Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  With enough wealth to control those around her and an alarming intolerance for disagreement, Mason could usually limit challenges to her fixed ideas. But her protégés were very much in the world. Because they were active participants in Harlem’s endless debates about identity, their ideas about race underwent constant growth and development. Hers, on the other hand, were preserved in amber.

  Locke, moreover, was a cautious man, deliberative and guarded. Mason led with her heart and her instincts, never doubting a “vision” once she had one. Locke led with his intellect, carefully weighing all information before coming to decisions. She found him balanced to the point of irritation. His lack of passion felt to her like a lack of commitment. She wanted protégés who would be swept up in her own sense of urgency. Locke was constitutionally incapable of grand gestures, which, for Mason, were all that mattered. “Truth,” for her, was necessarily cataclysmic.

  The Depression compounded her difficulties by reducing her resources. By her own account, she lost “half my capital to the Depression.” She was hoping “to succeed in my ideal in this matter depressed times or no!” but the deck was looking increasingly stacked against her. She could no longer invest in those who could not—or would not—produce according to her lights. “Alain you know perfectly well that all I want is to have helped to get these fundamental things for the Negro,” she wrote. But: “You don’t any of you stick to the truth so everything goes to pieces.”

  She feared that she would not live long enough to convince her protégés of the “flaming pathway” she needed them to build. “The discouragement of all the Negroes . . . weighs heavily on my heart,” she wrote to Locke in the summer of 1930. “What is the use of building all these radiant possibilities for a group that seems to have no recognition either of these possibilities or the sum of their effect on the present need and condition of the world! The flaming call, Alain, to great leadership is sounding, sounding everywhere.”

  Mason kept Locke on as her chief confidant, her adviser, and her go-between to all her other protégés. But now she promoted Hughes to the “Precious Brown Boy” status that had been Locke’s. She put Hughes on a generous monthly stipend and sent him luxurious gifts to free his creativity and support his “great adventures.” He sent her gifts of corn and evergreen boughs, long detailed letters, and drafts of his poems and novels, in which Mason discerned the indelible mark of the “Big Indian,” a clear sign of success.

  Many of Hughes’s “adventures” involved Hurston. She was collaborating with Annie Nathan Meyer and Fannie Hurst, but Hughes was her kindred soul. “Langston, Langston, this is going to be big,” she wrote of their collaborations. They shared confidences, money, folklore, publishing plans, travel expenses, and plans for the “real Negro art theater” that they hoped to realize with Mason’s help. Mason was not comfortable with their plans or their exclusion of Locke. Hughes and Hurston wanted to replace the minstrel tradition and Broadway’s commercial black musicals with their own folk forms, drawn from “the Negro Farthest Down.” But Locke, “born in Philadelphia, educated at Harvard and Oxford . . . had never known the common run of Negroes,” Hurston argued. His rarefied sensibilities were not to be trusted. Heady with success, Hughes and Hurston thought they could turn Mason’s triangles to their own advantage.

  Their strategy backfired. Throughout the Christmas holidays of 1929, there were dramatic fights and even more dramatic reconciliations. “I love you,” Hughes wrote. “I need you very much. I cannot bear to hurt you. . . . You have made me dream greater dreams than I have ever dreamed before. . . . I cannot stand to disappoint you.” Mason generally gloried in hyperbolic paeans to her beneficence. In the past, such apologies had succeeded. But now Hughes made a publishing decision that undid all his protestations of devotion.

  In July 1930, he published “Afro-American Fragment,” one of the poems for which he is now best known. Its subject is estrangement from even an imagined Africa. Even he could probably not have calculated the profound effect it would have on Mason.

  So long,

  So far away

  Is Africa.

  Not even memories alive

  Save those that history books create,

  Save those that songs

  Beat back into the blood—

  Beat out of the blood with words sad-sung

  In strange un-Negro tongue–

  So long,

  So far away

  Is Africa.

  The speaker both pines for and distances himself from an imaginary Africa—in the name of a racial alternative even less defined. It is a poem even more ambivalent about race, Africa, and the value of essences than Cullen’s “Heritage.” Mason did not believe in such ambivalence. Nor could she abide open questions about Africa’s value. The last thing she wanted to see was any of her godchildren wavering on the value—for them—of Africa.

  The poem could hardly have come at a worse time. Mason was still supporting Hughes and had installed him and Hurston in Westfield, New Jersey, to work uninterrupted on their collaborative folk play, now called Mule Bone. She was disappointed in Locke and still spending a lot of money on a museum project in which she now had no faith. There were conflicts over accounts all summer. By the end of 1930, Mason was still sending checks, and Hughes—her “Alamari”—was still sending her “psychic expression[s]” of his “inner vision.” But Mason was not happy.

  Then Hughes broke another “law.” In February 1931, Mason was chastising him for having taken a “sorrowful misguided way” and “wander[ing] in a miasma of untruth.” By March, she had concluded that “the call of the African drum is stilled.” She was done with him.

