by Carla Kaplan
Poet to Patron
What right has anyone to say
That I
Must throw out pieces of my heart
For pay?
For bread that helps to make
My heart beat true,
I must sell myself
To you?
Reducing their relationship to poems for cash, Hughes well knew, was the most insulting thing he could have done. The poem was designed to strike back. It was part of many efforts to seize back some control, his equivalent of her appeal to “The Friends.”
“Last Hope”
In the fall of 1930, Mason returned to New York, convinced that Hurston was her last and only hope of building her “magic bridge” from Africa to America and, in so doing, curing the modern world. Arthritis had plagued her for years, making it necessary for her to dictate most of her letters to Cornelia or Katherine. Her hearing was almost gone. And her sight was fading. She took a large suite of rooms at the Barclay Hotel from which she oversaw her staff’s reopening of her Park Avenue apartment—airing furniture, unpacking trunks, and cleaning all twelve rooms to meticulous standards. All the while, she was steeling herself to tolerate no more dithering from her remaining protégés. Now—or never—she would bring the spirit of Africa to New York. She thought she might have one “big thing” yet left in her if Hurston would just fall into line.
That meant she now had all her eggs in one basket again, just what she had wanted to avoid. This time, everything was wrapped up in a project variously called Barracoon and Kossula, a book on which Hurston had been laboring for years, without much success. Barracoon was a biography of Kossula, also known as Cudjo Lewis, the last surviving slave brought to America in 1859, snatched as a child from a West African town in Benin and sold into slavery on the Clotilda, America’s last slave ship. That live connection to both Africa and slavery made him a jewel to Mason; he was “the only man on earth who has in his heart the memory of his African home.” She believed that “without fail, that life of Kossula must burn to ashes the white blood that tramps leadening the Negro race in America.” She saw the chance for another endeavor like The Indians’ Book. Hurston had interviewed Kossula at his home in Plateau, Alabama, on a number of trips to the South. With Mason’s support and with film equipment provided by her, she had also taken short silent films of him on his slanted porch, smoking his pipe, chopping wood, and gesturing as if storytelling. Those were believed to be the only existing films of him, and Mason stashed them in her safe-deposit box. Convinced that “the future of the Negro in America” was hanging in the balance, she was determined “to succeed in my ideal” of telling Kossula’s story through Hurston.
But the manuscript was a mess. Kossula remembered only snippets about Africa. What he did remember—polygamy, leopard killing, murders, and wars—was not the “flaming” material Mason imagined burning off the layers of modern civilization. He recalled almost nothing of slavery and even less of the Middle Passage. Barracoon was uneven and sometimes unformed. Hurston needed more material, better material, more interviews. And she knew it. Kossula’s story had been a thorn in her side going back to 1927, when she had published an article on him and had been accused of plagiarizing from material in a 1914 book, Historic Sketches of the South. Even in a good publishing market—which the Depression certainly was not—the Kossula biography might have been a difficult sell. Both Boni & Liveright and Viking rejected the manuscript. If Mason hadn’t been laying on the pressure, Hurston would have dropped the whole business.
Mason pushed hard for revisions. “I am being urged to do things as quickly as possible and so at present I am working furiously,” Hurston told Franz Boas, but she was finding it “very hard to get materials in any shape at all.” Meanwhile, Mason pressed Locke to use his connections to persuade a credible publisher to take the book. By January 1931, Hurston had a second draft of the manuscript. She began working with the legendary editor Harry Block on a third version, which they hoped to send to Harper. That was the moment when the Mule Bone furor erupted. “If any of us breathe one word about it, the glory of what you have done, and the help that you are going to be to your people is going to be divided,” Mason warned. Only Mason, Locke, and now Harry Block were in on the Kossula secret.
Throughout February and March, Hurston continued “working furiously,” trying to complete an acceptable revision of Kossula and also finish her folklore collection, Mules and Men. “Do not despair of me, Godmother,” she wrote in April. “I shall come through this time.” But by June, the manuscript was still homeless. “I am at the end with this. I must get out,” Mason complained to Locke. “Convince [the publishers] that this is a best seller,” she begged him. “Break the stone heads of these publishers & throw them into the debris heap!” Locke failed to do so.
