IT WAS seven o’clock in the evening, and Beauford Delaney was hurrying from his room in the basement of the Whitney Studio Galleries on West Eighth Street. He was hoping to catch W. C. Handy at Luke Theodore Upshure’s house before the two men went out. Upshure, a composer and janitor, used to come by the Whitney, where Delaney had recently been part of a show and where Delaney also lived and worked as a janitor, and yesterday the composer had mentioned that Handy was in town and that Delaney should drop by. Beauford Delaney in a hurry did not really look flustered to the outside eye. He paused for a minute to admire the reflections in the windows of the store at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue—the plate glass doubled the fruit for sale and the fire hydrant—and then he went on. It was early in 1931; Handy had been out of town playing the trumpet at a few gigs and getting new material to add to what he’d published in his Blues Anthology five years before. Delaney was looking forward to seeing him.
It was Handy who had suggested that Delaney should try to draw the jazz musicians and some of the important figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and it was through going to jazz clubs with Handy and Upshure that Delaney had met and drawn Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. Delaney was pleased with the collection so far. He liked portraits, which he had started drawing and painting when he had taken classes at several art schools in Boston. Walking the streets of Boston had added a new dimension to his sense of faces. Delaney used to go and look at the Saint-Gaudens monument of Colonel Robert Shaw and his Black regiment that William James had dedicated in the Boston Common. The nearby Public Garden had been the setting for his first intimate experience with a man—in the swan boats there. Delaney sometimes went to draw from the portraits in the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, his “favorite place in Boston,” where he once had the pleasure of meeting the lady herself. He sometimes quoted Gardner on her reason for doing what she felt like. “C’est mon plaisir,” he would say when people asked him why he gave away money as soon as he had any, or why, later in his career, he began painting almost entirely with yellow.
Walking through Washington Square, Delaney talked to himself quietly—he sometimes heard voices in his head. The square, changed from the days when Henry James had lived there, would later be the setting for one of Delaney’s most famous paintings, Can Fire in the Park, 1946—showing four men warming their hands around a blazing trash can. In 1931, lots of people slept in the square. Delaney himself had slept a few blocks north, in Union Square, on his first night in New York, and someone had stolen his shoes.
In his head, Delaney might have been describing to Handy the sitting he had done a little while ago, when he had managed to talk his way into the NAACP office of W. E. B. Du Bois at 70 Fifth Avenue. Du Bois’s secretary had first said that under no circumstances could he go in and sketch the editor of The Crisis, who was preparing a lecture to be given across the country, firing off six letters, attending to international matters of consequence, attempting to keep the Communist Party from getting all the credit for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, and writing a novel. Delaney was gentle and shy; people found themselves wanting to help him. As Delaney later remembered it, the secretary relented and checked with Du Bois, returning to tell Delaney that he could go into the office, but that he was not to say one word to the editor. Delaney thanked the secretary gratefully and opened the door.
It wasn’t a large office; every inch of the walls was covered in books, and piles and piles of papers sat on virtually every surface. Du Bois’s hat hung on a hook by the door, and his cane leaned against the outer edge of the doorframe. After they shook hands, perhaps Du Bois gestured for Delaney to sit in the chair across his desk. Du Bois took up his pen to write again, and Delaney took out his sketch paper and pencils. Du Bois might have continued to write for a while, but he had enough of a sense of humor to recognize that he was posing, looking at the page as if he were thinking about how to conjoin the labor movement and the civil rights movement, while actually he was wondering if his shoulders were too hunched and if his glasses had slid down his nose.
Delaney, looking around the office, might have remembered that in Du Bois’s collection of autobiographical essays, Darkwater, which Delaney had looked at more than once, Du Bois felt he had cause to say, “I raise my hat to myself.” In the same set of essays, Du Bois announced that, after a harrowing experience in which he had politely raised his hat to a woman who expected him instead to get off the street altogether so she could pass, he never, ever tipped his hat to a white southern woman again. Du Bois divided the world into people to whom he tipped his hat and those to whom he didn’t.
