The Poisoned Patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason

One of the weaknesses of the Harlem Renaissance was that its producers were frequently reliant on white money to give them the space to create their art. Only sixty years out of slavery and further handicapped by the ferocious repression of an expanding Jim Crow structure, the African American minority could hardly be faulted for its lack of wealth or the weakness of its cultural institutions. However, that did give whites who decided to take up Black causes or knowledge or history or music outsized influence on the course and creation Black culture. Some of this influence was benign (the NAACP), some was complicated (Carl Van Vechten), and some was just megalomaniacal batshit crazy. Charlotte Osgood Mason definitively fell in the latter category.

Hers is a long and complicated story. She was born in 1854 in New Jersey to a family of Dutch descent, married Rufus Mason, a doctor twenty five years her senior in 1886 who became a prominent exponent of various psychical crazes (seances, telepathy, automatic writing), bringing his younger wife in tow. When he died in 1903, the rich window became even richer. She also inherited the primitivism of her husband who believed that native cultures could restore modern citizens to a lost spiritual health.

When Mason met Alain Locke in 1927, she was ready to use her tremendous wealth and formidable personality to transform the Africanist elements of the Negro Renaissance into her mystical vision of “a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa, across which the Negro world… should see the flaming pathway… and recover the treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on earth.”

Locke was the first to fall under her twin spells of patronage and personality. Locke introduced Mason to Langston who also became entranced, and he accepted presents and money from her for the next three years. Langston brought Zora in train, and she too got swept up in the mini-cult. The patronage was certainly an incentive (Mason’s money paid for Zora’s folklore research in the South, which included expensive recording equipment and a Nash coupe automobile), but Mason’s mystical sympathies and "loving" gestures evoked genuine affection. She insisted that her protégés call her “Godmother,” which they did without irony.

The motherly embrace with which Mason welcomed her artists turned into an iron grip on their work and lives. She not only wanted to give feedback; she wanted to control where and when they submitted. Her contracts with some of her artists stipulated that she owned the work they produced in perpetuity. Mason’s contract with Hurston stated that she owned Hurston’s anthropological research material, the documents and recordings, which she kept in a locked safety deposit box to which Hurston had no key. Mason’s closest, most suffocating relationship was with her “Precious Brown Boy” Langston whom she ordered to write to her daily. She also chose the books he read, the music he listened to, and the plays he saw. 

Whatever art Mason’s patronage might have produced was overshadowed by the emotional wreckage her imperious meddling brought about. She positioned Locke, Hughes, and Hurston in a triangle to jockey for her favor, significantly contributing to the bust-up of the close friendship Langston and Zora had enjoyed before becoming her courtiers. Langston was sufficiently bewitched by Godmother’s mystique and largesse to go along with her demands, but when he began to pull back after three years, she brutally cut him off both financially and emotionally, causing the normally unflappable poet the greatest pain of his life.

Hurston, savvier and more experienced about manipulating white people’s support, tried to play a double game of sycophantic assent and subversive pursuit of her own goals and projects. The Great Depression, taking a significant bite out of Mason’s wealth, allowed Godmother to pull back on the patronage that, by the early 30s, was clearly not going to bring about her "vision" of what Negroes should be doing (under her direction), and the relationship with Hurston died away.

Locke, whose mommy issues brought him into Mason’s orbit in the first place, moved on but never repudiated her friendship, even after the money had stanched. He stayed in touch throughout the 1930s and 40s, though Mason had permanently removed to the top floor of a hospital wing in 1933 for the last 13 years of her life. Her imperious ways had alienated everyone she had dragooned into her court, Black and white. She died alone, unloved, and unhappy.

But Godmother’s influence did result in one tangible poem that Langston published in 1939.

Poet to Patron

What right has anyone to say

That I

Must throw out pieces of my heart

For pay?

For bread that helps to make

My heart beat true,

I must sell myself

To you?

— Dr. Robert Philipson

Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in On Being a Patron.

SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts.