Zora and Langston

by Yuval Taylor

  If there was one thing Mason could not abide, it was ingratitude, and that was exactly what she considered Langston’s offer to wean himself from her support. Like the Old Testament God, she needed to be thanked effusively for everything. Langston’s proposal—to end his contract but to retain her friendship—must have felt like a slap in the face to Mason, especially after he had betrayed her trust by delaying Zora’s work with the crazy theater idea. Langston had misjudged her, expecting that she would be happy to be freed of her financial obligations to him, especially since he did not feel he was making good on her expectations. But on hearing that her “precious brown boy” no longer needed her, she exploded in fury.

  Langston told Louise all about it. “The way she talked to Langston,” Louise recalled, “is the way a woman talks when she’s keeping a pimp. ‘I bought those clothes you are wearing! I took care of you! I gave you this! I gave you that!’ ” Mason enumerated precisely how much she had spent on Langston, including what she had paid Louise, and asked, rhetorically, what she had gotten in return. Langston dramatized the scene in his autobiography:

  That beautiful room, that had been so full of light and help and understanding for me, suddenly became like a trap closing in, faster and faster, the room darker and darker, until the light went out with a sudden crash in the dark. . . . Physically, my stomach began to turn over and over—and then over again. I fought against bewilderment and anger, fought hard, and didn’t say anything. I just sat there in the high Park Avenue drawing-room and didn’t say anything. I sat there and listened to all she told me, closed my mouth hard and didn’t say anything.

  I do not remember clearly what it was she said to me at the end, nor her face as the door closed, nor the elevator dropping down to the street level, nor my final crossing of the lobby through a lane of uniformed attendants.

  But I do remember the winter sunshine on Park Avenue and the wind in my face as I went toward the subway to Harlem.

  The shock was terrible. That evening, Langston went to dinner at Louise’s house. “There were other guests,” he later remembered, “and her mother had prepared a wonderful meal.” But Langston couldn’t eat, and felt as if he were going to die. He “cried like a baby,” Louise testified. He began to experience the signs of a breakdown—“My voice seemed far away and the whole thought lost in such a void that I couldn’t correct myself.” It was eight in the evening. He went straight to his doctor’s office and “said I felt as if I had gone to the other world.” He felt violently ill, but the doctor told him there was nothing wrong with him. He couldn’t eat for a week. He saw three other doctors, had some X-rays taken, gave samples of his urine and blood, and, of course, remained undiagnosed.

  Langston thought that one immediate cause of the fracas was his decision to go to Washington, D.C., to keep a commitment he had made, rather than stay in New Jersey and write. But Langston never understood exactly why Mason erupted as she did. Scholars have offered a multitude of explanations for Mason’s conduct. Arnold Rampersad believes that she was upset about the lack of work Langston had done since finishing his novel. And indeed it is quite clear from their correspondence that Langston’s idleness upset Mason, even if she often advised her beneficiaries to rest and revive. Faith Berry, another Hughes biographer, thinks it was Langston’s overtly political poems and essays that caused the breakup, but Langston didn’t begin writing those until later that year. In The Big Sea, Langston misleadingly places the composition of his poem “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” prior to the breakup and intimates that because Mason didn’t like it the relationship turned sour. (It included the line “Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off your labor, who clip coupons [something that Mason did habitually] with clean white fingers because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed garments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends and live easy.”) However, the poem could not have been written prior to 1931, since the hotel didn’t open until that October. Carla Kaplan suggests that “the cause was an escalating conflict between Hughes and Hurston over their play,” but there is scant evidence of any conflict at this point. At the end of May, after Langston’s breakup with Godmother, Zora casually mentioned Louise favorably in a letter she wrote Larry Jordan, and she and Langston visited Carl Van Vechten together on June 10 to wish him farewell (he was going to Europe for the summer). Kaplan also suggests that the cause was Langston publishing “Afro-American Fragment,” a poem that questioned Mason’s belief in the direct linkage between Africa and African Americans. But once again, the break preceded the publication of the poem in July 1930, and probably its composition. (Neither Langston nor Mason mentioned the poem in their correspondence, making it unlikely that Mason had seen it by May.)

  As I mention above, The Big Sea and Langston’s correspondence with Mason indicate that the immediate cause was Langston’s desire to increase his financial independence, which was in part motivated by guilt over being driven around New York by a white chauffeur when his peers were sleeping in subways and going hungry (the unemployment rate in Harlem was five times that of the rest of the city). Mason interpreted this desire as the basest ingratitude.

  But I believe another major cause was his collaboration with Zora. Mason’s fondest hope was to make a difference to the world through a mystical connection to the primitive, which would overwhelm the malign forces of civilization. There were many linked routes to that connection, but by this time her energy was focused on Zora’s work. Langston’s novel was finished; Locke had become, as Kaplan points out, “disenchanted with [Mason’s] ‘vision’ of the Harlem Museum of African Art.” Mason “could no longer invest in those who could not—or would not—produce according to her lights”; her “last hope” rested on Zora’s unfinished manuscript. It had become, for her, an obsession.

