In 1933, the poet Langston Hughes came to Carmel-by-the-Sea to write. A wealthy patron had offered him a cabin near the beach where he could live for a year, rent-free. Hughes had risen to literary stardom during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s for his lyrical poetry about the Black experience in America. He had written many of those poems, such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” while still a teenager. Now 31, Hughes was well-known yet struggled to support himself by his published work alone. Carmel, he hoped, would bring productivity and peace.
His arrival coincided with a time of upheaval in California. The divide between the left and the right was deepening as a result of the collapsing economy, labor strikes, and an influx of migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl. Hughes, who’d spent most of 1932 touring the Soviet Union, was embraced by Carmel’s left-leaning artists and writers, especially the poet Robinson Jeffers and the muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffens. While Hughes’s sojourn started well, with picnics, cocktail parties, and focused days of work, a political conflict was looming in Carmel. It would end, as Hughes put it, with “vigilantes knock[ing] at my door.”
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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It would also end with Hughes producing some of his best writing: the short story collection The Ways of White Folks.
“COLORED POET HERE”
Today, Carmel retains a faint echo of its artist-colony beginnings in its galleries of plein air art and the twee fairy-tale details on the houses. It’s still there, just covered over by money—or so I thought when I visited one chilly Saturday last August. Despite the coastal fog, tourists crowded the streets, spilling onto the sidewalk for an afternoon pastry or trooping toward the white-sand beach on the edge of town. When I paused to look at Steffens’s former home, a block and a half from the ocean, a stream of convertibles, SUVs, and three-wheeled motorcycles flowed uncomfortably close. It was the level of traffic I’d expect at a stadium before a football game. Still, I couldn’t blame people for escaping the inland heat to enjoy this beautiful place.
I, however, was there to see Hughes’s cabin, Ennesfree, a 15-minute stroll from downtown. The philanthropist Noël Sullivan had rented the cottage for Hughes as a yearlong residency. Sullivan, who was named Noël because he was born on Christmas Day, was white, gay, Catholic, and the grandson of a prominent banker. He was the director of the San Francisco Art Association and a patron to many Black artists. The year before, Hughes had stayed with Sullivan in his San Francisco manor. While the men didn’t know each other well, there was a kinship between them. In January 1933, Hughes wrote to Sullivan from Moscow: “I liked you very much. I think, Noël, that life has given us the same loneliness.” He added that he was accepting Sullivan’s invitation “for a corner of your cottage where one might set a typewriter, and be quiet for a while.” But Hughes received much more than a corner when he moved in that August. Ennesfree came with an ocean view, groceries, utilities, and the services of a cook—a dream situation for any writer. Hughes even had a roommate, a three-year-old German shepherd named Greta, after the reclusive actor Greta Garbo, who sometimes hid in Carmel.
When I arrived, a fire truck was parked on the street where Hughes had lived. A city water pipe had burst, and water bubbled toward the gutters. A firefighter with a droopy mustache nodded as I passed by to look at the cabin—which is now a rambling yellow mansion. Ennesfree was in there somewhere, swallowed up by decades of additions. In the yard, a giant live oak tree was pruned to the point that it looked more like a bonsai than a California native plant. Its branches spread over an artfully wrinkled roof, the shingles crooked and jammed as if they’d been dropped there by squirrels or birds. It sloped asymmetrically, revealing an actual tower poking up in the back. That, combined with the weathered shutters and rock wall along the front, was meant to give the impression that the person who owned this house might be very rich, but was also a gnome.
The ocean view no longer existed, blocked by an entire neighborhood, so I took the two-minute stroll to the beach, as Hughes often did with Greta. A paved bluff looked down at the sea. Despite the wind, tourists surfed or crouched in tents on the sand, which appeared as soft as talcum powder. Everything was just a little nicer than on a regular beach. Instead of sitting in folding chairs, people lounged on recliners normally found by backyard firepits. The umbrellas had wooden poles and thick striped fabric. Every dog, without exception, sported a shiny coat that seemed like it would smell nice. When I walked up a flagstone path for a better view of the water, a man with a muscly upper body stood beside an expanse of ice plants, shaking out his long hair—Tarzan turned surfer.
