We do not know when Mary Locke began to decline. We do not even know what illnesses plagued her in her later years. But it is clear that as the 1920s dawned, Mary Locke was considerably less robust than she had been in the 1910s. We know that because of a remarkable photograph of Mrs. Locke, taken presumably sometime in the early 1920s, of her sitting peacefully in the second-floor apartment on R Street. Mary Locke is seated leaning on a Victorian parlor table with a slender vase next to her, looking into the camera with her soft eyes (see page 4). She is dressed in a beautiful embroidered shirt, her hair nicely uplifted back from her face, and she greets the camera with a controlled, but almost sad smile. She looks the part of the refined, contented, and dignified mother. She also looks considerably thinner and less vigorous than in the photographs of her during the 1913 trip to Bermuda. Now, she appears a bit frail, almost tired. Mary Locke had entered the last season of her life.
Locke responded to his mother’s decline in health in a variety of ways. For one, Locke stopped going to Europe in the early 1920s. He surmised that she could no longer stand the strain of a transatlantic crossing and the heavy walking required of European sightseeing. Instead, he found stateside resorts where they could vacation during the summers. He told one correspondent, “Mother and I have been in for repairs at Saratoga, at the summer resorts.”1 Although Locke did have a weak heart from his childhood bout with rheumatic fever, and suffered from gout and other common ailments from time to time, he was nonetheless a healthy individual. By exaggerating, if only so slightly, his own medical needs as his mother’s health declined, Locke preserved a bond with his mother that her advancing age threatened to sever. Locke had always identified with her—“took after her,” in the words of Metz T. P. Lochard, a Chicago Defender editor and close family friend—and that identification extended into her infirmity. In the early 1920s, illness bound them together just as wanderlust and sightseeing had linked them in the years he was abroad.
As Mary’s health declined in 1921, they were more cautious in the invitations they accepted with the upswing in their popularity as a couple at homes in Black Washington and with increasing demand for Locke’s assistance to Washington’s writers as a private critic. Mary needed more time to get dressed and greater recovery time from even the least stressful outing. In those downtimes when Locke was not teaching or providing her care, he ventured out to see his literary friends. After Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jean Toomer was becoming a closer friend. Entering an almost manic phase of writing in the early 1920s, Toomer wrote Locke frequently about his literary pursuits and often dropped by Locke’s apartment. Toomer was struggling to carve out a literary career for himself at a time when he was under considerable pressure from his father to choose a professional career such as teaching, medicine, or law. He seemed drawn to Locke as a sympathetic ally in the struggle to make a career as a writer and avoid the psychological death of sinking into a comfortably bourgeois professional career. Something in Locke’s council encouraged this rebellion, just as he himself had resisted as long as possible becoming a “professor.” Toomer dreamed of becoming the center of a literary salon and tried to enlist Locke in that effort. At his home at 1341 U Street, “I have managed to hold,” Toomer wrote Locke on January 26, 1921, “two meetings of a group (Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Miss Scott (of Howard), Mary Craft, E.C. Williams, Henry Kennedy, and myself) whose central purpose is an historical study of slavery and the Negro, emphasizing the great economic and cultural forces which have largely determined them.”2 The knitting together of the study of the material conditions of Black life with the “cultural forces” that “determined them” might be reminiscent of Locke’s consuming interest in his Race Contacts lectures, transcripts of which lay dormant in Locke’s drawer at 1326 R Street.
But Toomer’s reading group actually reflected his consuming search to define his racial identity and explore “the actual place and condition of the mixed blood group in this country.” He admitted, “The subjects may be a trifle elementary for you, but now that we seem to be underway, I certainly would like to have you join us … whenever the time will permit. And if she would enjoy it, bring Mrs. L by all means.”3 When Toomer later referred to this aborted literary salon in his thinly veiled autobiographical play, “Natalie Mann,” the play’s hero and Toomer’s alter ego, Nathan Merilh, claimed his salon failed because its society matrons would not allow expressions of real emotion and creativity at the meetings. In real life, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Mary Burrill, the actual salon’s female participants, were anything but society matrons. Toomer’s salon actually failed because he left Washington for a teaching job in Georgia and discovered that in the South, “there is poetry here—and drama, but the atmosphere for one in my position is almost prohibiting.” It also catalyzed his voice as a Black writer and led him to produce in his novel Cane “something … that will surprise most people, if not yourself,” as he wrote Locke.4
Even had Toomer stayed put, Locke probably would not have joined a group grounded in Toomer’s obsession with his racial origins and not one Locke would have subjected Mary Locke to. But Locke was probably flattered by Toomer’s invitation, which symbolized his growing stature in the Black literary world of Washington and in Toomer’s life. From 1921 to 1922, Toomer let Locke read and criticize much of the poetry that he published in the Little Review, the Double-Dealer, and the Broom, which was some of the best African American poetry written at the time. It was good that such an emerging poetic talent valued his counsel. Locke was at the center of what could soon be called a literary movement, though not its publicly recognized leader.
As early as February 1922, Mary Locke’s close friend, Helen Irvin, warned Locke that his mother did not seem well. “I have been exceedingly anxious about her, recently. You know how brave she always is and how nonchalant in speaking of her own condition, but I haven’t at all liked recent little things that I could read between the lines of her letters.”5 Because these letters have not survived, we do not know whether Locke agreed with Irvin’s observations or had already surmised that his mother was dying. On April 23, just two months later, Mary Locke passed.
Locke reacted well, at least initially. As his lover and friend William Crusor George wrote later, such self-control was a basic tenet of Locke’s personal philosophy: one should take “otherwise ‘bad news’ in an unusual manner … [and] instead of being blue or sulky … [be] happy and lively.”6 Yet even Locke had to acknowledge that in his effort to deal with the shock of her loss, he had to indulge a few “idiosyncrasies,” as he put it to Helen Irvin. His most public idiosyncrasy was inviting twelve of their closest friends to a wake in his house. Locke later claimed that he and his mother had discussed her death in detail and had agreed that a funeral and cemetery burial were unnecessary and that something simple and genuinely spiritual was more appropriate. That image was communicated to a friend of Helen Irvin, who had attended. “I had a really beautiful letter from Miss Hunt. … She spoke of the very sweet natural picture that your mother made lying there on the couch in her pretty grey dress with just a few blossoms here and there and none of the heavy scent that one usually associates with such occasions.” Further, “I have always felt that Dr. Locke’s influence over his students must be strengthened by his devotion to his mother and his tender care of her—and I am sure that this last scene will remain with them all their lives, to help them see life whole with death, a beautiful part of it.”7
The wake appeared to some as an appropriate way to honor a great mother love. Another interpretation surfaced among some of his mother’s peers. A fascination with the details of the setting persisted long after the event, which entered Black Victorian Washington’s folklore through numerous retellings of the story, especially the rumor that Locke seemed to continue to speak to Mary Locke as if she were alive. It was as if they were just socializing “at home.” What those who snickered or howled realized and then expressed, rather untactfully, was that there was something pathological in his love for his mother.
