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Free Mules,
and Cracked
of Dislocation
Were Watching
SHARON DA VIE is the direc-
tor of the Women's Center at
the Universityof Virginia.Her
publications includepoems; es-
says on sexuality in Yeats's
poetry and on the politics of
self-creation in the poems of
Sylvia Plath; and a study of
Harriet Jacobs, in the collec-
tion Famous Last Words:
Gender and Narrative Clo-
sure, 1845-1985 (UP of Vir-
ginia, 1993). She is writing a
book on women's centers and
on the theory andpractice that
shape them.
446
SharonDavie
Talking Buzzards,
Plates: The Politics
in Their Eyes
God
Thereis no point of viewfrom which the universalcharacteristicsof the human,
or of the woman, or of the black woman, or even of Zora Neale Hurston, can
be selected and totalized. Unification and simplification are fantasies of
domination,not understanding.
BarbaraJohnson,"Metaphor,Metonymy,and Voice
in Their Eyes Were Watching God"
There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it
from its own angle. So every man's spice box seasons his ownfood.
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Z ORA NEALE HURSTON'S Their Eyes Were Watching
God is powerful for many reasons-its tactile language, its
vivid story of a woman's emotions and senses, its encoding of African
American experiences and texts. But central to the pleasure and
influence of this novel are those moments in the text that pull the
cultural rug out from under the readers' feet, disturbing their com-
placent belief in the "mastery"(as Julia Kristeva calls it) of a rational
and hierarchical ordering of the world. It is as if Their Eyes Were
Watching God keeps reminding readers of the limits of the control
that reason accords them.
When Kristeva praises Mallarme, Joyce, Artaud, and others for
"introducing ruptures, blank spaces, and holes into language," she
suggests that "these modifications in the linguistic fabric are the sign
of a force that has not been grasped by the linguistic or ideological
system.... [T]his precisely is (sexual) pleasure (lajouissance)." Such
writing, Kristeva insists, is revolutionary:
 SharonDavie
[I]n a culture where the speaking subjects are
conceivedas mastersof theirspeech,theyhavewhat
is calleda "phallic"position.The fragmentationof
language in a text calls into question the very
postureof this mastery. ("Oscillation"165)
Whereas Kristeva tends to single out white male
avant-garde writers as subversive creators, Mar-
garet Homans argues that women writers whose
culture has marginalized them often have greater
access to creative forms that disrupt standard
cultural modes of perception. Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., offers still a third point of view, in
The Signifying Monkey. He notes that this alter-
native perspective, at least in African American
writing, is linked to an Afrocentric worldview
epitomized by Esu, the African trickstergod who
mocks binary either-or categorization.
Whatever the origin, Hurston's explosion of
societal, narrative, and linguistic hierarchies in
Their Eyes Were Watching God provides what
Kristeva calls "the sign of a force that has not
been grasped by the linguistic or ideological
system." Hurston's text not only inverts the
terms of accepted hierarchies (black over white,
female over male) but-more significantly-
allows readers to question, if only for a moment,
the hierarchical mode itself. Three formal de-
vices in the text-the free mule story and its
intricate chain of associations, the buzzard tale
that moves from the inside to the outside of the
free mule story, and the novel's pervasive physi-
cal imagery-create for readers a glimpse of a
"force" excluded from ideologies or languages
that assume a binary and hierarchical model of
reality.
But how does one talk about this force if it is
excluded from one's ideology and language?
Perhaps such discussions are impossible; one can
only point to a means of experiencing reality that
differs from the hierarchical mode of Western
culture, from the mode that privileges rationality
as the only way of knowing, from the mode that
categorizes and defines. In Writing and Differ-
ence, Jacques Derrida asserts:
We have no language-no syntax and no lexicon
-which is foreignto this[metaphysical]
history;we
can pronouncenot a singledestructiveproposition
447
whichhas not alreadyhad to slip into the form,the
logic,andthe implicitpostulationsof preciselywhat
it seeksto contest. (280-81)
It may be impossible to discuss a nonhierar-
chical, nondualistic mode of experience in a
nonhierarchical, nondualistic way. But texts like
TheirEyes Were WatchingGodmay help readers
to acknowledge the multiplicity and contradic-
toriness of experience, to acknowledge that
which one cannot pin down, fix, with rational
thought, that which one can name only to un-
name, or to name again, or to fail at naming, or
to succeed through admitting failure. Jonathan
Culler writes, convincingly, that an alternative
to a binary system of oppositional logic
is not a discipline,not anothermode of analysis,
but actsof writing,actsof displacement,playwhich
violateslanguageandrationality.Thoughtheseacts
can themselvesbe analyzedand understood,dis-
cussedin termsof codes which make them mean-
ingful,theyarein theirmoment,as examplesof the
play of signifiers,challengesto a perspectivewhose
limitationsthey expose. (42)
But of course Hurston's text also operates on
the level of "rational" binary consciousness, as
does any novel that human beings can read.