Du Bois was usually quick to spot a man of talent. He might have heard of Delaney’s prizewinning drawing at the Whitney Studio Galleries show or of the subsequent article about Delaney in Opportunity, but the two men did not know each other. Du Bois would have asked Delaney where he was from, and the answer, Knoxville, might have put Du Bois in mind of being at Fisk and teaching in rural Tennessee. From there, the conversation could have turned to Boston and to mutual acquaintances.
Delaney might have asked after Du Bois’s daughter, whose wedding, three years before, had generated an unprecedented volume of gossip, which Delaney had followed, for various reasons, with close attention. Du Bois had made a canny guess that Countee Cullen would be the poet leader of the coming generation and had arranged an evidently dynastic marriage between Cullen and his daughter, Yolande Du Bois. The wedding, in 1928, was, the columnists declared, the social event of the Harlem season, with sixteen bridesmaids and nearly 1,500 guests. Langston Hughes had been a groomsman, “by virtue of being a poet,” Hughes later wrote, choosing not to go into his own history with Countee Cullen.
Delaney, who was a fairly close friend of Cullen’s, knew perfectly well that Cullen and his friend Alain Locke had both put considerable effort into trying to seduce Langston Hughes, a beautiful man, who preferred his sexuality to remain a mystery to most of his friends. Carl Van Vechten said that he had only ever met two men “who seemed to thrive without having sex in their lives,” and one of them was Langston Hughes, though later people would say that the sex in Hughes’s life was just with men Carl Van Vechten never met. Cullen’s sexuality was less of a mystery: his bride went to Europe for their honeymoon on her own, and, as the Harlem columns noted with salacious pleasure, Cullen sailed later, with the best man, Harold Jackman. Du Bois, who may have preferred not to think of his daughter on her honeymoon in any case, chose to overlook Cullen’s sexuality altogether and was understanding when, less than a year later, the marriage broke up.
Delaney knew that Du Bois had been less circumspect when he had fired the talented writer Augustus Granville Dill, his right-hand man at The Crisis, after Dill had been arrested having sex with another man in a public lavatory. Many years later, Du Bois, with his characteristic ability to expand his view of humanity, apologized in his autobiography, writing that until that incident he had “never understood the tragedy of Oscar Wilde” and that he had spent “heavy days regretting my act.”
Du Bois’s late sympathy came in part from his own experience of struggling against a culture that denied him his manhood and expected his virility—his own not entirely happy solution had been many ongoing affairs. Delaney would have heard the talk of Du Bois’s infidelities and the rampant speculation as to the identity of the second Mrs. Du Bois, though the first was very much alive, if rarely of interest to her husband. Despite what the gossips said, Du Bois remained committed to his marriage in public and did not consider divorce. Divorce might have been acceptable—Harlem allowed its prominent men and women a certain latitude—but Delaney must have been aware that, in 1931 in Harlem, examples of the race were not homosexual. And, it might be added, neither were they abstract painters.
Du Bois had never had much interest in art that lacked an explicit political message and might not have found much to admire in Delaney’s jagged landscapes. Even the most avant-garde members of the Harlem Renaissance weren’t quite sure what to do with a painter who was so powerfully drawn to Cézanne and to Alfred Stieglitz’s theories about light. Delaney, in his sketchbook, called his drawing of Alfred Stieglitz Eternal Spirit, and he sketched Georgia O’Keeffe, too. Her portrait of him later hung in the Museum of Modern Art for a while. Stieglitz made only limited space for Delaney, encouraging the painter in his reading and visiting his studio but never, in all the long years they knew each other, offering Delaney a show.