Almost as controversial as the wake was his decision to have Mary Locke cremated. Isabella Claphan, of the rooming house that was Mary Locke’s last Camden home, expressed the typical sentiment of the time: “was sorry that you had your mother’s body cremated.”8 Most Christians opposed cremation because such destruction was believed to eliminate the possibility of a resurrection of the body. Some argued that the insistence on burial reflected the self-interest of the clergy, who historically owned the burial grounds. It seems surprising that a good Christian like Mary Locke would agree to this departure. Locke’s needs may have played a great part in this decision. Not only was cremation cheaper but served Locke’s emotional need to keep his mother close at hand. Locke kept the urn that contained her ashes on the mantel of the fireplace. It was powerful enough years later that Countee Cullen, a Black poet who stayed over at their apartment one night while Locke was away, spent the night walking the streets of Washington, rather than sleep in the apartment alone with Mrs. Locke. In some ways, she had not left.
In other ways, it was brutally clear to Locke that she was gone. For most people, of course, the death of one’s mother is one of the most traumatic experiences of life. But for Locke the impact was heightened by the lack of a spouse or a family to lean on in such a crisis. His mother’s death highlighted how alone he was as a single, gay, Black male in Washington, D.C. Locke did have a small circle of friends, and it was one of these, Georgia Douglas Johnson, who came forward and tried to fill the enormous psychological vacuum of his mother’s death.
It would be several years before he would complete his grieving, and, in another sense, the gaping hole in his life would not be filled until he found another mother figure. Meanwhile, he had to live with the recognition that he had lost the one person who provided him with unqualified love and adoration. With her departure, moreover, Locke sought an immediate substitute for some of the affection he had lost. Suddenly, he was a little more desperate in his search for friends and freed to pursue them more aggressively than ever before. No longer would he have to rush back from events to make sure that she was all right. No longer would he have to share the apartment with her and be limited in the kinds of activities he could pursue with friends and lovers. Yet his newfound freedom came at a considerable cost. Without his mother to help him maintain his balance, his emotional life would become a series of highs and lows dominated by his interactions with friends and lovers. Having lost his symbiotic partner in life, the newly vulnerable Locke lacked the emotional pillar that had enabled him to be aloof and uninvolved with even those he cared about. From now on, Locke would need much more from those he called Mon cher, and when they failed to deliver it, his rage at their disappointments could reach self-destructive proportions.
A case in point was his relationship with William George, a young man of sixteen when Locke met him in 1920. Locke had asked William’s older brother, John George, whether he would work for Locke as a secretary during the summer, and when John was busy, William offered his services. Having already “completed three years in the business department at Dunbar High School,” as his first letter to Locke announced, William believed he was well qualified for the job.9 Locke took William up on his offer. But while satisfying the need for someone to type his letters, which Locke later described as the “pretext of serious work,” Locke developed romantic feelings for William, which Locke apparently struggled to control even before Mary Locke’s death. An undated letter written by George to Locke suggests that George seemed to appreciate the relationship as well. “Before I begin work,” William wrote, “I must tell you how much I enjoyed my stay last night.” William’s visits to the apartment had already shifted from solely work sessions to “engagements,” during which Locke introduced William to classical music, discussed the boy’s future plans, and gave advice. As was the case in Locke’s attachment to “the children” during his second year at Oxford, Locke’s adult romantic attachments almost always exhibited a parental dimension. Emotions of a different character are revealed by Locke’s handwritten note at the bottom of another of William’s letters. “Tuesday—9,15—Two letter scene—took the love letter—Even came—ice cream walked out Mass Avenue with … [He] ran off for rehearsal. Wednesday—9,15 Walk—R St New Hampshire—sat in Sheridan arch—walked out Mass ave returned R St. Mother Courtship days—I am afraid those will never come. William Alain Home—first welcome kiss.”10 Locke’s note suggests that he may have discussed this growing infatuation with his mother, and then lamented that the “courtship days” she enjoyed with his father Pliny would “never come” to him. Given that Locke was primarily attracted to late-teenage boys, it was certainly true that he would probably never have the kind of peer relationship of courtship that his parents had enjoyed. Mary Locke may have helped him keep some perspective on such attachments and advised him to manage such relationships so that they did not threaten his position as a Black professional in Washington.
On April 2, three weeks before Mary Locke’s death, Locke and George ended their professional and friendly relationship—at least for a while. Some light is thrown on George’s feelings by an undated letter he wrote after the breakup.
Now that this matter is past and had been forgotten, I hate to refer to it. I felt that many nasty little remarks made by fellows whom I knew you had befriended and by fellows who knew nothing at all about you. I felt these remarks deeply because I knew they weren’t true and the more I’d either refute or argue these statements the more the fellows would kid. I did not seem to mind so much as far as I was concerned for I didn’t give a damn, but in the presence of a group of folks it was of course embarrassing. It hurt me to know how fellows you had helped and who seemed to be your friends could say such things knowing they weren’t true. I am sure this had some kind of psychological effect on me for I found coming to work a more and more difficult task even though I knew that the remarks were lies. You probably understand. I guess the climax came when we broke off.11
For his part, Locke may have come to feel that the relationship had reached a dead end: William’s naiveté suggests that Locke had kept their relationship platonic and may have felt that it was no longer worth the effort.
