Zora and Langston

by Yuval Taylor

  Dearest Godmother,

  All the week I have been thinking intensely of you and of what you have done for me. And I have written you several letters but I have not sent them because none of them were true enough. There were too many words in them, I guess. But all of them contained in some form or other these simple sentiments:

  I love you.

  I need you very much.

  I cannot bear to hurt you.

  Those are the only meanings in all that I say here. You have been kinder to me than any other person in the world. I could not help but love you. You have made me dream greater dreams than I have ever dreamed before. And without you it will not be possible to carry out those dreams. But I cannot stand to disappoint you either. The memory of your face when I went away on Monday is more than I am able to bear. I must have been terribly stupid to have hurt you so, terribly lacking in understanding, terribly blind to what you have wanted me to see. You must not let me hurt you again. I know very well that I am dull and slow, but I do not want to remain that way.

  And the second ends,

  Because I love you, I must try to tell the truth. We agreed upon that, didn’t we? Do not misunderstand me, dear Godmother. Of course I need you terribly,—but you must be free to live for all the others who love you too. If I am too much for you, you must not have me.

  Nowhere in Langston’s extensive correspondence is there language like this. These drafts of letters to Godmother uniquely reveal a depth of feeling he kept hidden from practically everyone else.

  We do not know what set Godmother off. They seem to have patched up their differences, for Mason’s correspondence continued as before, though her effusiveness seems to have been toned down a little in favor of more practical discussions. For instance, she gave him twenty-eight pages—Cornelia Chapin’s handwritten transcription of Godmother’s dictation—of chapter-by-chapter comments on his novel, which Langston relied on heavily when revising it.

  Godmother believed herself to be a “better Negro,” as she told Claude McKay, than most of the African Americans she knew; she went even further in a letter to Locke, writing, “I am a Black God in African art compared to you in the nourishment I give the Negroes, from the root of their primitive ancestry.” Her arrogance now seems absurd, but her correspondents seemed to have taken it in stride. After all, there was, by common agreement, something superhuman about Charlotte Mason.

  Still, her godchildren might find themselves perturbed by her behavior. Zora could confide only in Langston about her troubles with Godmother. When Zora needed a new car and mentioned this to Mason, the latter “simply exploded.” Mason “wrote me a letter that hurt me thru and thru,” Zora told Langston, and with good reason: Godmother had asked her, “Why couldn’t Negroes be trusted?” “I just feel that she ought not to exert herself to supervise every little detail,” Zora complained. At the same time, when Zora sent Mason her critique of a book, The Negro and His Songs, by two white folklorists, Mason misread Zora’s comment “that white people could not be trusted to collect the lore of others”—a sentiment Mason had expressed herself—as applying to herself. When Zora’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” was published, Godmother was angry, feeling that in publishing something without submitting it to her, Zora was violating the terms of her agreement. Zora wriggled out of this by telling Godmother that she had submitted the essay to The World Tomorrow prior to signing the agreement; she did not point out that the essay had nothing to do with her collecting work. Mason also got angry at Zora when she found out that Zora wanted to do some work for Franz Boas, and Zora was forced to write him that her hands were tied. Godmother constantly worried she was being taken advantage of, kept insinuating that Zora was being extravagant, and continually reminded her of the terms of her contract. Mason acted in just as controlling and accusatory a manner with some of her other protégés (though less so with Langston, whom she petted and indulged). Aaron Douglas, for example, had to turn down some important commissions because Godmother deemed them too white-leaning, and he eventually disentangled himself from her patronage. The constant supervision Mason imposed “destroys my self-respect,” Zora wrote to Langston, “and utterly demoralizes me for weeks. I know you can appreciate what I mean. I do care for her deeply, don’t forget that. That is why I can’t endure to get at odds with her.” Zora was so nervous about the relationship that she went out of her way to “conjure” Godmother when visiting Louisiana, making a wish at a fortune teller’s establishment in Marrero “that a certain influential white woman would help me.” The conjure woman told Zora that this woman would look after her for the rest of her life. Sure enough, the next morning, or so Zora later wrote, she received a telegram from Mason “stating that she would stand by me as long as she lived.” As indeed she would.

