“The Last of the Sweet Home Men”

In some respects, Beloved is a novel that’s ambivalent about freedom: the plantation Sethe escaped from is known as “Sweet Home,” and although Paul D remarks succinctly that “it wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home” (16), it does serve a quasi-nostalgic role in the novel, as its name suggests. As Sethe says, “But it’s where we were. . . . All together. Comes back whether you want it to or not” (16). Its bucolic setting strikes a sharp contrast with the grey, lonely house she now occupies on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Sweet Home is a painfully, tragically, ironically beautiful location, and this beauty makes the “rememory” of it a complicated experience for Sethe, whose life in “freedom” at 124 Bluestone Road, after the first ecstatic twenty-eight days, has been dull, isolated, lonely, and haunted. “Although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. . . . [S]he could not forgive her memory for that” (7). In this novel, memory is an involuntary, almost external force that Sethe must endure. And the fact is, the place she calls “hell,” where her milk was stolen and her back disfigured, which she risked everything to escape from, also represents the last time she was part of an intact family, a small and intimate community. She hasn’t seen her husband since she left, and she’s lost three of her children suddenly and without warning—across the river in “free” Ohio.

Paul D is equally ambivalent about Sweet Home—both a tortured, traumatic memory and something he looks back to with fondness. He remembers a particular tree, under which he and Sixo and Halle and the other Pauls would gather for lunch, and he’s named the tree “Brother.” It’s this tree that he tries to steal one final parting glimpse of before he’s led away in chains, sold to a guy named Brandywine by Schoolteacher after the failed escape attempt (125). Paul D has endured his own novel-worthy odyssey of suffering and wandering in the eighteen years since he and Sethe last saw each other, and in contrast to the chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, sitting in Brother’s shade eating Sixo’s “night-cooked potatoes” (25) looks pretty good.

It’s not just the physical beauty of the place that makes Sweet Home such an ambivalent memory for Sethe and Paul D. They are fully aware that their experience of slavery was not typical. Paul D and the others were known as “Sweet Home Men”: “He grew up thinking that, of all the Blacks in Kentucky, only the five of them were men” (147). Garner, the owner of the plantation and the men and women who worked on it, prided himself on his “progressive” slaveholding ways. He would boast, in language that is blissfully unaware of its own internal contradictions, that “my [N-words] is men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men every one” (12).

Garner deploying the slavemaster’s favorite dehumanizing epithet while proudly celebrating his slaves’ “manhood” creates dizzying cognitive dissonance, but this contradiction lies at the heart of Sethe and Paul D’s conflicted memories of their past. Garner allows his slaves a remarkable degree of freedom on the plantation, and he seems to view this as an enlightened form of government—he can “trust” his slaves around his wife, for example, because he hasn’t treated them like animals. He allows Halle to undertake the breathtakingly loving project of buying his mother’s freedom after “five years of Sundays,” by renting himself out as a laborer on a neighboring farm. He doesn't “stud” his male slaves, with his own female slaves or those on neighboring plantations. Sethe is allowed to choose her husband from among the five Sweet Home Men, and Halle’s dedication to buying his mother’s freedom has something to do with why she chose him: “A twenty-year-old man so in love with his mother he gave up five years of Sabbaths just to see her sit down for a change was a serious recommendation” (13). Sethe and Halle are allowed to get “married”—in an unofficial capacity, of course, with no legal standing, no formal ceremony, no fancy wedding dress. Baby Suggs points out how lucky Sethe is that all of her children are fathered by the same man; such a quasi-familial arrangement was not unheard of in the slavery era, but it was rare. Sethe has no personal experience with rape or corporal punishment at Sweet Home until Schoolmaster arrives and “his boys” steal her milk.

Paul D and Halle have been conditioned to see themselves as “men,” with a rare degree of self-sufficiency and independence. The men on Garner’s plantation were “encouraged to correct . . . even defy him. To invent ways of doing things; to see what was needed and attack it without permission. To buy a mother, choose a horse or wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to” (147). Literacy in particular was heavily policed among slave populations; a slave who could read would have a much wider range of escape options. But the training in the use of guns is maybe the most remarkable of all—an armed insurrection would have been possible, but we get the impression that Garner made life bearable enough that no one thought to rebel.

