Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  Fortunately, Hurst had appealing qualities as well: adventurousness, bursts of generosity, a wicked sense of humor, bluntness, and a deep sense of fair play and justice. In most cases she faced her own weaknesses squarely. She could be very charming.

  Being seen as ethnic did not suit her. In childhood, she followed her family’s suit and ignored being Jewish. “I would have given anything,” she reported in her autobiography, not to be acknowledged as Jewish. In New York, however, she discovered that there was an audience for ethnicity and that being Jewish could be an advantage, a source of colorful stories about immigrant lives. She loved to visit the “sweatshops and tenements of the Lower East Side” to gather background for her portraits of “shopgirls, immigrants, mistresses, and romantic and aspiring dreamers.” She took her notepad into night court to collect stories and also took a series of short-term jobs at a settlement house, as a waitress, in a sweatshop, as a salesgirl at R. H. Macy, and as a factory worker in the interest of gathering material. Heavily plotted and sometimes melodramatic, her work depicted socially marginalized characters struggling against stiff odds. Often, in stories that ranged from “Sob Sister” to Back Street, she wrote of women trying desperately to follow the social script of femininity but winding up abandoned and impoverished. Readers identified with Hurst’s fury over social double standards. Critics were not as impressed.

  Fannie saw few role models for combining domestic and professional goals. So in 1915, she secretly married pianist Jacques Danielson, maintaining her own name and a separate residence—dating her own husband, in effect—in order to keep their relationship “fresh” (and later to help her manage her multiyear affair with the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson). The arrangement also accommodated her writing schedule, as she typically wrote in the morning and then went out in the afternoons and evenings. When the secret got out in 1920, with a front-page New York Times story, Hurst made use of that also. Seizing the limelight she’d been given, she inveighed against the “antediluvian custom” of sexism and double standards. She was delighted when the press coined the phrase “a Fannie Hurst marriage” for any unconventional domestic arrangement. She was involved in progressive social causes, including public health, labor, sex education, reproductive rights, marriage reform, and feminism from the early 1900s on. After 1920, she was able to parlay her double celebrity—as writer and rebel—into a career almost as notable for public speaking as it was for popular writing. She was thus in constant demand for writing assignments, radio commentary, lectures, and magazine pieces. The exposure ensured a constant stream of press notices—focused as much on her hats, clothing, and weight as anything else—all of which she pasted into scrapbooks. As her success solidified and her marriage settled down, she became even more interested in the kinds of social issues her family had always ignored. She was a member of the Heterodoxy Club, which brought her into the sphere of feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Crystal Eastman, Janet Flanner, and Susan Glaspell. With them, she signed the Lucy Stone League’s charter protest against married women having to take their husband’s names. She marched for suffrage with her friend Annie Nathan Meyer’s sister Maud Nathan, among others, and was delighted to accept the Suffrage League’s invitation to lecture on polygamy and marriage, in spite of knowing little about the latter and nothing at all about the former. More than anything else, Hurst thrilled to her growing reputation as one of the country’s most important “friends of the Negro,” a public stance even more outré than feminism.

  In fact, Fannie Hurst came relatively late to the cause. It was not until the mid-1920s, having first gone to Harlem with Carl Van Vechten, that she began to take a serious interest in what she called “black matters.” Although she acted as a judge for a number of Harlem’s important literary contests, into the mid-1920s she was still dismissing the importance of race as “something I don’t particularly think about one way or the other.” She did, however, as she remarked in one interview, think that some blacks were “lovable characters.”

  In 1926, she joined the board of the National Health Circle for Colored People (NHCCP). The NHCCP partnered with nurses’ organizations to push for more public health services for blacks, especially in the South, and “to create and stimulate among the colored people, health consciousness and responsibility for their own health problems.” Like so many white-led social welfare organizations at the time, it took for granted that blacks needed white instruction in hygiene and personal responsibility, rather than equitably distributed social resources. In 1927, she lent her name to the organization’s fund-raising appeal, urging donors to give generously to a “languid . . . happy friendly race.” In 1928, she composed the NHCPP’s Christmas Appeal letter. “The Southern Negro,” she wrote, “knows pitifully little about keeping his body or his child’s body a fit place to dwell.” Among the organization’s donors was Cornelia Chapin, acting on Charlotte Osgood Mason’s behalf.

