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John Lowe
Black life and nature in the rural South of the twenties comes alive in Zora Neale Hurston's latest resurrection from the archive.

Zora Neale Hurston, unknown even to most African Americans thirty years ago, has entered the American literary firmament; her image gazes out from bookstore murals, and her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, has become one of the most-taught and best-loved novels in the African-American canon. Knowing a good thing when she sees one, Oprah Winfrey has grabbed an option to produce the movie. However, as scholars and her most dedicated readers know, Hurston was a shape-shifting, protean writer, who produced three other novels, many short stories and plays, and an impressive number of essays and reviews.
        Hurston was just as devoted to anthropological studies as she was to fiction and drama, and though she never finished her Ph.D. at Columbia, where she worked under the legendary father and mother of the discipline, Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, she collected African-American folklore throughout her career. She published two folklore collections, and now, after the dramatic and mysterious discovery of a third collection she left among the papers of an obscure scholar she probably didn't know, we have a third volume, entitled Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales From the Gulf States.
        The latter part of the new title was original to the text; the editor, Carla Kaplan, has added the prefatory expression, drawn from one of the tales. She has also provided a short introduction that relates the material to Hurston's career, and John Edgar Wideman has contributed a moving and appropriately poetic tribute in a foreword. The book is handsomely printed and, under a see-through slipcover, sports a gorgeous painting of black folk going to church by celebrated Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter, very much in keeping with the new title.
        This latest find at the Library of Congress can be added to the Hurston plays discovered there a few years ago, and to a previously unknown short story and a presumed-lost early play that were concurrently discovered in the pages of a sorority magazine. Every Tongue, however, must be accounted the most impressive archival trophy uncovered to date, for it provides us not just Hurston's voice, but the glorious utterances of her people.

The 'spyglass of anthropology'

eaders who only know Their Eyes may be surprised by the new book, which came out of its author's scholarly activities. These efforts seem to contradict the legend of Hurston as a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance during the twenties. Her studies at Morgan State and Howard had led her to New York, where she had snagged a scholarship to Barnard; there she soon became, in her words, their "sacred black cow."
She spent her days in classes and her nights in Harlem, where her down-home stories, performed with style and a wicked sense of wit, endeared her to

rising young talents such as Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Richard Bruce Nugent. She called their clique "the Niggerati" and joined them in literary competitions sponsored by racial uplift magazines such as The Crisis and Opportunity. These contests led to the publication of her second play, The First One (an African-American version of the myth of Noah's son Ham), and a fourteen-segment sketch, "The Eatonville Anthology," her first setting of folk-inspired tales from her Florida hometown.
        Eventually, Hurston and some of the younger writers grew impatient with the admonitions of the Renaissance's elder statesmen, such as Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois. The rebels published a short-lived (one issue) magazine, Fire!!! (1926), which contained some spicier, more experimental material than that found in Locke's monumental Harlem Renaissance anthology, The New Negro (1925). Hurston's short story "Spunk" had appeared in this latter collection, but an even better one, "Sweat," graced the bodacious Fire!!!, as did her first play, Color Struck, which braided together color prejudice within the race and the craze for the cakewalk.
        All these works, and others she published during this period, made use of the folklore she was beginning to appreciate with new relish, after acquiring what she called the "spyglass of anthropology." As she later put it, her culture had been fitting her too tight, like a chemise, so she hadn't really seen it.
        Boas knew that Hurston had the personality, drive, and ability to use her biological-insider status to succeed where white researchers had failed. He urged her to go back to Florida and collect folklore from those she called "the Negroes furthest down." In 1927 she set out, bankrolled by a wealthy white woman, Mrs. Osgood Mason, self-styled "godmother of the primitives," who also sponsored Hughes, Locke, and Hall Johnson, orchestrator of Marc Connelly's all-black musical, The Green Pastures.
        The trip didn't go well because Hurston was too forthright about her purposes, too much the academic and no longer a "homegirl." Back in New York, she hung her head as Boas insisted she try again. This time, driving a sporty Chevy coupe, dressed to fit the part of a bootlegger's woman on the run, she simply asked for a place to stay, got to know the "liars" (storytellers) in the community, and got things rolling more often than not by telling a tale herself. Zooming between small towns, turpentine camps, sawmills, and juke joints, Hurston succeeded in gathering a cornucopia of authentic folklore, enough to fill three volumes and more. Initially, she published much of it in a historic issue of the Journal of American Folklore, under the title "Hoodoo in America" (1931)--her piece constituted the entire issue. Afraid that this essay was going to take up dust on library shelves, she was impatient to find a broader audience.

