Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  By 1920, competition from other Native Americanists and primitivists was fierce. Mason and Curtis withdrew. Curtis gravitated away from Native Americans altogether and developed an interest in African-American and African music. She completed two volumes of black ethnomusicology, Negro Folk-Songs and Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent, based on work at Hampton Institute, one of the few black schools to also train Native Americans.

  In moving toward Hampton and studying blacks, Curtis was not distancing herself from her patron, whose long-standing interest in Africa deepened at that time as well. But in deciding, very late in her life (Natalie was then over forty) to pursue the “Great Happiness” of romantic love, she did effect a decisive break. In New Mexico in 1915, she had met the modernist painter Paul Burlin, who had begun incorporating native designs into his art. Burlin was Jewish, ten years Natalie’s junior, and, as she readily admitted, decidedly “not in the Social Register.” They married in Santa Fe on July 25, 1917. Mason was an anti-Semite, and Natalie’s marriage to a Jew must have stung. “Don’t, in your interest in Paul’s work, forget your own,” she wrote plaintively, as her own influence over Natalie waned.

  Natalie intended to persuade her new husband to “put the American Negro into American art.” They purchased a small house in Santa Fe and began to settle in. Paul now took Mason’s place as Natalie’s companion on her visits to native reservations. But increasingly, like many other modernists, they felt the pressure to expatriate to Europe. In May 1921, they sailed to England; they then went on to Paris, where Natalie composed and Paul painted. On October 23, in Paris, however, Natalie was struck by a car and killed.

  Mason was devastated. Her interest in collecting African art became obsessive, fueled by the determination she had shared with Natalie to explore the roots of American folk culture and help transport new spiritual resources to America. Enshrining the memory of her time with Curtis as a model of ideal collaboration, she turned The Indians’ Book into “a kind of bible, preaching the superiority of primitive spirituality.” The book became her solace, and she later presented a copy of it to each of her Harlem protégés, enjoining the recipients to consecrate it as a sacred text. In the wake of Curtis’s death, Mason froze her ideas about primitive culture, fixing them exactly where they’d been during her Southwest travels. While the rest of the world put primitivism under an increasingly intense microscope, Mason paid homage to her dead husband and Natalie Curtis by refusing to change. Rather than lose Natalie to Paul Burlin, Mason immortalized her as an icon. Neither Natalie Curtis nor Dr. Mason could now disappoint her.

  “Africa’s Flaming Pathway”

  According to most sources, Mason became interested in the Harlem Renaissance as a consequence of wandering into Alain Locke’s lecture on African art in early February 1927. By then, however, she was already a serious collector of African art. She owned fetish totem masks from the Ivory Coast and a Bundu secret society mask and headdress from Africa’s west coast, as well as weapons, cups, and ivory masks. An African spear and other pieces were on display in her Park Avenue drawing room. Her oversize bank safe-deposit box held other excellent examples of African art. “I want,” she wrote in 1927, “to see the same thing done by the Negroes as I did with the Indians.” As she saw it, Negroes with true “vision” (hers) now had the “privilege . . . to build a bridge of light . . . between two continents—between the past and the future—building a vital hope.” For that she needed a contact and partner from inside the Harlem Renaissance. She picked Alain Locke. Probably no one but Charlotte Mason, with her complete inability to see herself through others’ eyes, would have had the nerve to choose, as her second, none other than the “father” of the cultural movement she sought to influence. With Locke as her foot soldier, “the presentation of African Art,” she felt, could be “so positive that never again do certain horrors vibrate in Harlem.”

  Locke’s lecture, on February 6, part of the opening celebrations for the African Art Exhibit at the New Art Circle gallery, took place during a time of especially heated debates in Harlem over African art. Although Hughes had gone to Africa in 1923, most Harlem Renaissance leaders had not been there. But Locke had. His answer to Cullen’s question—“What is Africa to me?”—was clear: Africa was a vital resource, possibly the best resource, black Americans had available in their struggle to be recognized. “Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past,” he argued. Locke’s role was crucial in influencing the direction others in Harlem would take.