Two weeks after Mary Locke’s death, Locke resumed his relationship with George. He asked the eighteen-year-old to write a letter outlining his future plans and to include a copy of his academic record. William complied but confessed, “I am ashamed to show [the record] to you because I am afraid you will be disappointed.” Locke also recommended they resume their prior connection, which William quickly accepted. “You[r] proposition appeals to me not only because I know that association with you means advancement mentally and in maturness [sic] but because I feel you are a true friend and seem interested in my advancement,” although William also confessed that he could not see why Locke was so interested in him, given his modest intellectual and cultural attainments.12 Their resolution to be friends again, however, collapsed on George’s inability to keep their appointments. On May 17, George wrote and apologized for not showing up and gave as his excuse that on his way over he met up with “the ‘gang’ and they persuaded me to go to the Dunbar Theatre. I am not usually persuaded as I have a vary stubborn will.” Perhaps he was subjected to peer pressure not to spend the evening with Dr. Locke. A week later, George, adopting a more defiant tone, asserted, “between being fagged out by this war weather and doing extra work for Mr. Lucas—I find little time—if any—[to] get around. I do not think I can possibly get around again until after the first when I shall be glad to offer my rotten services.”13
Apparently that was not good enough. On or around May 28, Locke wrote the following letter to William’s mother. “I regret to inform you that I have been compelled to address the following letter to your son William.
Dear Mr. George,
Very shortly after the discontinuance of our business and personal relations on April second, one might have expected of any gentleman the return of my apartment keys. I requested them ten days ago, and again yesterday: it is not a matter that you could likely have forgotten.
I am sorry to have to drop consideration and gentility in the few remaining dealings it is necessary for us to have. I consider it now to be my duty to inform your parents of my reasons for discontinuing employment and friendship. I shall expect you to sign a personal note for your indebtedness from April 2nd, advance payment in the sum of thirty-five dollars, to be paid on or before August 31st, and I shall adjust any further outstanding matters only through your parents as your representatives.
With best wishes for your future, in spite of the attitude your behaviour has made necessary, I remain, very truly yours.
I am myself partly to blame I suppose, in the over-sympathetic manner I have treated William, but I have regrettably found it impossible to continue without loss of self-respect on my part, and character damage on his. His chief fault has been utter irresponsibility. I have no desire to cause him chagrin or chastisement, but feel it my duty to hold myself to any account you may wish to have me make of the situation as it has arisen and exists between us. If you require none, then I shall merely request that you see that he discharges the obligations mentioned in my letter to him.14
This suddenly hostile change in attitude toward friends and lovers would become a Locke trademark in the 1920s—a vindictive rage that had been better managed while his mother was living. Now, there was no one with sufficient credibility in his life to make him hold back once someone violated one of his cardinal rules. Suddenly, as later friends would acknowledge, Locke, the ultimate friend of budding young talents, could turn into a monster. William’s reply shows how devastated he was by Locke’s blow. “Dear Dr. Locke, I am heart-broken—I’ve never felt so bad in all my life. It would not have been so bad if mother had not seen the letter but she did see it and is worried to such an extent that I’m sick. She, of course, thinks everything—that I have gotten in trouble or something like that. I’ve explained to her as best I could & hope this evening everything will be straightened out. I am sorry, so sorry, that I did keep the keys for such a length of time and could give you no excuse other than what I told you. I know how highly you value promptness & should have returned the keys.” By retaining the keys, William compromised Locke’s privacy and heightened his sense of vulnerability that William or his friends could walk right into his flat whenever he pleased. Such a degree of access was excruciating to Locke, but what Locke was really mad about was that William was not using the keys to come by and spend time with him, that he had made and broken several engagements, and that he had, in the final analysis, deserted him. William disappointed him at a time in his life when he desperately needed companionship. In that sense, Locke’s letter was not completely honest about his reasons for being angry at William, and William was smart enough to point it out. “You[r] letter stated that ‘working & friendly relations ceased to exist.’ I did not know that friendly relations had ceased to exist for you gave me the distinct impression that we would at least be friends.” They had continued to be friends, actually closer friends than Locke would have liked Mrs. George to know. But once George had shown himself to be unreliable—again—Locke turned on William. William acknowledged:
I had noted your manner toward me and at once felt a great change & often wondered why you seemed so hostile. I did not know that by not giving the keys back what an ungentlemanly or ill-mannered thing I was doing. … I should have agreed the day I quit to settle the balance with you when I got work this summer. I can[’]t go on,
Sincerely
Wm. C. George
I often thought of calling to see you but your manner was so hostile & changed that I was perplexed. WCG15
What often surprised Locke’s friends about the sudden eruption of hostility toward them was that it seemed so out of proportion to the transgressions that produced it. In truth, when his friends or lovers failed him in some minor obligation, it triggered a realization in Locke that they could never deliver the kind of unqualified regard he had received from his mother. William’s error was that he had failed to dedicate himself to pleasing the older man who took such an unusual interest in him. On one level, it was simply a matter of sex: Locke wanted William, and yet had to be careful not to make his desires too explicit. Locke was angry that William did not understand and reacted similarly to those who were later physically intimate with him. Beyond sex, Locke wanted William to put the rest of his life on hold while he devoted himself to fulfilling Locke’s needs. Though Locke knew on a common-sense level that such devotion was unlikely, if not impossible, for another adult—especially a young adult like William—he still stubbornly demanded it and became enraged when he realized he would not be getting it any time soon. Less naive young men also found Locke’s hostility difficult to understand because the violations of Victorian propriety (the returning of keys, paying of minor debts, unwillingness to keep appointments) that triggered Locke’s rage were minor compared to Locke’s infinitely more serious transgressions of Victorian morality—the frankly sexual agenda he carried into many of these relationships with men. But for Locke, homosexuality carried with it no moral baggage whatsoever: for him, his main concern about sexuality was whether it contributed to or detracted from one’s creativity. Sex was morally neutral to him. But he did recognize the power of conventions in sexual areas, and in subsequent letters to William that summer in which Locke apologized indirectly for his vindictive attack, he not only admitted that “I love you,” but that his “greatest problem and concern is to keep it within the bounds of convention, and to make it function helpfully in your life.”16 Locke could not control the intensity of his feelings and find an acceptable outlet for them within the bounds of a conventional relationship.
