by Carla Kaplan
Meyer was a born contrarian, and she chafed against those standards. She also craved attention and wanted to “stand out.” She and Maud were known as “the fighting Nathan sisters.” When Maud Nathan became a social activist and a suffragist, Meyer became staunchly, infamously, antisuffrage. “She did it mostly to spite Maud,” one family member maintained. In her autobiography, Meyer wrote proudly of how her indignant essays “attracted a great deal of attention all through the country” and kept her in the public eye as “the most forceful of the Antis.” Being taken seriously meant moving into realms that were not already inundated with women like her, and it ruled out both suffrage (her sister’s world) and settlement work.
In 1885, she attended Columbia University’s Collegiate Course for Women but nearly failed her examinations because they were based on lectures that women weren’t allowed to attend. She fought the examining committee and won her certificate. But the experience was humiliating. So she organized a petition drive, wrote fiery articles for The Nation, went door to door collecting endorsements, and, with the support of her new husband, rented a building to house a new college for women, New York’s first.
Difficult as it was to found a college, getting the credit she craved for doing so proved even harder. From the day Barnard opened to the day that she died, Meyer waged a furious battle to be acknowledged not as a founder or one of Barnard’s founders but as the founder. She attributed Barnard’s resistance to acknowledging her to entrenched anti-Semitism. “During the entire forty-six and a half years since the College opened,” she wrote, “there has never been given any public official recognition of the part I played.” In her journal, she described being “heart-sick—wounded in the house of my friends.”
Meyer never got over the Barnard slight: “grudging, grudging . . . the worst hurt I ever received.” She stopped pouring her energies into her “own” community and her “own” people. For Jewish women like Meyer, there may have been particular temptations associated with activist work in Harlem. Jewish activists might become “white” people in Harlem, when many had never before experienced themselves as “whites” in the larger American culture. For them, being white in Harlem but Jewish (and hence not fully white) elsewhere provided special insights into the relative nature of all social identities, as well as a status otherwise unobtainable. “God! I’d like to be recognized,” she wrote in 1924, hard at work on Black Souls. Whereas Barnard had swept her name under the rug, Black Souls, in 1932, finally seemed poised to garner her the notice that she wanted.
To cover the play’s costs, she withdrew money from her savings accounts and sold her Liberty Bonds. To cover additional opening-night costs, she paid for special tickets, a manager’s assistant, costumes, Actors’ Equity dues for many cast members (including the two stars), props, an opening-night party (for which she felt her manager spent far too much money), telephones, ushers, a doorman, flashlights, and a treasurer. With such an outlay, it seemed to her that she could not fail.
Opening night looked promising. The theater was standing room only. Ticket sales were a healthy $286 for the evening. But white critics savaged the play’s opening night. By the second day, the number of tickets sold dropped from 220 to only 24. By the end of the fourth night, the play had lost $452.93. Subsequent performances fared no better. On Tuesday, April 5, the Provincetown Playhouse sponsored a special “Barnard Night” with speeches on Black Souls by Meyer, Hurston, and Fannie Hurst. Unfortunately, with 154 of the 220 seats for the special performance left unsold, the show netted only $21.50. Black Souls limped into the next weekend, netting a nearly $4,000 loss before closing on April 10.
Josephine Cogdell Schuyler was furious. She had seen the play on opening night with George and felt sure it would be a hit. Black Souls was infinitely superior, she believed, to popular plays about blacks such as Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize—winning The Green Pastures—with its retelling of biblical stories through simple-minded, happy-go-lucky black characters, “happy Negroes at a fish fry”—or plays by Eugene O’Neill. She very much looked forward to meeting Annie Nathan Meyer, who seemed a kindred spirit, in spite of being many years her senior and a northerner from an upper-class, highly educated, professional Jewish background: a far cry from Granbury, Texas. “As you know,” she wrote to Meyer, “many of our noted liberals like to patronize the Negro and when they find one as independent as Mr. Schuyler . . . they are slightly shocked. . . . It is for the same reason that Black Souls made them feel uncomfortable. Green Pastures permits them to feel superior but a Black Souls is accusing them on their own ground. They can’t tolerate that. . . . We simply must meet,” she added
Set on the campus of Magnolia, a striving southern black industrial college with liberal arts aspirations (a college strikingly similar to Lillian E. Wood’s Morristown), Black Souls tells the story of five people: the college founder and president, Andrew Morgan; his pretty black wife, Phyllis; her brother, David, a poet who has just returned from France with the 369th Regiment (the highly decorated unit credited with helping launch the Harlem Renaissance); a reprehensible white southern senator who raped Phyllis when she was only sixteen, a history that her brother, David, suspects but her husband, Andrew, does not know; and, Luella, Senator Verne’s pretty white daughter, who met David, our returning soldier, in Paris and tried to make love to him there.
