29
Black Curator and White Momma
On Sunday, February 6, 1927, Locke walked up to the podium at the New Art Circle Gallery at 35 West 57th Street and prepared to deliver his remarks at the New York opening of the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection of “primitive African sculpture and craft art.” Tired after years of fighting for his job back at Howard—Du Bois’s letter to Moorland was still three months in the future—Locke had decided to become a curator and enter the business of collecting and exhibiting art and antiquities. During his trip the previous summer to Europe, Locke had carried out a mission for Edith Isaacs, editor of Theatre Arts Monthly, and purchased with her money a collection of African art from Belgian diplomat Roaul Blondiau, who had served for years in the Congo. After months of preparing this special exhibit, catalog copy, press releases, and promotional articles, Locke stood before a small audience principally of White women and men, who had come out on this cold Sunday afternoon to learn more about the craze for things African in New York.1
The year 1927 was an auspicious one to open this exhibit, as the style negre was everywhere in the modernist world. African designs adorned modern furniture, sets and plays for the theater, and art by Ferdinand Leger and Alberto Giacometti. The previous year, Locke had met Mrs. Isaacs in connection with an article he had written on the Negro in American theater that mentioned the rise of African themes. Taboo, a play by Mary Hoyt Wiborg, starring Paul Robeson, had been a minor hit in New York in 1922 largely because of its African theme and costumes. Eugene O’Neill, the famous author of Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, had a collection of African art. Locke had convinced Mrs. Isaacs to fund his trip to Europe during the summer of 1926 to purchase a collection of roughly one thousand works of Congo art—an example of Locke’s resourcefulness in finding ways to fund his European trips while he was unemployed. After purchasing the collection, shipping it to New York, and finding a suitable gallery to exhibit it, Locke had also co-curated what was the first exhibit of African art at a commercial gallery in New York. And it was the first such exhibit of African art organized by an African American, who made sure the audience received a New Negro interpretation of its meaning and importance.
After acknowledging that European artists had brought aesthetic recognition to West African art, Locke reframed the meaning of African art in the history of world culture. “To possess African art permanently and not merely as a passing vogue we shall have to go beyond such reflected values and their exotic appeal and study it in its own context, link it up vitally with its own cultural background, and learn to appreciate it as an organic body of art.” African sculpture not only revealed to contemporary culture a West African world but also “the importance of beauty in the ordinary. American art, especially with its current revival of interest in the decorative and craft arts, needs this message.” As an American Negro, he was both proud that this message came from his ancestral heritage and also glad he had been able to bring this art to America so that Negro artists too could learn its lessons. African art was also an unexpected revelation for the American Negro, since “the arts of his ancestors” had been “crowded out of the slave ship.” African art was now repossessed by its American heir.2
After concluding his remarks, Locke endured the crush of well-heeled Whites who rushed the lectern to get a closer look at the tiny, delicate, overly sophisticated New Negro who spoke so authoritatively about what guests assumed was his collection. But it was Theatre Arts editor Edith Isaacs’s collection and it was for sale. If successful, the exhibit would transfer this African art to elite Whites who attended this midtown gallery opening, and its “art lessons” would be lost to the Negro artists Locke felt most needed them. If he were rich, of course, he would have bought the entire collection, opened a museum, and created an academy for artists to be inspired by this African art to create a new art. But Locke was not wealthy; he did not even have a job.
While Locke was packing up to leave, he became aware of an elderly White woman staring as if still listening to him. Relaxing her intimidating gaze, the seventy-two-year-old Charlotte Mason introduced herself. She was a widow of a wealthy psychiatrist with whom she shared a belief in the occult, spiritualism, and extrasensory perception. She had studied “primitive peoples,” in which she included Indians, Africans, and even those African Americans unspoiled by Western civilization, since she was a young woman. She was interested in African art because of the power she believed it had to reconnect Western civilization to the spiritual values “primitives” had revered for centuries. She was moved by his remarks that Negroes such as himself were rising up to use their heritage to reform Western civilization. Locke nodded in agreement and calculated how to respond. He had a feeling of being uplifted, enhanced, and strengthened in Mason’s presence. As they separated, Locke puckishly announced, “I am going to call up and ask to come and see you if I may.”3
Mason did not wait for him to call. Three days later, she was back at the exhibit, and they had a long talk. Locke told her he planned to launch a committee to raise funds to purchase the collection and install it in a permanent museum. Mason thought that a wonderful idea. Two days later, Locke left her a message about the committee and promised to call again. Before he did, she was back again at the exhibit, this time bringing her niece, Katherine Chapin, and purchasing a little man figure. Over the next month, she would make weekly, almost daily visits to the exhibit, often with friends, leading them on tours of the exhibit like Carl Van Vechten’s uptown forays to Black speakeasies. But there was a difference. While it was not yet apparent to Locke, Mason was a cultural conservative, who saw the primitive as the harbinger of conservative religious and cultural revival, one diametrically opposed to the decadent urban modernism of Van Vechten.4
Something about Mason’s enthusiasm led Locke to conclude that she would do more than simply help fund African art. He had put on the New Art Circle exhibition as a way to create interest and raise money through a subscription plan to purchase the collection from Isaacs for a museum in Harlem dedicated to the “art of the ancestors.” Mason became a major player in that effort. But even more than a patron of African art, Mason, Locke perceived, was interested in something far grander—a multifaceted renaissance that could transform the landscape of African American culture for years to come. She already believed in what he had only dreamed of when he put together the exhibit at the New Art Circle gallery.
