LANGSTON Hughes always said that Zora Neale Hurston was the only person he knew who could stand on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue with a large pair of calipers in her hand and persuade strangers passing by to stop so that she could measure their heads. She was studying at Columbia at the time, with the anthropologists Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits, who were gathering evidence to assert that, contrary to current anthropological belief, the shapes of people’s heads and the racial characteristics of those shapes were not correlated with their owners’ intelligence. Though some of the people on 135th Street said they were too busy for experiments—it was 1926, and there was a lot going on—Zora Neale Hurston was a force, and she made you laugh somehow right away, and there was something about the way she asked.
Hughes and Hurston had met the previous year at the banquet for Harlem’s newest literary magazine, Opportunity. They had each received more than one prize, with particular attention given to Hughes for his poem “The Weary Blues,” and to Hurston for her story “Spunk.” Hughes was just back from Europe and was surprised to find himself a celebrated author, though he was still planning to go down to Washington, D.C., where he hoped to find a job. Hurston and Hughes were glad to be included in the new Opportunity set, which, under the editorship of Charles Johnson and his close advisor Alain Locke, was staking out its place as an arts magazine, in contradistinction to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis.
Literature at The Crisis was sustained by the careful hand of Jessie Fauset, Du Bois’s second in command. Fauset was a novelist with an eye for new work and Langston Hughes had been very grateful to her for publishing his first poems. Du Bois and Fauset both believed in the arts as instruments of social progress. In 1925, Hurston had joined Du Bois’s Krigwa Players, which would become, in 1926, his Little Negro Theater. Du Bois, still attentive to contact, said this theater should be for us, by us, about us, and near us, “in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.” Hurston thought this a good idea, but she could be a little mean about the man whom it amused her to call “Dr. Dubious,” and Hughes and Hurston thought of The Crisis not as an arts magazine but as a political forum. The artistic energy of the Harlem Renaissance was intensifying around Opportunity, and Opportunity clearly knew how to throw a party.
At the awards dinner, Hughes was immediately taken with Hurston. She told the stories she knew from her hometown, Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated Black town in America and the first to have a Black mayor. Zora Neale Hurston used to hang around the front porch of Joe Clarke’s store, listening to the men (and the women, but mostly the men) telling how the different races got their colors or why Sis Snail quit her husband; Hurston’s father, who was moderator of the South Florida Baptist Association, told wicked tales of pastors and congregations. After Hurston moved to Harlem, she told Hughes stories about traveling all over the south with a Gilbert and Sullivan light-opera company, and about Washington, D.C., where she’d first met Alain Locke, of distinguished scholarship and snobbish taste, at Howard University, and about the women she was meeting at Barnard, and her new friend the famous novelist Fannie Hurst. Hurston seemed inexhaustible. In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes wrote of Hurston, “Only to reach a wider audience, need she ever write books—because she is a perfect book of entertainment in herself.” Among their literary circle, which she christened “the Niggerati,” one of the most popular genres was Zora stories.
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Once Hughes moved up from Washington, D.C., he and Hurston were often at the same parties. They would go up to A’Lelia Walker’s on 136th Street, where the parties were so crowded—Hughes remembered it being like “the New York subway at the rush hour”—that if you got there late you literally couldn’t get in the door. Harlem’s favorite hostess, about whom Hurston would later attempt a novel, had her money from her mother, who made a fortune in hair-straightening products. Sometimes instead, Hughes and Hurston went to the soirees of Jessie Fauset; these were formal and less fun, as, in her own house, Fauset’s nurturing support of many of the Harlem talents took the form of encouraging people to recite their poetry and to speak French, and besides there was never much to drink. Hughes and Hurston more often ran into each other at Carl Van Vechten’s—his apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street was sometimes referred to by people in the know as “the midtown branch of the NAACP.” Van Vechten had been at the 1925 Opportunity dinner, too, and had been reintroduced to Hughes—they had met once before in the middle of the dance floor at Happy Rhone’s nightclub, but Van Vechten thought he had met someone named “Kingston.” After the Opportunity dinner, they had gone to various Harlem clubs and Van Vechten, as was his way, had been further converted and was throwing himself into the Harlem Renaissance with brio. Within six months, he had arranged for the acceptance of Hughes’s first book of poems, The Weary Blues, by his own publishers, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, and had begun writing reviews of blues singers for Vanity Fair and hosting parties for his new friends.
Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.
Van Vechten’s were the only parties outside of Harlem to be reported on regularly in the gossip column of Harlem’s Inter-State Tattler. Hughes later described these parties as mixed, really mixed, half Black, half white, everyone talking to everyone, with plenty to drink. At one such party the well-known opera singer Marguerite D’Alvarez sang an aria and afterward Bessie Smith, not knowing who D’Alvarez was but liking what she heard, went up to her and encouraged her not to give up singing. Hughes loved this story and, wanting to tell it correctly in his autobiography, wrote to Van Vechten for the precise details. Van Vechten replied with enjoyment:
Bessie Smith’s exact and baleful words after d’Alvarez had finished singing were, “Don’t let nobody tell you you can’t sing.” Bessie arrived dead drunk at that party and had a FULL pint glass of straight gin when she got there. She sang with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and she didn’t hold it there with her fingers. Nor did she drop it. But she was in magnificent form and sang the Blues like a low-down Black Angel. I LOVED Bessie.
After a little while, Langston Hughes got used to these parties, but when he first started coming in 1925, twenty-three years old and working as a busboy in a hotel in Washington, D.C., he found it a little overwhelming to meet Alfred Knopf and Nora Holt, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, and James Weldon Johnson all at once. Zora Neale Hurston took to Van Vechten’s living room as to her natural element, recognizing right away what it had in common with the front porch of Joe Clarke’s store.
Things were changing in 1926. In the spring, Hughes’s Weary Blues was published, as was his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which he called out, “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.” Hughes always insisted on a poetic tradition that didn’t look down on any song, no matter how folk in origin. In staking his claim to this tradition, Hughes aligned himself with one of his heroes, Walt Whitman, and implicitly criticized the poetry of his friend Countee Cullen, whose beautifully metered verses were heralded by both Du Bois and Locke. The Weary Blues and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” made a big impression on the circle of which Hughes and Hurston were the center.
Hughes and Hurston wanted to shuck Du Bois’s Victorian aesthetic and his middle-class aspirations for the race, and they wanted to unload Alain Locke’s highbrow art for art’s sake, too. They decided, along with several friends, including Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, and Aaron Douglas, to start a magazine called Fire!! for these reasons and one other—they were angry about the reception their friend Carl Van Vechten had gotten for his novel Nigger Heaven.
Although they loyally didn’t say much in public, Hurston and Hughes both thought the title was a mistake. People, including Van Vechten’s own father, had advised strongly against it, but Van Vechten was set on it. He liked to be outrageous, and he cared about the metaphor; “nigger heaven” was the phrase used by Harlemites for the balconies where Black people were allowed to sit in theaters. “To Mr. Van Vechten,” Hughes felt obliged to explain in his autobiography, “Harlem was like that, a segregated gallery in the theater, the only place where Negroes could see or stage their own show, and not a very satisfactory place at that, for in his novel Mr. Van Vechten presents many of the problems of the Negroes of Harlem.” Van Vechten’s novel was careful about controversial issues, particularly the decision faced by light-skinned Black men and women over whether or not to pass for white, a care that was obscured for most people by the incendiary title. Hughes wrote to Alain Locke that, inside its cover, he thought the book sounded a little too much like it had been written by “an N.A.A.C.P. official or Jessie Fauset. But it’s good.” W. E. B. Du Bois, an official of the NAACP since its inception, thought rather the contrary. He wrote in The Crisis that the book was “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and the intelligence of white.” He continued in a reasonable tone: “After all, a title is only a title, and a book must be judged eventually by its fidelity to truth and its artistic merit. I find this novel neither truthful nor artistic.” On the other hand, after she read Nigger Heaven, Gertrude Stein wrote to say that “the first party . . . is one of your best parties and you know what I think of your parties.”
Hughes and Hurston stuck by Van Vechten. Van Vechten had neglected to clear permission for song lyrics quoted in Nigger Heaven, and, copyright trouble looming, Hughes took the train in from Lincoln University and overnight wrote new blues lyrics for later printings of the book. For Van Vechten, one of the most painful judgments on his book was a rumor that he was no longer welcome at Small’s Paradise; he mollified the club owners by showing up with Hurston, whom no one could turn away.