Braiding folklore and fiction

he story of how Mules and Men came into being is intriguing. In 1933, Hurston published her best short story, "The Gilded Six-Bits," in Story, a notable "white" magazine. A tale of adultery and forgiveness, it offers dramatic evidence of how she could use folklore and humor to leaven a serious subject without catering to racial stereotype. Lippincott, the publishing firm, took note and asked if Hurston had a novel for them. She didn't but promptly created Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), a moving, thinly fictionalized account of her parents' troubled marriage. Some critics find that if anything, there is too much folklore in it, for she was increasingly raiding her research materials to breathe life into her fiction.
Publishing the novel was doubly valuable for Hurston, for its success meant that Lippincott agreed to bring out her long-planned revision of her folklore material in a new format. The difficult Mrs. Mason, who claimed to "own" everything Hurston had

collected, finally granted permission for a new and more expansive collection, which appeared under the title Mules and Men in 1935. Until recently, the book has been the unquestioned authoritative collection of African-American folklore. Daryl Dance's magisterial new anthology, From My People, will now wear that title, but it has many selections from Hurston and certainly profited from her earlier example.
Dance is a compiler, not the person who collected all the stories in the field, and she hardly needs to make special pleadings to find readers. Today, we don't need a reason to explore this material. Hurston's skeptical readers--most of them white--certainly did. Ever wily, Hurston knew that African-American folklore often worked by

indirection--"hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick," as she put it, borrowing an expression from her people. She contrived a way to conjure readers into the backwoods communities she so loved. What she did was controversial, however, for unlike the dry, scholarly collections that preceded Mules (including her own), she hung the tales she had collected on a central narrative starring her as an intrepid, courageous, and often hilarious participant observer.
        Mules and Men is replete with Hurston's hair-raising encounters with jealous, knife-wielding backwoods women, bootleggers, and a variety of would-be suitors. Along the way, she "friends" with Big Sweet, doyenne of Polk County sawmill camps, who uses both her legendary tongue and her fists to win arguments and vanquish enemies. Through her and other characters with names like Blue Baby, Sack Daddy, and Box Car, we witness a vibrant series of oral performances that Hurston manages to keep throbbing in her printed version. The text divides into "Folktales" and "Hoodoo." The first part ends with Hurston barely escaping a rival's knife at a Pine Mill jook. Part two finds her exploring the world of hoodoo in New Orleans, where she is initiated as a priestess after studying with Reverend Father Joe Watson, the "Frizzly Rooster," and his wife, Mary. These scenes similarly fascinate because of Hurston's dramatization of them through her own persona. Mules concludes, however, with what some might see as an admission of failure on her part, for the appendix includes a set of "Negro Songs With Music," replete with scores, and various lists of hoodoo formulas, paraphernalia, and prescriptions, perhaps signaling that mere words can never fully capture the performative nature of a vital folk culture.
        Hurston followed up Mules in 1938 with Tell My Horse, a compelling account of her research in Jamaica and Haiti, complete with a photo she snapped of a zombie. These journeys were also notable because she wrote Their Eyes while in Haiti, in an effort to "embalm" the love she had felt for a West Indian man she met in New York in 1931.
        These brief accounts indicate how tightly braided folklore and fiction were in Hurston's life and imagination. Mules and Men and Tell My Horse greatly benefit from the way she used her own life--perhaps fictionally at times--to structure and enliven her presentation of her fieldwork. Today we take for granted anthropological studies written from a participant observer's standpoint, but Hurston was among the first exponents of these methods, predating even Margaret Mead.

Vibrant vernacular

have described these two preceding anthologies by way of indicating both the merits and relative demerits of the new volume. Editor Kaplan has carefully presented the manuscript as she found it; clearly, Hurston never gave it the kind of editing the preceding collections received, and there is no personal story on which the tales are hung. Instead, we have fifteen sets of tales organized by the topics of God, Preacher, Devil, Witch and Hant, Heaven, John and Massa, Tall, Neatest Trick, Mistaken Identity, Fool, Woman, School, Miscellaneous, Animal, and Talking Animals. Even more than in the preceding volumes, however, Hurston faithfully annotates the stories with the names of the presenters. Many are the same figures we encounter in Mules; James Presley, the first tale-teller, appears prominently in both volumes.

Folklore and fiction were tightly braided in Hurston's life and imagination.

