by Carla Kaplan
Throughout those years, Philippa’s professional success continued to grow, especially outside the United States. Increasingly, she lived and worked abroad, far from Josephine and George. She was emotionally unstable and involved in a string of unhappy romances, and Josephine worried about her.
In addition to performing and composing, Philippa followed her father’s lead as a journalist, imitating his conservatism. In 1967, she was on tour in Vietnam, performing and also reporting for the Manchester Union Leader. Josephine felt she was unsafe and begged her to come home. On May 9, the Schuylers received a phone call from a journalist friend. Philippa had been helping to evacuate orphans from Hue, and her helicopter had crashed into Da Nang Bay. Some of the passengers had been able to swim to safety. But Philippa’s lifeless body had been pulled from the water.
Philippa’s death was covered by every major television channel as well as all the national newspapers, and within hours there were dozens of tasks to perform: reporters’ questions to answer; letters, telegrams, phone calls, and cables to respond to; her funeral to plan. The international outpouring of sympathy was overwhelming. Ella Fitzgerald cabled. So did Henry Cabot Lodge and Sammy Davis, Jr. George could not get up from his chair, and Josephine took care of everything. The funeral, on May 17, 1967, rivaled anything Harlem had ever seen, including the gala funeral for A’Lelia Walker. Philippa’s silver casket was borne through the streets from Harlem to St. Patrick’s cathedral, with hundreds of mourners lining the processional route and another two thousand packing into the church.
In the following months there were many activities to distract Josephine. There was a memorial foundation to create. There was a memorial book to write, Philippa: The Beautiful American, Josephine’s poetic tribute to her daughter’s life from birth to death. There were hundreds of letters to write. There were tribute concerts around the world. Philippa had left unfinished manuscripts of all kinds. It was exhausting. But it was also something to which Josephine could fix her formidable determination, something to live for.
But as the two-year anniversary of Philippa’s death approached, most of those tasks had been completed and the active work of grieving, mourning, and memorializing was coming to an end. Josephine was entering what might have been the hardest phase of all: moving on with her own life.
She collapsed. Her depression overwhelmed her, and she stopped going out, stopped talking to friends, stopped reading the papers, and turned away from the world. By May 2, 1969, even George was worried. Josephine had not eaten or slept for days. She seemed distant and quiet. George found her, at one point, standing aimlessly in her bedroom, staring vacantly toward, but not out of, the window. He went back to the living room. Three hours later, he went back down the hall to Josephine’s bedroom. While he had been reading in the living room, Josephine hanged herself with her bedroom drapes.
She left a suicide note, carefully written out on her personalized stationery. “Everything I have goes to George Schuyler, my husband,” she wrote.
The cats must go to the ASPCA with pension. They must [not] be put to sleep. Call them and they will come. P.S. You had better marry Carolyn. The gold piano should go to Ivy Anderson—not Betty, but you can get the phone [number] from Betty Gumby in the book. The little typewriter to Hugh Gregory Jr. The music and instruments (violin and horn) in closet to Armenta Adams.
She also appended a note “to the press”:
I am killing myself rather than go to a New York hospital which today are crowded, dirty, with incompetent nurses, indifferent mercenary doctors & attendants looking like the cutthroats from a chain gang.
Like her daughter, Josephine was cremated. George was left alone in the quiet three-bedroom apartment on Convent Avenue, surrounded by his manuscripts, his wife’s manuscripts and paintings, his daughter’s manuscripts and compositions. Urns containing both women’s ashes sat on the mantelpiece in the living room.
In 1970, George made efforts to have Josephine’s novel From Texas to Harlem with Love published. He contacted an agent, who expressed great interest in placing the book. Nothing ever came of it. Josephine would have been happy to see that book published. But she would not have wanted to be judged on the basis of it or any one project. “We have refused to be conventional,” she once noted in her scrapbook. “We . . . are a challenge to the set notions of America on race.” Her whole life, in that sense, was her project. Though it may not have been happy, it is not clear that she would have declared it a failure either. Refusing to be conventional, as Josephine well knew, is a very risky business. And unconventional lives, by definition, are the most difficult ones to live—and to judge.
