Our Ancestors Were Messy - Zora Neale Hurston + Langston Hughes: Best Friends Forever

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

It's the summer of 1927 and Zora Neale Huston and Langston Hughes are driving across the South searching for folklore, swapping stories, and enjoying being the newfound stars of the Harlem Renaissance. Starring Alicia Walters. Support this independent production and access bonus content at https://ourancestorsweremessy.supercast.com Stay in touch at [e-mail] Follow the show on Instagram at @ourancestorsweremessy Follow the show on TikTok @ourancestorsweremessy Learn more about the show at https://ourancestorsweremessy.com Listen on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@OurAncestorsWereMessy  SOURCES Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal by Yuval Taylor Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston In Search of Zora Neale Hurston by Alice Walker The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance by Veronica Chambers and Michelle May-Curry The Complex Literary Friendship Between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston by Yuval Taylor Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston Jackson's classic collection of Black "toasts" is resurrected by Patricia Donovan Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition by Bruce Jackson Check out The Chicago Defender digitized and stored at The Library of Congress Read the archives at The Chicago Defender Archives

The Secret Adventures of Black People Presents. Our ancestors were messy. I imagine Zora saying, you know what, Langston, we should travel from Alabama to New York City together. Today, we'll join Zora Neil Hurston and Langston Hughes on a journey through the South in search of folklore. And that is why no black people died in the sinking of the Titanic. Along the way, they'll share their secrets.

Oh, that's the night before your wedding day? That's the night before your wedding day. That's what she dreams. New experiences. I just saw a cow being bread for the first time. And a fateful dream. Everyone back in Harlem was watching them and wondering what they're going to do next. Today's episode stars, artist, writer, and facilitator, Alicia Walters.

I love exploring how we get free. And your host, Nicole Hill. So they spent a weekend together in Italy. Oh, I know, right? This is Our Ancestors Were Messy, a show of, about our ancestors and all their drama. Girl, I understand. Where are you from and where are you now?

I am from Spokane, Washington, originally. And I like to say that I escaped that environment as soon as I graduated high school and lived in a bunch of different places, but now I reside in Oakland, California, on the land of the Olone, Chichenia speaking, alone people. Thank you very much. Beautiful. stewards of this land who are still loving and caring for it today. Yeah.

Ooh, and then what is this? Girl is just a go, Joe got salient blanc. You said bring, all you have to bring is one. I was like, done. What kind of a black are you? Oh, I love this question. I think I heard this on your original, the one, the episode you sent me. I was like, I love this question.

What kind of black am I? I am a mixed black, which means I'm constantly figuring out what kind of black I am. That is a forever question. I'm a black who, yeah, loves to be in nature. I'm a witchy black. I'm a witchy black. I'm definitely a witchy black. I'm kind of a ethereal black in that I like to be in a dreamy,

dreamy stays in space. I'm a Pisces. I'm a Pisces Black. Like, that probably explains a lot in and of itself. That encompasses everything. Yes. As a black person, what is your relationship to the South, specifically Alabama and Georgia? Actually, so my family, the black side of my family, comes from the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico. I always knew my grandparents to be in Florida. in Orlando. But I always was afraid to go to the South. And I could feel the difference. Like, if I landed in Orlando with my family, I felt a lot of, like, black Puerto Ricans. I felt Dominicans. Like, I could feel that culture and kind of a safety around that. But outside it, I was like, I'm not really trying to go too many other places because I've heard too many other things.

I have just enjoyment visiting Atlanta. Right. And I like Atlanta. I like Memphis. I haven't traveled too much outside of those places. And there's a lot of places I would love to go to. And then I also know I'm not doing that by myself. Like I would like to go with a crew and have a place to be and people I am meeting.

But I also love and appreciate what Southern black culture has contributed to the world and certainly bettered my life and enhanced and enriched my life culturally, politically, all of that. So, but yeah, that's my, that's my relationship. I feel like that's a very American relationship to the South. Right. Very black American relationship. It's complicated, in other words. Okay. So we'll now begin. It's July 23rd, 1927, and we are in Mobile, Alabama. Zora Neal Hurston, who is the star of our episode, lives in New York City, but she's always traveling all over America exploring. She's a cultural anthropologist and a folklorist.

And she has secured some funding to go down south and do two things. She's starting it in her home state of Florida. And she's her goal to do two things. She wants to collect black folklore and oral histories and interview some of the last survivors of slavery. And that's on the kind of folklore side. And on the anthropology side, she wants to demonstrate the sophistication of black culture

because there's this very popular belief right now that black people are culturally and genetically inferior. So she's got funding to prove that that is obviously stupid. Mm-hmm. So this is where we are. She's doing this. She's down in Florida and she's asking the elders if they'll share their stories with her for her research. And if you can believe it, these old black people are like, no, I won't.

You know our people. Yeah, they're like, I don't know you. I don't trust you. Literally. Who you say you are? Why? For what? No. So she's frustrated. But she's determined because she wants to show the world, especially the north, that the south is beautiful and full of culture and, like, changing everything.