When David and Luella meet again on Andrew’s campus, which depends heavily on Senator Verne’s political and financial support, Magnolia College is getting ready for distinguished white northern visitors who might become donors. David insists that Luella respect the South’s color lines, and he resists her persistent advances. But Luella chases him down and then, in the play’s third scene, follows him into the dark woods and leads him inside an abandoned cabin. “‘Miss Verne, I begged you not to come here,’ ” David pleads. “‘Really, you must go back at once. I had no right to weaken. You don’t understand what you’re doing.’” Luella, however, is hungry for life, adventure, and passion—all of which she identifies with David’s blackness. “I don’t want to be safe,” she insists. “No. I want to know everything. To feel everything, to experience everything! I’m not afraid of life. I want life—I want it—bubbling over the brim. . . . I’m not a child! . . . I am a woman—with the feelings of a woman.” She throws herself into David’s arms. He sees a “white face peering in the window,” and realizes that unless he acts quickly, Luella’s reputation will be ruined. “Swiftly he makes up his mind to do what he can to save her,” the stage directions read. “He would rather be killed for the usual cause than have her encounter the scorn and possible violence that would be aimed against her if white men suspected her of actually inviting him to bring her to this lonely place in the woods.” The scene ends with the door flung open by incensed white men and Luella’s ineffective plea: “Stop, stop, I say.” David, predictably, is lynched. His death not only terminates his career as one of Harlem’s most promising poets; it also brings his brother-in-law’s college crashing down. Phyllis, the ending suggests, will once again fall prey to the vile Senator Verne, whose lascivious crimes the now-weakened Andrew cannot avenge without starting “the biggest race riot the South has had yet . . . hundreds—thousands” of lynchings.
The final scenes are remarkable in insisting that freedom for blacks must include sexual freedom. A few black intellectuals, including George Schuyler and J. A. Rogers, were advocating for a full range of black sexual freedoms, but they were in a distinct minority. Most black writers avoided the subject assiduously. The final scenes also insist that we treat Luella’s desire for David as completely natural; the play’s dramatic realism never pathologizes her passion. Such insistence on white women’s cross-racial desire was unusual. Hurston refused to believe it. “I am absolutely certain,” she wrote to Meyer, “that the daughter of a southern senator would never follow any Negro man to the woods however handsome he might be, or brilliant.”
The play’s final scene, like Wood’s depiction of ly
nching (which Wood was composing at almost the same moment), implicated white women in racial violence to a degree almost unheard of on the American stage. Luella is paralyzed and useless. Desiring David, she forfeits any claim to either whiteness or womanhood, as defined by the culture of the American South at the time. Her ineffectual attempt to stop the violence carried out in her name—her pathetic “Stop, stop, I say”—shows that she cannot escape her own complicity with the barbarities of whiteness. Many historians of the period argue that white women were “reluctant to adopt” an understanding of lynching that took full responsibility for their role “in maintaining the system of racial oppression.” Meyer’s play sets itself apart by its eagerness to dramatize that understanding.