Delaney constantly encountered people who thought Black painters should work in Harlem and paint the people who lived there. He wasn’t naturally political in his artistic work, though his paintings observed city life with humanity. He used to write little notes in his journal to remind himself not to forget social content when he was working. As his mind and his illness pulled him toward abstraction and forgetting, one of the ways he anchored himself was to make portraits of people he met.
•
In 1931, it would have been difficult to breathe the air of The Crisis office and not talk politics. In a particular travesty of the American legal system, eight of the Scottsboro Boys were facing the death penalty; the ninth, thirteen years old, had been allowed a lesser sentence. The nine men and boys had been in a fight with some white men in a railroad car, and after this fight two white women had accused them of rape.
The case, largely mishandled by the NAACP, was being energetically pursued by the legal arm of the Communist Party, to which party Black Americans, villainously sold out by both Al Smith and Herbert Hoover in the previous election, were defecting in droves. Langston Hughes had published his poem “Scottsboro” (“8 black boys and one white lie. / Is it much to die?”) not in The Crisis, but in The New Masses. “Who comes?” he wondered in the poem, and answered himself, “Christ, / Who fought alone.” And added John Brown, Joan of Arc, and “Lenin with the flag blood red” to the list. Du Bois himself was angry that the NAACP had lost the opportunity to secure public support, but he also wasn’t sure he trusted the communist organizations. He worried that these associations were using Black laborers for their own purposes; they had already managed to get four Black sharecroppers in Alabama killed by organizing publicly in a rural area. On the other hand, disappointed in the major political parties and in the labor unions’ steadfast refusal even to accept Black members, let alone listen to their concerns, Du Bois had undertaken a careful study of Marxism and was arguing that the liberation of the race and that of the working classes might be accomplished together. He was soon to begin saying that it was entirely conceivable that Black Americans would never be accepted in the United States and that, insofar as possible, it might be better to try to create a separate and self-sustaining economy. Du Bois had recognized and named as one of the main issues, if not the central issue, of the twentieth century “the problem of the color line,” a problem he felt was common to all countries. One of his ideas, that small groups of people, disadvantaged by class or color, might collectively diminish their poverty by forming economic associations, would come into its own in third world countries half a century later.
•
Du Bois glanced at his desk, and Delaney, conscious of the secretary’s injunction, sketched more quickly. He had the face largely roughed in, and now he began to sharpen the details of the eyes, the goatee, the unusually small ear, the delicate line of the nose, and the curve of the cheek around the mustache. Du Bois found that he liked being with Delaney, with his easy voice and slouch and the sweet smile. Delaney made his interlocutors feel strong and unthreatened, an effect that was useful in dealing with white people and was soothing to the editor, too.
Delaney finished his sketch. Du Bois, who admired professional skill and was not averse to pictures of himself, was pleased. He straightened his shoulders as he looked at the drawing. Delaney wondered if it didn’t have the flatness of some of his drawings; with charcoal, he missed the depth you could get by gradually accumulating people out of little areas of paint. Still, he was glad of Du Bois’s pleasure; he had enormous respect for the man. He ventured a compliment on Darkwater, a copy of which lay on the edge of one of Du Bois’s bookshelves. Du Bois was a little surprised; he more often heard from people about The Souls of Black Folk. He stood to usher Delaney out, and they shook hands warmly at the door. Du Bois returned to his desk with a feeling of comfort and satisfaction. Delaney nodded to the secretary, who smiled at him as he left.
Delaney was running through all of this in his mind as he walked to Upshure’s that evening, and it seemed to him a strange though not impossible coincidence that, as he crossed Washington Square Park, he saw, going toward Fifth Avenue, the correct figure of a man in a dark suit with a bowler hat and a cane. Du Bois was returning to the NAACP office late, as he often did—perhaps he had a meeting or a rendezvous. Delaney continued across the park, slowing still further so as not to draw the editor’s attention. As they neared each other, Du Bois glanced up, the look of concentration passed from his face, and he recognized the man in front of him. He lifted his hat and said gravely, “Evening, Delaney,” and walked on.