Coda
coda Carrie had gotten worse by the time Langston moved her into his newly leased Harlem apartment in March 1938. She collapsed for the last time on Friday, June 3, at around four in the morning. At age sixty-five, the cancer that had consumed her body took her life. She died at Deaconess Hospital in Manhattan, where Langston had rushed her a few hours earlier. Langston then did what a dutiful son is supposed to do: he took care of the business of burying his mother. On Sunday, June 5, at 4:00 p.m., Rev. Peter Price of New Mother AME Zion Church officiated at Carrie’s services. Mable Diggs Bergen, accompanied by Dr. Melville Charlton, sang Carrie’s favorite songs: “Goin’ Home,” “City Called Heaven,” and “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.” Carrie was buried in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hill Cemetery, Lot No. 921, Section St. Phillips. Langston even paid six dollars for a biweekly cutting, cleaning, and trimming of the grave and installation of a new lawn on it. The cost of Carrie ’s funeral was $257.34, including casket, embalming, grave, hearse, and limousine (ARI 360–61). Langston did not cry at Carrie’s funeral, maybe because of the lessons of dispassionate restraint he had learned at his grandmother’s knee. More likely, he was just tired of crying for the way Carrie had neglected him most of his life, drained him dry financially and emotionally, and never refilled his emotional well. However, he would always know that he was 162 coda truly the only being that really belonged to Carrie. He was her Dear Boy. Instead of tears and other outward passionate displays, he did reveal himself and the feelings he had about the most influential woman in his life: he used his art to work out his complicated familial relationship. ...
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