Concerning Zora Neale Hurston and Mules and Men

Since I have had the pleasure of teaching classes entirely devoted to the works of Zora Neale Hurston, I have a pretty good collection of her writings and writings about her.

My favorite in regard to the anthropological or ethnographic writings is The Library of America volume, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings--Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road and Selected Articles because it includes a pretty thorough selection of her nonfiction writings in a fairly compact and light weight package.  It also includes some helpful supporting materials by Professor Cheryl Wall, including a biblography, an introduction and a useful chronology.  This chronology includes much of the information concerning Hurston's life that she chose never to reveal, such as her marriages, her real birth place and her real birth date in 1891 in Notasulga, Macon County, Alabama, which she wrote about only in fictional terms in her first novel Jonah's Gourdvine (1934).

There have been a great many revelations concerning Hurston's life since her celebrated rediscovery by the womanist writer Alice Walker in her first collection of essays, In Search of Her Mother's Gardens in the late 70s, beginning with the revelation that she had died unknown and in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida in 1961.

In this class we will focus on the significance of her combination of anthropology and fiction in Mules and Men (1935) and other work in which she renders her many hours of folktale and folk music gathering in Florida into a seamless narrative centered around a single trip, which begins in Eatonville, Florida and ends in New Orleans, Louisiana.  The book includes musical scores, recipes, spells, sermons, and tales of a vast description, as well as descriptions of the series of characters who provide the information.  For the most part, they convey themselves in a form of an African American dialect completely unique to Hurston, significantly departing from years of the conventional use of dialect in American literature designed mostly to imply the innate inferiority of African American speech.  

The simultaneous unreality and reality of this series of narratives, including that of Hurston herself who writes in flawless standard english, is woven together in a manner unlike almost any literary narrative before or since.  So much so that we can only guess at the reality of many things in this compendium.  We now know that Hurston had written many of these stories down in a previous form in 1927 recently rediscovered and published as Let Every Tongue Confess edited and introduced by Carla Kaplan but it had not been published, perhaps in part because it had been too clinical and straightfoward for Lippincott's taste.  Also godmother Charlotte Mason, who helped to sponsor the trip, kept a tight rein on Hurston's appearances in print. In Every Tongue's Gotta Confess, many of the same or similar tales we find in Mules and Men had been set down in sections designated by type along with an inventory of the informants, their ages, educational levels and birth places.  For me, this early work in 1927 (found in someone's papers all these years later) functions as a key to much of Hurston's subsequent writings across genre, from her letters (also edited by Kaplan) to her plays (all deposited with the Library of Congress and available on line), her short stories, her essays, novels and folklore collections.  In 1927, she was struggling for transparency in her collecting whereas by 1935, she had completely given up on any kind of straightforward presentation.  Of course she was actually 44 years old by then and knew better. 

As such, Mules and Men (1935) is a consummate act of storytelling and as is the case when one witnesses most canonical literary storytelling sessions, those of us who care are left wondering about many things, including what is finally the ultimate difference between the real and the unreal.  As many critics have pointed out, 1935 was a difficult year for black folks in the South.  Perhaps there is not enough sign of that in Mules and Men.  Perhaps there is more sign than we thought.

My approach to it in the classroom has simply been to work towards identifying its composite elements and leave the conclusions to the student's own predilection because I see and hear more and more every time I turn to it.  There is a page I found this time on the web which seems interested in many of the very elements I have found so intriguing since my first introduction to Mules and Men by my teacher Mark Mirksy at CCNY in 1971.

It is located at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/Grand-Jean/Hurston/Chapters/siteintroduction.html

and it is composed of a series of essays focused on Mules and Men and its unique ability to shed light on Hurston's unusual approach to almost everything, in particular African American folklore and vernacular culture.  There is little doubt that the inscrutability of the construction and methodology of Mules and Men can shed a lot of light on how Hurston was able to make a way out of no way.  In particular her fondness for the "lies" of her native Eatonville and African American folk culture.  It may also be the case that her empathy for the "folk furthest down" contributed to her own eventual invisibility and lack of success. 

ZORA IS MY NAME (DVD 1990 Edition), a staged version of Hurston's work, is available through Amazon for $17.99 and some kind of free shipping I never seem to get.  The abridged audio-tape of MULES AND MEN (2 cassette sets) by Ruby Dee is also available via Amazon used or second hand for as little as a $1.  I recommend that everybody get these before they are gone!

Aaron Douglas Paintings

Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage, 1944.

Aspects of Negro Life: An Idyll of the Deep South, 1934, Oil on canvas, 57x138 inches, Art and Artifact Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

In this image there are people playing the fiddle and dancing.  Some are farming.

Aaron Douglas, dust jacket and cover from Arthur Huff Fauset's FOR FREEDOM: A BIOGRAPHICAL STORY OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO, 1927. Collection of Thomas Wirth.

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979)

Aaron Douglas, Building More Stately Mansions, 1944. Oil on canvas board, 20 x 16 inches.  This work sold for $600,000 at Swann Auction Galleries via their new auction focus on African American art.  

Citation: "The Swann African American Fine Art Auctions: Conception, Achievement and Response" by Shawnya L. Harris, The International Review of African American Art, the 1940s, Volume 22, Number 1, 30-35.

From Slavery Through Reconstruction

Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 57x138 inches. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

The figures are primarily silhouettes some with baskets of cotton, others with broken chains on their wrists, others in union uniforms. There is also somebody  playing a horn. The background and foreground are composed of circles of colors which function to unite the image and to account for the fact that the subject of the painting is represented as moving through time from slavery to freedom.  

Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist

 www.aarondouglas.ku.edu is a website featuring the brochure on the retrospective exhibition at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.   This exhibition has now travelled to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture located at the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue just across the street from Harlem Hospital.