All right. So on this day in July, she's in Mobile, Alabama. She's 34, but she's pretending to be 24. Cute. More on that later. Only black people can do that. I know. She's dark skin, too. So that's why it's possible. She's like, I'm good. She's walking by a train station And then who should emerge from it But Langston Hughes Stop Mm-hmm, in the middle of Mobile So Langston's 23, he's actually 22

More on that later And he also lives in New York And he's traveled the world But never the South And so he decided to take this trip Starting in New Orleans Where he was reading poetry And then he's just going to explore, vibe out

That's what he's doing. They're really surprised to run into each other. They're very happy to see each other. She's like, Langston, go get your stuff. We're going to go eat. This is what they decide to eat. They feast in public on a meal of fried fish and watermelon. Yeah, this is what they do. So it is a weird thing for two black people to be doing this in 1927 to be eating watermelon in public. We know that post-slavery, black folks were making good money selling watermelon. Then people started putting that in their menstrual shows and making fun of it.

And so it is something that at this time you're meant to be ashamed of. But Zora and Langston are 20-somethings and they enjoy not just being provocative, they enjoy being disreputable. So they're just like, we're eating watermelon in front of everybody, especially Zora.

She has this big thing against code switching or changing up anything for white people. She's like, if I would do it in front of black people, I'm doing it in front of white people. And that's it. So they're eating fish and watermelon. They're catching each other up on their trips through the south, and at some point they come up with this idea.

This is part one of a two-part story of the loving friendship term bitter feud between Zora New Hurston and Langston Hughes. Dun-dun-dun-Dun. Thank you for the sound effects. Zora and Langston, they have a little something to prove. They are in the midst of what I like to call an intergenerational showdown.

So I'm going to present you with the two sides. of the showdown, and then at the end, you're going to have to pick who is right. Oh, okay. Are you ready? She takes a sip. That's right. I'm ready.

In one corner, you've got the old heads. These are the enslaved and their kids. The stars of this group right now, W.B. Du Bois and Alan Locke. Let's talk about Alan. He spells his name. His name is Alan, but he spells it Elaine, because he is a dapper,

Howard University philosophy professor, the first Black Road scholar, graduated from Harvard. Very, you know, very boogey. And he believes in this wild new slogan that Marcus Garvey has been saying all over town, which is black is beautiful. They're like, huh.

And then at the same time, W.B. Du Bois is telling people all art is propaganda. So Alan thinks, if black people could show the world how beautiful we are through our art, we could change the course of black history. Hmm.

And he's like, movies and plays, they do do that. They have that kind of power. Books, all of these things change people's perceptions of the world. So he's like, attention, all black artists. I need you to turn your pain into art that's going to evoke tears of shame in white people. It needs to be like Shakespeare, but it has to be better. And then I'm going to showcase the art and introduce the world to our talented tent. And then white America will accept our best,

and then our best will open the door for the rest. If only. And the motto that pretty much every educated black person is living by at this time is we lift as we climb. So you need to get to the top of this ladder, and then you need to trick these people into accepting us, and then you need to let everybody else in. This is the idea. So Alan throws this very fancy dinner party in New York City called the Opportunity Dinner. There's a hundred black artists there, and they share their short stories and their poems and all their art,

and they get a bunch of awards. The audience is made up of white publishers and rich white people, members of the press. And everybody's like, oh, my God, these black people are making such beautiful art up in Harlem. We can't believe it. Did you even know that they could do that? And then Alan publishes a book

with all these artists called the New Negro. And so everybody calls this artistic explosion in Harlem, the new Negro movement. And they call Alan Locke the father of the movement. And he is like, welcome to the Renaissance. That's their strategy. Now we're going to meet their counterparts. These are the New Negroes.

Their stars are Zorn Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes. They're born decades after Allen and W.B. Du Bois Bois. Zoran Langston won the most awards at the Opportunity Dinner, but there are a bunch of other artists, part of the New Negro crew. And they like to party together. They like to hang out in this apartment in Harlem that they say is like covered in drawings of penises. I didn't know that detail. Yeah.

Everybody's calling them the New Negroes and the Texans. town to 10th. They're like, hate it. Zora nicknames them the Niggerati. And they love it. Yes, that's what I've heard. And she nicknames their hangout spot Nigerati Manor. Is she the only woman? Are there other women in this mix? No, there's a bunch of other women too. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't want to be highbrow. They don't want to be respectable. Their philosophy is like, why would anybody need to be told that black is beautiful? We already know that. But they're also decades after slavery. So they're like, okay, boomers, everybody knows that black is beautiful, but it's not beautiful because we can write like Shakespeare and that we only talk about justice.

It's beautiful. Black is beautiful when it's like raw and when it reflects the real and the honest experiences of the proletariat. They're very, very into communism. The new Negroes hang out in these like smoky jazz clubs and they grind on each other at sweaty apartment parties and they drink and they smoke and they wander the streets of New York. They sleep with whoever they want. They talk plain. And then they put all of that in their art and like, this is what it is to be black. So instead of the opportunity dinner, which led to the Harlem Renaissance, that's what sparked it, they decide to publish a literary magazine that they named Fire because it's going to burn

out the old way of thinking and usher in the new. So here are some of the stories from that inaugural issue. It's a very tender story about a young black girl who, through a, the sweetest, most innocent misunderstanding becomes a sex worker. poems about black folks working low-wage jobs, liking attention, wandering around New York City. All of it's written very plainly. Easy to understand.

A really beautiful story about this unemployed artist who's just floating around New York. It seems like he's high. And he's spending one night sleeping with his boyfriend. And then the next night he's on a date with his girlfriend. And he's marveling at the fact that he can love them both so much. This could be today. This could be today.

