The summer of 1926, despite its scorching days and sweltering nights, must have felt to Hurston like a cool cloth applied to a fevered forehead. It gave her a needed break from the intensity of Barnard, where her first year had been more challenging than her easygoing exterior ever betrayed. “This year has been a great trial of endurance for me. I don’t mind saying that more than once I have almost said that I couldn’t endure,” she admitted to a friend.
“I shall hold on,” Zora vowed as her summer caesura approached, “but every time I see a cat slinking in an alley—fearing to walk upright lest again she is crushed back into her slink—I shall go to her and acknowledge the sisterhood in spite of the skin.”
Zora still was walking upright when the school year ended and summer delivered on its promise of a rest. Despite her flagging stamina, she had not fared so badly in her spring coursework: She merited Bs in anthropology, anthropometry, English, and physical education. In economics, classical civilizations, and French, she earned Cs.
At the end of June, Zora moved out of Harlem and into an apartment at 43 West Sixty-sixth Street, most likely because her summer anthropological job, secured with Boas’s support, required her to be more centrally located than a Harlem address allowed. To furnish her new digs, located in a small downtown row of Negro houses, she threw a Zora-ized version of a rent party. It was a “furniture party,” and each guest was required to bring a piece. Zora got plenty of lamps and knickknacks, and even a footstool. Though she grumbled a little about not receiving much furniture to sit on—couches and chairs were too big for her carless Harlem friends to haul on the subway—Zora still provided the party meal. It was, as Langston Hughes remembered, “a hand-chicken dinner,” because nobody brought forks.
“I have been going through all the hells of moving into a flat,” Zora noted as she settled into her new apartment, a short walk from Fannie Hurst’s place. “I am now in my flat and flattened out by honest but grimy toil.”
Zora’s summer was not all toil, however. Her apartment quickly became a popular downtown den for the Niggerati, and Zora welcomed them by habitually keeping a pot of something on the stove. “She was always prepared to feed people,” Richard Bruce Nugent remembered. On some evenings, when she felt particularly ambitious, Zora would treat her friends to one of her specialties: fried shrimp and okra. And she soon discovered that a pan of gingerbread and a jug of buttermilk could feed a roomful of New Negroes. “It fills ’em up quick so you don’t have to give ’em so much,” a budget-minded Zora once deadpanned.
Her generosity with food, Nugent believed, was emblematic of a larger, more notable munificence. Perhaps because of the hunger she had experienced not long before, Zora “would know when you were hungry,” recalled the chronically broke Nugent. “She always knew when you were and always did something about it. Not just food, but anything that you might be hungry for.”
Accordingly, Zora’s quarters were always available for friends needing a place to stay (Nugent lived with her for a time) or a place to create (“I wrote at Zora’s because she had paper, pencils, and the space,” he noted). Her apartment was a spirited open house for artists and the site of frequent spontaneous get-togethers, as one friend recounted. Zora—“all greased curls, bangles, and slashes of red”—usually presided over the festivities with her harmonica and her head full of stories. At other times, though, she worked quietly in the bedroom while her friends partied boisterously in the living room. And occasionally, if she had an appointment, Zora would just leave, announcing that the last one out should lock the door.
Although a festive atmosphere reigned at Zora’s apartment, her place was an oasis of calm compared with the Niggerati’s hangout in Harlem—a rooming house at 267 West 136th Street, where the owner provided rent-free rooms to artists. Among its tenants were Wallace Thurman (accompanied by his white male lover) and—in the summer of 1926—Langston Hughes, on break from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. With both Thurman and Hughes living there, and Zora hopping the uptown subway for frequent visits, “267 House” soon became the Harlem headquarters of the New Negro vanguard. And Hurston and Thurman promptly gave it a new name: “Niggerati Manor.”
The rooming house became infamous for its hedonistic happenings. “Those were the days when Niggerati Manor was the talk of the town,” recalled Harlemite Theophilus Lewis. Inside, the building was decorated in red and black, with gaudy wicker furniture. To reflect Thurman’s sexual interests, brightly painted phalluses adorned the walls. The paintings were courtesy of the flamboyantly homosexual Nugent, one of the habitues of Niggerati Manor—where, the rumor mill claimed, “gin flowed from all the water taps.”
