by Carla Kaplan
My sister Katie was the first to observe that by swishing her fingers she could produce certain noises with her knuckles and joints, and that the same effect could be made with the toes. Finding that we could make raps with our feet—first with one foot and then with both—we practiced until we could do this easily when the room was dark. . . . A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them. It is a very common delusion.
Some followers were devastated by the confessions of fraud, so much so that many refused to believe them, clinging tenaciously to the consolation that communicating with the dead had given them. The November 23, 1904, discovery of a man’s headless skeleton buried in the wet earth beneath a hidden inner foundation of the girls’ Hydesville home, along with recanted confessions by one of the sisters, bolstered their original story. For others, the body meant little. “What of it?” The New York Times asked. “It [the body] would only show that they were shrewd enough to exploit a local mystery to their own profit and the ludicrousness fooling, first, a few credulous rustics, and later a few hundred or thousand equally credulous urbanites.” Only those with “peculiarly constructed minds,” the Times maintained, would see corroboration in the body’s discovery. The Times, along with other national papers, inveighed against spiritualist “ghost-hunting” as nothing but “tricks” played by those “chiefly concerned with living without working.” Some contemporary clergy warned that spiritualism was an “incursion . . . [of] unclean and fallen spirits” and that “tampering with demons” would induce “degeneration.” For many, the spiritualists belonged in the same category as quacks, confidence men, and charlatans like John R. Brinkley, who promised sexual vitality to the thousands of unwitting patients who allowed him to surgically implant goat testicles into their scrotums, many dying under his hands. Others associated spiritualism with “black magic,” “devil worship,” and “witchcraft” and viewed believers as being under the sway of “mania,” “superstition,” “chicanery,” “epidemic delusion,” or worse.
The sisters remained, even long after their deaths, exemplars of the peculiarly American battles between faith and facts, tradition and rebellion. Thousands of followers remained loyal to them, in spite of everything. For believers, the Fox sisters’ strange saga was proof that society hounded nonconformists, an attitude that drew many to the spiritualists’ side: Mary Todd Lincoln, James Fennimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, abolitionists and feminists such as Isaac and Amy Post, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and others who were open-minded to unorthodox beliefs.
American and British scientists and professionals seeking to dissociate spiritualism from its discredited popular variant banded together to form the Society for Psychical Research. The organization attracted such members as William James (the president of the society from 1894 to 1895), the British physicist Oliver Lodge, and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Making spiritualism respectable was, nevertheless, an uphill battle. It called for unimpeachable scientific spokesmen. It also needed advocates of unimpugnable integrity. Rufus Osgood Mason presided over the establishment of the society’s New York chapter, wrote two books on hypnotism and telepathy, published half a dozen essays on “related phenomena” in medical journals, and produced a running column on the paranormal for The New York Times, passionately defending in his pages what the paper’s own editorialists were simultaneously decrying in theirs.
206 “heal . . . spirit”: Mason, “The Passing of a Prophet,” 875.
206 “every little mingapoop”: Mason to Locke, April 17, 1932, Collection of Mrs. Edmund Randolph Biddle and Stephen G. Biddle, Quakertown, Pa. (hereafter abbreviated Quakertown); Mason to Miguel Covarrubias, August 25, 1930, Quakertown.
206 “flaming pathway”: Mason to Locke, May 1, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
206 “magic bridge”: Mason to Locke, May 1, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
206 “As the fire burned in me”: Charlotte Osgood Mason to Alain Locke, May 1, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
206 He died at home: Certificate of death, Rufus Osgood Mason, May 11, 1903, State of New York, Certificate 14751.
207 Social healers offered orientalism: On the latter, especially, but also on the broader mass interest in cures, see Brock, Charlatan; Holbrook, The Golden Age of Quackery; Hoberman, Testosterone Dreams; Boyle, The Road to Wellville.
208 “the primitive element”: Mason to Locke, June 19, 1927, James Weldon Johnson, MSS 26, Box 111, Folder 2079, emphasis in original. “Anglo Saxon culture sucks the life blood out of the soul of art that is being born in this civilization,” she also noted. Charlotte Osgood Mason, February 20, 1927 [second entry], Alain Locke Notebook, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
208 “the most delectable”: James, Washington Square, 23.
208 liberal family: Her father, George, spent time at Brook Farm and married Anna Shaw, whose brother Robert led the all-black 54th Regiment from Massachusetts during the war.
208 “sincere, intense aversion”: Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 21. I am grateful to Michelle Patterson for sharing her biography with me in manuscript.
208 Robert Gould Shaw: Shaw’s self-sacrifice and his family’s insistence that he be buried with his black troops achieved for him an iconic status as a martyr for racial justice almost unmatched in American history (this status continued throughout the Harlem Renaissance and endures today in films such as Glory). He is enthroned as a white crusader for racial justice alongside John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, for example, in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Robert Gould Shaw” and Benjamin Brawley’s poem “My Hero.” See Bundy, The Nature of Sacrifice.
208 Anna’s sister, Josephine: See Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer and Bundy, The Nature of Sacrifice.