Hurston and Van Vechten loved many of the same performers. Van Vechten once gave a dinner party for Hurston so that she could meet one of her heroes, Ethel Waters, who liked Hurston enough on that first evening to sing “Stormy Weather” for her; they became great friends. Hurston sometimes brought performers she had discovered over to Van Vechten’s apartment, writing to him of one group: “Please hear them sing just one song . . . you will hear a spiritual done spiritually.”
Hurston and Hughes were beginning to see that they had real position and influence in Harlem. Even Carl Van Vechten needed them. Du Bois, with a pang and some pride, recognized that he was now the father of this next generation of writers coming up. Hughes, particularly, had been raised on Du Bois’s exhortatory prose. Hughes spent his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, with his grandmother, who, like virtually every educated Black person of her age in the United States, subscribed to The Crisis. The Hughes family was protest aristocracy; Hughes’s grandfather had fought alongside John Brown at Harpers Ferry. As a twelve-year-old, Hughes had staged an antisegregation protest when a racist teacher wanted to consign the Black schoolchildren to a separate row. The signs he made for every Black child’s desk that read JIM CROW ROW and his appeal to the parents eventually convinced her otherwise. When Hughes’s first book was being published, Hughes was happy to follow Jessie Fauset’s suggestion and to dedicate to W. E. B. Du Bois the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Du Bois was moved by the gesture.
In 1926, even with the Little Negro Theater thriving, Du Bois knew that a certain period of his artistic influence had come to an end. Nigger Heaven came out in August; Fire!! in November. For Fire!! Hughes and Hurston decided to put in anything of shock value, including Bruce Nugent’s story of homosexual life in Harlem, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” and Wallace Thurman’s story about a “potential prostitute,” called “Cordelia the Crude.” So clearly was Du Bois the target of Fire!! that both Hughes and Hurston remembered that Du Bois “roasted” Fire!! in The Crisis. But though he may have shuddered in private, in public he did nothing of the kind, confining himself to neutrally mentioning the magazine’s existence in one line. He refused, however, to concede in his battle against the libertine values of Carl Van Vechten, and his disapproval stayed with Hurston and Hughes as if it had been directed at them, too.
In fact, Hurston and Hughes were two of the artists of the next generation who took Du Bois’s charge of recognizing the dignity and artistic accomplishments of the race most to heart. Du Bois, despite his hope of creating a well-educated and socially polished cohort of Black artists, teachers, and other professionals, which he called the “Talented Tenth,” had been among the first to claim for folk art, especially the blues, its right place as an American art form. Du Bois had quoted extensively from spirituals in The Souls of Black Folk, and as his own political and economic analysis shifted to the left his championing of folk material grew. In the 1930s, Hurston, Hughes, and Du Bois all argued that Black art couldn’t come from the Black middle class alone. Du Bois liked independent women and respected Zora Neale Hurston; he thought some of her work “beautiful.” And Du Bois had a special feeling for Langston Hughes, who was five years older than his own son would have been if it had been conceivable for a white doctor to treat a Black child in the middle of the night in Atlanta in 1899 and the Du Boises’ son had lived. Despite his anger over Nigger Heaven and the affront of Fire!! Du Bois never repudiated Hurston and Hughes.
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In the following year, 1927, Langston Hughes arrived in Mobile, Alabama, and “No sooner had I got off the train than I ran into Zora Hurston, walking intently down the main street, looking just as if she was out to measure somebody’s head for an anthropological treatise.” This was the year of the great Mississippi flood, when thousands of Black field-hand refugees were rounded up, put into work camps, and given so little to eat that many died of starvation. Hughes had enrolled at Lincoln University in 1926 and from there had gone to give a couple of readings at Fisk University, but that summer he was more interested in going to the refugee camps where he could observe and take notes. Hurston had a car called Sassy Susie. When they met up in Mobile, Hurston and Hughes decided to drive the back roads to New York together. “I knew it would be fun traveling with her,” Hughes wrote. “It was.”
