Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  In that context, Van Vechten’s “Negrophilia” was a form of social currency. It was a time when Life could portray a caricature of a dancing African as wallpaper for the modern flapper. Many of New York’s theaters and restaurants still segregated blacks; some denied them admission outright. Interracial socializing was still considered scandalous. Van Vechten’s “passion for blackness” and his many interracial friendships were important in elbowing aside certain racial givens, especially the idea that blackness, as Patricia Williams put it, is “not worth knowing.” By making white interest in blackness more familiar, Van Vechten paved the way for other like-minded whites.

  But his flamboyance and love of attention also threatened to set the terms for such interest. Van Vechten loved the limelight. He reveled in the scandal his Nigger Heaven produced. “Every porter in the country seems to know the author of Nigger Heaven,” he remarked delightedly; “Harlem . . . is seething in controversy.” He thrilled to being so personally identified with the Caucasian “storm” that descended on Harlem that a popular song by the author of “Ain’t Misbehavin,’” called “Go Harlem,” encouraged its listeners, “Like Van Vechten,” to “go inspectin.’” Refusal to compromise was both his strength and his weakness. Although blacks were anxious not to be seen as entertainers, for example, he pressed his black friends to perform at his interracial parties by singing, dancing, or reading aloud from their manuscripts and drafts. Most felt it necessary to oblige. Van Vechten did not handle disagreement well. In 1929, when Essie Robeson refused to take his advice to “do some more work” on her biography of her husband, Paul, Van Vechten was so upset that he became physically ill. “This puts me in a frightful anger,” he noted in his daybook; it gave him a “sudden sore throat” and forced him to take to his bed.

  The situation was ripe for a white patron of a different temperament. And in 1927, following a lecture by Locke on African art, Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy widow with a long-standing interest in blacks and Native Americans, found her opportunity. Subdued where Carl Van Vechten was excessive, calm where he was overexcitable, private where he was attention-grabbing, Charlotte Mason struck many of her new protégés as an antidote. She seemed to be just the “Godmother” she asked to be called.

  Her gracious twelve-room home at 399 Park Avenue could not have been more different from the chaos of the Van Vechtens’ apartment. Park Avenue, by the time Mason took up residence there, had supplanted Fifth Avenue as “America’s street of dreams” and “the end of the American ladder of success.” Writer Edna Ferber described it as a haven of “sedate gentility where . . . space . . . silence . . . [and a] sense of peace and privacy” prevailed. Mason’s address, just north of Grand Central Terminal between 53rd and 54th streets, was a particularly good one, since her building (now replaced by the Citigroup towers) was on one of the earliest-developed sections of the avenue. Her apartment would have also been one of the largest on the street, topped only by some of the eighteen-room penthouses just then coming into fashion (rooftops previously having been the preserve of staff and laundresses). Apartments such as Mason’s, with high ceilings, large rooms, fireplaces, wood paneling, staff quarters, and bedroom suites with private baths, would have rented for $1,500 a month prior to the stock market crash, roughly $20,000 a month in today’s currency, making them inaccessible to any but Manhattan’s storied 1 percent.

  Her drawing room, a well-designed mix of European antiques and first-rate African art, was a refuge of hushed tones, Irish servants, and actual afternoon tea in place of cocktails. Finger sandwiches, lemonade, and cookies were served on bone china and fine crystal. On delicately turned side tables current issues of Opportunity, The Crisis, and Survey Graphic’s special issue on “The New Negro,” edited by Locke, were elegantly fanned. Mason’s debilitating arthritis meant that others fluttered about her, seeing to her every need. It made her seem downright girlish. She sat in her damask armchair, wrapped in a shawl, and invited her new protégés to share their dreams. White people in the 1920s rarely asked black people what they thought, much less what they dreamed. But she offered unstinting encouragement, pronouncing everything she heard brilliant and original.