208 “The sphere of the family”: Curtis, Orations and Addresses, 230. 208 “moral courage”: Curtis, “Life of a Gifted Woman,” 17.
208 “whose sex forbade them”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Memorial Day: An Address Delivered May 30, 1884, at Keene, N.H., before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of the Republic,” anthologized in The Essential Holmes, ed. Posner, 80.
209 “I want to have”: Natalie Curtis to Elizabeth Day, June 29, 1890, Natalie Curtis Papers, Danbury, Conn., quoted in Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 43.
209 “warm interest”: Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 104.
209 “restless and rebellious women”: Babcock and Parezo, eds., Daughters of the Desert, 1.
209 “‘living ruins’”: Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 84.
209 “sunset hour”: Jean Toomer’s Cane, one of the most important works of the Harlem Renaissance, echoed that sense that “the sun is setting on a song-lit race of slaves, [but] it has not set.” “Song of the Son,” in Toomer, Cane.
209 “the direct utterance”; “age”: Curtis, The Indians’ Book, xxi, xxix.
209 “I resented”: Natalie Curtis Burlin to George Foster Peabody, October 16, 1921, quoted in Bredenberg, “Natalie Curtis Burlin.” Bredenburg is a relative of Natalie Curtis Burlin and maintains a website and some of her archive. I am grateful for the information he provided me in our interview of June 14, 2008, which confirmed that there are no letters between Curtis and Mason contained in the archives he maintains.
209 “the Southwest was quite literally overrun”: Lavender, Scientists and Storytellers, 21. Boas’s endorsement of fieldwork and support for women ethnographers was radical. His students sought to prove that gender, like race, was culturally constructed. They wanted “to explode assumptions about women’s natural capabilities by illustrating the ways in which women defied such classifications once cultural restrictions were removed.”
210 “staged authenticity” . . . “artist-demonstrators”: Weigle and Babcock, eds., The Great Southwest, 157. Weigle and Babcock are quoting here from Harvey House promotional and tourist materials. In addition to selling specially designed jewelry, beadwork, and small weavings for tourists, the Fred H
arvey Company amassed the nation’s finest collection of high-end artifacts, ensuring that wealthy collectors such as William Randolph Hearst would have to work through the company and its official-sounding “Indian Department” to acquire goods and making itself the key power broker to the new museums just then seeking to build their collections. Collecting was quickly becoming a race against time, and the Harvey House enterprise consolidated its control by employing most of the nation’s foremost anthropologists and ethnologists, paying them to collect and also to write copy: catalogs of the Harvey House collections and books, brochures, and printed material that could both legitimize the Harvey House collections and serve as travel information.
210 Mason and Curtis disdained: Curtis, “New Art in the West,” 17.
210 he invited Natalie to sing: Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, 314.
210 “closed completely that door to the [other] white man”: Charlotte Osgood Mason to Alain Locke, August 16, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC. Hurston, fascinated with the same phenomenon, later called it “feather bed resistance” and made the strategy a bedrock of her folklore collections and her own life strategies as well.
210 “speaks with the straight tongue”: Curtis, The Indians’ Book, xxiii. Some of their competitors, however, were far more skeptical. Mabel Dodge, resentful of other New Yorkers moving into a Southwest she hoped to claim for herself alone, described Curtis (she did not mention Mason) as blind to her own condescension. “I think she never knew the Indians laughed kindly at her way of singing Indian music,” she said, oblivious, perhaps, of the possibility—if she was right—that she, too, might have been the target of some “kindly” derision. Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert, Vol. 4, 70.
211 “monotonous barbaric chanting”: Curtis, “An American Indian Composer,” 626.
211 “a new way of packaging racism”: Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 59.
211 “What a problem”: Natalie Curtis to Aleš Hrdlièka, March 30, 1916, quoted in Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 193.
211 “Do we tend to become”: Curtis, The Indians’ Book, 584.
212 Max Eastman as Katherine’s private tutor: Max Eastman to Mrs. O. Mason, May 5, 1911, Box 4, Folder 33, Francis Biddle Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Georgetown University Library, Washington, D.C. (hereafter abbreviated Georgetown). Among other books he suggested in 1911, he stressed the need for Katherine to read Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class.
212 A matching third ring: I am grateful to Frances and Steve Biddle for this and other information shared during many conversations in Wellfleet, Mass., and Bryn Mawr, Pa.
212 “there is never quite paper enough”: Katherine Garrison Chapin to Francis Biddle, July 24, 1917, Box 1, Folder 2, Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle Papers.
212 Katherine’s descendants have told me: I am grateful to Schuyler Chapin, Frances Biddle, and Stephen Biddle for their time and candor.
213 “to keep extant”: Natalie Curtis to Dr. H. B. Frissell, May 7, 1911, quoted in Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 201.
213 “the country’s promise”: Curtis, “The Winning of an Indian Reservation,” 330.
213 Hampton Institute: Mason, as a Hampton donor, presumably approved its vocational model.
213 “Great Happiness” . . . “not in the Social Register”: Natalie Curtis to “Aunt Natalie,” May 27, 1917; A. Curtis to G. Curtis, August 18, 1917, quoted in Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 279, 282.