Hurston was just then hitting her stride, ready to transfer her energies to scholarship and theater, and may not have understood what her book’s failure meant to Mason, just as Hughes had not foreseen the effects of forswearing his allegiance to Africa. She deposited the manuscript and film footage in Mason’s bank box and tried to draw the now profoundly depressed Mason into another theater production. Mason, unused to losing control, dispatched Locke to monitor Hurston. Despondently, she drafted her last will and testament. It left nothing to any of her black protégés and she never mentioned it.
Hurston’s new play made ample use of the wealth of material on black spiritual practices—conjure especially—that she had collected in the South from 1928 on, under Mason’s contract. That was precisely the material Mason did not want used. “Remember,” she admonished Hurston, “your solemn promises made when getting conjure. Perfectly willing to have you write it but not put it on the stage. You are as white as white can be when you break this faith.” But Hurston was eager for stage success. She saw her revue, The Great Day, as a way to get away from “the oleomargarine era in Negro writing . . . everything butterish about it except butter.” And she was eager to escape the vexations of the Kossula project. For once she held her ground against Mason’s various objections. “Very worried,” Mason repeated to Locke, “about her having Conjure in program as she gave her word to people down South she would not do this. May ruin her career. I have never broken a primitive law: they are mine to obey.”
The Great Day: A Program of Negro Folklore, with a Choral and Dramatic Cast was a musical portraying a day in the life of a black Florida railroad workers’ camp. Hurston described it as “a Negro concert of the most intensely black type.” Using the railroad camp as a folk setting, the play featured work songs, a sermon, lullabies, spirituals, children’s games, jook scenes, a Bahamian fire dance, signifying contests, and, in later renditions, a one-act play about slavery entitled The Fiery Chariot. This sort of folk drama was risky, with white producers relying on similar materials to keep alive minstrel traditions with their “happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking” blacks. The African elements that Hurston incorporated into her revue included an African folk dance celebrating spring, a drum dance, a ring song, and a buzzard imitation. In the program notes, Hurston, aware of her potential audience, described these elements as “primitive and exciting.”
Hurston assembled an enormous cast of fifty-two performers and tallied up her expenses for transportation, costumes, theater rental, and publicity. “I am on fire about my people,” she wrote to Mason, promising that her concert would make the “Negro Farthest Down” come alive and help her people “return to their gods.” Then she asked for money. “If ever I needed you Godmother, I need you now,” she pleaded. Mason lent Hurston more than $500, then drew up a second contract, imposing the condition that Alain Locke act as adviser to The Great Day, “arrange and write the program notes,” and come onstage halfway through the performance to explain its significance and show the audience where it made a “bridge” to Africa. She insisted, again, that the conjure material be cut.
All fall and winter, “Locke made periodic trips to New York . . . t
o consult with Hurston, attend rehearsals, oversee logistical matters, and keep Mason abreast of all that came to pass.” He reported to Mason that he had laid down the law about the conjure material: “I wrote it freshly on her kitchen table. She leaning over me as I did it—and with the explanations, she saw its logic and I believe adopted it. . . . So I think and believe all is again on the right path toward the goal of our hopes and plans.” But “Zora was awfully hurt at his high handed manner,” Mason admitted. And not all was as it seemed. Hurston refused to show Locke her final program. She did cut out the conjure ceremony as directed by Mason, and this entailed an expensive reprinting of the program. It was too late, however, to pull the mentions of conjure from some of the prepublicity for the concert which promised to let the audience in on the secrets of voodoo with a conjure ceremony that had “never before been publicly performed” and that was “authentic in every detail, and filled with weird, impressive rites.”