Its licentious reputation notwithstanding, the rooming house was the site of some enterprising artistic labor. There, in midsummer, Hurston and Hughes began discussing the possibility of working on a project together, a black opera based on jazz and the blues. While they shared a similar passion for black folk culture and an almost-equal regard for the folk, Langston and Zora would bring diverse strengths to such a collaboration. He’d already garnered experience writing song lyrics for a full-scale Negro revue that was in the works (O Blues). And she possessed a knowledge of the black South and its folkways that was unrivaled by any other Renaissance writer. (She was, in fact, the only one from the South. Hughes, for example, had grown up in Kansas, Countee Cullen was from New York, Richard Bruce Nugent and Gwendolyn Bennett had come of age in Washington, and both Arna Bontemps and Wallace Thurman had moved to Harlem from California.) Hurston also had some experience writing for the stage: In 1925, she’d won an Opportunity award for her play Color Struck; the same year, she’d filed a copyright request for a musical comedy, partially set in Harlem, called Meet the Mamma. The musical presumably was never produced or published and its broad humor succeeds only intermittently. Yet it stands as evidence of Hurston’s early interest in exploring Negro life in musical theater. Still, Hurston and Hughes made little progress on their proposed folk opera; they became distracted by a more immediate collaborative challenge.
That summer, they began working—along with Thurman, Nugent, Bennett, John P. Davis, and artist Aaron Douglas—to create a magazine that would exemplify the ideals Hughes had set forth in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” According to Nugent, the magazine was Hughes’s idea: “He suggested that maybe someone should start a magazine by, for, and about the Negro to show what we could do.” Getting the magazine from idea to publication, however, would be a communal endeavor. The quarterly magazine the Niggerati collectively envisioned would be aesthetically undiluted by sociological issues and propaganda efforts. It would reflect the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie, and it would challenge the Victorian morality of the Negro establishment. They would call it Fire!!
This new magazine would be “purely literary,” as Hurston saw it. “The way I look at it,” she said, “The Crisis is the house organ of the NAACP and Opportunity is the same to the Urban League. They are in literature on the side.” Zora and her friends hoped that Fire!! “would burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past,” as Hughes recalled. It would prove to the world that the younger Negro artists “were going to do something big and black and wonderful,” Nugent felt. “I believe we can run the other magazines ragged,” Zora instigated. To serve as editor of Fire!!, the group chose Thurman, “the fullest embodiment,” as one observer has noted, “of outrageous, amoral independence among them.”
Skinny, effeminate, cynical, and overly sensitive about his coal-black skin, Thurman was, according to Hughes, “a strangely brilliant black boy, who had read everything, and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read.” Perhaps Thurman’s most remarkable quality, Dorothy West remembered, was his deep, resonant voice, “welling up out of his too-frail body and wasting its richness in unprintable recountings.” In a group of people as witty, talented, and cocksure as the Niggerati, Thurman, remarkably, was something of a bellwether. As West put it, “Thurman fitted into this crowd like a cap on a bottle of fizz.”
Despite his drinking binges, his frequent all-nighters, and his pursuits of public sex (he was arrested in a subway bathroom a few days after arriving in Harlem), Thurman often worked as hard as he played. For those who bought into the notion that an artist’s life must be poverty-stricken, intense, and quickly spent, he was a perfect poster boy. For the Niggerati, Thurman—with his keen, California-honed editorial skills, his uncompromising commitment to the folk, and his acrimonious impatience with bourgeois party-line art—was the perfect leader for the Fire!! charge.
One of his goals for Fire!!, for instance, was to get it banned in Boston. Such a controversy, Thurman believed, would boost sales. So the group brainstormed on what they might include that would be shocking enough to warrant the magazine’s prohibition. After a coin toss, they decided Thurman would write about a teen prostitute, and Nugent about a homosexual. Fire!!, its founders intended, would reflect black life in all its complexities—the decadent, the divine, and the disconcerting.