  Mason was not socially positioned to broker the sorts of deals that Carl Van Vechten could arrange; the old New York society a doctor’s wife such as herself or Meyer could command was a very different world from his. What she had, however, was a great deal of wealth and no one on whom she wanted to lavish it. She also had a fiercely competitive spirit and was determined not to be outdone by someone like Van Vechten. She dispensed her money with unprecedented liberality, writing large monthly checks to each of her protégés and also encouraging them to round up others she could help. In return for that largesse, she requested only intimacy and the shared emotional bond that comes from working together. It seemed little enough to ask, and in the main, Harlemites gave it eagerly. To Locke she was an instant mother figure, “one of the two dearest and best creative forces in my life.” Zora Neale Hurston called her “the true conceptual mother.” “It was all very wonderful,” Langston Hughes said. “I loved her.” Indeed, the whole arrangement seemed too good to be true.

  It was. In the few photographs of her that survive, Charlotte Mason looks like a kindly grandmother or a sister to Lillian E. Wood, with a round face and features, a white bun, pearls, and a thick shawl. She appears kind and gentle, as she seemed at first to all of her protégés. Such pictures, however, do not tell the whole story. They do not capture Mason’s unwavering stare, the press of her thin lips, the intensity of her sharp blue eyes, or the pull of her steely will. Over time, the intense intimacy she demanded became more and more disturbing. Her relationships with her protégés became so peculiar that historians of the era have thrown up their hands. They regard Charlotte Mason as “a shadowy figure,” . . . “shrouded in mysteries”; a delusional, suffocating dowager; and a “regal husk” who turned her protégés into “courtiers” in “bondage” to her and her cash. “The purse strings she controlled were like tentacles,” one wrote. There is no accounting, they claim, for why so many Harlemites—almost every major figure of the Renaissance, in fact—tolerated her interference. “So little is known today about Mrs. R. Osgood Mason . . . that she almost seems a . . . fiction.”

  Charlotte Osgood Mason looking fierce.

  Much fiction has been created about Mason. But she was, like so many of the white women of Harlem, hiding in plain sight. Neither fictional nor a mystery, she made sense within the confines of her era’s race and gender ideologies, and her attempts at interracial collaboration also reveal a great deal about how people of different races and backgrounds, seeking to come together in the 1920s and 1930s, actually experienced those efforts. Born during slavery, reared in the Civil War, and raised to assume a leisured life as a doctor’s wife, Charlotte Mason is less an impossible puzzle than she is a key to understanding the origins of some of our own stubborn ideas of difference and race.

  A New Jersey Girlhood, a Spiritualist Husband, and a Mission

  Charlotte Osgood Mason, originally named Charlotte Louise Van der Veer Quick, was born on May 18, 1854, the same year that Josephine Cogdell Schuyler’s mother, Lucy, was born and the year the poem “The Angel in the House” prescribed woman’s role as domesticity alone. Her parents, Peter and Phoebe Quick, were farmers in Franklin Township, New Jersey. There was railroad and industrial wealth in the family, on the side of her relatives the Van der Veers, that would find its way to Charlotte decades later. In her childhood, none of it was in her parents’ hands, however. Her father’s side of the family could be traced back to Dutch settlers and farmers arriving in New York as early as 1640. Her mother’s side of the family revealed a direct line to the first white child born on colonial American soil. But pedigree did not always translate into assets. As was common, the Quicks had divided up their estate among their surviving sons, and Peter Quick had inherited one-seventh of his father’s large farm in Somerset County, originally worked by
as many as ten slaves. Charlotte was fascinated by her early family history. Her great-great-grandfather had owned dozens of slaves and freed them before the American Revolution in 1775; as an adult she shared that fact frequently.

  Known as “Lottie” as a child, Charlotte was born under what Julia Ward Howe called the “old doctrine that women should be worked for, and should not work, that their influence should be felt, but not recognized, that they should hear and see, but neither appear nor speak.” Her upbringing reveals little about the sources of her later belief that she should influence world events. Describing the society of Charlotte’s childhood, Annie Nathan Meyer wrote that woman’s work outside marriage was still subject to the “absolute scorn” of opponents. “More dangerous,” she added, “because instead of employing the weapons of disdain, they use those of homage; instead of goading with scorn, they disarm with the incense of a false and hollow sentimentality.”