Finally, Locke realized that their relationship had no real chance of success as a romantic, loving relationship, and, accepting that, he let William go. “My dear George, Please feel that I appreciate your motives and intuitions—but I quite understand the tragic impossibility as well. I have experienced this sort of thing before. Please let me help you with your school plans just to repay you for what you have already done for me—for even the hope of a few weeks has been a beautiful experience and will be a beautiful memory.”17 William did continue to drop by from time to time, and as Locke prepared for his summer trip to Europe, he and William agreed that the latter would continue to serve as an intermittent secretary, especially while Locke was abroad. That kind of relationship was still within the “bounds of convention,” and he would have to be satisfied with it. He needed to get away for several reasons—not only to ameliorate the pain of his mother’s death but also to distance himself from the pain of the impossible love that he could not enjoy in Washington, D.C.
Even before this explosion in his relationship with William, Locke had invited Dickerman to accompany him to Europe. Such companionship was now even more desirable, and it was one that was socially acceptable. Even Helen Irvin approved. Unfortunately, by the end of June, Dickerman informed him that he could not make the trip; Locke went ahead, obtained second-class tickets on the SS Aquitania, and sailed from New York Harbor on Independence Day.
Leaving America behind invigorated Locke’s muse. From on board he mailed two poems to William George, “Mon Cher, You will find enclosed two manuscript poems. They both grew out of the one I spoke of. Please copy them very carefully. Double space on separate sheets and type at the bottom ‘Submitted for publication in The Dial.’ Mail to ‘Editorial Rooms. The Dial, 152 West 13th St. New York City’—putting my return address, 1326 R Str both on the Manuscript and the envelope.” Technically, the poems had been inspired by this new relationship, but it was only upon leaving America that Locke had been able to write them. “You may keep the manuscript copy as souvenirs of June 29th and 30th—if you wish. … Do you like them?”18 Rather quickly after his mother’s death, Locke’s relationship with George had escalated, now encompassing secretary, romantic interest, confidant, and erstwhile muse. But it was the trip that was really helping Locke. “We have splendid weather—I am writing almost constantly—proof that it is Washington and not softening of the brain (as I had begun to fear.) … ”
To get back to the ship—most of us are just eating, drinking, dozing[.] There are several splendid musicians aboard—I used to write a great many letters from the café’s abroad—where there is always good music—it made a difference in the letters—they weren’t so prosy. You may get one or two prose-poems of the sort—don’t take them too seriously—if you don’t understand or like them, put them aside—and I’ll put them in my diary when I get back. … Sincerely your friend, Alain Locke.19
Sailing across the Atlantic released Locke from the double consciousness of being Black and being gay that constrained his creative life in Washington. While he flirted with William George in private, in public Locke had to fit his identity within the heterosexually defined reality of Black Washington. He had to be on guard constantly to cloak his sexual interests to avoid the social stigma of being a public homosexual. Of course, among certain persons, such as the boys with whom William hung around, Locke’s sexual orientation was known. But in Black bourgeois Washington, it was ambiguous. To keep it that way, Locke had to sustain an identity that was consistent with a heterosexually defined and socially validated definition of male when participating in conventional social situations, either up at Howard or at others’ homes.
Locke was living out a gay version of Du Bois’s conception, popularized in The Souls of Black Folk, of “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness … two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”20 No wonder it was difficult for Locke to be creative in Washington, where his survival as a member of the Black bourgeoisie demanded he suppress his real feelings and wear the mask. Abroad no one cared whether he was gay or not, so he could drop the mask. Locke’s life struggle would be to merge his “double self,” as Du Bois put it, “into a better and truer self.”21 On this trip to Europe, Locke was able to achieve a little bit of that by giving poetic—still metaphoric, but nevertheless public—expression to his new love. Locke’s elation was also related to questions of class. On board the Aquitania, Locke could live the life of the leisure class—eating gourmet food, drinking fine wine, enjoying the company of orchestra musicians—with an intimacy impossible in segregated Washington and he could believe himself to be just another member of the middle or upper class steaming his way to Europe on vacation.
Even so, Locke’s mood was tempered by his loss of his mother, which he sensed peculiarly at sea. Thoughts of his own mortality and what would happen if he suddenly died crowded his mind. His feelings led him to pen his first will. “I Alain Locke, being of sound [mind] and mentally and legally competent to decide … name Helen Irvin Grossley … as my sole executor or in event of her death or incapacity Arthur W. Claphan of 579 Stevens St., Camden.” The choice of Helen Irvin was not surprising: not only had she been his mother’s closest friend, but in the month after the funeral, she had tried to comfort him in his loss and suggest ways that he give up his apartment and store his effects—including the urn of his mother’s ashes—while he was away. While he did not give up the apartment, he did store his most valuable items in a safety deposit box. She had also wondered whether he would be willing to send her the letters he had written his mother from Harvard and Oxford, so that she might edit them for publication. Again, he had demurred, but something of her interest was reflected in his decision, in the rest of the will, to give his “manuscripts, books, and papers … and ornamental ware, pictures etc to Mrs. Helen B. Grossley.” He willed his “clothing and personal articles or such of them as he may desire to [his] cousin, Ross Baker Hawkins,” whom Locke shunned for the most part. Finally, he gave $200 to a memorial to St. Mary’s Chapel in the name of his mother, “$500 for the publication of any manuscript or memorial volume and the balance of the estate to be given to Howard University toward some worthy object such as student aid, English or Drama prizes, or the scholarship fund as in view of the amount available my executor may deem best.” If some foundation or scholarship were to be established, he wished it to “bear the memorial name of my parents, Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke rather than my own, in honour of their great sacrifices for me. It is my idea that whatever memorial of mine beyond my life work in the institution there should be the donation of my pupils, whom I urge to give freely to their alma mater.” Without a family or children of his own to whom he could give his legacy, Howard University, despite all of his criticism of it, and its students, surfaced at this moment as the surrogate family to receive his patrimony.
For the moment, Locke was leaving all that behind as he slipped into Southampton, spent a few days in London, and went to Paris, where he arrived on Bastille Day. A lot had changed since he was last in Europe. He now had money—after years of working at a fairly good job and saving as much as he could. And with his mother dead and prying eyes of America far behind him, Locke could now indulge without any obvious restraints. In a sense, he was attempting to subsume his mother’s loss in affection from other men. And he could now pay for those sexual favors, unlike during his student days in Berlin. Before leaving Washington, he had pestered Georgia Douglas Johnson for Claude McKay’s address in New York, because Locke knew, from some previous meeting, that the Jamaican-born poet, who was bisexual, knew of a particularly good gay brothel in Paris. Unfortunately for Locke, by the time that Johnson obtained McKay’s address, Locke had already sailed.
