by Carla Kaplan
Cudjo Lewis at his Alabama home.
But Mason saw a kindred spirit. She retained her imagination and her powerful ability to identify with others. And although she romanticized Lewis, she was not entirely off base in feeling that they were similar. Both were fiercely independent, able to reinvent themselves multiple times. Both were stubborn. Both had traveled far from what their upbringings had predicted. From afar, Mason could once again become the Godmother she longed to be. To Mason, Lewis’s letters, which he wrote on the rough blue-lined notebook paper elementary students use, were gratifyingly thankful:
You have don more for me then any one elce in this world. Since I ben in this country no one has thought enough of me to look out for my well fair as you has. . . . Dear Godmother, I want to see you with the eye before I die. If it not for you I die of starve but you send me the money. I want to see you with the eye before I die so I want come to New York for one day. Miss Zora she good to me but I want to see you and thank you and tell you much love.
They never met. In 1933, Charlotte Mason broke her hip. For the next thirteen years, she was the sole occupant of a large wing on New York Hospital’s sixteenth floor, overlooking the East River. Her room’s windows gave her the view she had “always yearned for, great distances, vast stretches,” but a street view might have been even better. Mason enjoyed nature, but she craved people. She lived for the moments when she could see into someone’s soul and divine just how his or her life should be lived. Even when her hip healed, she would not hear of returning home. She liked being waited on, and she liked a high perch. She discovered that she could preside just fine from her hospital bed in a corner room decorated with heavy furniture, European paintings, and antiques brought over from Park Avenue. In relative comfort there, wearing her usual lace collars and propped against a pile of white pillows, she offered an initially steady, then dwindling, stream of visitors her dictates, prophecies, and wisdom. Even confined to a hospital bed, she kept faith with her own visions and mission. She was immobilized but not incapacitated, and she still trusted her power to effect planetary change. She surrounded herself with the memorabilia of an active life: newspapers, magazines, photographs, and correspondence.
As she lay propped in her bed in New York Hospital—tiny, white-haired, arthritic, immobilized, deaf, and nearly blind but still able to “raise the fires of hell” with scathing criticisms of those she felt had gone astray from her “vision” for them—she still cared passionately about black arts and Africa’s message for America. She sent letters to Lewis until his death in 1935. And she never relinquished her hold on Hurston’s films of him. She continued corresponding from time to time with Locke, and she regaled her hospital guests—white family members and friends—with stories about black Harlem, the one topic she still cared to discuss.
Alone of all her Harlem protégés, Locke stayed in touch throughout the 1930s and 1940s, though he had been told as early as 1936 that his visits upset her, and after then they tapered off almost to nothing. By letter, he provided the detailed accounting of minutiae that Mason always demanded of her godchildren, dutifully reporting to her about the treadmill of his university work, his health, his travels, politics, literature, local gossip, the mental illness of his assistants, his classes and lectures, the war, his views of Katherine’s poetry (increasingly successful in the 1940s), and, with remarkable frequency, news of Langston Hughes. Locke and Mason saw each other every year or two, but only briefly. In 1942, Mason told Locke that she wanted to die and felt she could no longer be useful. Mason’s last two letters to Locke, written in 1943 and 1945, are modest and tender, entirely free of the fierceness that had been such a part of her character. “I am very changed dear boy,” she wrote. “My memory is not what it used to be nor the power to use my imagination which was so remarkable. I hope I can be of some help to you and we can have an interesting visit together. I hope you will not be too disappointed in your old Godmother.”
Ironically, though neither he nor she ever knew it, Locke was not just Mason’s last black friend; he was her last friend in the world. As her death approached in the mid-1940s, her domineering ways and lack of sympathy had—at long last—alienated even the loyal sisters Cornelia and Katherine. Her closest relative was Ethel, the stepdaughter whom she had raised from childhood after her husband’s death in 1903 but from whom she was now thoroughly estranged. (“She was only awful about poor Ethel—but so awful,” Katherine wrote to Francis after a 1945 hospital visit.) In March, Cornelia reported to Katherine that Mason was stone deaf, in pain, and raving but that “with her strong heart she will drag on I fear.” She had already “dragged on” far longer than anyone had expected, enduring well into her nineties in spite of myriad ailments.
