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through their streets in the evenings, staring at them as if they were “amusing animals in a zoo. The Negroes said, ‘We can’t go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won’t even let us in your clubs.’ But they didn’t say it out loud—for Negroes are practically never rude to white people,” wrote Hughes. “So thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses.”

The most prominent and influential white promoter of black culture was Carl Van Vechten, a collector and connoisseur of the new and the exotic. In the early 1920s Van Vechten became friends with James Weldon Johnson, an expert on Negro spirituals, and captivated the party-loving heiress A’Lelia Walker. He championed the blues as a serious art form in Vanity Fair; he worked to bring talented black writers into the literary mainstream.

Langston Hughes met Van Vechten properly in 1926. In less than three weeks, Van Vechten had secured him deals with Vanity Fair magazine and the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, and went on to write the glowing introduction to Hughes’s first volume of poems. Van Vechten “never talks grandiloquently about democracy or Americanism. Nor makes a fetish of those qualities,” observed Hughes with gratitude. “But he lives them with sincerity—and humor.”

Harlem became Van Vechten’s passion, but Harlem was ambivalent about Van Vechten. Du Bois and his future son-in-law, the poet Countee Cullen, found him subtly patronizing while Claude McKay “was eager to meet a white man who bothered to be subtle in his patronizing.”

Though she usually avoided the white world, as a favor to a friend, Bessie Smith agreed to attend one of Van Vechten’s parties downtown. When she arrived, Van Vechten archly offered her “a lovely dry martini.” Deliberately abrasive, Smith replied that she didn’t know about dry martinis, or wet ones either—she wanted a large whisky. She downed the first drink she was given in one and immediately demanded another. Then she sang, in the voice Van Vechten described as being “full of shouting and moaning and praying and suffering, a wild, rough, Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic, but seductive and sensuous too . . . the powerfully magnetic personality of this elemental conjure [sic] woman with her plangent African voice, quivering with passion and pain, sounding as if it had been developed at the source of the Nile.”

Finally, drunk, Bessie took her leave. When bird-like Mrs. Van Vechten tried to kiss her goodbye, she screamed, “Get the fuck away from me!” and stalked out of the apartment, with Van Vechten’s congratulations on her magnificent performance floating unnoticed and uncared-about in her wake.

Although his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven sought to portray blacks without prejudice or stereotype, Van Vechten was derided for arguing that blacks “civilized” themselves at their own spiritual cost. “We are, for the most part, pagans, natural pagans,” declared one character. But when Johnson reviewed Nigger Heaven in Opportunity magazine, he argued that his friend’s understanding of black culture was authentic and valuable. “If the book has a thesis it is: Negroes are people, they have the same emotions, the same passions, the same shortcomings, the same aspirations, the same graduations of social strata as other people,” he wrote. Johnson was only too aware that this in itself would be a revelation to many white Americans.

Regardless of the merits or demerits of Van Vechten’s literary take on Harlem, no one who knew him denied that he sincerely respected black culture—but even with Van Vechten there was a sense that Harlem provided him with an outlet for dark desires that he could not reveal in his normal life. Van Vechten threw most of the parties for which he was celebrated at the downtown apartment he shared with his wife, but he also kept a second apartment in Harlem of which she knew nothing. Here, in