Most of the white “Negro” plays by Paul Green, Eugene O’Neill, Julia Peterkin, and Fannie Hurst were as sympathetic to their white characters as to their black ones, if not more so. In spite of their efforts to write black, that sympathy often gave those white writers away. Luella is attractive and intelligent, even admirably rebellious. But she is wholly unsympathetic. More than unsympathetic, she is a version of the well-intentioned, monstrous white woman found throughout Harlem Renaissance literature. Luella embodies Angelina Weld Grimké’s (and other black women’s) view of white women as “about the worst enemies with which the colored race has to contend.” That figure appears in McKay’s and Toomer’s chilling poems, and she prefigures Richard Wright’s Mary Dalton, whose every good intention only further seals Bigger’s doom. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t know—honestly I didn’t!” Luella laments. Good intentions cannot get Luella off the hook. In fact, the worst acts of barbarism, as Black Souls demonstrates, may spring from good intentions. That was hardly a message well-intentioned “Negrotarians” would welcome. By insisting upon it, Meyer risked alienating other whites. Blacks, surprised to see it come from a white woman, were thrilled. The play underscored how sharply divided the black and white worlds were. So did its divided reception.
Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, believed Black Souls to be “a remarkably courageous and straightforward [play] free from the usual sensationalism.” It “cannot help but be convincing to those who have hearts and brains to recognize the truth,” he said. James Weldon Johnson overcame his earlier objections to call it “one of the most powerful and penetrating plays yet written on the race question.” Black folklorist and activist Arthur Huff Fauset (the son of a black man and a white Jewish mother and the half brother of novelist Jessie Fauset) appreciated its “unvarnished truths about the situation [interracial sex] which has so many lies and half-truths to its credit.” He called it “a landmark.” Black critic Vere Johns, in the widely distributed black newspaper New York Age, wrote that “Black Souls . . . gives a true picture of the cultured and educated Negro. . . . Mrs. Annie Nathan Meyer has written a play of frankness, of understanding, of sympathy.” Hurston offered the highest possible praise: “The author has such an understanding of this interracial thing. . . . Never before have I read anything by a white person dealing with ‘inside’ colored life that did not have a sprinkling of false notes.” Meyer also received fan letters congratulating her on her “compelling,” “wonderful, eye-opening” play. Some fans wondered why she was closing Black Souls early. Like Nancy Cunard and Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, she carefully pasted the letters into her scrapbooks.
The white press, on the other hand, liked almost nothing about the play. In spite of being widely reviewed in the white press, it was also roundly dismissed as “crude,” “almost hopeless,” “uneven,” “untheatrical,” “unfortunately inept,” “written clumsily,” “crudely written,” “muddled,” “windy,” and “meandering”—“rhetorical propaganda.” The New-York Evening Post said the play was “a great deal of earnest talk, giving the impression of a series of stump speeches demanding justice for colored folk.” And the New York Herald Tribune faulted it even as propaganda: “The play fails to become either an exciting bit of theater or a convincing treatise.” Worse yet, Walter Prichard Eaton, a Harvard-educated Yale professor and drama critic, claimed that Black Souls “has no authentic tang.”
Meyer’s Harlem friends tried to be comforting. “What a pity it is that newspapers must, perforce, dispatch mere ‘dramatic critics’ to report plays like this one,” Arthur Huff Fauset wrote. “What does your casual ‘critic’ know about Negroes or Negro-white relations?” Josephine Cogdell Schuyler rushed to Meyer’s defense. Under her pen name Heba Jannath, she wrote that Black Souls was “in advance of the popular conception of the Negro” and therefore too advanced for Eaton’s understanding. “I always felt,” Meyer agreed, that white critics “were afraid of it.”
Meyer was right. If there was one thing most of white America was unprepared for in the 1920s and early 1930s, it was sexual equality between races on the dramatic stage. Much milder, by any standard, than Black Souls, Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun Got Wings had led to a “press storm” and “more publicity before production than any play in the history of the American theatre, possibly of the world” over much less. Its depiction of a white woman married to a black man and a scene in which he—played by Paul Robeson—kissed her hand was O’Neill’s only breach. But it was enough. “A romantic scene between an interracial couple was perceived [even] by the black community as self-destructive, beyond sensible discussion.” O’Neill treated interracial love as a “doomed passion.” He reinforced long-standing notions about blackness as evil and whiteness as purity—“I’ve got to prove I’m the whitest of the white,” says O’Neill’s black Jim. Luella’s passion, treated unapologetically, is of another order altogether.