At 9 p.m. on a blustery, wet Monday night, April 15, 1946, Charlotte Louise Van der Veer Quick Osgood Mason, the “angel” and the “dragon” of the Harlem Renaissance, finally died of natural causes, a few weeks shy of her ninety-third birthday. Manhattan’s oldest and most prestigious hospital was, at last, free to release her rooms to other patients.
No one but the hospital staff was with her at her death. She had not seen either Hughes or Hurston since before entering the hospital in 1933. Katherine was en route to Nuremberg to join her husband, Francis, once a Mason intimate and now a presiding judge at the war tribunal. Cornelia was in Europe. Locke was not summoned.
On the day after her death, The New York Times carried obituaries of many people far less prominent than Charlotte Mason. The big story that day was the death of Commodore Guido Frederick Forster, who had survived attacks by Japanese suicide bombers, only to die in Summit, New Jersey, after a long illness. Langston Hughes had once described Mason accurately as “a friend of presidents and bankers, distinguished scientists, famous singers, and writers of world renown.” Yet her death went unreported. That silence must have come at Mason’s own insistence. Only after her death would her niece Marianne Quick, who signed her death certificate, have dared to list her aunt Charlotte as a “housewife.” Alive, Mason would never have allowed such a label to stand.
In the weeks before her death, lawyers from the prestigious New York firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hope & Webb were bustled into and out of her rooms and assigned various financial and legal matters. But she never had them add any bequests to black artists; nor did she soften toward those she had once believed were the heart of her grand designs. Her will left a roughly million-dollar estate chiefly to Katherine and Cornelia. Nothing went to black schools such as Hampton. Nothing to the NAACP or the Urban League. Nothing to any of the “godchildren”—Alain Locke, Miguel Covarrubias, Aaron and Alta Douglas, Arthur Huff Fauset, the sculptor Richmond Barthé, Hall Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, or Zora Neale Hurston. Even at the end, she could not relent.
Within a few weeks of Mason’s death, Katherine came to see her in a new light. She wrote to her husband, Francis, about “Mason’s bad effect her influence had had on Cornelia.” By July of that year she was “slowly destroying much” of “3 suitcases full of my letters to Godmother” unable to bear “the mass of sentimental tripe” she had written about Mason. Both she and her son, Randolph, blamed Mason for Randolph’s troubles finding his bearing.
Locke never knew any of that. Katherine’s about-face was shared only with family. Cornelia and Katherine, who dealt with all of Mason’s personal effects, picked out a number of African art objects as if they’d been “godmother’s gift” to Locke at her death. That “rare selection of things from our racial heritage,” he wrote to Katherine, had touched him deeply. It was Locke’s final, if ironic, triumph over all the other protégés who had once vied for Mason’s favors. By then, however, only he still cared.
Mason could forbid obituaries, but she could not keep herself out of the fiction of the Harlem Renaissance. In place of the obituaries she did not allow, that fiction became her legacy. She was depicted so often in the literature of the period that, as David Levering Lewis put it in his history of the Harlem Ren
aissance, she seemed “almost a composite of some of the characters in Renaissance fiction.” She was painfully easy to caricature.
Miss Anne as an Upper East Side matron; Covarrubias may have used Charlotte Osgood Mason as a model for the woman on the right.