What if he could get Mason to do what other patrons had been unwilling to do—provide funds to free contemporary Black artists, such as the attractive Langston Hughes, from financial worry and allow them to concentrate on producing the great art Locke had claimed the Negro Renaissance was destined to produce? At a minimum, her opened purse would help him wrest power away from Van Vechten, whom he believed was ruining Langston Hughes, Eric Walrond, and others. And if Locke secured real financial support for Hughes, perhaps he might be enticed into a closer relationship with him. Accordingly, when Mason invited him to accompany her to a concert of the spirituals on February 16, Locke arrived early at her apartment at 399 Park Avenue to have tea before they went out. In a gesture that signaled she was courting him as well, Mason invited Locke to sit in her great-great-grandfather’s chair. At the concert, Locke made his move. During the intermission, he sought out Hughes, probably by prior arrangement, and brought him over to meet Mason. After Hughes returned to his seat, Locke gauged her reaction and no doubt suggested that Hughes was the type of young man who could produce great art, if unburdened from niggling financial obligations.5
Aware that she was being courted, Mason peppered Locke with questions at their next meeting. What did he think of Carl Van Vechten, also at the concert? She had detected something vile in him. What did Locke think of the other “so-called Bohemian artists”? What did Locke believe the social status of Blacks should be in White society? Perhaps most important, what specific plans did he have for the Congo exhibit? Once he discussed his plans for a museum of African art in Harlem, she weighed in that such art should be planted in the “sub-soil” of Harlem to inspire all Negroes, especially young children, with the love of African civilization. It amazed him that they were thinking of the same thing. Listening to her was encouraging even when he disagreed with the particulars—which he of course kept quiet about now. Of course, Locke felt no need to keep quiet about his distaste for Van Vechten, his suspicions about the other White “Bohemians” interested in the Negro movement, or his enthusiasm for Roland Hayes, who had sung that night.6
Yet Mason was not yet convinced. She noted that Locke was an hour late to their next conference. Not satisfied to accept uncritically the proposal for the Harlem Museum of African Art he left at her home afterward, she called another meeting to discuss its particulars. Upon arriving, Locke, perhaps aware he was being scrutinized, “met her with open arms and a brush of the spirit,” as Mason recalled. But Locke wanted to shift her attention from just African art to funding African American contemporary artists with her money. That next Saturday, February 26, he telephoned Mason and asked if he could bring Hughes up to her apartment to see her. She spoke with Hughes at length. She gave a somewhat bewildered Hughes a big dose of her fervent ideas, so much so that upon leaving, he asked Locke, “Who is this woman? How does she know so much about us?” He did not have to question the other gift she bestowed on him: a $50 bill pressed into his hand as he left.7
Hughes’s question was a good one. Born Charlotte Van Der Quick on May 18, 1854, she was the great-great-great-granddaughter of a colonial Dutch immigrant, who received four thousand acres of land in Somerset, New Jersey, because of his friendship with King George III. The first American Van Der Quick was a farmer and a slave owner, although Charlotte quickly pointed out that her great-great-grandfather freed his slaves. By the time that Locke met her, Charlotte Mason was rich beyond imagination; and the resilience of her fortune during the Great Depression suggested that much of it still resided in landholdings. The only daughter in a family of three boys and a widowed father, she seemed to inherit the male side of the family’s aggressiveness and self-confidence. Her aggressive approach to power was her defining characteristic. As Arthur Fauset recalled, “She was someone who let you know that if something was to be done, she was the one to do it.”8
A strongly independent young woman, Charlotte had delayed getting married until she was thirty-four, spending her young adulthood in folkloric research among the Native Americans of the Southwest. From that she formed her sense that “primitive” peoples possessed a wisdom and connection to God unknown in Western civilization. She heard their critique of White man’s destruction of their civilization and intuited their ability to communicate with one another beyond words, something that reinforced her sense of her own gift for psychic communication. Her psychic sensitivity was reinforced when she married Rufus Osgood Mason, a fifty-six-year-old psychiatrist, who studied hypnotism, ESP, and psychic phenomena as a regimen to liberate patients from suffering. After his death, Charlotte Mason devoted herself to funding projects, such as Natalie Curtis’s Indian Book (1907), to bring attention to the neglected insights of primitive peoples. She believed the Indian Book embodied the true spirit of the American Indians and avoided prostituting that heritage for monetary or commercial gain. It is not clear she had had much contact with Negroes before meeting Locke in 1927, but she had surmised by analogy that Africans and African Americans possessed similar spiritual resources as the Native Americans and harbored similar resentments about the suppression of their ancestral culture. For her, African culture was still alive in America and ready to be revived in a counter-revolution against a soul-destroying Western civilization in America.9
This last aspect was key to Mason’s vision—a reformation, really, more than a renaissance, was needed to save humanity—and she was the one to lead it. There was a war going on between the forces of Western materialism and primitive spiritualism, and the latter had to be protected from the false friends who would betray it for personal self-aggrandizement. Mason felt called to protect the vision of “primitive man” from the other Whites and those over-assimilated minorities who wanted to use primitive culture to fill their pocketbooks. That calling fueled her controlling personality. Primitive art had to be tightly controlled—along with the people involved in it—to keep it from being dissipated into egotism, the self-destructive individualism of Western man. This would be a slippery road to travel for Locke, who by his own admissions was an egotist and proud of it.
Less clear was that Mason was also a frustrated woman by 1927. At more than seventy-two years old, her body was wracked with pain from arthritis and other ailments that limited her mobility and made her dependent on a platoon of nieces and servants to survive. She was childless and facing death without having added to the powerful aristocratic legacy of her family or achieved anything that testified to her brilliance. Though a strong-minded woman of the upper class, she was reluctant to exert herself publicly as a leader of any movement. Throughout her relations with Locke and others, she always forbade any mention of her name. She had authored one article, “The Passing of a Prophet,” about her husband, an indication that Mason felt more comfortable in public discourse paying homage to her husband, just as she always insisted on being referred to by her married name, Mrs. C. Osgood Mason, on all committee letterheads and other paraphernalia.10 Beyond her desire to bring long-neglected peoples the attention they deserved existed another motivation for introducing herself to Alain Locke: she needed him and other Negroes to exert an influence on American culture that she could not effect herself. She was a mother without children; they, in turn, would become her “godchildren.”
