Zora and Langston

by Yuval Taylor

  Langston came back to Tuskegee on his own, stopping overnight in Montgomery, and arriving August 7. He found a note from Charlotte Mason: “How wide open the door of your being is—how I love for you this experience that you are going through now—rising with the sun in the back country of the Alabama hills! You will know, dear child, so much better what lies deeply hidden in your poetic soul and in the far reaches of your ancestral dreams.” Mason had somehow recognized that Langston was experiencing a sort of rebirth. Indeed, as he was leaving Berkley, Langston had written a few lines for a song to be sung at a 4-H Club concert in December: “Out of death and darkness going toward the sun— / The sun, the sun.” And he also wrote a beautiful poem then, which has never been published, and which gives a good impression of his emotional state:

  There is no weakness here

  But only strength

  Bursting the grave asunder

  Seeking stars.

  There is no weakness here

  But only strength

  To smash iron bars.

  O, here in Alabamy earth

  The strength of stars.

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  Langston and Zora stayed another week at Tuskegee, during which he had a long talk with Thomas Monroe Campbell, the first African American agricultural extension agent, the first manager of the Movable School, and, at the time, the supervisor of over four hundred black extension agents throughout the South. At some point, Langston also visited the pioneering black scientist George Washington Carver in his laboratory, a massive brick building on the edge of the campus. And on the morning of August 10 he gave a reading to a “rather mixed audience composed of school teachers attending summer school, faculty members of Tuskegee Institute and not a few visitors,” as the Tuskegee Messenger reported. The reading was part of Tuskegee’s summer session, which was for high school and junior college teachers; besides Jessie Fauset and Langston, Alain Locke and Benjamin Brawley had also participated that summer. Langston talked about how he became interested in poetry while in high school and how he always tried to write “of things within his experience.” He read a number of his poems, and described his travels in France and Africa. The audience “was captivated by his pleasing voice, his assured, unaffected manner and the sincerity and feeling which he put into his verse.”

  What Zora did during those two weeks remains a mystery. She might have visited her birthplace, Notasulga, which is only six miles north of Tuskegee, but she probably remained in Tuskegee the rest of the time. She was most likely working on her Cudjo material. An undated note she wrote Langston reads, “Dear Langston—Finished work and got my check today. Woodson cut me a week. I thought I’d get pay for the month but he only paid me for two weeks. Have only $10000. Rather depressed. I hate that improperly born wretch. / Shall we drive, or shall I sell car? shall see you in five days at the outside. / Zora.” She probably sent it to him while he was in Berkley with the Movable School.

  There are three photographs of Zora and Langston at Tuskegee. In one they’re with Jessie Fauset standing at the center of Tuskegee’s campus in front of Charles Keck’s statue Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, which shows Booker T. Washington uncloaking a newly freed slave. In another they stand in full sun, brightly lit, with a number of trees behind them. From left to right are Colonel Joseph Ward, vice-president of the VA Hospital in Tuskegee, in his World War I uniform; Langston in shirt sleeves and a loosened tie; Zora in a white dress with a long string of beads around her neck; an unidentified heavy, light-colored man with a bowtie; and a distinguished-looking young African American man—perhaps a student—with a much tighter tie than Langston’s. None of them smile, but they look comfortable. In the third, again in full sun, the two writers stand with Sadie Delaney, the librarian at the VA hospital, who wears a simple white dress, and two very elegantly dressed young African American men. Zora is wearing a different white dress in each of the photographs, but the same long string of beads; Langston wears the same jazzy tie in the two sunny photographs. These are the only photographs that exist of Langston and Zora together.

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  When the two friends finally left Tuskegee on August 15, they crossed into Georgia. Langston wrote in his notebook, “Saw man driving goat cart in Columbus. Passed many gourds for bee-martins high on poles.” It’s impossible to imagine anyone driving a goat cart anywhere near Columbus today, and it couldn’t have been common in 1927 or else Langston wouldn’t have remarked on it. The gourds are practically the only things Langston wrote about in his notebooks that haven’t changed. (They are put up as houses for purple martins; Langston was mistaken about the bee-martins, another name for kingbirds.) Some poles sport as many as two dozen gourds arranged symmetrically; in other cases a line of half a dozen poles will sport one or two gourds each, put up haphazardly, like inverted Calder mobiles.