214 “Don’t, in your interest”: Natalie Curtis to “Friends,” July 13, 1921, quoted in Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 319.
214 “a kind of bible”: Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin, 232.
214 According to most sources: Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1; Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke; Huggins, Harlem Renaissance.
215 “I want,” she wrote: Charlotte Osgood Mason, “Fauset Notes,” October 9, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
215 “privilege . . . to build”: Charlotte Osgood Mason, “Committee African Art” notes, March 17, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC; Charlotte Osgood Mason, “Locke” notes, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
215 “father”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 57.
215 “the presentation of African Art”: Mason to Locke, Mason notebook, “A.L., Letters to Him,” April 1, 1928, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
215 Locke’s lecture: Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 220, 223.
215 “Nothing is more galvanizing”: Locke, The Critical Temper of Alain Locke, ed. Stewart, 409, quoted in Harris and Molesworth, Alain Locke, 222.
216 “we must believe”: Locke, “A Note on African Art.”
216 including Mason: A 2012–2013 exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde,” featuring the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection, among two others, did not mention Charlotte Mason’s name. In place of a formal exhibition catalog, the magazine Tribal Art devoted a special issue to the exhibition. Tribal Art, Special Issue 3, “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde,” 2012.
216 “natural, primitive, life-affirming”: North, The Dialect of Modernism, 27.
216 “African art”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 79; see also Locke, “The Legacy of Ancestral Arts,” in The New Negro, ed. Locke.
217 how the relationships felt: See the note on “affect studies,” page 359, note xxxi.
217 Those feelings blossomed: Mason notebook, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
217 “tremendous rapport”: Charlotte Osgood Mason, March 6, 1927, Alain Locke notes, Alain Locke notebook, Alain Locke Papers, MSPC.
217 “a relationship in which”: Harris and Molesworth, Alain Locke, 240, 237.
217 Both owned important pieces: Locke’s catalog lists her fetish totem masks, Bundu secret society mask and headdress, and his ceremonial fetish-figure dance mask. Exhibition catalog, “The Negro in Art Week, November 16–23.”
218 “I used to dream”: Charlotte Osgood Mason, “A” notes, March 18, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
218 “the dreams I had 47 years”: Mason to Locke, May 1, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
218 “happy in her heart”: Mason, “Steamer Letter to Alain Locke” (draft), June 29, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
218 What if “undeveloped Negroes”: Mason, “Committee African Art” notes, March 17, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
218 “weakening white civilization”: Mason, “Committee African Art,” notes, March 17, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC, 44.
218 “we have trampled”: Mason, memorandum, July 5, 1931, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
218 “white Negroes”: Mason, memorandum, June 19, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
218 “perfect contempt”: Mason, “Al” notes, February 20, 1927, and “Mr. Locke” notes, March 1, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
219 “You know I believe deeply”: Mason to Locke, August 25, 1929, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
219 “for a large measure”: Harris and Molesworth, Alain Locke, 241.
219 “godfather”: Wintz and Finkelman, eds., Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Vol. 1, 578.
220 “I believe we can transfigure”: Mason, undated notes, notebook labeled “Letters to Alain Locke, From February 16,” Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
220 “A Primitive light”: Mason, “Steamer Letter to Alain Locke,” June 29, 1927. Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
220 “This is unbelievable”: Mason to Locke, December 10, 1927, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
220 “sophisticated intellectual”: Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 104.
220 “little evidence”: Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in The New Negro, ed. Locke, 254.
221 “They are absolutely no use”: Charlotte Osgood Mason, “Memos. Negro-Art,” April 19, 1927, Alain Locke notes, Alain Locke notebook, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.
222 individual writers: Hughes dedicated his autobiography to Amy Spingarn and her husband, Joel. One of her dearest friends, he praised the “qu
iet way” she always did things. Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 122. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston inserted a cryptic acknowledgment of Spingarn’s assistance: “I am indebted to Amy Spingarn in a most profound manner. She knows what I mean by that.” Hurston, Dust Tracks, 228.
222 “the salvation of your people”: Mason to Hughes, September 9, 1928, MSS 26, Box 111, Folder 2079, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.
222 “I had loved very much”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 327.
222 “flaming pathway”: Mason to Locke, June 5, 1927, MSS 26, Box 111, Folder 2079, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.
222 “You are a golden star”: Mason to Hughes, September 9, 1928, Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.
222 “We don’t bore one another”: Hughes, notes, “Personal Papers,” Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.
223 “silent Indian chief”: Mason to Hughes, June 5, 1927, MSS 26, Box 111, Folder 2079, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.
223 “In the primitive world”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 311. According to Rampersad, this foreword was later cut. See Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 170.
223 “Laugh if you will”: Hurston, Dust Tracks, 128, 129.
224 Hurston called Mason: Hurston to Mason [December 1927], 111; May 18, 1930, 187–89; March 9, 1931, 211–12; April 18, 1931, 217–18; May 10, 1931, 218–19, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston.