After stopping at his favorite hotel to bathe and change clothes, Locke bought a ticket to the opera, ate a quick dinner at his favorite restaurant, Duval, and made his way directly to the Champs-Élysées, the boulevard of promenading gays in Paris. For the next five days, Locke would spend almost every evening at the opera, dining at his excellent but inexpensive restaurant, and then cruising the Champs-Élysées. The culmination of his sexual escapades in Paris would come Saturday night, when he returned from the boulevards, changed the ribbon in his hat, and went to a “Homo Ball” at “Madeline till 12:15.”22 For the first time in a long time, Locke could relax in an environment where he was comfortable.
That sense of freedom and acceptance catalyzed his ability to produce his first essay of the Negro Renaissance. Following a brief visit to the World War battlefields just outside Paris, Locke returned to London for a week and worked on his essay on the theater for the Crisis that Du Bois had invited him to write in March 1921. Perhaps to gain inspiration, he took a day trip to Stratford-on-Avon to view Shakespeare’s old Globe Theatre. In the shadow of that monument to English drama, Locke seemed to imagine that the Negro theater movement possessed a similar potential to be to African American life and culture what Shakespeare’s drama had done for the English. European art and culture always had functioned in this double way for Locke—as a vantage point outside of American conditions from which to view African American creativity and as a model for what that creativity could become. Thinking of Black theater in the context of Shakespeare not only held up a superlative standard for Black playwrights to emulate, but symbolized that larger significance of the Negro drama for world history. As such, Shakespeare had made a universal contribution by expanding the pathos and comedy of Elizabethan life into a drama for all of humanity, which the Negro dramatist must always aspire to, even if he or she failed in the attempt. In embracing Shakespeare’s model, Locke was drawing attention to Shakespeare’s achievement—that of making English drama the standard for world drama and the English Renaissance the model for the coming Negro Renaissance.
“Steps Toward the Negro Theatre” was his most inspired piece of writing yet, one in which he found his critical voice and established his critical posture on Black literature for the 1920s. In this article, Locke fused together the two sides of his professional identity—that of the aesthete of his Emile Verhaeren essay and the race spokesperson of “Race Contacts.” Locke went beyond Montgomery Gregory’s frankly promotional piece for the New Republic by issuing a challenge to the actors, playwrights, and patrons of Negro drama and thereby establishing himself as the conscience of the Black aesthetic movement:
Culturally we are abloom in a new field, but it is yet decidedly a question as to what we shall reap—a few flowers or a harvest. That depends upon how we cultivate this art of the drama in the next few years. We can have a Gilpin, as we have had an [Ira] Aldridge—and this time a few more—a spectacular bouquet of talent, fading eventually as all isolated talent must; or we can have a granary of art, stocked and stored for season after season. It is a question of interests, of preferences—are we reaping the present merely or sowing the future? For the one, the Negro actor will suffice; the other requires the Negro drama and the Negro theatre.23
Here was a demand that the race build something permanent in the history of the art.
Key to Locke’s argument was the notion that just living off of the momentary success of Black actors in roles created by White playwrights and performed before predominantly White audiences was not enough. Black actors were handicapped by the commercial theater, which forced them to appear in blackface and in vaudevillian comedies if they wanted to make a living as an actor. “Our art in this field must not only be rescued from the chance opportunity and the haphazard growth of native talent, the stock must be cultivated beyond the demands and standards of the market-place, or must be safe somewhere from the exploitation and ruthlessness of the commercial theatre and in the protected housing of the art-theatre flower to the utmost perfection of the species.”24 Only a Negro theater endowed by such a major Black university as Howard University could provide the kind of hothouse an authentic Black drama needed to survive.
Why Locke relied so much on the flower metaphor in this essay on the theater remains a mystery. His choice may have been inspired by something as mundane as the fields of lilies he had seen growing out of the grave-filled battlefields he had visited. Or it may have been inspired by The Flowering of New England, a book on the American Renaissance of the 1800s written by his classmate, Van Wyck Brooks, and published that year. The flower metaphor worked better than the renaissance for Locke now because, in truth, what he imagined was more of a flowering than a rebirth. Flowers also highlighted the delicacy of what Locke proposed. Locke wanted a drama that was devoted to Beauty in a way not predominant in American theater. This new race drama had its strongest analogies in the university drama centers of White America and not in the thriving Black commercial theater circuit, which was still dominated by “stereotyped caricature and superficially representative but spiritually misrepresentative force … of the ‘bootstrap-lifting kind,’ from the pioneer advances of Williams, Cole, Cook, and Walker, to the latest achievements of ‘Shuffle Along.’ ” In that world, “the dramatic side has usually sagged … below the art level”; what the Howard Players sought when they began collecting for a Negro theater was an alternative to the commercial Howard Theatre on its doorstep. There was the rub—the Black community was being asked to patronize and support an intellectual drama of little commercial appeal. Locke knew that such a demand was probably premature in 1922, but he wanted to raise the self-consciousness of his community as to why this was important to do.
Even more remarkable was Locke’s willingness to expose how contested the movement was in establishing a non-propagandistic drama in the Black community. He recounted, for example, the struggle within the Washington branch of the NAACP, which broke apart over the issue of propaganda plays. “If ever the history of the Negro drama is written without the scene of a committee wrangle, with its rhetorical climaxes after midnight—the conservatives with their wraps on protesting the hour; the radicals, more hoarse with emotion than effort, alternately wheedling and threatening—it will not be well-written.” As he went on to admit, “the movement has, of course, had its critics and detractors,” most of whom merely suffered from shortsightedness. Ironically it was more difficult to get plays written and performed that focused on the Black theme than those that focused on so-called universal themes. And those plays that merely dramatized the race problem had more immediate support than those that explored the culture and community of Black people as it was lived. Locke left the distinct impression that the tradition of caricatured misrepresentation in the larger American commercial theater had left the Black intellectual community afraid lest any exploratory theater produce more grist for the mill of American racism.