  Zora undoubtedly felt that Langston would too. By this time, however, a different woman had entered his life.

  ▼ ▼ ▼

  Louise Thompson grew up poor, an only child, in small towns in Nevada, California, Utah, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, attending all-white schools and, though light-complexioned, ostracized for being black. She graduated with honors from the University of California at Berkeley in 1923, but as a black woman was unable to find work in the Bay Area and had to pass for Mexican in order to get a menial job. She and her mother soon moved to Chicago; inspired by a talk she had with W. E. B. Du Bois at the NAACP convention there, she longed to go to New York City, but the amount of money she’d saved would have gotten the two women only as far east as the Chicago suburb of Evanston. On a whim, she decided to take a teaching job at the all-black Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal School of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, traveling to the Jim Crow South for the first time.

  She vividly described her disheartening experiences there in her unfinished and unpublished memoir; it’s a fascinating account of Southern racism and its effects during the 1920s. After one year, she took a position at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, another school for black youth, this one run mostly by whites. There she witnessed a groundbreaking student strike in 1927, an example of dignified nonviolent resistance to top administrators’ dismissal of radical students and professors, demeaning remarks, and segregationist policies. The strike greatly impressed her, despite its failure.

  Thompson first met Langston at a reading he gave at Hampton that March, near the beginning of the Southern tour during which he would encounter Zora in Mobile. Langston encouraged Louise’s move to Harlem; as soon as she arrived in 1928, Wallace Thurman hired her as a typist for his novel The Blacker the Berry, and then promptly married her. She was beautiful, intelligent, and twenty-six years old. The marriage was a great surprise to everyone who knew Thurman; he would never admit to being homosexual but his secret was known to—and accepted by—all. The marriage only lasted a few weeks before it fell apart.

  The Urban League had awarded Thompson a fellowship so that she could earn a master’s degree in social work at the New School for Social Research, but she soon realized that she wasn’t inclined toward that vocation, and left the program. She continued to work as a typist for Arna Bontemps and others while trying to get a favorable settlement from Thurman. In the summer, she went to Reno to finalize her divorce and was planning to stay there for the requisite three months, but her mother was diagnosed with cancer so she returned to Harlem.

  On October 2, 1929, as Louise later wrote,

  Suddenly, just like manna from heaven, Alain Locke appeared at my door and told me he wanted to take me down to meet someone. That someone was ‘Godmother.’ . . . She wanted to hire me to be secretary for Langston and Zora. I could work at home. Alain and she had discussed the arrangement before I met her. So she gave me $150 to buy a typewriter and desk to have at home. I was to be at her and their beck and call. . . . Before I left Mrs. Mason, it was all agreed and arranged. . . .

  Meeting her was like coming into the company of royalty. . . . I was awed, to be quite frank. She was quite different from the other types, the on
es who went slumming and seeking new outlets for their jaded tastes. Mrs. Mason was a woman who had been wealthy probably all of her life. Her house was very formal. She had all English servants, and she was very kindly. In the beginning, I did not see her as condescending. She was very soft in her manner and questioned me about my background and circumstances very skillfully. . . . And she was very nice and very kindly to me. I was very, very happy with the arrangement.

  In fact, Louise “was so taken with her” that she wrote an ode to her. It’s too long and effusive to reprint in full here, but it’s structured as the obverse of Little Red Riding Hood, in which Louise plays the title part and Godmother plays the grandmother, who seems to have defeated the Big Bad Wolf:

  She has walked with God. . . .

  “Ah, Godmother—what beautiful eyes you have.”

