‘The rhythm of segments’: Zora Neale Hurston's Collage Aesthetic in Mules and Men

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Notes

¹Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 51.

²Nadell, Enter the New Negroes; Anne Elizabeth Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005; Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007.

³Early critics defined the Harlem Renaissance as a period of optimism that came to a halt with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, but it is now commonplace to take the period of 1918 to 1937 to encompass the movement.

⁴Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar [1983], trans. from the French by Joachim Neugroschel and Pheobe Hoss, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

⁵George B. Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 62.

⁶Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture, New York: Macmillan, 1940, p. 217.

⁷Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, Cork: Cork University Press, 1996, p. 240.

⁸Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1934, pp. 34, 33.

⁹Edward Sapir, ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ [1919], in David G. Mandelbaum (ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963, pp. 308–31 (p. 326).

¹⁰Robert H. Lowie, Primitive Society [1921], London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949, p. 428.

¹¹Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’ [1934], in Cheryl A. Wall (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, New York: Library of America, 1995, pp. 830–46 (p. 836).

¹²Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’ [1934], in Cheryl A. Wall (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, New York: Library of America, 1995, p. 831.

¹⁴Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’ [1934], in Cheryl A. Wall (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, New York: Library of America, p. 835.

¹³Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’ [1934], in Cheryl A. Wall (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, New York: Library of America, 1995

¹⁵Lowie, Primitive Society, p. 428.

¹⁶See David T. Humphries, ‘Returning South: Reading Culture in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men’, Southern Literary Journal 41:2, 2009, pp. 69–86, for a fascinating discussion of the ways in which the car acts as a catalyst ‘for Zora's collaborative interactions with her subjects and her constantly evolving perspective’ (p. 74).

¹⁷Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men [1935], New York: Harper Perennial, 1990, p. 164. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in parentheses in the main body of the article.

¹⁸See Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 119.

¹⁹Carla Kaplan (ed.), Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, New York: Doubleday, 2002, p. 308.

²⁰See, for example, Hurston's description of the Frizzly Rooster's exceptional ability to ‘“read” anybody at sight’ (pp. 213–14) and the story of a family who resort to conjure to exact their revenge upon a white murderer because ‘[t]hey knew better than to expect any justice’ (p. 234).

²¹Alice Gambrell, Women Intellectuals, Modernism and Difference: Transatlantic Culture, 1919–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 14.

²²Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Hoodoo in America’, Journal of American Folk-Lore 44: 174 , 1931, pp. 317–417 (p. 318).

²³See, for instance, Hurston's confessional account of the terrifying Black Cat Bone ritual. When she attempts to put her feelings into words, she finds that her feelings lie beyond the reach of language: ‘I don't know. I don't know’ (p. 221).

²⁴Nadell, Enter the New Negroes, p. 104.

²⁵See Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

²⁶M. Genevieve West, Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005, p. 77.

²⁷In an adroit challenge to the temporal logic of primitivism, which consigned so-called primitive cultures to the past, Hurston consistently aligns hoodoo with the everyday practices of modern life, such as higher education and medicine. Take, for example, her description of the initiation rite that Covarrubias represents in his illustration: ‘The crown without the preparation means no more than a college diploma without the four years’ work’ (p. 198).

²⁸Nadell, Enter the New Negroes, p. 110.

²⁹Miguel Covarrubias, ‘A History of the Screen’, Vanity Fair, November 1929, p. 63.

³⁰There are several notable exceptions to this trend, including Leigh Anne Duck, Michael A. Elliott, Martha Nadell and Marc Manganaro.

³¹Lori Jirousek, ‘“That Commonality of Feeling”: Hurston, Hybridity, and Ethnography’, African American Review 38:3, 2004, pp. 417–27 (p. 426).

³²Sandra Dolby-Stahl, ‘Literary Objective: Hurston's Use of Personal Narrative in Mules and Men’, in Gloria Cronin (ed.), Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998, pp. 43–52.

³³Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980, p. 163.

³⁴Deborah Gordon, ‘The Politics of Ethnographic Authority: Race and Writing in the Ethnography of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston’, in Marc Manganaro (ed.), Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 146–62 (p. 161).