Hurston did not caricature Mason, but she did embed her in her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s greatest novel comes to a verdict similar to Hughes’s character’s conclusion that “everybody knows no good come out o’ white and colored love.” The novel reconfigures the ancient form of the quest romance as a young black woman’s search for intimacy and an ideal listener. In this framed tale, we witness both Janie’s search and her choice of whom to tell that story to. As it turns out, ideal listeners are few and far between. Hurston’s protagonist finds only one ideal listener worth speaking to, a young black woman very much like herself, from the same small town, who has lived through the very same experiences. Rather than explode Hurston’s trope of “feather-bed resistance,” showing exceptional white audiences for whom the veil can safely be lowered, the novel does the reverse: it leaves them out of the conversation. Written after her friendship with Mason had gone cold, Their Eyes Were Watching God dramatizes the impossibility of any real intimacy across racial difference—let alone the chasm that was 399 Park Avenue.
Part Four
Rewards and Costs: Publishing, Performance, and Modern Rebellion
Nancy Cunard with Negro anthology.
Chapter 7
Imitation of Life: Fannie Hurst’s “Sensation in Harlem”
Although it’s a “white” novel, Imitation of Life is certainly a part of the African American canon.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Imitation of Life may be, as Gates ruefully notes, the most notable white-authored “black novel” ever written. “Since its initial publication, Imitation of Life . . . has occupied a singular position in American culture, haunting it more persistently perhaps than any twentieth-century popular text about race other than Gone with the Wind.” A representation of interracial friendship produced by a white Jewish author who was once the most famous—and highly paid—writer in the country, the novel had a remarkable shelf life, beyond any of Fannie Hurst’s other novels, even in her heyday. The relationship between the novel’s main characters, Bea and Delilah, has influenced generations of ideas about friendships between white and black women. And Fannie Hurst’s connection with Zora Neale Hurston, including their collaboration on Imitation of Life, remains one of the most famous interracial friendships in American history.
Fannie Hurst at her desk.
Yet Fannie Hurst’s Harlem story is a fundamentally unhappy one, her vision of black life at least as pernicious as it was salutary. Harlem embraced Hurst at a difficult time. She repaid that embrace in peculiar—but very telling—ways.
Harlem gave extraordinary latitude to its interested whites. Carl Van Vechten was given entrée to black-only clubs, invited to judge drag balls, and allowed by many to use the forbidden “N-word.” Mary White Ovington was acknowledged as a—and sometimes the—founder of the NAACP, the nation’s most important black civil rights organization. Josephine Cogdell Schuyler was encouraged to pass as a black advice columnist, and white torch singer Libby Holman was celebrated for her Broadway impersonation of a black prostitute. Ernestine Rose was roundly praised for making Harlem’s public library the most important black cultural institution in the country. Although white, Annie Nathan Meyer was credited with having an important “Negro” voice. Dictatorial patron Charlotte Mason was adored and, when adoration became impossible, obeyed (until she was finally ignored). Even with a deaf ear for others’ feelings and a propensity for embarrassing publicity, Nancy Cunard was widely admired for her loyalty to her black lover and her dedication to the Negro anthology.
But latitude had its limits. And Fannie Hurst, as much a “Negrotarian” as New York ever produced, exceeded them.
Though wildly successful with white readers, Hurst’s blockbuster 1933 novel struck Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and other blacks as a betrayal of the friendship they’d shown her. The novel’s black characters—Hurst’s only black characters in her eighteen novels—recycle stubborn racial stereotypes. Like so many paper cutouts, they embody what the Harlem Renaissance struggled to stamp out. They are childlike. They emulate whites and denigrate blacks. They lack dignity. They are foolish. They are impractical but warm, quick to laugh and slow to anger. The novel was a “sensation in Harlem” partly because in it the best-known writer in America paid attention to black lives. But by 1933, many white writers had already beaten Hurst to that punch. Imitation of Life was “a sensation in Harlem” mostly because it was so much not what a very expectant Harlem had hoped for from Hurst.
