From Mentor to Supplicant: The Correspondence of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Langston Hughes

On January 6, 1925, Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote a letter to Langston Hughes from Paris. It's a long letter—over a thousand words—and it balances advice with appeal in ways that capture the intimacy and strength of their friendship. Her first novel, There is Confusion, had been published in 1924 and Fauset was on leave from her position as the literary editor of The Crisis, studying and writing in Paris. She had planned the trip as a celebration: finally, at forty-two, she had published a novel. However, the celebration was clouded by bad reviews and a particularly brutal public humiliation. A huge dinner party at the Civic Club supposedly in her honor, attended by hundreds of notable guests, both black and white, turned into an evening where her achievement was barely mentioned while the work of some of the young men whom she had discovered and mentored, including Hughes and Jean Toomer, were celebrated as the voices of the future. The evening is often cited as the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance and Fauset, who had done so much to make the artistic flourishing happen, was written out of the narrative.

Still stinging, she takes time from her own sorrows to console the much younger Hughes—he was twenty-three—on his own disappointments, writing, “You must not let what has happened to you dishearten you too much. . . . I am proud and grateful that you recognized without my telling you the unquestioning quality of my friendship. Long ago, almost ten years now, I learned with bitterness and tears that there is only one way of friendship and that is to be a friend.”[1] Fauset determined to be a friend to Hughes, as he was to her. She had published him early, encouraged him, and when, in January 1920, he sent his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” to her, she chose it not for The Brownies Book, the children’s magazine where his work first appeared, but for The Crisis, then the most prestigious publication for African American writers. Privately, Hughes defended Fauset, too, writing in a letter to Harold Jackman that Eric Walrond’s review in The New Republic “tempts one to want to punch him in the eye”; publicly, the young poet was more circumspect.[2]

This was not Fauset’s first trip to Paris. She had been in the summer of 1914—a trip cut short by the outbreak of World War I—and  on several other occasions since, including a 1921 trip with her mentor, collaborator, and partner, W. E. B. Du Bois, for the 2nd Pan-African Congress. But this trip was her longest solo stay in Paris, and she revels in the luxury of unscheduled time, “For a brief space I was bewildered when I came over this time. Six months of freedom—more freedom than I’d ever had at one time in my life, enough money to manage on and no restraints. Grown-up though I am and have been now for some time I had never known such independence” (January 6, 1925).

When she was planning her trip, she joked to him about the possibility of their being in Paris together: “You can take me to all the dangerous places and I can take you to all the beautiful ones” (April 20, 1924). Hers is the loving and affectionate joke of an older friend to a young one, confident and self-aware. But Hughes left Paris before she arrived, and she writes to regret that their paths had not crossed, thanks him for his suggestions of spots to visit, and teases, “I have a friend here who will take me and protect me. I don’t believe I’d choose McKay to accompany me to such places. He is a better artist than man I imagine.” It is a fitting joke from a woman whose freedom depended on maintaining a spotless reputation. She writes about her freedom and how she values and cherishes it, how she has spent it, and, anticipating James Baldwin, muses on the effect of France on her writing. It is a lovely letter, candid, sincere, and affectionate, and were that all, it would be a valuable document of expatriate black life.

But the opening sets it apart. It contains the seeds of the final scene of Plum Bun, the novel she was working on at the time. Fauset notes that Hughes wrote to her on Christmas and lavishes thanks on him for doing so: “To-day brought me your letter. It was nice of you to write me on Christmas Day,—a beautiful Christmas thought. And oh when I had given up all thoughts of hearing from you how splendid it was to see your writing again” (January 6, 1925). Fauset, the daughter of an AME minister, means it when she calls his “a beautiful Christmas thought.” The thought of being fondly remembered on a holiday that she is spending alone touches her deeply. The sincerity of her thanks itself conjures all the bittersweet melancholy of Fauset’s own Christmas, alone in Paris with everything she thought she wanted, which turns out to be not quite enough. This mood informs the happy ending of her new novel.

The new novel, Plum Bun (1928), tells a story of race passing through the Murray sisters of Philadelphia, Angela, a painter, and Jinny, a music teacher. When Angela is kicked out of a painting class by a model who recognizes her as black, she moves to New York to take art classes and start a new life, passing for white. Unsurprisingly, her plan hits snags, and by the novel’s end, she has broken up with her wealthy, racist white lover and worries she has lost the love of Anthony, the light-skinned black painter who, like her, can pass for white. After she cruelly betrays her darker sister, refusing to acknowledge her in public, the sisters have reached an uneasy truce, and, determined not to lie any longer about her heritage, Angela goes to Paris with a renewed commitment to painting.

