Zora and Langston

by Yuval Taylor

  Across the South, the summer of 1927 was marked by a growing recognition that the great exodus of African Americans to the North represented an economic threat that had to be dealt with. Alabama enacted a statute prohibiting the inducement of workers to leave the state “through grandiose promises of economic and social betterment”; Georgia already had a similar law on the books; and the labor commissioner of Louisiana warned of a crisis in the building trade in New Orleans if the exodus continued.

  The Great Mississippi Flood, the most destructive river flood in US history, had begun the previous summer and lasted until August 1927, breaking over a hundred levees along the Mississippi River, which at one point stretched to sixty miles wide. It had displaced over 600,000 people in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana; 25,000 of them went to St. Louis alone, adding more than twenty-five percent to that city’s African American population. But the emigration was widespread all over, for the conditions in which many black people lived, especially in rural communities, were insupportable. They were essentially under mob rule, with constant threats of lynchings and whippings. The land they had gained at the end of the Civil War had been stolen, the hardships of sharecropping kept them impoverished, and peonage and prison farms effectively re-enslaved many of them.

  Six years later, Zora would pen one of the most vivid descriptions of this great exodus in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine:

  Do what they would, the State, County and City all over the South could do little to halt the stampede. The cry of “Goin’ Nawth” hung over the land like the wail over Egypt at the death of the first-born. . . . Railroads, hardroads, dirt roads, side roads, roads were in the minds of the black South and all roads led North.

  Whereas in Egypt the coming of the locust made desolation, in the farming South the departure of the Negro laid waste the agricultural industry—crops rotted, houses careened crazily in their utter desertion, and grass grew up in streets.

  Earlier in 1927, Langston had published some poems that took place in the South, poems like “Song for a Dark Girl,” about a lynching, and “Mulatto,” about the rape of a black woman by a white man. Yet his demonstrated awareness of the dangers of being black in this area of the country he’d never been to did not for a moment deter him from going there. To Zora, on the other hand, the South was her home, and conditions for Negroes in the North were hardly better. And both of them loved taking risks.

  Also, Zora had her gun, which she wore on a shoulder holster. There’s a picture of her taken in Mobile that summer, pistol under her left arm, hands on her wide, low-slung ammunition belt, head cocked under a wide-brimmed hat; if it weren’t for her white dress and stockings, she’d look like a Wild West gunslinger.

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  Langston had jotted down a few observations in his pocket notebook on the train from New Orleans: “The palm trees / The pecan groves on both sides of Ocean Spring / The little boys with their derbies and box band[s].” When he got off the train in Mobile, it was either for a break or a pause between two trains on his way to Tuskegee, where he had made arrangements to visit the college. He had spent $13.34 on his ticket, the equivalent of about $175 today—the biggest single expense he noted for his trip.

  Right after meeting Zora, Langston wrote, “we went to eat some fried fish and watermelon.” Watermelon is, of course, a food loaded with negative associations for African Americans, and Zora and Langston were aware of its connotations. But they rejected them. Zora’s biographer Valerie Boyd writes, “Once, at a ritzy interracial party in New York, Zora had angered some of her fellow New Negroes by going straight for the watermelon. They viewed its inclusion on the buffet as a test of sorts, almost an insult, and had collectively vowed to abstain from the forbidden fruit. ‘And leave all this good watermelon for the white folks?!’ Zora dissented.” As for Langston, he recorded buying watermelons for thirty to fifty cents each several times in the detailed expense notebook he kept on his trip. (Another repeated expense noted there was for cigarettes, fifteen cents a pack.)

  After the watermelon, the two of them went to Dr. H. Roger Williams’s home, likely a two-story brick row house, where Zora had probably been staying, and met with the doctor and his daughter Lucy Ariel, “a talented pianist and poet.” Dr. Williams had opened, in 1901, the Live and Let Live Drug Store, the first black-owned drugstore in Mobile, in an 1891 row house right across fashionable Dauphin Street from his home in the heart of downtown. (The drugstore is now part of Wintzell’s Oyster House, and where Williams’s own house stood is now its gravel parking lot.) He had graduated from Meharry Medical School and was a published poet and one of Mobile’s best-regarded citizens. Lucy Ariel had just graduated with a degree in music from Fisk and her brilliant dialect poem “Northboun’ ” had tied for first prize in the 1926 Opportunity contest. It’s not known how Zora and Langston knew them, but they certainly moved in the same literary circles.

  In his notebook that evening, Langston wrote, “Mobile July 23. / Zora Hurston / Mr. H. Roger Williams / ‘I’m a sojourner in truth since I got religion so I just calls ma self Sojourner Truth.’ / The slave walk, which came from hoeing and planting. / The ‘Big House’ explanation for Negro jealousy of those who come up. / Zora’s bare front. / The chicken seller.” I have to assume that the lines about Sojourner Truth and slavery came from conversations Langston was having with Zora. As for “Zora’s bare front,” I can draw no conclusions except that the sight must have provoked some feeling in him. That Zora might, even inadvertently, reveal her “bare front” to Langston does not seem out of character.

