Wood and other activists such as NAACP founder Mary White Ovington were not glory seekers, indeed, they could be quite self-effacing. However, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, the privileged daughter of a Texas Ku Klux Klan member, took up the question of race in quite a different manner. Deeply interested in the issue of racial identity, Josephine Cogdell came North and married George Schuyler, a black Harlem journalist. She was one of the people who believed the white race was "spiritually depleted," and that America would save herself through intermarriage. She, Schuyler, and their daughter lived openly in Harlem but she was seen as a traitor to her race, a woman who lusted for black male company. When her mother finally learned of the marriage, she threatened the couple with arrest. Harlem, Kaplan writes, "did not warm to Josephine right away."
Annie Nathan Meyer, playwright and founder of Barnard College, sought to produce what she called an "authentic" "Negro play." Like Wood, she took up the subject of sex writing, in Black Souls, about a white southern woman's desire for a black man. Seven years passed before Meyer could find a company willing to stage the play which was "savaged" by white critics and quickly closed. Black leaders and critics felt otherwise, one stating that Meyer had written a play of "frankness, of understanding, of sympathy." Zora Neale Hurston contended that Meyer "has such an understanding of this inter-racial thing … Never before have I read anything by a white person dealing with 'inside' colored life that did not have a sprinkling of false notes." Defeated on the live stage, Meyer printed hundreds of copies of her play, advertised it, sold copies from her upper class home, and mass marketed it to black colleges and civic organizations. She considered herself a pioneer but vanished from Harlem Renaissance histories.
Fannie Hurst, perhaps the best known novelist in America in the early 1930s, came to the cause of race relatively late. She had written nearly twenty books before publishing Imitation of Life. The novel presented the story of an interracial friendship between Bea and Delilah (modeled on Aunt Jemima). Meant as celebration, the book, in fact, "recycle[d] stubborn racial stereotypes." Harlem paid attention to it largely because the characters and relationships betrayed what they had hoped for. This was particularly true of Hurston who had befriended Hurst and, according to Kaplan, provided her with the material for the novel (but subsequently refused to read or correct a draft). Hurston later wrote that "it was high time for white writers to earn the privilege of writing books about blacks." While Hurst insisted on "un-selfconsciousness" about race, Kaplan argues that she did not apply this belief to herself, and that Hurst had no intellectual interest in examining whiteness and its privileges.
Heiress Nancy Cunard and philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason each believed she could "speak as if I were a Negro myself." Common to Miss Anne was the idea that she could "volunteer for blackness." Cunard, once a British society figure, became the most important white woman in Harlem, a Miss Anne who maintained that identity could be reshaped and “experienced as fluid … the idea of becoming others." She made the controversial argument that race was socially constructed rather than biological, and that race-crossing was possible. The contention that race was not permanently in the blood permitted her to assert the right to "speak as if I were a Negro." Not all of Harlem agreed. Cunard pushed on and in 1934 produced an eight hundred page edited collection titled Negro. She had envisioned a documentary record of black culture and history. Negro contained over two hundred entries by one hundred and fifty contributors including Hurston, Hughes, W.E. B. Du Bois, Theodore Dreiser and others. It met a mixed reception. Cunard, however, found a home in publishing, establishing a distinguished career as a journalist, the only white woman to become a full-time reporter for the Associated Negro Press.
Patroness Charlotte Osgood Mason used wealth as her means of speaking as if she were a Negro. She developed widespread influence within the community of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. A widow with a longstanding interest in Native Americans and blacks, she was intensely private and anxious to cultivate protégés whose work she might direct. As Miss Anne she spoke forthrightly about her belief in primitivism and associated spiritual phenomena, antidotes for a "materialistic, hard, mechanical civilization." Unlike Cunard and Schuyler, Mason thought the races to be fundamentally distinct and primitive races to be artistically and spiritually superior. She believed that the world needed change: "a select army of Mason 'godchildren' would heal the world." Negroes with "true 'vision' (hers) … had the privilege … to build a bridge of light … between two continents-between the past and the future-building a vital hope."
Author Carla Kaplan; photograph by Robin Hultgren
The story of Mason's philanthropy confirms Kaplan’s assertion that "patronage remains one of the most vexed issues in the history of the Harlem Renaissance.” Was it a sincere commitment to interracial collaboration, or did it dampen and even destroy black creative expression? Mason wanted to control how non-blacks saw American blackness. To do this she arranged to meet Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others — all of whom had to call her "godmother," all of whom would aid in the building of her "magic bridge" from Africa to America.
Miss Anne in Harlem expands our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance. It is a story about female independence, race, and most of all unconventional lives — lives, Carla Kaplan writes, that are by definition the most difficult ones to live — and to judge. Miss Anne is a story about the costs and possibility of change. As such, the book commands attention because it joins other memoir, biography, and political works that give us insight into the personalities and power relations of people who seek to create a different future.
©2014 Jill Norgren for SeniorWomen.com
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