So why does Morrison set her novel in such a relatively progressive slavery context? Why not depict the most horrific, tortuous, repressive plantation imaginable?

Slavery operated by systematically degrading the slaves’ manhood and womanhood, conditioning them to accept their lot in life as inevitable. Literacy and access to arms, the ability to choose one’s mate, to raise a family are all constitutive of basic personhood or humanity, and this is what slavery categorically denied. But Morrison’s post-Emancipation former slaves were all conditioned to think of themselves as men and women, to see their participation in the plantation economy as something almost voluntary, in which they were personally invested.

We see how insidious the Garners’ “progressivism” is once Mr. Garner dies, and Mrs. Garner brings in schoolteacher and “his boys” to maintain order on the plantation. Schoolteacher is a “breaker”—his expertise lies in the ability to undo the “damage” done by Garner’s liberal policies, to “break” these slaves’ illusions of their own humanity. The central traumatic vignette of the Sweet Home portion of the novel—Sethe on the floor of the barn, being sexually assaulted by schoolteacher’s mossy-teethed “boys” while he looks on and takes notes in his book with ink Sethe made herself, with Halle stuck in the loft and forced to witness her rape, powerless to do anything to stop it, and later Paul D with the bit in his mouth seeing Halle by the butter churn and feeling mocked by Mister the rooster—entails the three principal characters all learning how limited Garner’s “manhood” actually is. Paul D thinks to himself, over a distance of years, “Was that it? Is that where manhood lay? In the naming done by a whiteman who was supposed to know?” (147). In other words, were they “men” at Sweet Home only because of Garner’s say-so? Or is manhood something more fundamental, an inalienable right? Paul remains pretty positive in his assessment of their relations with Garner: “In their relationship with Garner was true metal: they were believed and trusted, but most of all they were listened to” (147).

But when Paul stands there with the bit in his mouth, about to be sold to a man named Brandywine whom he will soon after try to kill (that manhood and self-assertion flaring up again; he hasn’t been completely “broken”), he learns the profound limitations of what Garner has “granted” them. “[T]hey were only Sweet Home men at Sweet Home. One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race” (147-48). Garner’s “enlightened” policies are only in effect as long as Garner is alive. Mrs. Garner will sell one of them if she has to, although she feels badly about it. And once schoolteacher arrives on the scene, at her invitation, Sweet Home becomes an entirely different place.

In these pivotal moments—Halle in the loft, Paul D with the bit in his mouth—they both discover that their manhood only exists in so far as it is recognized by the man in power. Even to Garner, they are paradoxically both “men” and “[N-words].” For schoolteacher, only the latter category applies. For Paul, it’s not just the painful indignity of the bit in his mouth, which immobilizes him and reduces him to the state of a speechless animal, who can’t even speak to Halle, crouching at the butter churn nearby—illustrating powerfully that he’s been chattel all along. It’s the roosters: “Walking past the roosters looking at them look at me” (85). Especially the rooster with the painfully ironic name “Mister,” who seems to smile at Paul D, to flaunt his own comparative freedom over this man with the bit in his mouth: “Mister, he looked so . . . free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. . . . Mister was allowed to stay and be what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to stay and be what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead” (86).

We can only surmise that a similar realization—of the profound limits of his freedom, his ability to be a man—is what “breaks” Halle after witnessing his wife treated like a barnyard animal by the “boys.” By “stealing” her milk—the milk intended for her children, now on their way to Ohio—schoolteacher and the boys reduce Sethe to the condition of livestock (we can read Halle’s gravitation toward the butter as an indirect comment on this). They steal her womanhood, just as they steal Paul D’s manhood. For Halle, husband and father, there is no way to act like a husband and father should act in this situation. He can’t stop what’s happening before his eyes, without compromising their escape plan and getting himself and Sethe whipped, sold, separated permanently. He’s confronting the limits of his manhood under slavery, and it breaks him. “Breaking,” once again, is schoolteacher’s stock in trade; he makes it plain to the Sweet Home Men that they are not men anymore.