Jinny writes, promising that she and Anthony have found a perfect present, and Angela is full of happy anticipation, but Christmas Eve comes and goes with no present, not even a telegram. Stubbornly resilient, Angela heads to midnight mass at Saint-Sulpice and a party, falling into bed just before dawn. In the early hours of Christmas morning, there is a knock on the door: “Anthony…rose to meet her…. ‘There ought to be a tag on me somewhere,’ he remarked apologetically, ‘but anyhow Virginia and Matthew sent me with their love.’”[3] Fauset transforms a “lovely Christmas thought” into a lover. It’s a fairy tale ending with fierce, melancholy, radical power. She invites us to imagine a world in which a young, talented black woman could have everything her heart desires: freedom to pursue her art in a welcoming city with her lover working by her side.

Jessie Redmon Fauset was the most prolific novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing four novels between 1924 and 1933. Yet if you have heard of her at all, it is likely through Langston Hughes. He labeled her as one of the “midwives” of the Harlem Renaissance, a label that Deborah McDowell notes might as well have been her epitaph. To be a midwife, even when intended as a compliment, is to be relegated to a helper, a feminized, near-anonymous role, crucial but secondary to the labor of the mother and the glory of the child. Whatever respect we may have for the profession of midwifery, its modest status is beyond doubt. Calling an editor, publisher, or mentor a “midwife” diminishes their role and discourages curiosity about the rest of their lives. Almost as frequently quoted, and even more damning, is Hughes’s description of a dull evening at Fauset’s apartment, on which occasion, afterward, Hughes and the guest of honor went to “Small’s Paradise where we had a ‘ball’ until the dawn came up and forced us from the club.”[4] Taken together—Fauset’s reputation as a midwife of a literary movement who hosted dull parties—it is not surprising that many have dismissed Fauset. Who would look further?

However, Hughes’s forty-year correspondence with Fauset, held at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and digitized and available online, tells a far richer story of a friendship that stretched from 1920 to her death in 1961, and which saw that friendship continue even as her role changed from mentor to supplicant, begging the poet whom she first published to help her find an agent. Even Hughes’s description of her parties takes on a different cast when we remember that he was nineteen years her junior. It is no surprise, and certainly no fatal damnation, to learn that a man in his early twenties found a literary salon hosted by a woman in her forties a little stiff and went out afterwards to a club. Earlier in that same passage, Hughes offers a more sympathetic explanation for the tenor of her parties: “At Miss Fauset’s, a good time was shared by talking literature and reading poetry aloud and perhaps enjoying some conversation in French. White people were seldom present there unless they were very distinguished white people, because Jessie Fauset did not feel like opening her home to mere sightseers, or faddists momentarily in love with Negro life. At her house one would usually meet editors and students, writers and social workers, and serious people who liked books” (The Big Sea, 247). Fauset refused to perform for white patrons. As a result, she had none. Dazzled by the accounts of flashier Harlem parties, many have overlooked the possibility that one might want to get together with friends and not be photographed by Carl Van Vechten in front of an interesting textile; amused by the tensions between white patrons and the black artists whose work they funded, few have contemplated the fate of a woman too proud to accept patronage.

Plum Bun was published in 1928. Her partnership and affair with Du Bois over, Fauset’s correspondence with him dwindled. She taught high school, once scribbling an invitation to Hughes on a scrap of paper during class, and wrote in the summer. The Chinaberry Tree came out in 1931; it is a novel about incest narrowly averted, set in an all-black town in Southern New Jersey much like the Lawnside of her birth. Two years later, her fourth and final novel, Comedy: American Style, came out. It is a brilliant and bitter tragicomedy about a mother obsessed with seeing that her children marry light-skinned partners so they and their children have the best chance at passing. A travel essay about her time in Tangier was published in the Metropolitan Monthly, a sophisticated, black-woman-owned and edited magazine along the lines of the New Yorker, but the magazine folded after a single issue.

The Hughes papers at the Beinecke includes five folders of letters from Fauset. When they started writing to each other, Fauset was a thirty-eight-year-old editor, still four years from publishing her first novel, and Hughes was just nineteen. She encourages him, mentors him, celebrates his successes, and seeks his advice. At the end of their correspondence, forty years later, it is Fauset who is begging Hughes for help. The first letter from Fauset to Hughes is on the letterhead of The Brownies Book, Fauset’s short-lived children’s magazine, from November 10, 1920. She accepts a poem, and, noting the Mexican return address, requests some material about children’s songs and games in Mexico that might interest African American children. She writes him again in December, thanking him for additional submissions. In January she gladly accepts “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and requests more: “I warned you before that I was going to be insatiable,” she writes (January 18, 1921). But it’s her February letter that first offers friendship. At the end of the typed letter, in Fauset’s handwriting, is a postscript: “The little poems were charming too, particularly the rain song. May I be a bit curious? You write so well and sympathetically – who are you and whence, and why do you live in Mexico? J.F.” (February 25, 1921). By October, Hughes was at Columbia University and he and Fauset were arranging a lunch. A nervous Hughes brought his mother.