Just as Locke was closing in on Mason as a patron, another patron came roaring back into his life, a reminder that all such relationships were dangerous. A scathing review of Locke’s New Art Circle Gallery exhibit appeared in the March 2 issue of the Nation, authored by Thomas Munro, a sycophant of Albert Barnes. Although Barnes later claimed he had nothing to do with the review, the article was part of Barnes’s long history of planting negative reviews or defaming letters in magazines about exhibits or collections or individuals with whom he disagreed. Munro worked at the Barnes Foundation as an educational specialist and co-authored with Paul Guillaume Primitive Negro Sculpture, which was published by the Barnes Foundation. The Nation critique sought to discredit the quality and veracity of the Blondiau Collection, a project Barnes carried on against any collection of African art that might challenge his. Interestingly, Munro’s review did not attack Locke personally—another Barnes tactic—but the quality of the collection. Munro asserted that it contained many unauthenticated, if not fake, artifacts, mostly craft rather than art objects, and being a collection of Congo art the collection was not representative of the best in West African art. As if that was not enough, Munro described the exhibit’s design as old-fashioned, more in accord with the nineteenth-century ethnological rather than a modernist presentation of African art. The more modernist strategy was to exhibit fewer objects in large amounts of space to allow the visitor to study closely the plastic qualities of each piece of sculpture. Those were the qualities that had led Picasso, Modigliani, Brancusi, and other European artists to bring African art to world attention, the author of Primitive Negro Sculpture asserted, as exemplary of the African’s aesthetic rather than anthropological genius.11
Locke counter-attacked immediately with a fierce letter to the editor of the Nation. It disputed Munro’s arguments one by one, especially the notion that the collection contained more handicraft than art. If Munro was such an expert on African art, Locke asserted, then he should know that “the distinction did not exist in that culture itself.” If such a distinction was “insisted upon,” Locke quipped, then “more than half the plates of his [Munro’s] own book on ‘Primitive Negro Sculpture’ would have to be eliminated.” At least, Locke concluded, “The Blondiau Collection had not been accused of ‘made in Paris’ unless niches of anything in the Barnes Foundation collection automatically lifts it from its ordinary plane and canonizes it as ‘fine art.’ ”12
West Africans, Locke argued, did not separate art and utility the way Westerners like Munro did. Of course, Locke still valued African art for its aesthetic qualities, but used this article to suggest that Barnes and Munro were actually misinformed outsiders to the African art traditions they wished to bend to what was already an outdated Western aesthetic. Boldly, Locke asserted that the truest meaning of African art was more than simply its inspiration of European cubists and abstract artists, but more its anchoring an entirely new conception of what art should do and be. It was this radical rejection of Western alienation of art from its context in the daily lives of the people that made African art truly inspirational. That shift from an art of the coterie to an art of the people was precisely what African art had to offer a visual arts renaissance among Negroes. Locke closed his letter with a telling counter to this orthodoxy. “Certainly it is at least as legitimate a modern use of African art to promote it as a key to African culture and as a stimulus to the development of Negro art as to promote it as a side exhibit to modernist painting and a stalking horse for a particular school of aesthetics.”13
Munro’s attack derived from Barnes’s long-standing enmity toward Locke after he published “A Note on African Art,” in the May 1924 Opportunity. Barnes believed Locke had stolen his ideas and published them as his own. But enmity had turned to white-hot hatred when Locke had had the audacity to write another essay on African art, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation that directly contradicted Barnes’s essay “Negro Art and America,” that Locke also published in the anthology. Locke had to include Barnes’s essay in The New Negro because Locke needed Barnes’s photographs of African art to illustrate the book. Barnes’s article asserted that African art showed the “primitivism” of the African people had carried over into the contemporary American Negro. “The most important element to be considered is the psychological complexion of the Negro as he inherited it from his primitive ancestors and which he maintains to this day. The outstanding characteristics are his tremendous emotional endowment, his luxuriant and free imagination and a truly great power of individual expression.”14 This was too much for Locke, given his own independent study of African sculpture. He countered by arguing the Atlantic slave trade had resulted in transformations in Diaspora African cultures, such that the tone of American Negro culture was strikingly different from that of African art.
The offshoot of the African spirit blended itself in with entirely different culture elements and blossomed in strange new forms. There was in this more than a change of art-forms and an exchange of cultural patterns; there was a curious reversal of emotional temper and attitude. The characteristic African art expressions are rigid, controlled, disciplined, abstract, heavily conventionalized; those of the Aframerican,—free, exuberant, emotional, sentimental and human. Only by the misinterpretation of the African spirit, can one claim any emotional kinship between them—for the spirit of the African expression, by and large, is disciplined, sophisticated, laconic and fatalistic.15
Locke’s cheekiness was on display: instead of rejecting Barnes’s essay, he published it in The New Negro along with his essay calling Barnes’s argument a “misinterpretation,” even riffing on Barnes’s exact words in his critique. Locke even asserted that the typical American Negro experienced African art as foreign, strange, a “classic” tradition to be studied, like the Greek statuary that fueled the Italian Renaissance, to learn from it. That was the point of publishing Barnes’s African art in The New Negro (a kind of exhibition itself) and then exhibiting another collection at the New Art Circle—to foment an encounter with a lost heritage to spark a renaissance among Negro visual artists in America. This was too much for the notoriously thin-skinned Barnes, who seized on Locke’s exhibition in 1927 to mount a counter-attack.
The immediate effect of Munro’s attack was to show Locke that Barnes would stop at nothing to discredit the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection. Locke arranged a national tour of the collection as a way to garner national media attention for the collection, to which his reputation was now tied. But the controversy also had the effect of pushing Locke further into a relationship with Mason as a kind of counterweight or protector to ward off attacks from Barnes. But Barnes did not attack again; and Locke would soon find that Mason held as problematical a set of notions about Negro primitivism as Barnes. And Locke’s Oedipal defenses against the overweening Barnes would not protect him psychologically with Mason.