They feel this as a loss precisely because Garner has conditioned them to think of themselves otherwise. But in fact, their personhood only existed at his whim. This is slavery at its essence.

Notebook Prompt: "Rememory"

When Denver sees Sethe kneeling and praying, with the white dress kneeling next to her, she asks her mother what she was "praying for." When Sethe replies that she "don't pray anymore" but "just talk[s]," Denver asks what she was talking about. Sethe explains, "I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory" (43). After she explains, Denver concludes, "that must mean that nothing ever dies." Sethe agrees: "Nothing ever does" (44).

Reread this passage (pages 43-44), where Sethe explains her concept of "rememory" to Denver. What does this passage have to do with the novel's portrayal of the past and present, memory, haunting, and history? How is this idea of "rememory" reflected in Morrison's narrative style and the novel's structure?

Take 7 minutes to contemplate the relevance of this passage in your Notebook.

Janie's Blues

Jazz music is a useful point of reference for understanding what Ralph Ellison is doing in Invisible Man. Ellison himself was an avid listener of jazz, he modeled his own urbane, debonair persona after Duke Ellington and other jazz musicians, and he described his fictional method of composition as “improvisations on a theme”—many of these improvisations being riffs on Richard Wright’s earlier composition, much as jazz artists cite, build upon, and alter earlier works in the tradition. He was inspired, as an artist, by the way jazz musicians appropriated European musical forms and instruments and made something new out of them, and he saw his own work as doing the same with white writers like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. One of the opening scenes in the novel depicts the narrator enjoying a his favorite dessert (sloe gin poured over vanilla ice cream—a merging of opposites in itself) while listening to Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” fantasizing about being able to play it on five turntables simultaneously, and falling into a visionary reverie (partly inspired by the music, partly by the reefer he accidentally ingests) that initiates some of the novel’s key themes of ambivalence and identity.

If jazz is a useful point of departure for Invisible Man, then blues might be the appropriate musical analog to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie’s narrative engages a number of tropes that are familiar from blues lyrics—love and loss, marital infidelity, jealousy, violence and knife-play, gambling, drinking, desire—and the novel’s complex tone of joy and humor balanced against great tragedy and pain evokes the central aesthetic tension of the blues genre. There’s even a massive flood, which calls to mind a whole host of blues songs dealing with bursting levees and rising lakes overwhelming rural communities (see Bessie Smith’s classic “Back Water Blues” for one example). The most obvious “blues” elements in the novel are its setting (the “muck,” or the Everglades, is reminiscent of the Mississippi Delta in a lot of ways) and its language (blues is among the first forms of original folk music in American cultural history, and maybe the first extended use of dialect as the voice of poetry). Janie as narrator is positioned in a way that is similar to the classic blues dynamic: she’s just returned from a great and trying event, and she’s survived to tell the tale. She’s the quintessential “good woman feeling bad.” She tells her story with poignancy and pain, but also with resiliency and pride and humor. Life has beaten her down when we first meet her, walking back into town in her muddy overalls, but she is walking tall and proud despite her pain. Ralph Ellison describes the appeal of blues music quite evocatively, as artists “fingering the jagged edge” of the pain life has dealt them, but blues music is odd and remarkable because of its ultimately buoyant and life-affirming effects on the listener—the topics the lyrics engage are tragic, but the music works against that tragedy to transcend the pain and make something beautiful and enduring from it. Likewise, as Janie completes her tale of love and loss, her audience, Pheoby, attests to the fact that it has changed her life: “Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ tuh you, Janie. Ah ain’t satisfied wid mahself no mo’. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishin’ wid him after this” (192). She is ennobled by bearing witness to Janie’s tale.

Ellison’s protagonist/narrator is in many ways a prototype of a jazz musician: an isolated genius, working hard to forge an individual voice out of the influences and social-cultural detritus of his experience. The jazz audience appreciates the spontaneous, individual expressions of creativity, just as the narrator riffs on his experience at his typewriter, transforming it into the often surreal and individuated vision we contend with in the novel.

