On the road with the legendary Hurston and Hughes
Two main characters in the Harlem Renaissance get a closer look from author Yuval Taylor
For American poet and writer Langston Hughes, his falling out with the prolific author Zora Neale Hurston marked the “end of the Harlem Renaissance,” the 1920s artistic and cultural explosion. Henry Louis Gates Jr. deemed it “the most notorious literary quarrel in African American cultural history.” Alice Walker, who deemed the pair “literary parents,” wrote, “When I consider the ending of their friendship, I am filled with sadness for them.” In his new book, Zora and Langston, Yuval Taylor traces the exhilarating intellectual and emotional connection between the two beloved authors, unspooling the story of a six-year friendship that ended in a searing conflict sparked by the play Mule Bone. Taylor offers a vivid account of an impromptu 1927 road trip in Hurston’s Nash coupe through the rural South. Hurston and Hughes met by chance on a main street in Mobile, Ala., where Hurston was interviewing Cudjo Lewis, the former slave who would become the subject of Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ (finally published last year).
And, of course, Taylor sifts through the wreckage of their bitter falling out, attempting to make sense of the feud that evolved out of their attempt to collaborate on a play, offering a snapshot of a cultural moment, illuminating two essential voices in American literature.
What does this relationship say about Hurston and Hughes? What did you learn from their friendship that you wouldn’t have, had you considered them independently?
After some reflection, I think I never would have suspected how generous they could be had I not examined their relationship. Zora read Langston’s book Fine Clothes to the Jew aloud to black workers around the South; they loved it, calling it the “party book,” and she passed the praise back to Langston in her long letters to him. Langston spent untold hours reading Zora’s folklore work, helping her shape it into a book, and helping her smooth her relations with their common patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason.
Both Zora and Langston presented themselves to the world as supremely self-confident and generally happy people. They rarely showed how deep their sorrow could run. The moments of genuine sorrow in my book —when Zora feels heartbroken in the winter of 1926-1927 and Langston helps her through her “dark hour”; when Langston is completely devastated by his break-up with (their patron Charlotte Osgood) Mason and writes Mason some of the saddest letters I’ve ever read; when Zora confesses, in 1937, that she wakes up crying about the break-up with Langston, and that it was “the cross of her life” — these moments made them so much more real to me than the picture of insouciance and assurance that they tried to project. What did you learn from following the road trip Hurston and Hughes took in the summer of 1927?
I learned so much on that trip, mostly the day-to-day details of where they stayed and what they saw; I also learned a great deal of Southern history. In Tuskegee, I was able to get a sense of what the Movable School that Langston went with to northern Alabama was like. In Macon I was able to visit the downtown theatre where the two of them saw Bessie Smith and to learn about the blackowned hotel that once stood next door, where they all stayed and talked about the blues. In Savannah I became friendly with a storyteller who adapts Zora’s folktales for use in weddings and other celebrations, and she taught me a thing or two about signifying and conjuring; we’re still in touch. The transcript has been edited for length.