Selected Letters of Langston Hughes: Edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel

¹ In The Big Sea, Hughes describes Mrs. Mason: “My patron (a word neither of us liked) was a beautiful woman, with snow-white hair and a face that was wise and very kind. She had been a power in her day in many movements adding freedom and splendor to life in America.… Now she was very old and not well and able to do little outside her own home. But there she was like a queen. Her power filled the rooms.”

² When Godmother asked Locke to find Hughes’s stepbrother, Gwyn “Kit” Clark, a home and a school, Locke secured Gwyn a home in Springfield, Massachusetts, under the roof and care of a woman named Eva Stokein, as well as enrollment in a nearby school. Godmother paid the bills.

³ Anne Spencer (1882–1975) was an African American modernist poet whose work appeared in various journals and in Locke’s The New Negro (1925). While in Lynchburg, Virginia, Hughes stayed at the home Spencer shared with her husband.

⁴ A graduate of Rutgers University and Columbia Law School, Paul Robeson (1898–1976) was an athlete, singer, actor of stage and screen, and civil rights activist.

⁵ Jessie Fauset threw a party on February 8 for Salvador de Madariaga (1886–1978), a prominent Spanish diplomat who was then professor-elect of Spanish at Oxford University.

⁶ Eugene Gordon (1891–1974), an African American journalist, was an editor and a feature writer for The Boston Post from 1919 until 1940.

⁷ A published poet, Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877?–1966) opened her home in Washington, D.C., mainly to other African American writers and their friends on Saturday evenings. Among the regulars at various times were Rudolph “Bud” Fisher, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Alain Locke. Her books of verse include The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928).

⁸ Charles S. Johnson (1893–1956) was a University of Chicago–trained sociologist. As director of research for the National Urban League, he edited its monthly magazine Opportunity, which also encouraged black writers. In 1927, Johnson became the chair of the Department of Social Research at Fisk University. In 1946, he became its first black president.

⁹ On April 9, Countee Cullen married Yolande Du Bois, daughter and only surviving child of W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most extravagant events (stage-managed by the bride’s father) seen that year in Harlem. The marriage was short-lived.

¹⁰ Nella Larsen (1891–1964) was the child of a black father from the Caribbean and a white mother from Denmark. From 1919 to 1933, she was married to Elmer Imes, an African American physicist. Knopf published her first novel, Quicksand, in 1928.

¹¹ The African American actor and baritone Jules Bledsoe (1897?–1943) originated the role of Joe (who sings the show-stopping lament “Ol’ Man River”) in Show Boat, the Broadway musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II based on Edna Ferber’s novel of the same name.

¹² Anna Nussbaum, a socialist scholar, translated thirty-seven of Hughes’s poems into German for publication in her anthology Afrika Singt: Eine Auslese Neuer Afro-Amerikanischer Lyrik (“Africa Sings: A New Selection of Afro-American Poetry”) (1929).

¹³ Congaree Sketches (1927) by Edward C. L. Adams, a white physician, is a collection of black folklore gathered from people living in the region around his home near the Congaree River in central South Carolina.

¹⁴ Haines Normal and Industrial Institute was located in Augusta, Georgia.

¹⁵ The Inter-State Tattler, a weekly black gossip sheet, was first published in 1925.

¹⁶ The African Saga (1927) is an American translation of Anthologie Nègre (1921), a collection of African folktales and stories compiled by Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), a Swiss-French poet, novelist, and soldier. Cendrars’s main sources were accounts by European travelers, especially missionaries.

¹⁷ Although publicly condemned by W. E. B. Du Bois for its celebration of lower-class habits and values, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) remains one of the defining novels of the Harlem Renaissance.

¹⁸ Hughes is referring to the uproar among many blacks caused by the title of Carl Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven (1926).

¹⁹ Francis Carco (1886–1958) was a French writer whose works describe the street life of Montmartre in Paris. Pio Baroja depicted the slums of Madrid (see also Hughes’s letter to Locke of April 6, 1923). Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) wrote about the lives of the lower classes in Russia.

²⁰ Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) was a Spanish activist and novelist. In his early novels, such as Flor de Mayo (1895) and La Barraca (1898), he wrote graphically about farm life in Valencia.

²¹ Rudolph “Bud” Fisher (1897–1934), a physician with a special interest in radiology, was also a noted writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Knopf published his first novel, The Walls of Jericho, in 1928.

²² Hughes described Wallace Thurman (1902–1934) as “a strangely brilliant boy, who had read everything, and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read.” His books include the novels The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) and Infants of the Spring (1932).