On Sunday, January 10, 1932, Charlotte Osgood Mason invited nearly four dozen of her friends to meet her at the John Golden Theatre to see the production. She was “depressed,” she told Alain Locke. She didn’t see “where Truth in the Negro world is ever going to be found, much less sustained.” Inside the theater, moving through the narrow lobby into the elegant Spanish-style auditorium, patrons were urged to forget, for a few hours, the grimness they’d traveled through to get there: shuttered businesses, unemployed workers, breadlines, newly homeless families warming themselves in the vestibules of vacated offices. Heavy velvet and thick upholstery muffled sounds from the outside world. The stage promised escape to a southern swamp, complete with trees hung thickly with Spanish moss. The cast members were dressed either as southern sawmill laborers or as African fire dancers in feathered capes, loincloths, ankle bells, and elaborate headdresses, and with bare brown feet.
The evening was clear and unseasonably warm. The winter rain had ended, leaving the city smelling fresh. The prepublicity for Hurston’s show had promised “original and unusual songs as yet untouched . . . fresh and without the artificial polish of . . . Harlem or Broadway.” Mason had sent announcements to everyone on her extensive personal mailing list, recommending the “unusual Negro performance which should be most interesting as it is the first time we have had real Negro folklore presented to us in this way and by a real Negro woman.” In their evening dress, Mason and her guests arrived at the plain-looking theater entrance on West 58th Street. A tuxedoed Alain Locke rushed anxiously behind the curtains for one last, hurried consultation with Hurston. The rest of Mason’s guests took their time finding their places in the theater’s ornate green-and-gold auditorium, arranging their wraps and gloves over velvet seats, and opening their folded programs to an introduction by Alain Locke promising “the true elements of the Negro heart and soul” and an acknowledgment of Charlotte Mason’s “spiritual and material” help in “salvaging some of the surprising portions of the original primitive life of the Negro” (one of the only public acknowledgments Mason ever allowed). In her seat, Mason composed herself to send the right “vibrations” for Hurston’s success. Her expression was characteristically implacable. But inside she was miserable.
Backstage, Hurston’s stomach was in knots. Unlike her patron, Hurston had an anxious disposition and a tendency to expect the worst. The stakes for her were unusually high that evening. If The Great Day succeeded, it would realize years of striving to bring authentic black theater to audiences previously exposed only to white-produced, white-directed plays that had “squeezed all the Negro-ness out of every thing.” She could move on from failed projects and difficult publishers to a life as a producer. If The Great Day failed, on the other hand, she’d be stuck with an angry cast and an angrier patron. Keeping a fifty-two-member cast in line had been like herding cats under the best of conditions, and tonight they were tense and cold. To add to those pressures, reviewers were there from all the important black and white New York newspapers: The New York Times, The Sun, The Herald Tribune, the New York Evening Post, and the Amsterdam News. Seated expectantly, they shared the buzzing auditorium with one of the more extraordinary cross sections of New York ever assembled. How strange and disappointing it must have been for Hurston to look out at the audience that night and not see Langston Hughes. After years of complaining about the “awfully bad colored shows [that] are being put on Broadway every week or so,” Hughes missed the one show he would truly have enjoyed.
Mason had provided, as she kept pointedly reminding Hurston, a “good part of the audience” that night. She paid $113.50 of the evening’s $261.00 ticket sales. She had purchased mostly expensive orchestra seats to put her stamp on the evening’s complex social rankings, placing her guests throughout the auditorium. Prior to the concert she had distributed tickets to Locke and five of his own guests, to Paul and Leila Chapin, to Quick family cousins, to Miguel Covarrubias, to members of the English Speaking Union, and to others. For herself, Cornelia Chapin, Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle, and Francis Biddle, she had reserved a group of seats in the second row, on the left aisle. Also seated in front was Carl Van Vechten, detested by Mason but adored by Hurston. “Please let me see you in a close-up seat,” Hurston had written to him that morning. Mason could not have been happy to see him there. Hurston’s friends, such as Fannie Hurst, Annie Nathan Meyer, Mary White Ovington, Nancy Cunard (with whom Hurston had just begun a lively correspondence and whom Mason also detested), the modern composer George Antheil, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, and George Schuyler, would all have received special invitations. Once she was seated, however, with her heavy coat draped across her shoulders, her cane placed under her chair, and the Chapins placed carefully around her, Mason was as likely to be approached as a queen would be.