  Within a few years of Charlotte’s birth, her mother died, and Charlotte became the only girl in a hardworking household of men. She had an older brother, Peter; and a younger brother, John. Before long, her father remarried; his new wife was named Catherine Jane Pumyea, and they had two children, Charles and Aletta. Aletta died in childhood, leaving Charlotte once again the only girl in the family. It was not uncommon in those postbellum times for some children to be raised by relatives who were better off financially. Charlotte’s half brother Charles was sent to live with his aunt and uncle on his mother’s side; he was listed as their servant in the 1880 census. Motherless girls were often raised by relatives. In spite of having a stepmother, young Charlotte was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, Joanna Van der Veer, and her aunt Amelia in Princeton, then a town of roughly six hundred families. She may have felt banished or abandoned. But had she stayed on the farm, her world would have been far more circumscribed.

  Lottie turned eleven in 1865, the year of Lincoln’s assassination. She spent the last years of the Civil War, an especially tense time in Princeton, with her grandmother and aunt. They lived in a neighborhood dominated by ministers, professors, and students and the various servants—mostly Irish and a few African Americans—who attended them, as well as a few cobblers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and a lawyer. The vast majority of young Charlotte’s neighbors were students at the College of New Jersey (renamed Princeton University at the end of the century). During Charlotte’s girlhood, fully half of those students were southern, sent north to acquire the genteel education requisite for legislators and plantation owners. The college worked hard to build up a reputation as “a suitable school for the Southern gentry who were loath to expose their sons to the abolitionism and radicalism at Harvard or Yale.” It succeeded in becoming the most southern of all the northeastern schools.

  At her grandmother and aunt’s home, the impressionable young Charlotte experienced the pleasures of being an only child in an all-female household (except when her younger brother John came to stay). She also experienced the suffocating constraints of gender. Her young male neighbors, not many years older than she was, were being trained as national leaders, spokesmen for their communities, models, and exemplars. It would have been impossible for her not to compare her own intelligence—which was formidable even in her adolescence—with theirs and not to notice how much narrower her options were.

  Race was a central social issue in the Princeton of Charlotte’s childhood. The town had a free black community with proud traditions. The college had been especially affected by the Civil War. Princeton’s southern students vanished almost entirely once the war began, returning home to either fight for the Confederacy or care for family plantations. “Indeed, as many Princetonians died fighting for the South and for slavery as for the Union during the Civil War.” That cast an especially mournful—and ambivalent—pall over the town. Charlotte briefly went to secondary school in Princeton. But a young girl’s education did not typically include much discussion of current political events, let alone the complexities of race and gender. She was left mostly on her own to ponder both the community’s debates and the possibilities for her own future.

  The Van der Veers were neither activists nor recluses. Charlotte’s father’s relatives recruited volunteers for the Union Army. And during the Civil War, many Princeton women gave their time to aid societies: making uniforms, assembling care packages, raising funds for the Union Army through recitals and lectures, and working as army hospital volunteers. Charlotte’s mother, Phoebe, as well as her grandmothers Johanna Garretson (on her mother’s side) and Lucretia Voorhees (on her father’s side), may have been involved in such activities. In Princeton, during the war, debates over slavery and race were unavoidable. But Charlotte’s family took no public stands on those issues and left no records of their views.

  As an adult, Mason would replicate the female-centered household of her grandmother by informally adopting young women she could mentor: ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis, followed by the artistically inclined Chapin sisters, Cornelia and Katherine. Rather than enter the public sphere directly, she entered through protégés she expected to act as her eyes, ears, and hands. And she thought of her role in a uniquely female way, calling herself “Godmother” and insisting that anyone she aided do likewise. Members of the Chapin family remark that the nickname “Godmother” was used without irony or humor. Mason evidently did not joke about her “mission” or her efforts to make a place for herself in the world. The Chapins also point to a story that influenced her ideas about how women could make a difference.

