Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe
must tell the tales, sing the songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings and doings of the Negro farthest down.’”7 Hurston’s stature as social scientist diminishes—although esteem in her storytelling prowess may escalate—as she launches into a performance of race and culture designed to reaffirm the dominant culture’s sense of itself as superior. The chapter proceeds with tales of her misadventures in the field, and snatches of folktales and songs accumulated during her years spent studying the folk of Polk County, Florida (177–205). The image of Charlotte Osgood Mason enjoying capon and caviar as Hurston regales her with stories of chain gangs and knife fights offers an unsettling portrait of the native ethnographer assuming the guise of the native informant and distorting it to the point of ridiculousness. Hurston does not question or problematize this moment in the autobiography. Yet in her ethnographic texts, her physical, Western, gendered, intrusive body is insistently present in the field, and her equally problematic self is evident at home, forcing the reader to question at all times the autonomy and authenticity of the self being represented at any given moment. In the previous example, for instance, Hurston appears to perform for Mason an image expressly designed to meet the dominating patron’s desires for exotic entertainment.
Hurston was not unaware of the complexity of her situation. In fact, she is unique among her contemporaries in the extent to which she theorizes specularity, linking ways of seeing to ways of knowing, and calling into question absolutist claims to authenticity, truth, and meaning. She links perception and knowledge in her introduction to Mules and Men:
When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism. From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through that. (3)
On one hand, Hurston narrates what Joanne Passaro has called “the epistemology of distance,” suggesting that social distance and greater degrees of “otherness” between ethnographer and informants are necessary to ensure the appropriate level of objectivity.8 Hurston makes clear her inability to appreciate and even see the distinctiveness of her culture until she acquires a geographical, educational, social, and perhaps emotional distance from her home. On the other hand, her notion of culture shifts from a description of it as a kind of material environment to one as a garment, something layered onto yet also difficult to separate from her physical being because it fits so “tightly.” The idea of culture as garment implicitly challenges the more commonly held belief that race and culture were synonymous. In its place, Hurston suggests that culture is something acquired through proximity to a particular environment; and she sets the stage for a consideration of the sophistication and beauty of African American culture that would contest widely held assumptions of racial inferiority. Living a culture, Hurston suggests, is a markedly different experience from seeing and thereby claiming to know it. During her Southern girlhood, she suggests, she lived Negro culture unreflexively. It took leaving that culture for her to recognize its unique attributes and its value. Anthropological methods provided Hurston with the tools with which to experience the double-consciousness that characterizes the modernist gaze-“see[ing] myself like somebody else”—and to experience that condition as self-awareness as opposed to the lack of self-knowledge that Du Bois ascribes to the African American’s doubled-consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk. And finally, Hurston inscribes Black communities’ orally conveyed tales and songs in order to allow them to present their own notions of social reality. Yet Hurston equates proximity, sight, and insight in a letter to Langston Hughes, dated March 8, 1928, in which she describes with excitement the success of her fieldwork: “I am getting inside of Negro art and lore. I am beginning to see really and when you join me I shall point things out and see if you see them as I do.”9 As in the previous example, seeing and knowing are virtually synonymous. But in contrast to her statements in Mules and Men, here Hurston stresses the importance of “getting inside” Negro culture in order to be able to see it clearly.
Not only does Hurston consistently equate looking and knowledge; she also links language and knowledge in her narratives. The John-Massa stories recorded in Mules and Men, for example, illustrate this point. John, described by Hurston as “the great human culture hero in Negro folk-lore,” is a trickster figure whose opposition to authority figures such as the master, God, and the Devil make him a cultural hero to the people who invented him (253). John, like Hurston, does not often make explicit his strategies of resistance, but he relies on duplicity and verbal dexterity to cover for his oppositional behaviors and consciousness. The John stories function as personal and collective allegories, resonating with the situations of African-descended peoples who transform displacement and disempowerment into a tenacious will to survive, and even thrive, in a hostile environment through sheer creativity and (self-) invention.
Described as “de first colored man what was brought to dis country,” who “doesn’t know nothin’ mo’ than you told him,” John, in one folktale, is taken by his master around the house and told fantastical names for the objects that fill it (85). The master tells him, for example, that the fireplace is a “flame Vaperator,” the stairs are his “jacob ladder,” and the bed is the “flowery-bed-of-ease,” and so on. The tale of an individual stripped of knowledge and language alludes to slavery and the erasure of an African cultural heritage. It reminds us, Robert Hemenway argues, “that whoever attempts to control language, the naming process, attempts to control our understanding of who we are, our definition of reality.”10 This allegory of language acquisition, power, and control takes a hairpin turn when John sets fire to the master’s barn and attempts to explain the sequence of events that have led to the disaster. First he speaks in sentences that string together the master’s neologisms with astonishing facility; second, the master is completely incapable of understanding him when the language game goes beyond the pointing and naming he has instigated; and lastly John drops the pretense and uses direct, plainspoken language that has a more immediate and forceful impact than the more rarified language of the master. This tale speaks to African Americans’ acquisition, mastery, and negotiation of foreign languages and cultures upon enslavement. It can also be read as a self-referential narrative that celebrates Hurston, the native ethnographer’s polyvocality, and her ability to slip between, around, and within multiple modes of narration.
Hurston’s ethnography enacts a paradoxical Black modernist gaze that looks at Black culture and looks back at the dominant culture with which the anthropologist is identified. Shamoon Zamir argues that W. E. B. Du Bois, another subject of this study, merits “a place in the history of American literary modernism … not because the work transcends the particulars of race. It deserves this kind of reassessment precisely because [they] can use the history of race in America as an entrance into issues of modernity.”11 Like Du Bois (and Hurston), other ethnographically inclined New Negroes consistently questioned the ways and means of knowing. Their work may not often conform to the formalistic experimentalism of high modernism, but their immersion into the murky terrain of knowledge and knowledge production is an intrinsic part of the modernist project. Working with and through ethnographic conventions-indeed, by transforming ethnographic paradigms—these artists and intellectuals carve open spaces from which Black people’s experiences and desires seep out, refusing the social scientist and the larger society’s attempts at cultural acquisition, mastery, and containment.12
Encounters in the Field: Anthropological Methods and Literary Symbols
Ethnographic literature of the Harlem Renaissance shares many of the defining characteristics of ethnography, a genre that depends on a method, namely fieldwork, to produce a narrative that simultaneously invents and documents a culture. New Negro encounters with the ethnographic imagination resulted in, for example, literature that attends to the Black intellectual’s travel to, participation in, and observation of folk communities. Although most of the artists I focus on were closely identified with the Harlem Renaissance, it is important to note that their interest in ethnography, anthropology, and folklore took them to places outside of New York City, such as the rural South and the Caribbean, and that such locations