Indeed, in part two of the appendix, Hurston provides thumbnail bios for all her "performers," as well as a chronology of her interviews and locations.
        There are over five hundred stories in all, although some of them repeat tales with slight variations. Kaplan has wisely omitted several tales that directly replicate others, and she provides helpful footnotes when strange terms are employed. About a third of the selections also appear in Mules, and others were published in a book Hurston helped compile for the Federal Writers Project, The Florida Negro. Many, however, are published here for the first time, and they are truly a revelation.
        Readers will delight in the variety found here, for the tales explore virtually every area of black life and nature as they existed in the rural South of the twenties. In aggregate, they also constitute a kind of communal memory of slavery, Reconstruction, and black families and institutions. Slavery appears most prominently in the "Massa" and "John" tales, which often focus on the crafty slave John's ability to find a "way out of no way" when confronted with the brutality of white culture. Although the stories are warmed by a wicked and often deeply ironic humor, they never completely mask the horrific details that are part of the telling. During World War II, Hurston wrote an essay on High John, where she offered him up as a spiritual tonic for a beleaguered people, and that is the way he emerges here too. Boasting, taking risks, "spreading his junk" to anyone who will listen, John is emblematic of many of the heroes, and narrators of these various tales, who find power in "mother wit" and the method of the "man of words."
        Throughout the text, Hurston's speakers employ a vibrant vernacular, drenched in metaphor and dizzying folk poetry. Although she accomplishes this partly through dialect, it is to her immense credit that she never uses it stereotypically but rather as proof of dialect's uncanny creativity and energy. Still, presentist readers might blanche at the bludgeoned grammar, the "eye-comedy" spellings, and the "country" inflections that are so far from the polite intonations of what Du Bois called "the talented tenth."
        Perhaps because this collection lacks the supporting mechanisms of Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, Wideman's foreword instructs us to "imagine the situations in which these speech acts occur, the participants' multicolored voices and faces, the eloquence of nonverbal special effects employed to elaborate and transmit the text. Recall a front stoop, juke joint, funeral, wedding, barbershop, kitchen: the music, noise, communal energy and release." One wonders, too, if he is nervous about these tales being read stereotypically.
        Some years ago, Broadway producers were contemplating mounting a production of Mule Bone, a play Hurston wrote with Langston Hughes about her Eatonville community. The comedy features a romantic triangle, plus the antics of two rival churches, and includes God's plenty of salty expressions, children's games, and copious examples of rural oddities. It also uses the "N word" quite a bit, as was usual, even in African-American communities, during the twenties. A committee of black theater and literary people almost decided to veto the production and only agreed to it when alterations were made to the play.
        Despite wonderful performances, it didn't have a successful run; one wonders if this collection will meet a similar fate, for it closely mirrors defects found in Mule Bone. On the other hand, live performances are often viewed more critically than those on the printed page, and one hopes that contemporary readers--both Hurston lovers and folklore neophytes--will find much to admire in these pages, if they can avoid glib presentist readings.

Every Tongue's tales

side from the obvious implications of the group titles, what else does one find here? As in the oral literature of many people--particularly Native Americans--many of the stories account for acts of creation, the way things got to be the way they are. Many signify on the Bible itself, in a black appropriation of a white text.
A tale Hurston told repeatedly throughout her career, "The Keys to the Kingdom," reveals that man and woman were originally equal in strength. Man tells God he'll accept the heaviest work if woman can be made his inferior. "De woman didn't lak dat a-tall. So she went up tuh God and ast Him how come He give man all de power." When God refuses to reverse himself, she goes to the Devil, who tells her to ask God for the three keys by his mantel. "De devil tole her whut they was. One was the key to de bedroom and one was de key to de cradle and de other was de kitchen key...'jus' ... lock everything an' wait' ... she could have her way ... So de man come on back and done lak de woman tole him for de sake of peace in de bed. And thass howcome women got de power over mens today." Similarly, another tale relates how the race got to be black.

Hurston's speakers employ a vibrant vernacular, drenched in metaphor and dizzying folk poetry. Although she accomplishes this partly through dialect, it is to her immense credit that she never uses it stereotypically but rather as proof of dialect's uncanny creativity and energy.