When There is Confusion came out, Fauset described herself to Hughes as finally embarking on her career, but the path was not nearly as smooth as she hoped. She left The Crisis in 1926 but could not find work editing or as a publisher’s reader, despite her willingness to work from home. In 1927, she appealed to Du Bois once more for help securing a position teaching high school, a job she had done—and disliked strongly—as a new college graduate in the ‘teens. Even that was not easy, but she eventually got a job at DeWitt-Clinton High School, where she remained as a teacher until 1944.

In 1948, Langston Hughes asked her for some poems for the anthology he and Arna Bontemps were editing. Their back and forth over this project, while still friendly, betrays her mounting exasperation. Fauset sends “fourteen poems” for consideration along with “love and constant pride in all your undertakings⁠” (January 23, 1948) but expresses her frustration at their selection of only a few previously published poems: “certainly my readers will think I have not advanced⁠” (January 23, 1948). As they are finalizing the contributor biographies, she writes a tart note about hers:

I thought it very strange of Mr. Bontemps to speak only of my teaching at Dunbar, when it really means something for a colored person to have taught at DeWitt Clinton which was then the largest High School in the world. I noticed Mr. B. Stressed everything possible in his own somewhat unremarkable career. Also Langston for obvious reasons—NO dates. Please don’t think me bitter about Mr. B. but I’ve suffered a good deal from colored men writers from Locke down to Bontemps—you know

“Without sneering teach the rest to sneer,” sort of thing.

Only you and Gloster have been fair⁠. (June 9, 1949)

Getting the life right mattered to Fauset. Many of her letters while at The Crisis concern biography: she provided biographical notes on Du Bois to his hosts in advance of hisspeaking engagements, and frequently corrected the notes written by others. After her retirement, she applied for a fellowship to write a series of biographies of notable African Americans, and Hughes corresponded several times with Mary McLeod Bethune to see if Fauset might work with her, either as an assistant, ghost writer, or biographer. As a teacher, Fauset understood the value of a well-written curriculum, and as a writer and mentor to others, she knew the power of even a biographical note for preserving the record of black achievement in the face of racist obstacles, but these projects never came to fruition.

As films with racial themes such as Pinky and No Way Out came into vogue in the late 1940s, Fauset tried, one more time, to insert herself into the conversation, begging Hughes to help her find a Hollywood agent: “I think I shall die if I don’t succeed in getting THE CHINABERY TREE and COMEDY: AMERICAN STYLE accepted in Hollywood⁠” (October 2, 1950). Ever positive, ever patient, Hughes shares his own inability to get a footing in Hollywood and his sense of how difficult this desire is.

One of the joys of these years was a year as a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Hampton University in Virginia: “Dear Langston: I love Hampton! Of course, tho; since I am a person whose middle name is ‘Nostalgia,’ I am happy to be going home tomorrow⁠” (December 18, 1948). Unlike the frustrations of high school teaching, Fauset reveled in the chance to work with college students and one wonders what her life might have been if college teaching had been open to her.

Their correspondence dwindled in the 1950s, although she still sends him invitations to receptions in honor of visiting dignitaries, including the South African anti-apartheid activist and singer Miriam Makeba. Fauset’s health declined and she spent her final year near family in Philadelphia. In 1966, Hughes wrotes to Arna Bontemps that he could complete Fauset’s biography for their anthology, having finally tracked down Fauset’s death certificate, thanks to her half-brother Arthur Fauset’s help “after 50-11 [sic] phone calls, cards, letters to old friends of hers, TIMES and AMSTERDAM morgues, etc. (after failure of Schomburg and CRISIS-NAACP to be of any help),” (Letters 412). After her death, it was Hughes, not Du Bois, who worked to keep her legacy alive.

It hardly seems fair to call the years after Plum Bun empty ones or to dismiss them as a time of sad decline. With two additional novels and abundant civic activity, Fauset’s late middle age was not merely sad. Her ability to retain the friendship and affection of her most famous discovery forty years later is a tribute to her generosity and their mutual care. Nevertheless, the ways in which Hughes, Du Bois, and many others failed to champion her career is an indictment of a larger rejection of the women who offer us hope. The Crisis was founded with the dual mission of fighting anti-black violence and sharing stories of hope and uplift. Fauset was the author of many of those aspirational stories, but her life—her inability to place her fiction in magazines other than The Crisis, win fellowships, or get good reviews—reminds us how ready we are to abandon our support for the brilliant black women who offer hope.