I love it. They put out fire. And because they are these stars, they're the new Negroes, everyone reads it. All the black newspapers cover it. I'm going to send you a link to a review that reflects the response. On page one, you'll find the review from the Baltimore Afro-American newspapers, one of the most red newspapers in America at the time. Wow.

I have just tossed the first issue of fire into the fire and watched the crackling flames leap and snarl as though they were trying to swallow some repulsive dose. The old heads, they drag it. Dragged it. They're like, it is 1926. We are in the middle of a race war.

Black people are literally, quite literally, being hunted for sport, and you think real and raw is going to help with that. We need to lift as we climb, you need to knock it off. And the new Negroes, again, they're like, okay, boomers, we're on to something. We're doing the right thing. But they can't find an audience because black people are like, why would we want to be reflected this way?

So they don't really buy it. And then they can't find financing. And then an actual fire burns up all the reserve copies of the magazine. And it folds after just one issue. Wow. I mean, I feel like this is the age old. Like, we're fighting for our humanity by painting us in this. exceptional light or we're fighting for our humanity that actually looks like the messiness of our

humanity. This is, I feel like it's this constant. It's happening today. As their descendant in their wildest dream, whose approach was the most effective for 1926, would you say? I'm just going to say, we need all those strategies. We need the rebellious. We need the counterculture. We need the innovative, Like people, you know, the things that people might go, ooh, that's disgusting. Because it's there before their time. And then we need the sort of institutional working within these systems and pushing. I think we need it all. I love it.

If there was a prize or a right answer, I would say that was it. All in the above. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Such a Pisces answer. All of the above. Okay. So the combined experiences of the opportunity dinner and fire. and probably a bunch of other things

serve as this call to action to a young Zora and Langston. And they're determined to tell stories about Black Life that they feel that the movement is leaving behind. So now it's a year later and Zora and Lankston have run into each other down in Mobile.

Because they had both been working on fire, but like at different times they hadn't had a chance to like really connect. But now they're here in Mobile together. They're eating watermelon. They're talking about this tour of the South that they're both on. And then I imagine Zora saying,

You know what, Langston? We should travel from Alabama to New York City together. I have this car. It looks like a Model T. She's named it Sassy Susie. It maxes out at 45 miles per hour. I love it. She says, you can help me collect folklore,

and I will be your guide through the South. And I can also be your protector because Zora is strapped. She keeps that thing on her right on her shoulder. Mm-hmm. And Langston is like, let's go. So he throws stuff in the back of her car, and our ancestors start driving north, through the South in search of funny, dirty, mystical stories about being black.

Now, something that doesn't come up on this road trip through the deep south in 1927 is racism. This don't talk about it, except for one time when they're worried about being pulled over by the cops. What about like sundown towns and shit? Like, they got to hustle through. She's only going 45 miles an hour. They never mention it. Like, here's how to stay safe. Let's not get lynch.

Like, none of that? That's be my first question. I know, right? I know. She just is not mentioned in their story. So this story is not going to be about that, even though what I think about driving through the deep south in 1927, but this is a little bit of Zora's style to choose what things to focus on

and what things to be like. It's not a problem if you don't believe it to be a problem. So. Interesting. Okay. Racism doesn't come up. Now, today we understand that Lansing Hughes, we understand him to be gay,

although he is very purposefully private about his, sexuality and he is experimenting, hooking up with, we don't know with the ladies occasionally at this time. So historians do speculate that like maybe there was like energy between them.

We should cast at this moment. We should look at pictures of Zora and Langston and cast actors for them. They are on page two of the document I shared with you. Oh, yes. Oh, okay. So I'm not great at knowing people's names. But I'm definitely giving, she's giving Angela Bassett because timeless.

Yes. Yes. Good at any age, better with age. Then it's about deep breathing, a massage or yoga. I don't do yoga. Yes. So he's giving like baby-faced. Mm-hmm.

I don't know. Who do you think? Let me see. Who could be? Who could be? Hmm. A cute young black. You know, this guy's having a real moment.

Let me see. Hold, please. He's in Rebel Ridge, Aaron Pierre. Oh, God, he's gorgeous. Okay. Yes. He's having a real moment. And the thing to know about Langston is like,

everybody is just like, this is the hottest man. we've ever seen in the history of our lives. People are freaked out when they look at Langston Hughes. Give me this jawline, this cheekbone, this lip situation, all of it. Pecks, the arms. I'm here for Rebel Ridge. Come on. What's your name again?

Roger, Air. Are you single? Oof. Go ahead, Angela. Enjoy that. So we don't know what happened between them, but Langston does make a list of things that he is seeing on the trip. And it's a very stream of consciousness list.

And on it, it says Zora's bare front. We don't know what that means. You said we don't know what that means? We don't. It could be what could it mean. I was like, who doesn't know what that means? Historians are like, what could it be? But we are normal people and we know what it means.

So they don't talk about messing around, though. So it's mainly just going to be like a buddy road trip story. As they speed along the Alabama countryside at 45 miles per hour, Zora might be mulling over what to say about the situation that she's gotten herself into. She might be thinking, what am I going to do about this man that I randomly married a couple months ago? Oh, shit. Why did I do that?