  There was, from the time of Charlotte’s birth, a much-discussed Princeton legend about a slave, James C. Johnson, and his white benefactress, Theodoric Provost. Johnson escaped from slavery in 1843. Landing in Princeton, he started selling candy and fruit out of a pushcart to Princeton University students, who developed a great affection for him. One day, at the height of tense student body divisions over the war, a southern student recognized Johnson as a former slave, informed his former owner, and effected the escaped slave’s arrest. Johnson’s trial attracted enormous crowds. His popularity, the black community’s outrage, and the determination of both factions to take advantage of an opportunity for opposing points about states’ rights, made a terrible riot seem imminent. Violence—and the ignominy of shameful national attention—was averted only when Provost stepped forward and paid the price needed to free Johnson out of her own pocket money. Johnson paid Provost back in less than five years. That was the kind of single-handed, heroic impact for which Mason strove. To have such an impact, however, she would need cause, sphere, and means.

  According to one family member, Charlotte Quick met her future husband, Dr. Rufus Osgood Mason, twenty-four years her senior and already widowed, when her parents called him to Princeton to help her break a morphine addiction that had left her bedridden. Such addictions were fairly common during a time when morphine and opium, in the form of laudanum, were widely used to treat everything from diarrhea to coughs, sleeplessness, and rheumatism. Dr. Mason had a New York City practice. He specialized in “supernormal” psychological phenomena such as telepathy, multiple personality, clairvoyance, and automatism, and he used hypnosis to cure an array of ailments, including drug and alcohol addiction. In New York, he was the darling of wealthy city dwellers anxious to host séances and other means of communicating with departed loved ones, many of whom were Civil War dead. Besides a shared New Jersey birthplace, Dr. Mason and Charlotte Quick had little in common. Charlotte was thirty-two, quite old then for a bride, and Mason was fifty-six, a Dartmouth graduate, Civil War veteran, and fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. He was firmly established in his profession and, by the standards of the day, already an old man. But his New York circles were more interesting than anything Princeton had to offer, including strong ties to the New York Philharmonic through his former father-in-law, and the growing field of psychical research, in which he was fast becoming a celebrity. Many of the patients for whom he acted as physician and psychic, as we
ll as occasional séance host, were New York’s wealthiest and most influential citizens. Charlotte felt an immediate affinity for the world of paranormal ideas. From Dr. Mason she learned that she was a “born sensitive” to whom grand “visions” came easily and who could discern the meanings of the “divine energy permeating the universe . . . a special class of persons.” She had long believed that she was one of the elect, put on the earth to lead, save, and get things done. Most of the people she met struck her as dull-witted, ineffective, disorganized, and lacking in determination. She expected little of them. But she was always on the lookout for other sensitives, born leaders, and role models, even before Dr. Mason gave her words for them and anointed them both as exemplars.

  For his part, Rufus Osgood Mason had been saddled, after the recent death of his wife, with a demanding practice and a young daughter in need of a mother. Charlotte was clever, maybe even brilliant. She was also willful and determined, as well as attractive, well off, and adoring. They married in New York City on April 27, 1886.

  Dr. Mason could now devote more time to his specialty of mind over matter: trances, hypnosis, divination, telepathy, clairvoyance, thought transference, somnambulism, automatic writing and drawing, and multiple personality. Hidden in each individual was a “subliminal self,” he believed. Hypnosis could release that self to cure myriad ailments. As a highly regarded physician, Mason added the weight of his medical training to the popular but not always highly respected field of paranormal investigation, lending it credibility while also increasing his own fame. Among the cases he claimed to have cured by hypnosis were a forty-one-year-old female melancholic, an eighteen-year-old woman debilitated by her fear of thunder and lightning, a German woman in her twenties plagued by “obstinate constipation,” a forty-two-year-old woman “afflicted with inordinate and excessive blushing,” a new mother whose breast milk would not come in, a bad case of measles, an infected hand wound, an alcoholic actor, and a practicing homosexual. An important part of his hypnosis therapy involved release from the “ego.” If the “ego,” which blocked the “divine within himself” of every human mind, could be freed of its “intense self-consciousness and self-considering carefulness,” humans could return to their purer selves. The parapsychologist-physician’s ability to effect that release, Mason believed, was “the most important work now being done in the world—by far the most important.” Mason considered himself a “pioneer.” In a series of newspaper stories, he described parapsychology as the nation’s greatest new frontier and researchers such as himself as “scouts” and “explorers,” comparable to Columbus, Darwin, and Shackleton in revealing the “laws of nature.”