Fannie Hurst was born in 1889 in Hamilton, Ohio, and raised in St. Louis in a “quiet house of evenly drawn window shades, impeccable cleanliness, geometrically placed conventional furniture, middle-class respectability.” The only child of upper-middle-class, assimilated Jewish parents, she grew up hoping to be nothing like them. Her mild-mannered father was withdrawn. Her mother was actively engaged with others, but also “temperamental” and dramatic, demanding a center stage that Fannie wanted for herself. Fannie considered her mother small-minded and shallow. She wished for parents with hobbies and fascinating friends. “We did not know anybody who was anybody,” she complained. For both parents, household minutiae, and their daughter especially, were their all. Her father read the newspaper—husbands always read the newspaper—but did not discuss national affairs. “Intellectual curiosity was languid at our house.” The Hursts were especially protective—a younger sister had died of diphtheria at the age of four—but not demonstrative. By her own description, Fannie was a “rather spoiled, overweight brat of a child, living snug as a bug in the middle-class middle-western so-called security of a pre-first world-war era.” She took her boredom as an affront.
She was headstrong from day one about her eventual escape from the “somnolent world” in which she was raised. A “wet-blanket of conservatism,” she judged it. From childhood on, she was hard at work becoming fascinating. She was determined to make herself broad-minded, intellectual, socially engaged, and unconventional—everything she believed that her parents were not. One of her greatest strengths was her phenomenal willpower. As an adult, Fannie lost a great deal of weight and allowed herself to become almost as famous for her dieting as she was for her writing. Having a fashionable figure so was important to her that to maintain it she managed to subsist for decades on a diet of no more than six hundred calories a day: an orange and black coffee for breakfast, a half head of lettuce and light dressing for lunch, and a dinner of boiled or broiled meat or fish with vegetables. Very few people could sustain such a regimen, but Fannie was built without a reverse gear. She moved only forward.
Her schooling, like her childhood home, was unremarkable for a woman of her class and time. It included English (at which she excelled), history, and French and a smattering of math and chemistry (at which she did not excel). Extracurricular activities included the usual activities that aspiring middle-class parents hoped would elevate their daughters: piano lessons, dancing, and tennis. Like most young girls, Fannie kept detailed diaries, complete with illustrations. And, like many a “girl reader” born to a house without books, she haunted the public library. Her parents let her read whatever she wanted. She devoured novels, gobbling up fiction well above her years. Looking back, she said that she had always been a “word lapidary” in love with the “colors” of words. From early on, she’d determined to be a writer of note. She practiced with poems and stories, her own school assignments, and even the school assignments of her classmates. Relatives, neighbors, and teachers obligingly regarded her as a “decidedly outstanding” young woman with remarkable self-possession. She needed her classmates to “regard me as the most interesting girl in the school. I wanted to share me . . . to exhibit me.”
Hurst’s signature
literary style was a blend of sentimental realism and progressive social commentary. Dismissed by some critics as mawkish, overwrought, and labored, her stories were so popular that at the height of her career, they regularly garnered $5,000 and her films anywhere from $35,000 to $100,000, equivalent to more than $50,000 per story and up to $1 million per novel, with film rights, in today’s currency.
Hurst’s greatest talent may have been what her biographer Brooke Kroeger called her “talent for success.” Once she visualized herself as a writer, her self-confidence never wavered. After graduating from Washington University in 1909, she left St. Louis and moved to New York City, against the objections of her parents, and shared an apartment with a girlfriend, to launch her writing career. “Even then nothing was allowed to disturb her during hours she set aside for work, and she worked seven or eight hours a day,” the roommate remembered. She composed on a typewriter at breakneck speed and “never rewrote.” When editors asked for revisions, she refused.
In a matter of months, however, she was setting her own terms. Nor did she mind when her willfulness became legendary. She happily divulged all the details of her writing process, sharing any information that interviewers cared to ask about. Ultimately, she refused even to alter her writing or touring schedule to respond to her parents’ deaths. Both “highly self-conscious” and “high-handed,” she could not imagine that others might not find her single-mindedness attractive. She had been born, she once admitted, a “pig for success,” competing even with her dead sister for approval and attention.