In “Steps Towards a Negro Theatre,” Locke seemed to have found the courage to voice the criticisms and concerns that had animated him and Gregory in 1916 when they left the NAACP Drama Committee. For example, even as important as were the achievements of the Howard University Dramatic Club since that time, Locke boldly suggested that Negroes could not achieve this transformative cultural flowering alone. Success would require more than simply the best effort of Blacks; Whites would also be involved, necessarily, in fostering the conditions for a viable Negro theater. “A movement of this kind and magnitude is, can be, the monopoly of no one group, no one institution, no paltry decade.” Locke’s essay was to sell the Black bourgeois community on the importance of a Negro theater as not a segregated theater, but a way into changing the whole basis and tenure of culture in America. By linking his argument to Shakespeare, Locke was trying to get the attention of the Black bourgeoisie who read the Crisis and who, as he suggested, were more comfortable attending plays by Shakespeare than patronizing plays on the Black experience in America. What he intended in the reference to Shakespeare was that the English people had become a great people because they nurtured, supported, and celebrated the work of their playwrights, and if Black people wanted to become great, they would have to do the same. Like the educational courses accompanying the summer Shakespeare festival, he called for the African American bourgeoisie to support the educational programming of the Howard University theater movement. Just as the Italian Renaissance needed a classical, Grecian model to inspire its creative modernity, so too a Black American Renaissance, taking place in the center of what was still a largely English culture, could not err in getting its inspiration from the greatest English playwright who had ever lived. Shakespeare and the English Renaissance represented the refined aesthete in Locke, the man of old-world values and conservative nationalism.
Why had it taken Locke so long to articulate his critique of Negro culture as well as its possibilities? Was it his desire to fit in to Washington as he came back from Howard? Or was he waiting for the demonstration of the success of the psychological drama in the Howard Players program that he and Gregory put together to assert that a non-didactic Negro drama could say something important without being embarrassing? Or was it that he had become too comfortable nestled with mother in northwest Washington to be fundamentally intellectually rebellious? One factor may have been that staying in the United States caring for his mother and building his brand at Howard University had cut him off from the cosmopolitan sampling of elite culture that was like food for Locke’s muse. He saw Othello performed at the Shakespeare festival on August 5, and it symbolized for him what the Negro theater could accomplish. For Desdemona had seen through Othello’s “visage” to the beauty of his mind and Shakespeare had done the same—seen through the prejudices of Elizabethan England to the mental genius of the Moor. Shakespeare’s transcendence served as a metaphor for what Locke hoped the Negro theater would accomplish in America—express the Negro mind. Sure, Blacks had music; but Locke believed, somewhat unfairly, that Black music did not communicate the ideas that an intellectually rigorous Black culture needed under modernism. Locke had a point. Within the American context, musical genius was qualified, compartmentalized, and ultimately marginalized as a sign of Negro genius but also a devalued symbol of entertainment, frivolity, and nonsense since the days of Thomas Jefferson.
One other factor was pivotal—for six years Locke had suppressed the subversive side of his personality, the rake who loved checking out the new clubs in London that de Fonseka had spoken of years ago, visiting brothels in Paris, cruising Champs-Élysées, and diving into queer culture of Berlin. Finally, he was able to indulge that side of his personality and it catalyzed something in him. After two weeks in England punching out his obligatory article to the Crisis, Black America’s quintessential Victorian monthly, Locke was ready to enjoy the pursuit of sex and raucous entertainment in the city he called “home.” Arriving August 14 at Berlin’s Banhof Station, Locke took the elevated to Unter den Linden, where he stopped in Thomas Cook and Sons to see if he had received any forwarded mail from such people as Helen Irvin, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and even William George. Berlin was far enough away from America that he could be truly anonymous, since almost nothing that he did there would get back to the United States. Berlin allowed him the opportunity to don his personality as the gentleman rake, who searched the Passage at the intersection of Unter den Linden and Freidrichstrasse for young men on the make. On his last visit Locke had had his mother along and though she “understood,” he had not been as free to sample the Passage’s offerings as he had been in his student days. With Germany’s disastrous run of postwar inflation thousands were plunged into poverty, which stimulated prostitution. Americans like Locke had their pick of the trade.
Berlin during the 1920s was a street theater, where bars, cabarets, nudie nightclubs, and traditional theaters developed revues and vaudevillian entertainment to attract the paying tourist. Berlin became a showplace for the well-heeled visitor, whether European or American, as street barkers, pimps, male and female prostitutes, and every sort of entrepreneur vied with one another for the visitors’ non-German money. Berlin possessed an urban energy and excitement that exceeded all other capitals. Increasingly in the rest of Germany, resentment grew against Weimar sexual permissiveness and cosmopolitan openness to foreigners and ultimately crystallized into rank-and-file German support for the increasingly violent right-wing nationalism that labeled the freewheeling lifestyle of Berlin, and especially its Jewish intellectuals, as threats to the “real” Germany. Just two months before Locke arrived, Germany’s popular Jewish foreign minister, the millionaire industrialist Walter Ratheau, had been killed in his chauffeured automobile in broad daylight. Perhaps another part of postwar Berlin’s attraction to Locke was this tension between its sexual and intellectual freedoms and its foreboding quality of violence and horror that eventually would sweep away such liberalisms.
Berlin also attracted Locke because of its modernist theater, which had blossomed after the war into a political critique of the generals and the bourgeoisie who had led Germany into that disastrous war. The abdication of the kaiser in November 1918 had precipitated a revolutionary period in Germany, during which Bavaria became communist and writer Ernst Toller became the head of the “Red Army,” before social democratic forces overwhelmed Munich in 1919 and consigned Toller to prison. Afterward, many writers and artists continued to sympathize with the workers and soldiers who had dared to attempt to create a revolutionary Germany. The armed struggle revitalized the prewar Expressionist movement in art and the theater, within its postwar mission of opposing the nationalist forces that Toller and other artists believed were leading Germany into another catastrophe. Such playwrights wrote, and traditional and working-class theaters produced, a stream of plays that hammered away at the national leadership and German bourgeoisie for their complicity in the war and the counter-revolution, and yet articulated faith in the spiritual transformation they believed was still possible for the German people.