  On August 20, the Chicago Defender, one of the main black newspapers of the era, ran an article, “Barbecue in Georgia,” on its editorial page. They reported that the white citizens of Talbot County had hosted an integrated barbecue the previous Sunday in order “to show that good feeling exists between the races, and that white people are their friends.” With thousands attending, one speaker there shouted, “ ‘We must stop this migration. . . . There will be no more lynching in this county, and no more in this state if we can help it. We have decided to remove all inequalities between the races; henceforth there shall be no more use of ‘nigger’ in this county if we have to build more jails to house those who violate this rule.’ ”

  This utopian satire gives a good indication of how desperate the Great Migration had made the South. And coincidentally, Zora and Langston drove right through Talbot County on the day after this fictional barbecue. “Passed a town last night named Tallbottom,” Langston wrote to Van Vechten, deliberately misspelling Talbotton. “Maybe that’s where the Blackbottom started. Anyhow the Georgia Grind seems prevalent.” Langston was referring, jokingly, to two popular dances of the day.

  Their next stop was Fort Valley, Georgia, where they visited Henry and Florence Hunt, who lived in a large, elegant white house next to the Fort Valley High and Industrial School, a high school and junior college which they ran (the house is still there on the campus of Fort Valley State University, and is now called the Anderson House). Henry Hunt, a light-skinned man with small glasses and a gray goatee, was one of the most important black educators in the South, “advancing” at Fort Valley “the vanguard of civilization on a front where the resistance has been most bitter,” as The Crisis would put it in 1930. An expert carpenter, who had helped build the state capitol building, he had come to Fort Valley High and Industrial School in 1904 with the idea of making it the equal of other black Southern schools like Hampton and Tuskegee. His wife Florence raised funds to build the area’s first infirmary, which treated both black and white patients. Unfortunately, it was summer break so the school wasn’t in session. Langston and Zora’s connection to the Hunts was their daughter Dorothy Hunt Harris, who was secretary to Charles S. Johnson and lived in Greenwich Village, where she had hosted the Niggerati on occasion.

  The Peach Capital of Georgia (and also a major producer of pecans, with towering orchards just outside of town), Fort Valley hosted a Peach Blossom Festival every spring from 1922 to 1926, with 40,000 visitors descending upon the town of 4,000 people for musical performances, dancing, pageants, and barbecue; but no festival had taken place in 1927, as it had simply become too overwhelming for a town of that size. From Fort Valley, Langston and Zora sent a telegram to Van Vechten, inviting him to join them; Langston also posted a letter to him from there, telling him that the Hunts’ home was “marvelous.”

  That night, as Langston related to Van Vechten, they drove out of town to a “backwoods church entertainment given by a magician. It closed with his playing on a large harp and singing the Lord’s Prayer in a very lively fashion. And his version began like this: / Our Father who art in heaven, / Hollywood be Thy name!” In a postscript,
Langston added, “There are so many amusing things to do here and the Hunts are delightful.” And he outlined their plan for the next day: to visit the old Toomer plantation.

  Jean Toomer’s 1923 Cane had been set in rural Georgia. His father had once been a slave on John Toomer’s small plantation not far from Fort Valley, and a number of his relatives still lived there. Jean Toomer had never actually been there himself, having grown up mostly in Washington, D.C. His account of Georgia in Cane is based on his three months in Sparta, more than eighty miles away, where he had been a substitute principal at the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute.

  The Toomer plantation was in Houston (pronounced houseton) County, Georgia. I couldn’t locate it precisely, but on Toomer Road there I found an old C.M.E. (Christian Methodist Evangelical) church, set a little bit away from the road in the woods, white, with the windows all boarded up with plywood painted black, and no driveway, just driven-over grass. In the graveyard are seven Toomer graves, the oldest dating from the 1950s: they are the only stones painted white. The churchyard is surrounded by pine timber farms. The plantation was likely nearby.