Actually, Locke had two White women patrons: Isaacs and Mason. On the surface, Isaacs had the most useful set of resources for a counter-attack on Barnes and Munro: she had money, connections, a major arts magazine, and now a collection. But Isaacs was unwilling to give Locke total control over the Blondiau Collection. By contrast, Mason was wealthier, more nurturing, and seemingly willing to make him the leader in whatever scheme he came up with to advance African art in America. Even after meeting Hughes at her apartment, Mason had returned to the exhibit that afternoon, this time with Roger Marian and Herbert Whitman. For her, the African spirit was the central issue: Hughes and any other contemporary Negro writer were means to a connection with that ancient but still living African presence. Most important, Mason, unlike Isaacs, saw the collecting of African art as something more than art—as a means to subjectivize the next generation of Black people. She envisioned a Harlem Museum of Art in which “little Negro children running in and out learning to respect themselves through the realization of those treasures” would be its focus. Isaacs, by contrast, merely wanted a collection of African art for its aesthetic value in stimulating contemporary arts, especially in the theater. Locke sensed that Mason needed Black people to realize a broader vision than that of Isaacs and that he could exploit that need to realize his agenda.
But Mason had not made any large financial commitment to the proposed Harlem Museum of African Art. With a committee that already included Franklin Hopper of the New York Public Library, real estate agent John E. Nail, Mrs. Isaacs, George Foster Peabody, and a smattering of other influential Whites, Locke still lacked the kind of endowment needed to buy the collection, retrofit an appropriate building, and create a professional exhibition space and storage facility to permanently house the art.16 Mason was as indefinite as Barnes had been about when or even if she would dispense some real cash.
As Locke was soon to learn, Mason was as full of surprises as Barnes. During a visit he made to her apartment on March 6, she suddenly announced that she was willing to help him go to Africa. She had a “mystical vision of a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa, across which the Negro world, that our White United States had done everything to annihilate, should see the flaming pathway … and recover the treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on the earth.” He was the bridge builder. Yet his choice of Abyssinia as the place at the end of the bridge that he would step into Africa was odd. Abyssinia did not have any West African sculpture. One wonders whether Mason knew how tentative his connection was to the Africa that had produced the Congo art she so loved. Locke chose Abyssinia for another reason: he hoped to entice young Langston Hughes to go with him, if funds for Hughes’s accommodations could be raised. Mason had another surprise at that meeting. She was angry with him for having put her in “the ugly position of drawing the color line, which is the first time in my life this has ever happened” when he and Hughes came to her apartment.17
Here was an early symptom of Mason’s psychopathology. Her remark made Locke, a Black man, responsible for her enacting a segregationist code in her own home. Perhaps a less eager seeker of patronage than Locke would have read this as a warning sign that Mason might be crazy. For her to welcome Blacks into her home and then blame them for her “drawing the color line” suggested a confused mind. But Locke was not daunted by this dressing down and returned two days later to deliver the African art pieces Mason had purchased from the Blondiau Collection. Locke accepted Mason’s cruelty in order to keep her support, a support that so far had resulted in no financial endowment. She was not funding the Harlem of African Art the way that Mrs. Gardner had funded Barrett Wendell’s projects. By contrast, Mason was ambivalent about the goals she said she shared with Locke.
Here was the rub in all of Locke’s patronage schemes, whether projected on Barnes, Isaacs, or Mason: the full realization of Locke’s aspirations would make Black people more powerful and independent of White influence than they were at present. Was that something these patrons really wanted to occur? Instead, most wanted such projects as a way to tie Black people to them, either as sycophants or minions. Mason no less than Barnes wanted a revolution that still required, ensured, really, the necessity of her! Mason bonded with Locke because it was clear he could not realize his goals without her; and yet she never gave him enough money and power to realize those goals. Mason thus empowered and disempowered him at the same time. Locke could not see this dirty little secret, because it had existed in his mother’s empowering but limiting relationship with him. It even characterized his relationships with those less powerful young men under his sway. Mason became the White momma for a Black “boy” whose neurosis made him vulnerable to hers. The unanswered question was, could they accomplish anything with those neuroses together?
Four days later the two of them went together to open a bank safe deposit box into which to store the artifacts. On the way back, the two had a “tremendous talk along Riverside Drive.” Mason advised Locke to write a book or long article on “Primitive Sexual Religion,” a suggestion Locke certainly deflected, as he knew his take on sexuality would probably not coincide with Mason’s.18 But the general tone of their interchange had improved. She had returned to the realm of sweetness and nurture, giving him instructions on exercises for his back, head, and digestion, and enlarging his belief that care of his health was crucial because of the valuable role he was destined to play among his people.19 Locke, in turn, shared with her his “great idea.” First, he told her his suggestion to get Paul Robeson to sing a benefit concert for the Harlem Museum of African Art. This idea appealed to Mason, because, although she had already donated $500 to the fund, she, like many other White philanthropists, believed the people who benefited from their gifts ought to make the first and foremost contributions, however small, themselves. This was another classic example of the abusive relationship, often seen between physically abusive men and their wives, where the makeup time is one of almost ecstatic elation.
Given the considerable length of their car trip down Riverside Drive, it’s possible something grander and more extensive than his “great idea” was discussed.20 Perhaps Locke felt comfortable sharing with her his larger vision in which the benefit was merely the opening act of a more ambitious plan to transform how Negro art was produced in the twentieth century. The museum had always been to Locke a means to stimulate the production of contemporary art through contact with an African visual tradition. His persistence in bringing Hughes was only the leading edge of his plan to fund a phalanx of African American literary, visual, and musical artists who would flood the market with contemporary Negro art that he—and she—could be proud of as authentic and true.
What Locke envisioned was anything but primitive. It was a plan to modernize the art production by bringing the best of the Renaissance artists under a kind of modern Medici umbrella with her financial benefaction to turn out art that would revise permanently how the Negro was perceived culturally. Together, they would counterbalance the influence of the commercial market and employ New Negro artists to produce art that was beautiful, not simply commercially viable. By reaching as many of the talented and willing artists as possible, they could, together, produce novels, poetry, and books of folklore that would prove the legitimacy of African civilization in America, and confirm (he probably did not say this) his prediction that great art by Negroes would soon issue from the Negro Renaissance. By combining forces—her money and his contacts—they also could sponsor folklore research in Africa and America, train young diplomats and social scientists in African Studies, and improve upon Opportunity magazine’s patronage by monitoring, regulating, rationalizing, and, most important, controlling what was produced. In a sense, Locke planned to take the production of Negro art out of the hands of the individual artist, whom Locke had already concluded was too weak to resist the temptations of easy money and cheap fame offered by the Van Vechtens, the commercial theater, and the enterprising publishing houses. Locke was imagining the transformation in production and convincing Mason that it was her idea. In doing so, he would have downplayed what this system really was: the modernization of art production on a scale never seen before in American art, let alone by Negroes.
After their thrilling car conversations, Mason began writing checks to fund the benefit concert, the first event to publicly connect a contemporary Negro artist, Robeson, with the Harlem Museum of African Art. Mason put up the money to secure the hall and piano, while Locke buttonholed Robeson and got his assent. As a rising star on the stage, Robeson had had to play a number of roles in which he tried to explore the theme of Africa on the legitimate stage. Robeson jumped at a chance not only to give something back to the Harlem community but also to make a statement for the serious study of things African. The Black bourgeoisie’s ambivalence toward Africa made large-scale giving to the museum unlikely at the beginning, so the star’s backing was a brilliant beginning to the campaign.
Collective work between Mason and Locke added to the increasing psychological intimacy of their relationship. Or so it seemed. As they moved forward to realize Locke’s grand plan, a power struggle developed between them, ostensibly over Mason’s ideology of primitivism but really over the authority and control of the wider operation. While Locke struggled to carve out his position in the system he constructed, his maneuvers were constrained by his powerlessness, that at any moment or over any disagreement, Mason could withdraw her money and the whole operation would collapse. Most difficult for him to finesse was that her notions of primitivism in the Black community were applied to him such that he, one of the most sophisticated people in America, was expected to embrace primitivism as his true personality.
Their discourse on this issue reached a head on March 18, when Mason wrote him a letter about his resistance to her ideas. She asked him whether his mother’s teachings made him question Mason’s ideas.21 Little more than a month after they had met, Mason felt comfortable attacking the basis of his cultural identity, and Locke let her do it. On one level, it is easiest to understand this as simply something Locke had to put up with to continue his access to Mason’s money. But without Mason having to tell him, Locke knew that the type of Culture his mother had inculcated in him during his youth was not the folk culture of the Black masses that Harlem Renaissance writers would celebrate in their writing. Increasingly in the literary debates of 1926 and 1927, Locke’s lack of certainty about his support of working-class over bourgeoisie Black culture allowed a vagueness to creep into his critical writings that could not be resolved simply by arguing what was good or bad art. A fundamental realignment of what constituted culture was taking place in the literary and anthropological fields of Black expression in the mid-1920s. Although Locke gave lip service to folk culture, he knew that it was not really the culture he enjoyed as an aesthete. Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky were much more likely to be heard in his presence than anything resembling the blues.
What gave Mason’s preference for folk culture some leverage with him was the larger shift in the definition of culture in the Black aesthetic—that others, not as wacky as Mason, were saying that folk culture was the basis of Black aesthetics in the twentieth century. Without some realignment in his taste or more openness to what Mason mistakenly called “primitive” Black culture, Locke was destined to fall increasingly behind the march of Black cultural discourse and be relegated to the position of a Du Bois or an Allison Davis, if he was not careful. It was not just Mason’s money, but also the logic of cultural shift that gave her critique a bite he could not ignore. Mason was correct in perceiving that he still held on to his mother’s ideas of Culture with a capital C; and in its most positive light, Mason’s queries can be seen as starting a process of self-examination that, without her psychological—and especially her financial—pressure, would not have taken place. He needed to loosen the grip of Anglo-American cultural mores on his soul. But that loosening also took place under the relentless, cruel pressure of a maniacal mother surrogate, Charlotte Mason, whose goal was to break his dependency on his mother and shift it to her. Increasingly, it was Mason’s emotional support that would be crucial in his life as much as or even more than her financial.22
But Mason was also acting in bad faith: Locke’s mastery of Western civilization and elite knowledge was a key asset that not only fueled his success but also made him valuable to her. His working knowledge of the French language helped him increase the holdings of the Harlem Museum of African Art, as much of the available African art rested in French hands. His sophistication, decorum, and excellent manners made it possible for them to interact so easily. One suspects that what she really disliked was that he was someone already formed and thus had a limited ability to be remade by her. Part of the problem was the ambiguity of her use of the word primitive. At times, it meant childlike, naive, nature-loving, and pure; at other times, it meant focused, concentrated, and undistracted by modernity and its decentering sensibility. But if Locke had been more “primitive” in the latter sense, he would have had no need for Mrs. Mason. The former sense of primitive actually was what Locke found useful. He could perform the role of the loving child she never had more easily than being the entirely focused premodern. And that is what he began to do.23
Mason’s attempt to supplant Mary Locke’s place in his life was fraught with difficulties, however, as Mason would soon learn. His mother’s domination of his life had produced resistance and subversion, not the least of which was his dandified homosexuality. Now, Mason would wrestle with his unique ability to combine dependency with subversive critique. A humorous example came after Locke and Hughes dined at Mason’s on April 16. A comment overheard by someone—other than Mason, since she was deaf—reached her ears belatedly and caused her concern. In her notebook, she wrote that she planned to ask Locke about it when they next met. “When Langston & Alain were going away after dinner on April 16, Alain said ‘Masque in one pocket and thick white envelope in another.’ Alain, what was that?”24 Actually, the comment’s meaning was clear: another of Locke’s infamous cutting witticisms, the remark “outed” the “hustle” of Hughes’s new relationship in a moment of telling transparency. He revealed his true perspective on patronage. Locke’s explanation must have been good, for the comment did not rupture their relationship. But the comment gave her pause, for it reinforced her persistent suspicion that she was just an old, rich, easily manipulated White woman who was being tapped for cash by Locke and his friends. She worried she was still a financial “touch,” rather than the maternal, disciplining force she saw herself as being in his life. He was still the thief and the confidence man, who seemed to be saying to Hughes: “Get all you can and as much as you can, before this good thing ends.” Locke’s comment also punctured Hughes’s later, carefully crafted pose in his autobiography, that he broke with Mason because he was not primitive enough for her. He was certainly primitive enough that night to get the “Masque” and the “envelope” from her. Locke was also reminding Hughes that he owed him for that envelope in his hands; only Hughes would think that he could benefit from Locke’s intercession and not repay the favor eventually. In a sense, it was probably good that the comment got back to Mason, because Locke needed much more than a “thick white envelope” to fund the museum, let alone his great idea of revolutionizing patronage. Was she ever going to really commit her largesse to his plans?