Locke saw some of these plays on his second night in Berlin. He visited Max Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Berlin’s huge auditorium that sat more than five thousand people, and saw four plays by Expressionist and Dadaist playwrights. C. F. W. Behl’s “Sakrament der Erde” (The Sacrament of the Earth) began with a soliloquy from Ernst Toller’s “Requiem”—“They have killed him, The Man of Merciful Eyes, The Man of true heart”—and concluded with a long lament to those imprisoned and murdered. That evening Locke also saw a scene from Toller’s unpublished drama, “Hinkemann,” written during his imprisonment at the fortress of Niederschonenfeld. The scene presented at the Grosses Schauspielhaus in 1922 was a dialogue from the play in which Eugene Hinkemann, the invalid, who was castrated during the war, asks a member of the petite bourgeoisie what he should do now that the war is over and his faith in the “imperialist” conflict has been shaken. The man tries to reassure Hinkemann with realism: “Only peaceniks believe the ideas. Have no misgivings about the affair. People want blood! Blood!!”25 Unfortunately, Hinkemann cannot make himself understand or truly believe that such war is really in the people’s interest or what the people desire. When the complete play was performed in Dresden in 1923, it resulted in a political upheaval and a vociferous debate about the theater. Locke, therefore, got a preview of one of the Weimar period’s most controversial plays, which showed the Berlin theater at its most self-critical. As Ludwig Marcuse’s “Der Kampf ums Theater,” the last play performed that evening, attested, there was a war going on in the Berlin theater.
Perhaps the most disturbing offering of the evening was the third play, Walter Mehring’s “Die Schuld der Juden am Weltkrieg, der Revolution und den nivellierenden Witterungsverhaltnissen” (The Guilt of the Jews in the World War, the Revolution, and the Socialist Atmosphere). Mehring was a famous Dadaist, who published numerous magazines, staged “happenings,” and produced plays designed to shock bourgeois audiences out of their complacent addiction to art as somehow above social conflict. Dadaists called for a frontal attack on the art establishment and the bourgeois sense of value that underlay it. They used collages, simultaneous recitations of poems, verbal fragments, and sound pictures to create art forms that fused the fragmented nature of the metropolis and the political movements of the day. Mehring’s play symbolizes that such criticism of the bourgeoisie from the left could also coincide with the anti-Semitism of the right. Even Reinhardt, himself a Jew, could present a play in which the chimerical argument that Jews were responsible for Germany’s loss in the World War could be articulated. This too was Berlin in the 1920s—a city whose modernism was laced with the racist belief, on the left and the right, that the Jews were to blame for Germany’s postwar disintegration.
Locke’s reaction to the temper of racism that echoed during his visit to Berlin was not recorded and can only be guessed at from later comments and his racial temperament. In the United States he tended to dismiss racial incidents as of little importance, exaggerated by the purported victims; thus, he may not have taken particular notice of foreign racism, especially since the targeted race was not his. Even though Locke had close Jewish friends and had compared anti-Semitism and American color prejudice, he may have ignored the racial undercurrents of postwar Berlin because of the personal freedom he enjoyed in that milieu. And in 1922, it was not yet clear how dominant right-wing anti-Semitism would become by the early 1930s. Locke’s interest was not in the content of these plays—he hated didactic, overly politicized drama—but in their new and bold forms. Here was drama that was being fashioned out of the stuff of social conflict, and in its use of dialogue, background, and graphic sets, it set a standard for the agitprop political theater of the 1930s in America. Locke probably noted the racial discourse of the plays that he saw and then moved on.
There was much to move on to, and Locke seemed to take in a different theater every night. He probably attended Leopold Tessner’s Staatliches Schauspielhaus, which presented classical plays from Sophocles to Shakespeare, but interpreted them in a modern idiom that made them speak to the urban milieu and consciousness of the 1920s. Tessner pared down the stage, the set, and the lighting and presented classical characters with a modern sleekness and severity that made them startling to watch. This theatrical style that privileged the projection of character over physical expression engaged Locke’s taste. Locke wanted an African American modernist aesthetic that would engage on the deepest levels of interiority, the ability of the African American actor and performer to dig deeply into the soul of the race’s experience and reveal something that was transcendent. What Locke found in the theater world of Berlin was a kinetic dramatic energy that raised the level of liveliness and seriousness about life. Yes, Berlin was full of contradiction; but those conflicts were heightened and wrestled with in public, not behind closed, closeted doors as in Washington, D.C. In Berlin he could feel himself come alive.
That sense of liveliness for Locke in Berlin surely came from the friends that he had there. From the moment he arrived, he met and interacted with such people as “Werner Land + seine Freund,” “George Lange + Freundlag,” and a host of others whose identities survive in such initials as “F.R.M.” More than likely, one of them took him to the Grosses Schauspielhaus and introduced him to the latest in Berlin theater. It is very likely that such friends also took him to the latest cafes, such as the Romanische Cafe, where painters, writers, publishers, journalists, actors, and bohemian intellectuals gathered to smoke, drink coffee, and indulge in the most important pastime of postwar Berlin—talk. While it is doubtful that Locke gained access to the inner circle of such artists as George Grosz, Emil Orlik, and Max Slegot, or that of the writers Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, and Joseph Roth, who congregated regularly at the Romanische, it is likely that he was enough of a regular by the end of August that he could sit comfortably and engage in dialogue in such cafes. In such company Locke would have heard discussions about the visit that year of Sigmund Freud to attend a psychoanalytic congress in Berlin, and even franker discussions of sex in relation to Magnus Hirschfeld’s recently established Institute for Sexual Science, which would become a center for research on homosexuality in Germany.
Locke gained from association with his Berliner friends the ideology of youth in Germany that was really a Weimar lifestyle. Stephen Spender has captured something of the spirit of such associations in his autobiography, which records his experiences first in Hamburg and then in Berlin during the 1920s.