  In The New Negro, Locke published photographs of African masks and sculptures from the Barnes Collection, as well as pieces from the Tervuren, Berlin Ethnological, and Frankfurt museums. The New Negro included Aaron Douglas’s reverential painting The Spirit of Africa, as well as bibliophile Arthur A. Schomburg’s essay insisting that “the American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future,” Cullen’s “Heritage,” and collector Barnes’s “Negro Art and America,” which claimed that black art was “great art” because of its proximity to Africa and its “primitive nature.” Locke’s own essay on African art in The New Negro, “The Legacy of Ancestral Arts,” advocated a broad view of “the resources of racial art,” richly detailed with images of African masks. In his declaration that “we must believe that there still slumbers in the blood something,” Mason thought she heard echoes of her own beliefs.

  The New Art Circle’s show followed a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1923. The centerpiece of that show was the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection, which Locke had assessed the previous year in Europe. The Blondiau Collection was assembled by a wealthy Belgian and purchased by a committee of wealthy New Yorkers, including Mason. It totaled more than four hundred high-quality pieces from the Belgian Congo and elsewhere. Mason, who was nearly deaf by then, usually avoided what she considered the “shame” of being unable to hear in public. But she went to the New Art Circle exhibition at least four times, taking Cornelia Chapin with her once and Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle twice. (After one visit, she purchased a “little man figure” for Katherine’s sons, Edmund Randolph and Garrison Chapin.)

  Fascination with Africa had been the backbone of modernist innovation in art and literature for years. African imagery was highly visible in the work of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Constantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Vachel Lindsay, Joseph Conrad, and many others who saw in it a “natural, primitive, life-affirming” presence. When black artists tried to embrace the tradition as a resource, they encountered a territory on which the white modernists had already planted their flags. As one of the chief architects of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke, whose conviction was that “African art held a key to Afro-American artistic expression,” was invaluable to Mason. She believed she’d found a precious foot soldier. For his part, Locke saw in her a wealthy and powerful partner. Mason had determination and deep pockets, as well.

  Patronage remains one of the most vexed issues in the history of the Harlem Renaissance. Some contend that it was a sincere attempt at interracial collaboration. Others believe that white patronage curtailed and ultimately destroyed black creative expression. Many place it somewhere in the middle, as a kind of necessary evil, support that the movement could not have done without but that it accepted at great cost. What few of those judgments ask, however, is how the relationships felt at the time. Through stories such as Mason’s we can see that for all the difficulties such relationships entailed, a giddy delight—not unlike falling in love—was a frequent feature of their beginning stages. Patrons and protégés both relished feeling recognized across race lines. In a world that cautioned against intimate interracial relations, interracial pioneers—patrons and protégés included—were proud of their own bravery and felt exhilarated by it.

  Those feelings blossomed when Alain Locke and Charlotte Mason were introduced at the African Art Exhibit on February 6, 1927. They had, Mason noted in her journals, a
n instantaneous “tremendous rapport.” Within days, Locke was at Mason’s Park Avenue home, where he was met with “open arms and a brush of the spirit” and presented with a $500 check to begin work toward an African art museum in Harlem. That project was the beginning of “a relationship in which all their private thoughts and ideas were constantly and freely shared,” a relationship that deepened and endured—against all odds—“for almost two decades.” From that day forward, whether together or separate they would both celebrate February 6, the anniversary of their meeting, as a momentous personal holiday.

  Mason served as vice chair of the planning committee they formed for their new Harlem Museum of African Art, and Locke served as secretary. Both owned important pieces of African art, some of which they lent to the traveling collection. After the New Art Circle show, the collection was temporarily housed at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, certainly with the assistance and support of librarian Ernestine Rose, before traveling to a number of locations, including Chicago, Buffalo, and Rochester, with a catalog written by Locke. Meanwhile, Locke and Mason conferred with others about how to realize their dream of a permanent museum of African art in Harlem.

  Mason, like both Josephine Cogdell Schuyler and Nancy Cunard, had been dreaming of Africa since she was a young child. “I used to dream as a child that I would go to Africa and bring back the things in the upstairs of Slave Ships.” Now she saw the possibility of realizing “the dreams I had 47 years before in regard to the creative impulse throbbing in the African race.” She was “happy in her heart,” she told Locke, when she went to the Harlem library and saw the African pieces on exhibit there, where “the little Negro children with wide eyes could look at their ancestral monuments and absorb without any fear from the white people.” She was ready to fund more such exhibits and more African travel for Locke. But she worried about how to ensure that the African art they’d brought over would be safe. Were the cases locked? Was the exhibit safe from fire? What if “undeveloped Negroes” went “wild” and destroyed the art?

  In their plan for a Harlem museum of African art, Mason believed, she’d found her solution to “weakening white civilization . . . whose spiritual life is choked by the love of material possessions and material power.” The quality of life that “we have trampled . . . to dust” could be restored by African Americans if they would avoid becoming “white Negroes” and look instead to Africa, as their “flaming pathway” back to the “Truth.” Mason believed that her Harlem mission was threatened by the shallow pleasure seeking that brought New York tourists north on Saturday nights. Whites such as Carl Van Vechten “horrified” her. She had only “perfect contempt” for them and considered them enemies. With Locke’s assistance, she’d take control of how outsiders saw American blackness.

  She’d chosen a complex person to be her champion and lieutenant. Born in 1886, and carefully drilled in old-school manners and propriety, Locke was considerably better-educated than Mason and the first black recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship. He studied in England and Berlin and traveled widely in Europe and Africa but also suffered discrimination in Cambridge, which refused to accept his thesis. He began teaching at Howard University—the Harvard of black America—in 1912, also traveling to Harvard for a PhD in philosophy, writing a dissertation on the problem of categories in human thinking, a cornerstone of cultural pluralism. Locke was often at odds with the Howard administration. He struggled for years, in vain, to teach courses on race there. In spite of those difficulties, he chaired the Department of Philosophy from 1918 to 1953, while also ushering in the Harlem Renaissance. A closeted homosexual, Locke was formal and reserved. Mason’s nearly instant intimacy with him was unusual, and many have explained it by the recent loss of his mother, Mary, with whom Locke had been especially close.

  Mason and Locke met often in the winter of 1927, conferring about the museum, having tea, attending concerts, seeing the exhibit together again, and dining at Mason’s home. Almost immediately, Mason began to offer Locke detailed advice about public speaking (which she had never done), heart exercises (Locke suffered from a weak heart due to rheumatic fever in childhood), handling university responsibilities (which she had never assumed), medicine (she sent him red marrowbone and bran bread, among other things), where and when to travel, eating and elimination, breathing exercises, and more. Locke was now her “precious Brown Boy.” “You know I believe deeply,” she wrote to him, “that you are the only one on the horizon now, who can be trusted to accomplish for his people.” He, in turn, told her of his ambitions and difficulties; introduced her to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others; and depended on her almost exclusively “for a large measure of emotional comfort.” Together they contrived to attack those blacks he considered “traitors” to their cause of revivifying interest in Africa. In spite of myriad connections to every important black intellectual in America, including Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter White, and others, it was to the white-haired white widow that Locke turned for advice on how to best occupy his position as the “godfather” of the New Negro movement. She helped him strategize how to “slough off this weight of white culture” and realize his full “Brown potential.” It was Mason, above all others, who he believed recognized and sympathized with him, understood his daily trials, and shared his grander visions. He trusted her. “I believe we can transfigure all things Alain,” she wrote to him. “A Primitive light moves before you my Boy,” she added approvingly.

  As maternal as Mason could be with Locke, however, she could also be bitingly critical. Only months into their relationship, Mason was upbraiding him regularly for excess “egotism” and susceptibility to “compliments” from others. She took him to task for failing to give her “crucial” information she needed to nourish him “mentally spiritually physically” (a detailed report of his days) and for sometimes saying the wrong thing. One letter expressing concern for her health got him into particularly hot water. Mason was then seventy-three years old and suffering from an array of ailments. “I do pray that you are already strong in your mind again,” Locke had written. “This is unbelievable that you could be so plain stupid,” she shot back. “Nothing the matter with my mind only that psychically I have to jump boulders. . . . Of course physically I have hardly any life. It’s only [because of] the strength of my flaming spirit and my mind that I can pursue life at all.” Many found it odd that a “sophisticated intellectual like Alain Locke could become deferential in her presence.” But Locke was more than deferential. Though generally imperious and bossy, he was simultaneously reverent and cowed with Mason. And he remained so for decades.

  Mason and Locke maintained their unlikely intimacy by glossing over their differences. They focused on their shared passion for Africa. And for each other. But they never saw eye to eye on race. Mason believed that races were fundamentally distinct and the “primitive” ones artistically and spiritually superior. Locke, on the other hand, like the Schuylers, believed that race was an “ethnic fiction” to be contested rather than celebrated. He saw “little evidence of any direct connection of the American Negro with his ancestral arts.” So any bridge he could build between Africa and America could only have fallen terribly short of Mason’s “vision.” Her thoroughgoing antipathy toward white Western civilization demanded a firm ideological essentialism. If blacks were no different from whites, how could they effect the cure she intended to bring about?

  At the time she met Locke, Mason was already feeling pressed for time and distressed about anyone who would not follow her direction. “They are absolutely no use, don’t count. Put them in a hole & let them die,” she wrote to Locke of those who disappointed her.

  Mason’s imperiousness was married to a fierce and often compelling curiosity. She was deeply interested in other people, and once she took them into her inner circle, she captivated them by never forgetting the minutiae of their daily lives and by interesting herself fully in every detail of their struggles
. That interest, combined with her lack of self-doubt, contributed to the power she was able to wield over others. It certainly contributed to Locke’s admiration for her and to the bond he felt. Deep pockets were nowhere near as enchanting as these deeper emotional ties.

  “Godmother” and “Psychologist”

  Alain Locke brought Mason his ambitions and anxieties, plans and ideas, finances and department hassles, health records and test results. He also managed to introduce Mason to almost everyone who mattered in Harlem: Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, composer Hall Johnson, Arthur Fauset, Claude McKay, and Miguel Covarrubias, among others. Some Harlem artists, such as Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Jean Toomer, and Countée Cullen, resisted Mason’s overtures—Louise Thompson declared her monstrous—but in a matter of months, Locke helped put Mason in the middle of Harlem’s key aesthetic and political debates. She could attend major cultural events—such as Wallace Thurman’s play Harlem—on Hughes’s arm, pass judgment on events with Locke, and visit storefront churches with Hurston. Happily ensconced in the comfort of her Park Avenue home, she was surrounded by the most luminous minds of the most interesting cultural movement of her day.

  Estimates of the amount of money Mason gave to the Harlem Renaissance vary widely, from a few hundred thousand dollars to well over a million dollars in today’s currency. But even the most modest estimates make her, by a very competitive margin, the largest white supporter of the movement, rivaled only possibly by Amy Spingarn, who quietly funded both the Crisis literary awards and many individual writers. The $150 to $200 a month that Mason regularly gave her protégés didn’t include her expensive gifts of clothing, luggage, writing supplies, and paid secretarial services; in all, her stipends were equivalent to a Guggenheim or MacArthur fellowship today and every bit as coveted. Mason was not going to repeat the errors she’d made with Natalie Curtis, however. As close as she was to Locke, whom she could at least trust not to marry, she engaged multiple other protégés as well, telling each that he or she was her most special “godchild.”