Girl, I understand. Man, I can act very passionately and decisively and not always in my own best interests. But I'm sure that's not going to be a problem with my fellow ingenue Langston. Hughes. And then as they pass through the small towns on the brand new highways and byways of America, Langston Hughes might be thinking, man, I have a real tendency to get very flirty and tight with people and then push them away. And that has created some real issues for me. But I'm sure that will never be a problem with my new friends or New Hurston. They continue driving. He sounds like an avoided, by the way, if we're talking about attachment styles. If we're talking about attachment styles,

then. So I'm going to tell you about three of their stops that they make that I just love. And I do think they solidified their friendship and eventually their troubles. So stop number one, Langston meets the folks in folklore. So a few days after linking up, our ancestors arrived to check out the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, which is just shy of 50 years old. And we know it today, of course, is the Tuskegee Institute. Here, students are learning farming and vocational skills from former slave,

turned president of the Institute, Booker T. Washington. He believes that vocational education is the best way to lift as we climb. The old heads, especially Zora and Langston's mentor, W.B. Du Bois, hate this way of thinking. And Booker Tee. But Langston has set up a meeting with him and his colleague, former slave turned scientist and father of the peanut, Dr. George Washington Carver. So they're like, we don't care that you don't like him. I'm going to go meet up with him. So he kicks it with them and Zora goes off to interview people and collect. more folklore, and they agree to meet back up at the end of the week.

And Zora doesn't record what she gets into, but Langston does, so we're going to follow him. Langston travels with the Tuskegee students to rural Alabama, where the schools doing outreach and teaching country folks. They say civilization. We hate that. But they go into this town called Berkeley, and Tuskegee students install toilets to replace the outhouses, and they build a foundation for a well. And then the Berkeley residents teach the students how to breed livestock, how to grow food,

and how to care for newborns and the sick. And then one night the teachers from Tuskegee show the students a bunch of educational films and over 100 residents of Berkeley come out to join because they'd never seen movies before and talkies and things like this. It's all new technology. And Langston says that they were so awed by the experience

that some people cried. Yes. Langston is a city Negro, so he can't really help with the manual labor thing or teaching livestock greeting. or anything like that. But he does teach the young boys of Berkeley how to swim. And he leads lessons about great Negro men like the boxer, Jack Johnson,

and the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar. And then at the end of the week, Langston writes a poem about the Alabama stars and the earth and the strength of southern Negroes. You know how people get after a week in the country. That's right. So imagine that him and Zora are back together at the Tuskegee Institute. He's telling her all his experience in the South. She loves this house so much.

She's so happy. If you were Zora, would you open up to him in this moment about your problems? Or would you, are you like the kind of person who's like a little bit more reserved? Well, I'm really in this space of like, she's 34. Mm-hmm. He's 23, 22, something like that. Yeah. He's a baby.

Mm-hmm. And so she is wise already. And so here comes this young baby being like, oh my God. And he's like wide-eyed. Like I just saw a cow being bred for the first time. And then they was growing stuff. And then the people was crying. And this whole thing.

He's having this whole mind-blowing experience. And I see her just being like, I'm so glad you're seeing my homeland. I'm so glad you're like experiencing it, I'm appreciating it in this way. Okay, so can we talk about my shit? Because I'm just married a man two months ago, and I need to talk about it. Like, I need to vent. Like, are we done? Let's say she decides, you know what, I do need to talk about it.

We're traveling. I'm in the vibes are right. So she says, okay, let's get into it. Let me tell you my backstory. So Zora's from the first all-black incorporated town in America called Edenville, Florida, where she lived with her mom and her dad, who was a philandering preacher in the town's mayor. And she has maybe eight, maybe four siblings. She does tend to exaggerate the details of her life.

They have enough to get by, probably not too much more. They're surrounded by black people exclusively. And her father tries to warn her that the world isn't really like this, but Zora is basically like, okay, boomer. Her mother tells her she should jump at the sun every chance she gets. Zora grows into this voracious reader. She loves Gulliver's travels, Greek and Roman mythology. The Jungle Book, but she's most mesmerized by listening to the adults gossip at the market and tell tales on the front porch.

And she wants to be a storyteller like them with all eyes on her. So she dresses loud. She talks loud with this thick southern accent that she never tries to hide. She just is a big appetite for everything she wants to live. But then her mom dies and her father remarries very quickly and Zora hates this woman. They physically fight. Zora does try to choke her out. and needs to leave home.

And it's when she left Eatonville that she learned what it actually meant to be black in the South. And she has to contend with this really intense racism. But she develops this philosophy where she says she hates any kind of victim mentality and she won't even pray because she feels like it's putting your fate

in somebody else's hands. So she is determined to not be bothered by racism to just keep it pushing. She's like, I don't, it's nothing. Just keep going. So Zora starts, heading north after she leaves home in search of more education and training to be a storyteller, but she never has any money.

She's always working a ton of jobs. And then she realizes that black teens are getting really good free education at schools in Baltimore. So she pretends to be 16. She's 26. Again. Very never been kissed. Only possible with melanin. Only possible with melanin.

Exactly. She successfully enrolls in high school and then she never adds the 10 years back on to her age. I guess why. Why? 10 more years of life. Exactly. Zora graduates and moves to D.C. to go to Howard. Age you!

You know! And she works as a maid, a waitress, and a manicurist to survive and pay tuition. She pledges Zeta. She starts the school's Hilltop student newspaper and she writes for their literary magazine. And that's where she meets Alan Locke.