²³ The Jamaican-born Claude McKay was then living in France.

²⁴ Ethel Waters (1896–1977) was an Academy Award–nominated actress and an acclaimed jazz singer also known for her popular rendition of the religious song “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” In 1951, Waters published an autobiography of the same name.

²⁵ Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891–1981), was praised for his paintings of black life in Chicago. Although he never lived in New York, his work became associated with the art of the Harlem Renaissance.

²⁶ Hughes had worked with Caroline Dudley Reagan (see also letter of October 9, 1925) on the review O Blues!, which Reagan hoped to stage with Paul Robeson as its star. However, following the success in London of Show Boat, in which Robeson created a sensation with his rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” he backed out of his agreement with Reagan.

²⁷ The New York Evening Graphic (1924–1932) was a periodical known for its confessional and true detective stories and also its “cosmographs,” sketches of court scenes with photographs of the heads of the participants pasted in.

²⁸ William Grant Still (1895–1978) was an acclaimed African American composer who set Hughes’s poem “Breath of the Rose” to music in 1928. In 1935, Still began work with Hughes on Troubled Island, an opera about the Haitian revolution. It was finally performed in 1949 in New York City.

²⁹ The composer H. Lawrence Freeman (1869–1954) received the 1929 Harmon Award for musical achievement. His opera Voodoo was produced in New York in September 1928.

³⁰ Austrian-American Ernst Krenek (1900–1991) composed the jazz opera Jonny Spielt Auf (“Johnny Strikes Up”), which failed on its Metropolitan debut in 1929.

³¹ Nella Larsen’s second novel, Passing, was published by Knopf in 1929.

³² Walter White’s Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, a study of lynching in America, was published in 1929.

³³ Supported by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the British Guiana–born short story writer Eric Walrond (1898–1966) left the United States in 1928 to work on a novel about the Panama Canal. Although he never finished the novel, his 1926 collection of stories, Tropic Death (which includes stories about the canal), was admired by other writers.

³⁴ Wallace Thurman’s novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, mainly about color consciousness among black Americans (Macaulay, 1929).

³⁵ Magie Noire (1928), a collection of stories by French diplomat and writer Paul Morand (1888–1976), appeared in English as Black Magic in 1929 and includes illustrations by Aaron Douglas.

³⁶ The poem, “Nonette,” appeared in The Crisis of June 1928.

³⁷ In the July Crisis, the black academic William Allison Davis (1902–1983) charged that Van Vechten had subverted Hughes’s talent. Hughes then pointed out that he had written the poems in The Weary Blues before he met Van Vechten. An anthropologist, Davis would become the first African American to hold a full faculty position at a major white institution when the University of Chicago appointed him in 1942.

³⁸ Louise Alone Thompson (Patterson) (1901–1999), later one of Hughes’s closest friends, graduated with a degree in economics from the University of California in Berkeley in 1923. Later she studied at the New York School of Social Work before joining the faculty at Hampton Institute. Forced out of Hampton for opposing its conservative leadership, she worked at first as a typist for various Harlem writers, including Wallace Thurman, to whom she was briefly married. In 1940, Thompson married William L. Patterson, a lawyer and prominent communist.

³⁹ Wallace Thurman wrote his first play, Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life in Harlem, with a white collaborator, William Jourdan Rapp. Their play opened on February 20, 1929, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

⁴⁰ All of Hughes’s letters to Charlotte Mason have been lost, apparently. In their absence, we include here several surviving drafts of letters from him to Mason.

⁴¹ On Monday, February 18, after what seemed to him a pleasant lunch, Mrs. Mason exploded at Hughes. She accused him of ingratitude and insincerity, of taking money and doing virtually nothing in return. Her fury, and her visible weariness once it was spent, deeply upset him.

⁴² The nature of the accident or injury to Hughes’s mother is not known. Carrie Clark was then living in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with her stepson, Gwyn.

⁴³ Since 1892, the weekly newspaper Baltimore Afro-American, commonly called The Afro, has served the black communities especially in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., metropolitan areas.

⁴⁴ Fania Marinoff (1890–1971), Van Vechten’s wife, was a Russian-born actress with a successful career on Broadway and in silent films.

⁴⁵ Eslanda “Essie” Cardozo Goode Robeson (1895–1965) was a trained chemist, writer, and civil rights activist. She published Paul Robeson, Negro, the first biography of her husband, in 1930.

