patron had offered him a full scholarship), Langston had had enough of white schools, so in February he enrolled in Lincoln University, then an all-black college with all-white teachers in the rolling hills forty miles west of Philadelphia (one of his classmates was Thurgood Marshall, who quite admired Hughes). He continued to spend some of his weekends and holidays in New York.
As for Zora, she moved out of her Harlem apartment (at 108 West 131st Street) in June or July 1926, for it was simply too expensive. Since her arrival in New York City in early 1925, she seems to have lived in seven different apartments, if one judges from her return addresses. Perhaps she was always behind with her rent (at one point she only had eleven cents to her name). Rents for black tenants were, in general, forty to sixty percent higher than those for whites in comparable apartments, and Harlem was especially expensive. It was difficult for African Americans to find apartments to rent outside certain neighborhoods. But Zora got lucky.
Her new apartment was at 43 West 66th Street, just half a block from Central Park, which would be her primary address for most of the remainder of the decade (the building no longer exists); calling herself “Queen of the Niggerati,” she often entertained the group there, with a stew on the stove that visitors would each contribute something to—when she wasn’t serving a specialty like Florida eel. Since she lacked money and possessions, she threw a “furniture party,” and each guest was required to bring something. Her friends quickly filled up her apartment with quirky objects, including silver birds perched in the linen closet. Zora reigned over the tight-knit group, singing spirituals, playing harmonica, and telling tall tales. Her apartment was always open to everyone, and her visitors included Columbia students, songwriters, and authors. She always had something ready to feed them: fried okra and shrimp, perhaps, or simply gingerbread and buttermilk.
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Despite the activity at Zora’s West Side apartment, the bulk of the action was in Harlem.
Carl Van Vechten, who described himself as “violently interested in Negroes,” was hardly alone among white New Yorkers in viewing the neighborhood as the ultimate playground. In fact, he served as the primary chaperone of the group of whites Zora referred to as “Negrotarians”; Bruce Nugent called him “the Livingstone of this Empire-State Africa . . . the big white discoverer of High-Harlem.” As his biographer Emily Bernard memorably describes him, “Photographs from around 1924 reveal a large, imposing [man], with thin graying hair and generous lips that barely reached over a famously protruding pair of front teeth. His odd looks were complemented by a one-of-a-kind wardrobe that included jade bracelets, ruffled blouses, and silk lounging robes.” His views had changed since the summer of 1924, when he wrote H. L. Mencken, “Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously for the moment. Doubtless, I shall discard them too in time.” He never did discard them, remaining faithful to the African American cultural cause to the end of his long life.
The motives of the other Negrotarians were a mixed bag. In his history When Harlem Was in Vogue, David Levering Lewis enumerates them clearly. Some, like Hart Crane and Waldo Frank, looked to Harlem for “personal nourishment” and “cultural salvation,” in Lewis’s words. Some, like Muriel Draper and Max Eastman, hoped that African Americans would overturn the established social and political order. Some, like Eugene O’Neill and Alfred Stieglitz, took a more Freudian position, thirsting for the unleashing of the id. Some, like Albert Barnes, Florenz Ziegfeld, George Gershwin, and H. L. Mencken, hoped to reap benefits—financial or in cultural capital—from African American culture. Still others had philanthropic motives.
As for Van Vechten, it wasn’t unusual to see him with Zora, Langston, and a group of his other friends in a Harlem nightclub or speakeasy, and he went out with one or both of them to parties, dinners, and clubs once or twice a month, not just during that summer but ever since he’d started his Harlem partying in May 1925. His motive was distinct from the others. Yes, he was devoted to breaking down all barriers between Harlem-dwellers and the crème de la crème of New York society. But he also simply liked to be with his friends, and his friends all lived in or loved to visit Harlem. The conviviality of the atmosphere was magical. They would go to Small’s, the Nest, the Vaudeville Comedy Club, the New World Cabaret, or Philadelphia Jimmie’s, but rarely to only one of those. If he threw a party at his house (invariably interracial), it was often either preceded or followed by a visit to Harlem, and he frequently stayed out until after dawn.
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Perhaps nowhere else and never before in the United States had sexuality of every variety been so open and accepted as it was in Harlem in the 1920s. “You just did what you wanted to do,” Bruce Nugent related. “Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.” The sexual act was public in places and private in others, promiscuous in race and gender, freely talked about and freely practiced. If you wanted something sexual, there was no shortage of ways to get it. One example out of many was millionaire A’Lelia Walker’s extravagant “funny parties,” where, as one partygoer recalled, “There were men and women, straight and gay. They were kinds of orgies. Some people had clothes on, some didn’t. People would hug and kiss on pillows and do anything they wanted to do. You could watch if you wanted to. Some came to watch, some came to play.”
Langston Hughes was by no means celibate. He had had a serious romance with a young African-English woman in Paris and visited prostitutes in various seaports; he also had quite passionate love affairs with several women in the 1930s, and came down with gonorrhea from his sexual activities. He had at least one homosexual experience—with a fellow seaman on his African voyage—and his friendships with homosexual men were some of his closest (though most of those men swore that Langston never expressed any interest in homosexual relations).
Still, there was something mysterious a
bout Langston, especially where his friends were concerned. As Van Vechten, a married man who made little secret of his queer predilections, would confess after a friendship of thirty years, Langston “seemed to thrive without having sex” in his life. Langston was living with two flamboyant queers, Thurman and Nugent; Thurman later boasted that his friendship with Langston was more than Platonic, but Nugent denied it. As social historian Ann Douglas cleverly puts it, Langston “obscured and shielded his sexual identity from clear scrutiny by anyone, probably including himself.”
This was not out of shame. Langston was proud of being disreputable. His elusive sexuality was simply part of his elusive nature—he was constantly in motion, never staying in one place too long, never devoting his attentions exclusively to one person. Just as he refused to confine himself to poetry—fiction, plays, essays, letters, and reminiscences flowed from his pen—he refused to confine himself to anything else either. His elusiveness was a deliberate strategy. As he wrote, “Silence is as good as the next best thing in the face of wrath. (And the next best thing is to evaporate! Get away, leave.)”
Wallace Thurman was quick to notice Langston’s elusiveness too. In his satire of the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring, Thurman characterized Langston, whom he named “Tony Crews,” as
smiling and self-effacing, a mischievous boy, grateful for the chance to slip away from the backwoods college he attended. Raymond [Thurman’s alias for himself] had never been able to analyze this young poet. . . . Even an intimate friendship with Tony had failed to enlighten [Raymond]. For Tony was the most close-mouthed and cagey individual Raymond had ever known when it came to personal matters. He fended off every attempt to probe into his inner self and did this with such an unconscious and naïve air that the prober soon came to one of two conclusions: Either Tony had no depth whatsoever, or else he was too deep for plumbing by ordinary mortals.