Josephine photographed by Carl Van Vechten.
Part Three
Repudiating Whiteness: Politics, Patronage, and Primitivism
Images inspired by African art appeared often on Opportunity’s covers.
Chapter 5
Black Souls: Annie Nathan Meyer Writes Black
Black Souls is accusing them on their own ground. They can’t tolerate that.
—Josephine Cogdell Schuyler to Annie Nathan Meyer
Program for Black Souls, close-up.
Deep in the basement of Columbia University’s Adele Lehman Hall, the linoleum floors dip suddenly and the hallways undulate as if a drunken builder had laid them out underwater. There, under suspended banks of fluorescent lights, are the Barnard College archives. In one of five cardboard boxes of unsorted material from Barnard’s founder Annie Nathan Meyer is a sepia studio portrait of her at fifteen or sixteen years old. A caption made of mismatched letters cut from newspapers is pasted onto the heavily matted old photo. Although she later grew into a solid, squarely built woman, she is slender in that photo, formally dressed in a heavy tucked suit cinched with a wide leather belt. She stands erect, her long neck rising out of a white collar and her hair smoothed neatly back. With her hands folded lightly in front of her, she avoids the camera, fixing the middle distance with a cool, direct gaze. Everything about the photo seems to assent to 1880s conventions: a familiar portrait of a carefully prepared young woman of means about to take her proper place in an ordered society. Everything but the caption. Presumably placed there by Meyer herself, its large cutout letters read, “Listen, honestly, Get Out.”
Meyer does not conform to the images we have of rebels. She did not support some of the most important feminist causes of her day. She founded a college for women but eschewed suffrage. She was a doctor’s wife and a writer prone to crafting melodramas out of step with modernist avant-garde aesthetics. But Annie Nathan Meyer kept faith with that young girl who wanted to “get out” of the life that was expected for her. One way she did so was to write a play called Black Souls, which was entirely unlike anything ever written before.
By 1924, Meyer was already the author of eight successful plays, numerous novels, many essays, and hundreds of editorials. Not entirely satisfied with any of them, she began drafting what she considered her most daring and important work: a short play called Black Souls. She wrote during a time when many successful “Negro plays” were by white authors. But she disdained the work of other white writers as not “authentic” and was determined to make her mark by doing something “bigger.”
Annie Nathan Meyer around the time she wrote Black Souls.
Nothing she had ever written had been quite so difficult for her, not even a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century novel about artificial insemination. Black Souls told the story of a white southern woman’s desire for a black man. It did not pretend that she had been seduced. It did not suggest that she had been deceived. It did not moralize against her desire. The appeal of her intended was treated as a given. This, in Meyer’s day, was unheard of. As a white woman, Meyer “felt utterly unworthy” to accomplish such a “great theme.” “Never approached a theme with such humility,” she noted. So she took her drafts to her friends Mary White Ovington and James Weldon Johnson.
Miss Ovington heard me read it before I went—thinks climax
builds superbly but thinks [first?] scenes drag. . . . I must reread it carefully trying to have less talk & less propaganda. . . . A few sentences are academic rather than from the heart. . . . Miss Ovington tho’t play immensely improved since she had heard it a month before. Last night I read it to James Weldon Johnson colored poet, orator & organizer & his charming wife. They were much moved. . . . All thot it true—one breathed a sigh when I finished & cried out “Dynamite!”
She asked Johnson to edit and authenticate the work, but she also felt she needed the input of a black woman writer. The perfect opportunity presented itself at the 1925 Opportunity awards, where she met Zora Neale Hurston and found her enormously engaging. Within a week she had sent Hurston money, recommended her to a friend who was a Vanity Fair editor, and helped arrange for Hurston to work with Fannie Hurst. She used her pull to persuade Barnard to accept Hurston on a scholarship, though no black student had ever been admitted before. Your interest “keys me up wonderfully,” Hurston told her.