⁴⁶ Written on the back of the envelope of the June 27, 1929, letter:
Cats in the alley fighting over guts
Women in whorehouses ″ ″ nuts

⁴⁷ The boxers Kid Chocolate (1910–1988), born Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo in Cuba, and Panama Al Brown (1902–1951), born Alfonso Teofilo Brown, became world champions in their respective weight classes in 1931.

⁴⁸ Arna Bontemps (1902–1973), a novelist and poet, served as head librarian at Fisk University from 1943 to 1966. After Hughes met Bontemps in 1924, the two men developed a lifelong friendship and exchanged thousands of letters. They also collaborated on several anthologies and children’s books, published and unpublished.

⁴⁹ Taylor Gordon (1893–1971), a specialist in spirituals, joined the versatile musician J. Rosamond Johnson to form a singing duo in the mid-1920s that toured the United States, France, and England. In 1929, Gordon published an autobiography, Born to Be.

⁵⁰ Nora Holt (1895?–1974) was a well-known African American singer who also served as a respected music critic for The Chicago Defender.

⁵¹ Probably Anita Thompson (1901–1980), a film actress and model who was involved with McKay in Paris at this time. She appears as “Carmina” in McKay’s autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937). On May 14, 1929, McKay had written that Thompson “says she knows you and has often visited Lincoln,” adding that she was “the society type that takes up bohemianism because it is smart to do so!” Her memoir was edited and published posthumously by George Hutchison as American Cocktail: A “Colored Girl” in the World (Harvard University Press, 2014).

⁵² Dudley Murphy (1897–1968) cast Bessie Smith in the leading role of his short film St. Louis Blues (1929), which provides the only recorded footage of Smith performing.

⁵³ “She” is Laudee Williams, a young woman with whom Hughes had apparently fallen in love the previous November.

⁵⁴ Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987) was an illustrator, short story writer, poet, playwright, and bohemian personality. Born in Washington, D.C., where he met and became fast friends with Hughes in 1924 or 1925, Nugent moved to Manhattan to join the Harlem Renaissance. With Hughes’s help, he published poems in Countee Cullen’s anthology Caroling Dusk (1927), in Opportunity magazine, and in Fire!!

⁵⁵ On August 15, Hughes went to the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Around September 1, he continued on to Canada.

⁵⁶ Late May 1930 marks the beginning of the end of Hughes’s relationship with Mrs. Mason. He believed that their break resulted in part from Godmother’s dissatisfaction with the slowness of his writing and the fact that he was not “primitive” or “African” enough for her. As he puts it in The Big Sea, “I was only an American Negro—who loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa—but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem. And I was not what she wanted me to be. So, in the end it all came back very near to the old impasse of white and Negro again, white and Negro—as do most relationships in America.” In this draft, Hughes alludes to their latest quarrel, which was precipitated by his decision to keep a commitment in Washington, D.C., rather than stay home and write. Seeing this decision as evidence of his disloyalty and ingratitude, she reminded Hughes how much she had spent to support his writing while he had given her almost nothing in return.

⁵⁷ Hughes wrote Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930) with Mrs. Mason’s generous financial support and intense encouragement.

⁵⁸ After submitting the manuscript of Not Without Laughter to Blanche Knopf on February 17, Hughes decided to seek a Cuban musician to collaborate with him on a new project, a “singing play.” Godmother liked this plan and gave him $500 to fund his trip. Hughes traveled to Cuba aboard the Cunard ship Caronia, which arrived there on February 25. He left Cuba on March 6, after making friends among the local literati but without finding a suitable composer. Returning to his residence in Westfield, New Jersey, he did not begin writing immediately. When news of his inactivity reached her (probably through Alain Locke, who had become her well-paid, principal advisor on black American culture), Godmother became angry.

⁵⁹ Louise Thompson (Patterson) had been hired by Mrs. Mason in September 1929 to be Hughes’s typist. (For information on Thompson, see note for letter of September 13, 1928.)

⁶⁰ Hughes spent the dog days of August on the beach in Far Rockaway, New York. His mother was working as a maid near this popular resort city.

⁶¹ Mrs. Mason sometimes poetically referred to Hughes as “Alamari.” The origin of the name is unclear, although it is perhaps linked to a reputed West African warrior dance of the same name.

⁶² Modeled in part on Hughes himself, Sandy is the main character of his novel Not Without Laughter.

