—LANGSTON HUGHES, “I, Too” Augusta Savage returned from Paris in September 1931. Straightaway, Joe Gould began threading himself into her life. “Miss Savage is giving a party,” he wrote to Countee Cullen that November, “and she asked me to invite you.”1 But, later, he admitted that when Savage returned to New York she refused to speak to him. She’d grown confident and cosmopolitan and commanding, and increasingly outspoken about art and race. “Something typical, racial, and distinctive is emerging in Negro art in America,” she said.2 She had shipped home much of her work. “I have brought back some 18 or so pieces,” she reported; “some are quite large.” She placed them in paid storage and worried about where to find the money to keep them.3 She opened a school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. She was named the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center. She founded a club called the Vanguard, to talk about race and politics.4 This attracted the attention of the FBI.