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  Mobile was Alabama’s second largest city (after Birmingham), with a population of about 65,000. Founded as the capital of La Louisiane, it was colonized in turn by the French, the British, and the Spanish before becoming part of the United States in 1813; it retained a distinctive culture not unlike that of New Orleans (it was the first US city to feature a Mardi Gras carnival, and that of New Orleans was imported from Mobile). Because of its port, it had been an important slave-trading center; now it was a bustling, cosmopolitan city.

  Cudjo Lewis, the reason for Zora’s presence in Mobile, was idealized at the time as the last true connection between Africa and America. (Zora later found an even older woman who had been on board with him.) The Clotilda was the last known slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States: it was secretly commissioned by a wealthy Mobile businessman and arrived in 1859, over fifty years after the United States had abolished the African slave trade. Lewis and his fellow shipmates were slaves only a few years. After the Civil War, they established an extensive community called Africatown a few miles north of Mobile, with shotgun shacks dispersed over a large wooded area. Unlike in Mobile, there were no sidewalks, paved roads, electricity, or gaslights. (Home to lumber mills from the time of its inception, the community has been continually plagued by industrial pollution, and even now its poverty is shocking. “We’re still burying most of our people between the age of 40 and 50 right now,” a resident stated recently.)

  Cudjo’s house had no windows, so he left the door open in the summer. He grew sugarcane and clingstone peaches in his garden. Speaking in a thick West African accent, he was somewhat cagey about his past. Zora helped him sweep out the church he attended and drove him to Mobile to buy turnip seed. But she was unable to obtain sufficient information from her interviews to complete the kind of report Carter Woodson expected. So she padded her article with lengthy uncredited excerpts from the 1914 interviews with Lewis that Emma Langdon Roche had published in her book Historic Sketches of the Old South, and submitted the resulting piece to Woodson, likely with no intention of having it appear in print. Woodson, however, unaware of her plagiarism (the last seven pages were taken almost verbatim from Roche), published the report under Zora’s name as “Cudjo’s Own Story of the Last African Slaver” in the Journal of Negro History. Zora never told anyone what had happened, and it wasn’t until long after her death that her copy
ing was discovered and revealed. Biographer Robert Hemenway believed that her plagiarism was a kind of subconscious academic suicide attempt, since Zora was at this point tired of being beholden to academic standards. Certainly if Woodson had discovered her source, it would have been the end of her academic career. Zora would, however, go back to interview Lewis again, much more successfully, later that year and the next, and would use those interviews as the basis for a book, Barracoon, completed in 1931 and finally published in 2018. In it, she heavily fictionalized her own experience, presenting her visit as having lasted from June to October, all under Godmother’s auspices. But Zora told Cudjo’s story faithfully, backing it up with copious research.

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  The first road over Mobile Bay, a complicated multimillion-dollar project that included five bridges and a causeway, was completed in June 1927, just in time for Zora and Langston to cross it on their way to Montgomery, probably taking the roads now labeled US 90 and US 31. It should have been tremendously exciting to traverse that brand new series of spans, one of them an enormous vertical lift bridge, across the twenty-four-mile-wide bay. They then probably drove through such thick timberlands that the road resembled the bottom of a canyon. Perhaps they stopped in Brewton, with its brick storefronts and cast-iron balconies, or Castleberry, which even then was the strawberry capital of Alabama. But perhaps they motored right through them.

  Langston and Zora spent Saturday night in Montgomery. Langston wrote of the “Distance from station / The churches with yelling ministers” on Sunday morning. It’s possible that one of these churches was the Dexter Avenue Church, built in the 1880s very near the capitol, quite a distance from the station, where Martin Luther King Jr. would help kick off the civil rights movement in 1955.

  Then they pushed on to Tuskegee. Booker T. Washington, a proponent of vocational training, had founded the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers in 1881. In addition to training teachers, the school taught a variety of agricultural and industrial trades. It did not teach liberal arts, political subjects, or any of the theoretical sciences. While white guests were put up in a spacious guesthouse, Langston and Zora stayed in a dormitory. Neither of them expressed any reservations about Tuskegee’s program at the time of this visit. In fact, Langston wrote a poem of praise for and remembrance of Washington, an anthem for Tuskegee called “Alabama Earth,” which was published on the cover of The Tuskegee Messenger the following summer. When Langston returned to Tuskegee in 1932, however, he responded with the poem “Red Flag on Tuskegee,” a lengthy and rousing call to Tuskegee students to join the Communist Party, and an explicit repudiation of Washington’s vision of black and white social life as “separate as the fingers” on a hand.

  Tuskegee’s campus is reminiscent of Harvard’s—red brick, traditional, with the clean lines of academic American architecture; the primary architect, Robert R. Taylor, was the first black graduate of MIT, and the campus was built entirely by its students, who even fired the bricks. Situated on rolling hills, it’s picturesque, but not to a fault; the central quadrangle is especially impressive. In 1915 the campus had over a hundred fully equipped buildings (it now has about seventy-five).