I sat on a bench and read Hughes’s poem—perhaps written while looking at this view—“Moonlight Night: Carmel.”
Tonight the waves march
In long ranks
Cutting the darkness
With their silver shanks,
Cutting the darkness
And kissing the moon
And beating the land’s
Edge into a swoon.
Ennesfree also came with a ready-made social life for Hughes. Jeffers and his wife, Una, lived half a mile away in Tor House, a handmade rock retreat that Hughes dropped by on afternoon walks. He also visited with Steffens, an elderly journalist with a pointy goatee who’d spent his career targeting titans of industry and corrupt politicians, as well as with Steffens’s ex-wife, the Australian-born Ella Winter. She’d just published her communist love letter Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia. Hughes made friends with the other Black people in the area, such as the cook Willa White Black, who invited him to get-togethers at her home and often fed him shrimp and rice or ham with red beans. And he attended meetings of the local John Reed Club (JRC), a leftist organization with 30 chapters nationwide, which he felt was doing “noble work.”
It was all so pleasant, Carmel began to look like a potential home. Hughes joked to a friend, “I am living so much like white folks these days that I’m washing my hair with [the shampoo] Golden Glow.” The racial problems that plagued the United States seemed far away. “The remoteness of this part of the world to all that is amazing,” he wrote to the poet Countee Cullen.
He was mistaken on that last point. On September 6, the Carmel Village Daily sounded a dog whistle with the headline “Colored Poet Here,” continuing, “Langston Hughes…is going to stay in Carmel for a few months at Noel Sullivan’s cottage, writing his book on Soviet Asia.”
SHOCKED “BOURGEOIS” EDITORS
While Hughes is remembered as a poet, he was a versatile writer, producing plays, journalism, essays, translations, children’s books, and a novel. In Carmel, he turned his attention to short stories. Inspired by D.H. Lawrence’s The Lovely Lady, he aspired to create psychologically powerful stories that would “touch on nuances of Negro-white life in America that haven’t been explored before.”
Working 10-to-12-hour days, Hughes quickly finished one remarkable short story after another. That winter, he hired a secretary, Roy Blackburn, who witnessed Hughes’s work schedule, which could stretch until three in the morning. As Blackburn describes to biographer Arnold Rampersad in The Life of Langston Hughes, “Mr. Sullivan’s dog would be asleep in front of the fireplace in the diningroom and we could hear the ocean nearby.” Blackburn continues, “Usually Langston dictated from his own typescript or from notes, and I typed.… Each draft was revised and then retyped, sometimes four or five times, until he judged it ready for the mail.”
Reading The Ways of White Folks, I’m struck by these wry, sharp stories, which address difficult issues like cultural appropriation, white saviors, and racial identity. In “Slave on the Block,” a couple who describe themselves as “people who went in for Negroes” steal the art and music of their Black employees. In the satire “Rejuvenation Through Joy,” a scam artist bilks the wealthy out of money by teaching them the “curative values of Negro jazz…music that the primitive Negroes brought with their drums from Africa.” “Poor Little Black Fellow” details the loneliness of a boy adopted into a white community, and “The Blues I’m Playing” is about a rich philanthropist who, after declaring a Black musician her protégée, is disappointed when she can’t also buy control over the woman’s life.
With irony, humor, and barely constrained anger, Hughes confronted these topics knowing that magazines would be reluctant to publish stories about them. His agent, Maxim Lieber, warned him not to be “too sanguine as to their sales possibilities.… I can imagine how shocked every bourgeois editor in town would be.” When Hughes followed up with the even more taboo “Red-Headed Baby,” about a white man who learns that his Black former girlfriend has a child with his red hair, Lieber protested: “Nothing I can do will stop you.” It was rejected by American Mercury, Esquire, Scribner’s, New Masses, Abbott’s, Harper’s, and Story.