He is her advisor. Oh, I didn't know that. Mm-hmm. And Alan has this attitude of like, I don't really think women have anything to contribute to this movement. Shocking. But he called her one of his best and brightest students that he'd ever had. In D.C., Zora gets along really well with the city's literary community,

even though they're rich and very city and she's poor and country. She'd show up to these parties and loudly announce Queen Zora has arrived. I love it, yes. And everybody loves it. And one person that especially loves it is a musician. studying medicine at Howard named Herbert Sheen. He and Zora start dating, and then he moves to Chicago so they are a long distance. Alan Locke tells Zora, it's probably time for you to move to Harlem, get into that scene.

She's like, you're right. She drops out of Howard, and she moves to New York, and then she goes to the opportunity dinner that Alan had organized. And that night, she meets one of the founders of Barnard College, who offer her a scholarship to study anthropology. And in 1925, Zor becomes Barnard's first and only black student. She says that she experiences a lot of racism, but that it doesn't bother her. She says she doesn't care. Again, she feels like if you complain or admit to it being a problem, then you are being a victim. And that your indifference is what robs racism of its power.

So she just goes to Barnard. She lets one wealthy white donor introduce her to another. She goes to their parties, and she regales them with the folklore and the story. stories of blackness and they eat it up and she feeds them more and it's all problematic but it does get her money which she pours into writing these short stories and these one act plays about the lives of you know poor black people in the south and her work she puts it out and it just keeps hitting. Zora is the moment she has so with everyone it's hitting with white people it's hitting with black people people are like every black paper is picking up her stories everybody

loves it and so These are her folklore stories. These are her like short stories, her poems, her one-act plays. She's like everything she's like writing everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just like somebody likes it. Somebody loves it. A lot of white people love it.

A lot of black people love it. The opportunity dinner really did. I mean, the opportunity dinner sparked the new Negro movement, which is the Harlem Renaissance, but they call it the movement then. And so every artist out of there is like, who are you? Who are you? But Zora is like, oh my God, who is this woman? Yeah.

So she's putting everything out. Big hit. All of it's spoken in a southern dialect about the messy, funny magic of being a Negro in the South. And at this time, she writes to a friend. And she says the following. Can you read on page four? This is a little bit from the letter she said her friend.

If you knew my dreams, my vaulting ambition. Prometheus on his rock, with his liver being constantly consumed as fast as he grows another, is nothing compared to my dreams. So radiant and astral beauty, I have not the power yet to make them come true. They always die. But even as they fade, I have others. Yes, Zora.

And so she's like having this amazing moment. And then there is Herbert. This is her boyfriend. They've been together for years at this point. And in the midst of her assent, his sister, who Zora is really close to, is murdered. And she and Herbert divide and conquer all the legal paperwork and the funeral arrangements, which brings her closer to him and his family. And maybe contributes to their, like, seemingly very random decision one day to get married.

So the night before the wedding, here's what she tells him she dreams. Ooh, shit. A dark barrier kept falling between us. And I sat up with the voice of your sister calling my name in the most unfriendly terms, commanding me to leave you alone. leave you alone or suffer severe penalties. It was as vivid as noon. We appeared like shadowy figures seen through an opal. It was terrible.

Ah, shit, that's the night before your wedding day? That's the night before your wedding day. That's what she dreams. Mm-hmm. And then she wakes up and she marries him. You know, oh, how many women have just kept the marriage going, even though, like, kept the, you just keep the wedding. That kind of is shocking to me as independent of a thinker as she is.

To have a dream like that. She seems like the kind of person that would be like, nope, it's off. You know, dream has spoken. But she went through with it. She was still a woman of her time. Yep. The wedding is bad. The wedding night is bad.

She says it feels like a mistake instantly. Girl. Herbert is like, do you want me to travel with you through the South and collect folklore, my wife? And she's like, okay, they do it. It's weird. He's like, I will leave. I'm going to go to Chicago. She's like, go to Chicago.

And then she heads to Mobile. She runs into Langston. Now we're all caught up. Being a poet, I would imagine that Langston listened very beautifully. He's like, you know, everybody known for being mature for his time. And then maybe she was like, okay, I told you all my business. Now you tell me yours. But Langston's really famous for being very closed off and super, super private.

But he was having some beef with Alan, Alan Locke. And so I bet Zora asked about it because Zohr, Zora was just like blunt in your face, but he wouldn't have told her right away. So they get back in the car, they get back on the road. Now we're going to stop number two, which is collecting stories and people watching. Okay, so my next favorite stop of theirs, it's several stops, and they're just interviewing people. They go out to the woods to talk to Turpentine workers who strip the bark off pine trees. They go to the riverbanks and interview dock workers.

They talk to voodoo women because Zora is very interested in voodoo. and hoodoo and root magic. And they talk to a woman who's in the process of buying a gun that she says she's going to use to shoot her husband. They're like, okay. And they just go along with her for the ride. So they're asking all these people to tell them what are called lies or stories that their grandmothers would have told to each other when they were enslaved. Some of these lies, they're like the story of why God made black people black, which was that we showed up to a meeting on CP time. And then there was some confusion and we got what we got.

Or there are these, that's one of them. Or there are a ton of stories about the tricks that a slave named John would play on his master. These are very popular. And they're like, give us all of them. And Zora's big worry is that if I don't get these and write them down, then by 2024, 5, 6, no one will know these basic stories that we all know. So that's what they're doing. And what's happening is that black people are not forced to.

coming with their stories, especially the ones about their drama. And in part what Zora has noticed is that black people recognize this kind of unusual amount of interest that white people have in their private interactions. Yes. And so black people have started, one, they're very protective. They're like, why do you want these stories? What is this weird obsession with what we talk about? And also they started to use language in this way where they change the meanings of words.

And it's leading a lot of white anthropologists to believe that black people can't speak English properly, like don't have the intellectual capacity to do it. And black people are like, yep, that's right. But Zora is like, no, they're camouflaging. This is a tactic. And I want to document it and use it as additional proof. That also from other folklore traditions, that's very like a legwa, like the trickster, the very like we're not. Yes. You can't quite capture.

You don't really know. But this is also opening a path to liberation. Yes. Exactly. The trickster is also the one who opens the path. So I've read a lot of her folklore. I have to tell you about my favorite kind of folklore, which are toasts, the tradition of toasts and toasting. Have you ever heard of, I'd never heard of this before. Okay. So toast started in Africa and then, you know, black people are enslaved. They tell toast to pass time on the plantation. And by 1927, they're just a thing that black people do when they get together. It's very, very popular. They're these long, adventure. stories. They're made up and very fantastical. And they have to be funny. They have to rhyme. You've got to be

able to deliver it to a beat. And in a toast, the protagonist is always this is how we are. We've always been this way. This is how we are. Be like, let's up the Annie a little bit. Yes, exactly. Don't just tell me a story. I want, like, give me some beats. Give it a beat. Make it rhyme. Give it a beat. Give me a beat.

In a toast, the protagonist is always a black man facing insurmountable, unbelievable, like, life and death odds. He'll never get out of. this, but he always wins in the end. He has to. Those are the rules. And people, when they were telling toes, they're trying to shock one another and make each other laugh. So the stories are so raunchy.

It's like tons of sex and drugs and cursing. They're so dirty. I can't read most of them on here. I want kids to be able to hear this show, but they're wild. And it's just like, this is what the slaves were doing to pass the time. This is what, like, black folks were doing, Deer and Jim Crow, this is just they're trying to make each other laugh. So there's a lot of different genres of toast, but the most popular ones are about the Titanic. So I will tell you one of those.

When? I already love it. I already love it. The Titanic sank in 1912. Black people, some percentage of us, just laughed and laughed and laughed. And we said anybody could have told those white people that boat was going to sink. It's too big. You were talking wild to God.

Of course it sank. Like the most popular toast, the largest number of toasts are about the Titanic and how obviously it was going to sink. I love it. So one of my favorites is, in a nutshell, there's a man who's working the Titanic, a black man, and his name is Boilerm Sam. And this is not Rangie, but it's just so funny. He realizes that the boat's going to sink immediately. He tries to warn the captain. The captain says all this racist stuff to him, tells him he's dumb, tells him to leave.

Sam goes, he gets all the black people together. They have a meeting as we do. Everybody's like, obviously, this boat is going to sink. Everybody's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We know. So they jump off the side of the boat and they swim to safety. And that is why no black people died in the sinking of the Titanic. Not because we weren't there.

Not because we weren't there. Because we knew when we got off. Yeah. I love it. I just love that it is this tradition of like, we're such keen observers of the world. world and of culture and we've seen things so many times before and it lives in our blood and our bones and so we can sit back and be like I could have told y'all that was going to happen

you didn't listen to me though but we know in the rocking chair too I can picture like in the rock chair I could have told y'all that was going to act fact I did but y'all didn't listen but okay nobody wanted to listen to me I said oh unsinkable oh mm-oh okay well we'll see about that you know Okay, so this conversation we've had, that's their value. That's the value of collecting this folklore, and Zor knows that. And so as black people are traveling, the toasts, they're taking them with them to places like Oakland to New York to Chicago. And when they get there, they change and they become more regionally specific. And some theorize that you can trace the origins of the heroes of black exploitation films like Dolomite, who was a big character in the toast and Shaft to the heroes in the toast.

This is how they kind of lived on. So in addition to collecting all these stories, Zora and Lankson are people watching, which is a passion of fine, so I was immediately like, yes, I want to talk about this. And they're observing this really popular thing that's happening among black southerners, kind of like it feels like all of a sudden.

Can I have you read on page six what Zora writes about what they're observing black folks are doing? I was going to say, is it the dozens? What's going on? Do what they would. The South could do little to halt the stampede. The cry of going north, quote unquote, hung over the land like the whale over Egypt at the death of the firstborn. Railroads, hard roads, dirt roads, side roads, roads were in the minds of the Black South.

And all roads led north. So people were calling this really shocking phenomenon of black folks flooding out of the South, the Great Exodus. And in addition to Toast, many of these travelers were carrying with them, the country's number one black paper, the Chicago defender. So the defender is based in Chicago, and it fought for social justice, civil rights, like every other black newspaper, but they are particularly concerned

with getting as many black people out of the South as they could. So every issue included pictures of the best schools, parks, and houses in Chicago next to the worst conditions in the South, stories about Southerners who'd made it in Chicago and then schedules for one-way trains

and buses to Chicago from every major southern city. lists of churches, mutual aid organizations, and social clubs that would help travelers find housing and jobs, and then horror stories and photos of, like, horrific graphic lynchings. And one of their most famous headlines is on page seven. Can you read that? When the lynch mob comes and you must die, take at least one of them with you. Ooh. Mm-hmm. The Chicago Defender was not playing. Their editor was from Georgia and made it to Chicago,

and he was like, I want everybody out. And if you got to stay, you'll probably get lynched, fight. People are getting a hold of this paper and getting inspired. And Southern leaders recognize the potential economic devastation of having hundreds of thousands of black workers leave the South all at one time. And so they ban the sale and the distribution of the defender. And in response, the defender coordinates with the Pullman Porter, the black men who worked the rails at the time. And they smuggle the papers into the South. And they drop them off at secret locations.

And today, the paper is credited as, like, the, one of the primary engines that fueled the Great Migration. So Zora and Langston, they've been hijinks in it up all across the South collecting stories. And maybe Zora's like Langston, what's up with you and Alan? You needed to tell me what's going on. And in my movie version of this, they are riding along in Sassy Susie. And he's like, all right, let me start from the beginning. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri. He thinks it's 1901, but it's 1902.

I just have to put this in here because every single black person in history doesn't know when they were born. I'm sure there's lots of reasons, but just nobody ever knows. All my research is like, maybe this year, maybe that year. But you know what? Sorry, I have to say this. This is also very African. Oh, true. So I used to live for a while in Namibia.

I remember people were like, this is May Kulu, which means grandmother. They were like, we don't really know when she was born. She could be like, people would be like, she's a hundred and twenty-six years old. People would be like, she's 94. Like, nobody knows the woman is old and she's bent over, but she will still cush you out and kill a snake. Like, this bitch is bad. So he's black, Jewish, Native American. His mom is descended from D.C.'s black elite.

And the story is always that his dad got so fed up with racism that he moved to Mexico and left Blankton and his mom behind. But I'm like, again. Was his dad black? Who's Jewish? I think his mom is maybe mixed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know his grandmother is like part Native American, like Cherokee.

Okay. So he's got like a lot of things going on. But they're always like, his dad was so tired of racism that he moved to Mexico and left them to figure it out on their own. I'm like, okay. It's a very kind of like nobles. Somebody kicked him out of this goddamn country. He like, went, he bought a horse farm.

Mm-hmm. Wait, he worked on a horse farm? He bought one. He lived on a ranch. Wow. So Langston's mom and his grandmother raised him between Lawrence, Kansas, Lincoln, Illinois, and Cleveland, Ohio. They're pretty solidly middle class, and Langston's always the only black kitten class.

So he's experiencing a lot of racism, and he's pretty lonely. but he does have poetry, which is his first love. And in particular, he loves the poems of Walt Whitman, which are written in very plain language that anybody can follow, and his style and his language and his imagery that becomes a real guide for Langston in the beginning. As he gets older, he spends some time in Mexico with his dad where he convinces his dad to give him the money

to go to Columbia in New York City. And that's where Langston discovers Harlem, and he falls in forever love. He loves the energy and the poetry and the music and the theater and the blackness, but not Colombia because they're so racist. Right. He's not like Zora with it.

He's like, this is horrible. I'm out. So then he drops out. He takes a job on a trading ship and he sails to Europe and Africa where he works as a cook, a waiter, a dormant, a bunch of other odd jobs to survive. And all the while he's working on a book of poetry about the every man and the struggles that they are going through to get by.

Now, as we've mentioned before, Langston is very hot. And people are literally writing letters to their friends being like, you need to do whatever you need to do to look at this man because he's gorgeous. So Aaron Pierre is, we're picturing Aaron Pierre. Yes. Somebody writes Alan Locke. And they say, he also happens to be overseas at this time. And it's before the opportunity dinner.

And they're like, have you seen Langston Hughes? So Alan gets a hold of his picture. And then he writes his friend back. It's like, this is a brown, virile God. Because Alan's also gay. That's what I was going to say. I was like, I feel like the Allen thing. Are they lovers?

That's what I was giving for me. So this is what happens. So I'm glad this is confirmed. Okay. Alan starts writing Langston these very flirty letters. Ooh, I love it. And Langston is a huge flirt. So he flirts and he flirts.

Of course he does. And Langston's in his 20s. Alan's in his 40s. Alan's like, we need to meet up in real life. And Langston's like, oh my God, you're so smart. I'd just be too nervous to me. You're too, like, gorgeous and handsome and brilliant. I can't.

Alan keeps pressing, keeps pressing. Lengthen's like, no, no, no. And then Alan's like, listen, I'm a philosophy professor at Howard, and I could probably get you in. And so Lansing's like, okay, we can meet up now. Yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So they spend a weekend together in Italy.

Oh, I know, right? A weekend in Italy by the sea, and they're near the water. Come on. they have this beautiful weekend and then Alan is like, okay, so we're boyfriends now, right? And Langston's like, Alan, you're so cute. No. Alan. You see all these pretty Italian boys.