Hurston had been looking for folklore down every back road, but she wasn’t yet collecting, as she sometimes said, “like a new broom.” She found that people “who had whole treasures of material just seeping out of their pores” didn’t respond to Hurston’s recently acquired “Barnardese.” Her next trip south would go much better. She would spend seventy-two hours lying in a dark room, naked, “my navel to a rattlesnake skin,” undergoing initiation rites for hoodoo, New Orleans voodoo, at the instruction of one of the most noted hoodoo doctors, the Frizzly Rooster. And she would go to a lumber camp in Polk County, where she would collect very well, after she allayed the suspicions of the lumberjacks by explaining that she had a car because she was a bootlegger on the lam. On her second trip south, Hurston got the stories of “Why the Sister in Black Works Hardest,” “How the Negroes Got Their Freedom,” “Why the Mocking Bird Is Away on Friday,” and the sorrow songs that spoke to Hurston’s and Hughes’s own footsore wanderlust:
Got on de train didn’t have no fare
But I rode some
Yes I rode some
Got on de train didn’t have no fare
Conductor ast me what I’m doing there
But I rode some
Yes I rode some.
Once they were on the road, Hurston and Hughes stopped off in Macon, Georgia, to hear Bessie Smith sing. By coincidence, Smith was living in the same hotel they had chosen and practicing every day, so they got to hear her quite a lot. “The trouble,” she told the two of them, “with white folks singing blues is that they can’t get low down enough.” The young writers were glad to know Smith; they both felt close to musicians, and they were building their work out of things they learned from the blues.
Farther on, they tried their luck finding songs with a group of stevedores in Savannah, but they didn’t get any new ones. Hughes remembered Hurston explaining that to get new material “you had to live with people a long while, as a rule, before you might accidently [sic] some day hear them singing some song you never heard before, that maybe they had learned away off in the backwoods or remembered from childhood or were right then and there engaged in making up themselves.” They went to visit a conjure man in backwoods Georgia, with whom they were unimpressed—“burning sulphur-stones,” cheap tricks, according to Hurston.
Hurston and Hughes drew closer to each other on this trip, but Hughes was known for his romantic unavailability and may have been more interested in men than women, though he didn’t say so; they didn’t become involved, but they began to talk about collaborating. When Hurston went back to Eatonville the following year, their plans were much on her mind: “Langston, Langston, this is going to be big. . . . Remember I am new and we want to do this tremendous thing with all the fire that genius can bring. I need your hand.” Hughes was a person to whom one gave love easily, to whom one couldn’t imagine not giving love. Marianne Moore wrote to him, “Inimitable, irresistible Langston, I do not know why you were not spoiled with love and care, from the cradle on, and were not a proud boy!” but it could have been Zora Neale Hurston, too.
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In the fall of 1929, Hughes and Hurston also began to share a patron, the wealthy and eccentric Charlotte Osgood Mason, who liked the idea of both her protégés living near each other in Westfield, New Jersey, not far outside New York City. Hurston was sorting through the stacks of folk material she had collected, which would eventually become Mules and Men. At the insistence of Mason, Hughes was trying to finish his novel, Not Without Laughter, with which he was never quite satisfied.
Hughes was aimless in part because he was not near the people he thought of as his own. People were sleeping in the streets, and Hughes and Hurston, who had both struggled against poverty all their lives, were more comfortable than they had ever been before or would be after. Chauffeured cars picked them up, beautiful white bond paper was delivered to their houses, the typing services of college instructor Louise Thompson—fired from the Hampton Institute for supporting a student strike against the surprisingly racially conservative administration and happy for work in the Depression—were liberally paid for. Mason, who told Hughes and Hurston to call her “Godmother,” had decided that Black art, especially its connection to “the primitive,” was the most important thing to support at that moment. She was paying Hughes, Hurston, and Alain Locke, among others, substantial monthly retainers just to work. Both Hughes and Hurston quite worshipped her, which seems to have been the attitude she expected, though this posture on the part of two of the most independent-minded American artists of the time was disconcerting to the people they knew.
Mason was a kind of mother to them. Hughes and Hurston had both lost their mothers at early ages—his went off with a new husband, hers died when she was thirteen. The two writers genuinely loved Mason, and when she eventually cut them off—for, more or less, failing to utterly subordinate their work to her plans for them—they didn’t know what to do with themselves. Hughes became bedridden with tonsilitis, problems with his teeth, and bouts of nausea. In the end, Hurston was the more deeply affected, as, according to the terms of her agreement with Mason, much of her folklore collection actually belonged to her patron, a situation that delayed and complicated publication and damaged Hurston’s career.
