Hitting A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston
272
Hitting A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston
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| ISBN-13: | 9780817386931 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 07/25/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 469 KB |
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Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston
By Susan Edwards Meisenhelder
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1999 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8693-1
CHAPTER 1
"Fractious" Mules and Covert Resistance in Mules and Men
In an oft-quoted passage from her introduction to Mules and Men, Hurston stresses the difference between her childhood unreflective immersion in black folklife and her later understanding of it:
When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism. From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that. (3)
As Hurston suggests here, she is more than a passive transcriber of folktales in Mules and Men. Distanced from the culture she depicts, trained as an anthropologist to analyze it, she shapes her material in order to reveal the warp and woof of the fabric she saw. Whereas Mules and Men seems (and was, in fact, seen by most reviewers as) a straightforward, nonthreatening depiction of the humorous and exotic side of black culture in the rural South, Hurston offers in veiled form a complex analysis of race and gender in black life. Detailing the effects of white domination on the racial and gender identities of black people, Hurston examines the price paid for internalizing the values of the dominant culture, the avenues available for resisting its hierarchies, and the possibility of a radically different, autonomous alternative.
Part of the reason Hurston takes an indirect approach to this critique stems from her dependence on white figures who exerted considerable control over her work. Charlotte Osgood Mason, for instance, literally owned Hurston's material and consistently pushed Hurston to express only the "primitivism" she saw in black culture. Hurston's struggle with Franz Boas in her research and writing of Mules and Men is less well known, but as the correspondence between him and Hurston indicates, his control over her field work at this time in her career was just as intrusive as that exerted by Mason. In addition to dictating the focus of her research and treating her as an aid or informant rather than a researcher in her own right, Boas also clearly pressed Hurston to accept his interpretation of her material. Aware of Boas's power to validate or dismiss the significance of her research, Hurston addresses him not by directly asserting her views but by posturing as a deferential disciple, requesting permission to express her own conclusions. As she looks over her material, she writes to him on April 21, 1929:
Is it safe for me to say that baptism is an extension of water worship as a part of pantheism just as the sacrament is an extension of cannibalism? Isn't the use of candles in the Catholic church a relic of fire worship? Are not all the uses of fire upon the altars the same thing? Is not the christian ritual rather one attenuated nature- worship, in the fire, water, and blood? Might not the frequently mentioned fire of the Holy Ghost not be an unconscious fire worship? May it not be a deification of fire?
May I say that the decoration in clothing is an extension of the primitive application of paint (coloring) to the body?
May I say that all primitive music originated about the drum and that singing was an attenuation of the drum-beat? (APS)
The tentative tone of Hurston's correspondence reflects her awareness of Boas's power but not her acquiescence to it. That it represents the mask she donned to deal with a powerful mentor rather than her own uncertainty is clear from a letter she wrote Langston Hughes nine days after her letter to Boas. Despite Boas's unsupportive response (April 24, 1929, APS), she unequivocally and enthusiastically expressed to Hughes her view of Christianity as rooted in nature worship (April 30, 1929, Yale, JWJ). Hurston had her own anthropological views to express in Mules and Men as well. What she discovered when she looked at her culture through the spyglass of anthropology was that the folktales she had always heard were not merely amusing stories, nor even relics of slavery, but living forces, strategies used in her own day for dealing with racial and sexual inequities. As she emphasized in "Characteristics of Negro Expression," "Negro folklore is not a thing of the past" (56) but testimony to the power of her own contemporaries to do battle in a world of inequality.
Faced with the dilemma of how to present her analysis in a way that could bypass the censoring eye of her mentors and potentially unsympathetic white readers, Hurston adopted a strategy of masking social conflict and critical commentary with humor. The persona she creates is crucial to this project. By presenting herself as a lovable "darky," one who thanks white folks for "allowing" her to collect folklore and who praises the magnanimity of her patron, Mrs. Mason, she appears a narrator with no racial complaints or even awareness. Pouring on "the charm of a lovable personality," commented on by Boas in his Preface (x) and by reviewers, Hurston paints herself as an Uncle Remus figure pleased to entertain the white world with her tales. Making no controversial statements and, in fact, offering little explicit analysis, she plays a role eminently acceptable to whites: lovable, entertaining, and intellectually mute.
Hurston reminds us in Mules and Men, however, that black humor is richly multifaceted, reflecting a wide range of emotions: "The brother in black puts a laugh in every vacant place in his mind. His laugh has a hundred meanings. It may mean amusement, anger, grief, bewilderment, chagrin, curiosity, simple pleasure or any other of the known or undefined emotions" (67–68). Much of the humor in Mules and Men reflects this complexity rather than the primitive simplicity and carefree gaiety seen by reviewers. Hurston also hints at the complex ambiguity of folktales themselves in discussing the black person's strategy for deflecting the probe of white cultural analysis:
... the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, "Get out of here!" We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn't know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather- bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.