Jazz is an urban music—its most significant innovations have taken place in nightclubs and recording studios. Blues, on the other hand, is a rural, colloquial music that only later made the migration into urban settings and popular culture. And even while jazz was in the process of “crossing over” into mainstream respectability in the 1930s and 1940s, country blues was still seen with ambivalence, as a cruder, less sophisticated folk genre. Duke Ellington would lead his big-band orchestra in a tuxedo at the Cotton Club in Harlem, while Leadbelly was recording his gritty songs in prison, accompanied only by himself on guitar. Doesn’t this same dichotomy call to mind a central distinction between Ellison and Hurston’s aesthetics? Ellison deliberately casts his novel in the “high-art” literary domain, and his settings are contemporary, modern, and urban, while Hurston leaves Harlem and goes back into the South for her subject matter, depicting an often gritty, violent community that for many evokes the past rather than the present (a past that many in the Harlem Renaissance wanted to distance themselves from).

While Ellison doesn’t directly write about any jazz musicians in his novel (except for Armstrong’s vinyl cameo), one of Hurston’s main characters, Tea Cake, is himself a blues musician (of the general type that Hurston herself helped Alan Lomax record throughout the South). One of our earliest impressions is of him sitting at the piano in Janie’s house (which, as far as we can tell, Jody had only for decoration), “playing blues and singing, and throwing grins over his shoulder” (103). After his controversial excursion with Janie’s two hundred dollars, Tea Cake heralds his return by singing outside the window. And it’s clear by the description that he’s singing the blues: “After a while there was somebody playing a guitar outside her door. . . . It sounded lovely too. But it was sad to hear it feeling blue like Janie was. Then whoever it was started to sing ‘Ring de bells of mercy. Call de sinner man home.’ Her heart all but smothered her” (120). Tea Cake’s extraordinarily smooth apology begins with a little confessional singing, to smooth the way for his charm. In his description of the wild party he threw with her money, Tea Cake explains how he came to buy the guitar: “Everybody began to holler at the music because the man couldn’t play but three pieces. So Tea Cake took the guitar and played himself. He was glad of the chance because he hadn’t had his hand on a box since he put his in the pawn shop to get some money to hire a car for Janie soon after he met her. He missed his music. He bought the guitar on the spot and paid fifteen dollars cash” (123).

When Janie and Tea Cake arrive on “the muck,” their home becomes the social center of the community, and Tea Cake’s music has a lot to do with it: “The way he would sit in the doorway and play his guitar made people stop and listen and maybe disappoint the jook for the night” (132). The “jook" is a roadside bar where blues music is performed, and where people dance and drink and fight and gamble and generally have a good time. (The term “juke box” derives from the idea that the recorded music on demand would re-create the live experience of a “juke joint” like Hurston describes.) In the context of the general critique of Hurston as perpetuating a “minstrel” dynamic in her novel (see Wright et al., as summarized in the documentary), her description of the jukes on the muck might be an instructive example to consider. At the same time that minstrel shows were experiencing their revival throughout the North and South—where white and black musicians and dancers were performing a popularized hybrid of blues music in blackface to mostly white audiences—the juke joint was a context where black musicians performed for exclusively black audiences. Bessie Smith—one of the most badass figures in American musical history, who was fiercely uncompromising when it came to the terms of her performances (she reputedly once faced down a contingent from the local Ku Klux Klan to ensure that her show would go on)—didn’t play minstrel shows; she played roadside juke joints of the sort Hurston describes so evocatively: “All night . . . the jooks clanged and clamored. Pianos living three lifetimes in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour” (131).