⁶³ In The Big Sea, Hughes recalls his final meeting with Godmother: “I cannot write here about that last half-hour in the big bright drawing-room high above Park Avenue one morning, because when I think about it, even now, something happens in the pit of my stomach that makes me ill.… Physically, my stomach began to turn over and over—and then over again. I fought against bewilderment and anger, fought hard, and didn’t say anything. I just sat there in the high Park Avenue drawing-room and didn’t say anything.”

⁶⁴ Mrs. Mason’s financial support of his stepbrother, Gwyn Clark, is discussed in earlier letters to Alain Locke (see those of January 3, 1928, and February 27, 1928).

⁶⁵ Hughes included this asterisk to indicate the insertion of text (also marked with an asterisk) that he had written on a separate sheet, with a different pen. The crossed-out line preceding the asterisk appears at the top of this separate sheet.

⁶⁶ The poet Katherine Garrison Biddle (1890–1977) and her sister Cornelia Chapin (1893–1972), a sculptor, served as assistants to Mrs. Mason. L. H. Paul Chapin, a businessman (1888–1938), was their brother.

⁶⁷ The following incomplete text appears on a page that Hughes crossed out with a large “X”:
“When I read the letters that come to me expressing surprise and admiration at its simplicity and lack of propaganda, I say “They do not know who helped me to write that book.” And I never read a review but that I Iv remember the flaming and superior finest criticism which you wrote for me when the book was only half finished.
I wish we could work on the play together, Dear Godmother.
Every day for hours here on the lying in the sun on the beach, I try to puzzle out what has happened to me recently that has”

⁶⁸ In June, Hughes had been invited to the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, the first residential repertory theater in America. Its director, Jasper Deeter (1893–1972), a former member of the Provincetown Players, founded the Hedgerow Theatre in 1923 with a commitment to staging experimental and progressive plays. Deeter had planned a season of six plays with black or integrated casts and wanted a black playwright in residence. Hughes arrived in Moylan–Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, on September 15.

⁶⁹ Rose McClendon (1884–1936) was one of the most accomplished black actresses of her time. While at the Hedgerow Theatre, Hughes showed McClendon an early draft of “Cross: A Play of the Deep South,” a drama about miscegenation that he later renamed Mulatto. When Mulatto was produced on Broadway in 1935, McClendon played the part of Cora Lewis, the black common-law wife of a Georgia plantation owner, Colonel Thomas Norwood, until her final illness forced her to leave the cast.

⁷⁰ Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) tells the story of Brutus Jones, a black American porter who is jailed for fighting but escapes to an island in the West Indies, where he establishes himself as emperor. At the Provincetown Playhouse premiere on November 1, 1920, the African American actor Charles S. Gilpin (1878–1930) performed the title role while Jasper Deeter played Smithers, a white colonial opportunist.

⁷¹ Regino Pedroso (1896–1983) was a Cuban writer of African and Chinese descent whom Hughes met on his second trip to Cuba. Hughes helped Pedroso to place his poem “Alarm Clock” in the New York–based Poetry Quarterly.

⁷² Hughes encouraged the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989) to employ black Cuban vernacular forms, including speech, songs, and dance rhythms, in the same way that Hughes had used blues and jazz in his own poetry. Shortly after Hughes left Cuba in March 1930, Guillén created a sensation in Havana with the publication of Motivos de Son, eight poems that used the popular son dance rhythm rooted in Cuba’s black culture.

⁷³ Graziella Garbalosa (1896–1977) was a prolific Cuban poet and avant-garde writer. In 1920, she published a volume of poetry entitled La juguetería de amor (“The Toy of Love”).

⁷⁴ Scarlet Sister Mary, Julia Peterkin’s play based on her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name, opened in Columbus, Ohio, on September 22, 1930, and in New York on Broadway on November 25, 1930. Peterkin (1890–1961) was a successful white writer known for her portrayals of black folk life in the South Carolina Low Country.

⁷⁵ Potter’s Field: A Symphonic Play of the Negro People was the first musical drama written by the white North Carolina playwright Paul Green.

⁷⁶ Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold (1874–1940) was an avant-garde Russian theatrical producer, director, and actor important in the Moscow Art Theatre until he left it in 1902. Although Paul Green had been told that Meyerhold would arrive in October 1930, Meyerhold did not come to the United States in 1930 or 1931, nor did he produce Potter’s Field in New York.

⁷⁷ Clarence Cameron White (1880–1960) was an African American concert violinist who studied composition in Great Britain with the black musician Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. In 1932, White created the opera Ounga with John F. Matheus, his colleague at West Virginia State University. Ounga tells the story of Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), the slave turned revolutionary who declared himself emperor of Haiti in 1804.