I'm everybody's lover. You really think we're going to be, no, grow up. So then Langston gets robbed of his money and his passport and Alan just leaves him in Italy to figure it out. He's so mad. It takes Langston months to get back to America. When he gets back to the U.S., Langston moves in with his mom, who's now in D.C., and he tries to get into Howard on his own, but he can't afford it, and Alan won't help. So he works as a busboy, he's writing poetry. He's spending a lot of time with the black elite, his mom's friends. He hates it. Really rich, learned people make him very uncomfortable. But he manages to publish his book of poems and names it The Weary Blues, and it's a hit. It like catapults him into fame.

and Alan puts their differences aside and invites him to the opportunity dinner where Langston is awarded enough money to finish college at the historically black Lincoln University. Then he starts touring and reading his poetry live and everyone is just like, oh my God, you're such a great poet. Like we can't wait for all the poetry to come. But he's thinking, I want to tell stories in every single way. I want to write short stories. I want to write novels.

I want to hear my poem set to music and I want to write a play. And Zora, maybe she has not shared this with him yet. In my movie version, she has not. But Zora really wants to take all this folklore that she's been collecting and turn it into a play. So that people can really like live in the dialect and the rhythm and just like all the energy of these scenes that she's a part of. And it's a big, big goal of hers. And she loves Broadway. She loves the theater.

And Langston's mom had been an actress and he loves Broadway too. But in my movie, they don't know that about each other yet. So now we're going to go to their last stop. Stop number three, which is just like a fun one. So they're driving through Georgia and they're kind of like ready to go back to New York. And then they hear that the singer Bessie Smith, known as the Empress of the Blues, is having a concert in making Georgia. And they're like, we have to detour.

We have to go there. We are broke, but we have to go. We can't miss Bessie. So Bessie Smith had toured with Ma Rainey, who taught her business management and crowd control techniques. Both of these served her well because Bessie now has a hit song out

called Downhearted Blues and she loves being a star. She is staying up late. She is drinking. She is parting. She is hooking up with the ladies. She's living her best life. Zora and Lansing go to her show.

So we're picturing Angela Bassett and Aaron Pierre just like dancing the night away. Bessie's dancing and dancing. Everybody's having so much fun. It's like sweaty juke joint and making Georgia. They love it.

After the show, they get an invite to the after party at the colored hotel in town, which like I just have to say like people is just like, oh, segregation is just bad, but like, which party do you want to go to? You want to go to the... Right. So they go to the colored hotel in town. Everybody's getting down. Bessie, a bunch of the other color performers and artists she's traveling with, they're all

there. So I'm imagining drinks are flowing. Maybe somebody is playing live music. Maybe people are telling toasts because Bessie grew up poor. in Tennessee and she really liked Branchi talk. So I'm sure she would have had a few. Zoran Langston probably felt right at home. Unlike the old heads,

W.B. Allen, even like Dr. Carver, Booker T. They see moments like these is dirty, but like Zora and Langston are like, this is high art, this is worthy of praise. And maybe they talked about the pressure and the motivation they felt knowing that everyone back in Harlem was watching them and wondering what they're going to do next. And maybe

it should be something with all this folklore that they've collected. And so in the movie version of the scene, this is when they turn to each other. And they're like, you know what? We should write a play together. For him, the events that follow, he'll call them a painful marker of the end of the Harlem Renaissance. And for her, the events that follow, she'll call the biggest regrets of her life. That's next time on our ancestors for messy.

No. You're going to leave me here? Who gets to do the next one? I mean, you can do it. I don't want to do it. You go and leave me hanging like this? Hell, no. You know, we hear the stories of the Harlem Renaissance.

We might hear about these individual artists, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, but we're not, I think so many times black artists are taken out of the context of our living, of our communities. Like we're seen, and that's a very, like, Eurocentric thing to do. Like, the American individualization, like, it's just about this artist as if they exist on their own. No, they were created by a community. They were, like, artists as a, artists, we're taking in all of this information and then like translating it through our bodies

and our creativity, but it comes from a place and we come from a place. And so you can't separate the artists from place. And so I'm, I love seeing them as artists from the places that they come from and the different perspectives they're seeing things through. And then the art that's made from that. And this is why I'm really curious about like, what was their collaboration like? like how did they bring these stories together and why did it end up blowing up both their friendship and for each of them like the end of the Renaissance in some ways?

That's what the whole next episode is about. It's what it's all about. Yeah. God, I want to tell you so bad. But I can't tell you. Oh, no. Okay, what are we doing the next thing? I need to know.

Okay, okay. Let me stop. This show was written, researched, and produced by me, Nicole Hill. Thank you to the lovely Alicia Walters for being my guest on this. and the next episode. I relied heavily on the novel by Yuval Taylor called Zora and Langston, a story of friendship and betrayal,

and I'm just going to let you know I left a lot out. So if you want even more details about their antics and their adventures, you should definitely go check that book out. This is an indie show, but that does not mean that it was made alone. Please give it up for my executive producer, A.A. Hernandez, this week's sound designer extraordinaire, Kyle Murdoch, My story producer, Martina Abraham Zilunga, my research producer and the voice at the top of the episodes, Chiokai Ainsen. My script editor, Shante Hill, and a huge thank you to Selika Smith, who designed my show art.

If you'd like to support the show, please consider joining the household. That's the community of donors who generously lend their support to help fund the making of this podcast. You can sign up at our AncestorsWMessy.com. to learn more about the show, you can visit our ancestors were messy.com and if you ever want to email me, hit me up, you can reach me at our ancestors were messy at gmail.com. Before I go, I just have to say, I'm not a historian or an archivist by training. I am a storyteller who stumbled across our ancestors old newspapers one day and was reminded

of a quote by the columnist Sidney J. Harris. History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage it's done.