  Hughes never understood in what way he had transgressed, but the breach left him feeling “violently and physically ill . . . as if I was going to die.” His biographers disagree on what occurred. Arnold Rampersad believes that the problem was “a result of Godmother’s displeasure over his unwillingness to return to work” after completing Not Without Laughter. There is no evidence, however, that she had such concerns; often, in fact, she advised her protégés to rest and rejuvenate. Faith Berry claims that “the facts . . . reveal that it was not what he did not write that displeased her, but what he did write,” which caused the rupture: “his political poems were a contributing factor.” Mason had a short fuse, it is true, with regard to what she considered literary propaganda. But political poetry was not against her “laws.” Neither not writing nor writing the wrong thing would cause her to give up on the man she considered her spiritual “child.”

  The cause was an escalating conflict between Hughes and Hurston over their play Mule Bone, exacerbated by Mason’s increasingly frantic hold on her African “vision.” What might have been a classic tangle between coauthors snared Mason in her own psychological machinations, stranding her between the two “godchildren” from whom she now expected vindication for a philosophy she had clung to throughout her life, against the grain of public opinion. Mason was too dogged to change her visions. And she saw no one else who might carry them out.

  It is hard to imagine a more ironic wrench thrown into the works than Mule Bone turned out to be. Set in Eatonville, the play tells a relatively simple story about two boys fighting over a girl: a tale of triangles and the violence they can engender. Hurston gave a copy of the play to Van Vechten. From him it found its way through a number of hands until it reached theater founder Rowena Jelliffe and the Gilpin Players of Cleveland, who planned to stage it. By chance, Hughes ran into Jelliffe when he happened to be in Cleveland on a family visit. His shock that Jelliffe had a copy and planned a production was matched by Jelliffe’s surprise that he was a coauthor. Hurston was summoned to Cleveland. She had no more idea of how the play had found its way to Cleveland than Hughes did, so she resented the accusations of backhandedness that met her on arrival. Insults were exchanged. Things got out of hand. Hughes and Hurston both turned to Mason for support.

  The Mule Bone conflict is considered “the most n
otorious literary quarrel in African-American cultural history.” As unfortunate as it was, yet more unfortunate secrets lurked behind it. Under especially stringent orders from Mason, Hurston was working clandestinely, at the time, on a project that Mason called her “last hope.” Designed, as the idea of a Harlem Museum of African Art had been, to showcase Africa’s powerful restorative forces, Hurston’s secret project involved high stakes. Locke had let the museum project drop, and Hughes’s novel had not accomplished Mason’s goals. If any of her projects was now to succeed, that success was in the hands of the protégé whose impulsiveness Mason trusted least. She did not want Hurston distracted by Hughes, who she now claimed made her “earth path even harder.” To protect her investment in Hurston she turned against Hughes. Caught up in the usual jostling for Mason’s favor, Hurston and Locke did not fully grasp what was occurring. Even they could not have predicted the emotional 180s that Mason could turn. So Locke fed the grudge and threw gasoline on the fire, calling Hughes “shameful” and “mean,” accusing him of “willful egotism” and “megalomania,” and predicting his “big fall.” “It does seem,” he wrote to Mason, “as if all the young Negroes had completely lost their heads.” Locke misperceived Mason’s about-face as personal. This was a fundamental error in his judgment. Insofar as she had imagined Hughes as her perfect black “child,” rejecting Hughes began to mean rejecting the race. Without realizing it, every word that Hurston and Locke spoke against Hughes worked also to damn their race to its most generous patron. And for his part, the rupture devastated Hughes, causing an emotional wound that never healed. He was left with “shattered” health and lifelong bitterness. Even years afterward, his agony shows clearly in his autobiography:

  I cannot write here about that last half-hour in the bright drawing-room high above Park Avenue one morning, because when I think about it, even now, something happens in the pit of my stomach that makes me ill. 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.

  Locke was largely oblivious to the growing dangers. But Hurston began to sense them. She had long resented Locke’s lack of insight into others’ emotions, as well as the cool indifference with which he wielded his considerable cultural capital in Harlem. Never as impressed with his learning, degrees, or demeanor as he was, Hurston occasionally (and privately) called him pretentious, “abstifically a fraud,” and “a malicious, spiteful little snot.” Publicly, though, she was now saddled with him. With Mason so fiercely taking her side, and at such a cost, Hurston could not risk any sniping about Locke. She had to pretend that the new arrangement, which locked Hughes out, was fine. She did her best to be cordial. But the situation was destined to worsen.

  Letters from “The Friends”

  For Mason, the break with Hughes, not the stock market crash, would always be “the tragedy” of 1930. She was so unseated—“he has knocked her to pieces,” Katherine wrote—that she had to leave New York. First Katherine and Cornelia took her away to Dublin, New Hampshire, where they retreated to “Glimpsewood,” Rufus Osgood Mason’s old gray house among the birch trees, which “in its early days had a reputation for things psychic.” From there they went to Gay Head, the windswept rocky tip of Martha’s Vineyard, and then to Germantown, Pennsylvania, where they holed up “in the little Katherine’s Room in School House Lane.”

  In those three remote locations, Mason turned to the dead for reassurance. She wanted to be told that letting go of Langston had been right.