  Langston and Zora talked there with some of Toomer’s distant relatives, and according to his autobiography, Langston became enamored of an old hat that one of the men there wore, “a marvelous patchwork hat of felt, patched over and over with varicolored bits of leather, linoleum, canvas, and baize where the holes of time had worn through. The entire hat was wonderfully weather-stained and dirty. The old Negro looked like something out of Uncle Remus. Indeed like Uncle Remus himself.” Langston wanted that hat because it reminded him of “the quaint soul of labor in the Old South”; he then referred to some lines from Cane about “caroling softly souls of slavery” and “early dawn on the Georgia plum trees and sunlight in the cotton fields.” In the end, Zora paid the man three dollars for it, and Langston brought it back to New York.

  Langston’s fondness for Uncle Remus and “the quaint soul of labor in the Old South” isn’t just retrograde, it echoes age-old white justifications for the horrors of slavery. Perhaps thirteen years after his trip he wanted to give an impression of it that would amuse and flatter his white readers. His writings of the 1920s are altogether different. Here’s how he described the same visit in his journal: “Homestead now occupied by Tom Buff (73 years old) [probably the man who sold him his hat] and his grandchildren. Old man knew Toomer well, aunt and cousin of Gene’s [sic] now living on place. Aunt (Fannie Coleman) looks like ghost of past; pale, dry, and white,—didn’t know Gene was writer.” (Jean Toomer was also fair-skinned, and would later refuse to identify as black.) “Cousin (Fred Toomer) much like Gene. Wife ill. House in midst of cotton fields and peach trees. Chickens running under house and two dogs alive with fleas. Pecan, and English walnut trees. Grape vines and brambles. A very deep, cloudy well. / Came back to town and went looking for a guitar player named Bugaboo but couldn’t find him.” The simple lyricism I find stunning.

  The next day, August 17, Langston and Zora sent Van Vechten a postcard joking about the slowness of Zora’s car. (The top speed for the era was about 35–40 miles per hour; Sassy Susie likely chugged along at a more moderate pace.) It read, “We are charging home in a wheezy car and hope to be home for Xmas. We are being fed on watermelon, chicken, and the company of good things. Wish you were with us. Lovely people not spoiled by soap-suds and talcum.”

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  Langston described their visit to the “famous conjur-man away off in the backwoods” at great length in his autobiography; Zora talked about it in a letter to Van Vechten; and Langston listed the “Herb Doctor’s routine” in his notebook. Apparently he was so popular that on the weekends his cabin yard would be filled with visitors, both black and white. But neither Langston nor Zora revealed his name or the town he lived nearest, only that one had to drive over red clay roads to reach him (these kinds of roads were common, but they had been driving mainly on gravel or chert roads), and that everyone they asked on the way knew him. They arrived in the early afternoon and were received by “a tall, red-skinned, middle-aged man. . . . There was nothing especially distinguished about the man either in appearance or personality. He was quiet and pleasantly serious and asked us, in a southern drawl, what our trouble was.” Zora told him a lie about a cousin of hers, and named Tom R. Smith as the one who placed the curse they wanted the herb doctor to lift. (Smith was a white New York friend of Van Vechten’s who had edited The Century magazine in the teens and was now editor in chief at the publisher Boni and Liveright.) Ten days later she explained to Van Vechten that they had nothing against Smith, “but we had to have a victim and since he is free[,] single, and childless we thought he was the best one to use. If he should turn up one day with his limbs all tied up in a knot don’t tell that we conjured him.” As Imani Mtendaji, an African American storyteller in Savannah, pointed out to me, “Zora and Langston had to conjure a white man; conjuring a black one would have been too risky.”

  The conjurer read to them from chapter six of the Book of Tobit in his “huge apocryphal Bible,” including the passage that explains that “if a devil or an evil spirit trouble any,” smoke the heart and liver of a fish, “and the party shall be no more vexed.”

  The conjur-man then “darkened the room, after having laid out various chalks and powders on a nearby table.” He took a piece of chalk and made white marks on Zora’s forehead and breast in the shape of a cross. Then he sprinkled water on them from a green bottle, anointed them with “Palm of Gilead,” “mumbled an incantation,” gave each of them a small rock, and touched the rocks with a lit match. They began to burn. He told them to make the sign of the cross with the stones, which he described as “Burning of hell fire and brimstone.” “After the stones had burned a while, he spoke in tongues, performed other simple rites behind our backs, and then raised the curtains and opened the door.” Zora paid him two dollars.