In December, Hughes sent the collection to the publisher Blanche Knopf, who replied that it was “absolutely top notch and superb” and accepted it for a summer 1934 release. The book, dedicated to Sullivan, included the epigraph “The ways of white folks, I mean some white folks.…”
Years later, Hughes was still grateful to Sullivan for the time in Carmel. He wrote in his autobiography I Wonder As I Wander that it was the “first long period in my life when I was able, unworried and unhurried, to stay quietly in one place and devote myself to writing.” Despite the acclaim for Hughes’s work, many job opportunities, such as penning screenplays in Hollywood, were cut off to him in favor of less talented white writers. Thus, Hughes depended on patrons to support his career. This could sometimes be painful, as with “Godmother” Charlotte Mason, a controlling benefactor whose relationship with Hughes ended badly. The cost of patronage is a theme throughout The Ways of White Folks. In several stories, Black characters “reject the benefits offered to them by wealthy whites because the price is too high in terms of human dignity,” writes Laurie F. Leach in Langston Hughes: A Biography.
In fact, the only time Hughes supported himself with his writing was his year in the Soviet Union. In a letter, he explained, “Poets and writers in the Soviet Union are highly regarded and paid awfully well.” While he’d traveled throughout Russia, Hughes seemed unaware of the dark side of Joseph Stalin’s regime, which included famine, slave labor, confiscation of property, and brutal suppression of dissenters.
“He thought of the Soviet Union as a kind of Utopia where, maybe a little bit naïvely, racial prejudice and economic exploitation and gender prejudice, all those things, were wiped out,” Leach told me in an interview. “And he was able to support himself from his writing in the Soviet Union. He did travel articles and wrote poems that were published [and] translated into various languages. And so he was like, ‘What I’ve never been able to achieve without a patron in the U.S., I’m achieving in Russia. A Black man can have the opportunity to be a writer and to write about his life here.’ ”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation took notice. Soon, it would begin a file labeled “The Communistic Activities of Langston Hughes.”
“A KIND OF HYSTERIA”
He was also being watched in Carmel. By 1932, most Carmelites were conservative, voting for Herbert Hoover over Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the presidential election. In October, Hughes experienced his first pushback from the community when he was scheduled to lecture at the JRC. On the evening of his speech, the fire department padlocked the door, and the club had to scramble to find a last-minute location. Hughes told a friend, “Steffens, in introducing me, said that the fire laws are seldom evoked except when something left is about to come off.”
Hughes shrugged off the hostility with characteristic optimism and productivity. With the release of The Ways of White Folks on the horizon, he entered 1934 ready to take on new, politically charged projects. He started a book about his time in Soviet Asia and collaborated with Winter on a play about a cotton strike, called Blood on the Fields. He wrote radical poetry such as “One More ‘S’ in the USA”: “Put one more s in the USA / To make it Soviet. / One more s in the USA / Oh, we’ll live to see it yet.”
He was also raising legal fees for the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers in Alabama who had been falsely convicted of raping two white women; eight had been sentenced to death—the penalty for the crime. In February, Hughes solicited famous acquaintances for original art and literature to sell at a charity auction at San Francisco’s Women’s City Club. With the actor James Cagney as auctioneer, the organizers sold pieces by Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, D.H. Lawrence, Theodore Dreiser, Bertrand Russell, Jack London, and Anita Loos. The auction raised $1,400, which was 40 percent more than Hughes’s goal.
Encouraged by this successful activism, the JRC turned its attention to a growing crisis on the San Francisco docks. On May 9, some 12,000 dockworkers on the West Coast walked off their jobs to demand better hours and a living wage. Ports from San Diego to Seattle were closed for 83 days. Goods piled up on the piers, and trade ground to a halt. Every community was affected, including Carmel.
The JRC eagerly supported the workers, collecting money and supplies and sending telegrams to government officials. It invited a union member to Carmel to speak about the strike on July 1. About 200 people attended; the discourse was civil, and the club scheduled another meeting for later that month.