⁷⁸ Hughes left the Hedgerow Theatre in late October to return to his home in Westfield, New Jersey.

⁷⁹ Arthur B. Spingarn (1878–1971), the brother of Joel E. Spingarn, was Hughes’s lifelong attorney and friend. A tireless advocate for black rights, he served as president of the NAACP from 1940 until 1965.

⁸⁰ Lewis Sheridan Leary (1835–1859) was the first husband of Hughes’s maternal grandmother, Mary Langston. A member of John Brown’s insurrectionist band, Leary was killed in the Harpers Ferry raid.

⁸¹ Soon after writing this letter, Hughes visited a Park Avenue specialist (recommended by Spingarn), who rudely dismissed the tapeworm diagnosis. In The Big Sea, Hughes acknowledges that anger had made him sick: “Violent anger makes me physically ill, I guess, although I’ve only been that angry twice in my life. All that day I had kept trying not to feel angry or hurt or amazed or bewildered over the morning on Park Avenue—and I didn’t feel any of those things consciously—for I had loved very much that gentle woman who had been my patron and I wanted to understand what had happened to us that she had sent me away as she did.”

⁸² This bibliography was published by the Oakland Public Library, following (according to the library) “a suggestion from Mrs. Delilah Beasley.” There are three copies at the Oakland Public Library.

⁸³ Amy Spingarn sketched a portrait of Hughes, which was used as the frontispiece for their booklet Dear Lovely Death (1931).

⁸⁴ Sutton E. Griggs (1872–1933), the son of a former slave, was a Baptist minister, orator, and writer. His five published novels, written between 1899 and 1908, are generally considered early works in the Black Nationalist literary tradition. The first and best known is Imperium in Imperio (1899).

⁸⁵ In the spring of 1930, Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston began to collaborate on a folk comedy they called “Mule Bone.” The basic plot comes from a story collected by Hurston entitled “The Bone of Contention.” Once the best of friends, Hurston and Hughes quarreled over the authorship of the comedy (see also letters dated January 30, 1931, and February 7, 1931). Because they could not resolve their dispute, “Mule Bone” was not produced in their lifetimes. It was finally staged, with only limited success, at Lincoln Center in New York City on February 15, 1991.

⁸⁶ Around May 1930, with “Mule Bone” almost finished, Hurston suddenly left Westfield and moved to Manhattan. Whenever Hughes tried to reach her to discuss the future of the play, she evaded him. The following February, while visiting his mother in Cleveland, Hughes was stunned to learn that the Gilpin Players, a local amateur theater group, had received a script of “Mule Bone” that credited Hurston as the sole author. In October 1930, with Hughes at the Hedgerow Theatre, Hurston had copyrighted the play in her name only.

⁸⁷ The Gilpin Players (which would stage several plays by Hughes) were a mainly black amateur theater group founded and led in Cleveland by Rowena Woodham Jelliffe (1892–1992) and Russell Jelliffe (1891–1980). In 1915, the Jelliffes, a young white couple, established an interracial settlement house in Cleveland based on Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago. They also started the Dumas Drama Club, but renamed it in 1923 after a visit from the outstanding African American actor Charles S. Gilpin. In 1927, when the Gilpin Players acquired a theater adjacent to the settlement house, they called it Karamu House, karamu being Swahili for “a place of joyful meeting.”

⁸⁸ Roseanne is a romantic three-act drama with Negro spirituals written by Nan Bagby Stephens, a white playwright. First produced in 1923 with an all-white cast made up in blackface, it was then revived with greater success in 1924 with a black cast. The revival attracted outstanding performers: Rose McClendon starred in the 1924 touring production opposite Charles S. Gilpin, who was later replaced by Paul Robeson.

⁸⁹ In November 1930, Hurston (implicitly claiming sole authorship) had sent Carl Van Vechten a finished version of “Mule Bone.” Charmed by it, Van Vechten passed along the play to Barrett Clark of the Theatre Guild in New York. The Guild rejected it, but in his capacity as an associate of the prominent Samuel French Agency, Clark then recommended the comedy to the Gilpin Players.

⁹⁰ Probably eager to maintain his own lucrative ties to Mrs. Mason, Locke had assured her that he would support Hurston’s claims against Hughes in the controversy.

⁹¹ The Harmon Foundation, established in 1922 by William E. Harmon (1862–1928), a white real estate developer and philanthropist, promoted black participation in the fine arts. The Harmon Gold Award (a gold medal and $400) honored distinguished achievement in seven areas, including literature. Nominated apparently by Alain Locke, Hughes received the award in 1930.

