A review by ebonyutley
Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal by Yuval Taylor

4.0

I highly recommend Zora and Langston. Sure, the author is obviously guessing about their relationship at several points, but his research is thorough and because the book is new, it was nice to read someone who had already read their autobiographies so I didn’t have to revisit them. Both Zora and Langston were strong personalities. It is a wonder they were ever friends, but their letters and Langston’s journals show that they were even though he’s pretty mean to her in his autobiography, and she writes as if he doesn’t exist in hers.

So what happened? Well, the books delves into the details, and it’s still hard to tell. They both outright lied on each other and to each other and maybe to themselves. There were lots of people in the middle (one in particular), taking sides, making a mess, and telling their own tales. Zora seems like the type of irreverent woman that you had to love or hate, and Langston seems like the type of man who would never love you back quite the way you wanted to be loved. At least how Taylor portrays them.

But perhaps more important than their personalities and their friendship and its demise, is this treatise on living an intellectual life with someone. About how travel and study and sustained time with someone thinking about the same things shapes a person. I have one of these opposite sex intellectual comrades and the times where a sentence from him cleared up an entire thesis for me is not lost on me, but with text messages instead of effusive letters our friendship and collaboration could just as easily be lost until a researcher becomes determined to dig it up and figure out how we learned to think our thoughts.

I was in Harlem when I read the book, so the addresses of all the things was really helpful as was the story of how the Fire crew got together and how the Niggerati became the Niggerati. It was inspirational to see these smart black people world traveling (like it was easy) and thinking about the best ways to represent blackness in America. I had forgotten what a researcher Zora was and about how much of what we know about southern black life was gathered by her. What if she hadn’t done it? Scholars of black life owe so much to Zora and so many of her contemporaries tore her down. If I’m honest, though, I might have been one of them. Those moments where she kowtowed to Mason made me sick to my stomach. Langston too. I just don’t get it. I know they needed the time and peace of mind her money bought, but she reads like a terrible person-- patronizing at best and racist at worst. I could not have been her patron, and it’s not like they couldn’t choose because there were other contemporaries who extricated themselves from Mason. I would have called Zora out for pandering to that white woman.

Again, most of what I know Taylor wrote. Upon reading primary sources, I might come to another conclusion, but I’m not going to. He writes as if he’s trustworthy and the value of the book for me is thinking about an intellectual life lived with someone who then breaks your heart. Taylor is great at distinguishing emotional from romantic from sexual life, but he also writes Zora, Langston, and their community as sexually fluid before people were using “sexually fluid” as a language. I loved it. It was liberating and inspirational. So much of popular literature praised by white folk are struggle stories. Not that the struggle isn’t real, but it isn’t all that black people are and the legacy of Zora and Langston is that when they were friends in particular, they were both dedicated to the fullest representation of being black.