  Zora, who had visited a lot of other conjure men, told Langston that this one “was a poor one without power, using tricks like the burning sulphur-stones to amaze and confound people.” They were both baffled as to why he was so well known in the area: apparently some of the doctors had been complaining that he’d robbed them of patients.

  That day, Zora told Langston many things she’d picked up from her research. He jotted down some of them in his notebook: “A black woman so evil she sleeps with her fists doubled up”; “Threat: ‘I can make all four of yous strip buck naked and dance right here till sun down.’ ” Then she told him a how to cast a black-magic spell. “Take a black cat on a black night deep in the woods and boil him alive,” she said. To find the lucky bone, you throw all the bones in a stream and choose the one that floats upstream. With this bone, “you can give yourself to the devil. Put it in your mouth and you can disappear, become invisible.”

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  They had found out while in Fort Valley that Bessie Smith was performing in Macon, and made sure to get there in time to see her. Langston was a devoted fan of the great blues singer, who became known as “The Empress of the Blues” in 1923 when her song “Down Hearted Blues” sold 760,000 copies in six months. He wrote a blues song for her in 1925, which he sent to Carl Van Vechten to give her; he had seen her perform several times; and he listened to her records probably more than those of any other musician. Famously foul-mouthed, violent, and frequently drunk, she was a powerful woman whom nobody messed with.

  Langston had first met her backstage in Baltimore in 1926, where she told him about her summer traveling tent shows down South and how lucrative they were. She remembered the Van Vechtens but didn’t exactly appreciate Carl’s Vanity Fair article on the blues (which Langston had helped write), and the only thing that interested her in “the art of the blues” was the money to be made from it. Smith attended a few of Van Vechten’s parties; at one, she told a Metropolitan Opera diva, “Don’t let nobody tell you you can’t sing.” She was fond of telling the story of how, at a party he gave in 1928, sh
e downed three shots of whiskey, performed a set of blues, and, when Van Vechten’s wife Fania Marinoff threw her arms around her and tried to kiss her goodbye, exclaimed, “Get the fuck away from me!” and threw her to the floor. As for Zora, she had not yet met Smith, but had accompanied Van Vechten to a Harlem performance Bessie gave the previous summer, and at some point may have corresponded with her.

  Now Smith was appearing at Macon’s Douglass Theatre, built by African-American entrepreneur Charles H. Douglass in 1921, and one of the most important movie theaters and vaudeville halls in the area. The lobby was lush and polished, with a chain-link motif stenciled on the walls, and Zora and Langston, who paid fifty cents for their tickets, likely had good seats in the gloriously ornate auditorium with its gold-and-red-painted walls. The opening act was a vocal quintet called Philips and Darling; then Bessie strutted on stage with her accompanists, hollering her saucy blues. However, “You didn’t have to go near the theater to hear Bessie sing,” as Langston wrote. “You could hear her blocks away.”

  After the show, the travelers and performers ended up staying at the same hotel together, and spent quite a bit of time hanging out. Among other things, Smith told them, “The trouble with white folks singing blues is that they can’t get low down enough.”

  The hotel was almost certainly the Colonial, Macon’s only hotel for black patrons, another Douglass building; it stood right next to the theater and advertised “25 Neatly Furnished Rooms with Hot and Cold Baths.” (The theater has been beautifully restored; the hotel is no longer there.) With a population of 53,000 (two-thirds of them black), Macon was the fourth largest city in Georgia, and downtown was full of tall buildings; the Colonial was one.

  Smith was accompanied by sixteen people on her Southern tent tour that summer, including Dinah Scott, a comedian who had directed a revue called Harlem Frolics; her brother and sister Clarence and Maud; and her husband and manager Jack Gee. She had just given tent shows in Athens and Atlanta, and would soon appear in Birmingham. She may not have brought her entire entourage with her to Macon, though, since this was a theater performance rather than a tent show.