In many ways, New York—and particularly Harlem—seemed ripe for a venture as daring as Fire!! In the 1920s, America witnessed a shift from Victorian morality to modernist blasphemy. Nowhere was this sea change more evident than in the nation’s most powerful city. The capital of American literature, music and theater, New York in the 1920s was a dazzling metropolis of new skyscrapers, instant gratification, and a nonchalant tolerance of debauchery. In some quarters, debauchery and decadence not only were tolerated but enthusiastically encouraged—often under the influence of popular sexologist Sigmund Freud. The father of psychoanalysis, he “sexualized the narrative of Western culture,” as one writer has put it, “and no one got the revamped storyline better than his American fans.”
In this decade of unprecedented permissiveness, the term “sex appeal” entered the American vocabulary, contraceptives were publicly promoted, advertisers began pandering to subconscious sexual motives, and popular blues songs traded in transparent double entendres. Even milquetoast magazines such as Good Housekeeping warned that the sex drive was something to be reckoned with: “If it gets its yearning it is as contented as a nursing infant. If it does not, beware! It will never be stopped except with satisfactions.”
In the 1920s—a new age of individuality, tell-all, and technology—few subjects escaped discussion. “This generation was the first in American history to make, buy, and fit into ready-made, exact-sized (rather than ‘stock-sized’) clothing. Its members patented electric Victrolas, cameras, microphones, radios, and talking pictures and initiated IQ tests, sex education, birth-control clinics, opinion polls, consumer organizations, and syndicated gossip columns,” scholar Ann Douglas has catalogued. “Aiming to leave little or nothing to the imagination, they found out more about themselves, how they looked, how they sounded, what they wore, what they said and did, with whom, where, and why, than any previous generation had ever done, and they made of self-knowledge a fad and an industry.”
Not only was self-knowledge valued in this brave new world, but so was self-expression—both artistic and sexual. Mae West’s Sex was the hottest ticket on Broadway in 1926. (Zora saw the raunchy tabloid drama and pronounced it a must-see.) The same year, The Captive, a play about a married woman’s seduction by a lesbian, briefly scandalized the Great White Way. Meanwhile, dancer and movie star Louise Brooks was hailed in a 1926 magazine profile as the epitome of New York style because she knew how to “BE COOL AND LOOK HOT.” Elsewhere, Brooks announced, in crude and certain terms, that her favorite pastimes were drinking and having sex. And she did plenty of both, sometimes very publicly. Her behavior was not uncommon: several white Manhattan cultural figures were known to engage in public sex acts, and many bragged loudly about their private exploits.
For some white sophisticates—seeking distance from their usual circles, either for a dash of discretion or for more “exotic” playmates—Harlem became an uptown playground. Among those who frequented Harlem in the 1920s were William Faulkner, George Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, Jimmy Durante, Tallulah Bankhead, Muriel Draper, Theodore Dreiser, and Alexander Woollcott. Most of them were “mere sightseers,” as Langston Hughes recalled, “faddists temporarily in love with Negro life.” Drawn as much by the irresistible blues and jazz as by Harlem’s supposedly loose morals, they journeyed uptown in search of the uninhibited ecstasy that some believed was the Negro’s natural state. For these white thrill seekers, Harlem—brimming with jazz, sex, and alcohol—represented all that America, in a rebellious mood, wished to be.
“The Negro,” historian Steven Watson has observed, “perfectly satisfied progressive America’s psychological and intellectual needs of the moment—he represented pagan spirituality in a period of declining religion, native American expressiveness at the time the nation was forging its own aesthetic, and the polymorphous sensuality that exemplified the 1920s’ loosening of behavior.”
The decade witnessed the rise of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, and Louis Armstrong. It signaled the beginning of the blackening of American culture. Or, as crusty white journalist H. L. Mencken so crassly put it, it was “the Coon Age.” By the mid-1920s, a kind of Harlemania had set in. “Negro stock is going up,” Harlem writer and physician Rudolph Fisher declared, “and everybody’s buying.”
Leading the white influx into Harlem was cosmopolitan trendsetter Carl Van Vechten. “Sullen-mouthed, silky-haired Author Van Vechten has been playing with Negroes lately,” Time magazine noticed in 1925. He was “writing prefaces for their poems, having them around the house, going to Harlem.” Blond, buck-toothed, and occasionally blundering, Van Vechten nevertheless was widely regarded as one of the hippest white men in America. He was reputedly the first man in New York to wear a wristwatch, and he otherwise set fashion standards in a notably fashionable city. In the 1920s, however, Van Vechten found nothing more fashionable than the Negro.