They approached each other as fellow writers, sharing story ideas, outlines, and drafts. But Meyer also became Hurston’s most important “Negrotarian.” “I must not let you be disappointed in me,” Hurston wrote to her on May 12. Hurston’s early letters to Meyer adopt a mock-servile pose: “Your grateful and obedient servant”; “Your little pickaninny”; “Yours most humbly & gratefully”; and so on, all designed to give Meyer honorary status as a Harlem insider with whom one could joke about race.
Meyer first shared Black Souls with Hurston as early as the fall of 1925 or winter of 1926. Hurston wrote back that Black Souls was “immensely moving . . . accurate . . . [and] brave, very brave without bathos.” At first Hurston hoped that she would act in the play, in the role of Phyllis. “I want to be the principal’s wife so badly.” She became the play’s advocate, talking to “every one of the literary people” and “scouting around” for singers, “trying to pick them up off of Lenox Ave.” Meyer soon became convinced that Hurston should rewrite Black Souls as a novel. On January 21, 1927, as Hurston was heading south on her first folklore-collecting mission as Charlotte Mason’s “agent,” Meyer offered terms: “[If] the book is published, I shall make full acknowledgement. . . . Also I shall give you one half (½) of all royalty received by me. . . . I shall give them to you also if a Movie is made from the novel, but not if a play is produced, because I have already done the play. . . . I do hope you will enjoy making it into a real novel.” By March, in spite of crisscrossing Florida, collecting folklore, starting a novel, and getting herself engaged, Hurston was able to reassure Meyer that she had already completed the first thirty pages of a rewrite. “I hope you will like what I have done on the story,” she wrote. By fall she had finished the first draft. But now she felt that the crucial interracial love story “would strike a terribly false note” in the South, especially. I could “go over it with you page by page,” she offered. Meyer was committed to that scene, and rather than drop it from the play, she let their collaboration fade.
As it turned out, the scene that Hurston thought should be removed was in fact too controversial. Despite the approval of many of Meyer’s friends and collaborators, no producer would touch the play. Annie Nathan Meyer had the persistence of a tugboat. The resistance to her play convinced her of its merit, and she labored on it doggedly for the next eight years.
Finally, in 1932, the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village decided to stage Black Souls. Featuring some of Harlem’s most celebrated actors, including Rose McClendon in a starring role, and involving the design and directing talents of many of the best artists in Greenwich Village, Black Souls opened to great fanfare, mixed reviews, and one of the most heated controversies in the history of modern American theater.
All of Annie Nathan Meyer’s friends had advised her that she would never find “any manager bold enough to produce” the love scene between white Luella and black David. But for Meyer, that love scene was the heart and soul of the play:
Program for Black Souls.
To me the most original note in my play had been the hither-to untouched accusation that beneath the lynching of the Negro, beneath the Southern white man’s determination at all costs to protect his women, was the dread that some of them responded to the call of the strong black man. It was easy enough to cry “Rape,” but it was not so easy to feel satisfied in one’s heart that it was entirely a question of force.
Josephine Cogdell Schuyler told her that the scene was
absolutely true to life . . . to have a Southern girl of the upper classes who has seen her father keep black mistresses fall in love with a Negro is not nearly so unusual as people like to think. In fact I did exactly that myself and for this reason your play rings exceedingly true.
Important political events influenced the Provincetown Playhouse’s decision to stage the play. On March 24, 1932, the Alabama supreme court voted to uphold the death sentences of the Scottsboro Boys, in spite of a dearth of evidence and the recantation of Ruby Bates. There had been, Bates now admitted, no rape. “Those policeman made me tell a lie,” she wrote to her boyfriend, Earl Streetman. “I wish those Negroes are not Burnt on account of me it is these white boys fault.” Wild enthusiasm initially greeted Ruby’s recantation. The Scottsboro Boys’ supporters were sure that it would lead quickly to justice. For white women, especially, the Scottsboro case represented an opportunity to take a stand against what Nancy Cunard called “the abomination of racial injustice” carried out “in the name of white American womanhood.” The American Left, still reeling from the executions of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 and the feeling, as John Dos Passos put it, that “we are two nations,” was determined to see no more wrongful executions. Both blacks and whites believed that the national outcry over the case could reverse the tide. To their horror, the recantation made no difference. Bates’s testimony had put the Scottsboro Boys in jail, but her recantation could not free them. Once she became part of what Nancy Cunard later called “the lynch machinery,” facts no longer mattered. Ruby Bates’s inability to stop the wheels that she herself had set into motion became a crucial aspect of Scottsboro’s symbolic meaning.