Late as usual to Heaven on the day God gave out color, they start pushing. "God pushed them back and said 'Get back!'; they misunderstood and got black."
        "De Flying Negro" offers the traditional tale of a black man who goes to heaven and just can't behave once he gets his wings: "Watch me skim right 'cross de sea uh Glass an' round de throne an' right 'cross God's nose"; naturally he creates havoc, and "Gabull ... snatched off his wings ... 'you ain't gointuh git no mo' wings neither." His friends say "Unhunh! We tole you ... Everybody got wings but you." "Oh, I don't keer," he says, "but I sho wuz uh flyin' fool when I had 'em." As is often the case in folktales, this tricksterlike figure inspires admiration and amusement with his bravado, but the theme of the trickster tricked permits corrective humor that might help instruct youngsters.
        Over and again, humor is alternately employed to reveal a grisly truth. Lynching underlies many humorous tales, like this classic: "Twuz uh white lady walkin' cross de street. Uh colored man stood looking after her as she passed by. She looked nice tuh him, so he said: 'Long dere's life dere's hopes.' He didn't see a white man standing right behind him. So de white man said, 'Yes, an' long as dere's a limb, dere's ropes.' " Conversely, some of the tales emphasize the horror of interracial betrayal; "Moufy Emma" concerns a slave who tattles to the whites, causing other slaves to be beaten to death. The community does her in with a poisoned pomegranate and sings over her grave, "Same way you done Brother Jefiries / Same way come back to you. / Mouf is de cause of it all."
        As in Mules and Men, we find plenty of one-liners, sometimes forming a sequence that builds. "I seen a man so ugly he had to take a hammer to bed to break day" leads to "I seen a man so ugly they threw him in Dog River. They could skim ugly for six months." Other sequences concern the "meanest man," the "stingiest man," and so on, demonstrating humor's key function of correction and the dueling aspect of verbal humor. Sometimes, too, the message gets slipped in under the humor, as in "I knowed a man and he was foreman and he was so stingy that when three of his men on the job got blowed up, he docked 'em for the time they was up in the air." A comic commentary on a man who has sold out, it is also a reminder of the dangerous and low-paying jobs many black men had to accept.
        Witch and devil tales speak to the African-derived traditions of conjure and hoodoo, but more often than not, any mention of religion leads to a signification on Christianity. As a preacher's daughter, Hurston relished the many rich jokes told about chicken-eating, lascivious pastors, but these church fables could signify on white folks, too. "Uncle Jeff and the Church" tells about a man who tries to attend a white church and promptly gets ejected. He meets Christ outside: "He say dat a good Christian lak me oughter been 'shamed of myself for even comin' here think' 'bout joinin' this church. He says He ain't never even joined here Hisself. Fact is, He don't think He could git in if He wuz to try." The story is the basis for Langston Hughes' classic short story "On the Road," which ends in the same fantastic and deeply ironic way.
        The theme of correction can take variant forms too; sometimes opposition to the authorities gets celebrated. One tale features a mother who tries to cure her son of cussing; while he sleeps, she transfers him to a coffin in a cemetery and hides behind a tombstone to listen. He wakes, bellowing, "Well, I'll be damned if this ain't judgment day and I'm the first son of a gun up."
        As this story suggests, even in manuscript, Hurston edited out much of the salty language, knowing that it would never get by the censors of the day. Dance, our great contemporary folklore scholar, has let the raunchy stuff do its rude magic in her new collection, a luxury Hurston could not afford. On the other hand, Every Tongue does contain a comic tale about a man who diddles a mule and other risqu?material; one wonders if it would have escaped the censor's knife had Hurston brought the manuscript to a publisher.
        Animals often talk and play tricks in these stories, constituting a tradition straight out of Africa, yes, but one with affinities to many other tales, from Aesop to Babe. Here we find more creation/how things came about tales, such as "Why de Alligator Is Black," and a particularly impressive one, "Why de Porpoise's Tail Is On Crosswise" (God didn't want him to continue to be faster than the Sun!). These tales can go on for several pages, or be as short as "Know why 'possum ain't got no hair on his tail? Ham cut it off for banjo strings." Several of these stories parallel tales told by Joel Chandler Harris, but they lack the racist frame tale of Uncle Remus.
        Not all the tales succeed. Some are lame, or lack a real conclusion or moral. Hurston claimed she used the "vacuum method, grabbing everything I see," and it seems likely that had she shepherded this collection into print, some would have been pruned away.
        Because of the limitations I have mentioned, it seems unlikely this work will be accorded the status of Mules and Men or Tell My Horse. In its own right, however, it offers soul-satisfying morsels that will filter and fiber your blood; after all, as Hurston once asserted, folklore is "the boiled-down juice of human living." As such, it instructs, entertains, and helps us laugh along with, rather than at, a great and glorious people. As Hurston would have said, "Selah!"

John Lowe is professor of English at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Author of Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston's Cosmic Comedy (1994), he has published many articles and essays on African-American, southern, Native American, and ethnic literature, as well as pieces on humor and humor theory. He is currently completing The Americanization of Ethnic Humor, a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary examination of changing patterns in American comic literature.