B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (15 page)

Zora Neale Hurston, 1934. (Photo by Carl Van Vechten / Courtesy of the Van Vechten Trust and the Carl Van Vechten Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Langston Hughes was not a member of the FWP, but since the earliest days of his career, he, too, was concerned with fidelity to “the way it is.” As early as 1926, he argued that
nothe low-down folks
,
the so-called common element
would be the only launching ground for a
truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.
The other classes, producing greater numbers of artists of lesser quality, were too self-conscious and too concerned with European standards, he thought, to make a great achievement.

Hughes himself was from a modest background, but he was well educated and well traveled. He had his own moment of confusion about European standards when, famously, his white patroness Charlotte Osgood Mason rejected some of his writings as lacking the authentic and primitive qualities of the work that had first gained her attention and accolades from the white publishing world. This episode sent Hughes into a crisis—he broke with Mason and went on an extended trip to Haiti to recover. His crime had been attempting poetry that was, in the opinion of his patroness, inauthentic.
And let that page come out of you—/ Then, it will be true.

Throughout the rest of his career, Hughes hewed closely to a style of poetry that could better be labeled “authentic” and pertaining to
the so-called common element
. He enjoyed wide popularity, earning the unofficial title of Harlem’s poet laureate. But some of his work, including the collection
Montage of a Dream Deferred,
caused at least one reviewer to grumble about
the limitations of folk art
.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Harlem’s beloved poet wrote a popular weekly column for the
Chicago Defender
that borrowed the voice of the
low-down folks
. Like Ellison and the other WPA writers, Hughes was a denizen of Harlem barstools. From that
perch he copied down as accurately as possible the humor, cadences, and quandaries of his neighbor’s lives, animating them though his barfly avatar Jesse B. Semple, also known as Simple. Though Simple was a fictional creature, Hughes explained the nature of his material:
I cannot truthfully state
,
confesses Hughes,
as some novelists do at the beginnings of their books, that these stories are about “nobody living or dead.
”

On one occasion, Hughes came face to face with a facsimile of his hero. When entering the local pub, a bartender who was an avid reader of the Simple columns introduced the writer to a patron.
Without me saying a word
, a conversation began so much like the opening chapter in my book that even I was a bit amazed to see how nearly life can be like fiction or vice versa
.

Hughes opened himself as a medium for the voices of the public. I wonder what effect that had on what he could or could not say about his private life. Hughes, like many of the most prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, was a homosexual, although his biographer is content to class him as
asexual
. While Hughes’s love for his people received full-throated, unequivocal expression in his writing, his love for men could not.

There was one love poem by Langston Hughes that I did not encounter back as a never-been-kissed teenage girl. It is written in the voice of the folk:

Zora Neale Hurston is a writer about whom the questions of fiction, fact, and authenticity are always urgent. She is one of the most iconic writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, yet it is rarely noted how little of her written production concerns the place itself, and how little time Hurston actually spent there. This particular trick played on literary history seems fitting for a writer who thought of New York as both
a basement to Hell
and the place where she was most free:
At certain times I have no race
, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance… the cosmic Zora emerges
.

The cosmic Zora
was the one brought up in the protective landscape of an all-black town in Florida, with little interaction from the white world to disrupt the certainty that she and her people were the center of existence. The cosmic Zora had
lied about her age
in order to further her education. Cosmic Zora was the scene-stealer who
made jaw-dropping entrances at parties. She spoke
carefully accented Barnardese
but abandoned that refinement when it hindered her collection of anthropological materials during trips down South.

Langston Hughes tells a hilarious but possibly apocryphal story that shows the unflappable Zora Hurston at work in the streets of her Harlem City. He describes the research she pursued for her studies at Columbia University:

Hurston gives a wonderful mission statement for her work:
Research is a formalized curiosity
. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell within
.

Hurston was as resourceful in her research as she was in procuring the means to pursue it. She was a protégée of the same demanding patroness who rejected Langston Hughes. But Charlotte Mason did not cause Hurston any angst, at least none that Hurston later wrote about. Hughes only barely conceals the scorn left over from his colossal falling out with Hurston when he describes how
[to] many of her white friends
, no doubt, she was a perfect “darkie,” in the nice meaning they gave the term—that is a naïve, childlike, sweet, humorous, and highly colored Negro
. But Hurston also manipulated those patronage relationships to her advantage, gaining support for the research trips that took her throughout the American South, to Jamaica, and to Haiti. In some ways, her association with both the
niggerati
(as she deemed her black creative contemporaries in Harlem’s artistic and literary
bohemian set) and the
negrotarians
(as she called the enthusiastic white supporters) happened from a distance. Harlem was a point of access and a point of departure. Harlem was the place that launched her into the wider world. She was not blocked in.

I have always been intrigued by a particular product of Hurston’s research. Her “Glossary of Harlem Slang” accompanied a short piece of fiction that was called “Story in Harlem Slang.” Indeed, the story’s plot is so thin that it seems her main intention was to showcase her fluency in the fast-flicking mother tongue of the street. What happens is not as important as how it’s said, and the uninitiated will need Zora Neale Hurston nearby to explain.

A brief selection from the glossary shows her vivid mastery of the language. There are many variations on the provinces of Hell among other place names:

And then there are the many synonyms for black:

But for all its value as research, and its possibly diverting pleasures for those white patrons who, according to Hughes, considered Hurston a
perfect darkie,
Hurston’s Harlem dictionary defines a troubling conundrum. If Hughes was the unmediated, celebratory voice singing of the folk to the folk, Hurston acted as a filter, collecting, preserving, and exalting the genius and artistry of black folk life even as she acted, sometimes literally, as a tour guide and interpreter.

This complexity extends to other aspects of Hurston’s thought. On the one hand, she celebrated the all-black town that grew her up, eventually
arguing in favor of segregation
on the grounds that black people had nothing to gain from mixing with white folk. But, just as often, she casts off the shared burden of racial experience:
Since I wash myself of race pride
and repudiate race solidarity, by the same token I turn my back upon the past. I see no reason to keep my eyes fixed on the dark years of slavery and the Reconstruction
.

What does it mean to turn one’s back on the past, as Hurston pronounced? It means more than her experiments with personal mythology. It is, perhaps, a stony kind of realism. From where she stood, the past did not hold any mystical key to the present. (
My old folks are dead
. Let them wrestle all over Hell about it if they want to
.) From where she stood, the future did not necessarily hold salvation. (
Standing on the watch-wall
and looking, I no longer expect the millennium. It would be wishful thinking to be searching for justice in the absolute
.)

In almost every essay James Baldwin wrote about Harlem, there is a moment when he commits a literary sleight-of-hand so particular that, if he’d been an athlete, sportscasters would have codified the maneuver and named it “the Jimmy.” I think of it in cinematic terms, because its effect reminds me of the technique wherein camera operators pan out by starting with a tight shot and then zoom out to a wide view while the lens remains focused on a point in the distance.