  “The better to see you with my child.” And she does see as only one who has stood apart from the world, on the edge of the world[,] looked down upon it, was troubled by it, loved it, and came from the high places to succour it. . . .

  “Ah, Godmother, how tiny you are.”

  “The better to fit into the nooks and crannies of my dear children’s lives.” Legion are her children and always she must hide away behind them. . . . And with this she reaches into her magic bag and brings the necessary potion of material of spiritual encouragement. What fascinating little hidden pockets she has in her full soft skirt—she pulls out crackly paper bills from a soft leather purse and presses them gently into the empty hand. . . .

  This may strike us now as parodic, but it was quite heartfelt. Once again, Godmother was giving the impression of being a minor goddess.

  Godmother proceeded to read a Native American myth to Louise, prefacing it with the observation, “There is a spontaneity and beautiful emotional freedom and communion with the life of earth and sky in these peoples which civilization has had not yet time to destroy, thank God.”

  Godmother would send for Louise every once in a while and talk to her, Louise sitting on a stool at her feet. She related her experiences with American Indians; she introduced Louise to her vicious anti-Semitism, which she espoused openly; she told her how much she looked down on the vulgarity of the nouveaux riches like the Astors and the Vanderbilts; she told her not to polish her nails, as it was vulgar; she would probe into the intimate details of Louise’s personal life, including her diet and bowel movements; she would give her nutritional advice. “When she talked about blacks,” Louise wrote, “the thing that interested her was their nearness to nature and the idea that they had not been corrupted by modern society. . . . Her model was Zora. She would tell me how Zora was so close to the earth and so forth.” Mason was so “ecstatic” when talking about Zora that Louise couldn’t wait to meet her. Mason was also clearly very fond of Langston, but had reservations about Locke, who “apes white people too much.” She was “solicitious” about Louise’s mother’s health, and would usually give her money to “get something for your mother.” And she took a keen interest in Louise’s own career—she didn’t view Louise as simply a stenographer, but as a future writer.

  Louise, however, also saw another side to Godmother, one that wasn’t quite so kind. Once, during lunch, an English servant girl “dropped a spoon or something and got fired on the spot.”

  Another time, Louise, feeling uncomfortable and at a loss for words, commented to Godmother during one of their formal luncheons (she felt as though she were eating at Buckingham Palace), “This is a lovely table arrangement of flowers, Mrs. Mason” (Louise never called her “Godmother” to her face, despite Mason’s desire for her to do so; “she was my employer,” she later explained, “not my godmother”).

  “Oh, you like it, my child?”

  “Yes it’s beautiful. Very nice.”

  “Which color do you like?” Godmother asked.

  “I think the red ones are lovely. They’re all lovely, but I think the red ones are very pretty.”

  Godmother replied, “You would say that, my dear little primitive child.”

  Louise, chagrined, did not respond.

  ▼ ▼ ▼

  For his senior project in sociology at Lincoln, Langston had studied the student culture there, and the resulting survey, condemning the all-white faculty and the students’ apathy about it, had caused a furor. Locke, who visited him, commented to Mason, “The quiet informal way he is doing it is masterly,” and told Langston, “Instead of going out of Lincoln by the front door, it seems to me you are coming out through the roof and taking it off with you.”

  Langston appended a brief foreword to the survey, which read in its entirety,

  In the primitive world, where people live closer to the earth and much nearer to the stars, every inner and outer act combines to form the single harmony, life. Not just the tribal lore then, but every movement of life becomes a part of their education. They do not, as many civilized people do, neglect the truth of the physical for the sake of the mind. Nor do they teach with speech alone, but rather with all the acts of life. There are no books, so the barrier between words and reality is not so great as with us. The earth is right under their feet. The stars are never far away. The strength of the surest dream is the strength of the primitive world.

  Perhaps nowhere is the primitivist philosophy that Charlotte Mason, Langston, and Zora shared so clearly and succinctly expressed. As Carla Kaplan points out, it reads as if Mason had written it herself.