  A group of spirits, whom she, Katherine, and Cornelia called “The Friends,” were asked to weigh in on her handling of the “tragedy.” Over a period of months, from late summer to early fall, the three women gathered in spare, drafty sitting rooms to take dictation—through a form of automatic writing—from the dead. “The Friends” were WCS, David (a child), Stella King, H. (Herbert), D.D. (for “Dear Dearest” or Rufus Osgood Mason), and Natalie (Curtis). Long-limbed, melancholy Katherine was grieving for her son Garrison, who had recently died. He was adjusting well, “The Friends” wrote, to life on “our side.” A few letters from “The Friends” addressed whether Cornelia, a large-boned, strong-faced lesbian, should marry. (After much consideration, they finally determined not.) Most of the letters, though, were about Hughes and, more generally, Harlem’s failure to come through with a world “cure.” They are largely paeans to Mason’s great sacrifices for blacks: “All honor and glory to you dear Lady Charlotte,” “The Friends” wrote; “you dear Lady Charlotte are so valiant it is difficult for us to do more than stand in admiration of your courage.” They advised her to move on from her hopes for Hughes. “A readjustment of outlook on all the dusky ones is going to be necessary and a letting go,” they counseled. It will be “the hardest task of your flaming career—the task of letting go,” but “the risk of your creation in the Negro field was magnificent.”

  “The Friends” offered detailed recommendations of what was to be done with each protégé. Hughes, they advised, could no longer be helped. “We see little hope ahead for L. [Langston],” they dictated. “You have lived finely—done well—in all regard toward him. So do not have regret. . . . Langston Hughes the blind one is slowly beating out his brains on the wall of his own conceit. He will have flashes of success but the foundations you so carefully worked over[,] planned and built from him are rotting away from misuse.” Other protégés who had broken “laws” were dispensed with in just a few words. “Louise [Thompson],” they wrote, “is one to be wiped off the slate of Godmother’s existence—simply in few words.”

  Those letters, “dictated” to Mason, make clear for the first time what Hughes strained so hard to understand. Without knowing it, he had broken Mason’s “law” against “egotism.” “This egotism,” Mason wrote, “sprang up like a mushroom growth overnight and covered our relationship like barnacles on a ship.” To our ears, that might seem a peculiar charge. But Mason meant something quite different from what we mean by “egotism” today. Her notion of creative genius entailed a willingness to use one’s subconscious, instinctual, subliminal, or child self to channel the collective, creative forces of nature that “civilization has often forgotten or ignored.” Those forces, she believed, were available only to the artist who was open to “powerful auto-suggestion” and “the instinctive following of certain fundamental laws of structure and harmony.” Fighting egotism meant opening oneself to channeling such outside forces. A principle of the creative process, it was also fundamental to interracial collaboration. “Truly,” she wrote, “we must obliterate self if we would receive the clear stream of God’s truth from one another, and this humility of soul is as needful between races as it is between individual men.” She considered herself a model of self-obliteration. Hughes was not. Without the Mule Bone dispute, even such a failure might have been forgiven. But now “The Friends” were certain that there was no going back; the link to Hughes could not be repaired.

  Fortunately, “there is still Hope from some sources,” they felt. “Zora is blundering but may find her way. . . . Her work which is YOUR work has real value.” They never mentioned Alain Locke. Evidently Mason did not feel she needed the “other side’s” counsel regarding him. Mason turned to the spirit world for advice after the break with Hughes not only because of personal desolation; she also feared that their failure to release their divinity to each other—Hughes’s failure, she would have said—might call into question the larger racial project. His “egotism” might block the race’s “subliminal self” and thereby the possibility of saving the planet from itself, a goal she still believed was in her grasp.

  As Mason was in New Hampshire, trying to exorcise Hughes, he was trying to get her out of his system also, not altogether dissimilarly. He began to write stories about her almost obsessively, violating over and over again the “law” of silence and secrecy. In one, he presented her gener
al attitudes through two white people, Anne and Michael, “who went in for Negroes . . . [but] as much as they loved Negroes, Negroes didn’t seem to love Michael and Anne.” Other Hughes characters, such as Dora Ellsworth in “The Blues I’m Playing,” identified Mason through her favorite sayings, her Park Avenue furniture, and her summer home in exclusive, rustic Northeast Harbor, Maine. Dora Ellsworth, wearing Mason’s usual “gown of black velvet, and a collar of pearls,” is a childless widow who takes up a black protégé and fashions herself as an instant expert. “Poor dear lady, she had no children of her own. Her husband was dead. . . . She was very rich, and it gave her pleasure to share her richness with beauty. Except that she was sometimes confused as to where beauty lay.” Hughes even depicted Dora Ellsworth reading to her protégé in bed—just as Mason had done with Katherine. Another story, “Rejuvenation Through Joy,” gathered up Mason’s theories about silence, “vibrations,” and even chairs (sitting too long in them was dangerous, she believed) to put them into the mouth of a charlatan, a send-up of Dr. Mason, who is visited by “smart neurasthenics from Park Avenue.” Hughes not only lifted the veil on a very private woman; he called her out publicly in a poem about her dominance and control: