Excerpt from Mule Bone

And fall out, unfortunately, they did, thereby creating the most notorious literary quarrel in African-American cultural history, and one of the most thoroughly documented collaborations in black American literature. Langston Hughes published an account entitled “Literary Quarrel” as the penultimate chapter – indeed, almost asa coda or an afterthought – in his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston’s biographer, published a chapter in his biography entitled “Mule Bone,” and Arnold Rampersad, Hughes’s biographer, presents an equally detailed account in volume one of his The Life of Langston Hughes. Only Zora Neale Hurston, of the two principals,did not make public her views of the episode. But she did leave several letters (as did Hughes) in which she explains some of her behavior and feelings. In addition, Hurston left the manuscript of the short story, “The Bone of Contention,” upon which the play was based. These documents – letters, the short story, Hughes’s account, and two accounts from careful and judicious scholars – as well as a draft of the text of the play, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, comprise the full record of the curious history of this brilliant collaboration between two extraordinarily talented African-American writers. We have assembled this archival and published data here to provide contemporary readers with the fullest possible account of a complex and bizarre incident that will forever remain impossible to understand completely, be-clouded in inexplicable motivation.

In a sense, this is a casebook of a crucial – and ugly – chapter in the history of the Harlem Renaissance, that extraordinarily rich period in American cultural history that witnessed the birth of jazz, the coming to fruition of the classic blues, and the first systematic attempt to generate an entire literary and cultural movement by black Americans. The Harlem Renaissance, also called “The New Negro Renaissance,” is generally thought to have begun in the early 1920s and ended early on in the Great Depression, about the time when Hughes and Hurston had their dispute. The origins of the Renaissance are, of course, complex and have been written about extensively. It is clear, however, that the production of a rich and various black art, especially the written arts and the theatre, could very well help to reshape the public image of black people within American society and facilitate thereby their long struggle for civil rights, a struggle that commenced almost as soon as the last battle of the Civil War ended. As James Weldon Johnson put it in the “Preface” to his Book of American Negro Poetry (1922):

A people may be great through many means, but there is one by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

If, then, African-Americans created a recognizable and valued canon of literature, its effect would have enormous political ramifications: “The status of the Negro in the United States,” Johnson concluded, “is more a question' of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”

Johnson, by 1922 one of the venerable figures of the black literary and theatrical traditions, effectively issued a call to arms for the creation of a literary movement. Soon, political organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, through their magazines, The Crisis and Opportunity, began to sponsor literary competitions, judged by prominent members of the American literati, with the winners receiving cash prizes, publication in the journals, and often book contracts. At the prompting of Charles Johnson, the editor of Opportunity, Hurston submitted two short stories – “Spunk” and “Black Death” – and two plays – Color Struck and Spears -- for consideration in Opportunity’s annual literary contests in 1925 and 1926. While “Spunk” and Color Struck won second-place prizes, Spears and “Black Death” won honorable mention. Two other short stories, “Drenched in Light” and “Muttsy” would be published in Opportunity, along with “Spunk.” It was at the 192 5 annual awards dinner that she met another award winner, Langston Hughes, who took third prize jointly with Countee Cullen and first prize for his great poem, “The Weary Blues.” It was a momentous occasion, attended by “the greatest gathering of black and white literati ever assembled in one room,” as Arnold Rampersad notes, and included among its judges Eugene O’Neill, John Farrar, Witter Bynner, Alexander Woolcott, and Robert Benchley. Hughes was quite taken with Hurston, Rampersad tells us: She “‘is a clever girl, isn’t she?’ he soon wrote to a friend; ‘I would like to know her.’ " Eventually, he would know her all too well.

Between 1925 and their collaboration on the writing of Mule Bone between March and June 1930, Hughes and Hurston came to know each other well. As Rampersad reports, by mid-summer of 1926, the two were planning a black jazz and blues opera. Hemenway calls it “an opera that would be the first authentic rendering of black folklife, presenting folk songs, dances, and tales that Hurston would collect.” By the end of that summer, the two (along with Wallace Thurman, John P. Davis, Gwen Bennett, Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglass, all members of what was jokingly called “The Niggerati”) decided to found a magazine, called Fire!!, the title taken from a Hughes poem. The following year, in July 1927, Hughes and Hurston met quite by accident in Mobile, Alabama, and decided to drive together to Manhattan in her car, “Sassy Susie.” “I knew it would be fun travelling with her,” Rampersad reports Hughes writing. “It was.” The trip lasted about a month, with the two sharing notes on hoodoo, folktales, and the blues along the way, and even meeting Bessie Smith, the great classic blues singer. Shortly after this trip, Hughes introduced Hurston to his patron, Charlotte van der Veer Quick Mason, who would contribute about $75,000 to Harlem Renaissance writers, including $15,000 to Hurston. While Hughes received $150 per month, Hurston received $200…

The above is excerpted from “Mule Bone” by Zora Neale Hurston. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022