⁹² Arthur Spingarn represented Hughes’s legal interests in the “Mule Bone” controversy.

⁹³ Hughes had joined the nationally prominent black Omega Psi Phi fraternity while attending Lincoln University.

⁹⁴ Charlotte Mason’s address in Manhattan was 399 Park Avenue.

⁹⁵ Remaining in Cleveland after Hurston left, Hughes finished the revision of his play “Cross” and renamed it Mulatto. Distraught after Godmother took Hurston’s side in the “Mule Bone” dispute, he decided to escape to the Caribbean. On April 1, he and his traveling companion and driver Zell Ingram left for Florida in a car owned by Ingram’s mother. From Miami, they took a train to Key West, where they went by boat to Havana. After about two weeks in Cuba, the men traveled by boat to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and then via bus to Cap-Haïtien in the north.

⁹⁶ La Citadelle Laferrière is a spectacular fortress (the largest in the Western Hemisphere) approximately seventeen miles south of Cap-Haïtien. Built between 1805 and 1820 from pieces of stone hauled up a three-thousand-foot mountain, it was designed to resist French attacks on the newly independent republic.

⁹⁷ Bezique is a card game for two players.

⁹⁸ Rozelle “Zell” Ingram (1910–1971) was a young African American artist at Karamu House who worked in prints, woodblocks, and theater scenery. In 1931, he and Hughes traveled together to Cuba and then to Haiti. In I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes describes Ingram as “a solid, amiable, easygoing fellow who had grown up, as I had, in the slums of Cleveland.”

⁹⁹ The entertainer Earl Tucker (1905–1937), dubbed the “Human Boa Constrictor,” was also known by the name of the sinuous dance he invented, “Snakehips.”

¹⁰⁰ Addison Durland was the child of a Cuban journalist and a New York banker. He became an NBC executive who later worked in Hollywood to improve the presentation of Latin Americans in the film industry.

¹⁰¹ The Magic Island (1929) is a study by Alexander King B. Seabrook of Haitian social and religious customs.

¹⁰² Mrs. Sarita “Sallie” J. Garvin (d. 1935) was the sister of Hughes’s father.

¹⁰³ Henri Christophe (1767–1820), a former slave and revolutionary, was elected president of the Northern State of the republic of Haiti in February 1807. His election followed the 1806 assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had crowned himself emperor of Haiti in 1804. On March 28, 1811, Christophe proclaimed the Northern State as the Kingdom of Haiti and himself as King Henri I.

¹⁰⁴ In his letter of January 13, 1932, James Hughes offered to send Langston a copy of the rabidly anti-black The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (1901) by William Hannibal Thomas (1843–1935). Thomas was himself African American, born free in Ohio.

¹⁰⁵ Robert Sengstacke Abbott (1870–1940) printed the first edition of his weekly newspaper The Chicago Defender, aimed mainly at an African American readership, on May 5, 1905. In October 1930, Abbott launched the short-lived magazine Abbott’s Monthly.

¹⁰⁶ After Ossian H. Sweet, a black physician, moved his family into a previously all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925, unruly whites targeted his house. Dr. Sweet, members of his family, and some visitors to the house were brought to trial after an incident in which gunfire from inside the house killed a demonstrator. With support from the NAACP, the famed lawyers Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hayes defended them. At the second trial (the first ended with a deadlocked jury), Henry Sweet, who had admitted to firing the fatal shot, was acquitted. The prosecution then dropped charges against the other defendants.

¹⁰⁷ Jesse Binga (1865–1950) opened the Binga State Bank on January 3, 1921, to serve the black business community in Chicago. In July 1930, the bank closed as a result of the Depression as well as bad loans and investments.

¹⁰⁸ In 1924, a wealthy New Yorker, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, sensationally sued for divorce Alice Jones Rhinelander, his wife of six weeks. He charged that she had fooled him into believing she was white. Her attorney had her disrobe behind closed doors for the white, all-male jury to see evidence of her “colored blood.” The jury ruled in favor of Alice Rhinelander.

¹⁰⁹ The Patiños—Dolores, Refugio, and Rafaela—were old friends of Hughes’s father. In The Big Sea, Hughes describes them as “three charming Mexican ladies who were his friends—three unmarried sisters, one of whom took care of his rents in the city. They were very Latin and very Catholic, lived in a house with a charming courtyard, and served the most marvelous dishes at table.… These three aging ladies were, I think, the only people in the whole world who really ever liked my father.”