But on July 5, there was an eruption of violence in San Francisco. Police and workers clashed, leading to two deaths and hundreds of injuries. The day became known as Bloody Thursday. The rising tension spread to Carmel, which “bubbled with a kind of hysteria,” Hughes wrote in his essay “The Vigilantes Knock at My Door,” for New Masses.
On July 15, when Hughes arrived at the JRC for the scheduled meeting, the street was blocked with traffic, and the hall was packed with people. A police car’s headlights illuminated the door, and the chief of police stood by the entrance. Inside, the room was divided between union supporters and members of the American Legion, who were against the strike. They’d brought along a stenographer, who recorded every word, and sat “grim and unsmiling…gathered together to protect America,” Hughes wrote. “I was the only Negro there.”
While many members of the JRC were harassed, Hughes had to deal with an added layer of racism. He was soon the focus of malicious lies, including “that I was frequently seen on the beach and in cars in company of white women, that I called them by their first names, that I was a bad influence on the Negroes of the town.” A month later, the editor E.F. Bunch published a hit piece on Hughes in the Carmel Sun: “Langston Hughes has been a very ‘distinguished’ guest in Carmel—not that the town is proud of it.… White girls have ridden down the street with him, have walked with him, smiling [into] his face.… Russia would be a good place for Hughes.”
But it wasn’t just rumors and threats. Conservative factions were organizing. According to Carmel historian Neal Hotelling, on July 18, the city council created the Americanization Committee, which was “deputized and empowered to safeguard the public peace and safety.” The city council also formed Company A, headed by the Uruguayan-born artist Jo Mora, remembered today for his cowboy sculptures. A hundred men, many of them World War I veterans, marched with riot guns on the town polo field.
By July 20, Hughes wrote, the JRC had heard that “certain of us were marked for physical violence by the patriots of the town.” While this included Hughes, he remained in Carmel, perhaps unwilling to be bullied from his home. On July 24, an unnamed vigilante sent Hughes a message through another Black person, who “quietly advise[d] me to leave the village, that I was in physical danger.” Unable to write in this atmosphere and “not wishing to be tarred and feathered,” Hughes finally fled, taking the long way out of Carmel through the Santa Cruz Mountains, according to The Life of Langston Hughes.
The vigilantes hadn’t literally knocked, but they’d come very close to doing so.
A BITTER HARVEST
A month later, refusing to be intimidated, Hughes returned to Carmel, and the harassment resumed. In the middle of all this, The Ways of White Folks was published to critical acclaim. While a few reviewers were defensive over the portrayal of white people (“Mr. Hughes, my hat is off to you in relation to your own race, but not mine,” complained Sherwood Anderson in the Nation), most loved the book. “This is a collection of short stories that will bear comparison with the best contemporary American work in the field,” raved the Detroit News. “At least half a dozen stories might be awarded the O. Henry prize,” added the New York Post. Others said that Hughes possessed a “talent of the highest sort,” had the “gift of the born raconteur,” and “just about puts his foot over the genius wire.”
However, book sales were disappointing. And there was more bad news: Knopf declined the Soviet book, explaining that it was “charming and pleasant, but…not fresh and not new.” When Hughes returned to Carmel, Winter wanted her name taken off their play. Hughes wrote in a letter, “After all she does have to live there and…get her milk from a dairyman who declared he was just waiting for the day when he could get behind a machine gun and drag all the members of the JRC…out and shoot ’em.” The play, retitled Harvest, was never published in Hughes’s lifetime. After a year in Carmel, Hughes was back where he’d started, broke and with a limping career. He left for Mexico in November, and while he would visit Carmel, he never again lived in the area.
But he’d written a masterful work of literature depicting nuanced racial issues that mainstream culture is just now starting to acknowledge. Many of the problems Hughes encountered are still part of American life today: sudden violence, financial inequality, and racism, to name a few. For some, Hughes was a threatening figure in part because he lived a life of conviction. His presence was an affront to the fairy-tale façade of Carmel, revealing what was underneath. Hughes, in turn, took that out and held it up in the light.•
Joy Lanzendorfer’s first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Raritan, the Atlantic, and Ploughshares as well as on NPR and for the Poetry Foundation, among others.