Fortunately, April 1927 brought several opportunities for Locke to be away from Mason’s constant prying and scrutiny, the price of the little money he was getting. He needed to earn some real money. First, he went to Louisville to give some public lectures, which gave him some much-needed cash, and then to Nashville, where he gave a series of lectures at Fisk.25 The latter were particularly important as Fisk’s president wanted to hire Locke. After the lectures, the dinners, and the meetings with alumni, Locke would be offered a one-year temporary teaching position for the academic year 1927–1928.26 Such an appointment, however, would mean living away from New York’s artistic energy and Mason, and living in the South, not so easy for Locke.
Then, the Foreign Policy Association approved his grant to study and report on the African Mandates System of the League of Nations. Engineered by his one male patron, Paul Kellogg, with whom Locke never experienced conflict, the fellowship meant he could spend the summer and part of the fall in Europe, resurrecting his theorizing about European imperialism that had languished in his still-unpublished lectures on Race Contacts. Du Bois, among others, had demanded at Versailles that former German colonies be “liberated” by the Allies after the World War; but instead, the League of Nations had turned these colonies into wards to be “managed” by the Great War’s victors according to “Mandates” about what their new colonizers—the English and the French—could do with the colonized. Raising armies from these former German colonies was verboten, but putting their inhabitants to work under conditions that veered into near-slavery was allowed. Locke suspected the English and French actually controlled and exploited these colonies through the League’s Mandate system, especially as reports of starvation, widespread disease, and torture reached the news. If Locke could turn this stint observing deliberations about the future of these African colonies at the League headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, into a crackerjack report, he might gain international reputation as a spokesperson and negotiator of African interests.
Overjoyed with the appointment, Locke brought the news to Mason. But she was not overly impressed and questioned what he could accomplish for primitive peoples through the League of Nations. She was also curious about his qualifications to do the job adequately and advised him to brush up on his French, since the League conducted business in that language. Locke countered he was fluent in French and was under contract to translate Rene Maran’s Batouala into English. In the back of Locke’s mind was the hope that if he did the job well, he might even receive some sort of diplomatic post and be able, finally, to live openly as a gay man in Europe.27
Still, Locke’s major focus at mid-month was preparing the upcoming Paul Robeson benefit concert. Robeson and Lawrence Brown, his accompanist, agreed to do the benefit, and ticket sales were good. Mason provided the funds for all of the little things required to make it a success. That was another narcotic of their relationship—the drug of efficacy, of being able to get things done, an effectiveness that Locke associated with White people. But all patronage comes at a cost, and Locke would soon learn that.
As the date of the performance neared, Mason had a suggestion. Why not have Robeson don one of the African masks from the Blondiau Collection while he sang in the concert?28 Of course, the program, which was Robeson’s choosing, consisted mainly of spirituals and other African American folk music. Locke asked Robeson to do this, at a private meeting. Robeson refused. He knew that it was inappropriate to sing a program of African American folk music wearing an African mask. Some of the masks may have been sacred objects to be worn only by religious figures, who had the status to wear such things. It was inappropriate for anyone not from that community to wear those masks. Robeson was an African American, a blend of European, African, and perhaps Indian heritages, and a modern, who was light years removed from the culture and beliefs of the Congo that had produced the mask. Locke knew this request was absurd, but apparently he did not inform Mason of this. Instead, he carried the suggestion to Robeson and, after the rejection, had to explain what had happened. Here again, after the rejection, was an opportunity to dispel her likely reaction—that Robeson was a “White” Negro and thus did not want to do this act of identification with Africa because he was not primitive enough.29 Locke knew anthropology well enough to explain to her that it was an act of disrespect to don other people’s religious or ceremonial masks. Here was an opportunity to change his relationship with Mason forever and make her the student and him the teacher. Even if it took him a day or so, Locke had the time to compose a response. And Mason was not so dilettantish that she would not have understood the difference between a facile and a serious explanation. But he did not do it.
His subsequent acceptance of questionable and simply wrong assertions by Mason without contestation became a regular feature of their relationship. Something kept him from challenging her on this and other points crucial to the value of what her patronage could produce. Without realizing it, Locke had participated in a wake for himself as a New Negro of the 1920s. One of his assertions in The New Negro proved true in this incident. Locke had stated that the “younger generation” of Black voices was strong enough to oppose mindless White paternalism. In this instance, that voice had been Robeson’s, not Locke’s.
That Locke, a rather opinionated intellectual, would defer to the opinion of a rather unsophisticated devotee of the “primitive” is curious. He had been quite willing to infuriate Albert Barnes and his cockeyed notions about Black people, even when the reward for obsessive obeisance would have been money. That Barnes had been reluctant to give Locke money played some part in his attitude; but others, such as Thomas Munro, Aaron Douglas, Gwendolyn Bennett, and even Bertrand Russell, had been able to keep silent and deferential to Barnes’s crass and overbearing authority long enough to receive some cash. Locke undermined that authority, almost as a matter of course, and had enjoyed doing so. With Mason, he was different. She was no less crass, coarse, or brutal in her sweeping judgments of him and others; and yet the emotional chemistry between them elicited something rarely seen in him, a kind of fawning deference in her presence that allocated to her an unusual authority over him. Despite Locke’s innate aggressiveness, his refined sensibilities, and his nuanced sense of decorum—indeed, his egotistical sense that he was always, even when neglected, the best and the brightest mind in the room—something in his armor had split in her presence, and the chink became wide enough that she could enter his inner sanctum and inhabit it in ways he had only experienced before with his mother.
Even Locke’s relationship with his mother had been different. With Mary Locke he had the advantage of her in regards to education, breadth of culture, and cosmopolitan exposure—precisely those qualities she respected. With Mason, not only did she possess an insider’s knowledge of aristocratic America, a knowledge he lacked, but she also respected the Western aesthetic culture he had mastered, even if his mastery of it went beyond hers. Mason was not a replacement for his actual mother, but more the idealized young Locke’s fantasized mother, which no mother could completely embody. Part of the occasional meanness toward his real mother that surfaces in his correspondence with her is anger that she does not live up to this image of the omnipotent mother. Mason’s psychological power in his life in 1927 comes from the fantasy, which she cultivated with all of her “godchildren,” that she was the all-powerful mother, and she wielded her power over her “godchildren” because she found that place of weakness in their psyche that came from unresolved feelings for their own mothers. With Locke especially, Mason manipulated his dynamic need for a new, more powerful mother than his own and gained from it tremendous influence over him emotionally.30
And then there was the money. That such an emotional dependency would erupt in someone who had so confidently asserted the “self-determination” of the New Negro is perplexing until we realize that key to the fantasy of total self-determination was the fantasy of power and her money could bring him that. Locke was motivated by a desire, almost a craving, for power, authority, and control; in Mason, he saw those attributes, not only as her attributes but also something he could acquire through her financial resources. In 1927, he faced the reality that his own power, especially over the young Black writers and the Renaissance debates, generally, was waning. Mason became a way for Locke to exercise power over others he would not be able to control or influence on his own. That’s why the all-powerful mother Mason represented herself to be was both emotionally and professionally intoxicating to him. He became weak around her, because he became in her presence the frightened little man desperately in need of love and nurture, a man running on empty five years after the death of the only person whom he was sure had really loved him.
Locke revived a persona with Mason—that of the “little boy.” On one level, this persona was designed to win her confidence and secure her funding. But on another, it was not fake or manipulative. The phrase “little boy” or “your little boy” was exactly what he signed at the end of his letters to his mother. It would soon become evident that he gave his contact with Mason the same kind of valuation he reserved for his mother, since in the corpus of Locke’s correspondence, the volume of Mason-Locke correspondence was only second to that which he maintained with his mother. Without perhaps completely realizing it at first, a kind of transference had occurred from Mary Locke to Charlotte Mason. What he did know was that he was desperate in 1927, and he could not do without this relationship. How desperate he was soon became clear.
A precipitous emotional slide for Locke into despair began after the concert was over. It had been a musical success, generating almost immediately talk as to when it might be repeated, perhaps on an annual basis. But Locke knew that one benefit concert was not enough to build a museum in New York. In a telephone conversation with Mason, Locke confided to her that what made him particularly despondent was a long, discouraging talk he had with Roland Hayes, who declined to contribute in a major way to the museum. It is not clear whether Hayes did not want to do a concert like Robeson or he did not want to give money outright to the project. Either way, his refusal of Locke’s invitation was more than just another dead end, for Hayes was the man who had been the subject of one of Locke’s first articles on the New Negro artist. That article had furthered Hayes’s career, as had having his portrait by Winold Reiss on the cover of the Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic. Hayes had benefited from the work Locke had done for the movement, and yet he was not willing to help Locke in return for all he had given him. If the Black artists who were actually benefiting from the movement would not pour back into the movement some of the profits they were reaping, then where could Locke turn for such support? If Negroes of talent would not contribute to a Black arts institution, how could Locke expect Whites to do so? If this was the result of all of his hard work, what did he have to show for the five years since his mother’s death that he had spent diverting the love he had had for her into an almost incessant promotional love for Negro artists?
Locke spent the next few days at Mrs. Mason’s apartment, soaking up in eight-hour sessions with her whatever strength he could gain to go on. His conversation with Hayes had touched a deep well of pain. Hayes’s rejection symbolized the broader failure of Locke’s effort to create enduring Black institutions out of the Negro Renaissance.
Of course, in one sense, Black creativity would continue to flower without the kinds of institutions he wanted to create. But Locke correctly perceived that without a solid foothold in the “exhibitionary complex” of the art gallery, the art museum, the concert hall, the theater, and the university, Black artistic expression would remain a fitful expression of brilliance and lack the institutional structure to sustain such talent.31 Hayes’s reaction exposed that Locke was unable to convince the Black middle-class artists to think beyond the cult of individualism. But the setback also brought up Locke’s deep-seated doubts about the ability of Negroes to work together to create something of permanent value. That feeling usually lurked under the public face of Alain Locke, unseen by most who knew him. But it was drawn out into the open by Hayes’s reaction and was only beaten back by Mason. Locke was emotionally dependent on White patronage in large part because the Black bourgeoisie would not support his outsized dreams.
Ironically, as Locke was becoming more dependent on Mason, he felt more alive. She supported his projects, not the Black artists he had helped. That held a lesson for him that put into context all of those Black nationalists who called for a Black-only New Negro movement. Locke had tried that, first at Howard with the Howard Players, then in the streets and institutions of Harlem, Washington, and Philadelphia; and now Hayes’s reaction suggested it would not work. The rejection by Hayes gave him permission to move in a direction he had always used effectively before—to build hopes of Black success, especially his success, on the interest of and support of largely White strangers.32 Locke’s move to Mason was predictable from the standpoint of the history of art institutionalization in America and a capitulation to the reality that a purely Black nationalist aesthetics had not succeeded among the very class of persons, the Black bourgeoisie, who were the natural patrons for such a movement. But as he was strengthened, he was simultaneously weakened as an independent subject. As Locke accepted Mason’s support, he became increasingly subject to her pathological demands to stroke her, defer to her, and agree with her fantastical notions of Blackness and civilization. Receiving her psychological support required acquiescing to her intellectual dominance, which on some level was ridiculous.