  The phone call from Langston and Zora about their play had to have been a major disappointment. Mason had never had a kind word to say about the theater. And the call made her believe that the play had been instigated by Langston. It was taking Zora away from her most valuable work. As Kaplan writes, Mason “did not want Hurston distracted by Hughes, who she now claimed made her ‘earth path even harder.’ ” Zora was at this point indispensable for Mason’s plans; Langston was simply getting in Zora’s way while failing to produce anything of value himself. And then he had the audacity to insult Mason, as she thought, by claiming his independence from her.

  Langston borrowed some money from Van Vechten on May 26, now that his monthly stipend was gone. He wrote a series of pleading letters to Mason. Again, we have only drafts—we don’t know whether they were actually sent. And they were likely interspersed with telephone conversations, since in the June 6 letter, Langston mentions Godmother’s “kind and sincere talks with me the last few weeks.”

  The first of these letters was dated May 28. “You have been more beautiful to me than anybody in the world, and my own failure is miserable beyond speech, so I will say no more about it. . . . I did not want to hurt you. I wanted only to be true to your love for me, but human words have too many meanings other than the single meaning of the heart. . . . I want to be your spirit-child forever.”

  The second and third letters (one an impassioned plea for forgiveness, the other about financial matters) are far longer, and were written a few days later in Washington, where Langston had met with Locke, who in turn had introduced him to a young Cuban who was helping Langston with translations of Cuban poetry. “Washington is lovely,” Langston wrote.

  Companionship and sleep have done wonders for my nerves. I had just about gone to pieces when I came down here. I could not control the musles [sic] in my body—and I was terribly worried. . . .

  Now that I am quite unworthy of your goodness, I beg of you to release me—or rather to release yourself from the burdens of my own lack of wisdom. Let us be as we were three years ago when I first knew you and loved you for the beauty of your soul—before my own selfishness came between us and the flaming gifts of your
spirit. Now I am shut out and must find my way back alone. The fault is mine. The darkness is mine. The search is mine. The gods have given me the light of your kindness and I do not know how to follow. Forgive me. I am sorry.

  The physical truth of what is happening now, as nearly as I can arrive at, is this—that I have not the capacity to do the things which you think wise. A full year of living by myself, working by myself, has caused my natural isolation to grow into a loneliness that is unbearable. And your insistence on gratitude has made me feel that I have not been any where near able to give you the thanks which you deserve—and that therefore I must not receive any more help from you since I do not know how to thank you—especially since I can not write—and I feel my nerves going to pieces. I love your friendship, dear Godmother, and I need your monetary help badly, but I can have neither now, unless I have your permission to live and move again as it satisfies my own understanding—and unless I may spend the money as wisely as I know how without accounts or pressure. I cannot keep another account. . . .

  But I cannot write at all when everything is planned in advance because I must feel, however mistakenly, that I owe an unpayable debt to you—or any other person. The pressure is too great. It is greater than the pressure of hunger. I can only write when I write for myself. Anything else is terrible. And it is not ingratitude which makes me say this—it is that I cannot live as you would have me.

  On June 3, Mason sent Langston a list of foods in two columns, classified into “top vegetables” and “root vegetables.” She followed this with a note on June 6: “Your letter stating your desires, describing your feeling of restraint has come to me. Dear child, what a hideous spectre you have made for yourself of the dead thing Money!” She enclosed a check for $250.

  Langston wrote her again that same day; perhaps the letters crossed.

  In all my life I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing. With my parents, with my employers in my struggle for food, in all the material circumstances of life, I have been forced to move this way and that—only when I sat down for a moment to write have I been able to put down what I wanted to put down, to say what I’ve wanted to say, when and where I choose. . . . [W]hen you told me I should have begun my writing again the week after I returned from Cuba—I must disagree with you. I must never write when I do not want to write. That is my last freedom and I must keep it for myself. . . . [ellipses in original] Then when you tell me that you give me more than anybody ever gave me before—($22500 a month—my allowance and half of Louise)—and that I have been living in idleness since the first of March—I must feel miserably ashamed. . . . I cannot write on any sort of pre-arranged schedule. The nervous strain of finishing the novel by a certain time has shown me that.

  There is no evidence that Mason replied.

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  Sometime in June, rather suddenly, with the first and third acts and the brief first scene of the second of The Mule-Bone mostly finished, Zora left Westfield. There was no drama about it—she did not “break up” with Langston, who remained there. That was still to come. She simply moved back to Manhattan. Langston claimed to have no idea why, but guessed (correctly) that she needed to get her folklore collection ready for publication. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason, as ensuing events would make clear. Zora promised to work on the play some more, and made at least one trip to Florida to collect folklore that summer.

  Louise was puzzled. Word got back to her that Zora wanted to beat her up and had said that Louise and Langston had “done her in.” Sue Bailey, her roommate and close friend, warned her, “Louise, you’re so fond of Zora; you think she’s your friend. I’ll bet you she’s not. She’s cutting your throat as high as she can, right now.” Another of Louise’s friends told her that Zora had accused her and Langston of trying to steal her play.