  After 1928, Hurst’s name increasingly appeared on the board lists of organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League. Her involvement was largely nominal, however. Impatient with the routine work of political organizing and the tedium and anonymity of grassroots work, she preferred judging literary contests, giving talks, penning appeals, and mentoring individuals: tasks that made use of her name and reputation. She rarely attended the board meetings for which she lent her large apartment. Instead, she left instructions with her staff. Her caveat for organizational participation was that fellow members accept “that I was not in a position, owing to countless obligations, . . . to give either time or money.” It is hard to imagine that the apartment she lent was a particularly congenial place for committee meetings. It had forty-foot ceilings, dark woods, oversize medieval art (Catholic Madonnas and crosses), red brocade curtains, calla lilies (Hurst’s signature flower), and numerous portraits of herself; it was a stylized shrine to a highly constructed image, as much a stage set as a home.

  Fannie Hurst’s New York apartment.

  It was into that space and that image that Hurst tried to shoehorn Zora Neale Hurston, another outsize personality with a carefully constructed image to maintain. Hurston caught Hurst’s attention at the dinner for the 1926 Opportunity awards, which Hurst judged. Throwing a red scarf around her shoulders and yelling out the title of her award-winning play, Color Struck, Hurston was clearly the most flamboyant person in the room. Hurst was unused to such competition, and it is to her credit that she gravitated toward the woman who upstaged her. Fannie Hurst was by then the highest-paid writer in the United States, with many novels and hundreds of stories already in print. She was also probably the most influential and widely known white person to interest herself in black New York. Hurston, by contrast, was a recent arrival to New York, struggling to make ends meet. She had appealed for support to both Arthur A. Schomburg and the hairdressing entrepreneur Annie Pope Malone (the Madam C. J. Walker of the Midwest) but both had turned her down. Annie Nathan Meyer had already taken an interest in helping her get into Barnard but lacked sufficient funds to cover all of Hurston’s expenses; she encouraged her friend Fannie Hurst to help out as well.

  Knowing Hurst proved an enormous advantage to Hurston, then Barnard’s only black student. “Your friendship was a tremendous help to me at a critical time. It made both faculty and students see me when I needed seeing,” Hurston wrote to her. Hurston suddenly had two very well-known Jewish women friends, both of them well-established writers. “I love it! . . . To actually talk and eat with some of the big names that you have admired at a distance,” Hurston told a friend. Her unabashed delight contributed to Hurst’s ongoing self-crafting. So Hurst helped out enthusiastically, enlarging Hurston’s social contacts, introducing her to Stefansson, writer Irvin Cobb, Paramount Pictures co-founder Jesse Lasky, actress Margaret Anglin, and others. It was timely assistance, since Hurston was down to her last “11 cents.” And Barnard, which catered to upper-class women, was requiring her to pay for a gym outfit, a bathing suit, a golf outfi
t, and a tennis racket. Far worse, some of her Barnard professors were assigning “C” grades to her examinations before she’d even sat for them. She was feeling, she said, like a “Negro Extra.”

  Hurst was entranced with Hurston. She believed she saw an essential, primitive blackness in her. “She sang with the plangency and tears of her people and then on with equal lustiness to hip-shuddering and finger-snapping jazz,” Hurst wrote approvingly. She was as “uninhibited as a child.” To Hurst, Hurston was a humble native genius, close to the soil, a delightful “girl” with the “strong racial characteristics” of humor, humility, and wit. She saw in Hurston a “sophisticated negro mind that has retained many characteristics of the old-fashion and humble type.” She praised her “talent,” her “individuality.” Mostly, she delighted in what she called Hurston’s “most refreshing unself-consciousness of race.” Hurst hired Hurston as a chauffeur and personal secretary—“the world’s worst secretary.” Hurston was to run errands and answer letters and the telephone. “Her shorthand was short on legibility, her typing hit-or-miss, mostly the latter, her filing, a game of find-the-thimble. Her mind ran ahead of my thoughts and she would interject with an impatient suggestion or clarification of what I wanted to say. If dictation bored her, she would interrupt, stretch wide her arms and yawn: ‘Let’s get out the car, I’ll drive you up to the Harlem bad-lands or down to the wharves where men go down to the sea in ships.’” Fortunately, Hurst loved to visit out-of-the-way places and Hurston loved to drive. Invariably, Hurst took the backseat.