Locke’s dependency on Mason did not compel him to drop some of the most important masks he wore, however. On April 30, perhaps in response to his evasiveness after the Robeson-African “masque” episode, she noted in her diary that Locke “suffered” from a sense of protection “which slavery has created throughout the Negro race. Even with me, whom he trust(s) implicitly he is self-conscious in writing a letter.”33 Perhaps if Mason had been less willing to play the role of the master, he would have been less willing to be the trickster slave! Of course, that thought never crossed her mind. Her vicious maternalism created the conditions under which for his psychic survival, Locke felt he needed to keep some of those masks handy.
Most profoundly (and apparently successfully), Locke masked from her that he was gay. Apparently he fabricated a story of a pseudo-romantic relationship in order to explain to Mason why he never married. In a lengthy entry in Mason’s diary, she chronicled Locke’s story that he had a romantic relationship with Helen Irvin, his mother’s friend, whom, according to the diary entry, he “never married because he could not have children on account of his heart.”34 Nowhere in the voluminous correspondence between Locke and his mother, or between Locke and Irvin, is there an inkling of a romantic feeling, let alone a courtship, between the two of them. It is true that an inclination of his heart did mean he did not have children, but it was the inclination of his heart not the weakness of it physiologically that caused their absence. His heart did periodically act up and forced him into a slower, almost sleepy regime, until the period passed. But that was the exception, rather than the rule, for the hyperactive hypochondriac. He was certainly capable of the physical exertion of sex, not to mention his exhausting travel and lecturing schedule. That Locke masked this central fact of his existence from Mason suggests why he was “self-conscious in writing a letter” to her. That Mason believed the story shows not only her gullibility but the intensity of her homophobic desire not to see the obvious if cloaked signs of Locke’s homosexuality, not the least of which was his salivating pursuit of Langston Hughes.
That obsession doomed Locke’s chance to have her finance a trip to Africa. Early in May, Mason drew up a list of “Reprimands,” chief among them being that after hearing her comment about wanting to send him to Africa, he cultivated another patron’s support “to carry him to Africa,” as she put it. What he wanted was enough money from another patron to bring Hughes along! This was too much for Mason. It exemplified his “egotism.”35 But Locke was not interested in going to Africa in 1927 unless he could link it with the pursuit of Langston Hughes.
After writing about Locke’s “egotism,” Mason held her first meeting with Langston Hughes alone, an hours-long conference on May 22. Hughes’s biographer suggests that meeting “consolidated” the relationship because Hughes accepted the emotional tone and personal requirements/expectations Mason imposed on him, specifically that he should call her “Godmother.”36 Hughes may have used that meeting also to confide perhaps that Locke’s attentiveness made him uncomfortable. After the meeting, Hughes seemed to accept her conception of the primitive. He was the ideal child, someone she could mold, regardless of his chronological age, and retained the sense of wonder and creativity of the artistically gifted. Hughes seemed a better prospect to become this type of primitive—the child of “genius”—than the perpetually blocked and neurotic Locke. This comparison was not exclusive to Mason. Many of the “younger New Negroes,” artists like Richard Bruce (Nugent), for instance, chafed under Locke’s constant prattling conceit that the New Negro movement was his baby and that they, as the artists, ought to follow his prescriptions. Instead, “we felt that Langston Hughes was much the better authority on the New Negro and a truer, more humble leader of the movement, as well.”37
At that Sunday meeting, Mason very well may have asked Hughes whether he wanted to go to Abyssinia with Locke. Sitting one-on-one with her, Hughes had an opportunity to share with her his plans; he preferred to spend his summer going South, to Florida, to Cuba, in part because of his growing awareness of what Spanish-language poets were beginning to do in Cuba, and also his sense that the distinctive culture he had mined from Negro migrants in Washington, D.C., came from the South, not Africa. Hughes wanted to follow, in effect, the footsteps of those migrants back to the root of the culture they had transplanted north, the oral sources of a distinctively Black American tradition. What particular tradition Locke would be uncovering in Abyssinia remained hazy at best, especially for a poet like Hughes. The meeting alone with Mason, therefore, allowed Hughes to impress Mason with his own intellectual perspective, to assert his authority over his development as a poet, and to win her approval for those plans, thereby separating his career and relationship with her from Locke’s.
Locke was losing authority with another poet as well. On June 4, 1927, Claude McKay did what he had threatened to do in October 1924—sever his relationship with Locke.38 In the Harlem issue of Survey Graphic, Locke had changed the title of McKay’s poem “White House” to “White Houses” and continued the new title in The New Negro: An Interpretation as well. Upon receiving his copy of the anthology, McKay had informed Locke that he had misrepresented the title of the poem. Then, once again, in 1927, Locke published the poem with “White Houses” as its title in Four Negro Poets, a short anthology of poetry by Toomer, Cullen, Hughes, and McKay. Dutifully, Locke brought the volume to Mrs. Mason, who loved it. But in June, McKay wrote a letter that attacked Locke’s stated motivation for the change—that Locke did not wish to have the reading audience think that McKay was speaking about the residence of the American president—as weak-kneed and unnecessary. McKay no longer wanted Locke to represent or publish his work or consider him his friend. That Locke had continued to use the poem—which he could have simply not published in Four Negro Poets—shows something of Locke’s sense of entitlement: he, representing and creating a market for their poetry, had a power superior to these “Negro Poets.” The controversy shows, perhaps, how Mason’s power over Locke prevailed. Her hegemony over him was another version of his over penniless authors like McKay.
Instead of going to Abyssinia, Locke left on June 21 for Europe, to spend most of that month trying to translate Rene Maran’s Batouala into English and prepare for Geneva and the League of Nations conference he would be attending in September.39 Locke forbade them to put his name on the ship’s list, lest he be disturbed—a comment Mason liked, as it meant he would go into hiding, consistent with her belief that he needed to shield himself from distractions in order to work. But he also needed to shield himself from the emotional disappointments of the spring. At least in Europe he could reconnect with old lovers, dodge McKay, and try to forget Hughes. And he could escape for a while Mrs. Mason and her panopticonic gaze.40
Charlotte Mason. Photograph by Hollinger. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.