My host introduced me to his friends, who invited me to parties in their bed-sitting rooms and studios. We went swimming in the lake and for excursions in canoes. To these young Germans who had little money and who spent what they had immediately, the life of the senses was a sunlit garden from which sin was excluded … their aims were simply to live from day to day, and to enjoy to the utmost everything that was free: sun, water, friendship, their bodies. … Thousands of people went to the open-air swimming baths or lay down on the shores of the rivers and lakes, almost nude, and sometimes quite nude, and the boys who had turned the deepest mahogany walked amongst those people with paler skins, like kings among their courtiers. The sun healed their bodies of the years of war, and made them conscious of the quivering, fluttering life of blood and muscles covering their exhausted spirits like the pelt of an animal. … I went to the bathing places, and I went to parties which ended at dawn with the young people lying in one another’s arms. This life appeared to me innocuous, being led by people who seemed naked in body and soul.26
Locke, who as a young child had been chastised by his mother to stay out of the sun—“you’re black enough already!”—“found a sense of physical release in this fraternity of German youth: he was, after all, already ‘mahogany.’ ” Connected with this sunbathing, canoeing, and enjoyment of the outdoors was a belief in the restorative powers not only of nature, but of youth, of being “advanced” in one’s thinking about gender and sexual orientation. There was an acceptance of one another as quintessentially “modern” and open to the reformation of relationships based on that modernity. Thus, while race was certainly present in the background, color was not an obstacle for Locke. This youth culture fostered a spirit, a verve, and an attitude toward progressive relationships that invigorated Locke and gave him hope.
Locke recorded the restorative effect of friendship in a poem that he wrote on September 1, 1922, while he was still in Germany.
Friend
Life gives dark hours,
takes away hope, joy, and desire to act (Lust),
[we] can give balm to the heart
to the wounded heart in the breast.
Pale and dim/sad looks the eye
[unintelligible] mouth
all hope lies in the dust
with love in the night and bottom
Only then does the anxious heart know
what the true friend was to him
what, when we enjoyed wine, pleasure and song,
he [got] what he always asked for.
Though incomplete and poorly expressed, Locke’s poem suggests that his mother’s passing robbed him of his “desire to act,” which he seemed to regain in Germany in the company of his friends.
He also regained his sense of direction. Bonding with a youth culture was not simply an isolated, decadent social practice for Locke, but an embrace of the spirit of catharsis that undergirded the artistic revolution in Berlin. What Locke found there was an art movement inspired by the youth culture and its vision of modernity. “It was a renaissance,” recalled Sol Hurok, a Jewish émigré from 1920s Berlin, as he looked back fondly on the period when Locke was in Berlin. “It was a renaissance … the greatest renaissance in this century? Now how would you translate that into words?”27 Locke agreed. Although publicly more identified with the Harlem Renaissance, Locke was inspired by the German one that satisfied his intellectual sense of what a modern art movement should be, and his personal sense of what a youth movement should do to one’s soul. In Berlin, he found dramatists who translated the classics into modern forms, and architects and designers, as in Bauhaus, who transformed interiors and exteriors with the crisp lines of the industrial age. The youth-driven attitudes of modern human relationships coalesced in Germany with a more critical, aesthetically demanding art and culture. The interpenetration of art and life in modern Germany bonded him to that country. It inspired in him the kind of intellectual and personal renaissance he needed to revive and reinvent himself. Now, he could return to America with a vision of what he wanted African American culture to become.
Before leaving Germany, however, Locke took the train first to Munich and then to the little village of Oberammergau to witness an ancient, vital tradition. There he attended an outdoor performance of the Passion Play held every ten years by village residents who had performed the play ever since the Middle Ages. At that time, the village had been decimated by the plague. As their numbers dwindled, the Oberammergau villagers had sought divine intervention by enacting the Passion Play of the death of Jesus. The plague subsided and, believing its cessation was an act of God, the villagers continued to perform the play every decade. Locke must have learned in Berlin that this play was due to be performed in 1922 and took the trip south to see it. It certainly completed his study of the theater that summer. The Oberammergau Players did not merely perform the play, but lived their assigned roles in the years between performances, often seeming to become the characters they played. This was the ultimate commitment for an actor. Locke could not miss it. Here again, Locke would have bracketed and screened out the racism of these performances that voiced ancient Christian hatred for the Jews as killers of Christ. For Locke, though, this performance symbolized the spiritual renewal that came from immersion in tradition, in this case the Christian tradition of his mother. In a sense, tradition had become, by now, a kind of mother to Locke. By honoring tradition, as he had his mother, he could reassure himself that he would never abandon his soul in the process of becoming a modern Alain Locke.
Locke’s sojourn abroad also may have involved a detour. Shortly after the death of his mother, Locke heard from his distant friend Plenyono Gbe Wolo, whom he had met while at Harvard as a graduate student. Wolo was returning to Liberia with the financial support of an array of powerful White backers such as Harvard president Abbott Lowell and Thomas Jesse Jones of the Phelps Stokes Fund.28 Wolo started a school in his village, ostensibly to train a new generation of Liberian youth to follow in his footsteps of Christian faith and Anglo-American education, but really to utilize his education and critical assessment of Western colonialism to bring about an independent development for native Africans in Africa. Apparently, Wolo wanted Locke to join him in Liberia in this work of educating his people but also turning the Firestone rubber interest in Liberian raw materials for the production of tires into something economically sustainable for native Liberians. Here was a different kind of transnationalism for Locke from that of Berlin, the possibility of an economic partnership through a triangle of Howard University, Berlin, and Grand Cess, Liberia, to foster an independent African economic power base. Wolo was also a young man who combined aggressive national self-promotion with personal sensitivity.
Perhaps bonding with Africa and perhaps visiting with Wolo was also part of Locke’s healing process. Locke’s passport contains an entry for Liberia—perhaps a suggestion he may have traveled to Africa during his mourning in Europe. Even the idea of Africa brought a recurring tease—an empire of his own through which he might, with African intellectuals like Wolo, who later worked for the Firestone Company, find an economic basis for the Black renaissance. A triangle of Howard education, African brotherhood, and Europe modernism was in his thoughts as he returned home early in 1923.
Locke’s time abroad in the aftermath of his mother’s death gave him a more complex notion of a renaissance of African American aesthetics than other Black thinkers in the United States. In the Germany of the 1920s, volk culture was the backdrop of a modernism just as a rich tribal tradition was the backdrop of Wolo’s attempt to forge a new, progressive African educational system in Liberia. Homosexuality and the possibility of an adult, leadership role in the future of his people seemed to fuse in Locke after this trip. They no longer led in opposite directions as they often did while his mother was alive. Something had broken—not just his attachment to his mother, but also his attachment to a double consciousness that was self-defeating. He would forever afterward stare down those who wished to block his path to Black leadership because of his sexuality. He would let his vision do the talking for him. For now he had one.