On March 24, 1932, the Alabama supreme court upheld almost all the nine convictions. On March 30, 1932, Black Souls opened at the Provincetown Playhouse. The play’s advance publicity did not mention Scottsboro or Bates’s flailing attempt to change her story. It didn’t have to. The Bates/Luella parallel was clear. The 220-seat house was packed. The program for the play’s opening night included an essay by George Schuyler under a drawing of intertwined black and white bodies. Schuyler was known for his sardonic tone. But with atypical earnestness, his program notes extolled Black Souls for helping “our nation . . . emerge from its present savage state” and “redrawing the color line.”
When the Provincetown Playhouse finally staged Black Souls, the country was also in a deep economic depression that hit the arts and Harlem especially hard. Since “Negro plays” were now considered too risky and producers wanted private backers to finance productions, (as Charlotte Mason had done with Hurston’s The Great Day two months earlier), Meyer agreed to finance Black Souls herself. She had been born with a surfeit of self-confidence and a prodigious capacity for work. She was capable, opinionated, and stubborn. She had grown up, like Mary White Ovington, in thrall to stories about William Lloyd Garrison, and she wanted to be someone, like him, who “stands up & dares” and who “cannot be juggled with.” She was also easy to underestimate. Even as a young girl she had a decidedly matronly look, which she adopted as a kind of disarming armor: old-fashioned pince-nez, high tight collars, and a severely upswept hairdo. She used conservatism to stand out from her more liberal relatives. And she used her money to stand out from other whites.
Meyer was born on February 19, 1867, into a relatively opulent but also circumscribed world at odds with her own ambitions. The Nathans’ world was a tight-knit Jewish version of Edith Wharton’s
Old New York: a private-clubbed, grand-pianoed, silver-serviced world of Sephardim from the South, Manhattan, and Rittenhouse Square. It was “narrow, provincial, smug, self-satisfied,” her sister, the prominent suffragist Maud Nathan, called it. This was a world of libraries and music rooms downstairs and made-to-order furniture and drawing rooms upstairs. The household staff included Irish maids, a waitress, two nurses, a governess, three servants, and a yardman. Seamstresses were brought in to hand-make the family’s clothing, mattress covers, sheets, pillowcases, and bath linens. Unlike some households, which reserved their best things for company, “we used our solid silver every day,” Meyer remembered. The Nathans were one of New York’s first families, and their genealogy included presidents of stock exchanges, renowned rabbis, Columbia University trustees, Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, and Emma Lazarus, whose poem “The New Colossus” was engraved on a tablet within the pedestal on which the Statue of Liberty stands. They were “imbued . . . with the spirit of New York’s social directory.” Annie Nathan Meyer was raised with the understanding that her family was “the nobility of Jewry” and “the nearest approach to royalty in the United States.” Nathan men were expected to accomplish great things. But Nathan women were expected to hang back. Her mother, the southern-bred Augusta Anne Florance, who had grown up “well-to-do and surrounded by slaves,” had “very decided” views about her two daughters. The girls were told to have no “pursuits” of their own, sent to dancing school, and taught “to cook and to sew . . . [and] to embroider.” Despite all their privileges, Meyer and her sister grew up, she later wrote (sounding strikingly like both Josephine Cogdell and Nancy Cunard), “heart-hungry, brain-famished.” Meyer was a brilliant child, but her father discouraged her studies. “Men hate intelligent wives,” he warned her sometime before he abandoned his family altogether.