  One night at the Savoy, Louise saw Zora on the dance floor. She turned to the man she was dancing with and told him, “Zora Neale Hurston’s here tonight, and she’s threatened that if she ever sees me, she’s going to wipe up the floor with me. So don’t be surprised at what happens, if anything happens here tonight.”

  To Louise’s surprise, Zora walked up to her, threw her arms around her, and kissed her. It was the last time Louise would ever see her.

  Even decades later, Louise still didn’t know what to think. “Arna Bontemps always believed,” she wrote in her memoir, “that Zora was jealous of me. It was not over Langston because we were just good friends.” Indeed, Bontemps wrote, much later, that Zora had told him herself how jealous she’d been of Louise; Zora confessed the same thing to Langston himself in 1931. Louise wondered, though, if Zora might have been jealous of her relationship with Godmother. She never understood how strongly Zora felt about her relationship with Langston.

  Zora was justifiably proud of her play and felt that Langston had wanted to give Louise too much credit for it. But in addition, Zora may have discovered that her feelings for Langston were deeper than she’d ever admitted, even to herself.

  After all, Langston was not just Zora’s best friend, but one of the few people with whom she felt a deep kinship. Her affection for him is obvious from her letters to him. One could easily make the case that she was in love with him, even if it was Platonic: her letters are full of endearments like “honey” and “darling,” not to mention her “lovingly yours” signatures and her request for a picture of him. He was, she would soon confess, not just her best friend for years, but “the nearest person on earth to me.” He was the only person she really wanted to show her work to, probably the one who understood it best, and whose reaction she most desired. He was one of the very few who fully shared her ideas about folklore and black language—possibly the only one. She thought highly of his poems, and he thought highly of her writing. He had introduced her to her benefactor, and was the only person she could consult when she was in trouble with Godmother. Langston and Zora had collaborated not just on an aborted opera, a magazine, and a play, but on a shared vision of what Negro literature could be. So when Louise replaced Zora as the main object of Langston’s affections, who could blame Zora for feeling jealous?

  And indeed, Langston’s affection for Louise, even if it was also Platonic, went deep. His mother wanted him to marry her. Louise later said that if he had asked her, she would have said yes, despite the fact that she was not yet divorced. Was she in love with him, even if she never said so in so many words? It certainly appears so. In any case, Zora could have felt supplanted, especially when Langston turned to Louise for comfort after his breakup with Godmother.

  Langston may have sought out Louise’s company but he would never talk to her about his relationship with Godmother—or to anyone else. (Even in 1967, a few weeks before he died, Langston insisted on not revealing Mason’s name to an interviewer.) But, for that matter, Langston wouldn’t talk to Louise about relationships at all. “Langston was not one to go very much into things like this,” Louise explained. “He’d make jokes and laugh. But sit down and have a serious discussion about something?” That he wouldn’t do. He probably didn’t even talk to Zora about these things.

  It’s difficult these days, when love and sex are so intertwined, to imagine a world like the one in which the protagonists of this book lived. Langston, Louise, Zora, Locke, and Godmother were each “in love” with at least one of the others to varying degrees, yet sexual desire was rarely part of the equation. (In fact, there was so little heterosexual activity among the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance that almost none of them ended up having children—as Arnold Rampersad points out, besides Langston and Zora, Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, Harold Jackman, Bruce Nugent, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larsen, and Aaron and Alta Douglas were all childless.) On the other hand, what I mean by “in love” is more than just a strong friendship. It requires intimacy and passion: the kind of intense feeling that unbalances one’s emotions and that, when brought
to an end, can produce anxiety and depression. That’s what Langston and Godmother felt for each other; what Zora, Louise, and Locke all felt for Langston; what Zora would later feel for Jane Belo. Physical desire has little or nothing to do with these passionate attachments: Locke had never met Langston when he fell in love with him, and Langston never seemed to show any physical desire for anyone.

  But relationship experts recognize that emotional attachments are usually stronger than physical ones. In a recent study, two-thirds of women surveyed said that a partner’s emotional affair would be more hurtful than a sexual one. Zora’s emotional attachment to Langston had lasted at least three years by this point and was the strongest bond in her life. It’s small wonder that when Louise and Langston “clicked” so well, Zora became jealous.

  Zora’s jealousy, though, was not the kind of all-consuming rage associated with sexual infidelity. It was, instead, a deep, cutting sorrow that she wanted to keep hidden. She kept imagining the things she wanted to say to him, and couldn’t bear the thought of doing so. As she later put it to Langston, “I felt that I was among strangers, and the only thing to do was to go on away from there.”

  And then, of course, Zora knew about Langston’s break with Mason, and could easily guess that her own inability to finish her folklore work and her collaboration with Langston on the play had helped cause it. It was quite clearly in her best interest to distance herself from Langston at this point if she wanted to remain in Mason’s graces.

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  These very close friendships followed by sudden breaks had become endemic to Langston. First Alain Locke in Venice in 1924; then Countee Cullen later that same year; now both Godmother and Zora. The people who loved him the most all expected more than he could give.