While the story is often highly critical of society's
hierarchical systems, it does not question the
binary perspective that divides reality into men
and women, black and white, hierarchical and
nonhierarchical-dualisms that many cultures
inevitably organize into the categories of supe-
rior and inferior (Cixous 91; Epstein 14-15). Like
anyone who criticizes the cultural system, Hurs-
ton speaks from within that system.
Nevertheless, Their Eyes Were Watching God
at times requires readers to enter the "process"
that Kristeva says is necessary for sociopolitical
change, "a process [that] involves going through
what is repressed in discourse, in reproductive
and productive relationships" ("Woman" 141).
In Western culture, "what is repressed in dis-
course" includes ways of knowing that are not
hierarchical, not dualistic. Hurston's novel al-
ways links these moments of disconcerting (or
exhilarating) dislocation from accepted modes of
448 Free Mules, Talking BuzTards, and CrackedPlates
perception to a recognition of physicality: hu-
man sexuality, human death. Perhaps this con-
nection is unsurprising, since these experiences
can jostle any vision of the omnipotent power of
rational thought.
Some commentators have read Their Eyes
Were WatchingGod as apolitical, from Richard
Wright in 1937, who argued that the novel
"carriesno theme, no message, no thought" (25),
to Harold Bloom in 1987, who confidently
asserted that Hurston's "sense of power has
nothing in common with politics of any persua-
sion" (4). I would suggest instead that the text's
deliberate undermining of hierarchy as an un-
questioned perspective-its habit of surprising
readers with their own ignorance-is a pro-
foundly political act.
This strategy is political because it may push
readers to see that reality outside the text is also
constructed, its meaning unstable, contradictory.
If, as Barbara Johnson writes, "[u]nificationand
simplification are fantasies of domination," the
text's playful and deliberate confusion of who or
what is "on top" may shake readers' confidence
in unified and simple judgments about "who is
on top" outside the novel ("Metaphor" 170). By
leading readers to the uncomfortable recognition
-even if just for a moment-that all labels are
slippery and unstable in their usefulness, the text
may join with other forces to cause a crisis of
faith in any monological understanding of per-
son or politics, text or nation.
Like Richard Rorty, I believe that the imagi-
native redescriptions inside a novel may well be
politically useful in a way that rationalist moral
reasoning is not and that "political usefulness"
implies some chance of undermining existing
circumstances of cruelty and repression (Rorty
93-94). Definitions of cruel and repressive obvi-
ously vary (and matter relatively more or less)
according to the reader's own political vision.
My assumption is not that rational, hierarchical,
binary thinking can (or should) be banished. But
without acknowledging the contingency of the
truths this thinking provides, human beings are
often static in their arrogance.
At the same time, sociopolitical change does
not occur simply through imagination, through
moments in texts, no matter how powerful. As
Kristeva speculates, the process of change in-
cludes "going through" not only "what is re-
pressed in discourse" but also what is repressed
in "reproductive and productive relationships."
Hurston's multifaceted political vision reflects
these requirements.The text's linguistic and nar-
rative politics of dislocation is inseparable from
Hurston's depiction of the complexities of rac-
ism. Her depiction of racism is inseparable from
the text's narrative about sexism. Constructed
out of African American women's history and
story, tradition and change, these textual mo-
ments offer an alternative reality that has no
intrinsic masters, master narratives, hierarchies,
or single reigning truths.
The Free Mule
Several commentators have underscored Hurs-
ton's linguistic overthrowing of hierarchies in
TheirEyes Were WatchingGod. As Gates points
out, the narrator's standard English slides into
a free indirect discourse that "privilege[s] the
black oral tradition," upsetting a linguistic hier-
archy still imposed in most school systems
("Blackness" 290). Barbara Johnson argues
persuasively that, in shifting back and forth
from "standard English ... to the careful rep-
resentation of dialect," the text expresses the
"self-division"-the multiplicity and contradic-
toriness-of the narrative voice itself ("Meta-
phor" 171). Like the artist and his audience on
the front porch in Eatonville, both Johnson and
Gates assert, the narrator and her narration, the
inside and the outside, are intermingled. The
illusion of hierarchy and control-narrative
voice coming from above and controlling the
characters-is deliberately broken.
The free mule stories accomplish a somewhat
different displacement of hierarchies:the mule is
tied to moments of displacement that build on
one another through repetition and transforma-
tion of key words and images. In the process, a
vision of reality as indeterminate, as too tran-
sient, diverse, and inconsistent ever to be fixed
in hierarchy, emerges. The text itself becomes
like the trickster of the African folk imagination,
who, Ivan Van Sertima writes, plays "a role
related to the profound and often obscure long-
 SharonDavie
ings of the human psyche for freedom from fixed
ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, acting; a revolt
against a whole complex of 'givens' coded into
a society . . ." (103).