³⁵Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, London: Virago, 2004, p. 221.

³⁶Gordon, ‘Politics of Ethnographic Authority’, p. 160.

³⁷Benedict, Patterns of Culture, p. 2.

³⁸Mason's controlling influence upon Hurston's creative output is well known. In order to qualify for a monthly payment, Hurston had to sign a contract that gave Mason ownership of any material she collected. Since the contract stipulated a ban on publication without Mason's approval, it effectively delayed dissemination of Hurston's first ethnography until the 1930s. See Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 117–31.

³⁹A letter Hurston wrote to Mason on 4 April 1932 suggests that Locke was not always a perceptive reader of her work. In an effort to dispel the impression that she had ‘lost [her] grip on things’, Hurston expresses her frustration at Locke's misinterpretation of her formal choices in the ethnography. See Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 249–50.

⁴⁰A letter Hurston wrote to Mason on 4 April 1932 suggests that Locke was not always a perceptive reader of her work. In an effort to dispel the impression that she had ‘lost [her] grip on things’, Hurston expresses her frustration at Locke's misinterpretation of her formal choices in the ethnography. See Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 120, 142.

⁴¹A letter Hurston wrote to Mason on 4 April 1932 suggests that Locke was not always a perceptive reader of her work. In an effort to dispel the impression that she had ‘lost [her] grip on things’, Hurston expresses her frustration at Locke's misinterpretation of her formal choices in the ethnography. See Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 44. Later in the decade, Locke accused Hurston of political escapism at a time when the critical tide was turning in favour of social realism. In 1936, he judged Mules and Men ‘too Arcadian’, and Hurston never forgave him for his assertion that Their Eyes Were Watching God was marred by ‘oversimplification’. See Werner Sollors, ‘Anthropological and Sociological Tendencies in American Literature of the 1930s and 1940s: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and American Culture’, in Steve Ickringill (ed.), Looking Inward, Looking Outward: From the 1930s through the 1940s, Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990, pp. 22–75 (p. 61) and Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, p. 26.

⁴²Ira Jacknis, ‘The Ethnographic Object and the Object of Ethnology in the Early Career of Franz Boas’, in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, pp. 185–214 (pp. 199–200).

⁴³Michael A. Elliott, The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 10.

⁴⁴Marc Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 37.

⁴⁵Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 12.

⁴⁶Elliott, Culture Concept, p. 177.

⁴⁷Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and US Nationalism, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006, p. 127.

⁴⁸Boas, Race, Language and Culture, p. 217.

⁴⁹Elliott, Culture Concept, p. 2.

⁵⁰David Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 165.

⁵¹Nadell, Enter the New Negroes, p. 107.

⁵²Sommer, Proceed with Caution, p. 17.

⁵³See, for example, Hurston's story about the creation of butterflies: ‘[God] went 'round clippin’ li'l pieces offa everything – de sky, de trees, de flowers, de earth, de varmints and every one of dem li'l clippin's flew off’ (p. 120).

⁵⁴One of Hurston's unnamed informants explains what happens at a toe-party: ‘Well, they hides all de girls behind a curtain and you stick out yo’ toe. Some places you take off yo’ shoes and some places you keep 'em on, but most all de time you keep 'em on. When all de toes is in a line, sticking out from behind de sheet they let de men folks in and they looks over all de toes and buys de ones they want for a dime. Then they got to treat de lady dat owns dat toe to everything she want. Sometime they play it so's you keep de same partner for de whole thing and sometime they fix it so they put de girls back every hour or so and sell de toes agin’ (pp. 14–15).

⁵⁵Karen Jacobs, The Eye's Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 111.

⁵⁶Humphries, ‘Returning South’, pp. 82–3.

⁵⁷See, for example, Luke Turner's insistence that ‘hoodoo is private … The white people come look on, and they think they see all, when they only see a dance’ (p. 193).

⁵⁸Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals’ [1934], in Wall, Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 869–74 (p. 873).

⁵⁹Benedict, Patterns of Culture, p. 8.