  Zora and Langston arrived on July 24. In his notebooks, Langston noted practically all the people he met with over the next few days, but it would be hard to tell exactly who several of them, mentioned by last name only, were. Some are identifiable, though: on the 25th, he saw Jessie Fauset, who had come from New York. Fauset, whom Langston once described as “my own brown goddess,” had been watching over Langston for years, publishing most of his greatest poems while unsuccessfully trying to steer him away from free verse, Lincoln University, and what she considered the baleful influence of Carl Van Vechten (she wanted him to go to Harvard and write more like Countee Cullen). She had even more or less propositioned him in a letter she wrote him when he was in Paris. She no longer worked at The Crisis, having had a bitter falling out with her boss and sometime lover W. E. B. Du Bois. Langston also met Mary Williams, the nurse in charge of the Tuskegee Institute Health Center, that day, and they had dinner that night and took a drive together the next day in Fauset’s company. On the 27th, Langston had lunch with Sadie Peterson, who had helped develop the African American collection at the New York Public Library in the early 1920s and then the library at the Veterans Administration hospital in Tuskegee; he had dinner at the house of Albon Holsey, personal secretary to Tuskegee’s president. He also received a check for $100 that day from Godmother, along with a letter. Mason expressed her joy that he was making a “pilgrimage through the South at the moment you extend your own field of freedom,” then asked him not to tell anyone in New York about his trip, but instead to use the material he was gathering later, when “the flame of it can burn away the debris that is so rampant” in the city. He replied with a long letter (now lost), detailing his travels.

  On July 29, he wrote to Gwendolyn Bennett, who would publish an excerpt from his letter in Opportunity in September: “I am having the time of my life down here. Everybody’s fine to me and the South isn’t half bad. Tuskegee is wonderful. Jessie Fauset is here, Marie [sic] Peterson and gangs of delightful folks. . . . I am going to the country tomorrow for a while and then on to Georgia.”

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  What Langston meant by “going to the country” was a journey with Tuskegee’s Movable School, or the Booker T. Washington Agricultural School on Wheels, an exemplar of rural outreach. The Movable School worked through county agents who would arrange stops throughout the area. Alabama was the only state that had one. It had been Washington’s idea, and had first operated using mules, then a Ford truck; by Langston’s time it was housed in a White Motor Company truck (the 1920s equivalent of a heavy-duty pickup). It carried a Delco-Light “electric plant” (a generator), motion picture projector, electric sewing machine, iron, churn, gasoline stove, tool chest, ax, shovel, fireless cooker (a wooden bucket with an inner metal pail surrounded by sawdust; it functioned like a modern crockpot when one put a heated brick or rock in it), and water cooler, along with volleyball equipment, flour, baking powder, sugar, pots, pans, and more. Langston left Tuskegee at 7 a.m. on July 30 with three teachers and arrived in Decatur, Alabama, near the Tennessee border, at 8:30 p.m.

  The week was mainly spent in Berkley, about twelve miles from Huntsville. Langston was staying with a family of black landowners. They had a five-room house and a riverside farm with three mules where they grew mostly cotton, but also some corn, peanuts, pears, sweet potatoes, cane, and sorghum; they also kept pigs, cows, and chickens. The Parkers had ten children, who went barefoot most of the time, and who, for one week out of the year, attended the Movable School.

  During that week, the big project for the men and boys was the construction of an outdoor toilet. They also cleared a yard and laid down a walk through it, and built a roof and a concrete base for a well. They learned how to use surveying equipment; care for, breed, and judge livestock; build a chicken house; and make whitewash. The women and girls, meanwhile, learned how to frame pictures, make rugs, care for and feed typhoid patients (with one girl playing the part of the sick woman and the others bathing her, feeding her, and cleaning her teeth), bake bread, raise egg-laying hens, store sweet potatoes, bathe babies, prepare salad, can beans and vegetables, and set tables.

  The school’s aim was clearly to bring a bit more “civilization” to these country folk. Children were taught the importance of baths and cleanliness, and Langston spent a memorable afternoon delivering a lesson on “Great Men,” especially “Great Negroes,” to the boys. Most of them had never heard about “Great Negroes”; one knew about the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and one the boxer Jack Johnson, while others thought that Abraham Lincoln was black. One evening the school showed educational films, which attracted about a hundred and twenty spectators, most of whom had never seen a movie before. They cried, “Look a yonder” and shouted at every movement. The show ended with a lecture on sanitary toilets, f
lies, and their effect on health.

  Langston participated as much as he could. He especially enjoyed working with the littler children, teaching them how to blow bubbles with spools, or swimming with them in the river. He also appreciated the local food, on which he kept meticulous notes. One breakfast consisted of ham, cornbread, buttermilk, and molasses; another of catfish, chicken, cornbread, applesauce, peach preserves, and sweet milk. Dinner was served at noon, and might comprise chicken, ham, cabbage, corn muffins, mashed potatoes, tomatoes, buttermilk, and custard pie; then again the menu might be rolls the girls had baked, chicken cooked in the fireless cooker, okra, stringbeans, mashed potatoes, tomatoes, apple cobbler, and iced tea. Supper was usually a bit lighter: ham, applesauce, preserved tomatoes, and hot biscuits; or chicken, biscuits, and sorghum. The meals each cost him between a quarter and forty cents, which was significantly cheaper than similar meals elsewhere during their trip.