  On one of their driving trips, Hurston took Hurst to see her hometown, Eatonville, Florida. Eatonville was the nation’s first incorporated black town, Hurston’s folklore source, and her emotional touchstone. To her it was a utopian world where blacks lived near whites “without a single instance of enmity”; where people lived a “simple” life of “open kindnesses, anger, hate, love, [and] envy”; where you “got what your strengths could bring you.” But Hurst saw “squalor” instead of the splendor dear to Hurston’s heart. She looked pityingly on what Hurston claimed as the “deserted home” of Hurston’s family, “a dilapidated two-room shack.” The building, in fact, had never housed the family. But Hurst never found out that Hurston had never lived in such a shack. On the contrary, the family home in Eatonville was a gracious eight-room property on five acres, a “roomy house” on a nice “piece of ground with two big Chinaberry trees shading the front gate and Cape jasmine bushes with hundreds of blooms on either side of the walks . . . plenty of orange, grapefruit, tangerine, guavas and other fruits” in the yard. Hurston clearly understood, and provided, what Hurst expected to see.

  Hurst was at a difficult point in her career. Commercially successful almost beyond imagining, she was nevertheless becoming increasingly discontent. She longed, as she put it, to be a “darling of the critics,” but she was becoming their whipping girl instead. In fact, she had become their model of “how not to write.” Hurst had no talent for breaking her own patterns. But now she needed a drastic alteration of her own formula, a book that others would see as entirely new and different.

  It was on one of their car trips, just at this juncture, in June 1931, that Hurston—who was also collaborating with Annie Nathan Meyer and under increasing pressure from Charlotte Osgood Mason—furnished Hurst with the material for Imitation of Life. Hurst told Hurston that they were motoring toward Vermont to look at property and visit her literary agent, Elisabeth Marbury, who had just taken Hurston on board as well. Marbury was a powerhouse, and Hurston would naturally have been eager to solidify the new relationship with a social visit. Hurston’s contract with Mason had ended that March, freeing up her publication plans but also leaving her without the regular financial support she’d grown accustomed to. She had two manuscripts under revision but no acceptances and Franz Boas looking over one shoulder, Mason glaring over the other. With fewer and fewer outlets for black literature available after the stock market crash, good relations with both Hurst and Marbury could make all the difference.

  But Fannie Hurst had her own agenda. She had been making secret plans to leave her husband for Stefansson. Hurston provided cover. As they drove north, Hurst suddenly pressured her to drive into Canada, where Stefansson was lecturing; she promised to show Hurston Niagara Falls.

  Hurst and Stefansson eventually scuttled their plans, and Hurst remained in her marriage to Danielson. But the trip to Canada was not a loss for her. All along the way, Imitation of Life took shape in lengthy conversations in the car. Hurston had always been fascinated with the inner lives of workingwomen, Hurst’s favorite subject. Mapping out the interior life of Hurst’s new characters came naturally to Hurston. In her rear seat, Hurst scribbled hurriedly in a small notebook. At night, alone in her hotel room (Hurston stayed in rooming houses that accepted blacks or else she slept in the car), Hurst added to her notes. Hurst returned to New York with the core of the novel that would ensure her legacy for decades to come. Hurston, on the other hand, returned to New York to find that Mason and Locke were furious with her and banishing her to the South.