In the wings, Alain Locke was fidgeting in his “faultless tails,” eager to remind Hurston of Mason’s laws. Hurston, already in costume in a striped Seminole dress, had no time for him. The curtain went up. The revue commenced. The audience was entranced and enthusiastic.
Mason and Locke had planned for Locke to come out and explain to the audience the meaning of what they had seen. Otherwise, Mason feared, the production would just be cheap amusement. But in a surprise move, Hurston took the stage in the middle of the show. She did her own explaining. “Godmother had meant for me to call Dr. Locke to the stage,” she admitted later. “I had seemed to ignore Dr. Locke.”
Hurston considered The Great Day a great success—“the concert achieved its purpose,” she said—and so did the reviewers. But Mason judged it a “failure.” She had already sacrificed her cherished relationship with Hughes to pave Hurston’s “flaming pathway.” Now she was out of patience. Hurston, sensing disaster, tried hard to bail water. “About the concert. Godmother, I am sorry that my thickness has distressed you so. . . . I am afraid that I am hopelessly crude, Godmother darling. Please don’t let my clumsiness disturb you too keenly.” But Hurston must have known that she had gone too far, because even as she apologized, she also trespassed further, making warm mentions of the now-banished Hughes. She reported that she and Hughes were reconciled and that he’d been visiting with her brother in Florida. In another letter she told Mason that she and Hughes had had a “polite and rather cordial” phone call and that he had sent his regards to her but was too busy to write.” I have “not heard from Alain,” she added nervously. “Hope he is not angry about anything.”
She could not have been surprised when, in early April, she was summoned for a major dressing-down by Locke. He chastised her for her housing, the costs of her heat and hot water, her lack of gainful employment, the order of the pieces in her book Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States, her health and medications, her debts, and—most important—her creative work. “I understand that both you and Alain feel that I have lost my grip on things,” she noted glumly to Mason.
Mason offered Hurston one last chance. She was to go back south to Eatonville, concentrate only on Barracoon, and stop “robbing” her books for theater projec
ts. Mason drew up a new and even stricter contract: Hurston was to use “none of the other data or material” she had collected under her original 1927 contract and especially none of “the Conjure materials and rituals.” Mason sent money south to her but not the encouraging, loving letters she had written before The Great Day.
But Florida was freedom. Instead of returning to Kossula’s story, Hurston revived The Great Day, performing it throughout the South. She cut Locke’s preface. After briefly chasing Mason in letters, she gave up. The last exchanges between Hurston and Mason all concerned Kossula. “I am very much distressed” about Kossula, Mason wrote to Hurston in May 1932, asking her to make another trip to Plateau to see about him. Hurston promised to do so, then went back to her play. In a private aside to a friend, she expressed her frustration that the “Park Avenue dragon” was still attempting to tell her what to do.
Kossula and the “Park Avenue Dragon”
Throughout the early 1930s, Mason sent monthly checks to Cudjo Lewis, but she worried that Lewis’s grandchildren were siphoning the funds. “I have sent his money regularly every month by registered mail,” she noted plaintively. She wanted someone—Hurston or Locke perhaps—to check on the situation. But no one did. That told her where her influence now stood.
Mason’s and Lewis’s worlds could hardly have been more different. At 399 Park, Mason had a professional maid on her staff, an Irishwoman named Mary Beggans; anything she desired was delivered to her home; and a driver waited on call downstairs. In addition to her staff, Cornelia and Katherine read to Mason and brought her books and magazines; they helped her with her correspondence and kept her up-to-date on current affairs, and when Mason hosted luncheons and teas, they put out her good crystal, arranged the sandwiches and tea, and kept the conversation flowing. Used to having others do her bidding, Mason had never worked at a paid job in her life and never, in fact, had a Social Security number. Lewis, on the other hand, had worked every day of his life, helping found the community also known as Africa Town, then helping it prosper and raising a family there. At nearly a hundred years of age, gnarled but spry, he still split his own firewood and worked as a sexton at the local Baptist church. His windowless wooden cabin was a far cry from 399 Park. Its walls were decorated with newspaper clippings, framed pictures, pots and pans, and hat pegs; an oversize fireplace took up one wall, and a slanted front porch off the kitchen sloped down into a packed-earth yard.
