Read Every Tongue Got to Confess Online
Authors: Zora Neale Hurston
Every Tongue Got to Confess (2 page)
A model for this self-conscious, self-appraising work manifests itself in the critique of language contained in these Gulf narratives. First, the folk-tales inhabit a pantheistic world where everything talks—peas grunt when bursting through the hard soil in which they’re planted; corn gossips in a cemetery; mules, alligators, horses, dogs, flies, cows, converse or sing. Language resides in the boundless sea of Great Time. One summer words frozen during a particularly severe winter thaw and suddenly the air is filled, like the air of Prospero’s enchanted island, with ghostly voices.
Language is treacherous, the tales school us. Interpretation, translation of words, leads to dangerous misapprehensions or not-so-funny comic predicaments, such as one slave bragging to another that he got away with looking at Ole Missus’ drawers and the second slave receiving a painful thumping when he tries to look at Ole Missus’ drawers when they’re not hanging on the clothesline but wrapping her behind. The tales warn us that anyone speaking must be eternally vigilant and circumspect. For one thing, tattlers’ ears are everywhere and always open. Even a prayer is liable to interception and subversion.
Once there was a Negroness. Every day he went under the hill to pray. So one day a white man went to see what he was doing. He was praying for God to kill all the white people; so the white man threw a brick on his head. The Negro said, “Lord can’t you tell a white man from a Negro?”
A master’s penchant for extravagant metaphorical overkill in his speech is satirized by a slave who transposes the master’s style into an equally fanciful rhyming vernacular version and fires it back at him, “You better git outa yo’ flowery beds uh ease, an put on yo’ flying trapeze, cause yo’ red ball uh simmons done carried yo’ flame uh flapperation tuh yo’ high tall mountain.”
“What you say, Jack?”
The problematic relationship between oral and written is documented playfully in a tale quoting an illiterate father who chides his educated daughter because she can’t write down in the letter he’s dictating a mule-calling sound he clucks.
Is you got dat down yit?
Naw sir, I aint’ got it yit?
How come you ain’t got it?
Cause I can’t spell (clucking sound).
You mean tuh tell me you been off tuh school seven years and can’t spell (clucking sound)? Well, I could almost spell dat myself.
Thus these narratives from the southern states instruct us that talk functions in African-American communities as it does in Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction and life—as a means of having fun, getting serious, establishing credibility and consensus, securing identity, negotiating survival, keeping hope alive, suffering and celebrating the power language bestows.
—J
OHN
E
DGAR
W
IDEMAN
Zora Neale Hurston is now famous—iconic even—as the author of the justly celebrated black female
bildungsroman, Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937). But her first love was African-American folklore, and without an understanding of what she saw in it—a people’s artistry and sensibility, their humor, their grievances, their worldview, “the first thing that man makes out of the natural laws that he finds around him”—her fiction, with its unexpected segues into folklore, magical realism, and myth, loses some of its force.
In February of 1927, after two years spent helping launch New York’s celebrated Harlem Renaissance and studying anthropology as Barnard’s only black scholar, Hurston headed to Jacksonville, Florida, to initiate an in-depth study of the rural, southern, African-American folklore she loved. She had a small ($1,400) grant from Carter Woodson’s Association for the
Study of Negro Life and History, and the intellectual support of Columbia University’s renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. Over the next two years she traveled to Florida, Alabama, Georgia, New Orleans, and the Bahamas, collecting material she would draw on for the rest of her life, recycling it often and in various forms into her work, and attempting, in spite of constant resistance, to bring authentic black folklore to mainstream, popular audiences.
While she had to learn to build bridges between a heritage among free-flowing storytellers exchanging dramatic “lies” (folk-tales), and an academic training that emphasized objective “facts” and cautioned against “the habit of talking all over your face,” Hurston ultimately amassed huge amounts of invaluable material.
3
“I am getting some gorgeous material down here, verse and prose,
magnificent,
” she wrote to Langston Hughes.
4
She collected so much material from just the American South that she had the basis for seven volumes of American folklore: “My plans: 1 volume of stories. 1 children’s games. 1 Drama and the Negro[.] 1 ‘Mules & Men[,]’ a volume of work songs with guitar arrangement[.] 1 on Religion. 1 on words & meanings. 1 volume of love letters with an introduction on Negro lore.”
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Had she published these seven volumes she could certainly have laid claim to being
the
leading folklorist of her generation. But doing so might also have derailed a career as a major American novelist. Of the seven books she eventually did publish, four were novels, one was an autobiography, and only two were folklore. The folklore books,
Mules and Men
, a collection of American folk-tales and Hoodoo material from New Orleans, and
Tell My Horse
, a study of Haitian and Jamaican voodoo, were published in 1935 and 1938, respectively.
Mules and Men
drew heavily on her fieldwork from the twenties. But vast amounts of material collected at that time seem to have disappeared.