  Imitation of Life was an important experiment for Hurst, designed to prove to the modernists who ignored her and the critics who derided her that sentimentality, a deeply female literary form, could address the “hard” social issues. She had a lot riding on the novel. But she needed Hurston’s help. She wrote a series of letters, begging Hurston to return to New York and review her draft. Hurston was in Florida working hard on her folk opera and trying to keep that fact from Mason, who wanted her to work on Barracoon. Hurst desperately wanted her advice on the manuscript, but Hurston dodged her, sick of being anyone’s “pet Negro.”

  Hurst finished the novel, her only black story, on her own. It shows. Set just beyond the bustling Atlantic City boardwalk, Imitation of Life tells two unhappy stories of passing: white Bea Pullman (née Chipley)’s brief passing for a man and black Peola Johnson’s lifelong passing for white. Bea’s passing costs her dearly, but it is excused because of the disadvantages imposed on women in a world of sexual double standards, a frequent theme of Hurst’s. But Peola’s passing, although occasioned by a similar desire to escape the racial double standard, is neither excused nor forgiven in the novel. Peola’s unhappiness is depicted as her own fault, the consequence of her sinful efforts to pass.

  Bea grows up in a claustrophobic, middle-class household not unlike Hurst’s own. She lives close enough to hear but not see the exciting Atlantic City boardwalk, a none-too-subtle symbol of bourgeois restraints on women. The Chipleys’ world consists of “monotonous . . . minutiae of detail . . . automatic processes of locomotion and eating and sleeping” stuffed into a “little household . . . all cluttered like that, with littleness.” Mrs. Chipley’s early death obliges Bea to begin looking after her “exacting” father and the family’s boarder, Benjamin Pullman.

  Fannie Hurst.

  The men of the household, father and boarder, decide that Bea should marry Pullman, an unattractive, older pickle and maple syrup salesman. Bea resolves on going through with the sweet-and-sour marriage for the sake of “security!” and enters into a loveless union in which sex is “a clinical sort of something, apparently, that a girl had to give a man.” That “let down” is followed, in quick succession, by pregnancy, with its “perfectly terrible spells of morning nausea”; her father’s debilitating stroke; her husband’s sudden death in a train wreck; and the premature birth of her daughter, Jessie.

  To try to keep her family afloat, Bea uses her dead husband’s “B. Pullman” business cards and passes for a businessman. As “B. Pullman,” she does well, even better than her late husband. But it is not enough. She must be father, mother, and daughter, must “report back, every hour or less, to the house on Arctic Avenue that contained her father and child.” So she drifts “across the railroad tracks to the shanty district” to wander among the “what nots” who do domestic work and find domestic help. There she encounters Delilah, “the enormously buxom figure o
f a woman with a round black moon face that shone above an Alps of a bosom” and hires her on the spot. Delilah brings along her “three-month-old-chile” Peola, an infant as light-colored as Delilah is dark: “the purfectest white nigger baby dat God ever dropped down in de lap of a black woman from Virginie,” as Delilah describes her.

  Once established as a force of order in Bea Pullman’s kitchen, presiding “like a vast black sun over the troubled waters of the domestic scene,” Delilah, the wondrous “what not,” can turn to ensuring the success of Bea’s growing waffle house and coffee shop business. Bea’s “walkin’ trade-mark,” Delilah lets Bea market her as a “mammy to the world,” selling southern nostalgia to enervated northern city dwellers. Embodying the qualities of nurture and care that made whites such as southern writer Julia Peterkin label the “Mammy” a “credit” to her black race, Delilah helps Bea create a “rest cure” of comfort tucked into American modernity. Hurst’s “mammy,” finished without the benefit of Hurston’s keen eye, is a figure indistinguishable from the one that the Daughters of the Confederacy had hoped to honor, in 1923, in Atlanta, an image of the comfort and care sought by anxious whites, afraid of change. Black journalist Chandler Owen, among others, argued that it was high time for the nation to “let go” of its love of black mammies. “Let it fade away,” Chandler wrote. “Let it be buried. . . . We favor erecting a monument to the New Negro.” But Hurst, writing ten years later, did not “let go.” On the contrary, she used the “Old Negro” to create a memorable New Woman.