The theory behind our tactics: "The white man is always trying to know into somebody else's business. All right, I'll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho' can't read my mind. I'll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I'll say my say and sing my song." (4–5)
While Hurston makes these comments to convince readers that they are reading the unvarnished truth in Mules and Men, that she is initiating them into the black world, her remarks provide an interesting comment on her strategy in the work. She uses "feather-bed tactics" in her rendition of folktales, placing her "lovable personality" and the seemingly simple, humorous stories of her informants as a "play toy" in the hands of her white readers.
As Hemenway suggests in his introduction, Hurston's "cultural messages" in Mules and Men are "coded" ones (xxiii), similar to black proverbial expressions or "by-words," which as one man explains, "'all got a hidden meanin'" (134). Conveying her cultural messages not by explicitly analyzing folktales but by embedding them in a social context, Hurston uses that context and careful juxtaposition of tales to underscore controversial issues of race and gender. Undoubtedly aware that the context of Joel Chandler Harris's tales had defused the conflict and resistance in them, Hurston embeds her tales in situations that highlight this function of black folklore. Her mode of presentation in Mules and Men is thus crucial. As Boas notes in his Preface, it was a novel one; "by giving the Negro's reaction to every day events," by placing tales in "the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro" (x), Hurston is able to convey her commentary without asking permission or offending her mentors.
Whereas Boas rather dimly praises this aspect of Mules and Men in his Preface, his correspondence with Hurston reveals her trials in getting him to write it. Fully aware what his stamp of approval would mean for her work's acceptance, she pleads with him to write an introduction: "I am full of terrors, lest you decide that you do not want to write the introduction to my 'Mules and Men.' I want you to do it so very much" (August 20, 1934, APS). From her extensive experience with Boas's scientific "rigor," Hurston was clearly aware that the novelistic frame for her tales might present a potential problem for Boas. She was, therefore, extremely careful to explain the conversations and incidents between tales as required by the publisher's desire for a readable book aimed at the general public (August 20, 1934, APS). Foisting responsibility for "unnecessary" elements in her work onto her publishers and further implying they are anthropologically insignificant, Hurston ends this letter with her familiar strategy of ingratiation:
So please consider all this and do not refuse Mr. Lippincott's request to write the introduction to Mules and Men. And then in addition, I feel that the persons who have the most information on a subject should teach the public. Who knows more about folk-lore than you and Dr. Benedict? Therefore the stuff published in America should pass under your eye. You see some of the preposterous stuff put out by various persons on various folk-subjects. This is not said merely to get you to write the introduction to my book. No. (August 20, 1934, APS)
Hurston's strategy of deferential humility, of course, worked. She was able to publish her work with this crucial contextual material and to get Boas's (albeit brief and rather condescending) approval in the Preface.
The "between-story conversations and business," the contexts in which tales are narrated, are central in Mules and Men, for they highlight the realities of racial and sexual oppression in the lives of the characters who relate them. One set of tales, for instance, those told in the context of the sawmill in Polk County (Chapters IV and V), provides an important commentary on the situation of black workers in the South. Hurston sets up this work scene to emphasize white domination and control of these men's lives: arriving at work to find no straw boss, the men think they will be given a day off but are disappointed when the foreman orders them on to the mill to see if they are needed there (74). Telling tales all the way, they walk the long distance to the mill, only to be summarily dismissed by the mill boss (100). Moved from one work location to the next, never informed of the white boss's plans, the workers use traditional tales throughout this section to defy the white world's definition of them as mules and to assert their humanity. For instance, after general speculation that the swamp-boss is absent due to illness, one man sneers, "'Man, he's too ugly. If a spell of sickness ever tried to slip up on him, he'd skeer it into a three weeks' spasm'" (73). This last comment leads into a series of exaggeration stories, in which the workers try to top one another's stories about men who are "so ugly." As a later series of exaggeration stories told while fishing shows (106), this traditional form is often a form of fun-filled verbal play engaged in for its own sake. In a dehumanizing work context, however, the form is used specifically to lampoon a white power figure. Similarly, the men deal with their frustration and anger when the foreman announces that they must report to the mill through another series of exaggeration tales about mean men, initiated by one man's comment, "'Ain't dat a mean man? No work in the swamp and still he won't let us knock off.'" The tales that follow detail one straw boss "'so mean dat when the boiler burst and blowed some of the men up in the air, he docked 'em for de time they was off de job'" and a road boss so mean "'till he laid off de hands of his watch'" (75).