In a personal crusade to break down the color bar, Van Vechten and his wife, Russian-born actress Fania Marinoff, hosted frequent interracial parties—gatherings that were “so Negro that they were reported as a matter of course in the colored society columns,” according to Hughes. And when he wasn’t hosting mixed-race parties at his luxurious Fifty-fifth Street apartment, Van Vechten—his sterling-silver hip flask in tow—was often in Harlem, where he routinely served as a tour guide for prominent whites slumming uptown.
Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, friendly with Zora and others of the Niggerati, drew a caricature of Van Vechten in 1926 with an ink-black face. Tellingly, he called it “A Prediction.” Van Vechten’s passion for all things black was so all-consuming that his white friends—even fellow Negrotarians like Fannie Hurst—sometimes wearied of hearing about it. In May 1926, for instance, Hurst invited Van Vechten to a “taboo-tea” in which they would talk about something—anything—else. “Taboo—just for once! The Negro,” she pleaded.
Some Harlemites, too, were unnerved by Van Vechten’s ubiquitous Nordic presence and especially by the herds of whites he ushered uptown. “Harlem is an all-white picnic ground and with no apparent gain to the blacks,” Claude McKay groused from his outpost in Europe. Others, like Rudolph Fisher, took a more optimistic approach: “Maybe these Nordics at last have tuned in on our wave-length,” he ventured.
Zora seemed rather indifferent to the white presence in Harlem. She didn’t mind sharing a table with a white carouser in one of her favorite nightclubs if the visitor was sincerely interested in black culture, as she judged Van Vechten to be. Still, when a white person was “set down in our midst,” Zora noted, she became acutely aware of the contrasts between black and white. Listening to the “narcotic harmonies” of a jazz band could move her to a feral inner state: “I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop …,” Hurston once wrote. “My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum.” Eventually the music ended and the jazz shamans wiped their lips and put down their instruments. And, inevitably, when Zora crept back “to the veneer we call civilization,” she would be startled to find “the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly,” as she observed. “‘Good music they have here,’ he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us,” Hurston concluded. “He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.”
If Zora met any white people she considered exceptional in this regard, Van Vechten would have been the one. Even so, his headlong infatuation with Harlem was not above reproach. Some Harlemites openly questioned his motives: Van Vechten, despite his marriage, was a “dinge queen”—Harlem slang for a homosexual white man attracted to black men. And nowhere could a dinge queen find more black men to choose from than in the speakeasies of Harlem.
Yet, despite any untoward sexual motives, Van Vechten was “a sincere friend of the Negro,” as Richard Bruce Nugent recalled. Abundant evidence backs up Nugent’s assessment: Van Vechten served as press agent, vocal champion, generous bank-roller, and trusted confidant for several black intellectuals and artists. He wrote numerous feature articles for Vanity Fair lauding the talents of Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and others. As a result, many of Harlem’s brightest stars were devoted to “Carlo,” as they called him. Among them, Robeson and Waters, James Weldon Johnson and Walter White of the NAACP, and Niggerati members Hughes, Thurman, and Hurston. “If Carl was a people instead of a person,” Zora once said, “I could then say, these are my people.”
Van Vechten almost lost his honorary Negro status, however, when his novel Nigger Heaven was published in August 1926. The first fictional account of Harlem by a white writer, the novel created a huge controversy while becoming an instant bestseller. With its depictions of common Negroes and Talented Tenth–inspired intellectuals, Nigger Heaven divided the black literary community. Many readers couldn’t get past the unfortunate title; that it was a play on a common term for the segregated balcony of a theater did little to ease its sting. “Anyone who would call a book Nigger Heaven would call a Negro Nigger,” The New York News opined. Most Harlem Negroes, including Countee Cullen and W.E.B. Du Bois, were deeply offended by the book, which Du Bois called “a blow in the face.” Others—including James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Charles S. Johnson, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, and Zora Hurston—viewed the novel as an accurate reflection of uptown life. “We could find a counterpart in Harlem life for everything Mr. Van Vechten has pictured in his book,” James Weldon Johnson defended. It was, if anything, too full of pro-Negro propaganda, Hughes suggested. “Colored people can’t help but like it,” he wrongly predicted.
To the contrary, nothing Van Vechten’s supporters said could convince most Harlem Negroes that the book was anything more than “a copyrighted racial slur,” as one writer put it. Though the novel was lavishly praised by white readers and critics, someone in Harlem proposed that Van Vechten be hanged in effigy. The managers of Small’s Paradise, one of the author’s favorite Harlem nightspots, exacted a harsher punishment, in Van Vechten’s view: they barred him from entering the club. Other black-owned speakeasies followed suit, and Van Vechten was mortified. After a while, he became desperate enough to defy the ban. To successfully do so, however, he had to have a formidable escort: Zora Neale Hurston.
To be indefinitely banned from Harlem’s nightlife would have been close to personal tragedy for Van Vechten, who reveled in nightclubbing and its attendant vices. He had become so noted for his nocturnal forays into Harlem that he was soon immortalized in song. The popular “Go Harlem” (with lyrics by Harlemite Andy Razaf) urged listeners to “go inspectin’ like Van Vechten.” And the lumbering six-footer had gone inspecting practically everywhere, from NAACP dances at Happy Rhone’s nightclub to transvestite costume balls at the Rockland Palace and the Savoy Ballroom.
Van Vechten’s image-conscious Negro detractors might not have minded so much if he had only portrayed NAACP dinners and the like in his novel; it was the drag balls that worried them. Put another way, Nigger Heaven created such a flurry of controversy partly because it exposed what many black people thought of as “family secrets,” as Charles S. Johnson pointed out. Perhaps most notably, the novel gleefully bared the sexual underbelly of Harlem.
During the experimental 1920s, Harlem was known among erotic adventurers for its “buffet flats,” house parties where all manner of sexual activity—hetero and homo—was proffered, cafeteria style. Patrons paid a small admittance fee then were free to roam. “They had shows in every room, two women goin’ together, a man and a man goin’ together … and if you interested they do the same thing to you,” one Harlemite recalled.
Harlem’s sexual sparks were so pervasive that they singed even people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a buffet flat. To be sure, the atmosphere was sexually charged at most of the swank uptown dance clubs: Small’s, the Savoy Ballroom, and the Rockland Palace. And the mix of swank and bawdy became noticeably bawdier at the working-class speakeasies along “Jungle Alley”—the main drag of nightspots on 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. Bootleg liquor flowed freely in Jungle Alley, and marijuana—Harlemites called it “reefer”—could be purchased at a rate of ten cigarettes for a dollar.
Several Harlem nightclubs, like the Savoy and the Yeahman, catered to sexually diverse crowds—though, as Van Vechten suggested in Nigger Heaven, heterosexual patrons sometimes quit a club when they felt uncomfortably outnumbered. Homosexual nightclubs also thrived uptown: the Ubangi featured a female impersonator who bellowed “Hot Nuts, get ’em from the peanut man!” And at the Clam House, lesbian headliner Gladys Bentley, wearing a tuxedo and top hat, playfully sang “Sweet Georgia Brown.” “Miss Bentley was an amazing exhibition of musical energy—a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard—a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm,” Langston Hughes enthused.
Hughes obviously had paid a visit or two to the Clam House, the most popular nightclub for those “in the life” (one way black gays and lesbians identified themselves then, as now). Many of the men of the Harlem Renaissance, in fact, were gay or bisexual: Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Harold Jackman, and Niggerati stalwarts Nugent, Thurman, and possibly Hughes (who was so furtive in his sexuality as to almost seem asexual).
Less is known about the sexual and affectional preferences of the Harlem Renaissance’s women. Angelina Grimke wrote poetry that hinted at her lesbianism, but she was perhaps the only female writer of the Renaissance to publicly express any homosexual leanings. Many of Harlem’s most popular female performers, however, were known to be bisexuals, if not unalloyed lesbians: Alberta Hunter, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Ethel Waters, and Bessie Smith, who was reportedly initiated into the life by her mentor, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. In 1925, Rainey was arrested for a lesbian orgy at her home and bailed out of jail the next morning by Bessie Smith. Rainey parlayed the public scandal into a hit record, “Prove It on Me Blues,” a salacious song about a woman-loving woman.
The popularity of Rainey’s tune demonstrated that, in the 1920s, bisexuality (especially among women of wealth or fame) was viewed as intriguing and provocative. Harlem housewives even occasionally engaged in lesbian affairs, sometimes openly and with their husbands’ approval. While out-and-out lesbianism may have been regarded as deviant, bisexuality seemed to suggest a woman was ultrasexy. And many men did not take the lesbian part of bisexuality seriously. In fact, all of the above-named female performers were married at some point. Of course, Harlem gossips suspected that their marriages were covers and that their husbands were gay. Yet, more often than not, these women were just sexually versatile. And they had chosen the right location to exercise their flexibility: Harlem in the 1920s was a place where people of all sexual stripes could find a comfort zone. “You just did what you wanted to do,” Nugent recalled. “Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.”
On the frontlines of Harlem’s sexual liberalization was wealthy heiress and voluptuary A’Lelia Walker, who also was married—frequently and usually fleetingly. Harlem’s “joy-goddess,” as Hughes dubbed her, was “a gorgeous dark Amazon” who could afford to look like a queen and sometimes, as Van Vechten accused, act like a tyrant. Often attended by a small harem of handsome women and pretty men—all ladies-in-waiting, Thurman cattily called them—Walker was so wealthy and influential that her private pleasures had the power to sway public opinion in Harlem. She’d inherited a fortune from her mother, Madam C. J. Walker, a former washerwoman whose “Wonderful Hair Grower” had made her one of the wealthiest women in America and a generous philanthropist for black uplift. In the 1920s, A’Lelia (who continued her mother’s hair-care business) spent a large chunk of her riches entertaining New York sophisticates, both black and white. Whether held at her extravagant townhouse on 136th Street (less than two blocks from Niggerati Manor) or at Villa Lewaro (her thirty-four-room mansion on the Hudson River), A’Lelia Walker’s sumptuous parties were always as crowded as the New York subway at rush hour, Hughes remembered. Though her gatherings usually attracted a wide cross-section of guests, some of her soirees were mostly intellectual and literary; others were “funny parties,” as Harlem dancer Mabel Hampton recalled. “There were men and women, straight and gay. They were kinds of orgies. Some people had clothes on, some didn’t. People would hug and kiss on pillows and do anything they wanted to do. You could watch if you wanted to. Some came to watch, some came to play.”
Just what role Zora Hurston played in the sexually liberal Harlem of the 1920s remains largely unknowable, particularly from a distance of eight decades. She likely attended A’Lelia Walker’s literary parties on occasion. And with her penchant for adventure, Hurston also might have attended one of Walker’s “funny parties” or even a buffet flat. “Zora would go anywhere, you know—one time at least,” Arna Bontemps observed.
As his comment suggests, Hurston was nothing if not adventurous. And she had no trouble handling herself wherever her adventures might take her, even in parlors and speakeasies where roughnecks and would-be womanizers skulked. Once, for instance, Zora was on her way to a party when she found herself alone in an elevator with an aspiring Beau Diddely (a common name in Negro folklore for a ladies’ man). The unfortunate fellow made an overly aggressive move, and Zora—decked out in a willowy white dress and a wide-brimmed hat—coldcocked him with a roundhouse right that left him sprawled on the elevator floor. She then calmly stepped over the erstwhile playboy, exited the elevator, and went on to her party.
Clearly, Hurston was an independent woman, one who, for the most part, went wherever she wanted to go and did whatever she wanted to do. It’s easy to imagine, then, that Zora was as independent and adventurous sexually as she was in other areas of her life, particularly during a period when sexual exploration was not only tolerated but, in her own constellation of friends, encouraged.
Hurston certainly did not shy away from the unorthodox act. One sunny summer day, Nugent remembered, he and Zora were walking down Seventh Avenue when she suddenly asked him: “Will you walk on the street with me if I smoke a cigarette?” Zora, who preferred Pall Malls, knew that 1920s propriety frowned upon women smoking in public. But Nugent was game. He lit a cigarette for her in front of the Lafayette Theatre, then watched people’s reactions in amused amazement. “They stared at this fallen woman, smoking a cigarette on the street in broad daylight,” he recalled. Soon, the pair mischievously lit another cigarette, then another. “And so here we go, the fallen woman and the sissy walking down Seventh Avenue smoking cigarettes.” Only days later did Nugent realize “that this really was an act of defiance on Zora’s part.”