According to her biographer, “the material [Hurston collected] was so extensive that Thompson [Hurston’s secretary]
often typed half the night.”
6
Some of this material (games, songs, and an essay on religion) eventually found its way into
Mules and Men
and some reappears in Hurston’s contribution to the Federal Writers Project’s book-length study “The Florida Negro.” But together they account for less than a third of the “gorgeous” stories Hurston originally vacuumed up.
7
Some of this missing material may still be found. After all, the full text of these stories Hurston considered “the life and color of my people” settled anonymously into a basement storage room at Columbia University for thirty years. It spent another twenty years at the Smithsonian, unrecognized as the vital core of Hurston’s missing fieldwork, let alone as the “boiled-down juice of human living” she intended it to be.
8
This missing text is published here, in full, for the first time.
Hurston wanted to present authentic African-American folklore, not something doctored to suit either dominant aesthetics or stereotyped notions of black culture. “White people could not be trusted to collect the lore of others,” she confided to Professor Alain Locke, one of the “midwives” (her term) of the Harlem Renaissance; they “take all the life and soul out of everything,” she wrote her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason.
9
In her view, “the god-maker, the creator of everything that lasts” was “his majesty, the man in the gutter.”
10
The stakes of such collecting were high. Oral folklore was both crucial to cultural anthropology’s legitimacy and a valuable tradition on its own terms, especially if those terms could be shook free of external pressures. Hurston feared that “the greatest cultural wealth of the continent was disappearing without the world ever realizing that it had ever been.”
11
“It is fortunate that it is being collected now,” she wrote Franz Boas; “the negro is [having his]…Negroness…rubbed off by close contact with white culture.”
12
Years later, Hurston reflected on the cultural meaning of black folklore:
In folklore, as in everything else that people create, the world is a great, big, old serving-platter, and all the local places are like eating-plates. Whatever is on the plate must come out of the platter, but each plate has a flavor of its own because the people take the universal stuff and season it to suit themselves on the plate. And this local flavor is what is known as originality…. One fact stands out as one examines the Negro folk-tales which have come to Florida from various sources. There is no such thing as a Negro tale which lacks point. Each tale brims over with humor. The Negro is determined to laugh even if he has to laugh at his own expense. By the same token, he spares nobody else. His world is dissolved in laughter. His “bossman,” his woman, his preacher, his jailer, his God, and himself, all must be baptized in the stream of laughter.
13
I thought about the tales I had heard as a child. How even the Bible was made over to suit our imagination. How the devil always outsmarted God and how that over-noble hero Jack or John—not
John Henry
, who occupies the same place in Negro folklore that Casey Jones does in white lore and if anything is more recent—outsmarted the devil. Brer Fox, Brer Deer, Brer ’Gator, Brer Dawg, Brer Rabbit, Ole Massa and his wife were walking the earth like natural men way back in the days when God himself was on the ground and men could talk with him. Way back there before God weighed up the dirt to make the mountains.
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Negro folklore is not a thing of the past. It is still in the making. Its great variety shows the adaptability of the black man: nothing is too old or too new, domestic or foreign, high or low for his use. God and the devil are paired, and are treated no more reverently than Rockefeller and Ford. Both of these men are prominent in folk-lore,
Ford being particularly strong, and they talk and act like good-natured stevedores or mill-hands. Ole Massa is sometimes a smart man and often a fool. The automobile is ranked alongside of the oxcart. The angels and the apostles walk and talk like section hands. And through it all walks Jack, the greatest culture hero of the South; Jack beats them all—even the Devil, who is often smarter than God.
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Hurston sought the most out-of-the-way locations for collecting. “Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds,” she wrote. “The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people being usually under-privileged are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by.”
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Evidently, she cut an unusual figure: a single black woman, driving her own car, toting a gun, sometimes passing for a bootlegger, offering prize money for the best stories and “lies.”
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It’s easy to romanticize Hurston with Model T and pistol, searching out his shy “majesty” and “woofing” in “Jooks” along the way. But the truth is that she worked hard under harsh conditions: traveling in blistering heat, sleeping in her car when “colored” hotel rooms couldn’t be had, defending herself against jealous women, putting up with bedbugs, lack of sanitation, and poor food in some of the turpentine camps, sawmills, and phosphate mines she visited.
Hurston’s situation was unusual. She was from the Alabama and Florida regions where she traveled, but her New York education and Columbia University pedigree made her seem an outsider. She was committed to the systematic study of folklore as an academic enterprise, but before any American university had yet to create such a department or program. Hurston’s Harlem Renaissance art circles were steeped in notions of race “propaganda”—contesting white racism by showing black culture at its best (i.e., most middle-class). But the bawdy stories
Hurston collected from sawmills, small towns, dance halls, and turpentine camps were hardly what the “Talented Tenth” had in mind. Combined with a form of feminism that rattled some of her male colleagues, Hurston’s unwavering commitment to a relatively unfamiliar folklore aesthetic may help account for the sharply negative reviews she received from peers like Richard Wright, who accused her of pandering to white audiences, or Alain Locke, who eventually charged her with “over-simplification.”
18
Most unusual in Hurston’s situation was her funding. At the end of 1927, she signed a contract with a wealthy, white New York patron: Charlotte Osgood Mason, an eccentric, demanding woman who had supported Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Alain Locke, and others, but who also thought nothing of directing their creativity as a self-appointed empress of art. Encouraged by Locke, Mason promised to support Hurston’s folklore-collecting to the tune of $200 a month. For her part, Hurston saw Mason as someone who understood the importance of recording “the Negro farthest down” and she insisted that she and Mason shared a “psychic bond.”
19
But their arrangement proved profoundly constricting. In the view of Hurston’s biographer, Mason was both “soul mate” and “meddling patron.”
20
Whereas Boas’s cultural relativism sought to overturn the premises upon which “other” cultures were devalued, Mason was every bit the primitivist, convinced that African-Americans were emotionally and aesthetically superior to whites, but inferior in other ways. Louise Thompson, among others, viewed Mason’s largesse as a way of “indulging her fantasies of Negroes.”
21
The terms of the Hurston/Mason contract obliged Hurston to act as Mason’s “agent” by collecting,
for Mason
, “all information possible, both written and oral, concerning the music, poetry, folk-lore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art and kindred subjects relating to and existing among the North American Negroes.” Hurston’s charge was “to return and lay before [Mason] all of said information, data, transcripts of music, etc., which she shall have
obtained.”
22
Hurston was not even allowed “to make known to any other person, except one designated in writing by said first party any of said data or information.”
23
This meant that while Hurston had
her
idea of African-American folklore, she had to answer to two outside powers with different ideas, one of whom sought control over every word she wrote.
Indeed, while Mason reportedly kept her copy of the manuscript Hurston called
Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States
in her safe-deposit box, Hurston surreptitiously circulated other copies (possibly different ones) to Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, Helene Johnson, and Franz Boas.
24
Mason did eventually “press” publication of the stories, but only in her own edited version. “She says the dirty words must be toned down. Of course I knew that. But first I wanted to collect them as they are,” Hurston told Hughes.
25
At the same time as she was juggling Mason’s expurgations, Hurston was also trying to meet Boas’s exacting standards for precise transcription:
About the material I have been collecting. It is decided that the stories shall be one volume…. I have tried to be as exact as possible. Keep to the exact dialect as closely as I could, having the story teller to tell it to me word for word as I write it. This after it has been told to me off hand until I know it myself. But the writing down from the lips is to insure the correct dialect and wording so that I shall not let myself creep in unconsciously…. Now in the stories, I have omitted all Pat and Mike stories. It is obvious that these are not negroid, but very casual borrowings. The same goes for the Jewish and Italian stories.
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Boas encouraged scientific, uncensored publication, yet, ironically, he also wanted Hurston to contextualize the stories and provide a sense of “the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro,” as he put it in his preface to
Mules and Men
, where he praised Hurston for providing the reader with “the charm of a loveable personality.”
Apparently, what
Hurston
wanted was a volume of folklore that would stand on its own, without interference, interpretation, anthropological voice-over, or her own personal “charm.” “I am leaving the story material almost untouched. I have only tampered with it where the storyteller was not clear. I know it is going to read different, but that is the glory of the thing, don’t you think?” she wrote Langston Hughes.
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We cannot know exactly what stopped publication of the stories in 1929 when Mason first “pressed” ahead. Maybe she intervened. Maybe Boas did. Maybe publishers were the problem. According to Hemenway, Hurston’s publishers “demanded something more than the mere transcription of collected tales.”
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Whatever the reason, the volume Hurston hoped for was scrapped. This is its first publication.
This manuscript turned up at the Smithsonian in the papers of William Duncan Strong, an American anthropologist known to have been a friend of Franz Boas’s. There are a number of ways that Hurston and Strong might have crossed paths. In 1925 and 1926, while Hurston was studying with Boas, Strong worked as a research assistant in the Anthropology Department at Columbia. He left in 1926 to finish a Ph.D. at the University of California and then went to Chicago, Labrador, and the University of Nebraska. In the mid-1930s, he worked in Honduras, a country in which Hurston developed strong interests in the mid-1940s. In the late 1930s, Strong returned to Columbia University where he taught until 1962. Strong also served as the president of the American Ethnological Society, of which Hurston was a proud member. There is no mention of Strong in Hurston’s known correspondence and he is unfamiliar to Hurston’s biographer. Professor Akua Duku Anokye, who helped authenticate the manuscript in 1991, speculates that
Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States
may have found its way into Strong’s papers by accident. Suppose that Boas “kept it with other Department files which were later stored in the basement for lack of space. Later still the Strong papers were stored there
and all the stored papers transferred to the National Anthropological Archives in Washington.”
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