The allegedly “minstrelesque” dynamics we see in Eatonville also entail black performers and black audiences,  the critique is that white readers are the real audience, and Hurston’s characters are “shucking and jiving” for them. Maybe because white readers “consume” the kind of skits she puts her characters through (Matt Bonner’s mule, Sam and Lige on nature vs. nurture, the “mock-courtship” of the pretty girl in the street), there is this inescapable “black-performing-for-white” dimension to the fiction—as Henry Louis Gates points out in the documentary on Hurston, black fiction, especially in Hurston's time, was written with an idealized white readership in mind. But since we can’t actually listen to Tea Cake’s music, we aren’t his audience in quite the same way: we observe black folk music is being performed in an “authentic” context that stands in stark contrast to the minstrel dynamic that might be troublesome elsewhere in the novel.

Love or hate Tea Cake, he’s no minstrel performer. We see his music in action, a living and breathing part of the life of the culture Hurston represents.

The Poetry of Hurston’s Dialogue

Readers of Their Eyes Were Watching God notice Hurston’s “double-voiced” narrative style right away—the third-person narrator frames the story of Janie returning to Eatonville, alone, in her muddy overalls, which then shifts to Janie telling her story to her friend Pheoby Watson that evening, and then Janie’s spoken narrative to Pheoby is taken over by Hurston’s narrator (which represents more or less what Janie tells Pheoby—although the formal narrative includes all kinds of details she wouldn’t need to tell Pheoby, since Pheoby would have witnessed them herself or known about them, and reflects events Janie wasn't present for, and points of view other than hers). What we’re reading, chapter by chapter, is taken to be a novelistic expansion of the story Janie tells to her friend.

Hurston’s narrative voice is strikingly lyrical and poetic—she does a lot more than merely convey information. The novel opens with a proverbial voice that sets out a putative distinction between the ways men and women view the world: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time” (1). “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget,” the narrator continues. “The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (1). There’s a ceremonial formality to the novel’s opening—forget about whether or not these statements about how men and women view reality in entirely different and maybe incompatible ways is true. It sounds incontrovertible, coming from this narrator, largely because of the aphoristic, metaphorical form that these statements take. They sound like proverbial wisdom, as we imagine the quintessential “man” gazing forever at the ships on the horizon. The narrator’s language is figurative and metaphorical (“The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky” [1]; “[T]hey chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish” [2]; “She left the porch pelting her back with unanswered questions” [4]). These examples are all drawn from the first chapter, but this lyrical and metaphor-laden language continues throughout the novel—it’s one of the most distinctive aspect of Hurston’s fictional style, and the thing many of her admirers most enjoy about her work. Her narrator seems to transform ordinary life—even modest, hardscrabble, impoverished life—into something magical and artistically rich. It might be easier and more efficient to merely state that the sun had set, and the twilight was fading; but poetry isn’t concerned with efficiency and simple information, and thus we get the memorable image of the sun leaving its footprints in the sky.

When the narrator quotes the fictional characters, though, the effect can be jarring, as we shift from the lofty, wise musicality of the third-person voice to the speech of the people: “‘What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t she find no dress to put on?—Where dat blue satin dress she left here in?—Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her?’” (2). Hurston’s rural Floridian African Americans speak in a manner that is anthropologically accurate—she grew up in this area, indeed in the very town of Eatonville, and she studied the folk cultures of the African American South extensively as an anthropologist. She renders her characters’ speech with phonetic spellings (“dat,” “dem,” “overhalls”) to try and capture their accent and pronunciation, and she also reflects the nonstandard English grammar that follows its own internally consistent rules as a dialect (“Where all dat money”?). It takes some getting used to, for many readers—we need to start seeing the first-person pronoun as “Ah” instead of “I.” It helps to read these passages aloud; I can hear her characters quite clearly when I read, even if I sound silly trying to convey what I hear when I read such passages aloud in class. I also recommend the excellent audiobook, with the late Ruby Dee narrating—she moves easily between the narrator's voice and the characters' voices, and if you're having trouble with the syntax and speech rhythms of the dialogue, her rendering will make it clear for you. (Thanks to Elias, Madeleine, and Sam K. for passing on this recommendation.)