That difference made Black Souls a cause célèbre in Harlem. What Fauset called the play’s “tragically brief run” became a symbol of the sorry state of American race relations. Black Souls emerged as a testing ground for insider or “honorary” status in Harlem. Those whites who liked Black Souls were viewed as reliable members of what Fauset called the “ever narrowing band of fearless ones on this earth.” They could be trusted. Those who disliked it were outsiders. They could not be trusted politically. Socially, they were seen as hopeless. George Schuyler spoke for many in Harlem when he called Meyer “brilliant and peppery” and noted how unusual it was for “an elderly Jewish lady, wife of the distinguished Dr. Albert Meyer,” to be such a “militant feminist, a fine writer and an outspoken Negrophile.”
Meyer took happily to being a “landmark” and attempted to pay homage to her predecessors such as Lillian Wood. She encouraged Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler to recognize “some white educator of colored people.” Butler declined.
The play’s reception by blacks became her special source of pleasure, compensating for the decadelong effort she had put into what had turned out to be a ten-day run. “When persons didn’t know who I was,” she declared proudly, “they always assumed it was written by a Negro. . . . One and all the Negroes have thought well of it.” “It is the biggest piece of work I have ever done,” she stated. She took increasing comfort in Josephine Cogdell Schuyler’s idea that Black Souls had succeeded by failing and had been forced to close only because its message had been too radical for other whites to tolerate. As Nancy Cunard would also do in the years following the publication of Negro: An Anthology, Meyer reread her “wonderful letters of appreciation” over and over to relieve (and perhaps relive) her anger.
Although she had questioned the interracial love affair, Hurston remained a staunch supporter of Black Souls. When the play closed early, she argued that “the Negroes should raise the money for its subscription.” Meyer never forgot that. Decades later, she was still telling people that “Zora Hurston said I really penetrated to the real soul of black folks.”
Black Souls set itself apart by depicting female desire at all, let alone white female desire for a black man, and also by eschewing dialect, concentrating on the middle class, and using none of the folk elements—singing, dancing, storytelling, a
nd sermonizing—that were selling so well in white authors’ Broadway revues about black life. Even Zora Neale Hurston had included those elements in The Great Day, which had opened just two months before Black Souls.
By the time she began writing Black Souls, Meyer was a mature playwright with many Broadway productions to her credit (The Advertising of Kate was first produced in 1911). In addition to her longtime literary agent, Margaret Christie, she was represented by both Samuel French and Elisabeth Marbury, the two most important theatrical agents of her day. She might not have come to Harlem with the resources of a Van Vechten, a Spingarn, or a Knopf, but her professional theater background was cultural capital. She resolved to create something other than the derisive, romantic, predictable reviews of dancers, cakewalkers, “Mammies, faithful servants,” and comics then popular onstage. She did not want to produce another “happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being.”
Like most white playwrights, she had begun with no background in African-American culture. But like Nancy Cunard, Charlotte Osgood Mason, Lillian Wood, Mary White Ovington, and Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, she went about her self-education in blackness with an autodidact’s dedication, reading everything she could get her hands on. “I studied and read for years to write it.” As part of her self-education she boarded a train to learn about southern conditions firsthand, reversing the direction of the many thousands who were making the “Great Migration” North. Her trip included a stop in Atlanta, where she met with black Morehouse College’s first black president, John Hope, and his wife, Lugenia. They made a lasting impression on her. Hope was the biracial son of a white Scottish father and a free black mother who had been forbidden marriage under Georgia’s antimiscegenation statutes. He leaned toward Du Bois’s militant views of black education in the debates that divided followers of Du Bois from followers of the vocationally oriented Booker T. Washington over the controversial “Hampton model.” His relations with white liberals were hence often strained. But he and Meyer got on well. “Your visit with my wife and me is quite pleasantly remembered by both of us,” he wrote her. “Your good cheer, your insight into both races, and your great sympathy with the best that is in colored people.” Inspired by her visit, Meyer “returned from Atlanta Ga. more than ever feeling that Black Souls is worthwhile.” Hope was her model for Andrew, the college president in the play. She also took her success in breaking through Hope’s usual reserve with whites as a model for gaining acceptance in Harlem.