  After graduating, Langston visited Manhattan for two weeks before returning to Lincoln to spend the summer revising his novel. He found Harlem completely changed: many of the nightclubs had started to cater exclusively to whites. Langston complained to Claude McKay about the “awfully bad” and “unbearably vulgar” shows and music now being produced by African Americans in Manhattan. And the better work, like Wallace Thurman’s literary magazine Harlem, couldn’t survive—it folded after only one issue.

  ▼ ▼ ▼

  In September 1929 Langston moved from Lincoln to 514 Downer Street, Westfield, New Jersey, about an hour from Manhattan, since Godmother felt that in New York he would be subject to too many distractions. He stayed in a tiny clapboard-paneled attic room in the front of the late-Victorian house, which was occupied by an elderly black couple, the Peeples (the room is still there, looking much as it did then). Louise now started working as a stenographer for him, traveling to New Jersey, as well as for Mason herself, assisting Katherine Biddle and Cornelia Chapin. A few weeks later came Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, the Wall Street crash that would plunge the nation into the Great Depression. Mason lost half her money, but continued to fully support her beneficiaries, and Langston and Louise were unaffected.

  Louise, her mother, and her friend Sue Bailey lived in a Harlem apartment at 425 Convent Avenue, just north of 148th Street, not far from City College. Although Louise had many suitors, a reporter for a black gossip magazine, the Inter-State Tattler, mentioned seeing her holding hands with Langston on Seventh Avenue. Her boyfriend at the time grew so jealous that he moved to Africa. Louise and Langston frequented the Savoy Ballroom, where she tried in vain to get him to learn the Lindy hop; they watched football games at the Polo Grounds (home of the New York Giants); and they went out on the town with Aaron Douglas and his wife Alta.

  A year earlier, in November 1928, Langston had fallen in love with a young woman named Laudee Williams, of whom little is known; they had exchanged rings, but he seems to have lost interest rather quickly, and she had left him “broken hearted—not even in love anymore,” as he wrote to Wallace Thurman in a joking tone the following summer. In contrast, Langston never gave anyone any indication that he was “in love” with Louise. Louise, however, was clearly in love with Langston.

  Langston was seeing plenty of Mason as well. And under her guidance (she sent him copious notes and tendered valuable advice) and with help from Louise (“who must have done certain pages over for me so often she could have recited by heart their varying versions”), he fini
shed his novel, which Knopf accepted for publication.

  A medical report from early November states that Langston was working eight to twelve hours a day; devoted an hour a day to walking and running; did twenty or thirty minutes of calisthenics; refrained from coffee, alcohol, and tobacco; and suffered from nervousness and some insomnia, “probably due to overwork.” At five foot five, he weighed 124 pounds, and his musculature was “moderately firm.”

  Langston, however, felt uneasy about being so well taken care of when masses were going hungry. He was sick of his novel, and he had written almost no poetry of note during the last few years. As usual, he found relief by traveling, and spent ten days in Cuba looking for a musician to collaborate with him on a “singing play.” There, to his surprise, he found himself the toast of Havana: “Everyone,” writes his biographer Arnold Rampersad, “wanted to be introduced to the greatest Negro poet of the United States of America—indeed, the greatest Negro poet in the world.” Never before had he felt so important.

  By the time he returned to Westfield, he had company there. Zora had moved into a one-room rental unit at 405 West Broad Street, another late-Victorian house not much bigger than the one Langston occupied, only two blocks away.

  8

  SPRING 1930

  The Bone of Contention

  Charlotte Mason had orchestrated it all. Upon Zora’s return to New York in March (she had been in the Bahamas for the last two months, writing an article entitled “Dance Songs and Tales from the Bahamas”), Godmother had summoned her to come to her Park Avenue apartment, where she asked Zora to tell the stories, sing the songs, do the dances, and show the film footage she’d gathered in the South.