Now that the Master's Seminar has seen the exhibition and I have too, I am glad we made the attempt although it was entirely last minute.  I had no idea that this exhibition was going on until my sister forwarded this brochure and the one for children to me.  It occurred to me immediately that this might be a very important exhibition, because Douglas was overdue for attention and also as a visual artist he would fit right into our segment on Harlem Renaissance Literature, in which we are reading Jean Toomer's experimental novel CANE (1923) and Zora Neale Hurston's collection of African American folklore, MULES AND MEN (1935).

The exhibition space at the Schomburg Library is newly built and forms an atrium over the main public research room, which is one floor down, where murals by Douglas have always been on display.  Large photocopies were made of Douglas's series of four murals ASPECTS OF NEGRO LIFE: 1) Negroes in an African Setting,  2) FROM SLAVERY THROUGH RECONSTRUCTION, 3) IDYLL OF THE DEEP SOUTH, 4) SONG OF THE TOWERS (1934), in order to allow the murals to travel with this exhibition which originates from the University of Kansas.  Douglas was born in Kansas. 

At the Schomburg, the actual paintings were hung inside the atrium, and on the other side of the wall was the color photocopy of the same painting.  If you compare them-- although you have to look back and forth since you can't see both at the same time--you will notice that the colors of the actual paintings are both darker and richer.  I had begun to notice years ago that these paintings, which I have been looking at off and on all my life when going to the Schomburg, are absolutely bewitchingly beautiful.  I was perhaps guilty of taking them for granted as a kid since as a resident of Harlem they had always been there.  Also, they had gotten very dirty through neglect and inattention.  Since then they have been cleaned up until they sparkle.  For all I know, restoration may have lightened them slightly. 

The Schomburg has a fabulous collection of original art by African American artists and it has always been freely displayed throughout the building.  It is unusual, especially in these days, to see so much really important art on the walls of a public building, especially a building in Harlem.   But the exhibition was not without safeguards.  It lacks that free and open atmosphere of the major museums downtown.  It seems to me also that there were an unusual number of guards, and each time I have been to see exhibitions in this new space, I have felt as though I am being gently encouraged by the guards not to enter that room.  I don't know whether it is because it is less trouble for them if nobody goes in there or whether it is because no one has taken the time to explain to them what this new feature of the Schomburg means and how they should conduct themselves in order to assure its success.  

A lot of people don't seem to know much about visual art these days, probably because they were never introduced to it as children-- and you really need to establish a comfort level with the arts, maybe especially visual art, as a child, no later than five or six because, as my mother likes to say, children are such wonderful artists.  But they have to have a chance to see art and to make art.  If not, I am not quite sure what happens to this innate ability.  

But art education is one of the things that has been cut from the offerings of public schools and perhaps it is viewed by many educators as an unnecessary extra.  This is not the case however with the Thurgood Marshall Academy, a chartered elementary school which is just up the street and around the corner from the Schomburg.  It is located where the Theresa Hotel use to be, and the children there benefit from having a principal who is both a fine person and a lover of visual art.  The teachers there are engaged in providing an extensive art curriculum for the children, and I would be willing to bet that they have already been enjoying the Douglas exhibition.   

For the most part public buildings have permanent installations or the art is placed high enough to make it impossible to touch it or remove it.  For instance, there are several such pieces at City College, around the entrance to the student cafeteria whereas there is a wonderful Houston Conwill work which is displayed on the wall at the entrance of the faculty cafeteria where students and the public are not encouraged to go.  

Most of the art one can see in Harlem is in the form of public murals and/or commissions, such as the fantastic mosaics featured on the platforms of every subway station in Harlem created by a range of African American artists.   

In addition to the exhibition and the research facilities at the Schomburg, another lovely feature is the gift shop, which has one of the most extensive collections of books on African American topics in the tri-state area I suspect.  You may not have noticed it before but Harlem is particularly short on bookstores.  There's Hue-man books on 125th Street and there's your school bookstore at CCNY.  There is also a meagre collection of books at the Studio Museum Gift Shop where the space is increasingly devoted to knicks knacks and jewelry of various kinds. There are a lot of outdoor book tables in Harlem, although the literary quality of what they offer has dropped sharply in recent years. Aside from these resources, there isn't much else.  Of course, libraries help, especially since books are getting more and more expensive.  

I think perhaps that Amazon may have completely thrown off the entire book market, which is in a state of confusion (I hope not collapse). 

The exhibition was stunning and I was surprised how well it segued into the material of the course because Aaron Douglas was so much the artist of the Harlem Renaissance, illustrating the works of Alain Locke, Langston Hughes and lots of others.  He also did quite a number of public murals at Fisk University where he taught for many years and in other places where he was asked.  

I have included on this page some samples of his work.

CANE by Jean Toomer, Renaissance Novel

***Link to Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist Exhibition Brochure*** and more information about the exhibition at the University of Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art website.

Aaron Douglas is particularly appropriate because he is the key painter and visual artist associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the topic of our next segment in which we are reading Jean Toomer's CANE, a groundbreaking and unprecedented Modernist novel. It was written in 1923 and I first read it in about 1970 when I was a student at CCNY, myself. I don't believe I read it in a class. I read it on my own and had no one to talk about it with since African American Literature was still a very new field in academia.

CANE was the first of a series of African American novels to come into vogue in the 70s along with a renewed interest in the Harlem Renaissance. CANE was for me then a wonderful book set in Georgia and Washington D.C., and exhibiting some of the features of the stream-of-consciousness technique I found so fascinating in James Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. CANE is made up of a series of short stories, poems and dramatic sequences. Jean Toomer, himself, was quite a character. After he wrote CANE, since he was very racially mixed, he decided from then on that he would no longer be black, making him a highly controversial figure in African American studies to this day.