Significantly, stories about "slavery days" are most common in this section of Mules and Men. Often focusing on the trickster figure, John, and the slave's strategies for dealing with apparent powerlessness, many of them graphically demonstrate the impossibility of open defiance and the need for indirection in battling oppressive whites. In "Big Talk," for instance, one slave foolishly speaks out against his master (and is nearly killed) after having heard another slave brag that he "cussed" him without punishment. The braggart later explains the crucial difference in their defiance: "'Ah didn't say Ah cussed 'im tuh his face. You sho is crazy. Ah thought you had mo' sense than dat. When Ah cussed Old Massa he wuz settin' on de front porch an' Ah wuz down at de big gate'" (83–84). As this tale suggests, overt resistance, with death as the price, is the strategy of fools; indirection, on the other hand, is a crucial strategy for survival and for victory. As one listener remarks, such foolhardiness is not the hallmark of the black folk hero, John: "'dat wasn't John de white folks was foolin' wid. John was too smart for Ole Massa. He never got no beatin'!'" (85).
The slavery stories in these two chapters, the bulk of the ones told in Mules and Men, function as a model for these men in psychologically resisting their own oppression. Unable to openly defy their bosses, they too "talk at the big gate" in the tales they narrate, reliving the slave's symbolic victory. Tales related in this section also solidify the group, uniting the men, who at least twice respond to stories by moving "closer together" (73, 74) in spiritual opposition to their bosses. By placing most John stories in this section, by having them told against a backdrop of economic slavery, Hurston reinforces the contemporary subversive import of these tales. As she suggests in her essay, "High John de Conquer," in which she analyzes the dynamics of these stories, a John story "was an inside thing to live by. It was sure to be heard when and where the work was the hardest, and the lot most cruel. It helped the slaves endure" (69). In the Polk County section of Mules and Men, Hurston demonstrates that John did not die with Emancipation, but "retire[d] with his secret smile into the soil of the South and wait[ed]" (Sanctified Church, 78), reemerging — even in the 1920s — when needed to help black people deal with oppression. By not analyzing in Mules and Men how these tales work, by inserting her extremely brief description of John only in her glossary, and by giving tales innocuous titles that mask their thematic import, Hurston hoped to recreate the plantation dynamics of the John tales. Like Massa and Old Miss, her contemporary "masters" could hear the tales without understanding their subversive import.
The complex ambiguity of these tales is evident in one John story narrated in this section, "Ole Massa and John Who Wanted to Go to Heaven," a favorite of Hurston's told elsewhere as "The Fiery Chariot." Although the tale seems to poke fun at the black man through a series of racist stereotypes, a different kind of humor derives from the depiction of John as a trickster who not only outruns the Lord but also verbally outwits him. Whereas escape is obviously uppermost in his mind, he engineers it by feigning concern for the Lord's interests. He begins with a short appeal to decorum: "'O, Lawd, Ah can't go to Heben wid you in yo' fiery chariot in dese old dirty britches; gimme time to put on my Sunday pants'" (77). When this strategy is exhausted because "John didn't had nothin' else to change" (77), he lays the groundwork for his escape by appealing to "facts" God cannot possibly deny, His superiority (77) and the black man's inferiority (77–78). John's last plea is a rhetorical flourish, demonstrating that what Hurston has called in "Characteristics of Negro Expression" the black person's "will to adorn" often derived not just from love of the poetic possibilities of words but from an awareness of their strategic rhetorical value. Here John calls on metaphor, double descriptive, and parallelism for perhaps the most serious persuasive motive — to save his own life: "'O, Lawd, Heben is so high and wese so low; youse so great and Ah'm so weak and yo' strength is too much for us poor sufferin' sinners. So once mo' and agin yo' humber servant is knee-bent and body-bowed askin' you one mo' favor befo' Ah step into yo' fiery chariot to go to Heben wid you and wash in yo' glory — be so pleased in yo' tender mercy as to stand back jus' a li'l bit further'" (78). Just who in this scene is "brighter" becomes quite complicated when "Ole Massa stepped back a step or two mo' and out dat door John come like a streak of lightnin'" (78).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Susan Edwards Meisenhelder. Copyright © 1999 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsAcknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. “Fractious” Mules and Covert Resistance in Mules and Men
2. “Natural Men” and “Pagan Poesy” in Jonah's Gourd Vine
3. “Mink Skin or Coon Hide”: The Janus-faced Narrative of Their Eyes Were Watching God
4. The Ways of White Folks in Seraph on the Suwanee
5. “Crossing Over” and “Heading Back”: Black Cultural Freedom in Moses, Man of the Mountain
6. “With a Harp and a Sword in My Hand”: Black Female Identity in Dust Tracks on a Road
7. The “Trials” of Black Women in the 1950s: Ruby McCollum and Laura Lee Kimble
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index