Before these ruptures, though, in the spring of 1930, Hughes and Hurston and Louise Thompson would get together and make themselves sick with laughter telling stories and trying to get up enough material for Thompson to type out the script of the play they had decided to write. Hurston provided the tale itself, the colorful bits of dialogue, the title, Mule Bone, and the background, a setting very like Joe Clarke’s store in Eatonville. Hughes’s job was to structure the narrative and to fill out and polish the writing. Something happened, something about which Hughes was always quiet and disingenuous and Hurston loud and disingenuous. He said she just decided to leave, and he didn’t think much of it. She said he was disrespectful and was giving too much credit to Thompson, and she suggested that he was sleeping with Thompson. He said he had to leave Godmother’s employ because he had to write when he wanted to write and not when he was told to and that he was very sorry. She scrambled to distance herself, to keep her patron. She wrote to Godmother, “Langston is weak.” She took the play with her and sent it to Carl Van Vechten, explaining that she had rewritten it and that it was all her own work. Van Vechten, not knowing the whole story, passed it on to an agent, who sent it to a regional theater company in Cleveland, whose director was an old friend of Hughes. There were soon lawyers involved: advice came from Arthur Spingarn. Joel and Arthur Spingarn were Jewish brothers, both of whom were officers on the board of the NAACP for more than a decade. Arthur Spingarn did all the legal work for every major figure of the Harlem Renaissance and the brothers sponsored, with Joel’s wife, Amy, the Spingarn Medal for a distinguished career in civil rights work. Joel and Amy Spingarn also paid for Langston Hughes to go to college. With the attention of Van Vechten and Arthur Spingarn, Hurston seemed to be coming around. Then she found out that Thompson had been in Cleveland at the same time as Hughes, and again she threw a fit, making it seem like romantic jealousy on her part. Hughes, in one of his harsher moments, wrote to Van Vechten:
She made such a scene as you can not possibly imagine, she pushed her hat back, bucked her eyes, ground her teeth, and shook manuscripts in my face, particularly the third act which she claims she wrote alone by herself while Miss Thompson and I were off doing Spanish together. (And the way she said Spanish meant something else.)
Langston Hughes had a way of being indispensable but absenting himself if you asked too much. Hurston had a way of asking too much. They were the brilliant godchildren of the same patron, and they shared an intimate knowledge of the blues—it may have been hard for them to tell where one started and the other left off.
Van Vechten told Hughes that Hurston had come to relate the story of the fight and had “cried and carried on no end.” Eight years later, Hurston told the writer Arna Bontemps that she still woke up in the night, crying. Bontemps relayed to Hughes that Hurston had said, “The cross of her life is the fact that there has been a gulf between you and her.” Hurston mentioned Hughes only once, in passing, in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road. Hughes gave a brief summary of their friendship and falling-out in The Big Sea and, though she turned up in his fiction, didn’t mention Hurston’s name in print again.
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Perhaps Zora Neale Hurston was startled to see herself in a story collection Hughes published in 1934 called, with reference to a Du Bois essay, The Ways of White Folks. The story was “The Blues I’m Playing,” about a Black woman, a pianist, supported by a white patron. Hughes’s pianist, Oceola, was playing for her patron and stopped in the midst of Ravel and started to play the blues. The patron, angered, asked if it was for this that she had spent thousands of dollars having the young woman trained: “‘No,’ said Oceola simply. ‘This is mine. . . . Listen! . . . How sad and gay it is. Blue and happy—laughing and crying. . . . How white like you and black like me. . . . How much like a man. . . . And how like a woman. . . . Warm as Pete’s mouth. . . . These are the blues. . . . I’m playing.’”
The story had the author’s tenderness for them all, for the artist, and the manipulative patron, for Hurston and for his younger self, for the work they might have done under Mason, and the art they would have made had they stayed friends. Hughes made Oceola’s blues big enough to hold himself and Zora Neale Hurston, merged together as they sometimes hoped and sometimes were terrified they would be. Maybe Hurston cried a little when she saw how Langston Hughes had been thinking of her. At the end of the story, Hughes had Oceola play one more song. The words went:
O, if I could holler
Like a mountain jack,
I’d go on up de mountain
And call my baby back.