Janie’s story is presented as a frame narrative—she’s telling Pheoby her story—and at first, Hurston allows her to narrate for herself: “Ah ain’t never seen mah papa,” she begins. “And Ah didn’t know ’im if Ah did. Mah mama neither. She was gone from round dere long before Ah wuz big enough tuh know” (9). But the narrator soon intervenes, speaking “for” Janie as she narrates: “It was a spring afternoon in West Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days” (10). Now, some readers are probably relieved that the entire novel will not be narrated in Janie’s oral dialect; the narrator’s style is more “literate” in the sense that it is written language meant to be read on the page. Hurston’s narrator often sounds like she’s writing, not speaking. Janie’s language is an oral narrative, meant to be listened to. And throughout the novel, there will be this discrepancy between the authorial narrator’s voice, telling Janie’s story on her behalf in a “poetic” prose style, with (mostly) standard English grammar and a comfortably familiar “literary” style, and the speech of the characters within that narrative, who speak in dialect throughout. (Janie, narrating in dialect, presumably renders others’ speech in the same voice as her narration.) 

What do we do with this perceived “distance” between the author and her characters? Is it the case that Hurston herself wants to assert some space between her identity as the author and the characters (and speech styles) she depicts? Does the narrator seem to be a part of this community, or to hover “above” it somewhere, speaking “for” them, like Max speaks for Bigger in court? Is Hurston representing these characters on their own terms, or is she “translating” them for her presumably northern, educated readership? And is something important lost in translation? Does the author condescend to the people she represents in her novel?

We’re touching on one of the enduring debates surrounding this novel (as we’ll see in the documentary Jump at the Sun), and it’s too big a question for me to even try to settle here on this modest blog. But whenever the topic of Hurston’s dialect comes up, I feel compelled to point out the remarkably poetic nature of folk speech as she depicts it. We might be tempted to ascribe all the novel’s lyricism to the authorial narrator, who writes so stirringly about the sun leaving footprints in the sky, and to describe the dialogue as “earthy” and “authentic,” or even “crude,” in contrast. But be careful not to overlook the wonderfully metaphorical speech of these characters. Hurston based her dialogue on careful recording and study of the ways black people actually spoke in the region she’s depicting, so there is a kind of quasi-scholarly “authenticity” to it, but like James Joyce depicting Irish English, Hurston depicts her everyday people as spontaneous poets—not writers of formal poetry, but makers of metaphor and innovative turns of phrase and figurative language in day-to-day situations. My reading is often halted not by confusion about syntax or phonetic spellings of familiar words but by the sheer strangeness and wonder of the way her characters speak. You have to pause and interpret, much as with a poem.

When Janie brushes off the gossips on the porch with the phrase, “If God don’t think no mo’ ’bout them than Ah do, they’s a lost ball in de high grass” (5), I have to stop and turn it around a couple of times in my mind. To hazard a paraphrase, she’s pretty much saying that she doesn’t think about these gossips and haters anyway, so she’s not going to worry about what they think of her. But by connecting her indifference to God’s, she neatly inflects it with a moral judgment, driven home by the familiar image of a “lost ball in de high grass.” The porch-talkers are out of sight and out of mind—to Janie and to God. And I can’t think of a more eloquent symbol for irrelevance than a lost ball that no one’s even searching for anymore. All of this is conveyed with a compact, humorous, and self-affirming one-liner that refutes all the jealousy and scorn without even dignifying it with a reply. It’s poetry. I wish I could talk this way off the top of my head sometimes. I want to remember the line and use it at the next opportunity.

Just as the authorial narrator takes a “proverbial” tone at the start of the novel, sometimes Hurston’s characters speak in phrases that could be proverbs—only I’ve never heard these particular proverbial phrases anywhere but in the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. Like when Janie is explaining why she has to tell her story in such personal detail for Pheoby to really get it—to “give [her] de understandin’ to go ’long wid it”: “Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain’t no different from a coon hide” (7). Doesn’t this sound like a phrase that could be a familiar old line, like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or something? But what a nifty way to get at the idea that the individual story needs all its individual details to really communicate its meaning—Janie’s story might bear certain superficial structural resemblances to other stories you’ve heard, just as a raccoon skin would resemble a mink’s, shorn of fur (or is it that the fur will feel the same to the touch, if you can't see the difference?). The story, the details, the value is in the “fur”—and we need to hear out the full story to realize we’ve got a mink, so to speak. The paraphrase sounds clunky in a way that the original doesn’t—Janie’s version is much more eloquent and memorable than mine, even if it requires a few moments of contemplation to “get” it. This is how poetry works: it gives us pause, we turn the phrase and image around in our minds, and then (sometimes) a lightbulb goes off. There’s a compactness and grace—and humor—to Janie’s proverbial phrase that resists paraphrase, just like the best poetry. It says more than it says on the surface.