The defiant Hurston rubbed shoulders with Harlem’s most worldly women, history tells, including Bessie Smith, Jackie Mabley, and Ethel Waters. Hurston and Waters eventually became good friends, according to Hurston’s autobiography, in which she devoted several pages to a discussion of “This Ethel Waters.”
Tall and slender, Waters had dreamy eyes and a seductive, gap-toothed smile. Once billed as “Sweet Mama Stringbean,” she recorded, for Black Swan Records, the 1921 hit “Down Home Blues,” with “Oh Daddy” on the flip side. By the mid-1920s, the high-salaried singer and actress was well on her way to becoming one of America’s most popular and enduring black stars.
Van Vechten introduced Hurston and Waters at a dinner party in Hurston’s honor. “He was fond of her himself,” Zora wrote, “and he knew I wanted to get to know her better, so he had persuaded her to come. Carl is given to doing nice things like that.”
Hurston spoke lovingly of Waters: “She is shy and you must convince her that she is really wanted before she will open up her tender parts and show you.” Though these may be simply innocent words of friendly admiration, Hurston’s intimate, almost-homoerotic tone has raised questions recently among gay studies scholars—particularly since Waters’s bisexuality has been well documented. Perhaps Hurston (who could wield a witty double-entendre as well as anyone when she wanted to) was being slyly literal, as well as figurative, when she wrote of her closeness with Waters, of their ability to speak for each other, this way: “I am her friend, and her tongue is in my mouth.”
Regardless of its nature, the hermetic Hurston-Waters friendship seems to have crested later, in the 1930s and early forties. In 1926, most of Zora’s closest friends were homosexual men like Nugent, Thurman, and Van Vechten. With them, she surely went to see Gladys Bentley perform at the Clam House and she no doubt went dancing at the Rockland Palace and other nightclubs where homosexuals and heterosexuals partied side by side.
Zora gave the distinct impression, Bontemps recalled, that she was a free woman. “There was nothing in her that I saw that suggested a love affair in Harlem. She certainly seemed self-sufficient.” Noting that Zora did not appear attached to any particular man in the 1920s, Bontemps also acknowledged that she did not seem the type who would abstain from any worldly pleasures.
Though she had a reputation for flamboyance, Zora could be quite guarded about private matters; discretion about any Harlem amours, then, would have been characteristic. Her discretion also would have been warranted by the fact that she was still in a long-distance relationship with Herbert Sheen.
Given the span between New York and Chicago, however, Hurston and Sheen did not necessarily view monogamy as an imperative. “At the time I was going around with Zora, I had so many other girlfriends that it was almost confusing,” admitted Sheen, whose kind eyes, princely handsomeness, and bright future in medicine had won him plenty of female admirers. “It was just, you might say, too hard to turn them down. But we never had any difficulties there,” he added, citing Zora’s broadmindedness. “I don’t remember having any difficulties with Zora about this. Zora was always magnanimous; whatever pleased me was all right with her.”
Perhaps Zora’s magnanimity was a result of her being “wrapped up in her work,” as Sheen believed. Or perhaps she also was immersed in an erotic life of her own. If any of Zora’s amorous adventures were with women, these experiences only would have contributed to her broadmindedness. And they would have been temporary jaunts: All evidence suggests that Zora’s abiding sexual and romantic interests were men. Yet her broad perspective on issues of gender and sexuality—kindled in the sexual tinderbox that was Harlem—would inform her life, and her work, for decades.
Nugent, who was Zora’s roommate for a while, viewed her as an extraordinarily multifarious woman—“an integrated person,” as he put it—who had the capacity to understand and appreciate human diversity in all its complex forms. Zora certainly knew about—and was comfortable with—Nugent’s homosexuality, for example. In turn, Nugent knew that when Zora had certain company, his added presence constituted a crowd. “Whatever I ‘knew’ about Zora and her loves,” he recalled, “didn’t mean anything to me except, ‘Don’t stay too long … maybe they want to be alone,’ that sort of thing.”
Nugent added elliptically: “I knew that Zora was very capable of doing whatever she wanted to do with her life and her body.”