One of the simplest examples in the first few pages of the novel comes when Janie tells Pheoby that it’s fine with her if Pheoby tells everyone else in town what happened to Janie, even if Janie herself doesn’t intend to “bother wid tellin’ ’em nothin’” (6). As the ideal, sympathetic audience for her narrative—as a friend hearing a friend’s story—Pheoby would be a reliable conduit for Janie’s own point of view: “You can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ’cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf” (6). At first glance, the image might be a little suggestive (are they kissing?). But clearly “tongue” here is a metonym for speech, for narration, and the idea that a sympathetic listener/reader can convey a story faithfully because of that sympathy is captured beautifully in the image of a “borrowed tongue.” Pheoby will speak for Janie, and Janie has full faith that her friend will represent her accurately and sympathetically—much as Hurston’s narrator speaks for her within this novel.

Examples can be found on just about every page of the novel—and not just in Janie’s speech, either. Hurston’s dialogue is infused throughout with such striking bits of poetry. Maybe some—or even most—of these are a product of Hurston’s anthropological work, as she recorded folk tales and speech styles throughout the American South. And maybe some are phrases she remembers people using when she was a girl in Eatonville. But as you sort through the controversy surrounding Hurston’s depiction of poor, rural, mostly illiterate African American folk culture in the post-Reconstruction South, keep in mind the fact that she renders them as spontaneous poets.

And definitely be on the lookout for the next opportunity to refer to someone as “sitting on their royal diasticutis.”

Notebook prompt: Hurston's narrative voice

NOTEBOOK (5 min.): How would you describe Hurston’s narrative voice / style in the first chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God? Who is telling this story, what seems to be their relation to the people and settings they narrate, and what do you make of the prose style or “voice” of this narrator?

Notebook prompt: "I speak for you"?

NOTEBOOK (5 min): The famous opening line of Invisible Man begins with the word “I” (3), and the novel ends with the word “you” (581). The text we have just read represents the narrator’s act of writing from his “hole,” his effort to make sense of his “above-ground” experience by crafting it into a narrative, “writing it all down.” What “arc” do you see reflected in these opening and closing lines? Have we arrived at somewhere new by the end of this long narrative? How do we get from a gesture of radical alienation and individualism (“I am an invisible man”) to a potentially “universal” claim (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you”)?

"He'll kill your depression, and your dispossession"

Some of the most surreal-seeming, hyperbolic, and symbolically laden details in Invisible Man turn out to be based in the historical reality of American popular culture. The "Dancing Sambo" dolls that Tod Clifton is found hawking on 43rd Street, which the narrator experiences as a personal and political "betrayal," with the mysterious mechanism that makes them dance and shimmy, seemingly on their own power? (The narrator is apparently unfamiliar with the technology of the marionette--one more example of him not seeing who's really pulling the strings!) Ellison isn't making this stuff up. There used to be not quite as many "Dancing Sambo" dolls on eBay as there were "Black Americana Banks," but they have now apparently banned sale of these items as well. They are still easily available on independent antiques web sites.

The packaging boasts that "It works by your magic," and it's pitched as a "magic trick"--so maybe we can forgive the narrator's failure to see the strings at first glance. Can you see what enrages the narrator about Clifton selling such an image, how it represents a "betrayal" of the Brotherhood's ideals? Clifton's dolls sound a bit cheaper--made of tissue paper and cardboard instead of wood--but the idea is the same. And once again, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia has some useful background information on the "Sambo" caricature and its origins in the children's book Little Black Sambo, within its overview of the "Picaninny" stereotype.