Of course, the trickster figure has played that
role for many cultures. But Hurston's question-
ing of a rationalist, foundationalist perspective
occurs within a specific context: historically,
Western ideas of hierarchy have articulated a
racism that places black people below whites
precisely because blacks supposedly lack the
human ability to reason.1Hurston's text subverts
the very vision of rational truth that has long
positioned Africans, African Americans, and
women of all colors below white men-on a
lower rung of a ladder that moves upward from
body to spirit.
For instance, in the mid-eighteenth century
Hume and Kant posited that blacks, because of
their drastically lower intellectual capacities,
were "naturally inferior" (Hume's words) to
whites, and Hume stressed the lack of "arts"and
"sciences" among nonwhite races as evidence of
this inferiority (Hume 252nl; Kant 111; see also
Gates, "Writing" 10-11). A cruderversion of this
belief exists in The History of Jamaica, published
by Edward Long in 1774, which asserts "the
most intimate connection and consanguinity"
between the African and the "orang-outang"
(qtd. in Gates, Figures 11). As Gates concludes,
whites who did see blacks as human often be-
lieved them to be at the margins of the human
and the animal: "the human scale rose from 'the
lowliest Hottentot' (black South Africans) to
'glorious Milton and Newton"' ("Writing" 8).
But on the great chain of being constituted by
the received white wisdom of the day, blacks
seemed to slide into the category of animal-a
convenient justification for owning them.
In TheirEyes Were WatchingGod the story of
the freeing, death, and funeral of Matt Bonner's
mule echoes with complexity the historical link-
ing of blacks and animals in the great chain of
being. Hurston creates the framework for a
multilayered irony by reminding readers of an-
other Western cliche of otherness: women's ani-
mality and supposedly inferior ability to reason.2
Joe Starks, Janie's second husband, makes the
connection clear: "Somebody got to think for
449
women and chillun and chickens and cows. I
god, they sho don't think none theirselves"(110).
Janie's grandmother, Nanny, describes a hierar-
chical chain in which black women and animals
occupy the same space:
So de white man throw down de load and tell de
niggerman tuh pickit up. He pickit up becausehe
have to, but he don't tote it. He hand it to his
womenfolks.De niggerwoman is de mule uh de
worldso fur as Ah can see. (29)
In this context, readersunderstand that Janie's
sympathy for Matt Bonner's mule is empathy,
that her anger at the crowd of men baiting the
half-starved mule-she mutters and fumes about
their cowardice in mistreating "helpless things"
(90)-is an expression of frustration at what she
perceives to be her own helplessness. Joe appro-
priates Janie's words, overhearing and repeating
them as his own, and he makes a grand public
show of buying and "freeing"the mule, a perfect
sleight of hand. Not even Janie notices the
switch; she ends up complimenting Joe on his
masterful gesture, comparing him to Abraham
Lincoln (92). This part of the free mule story in
a sense supports the hierarchicalstatus quo. Like
Lincoln, the white man who frees black people,
Joe, the black man, frees the mule. And the black
man has more power than the black woman
does, because he can name another living thing
as "free." As in Houston Baker's reading of
TheirEyes Were WatchingGod, economic power
is the grounding of such expressive power
(Blues 58).
The mule's other associations with hierarchi-
cal status have different implications, though, in
the various free mule stories that spring up
everywhere after Joe liberates the animal. The
stories all playfully upset the man-animal hier-
archy: when the mule sticks its head in the
Pearsons' window, for instance, Mrs. Pearson
mistakes it for Rev. Pearson and hands it a plate
(92). The stories are funny and fun; they are told
for pleasure, but the laughter at a subverted
hierarchy reminds readers of other hierarchies
that can be overturned. Hurston's mule tales also
recall other hierarchies that were subverted,
echoing a diverse tradition of animal folktales
450 Free Mules, Talking Buzzards, and CrackedPlates
from slavery that often masked defiant self-affir-
mation (see Baker, "Animal Tales"; Brewer;
Barnes and Goss).
But Hurston's serious play with the mule only
begins here. When the free mule dies, Joe forbids
Janie to attend the festival-like "dragging-out"
of the animal (to a distance "far enough off to
satisfy sanitary conditions in the town" [93]). She
cannot come with the rest of the community, just
as she cannot exchange stories with the others
on the front porch of the store. Joe orders her
to "class off": "You'se Mrs. Mayor Starks,
Janie. I god . .." (85). While Joe uses his position
as "man of the house" to impose this class status
on Janie, the town troops off to hold a mock
funeral for the free mule, in which the pleasure
of laughter undermines the very idea of status.
Even Joe joins in:
They mocked everythinghuman in death. Starks
led off with a greateulogyon our departedcitizen,
our most distinguishedcitizen.... He stood on the
distendedbellyof themulefor a platformandmade
gestures. (95)
Sam Watson preaches the sermon: "He spoke of
the joys of mule-heaven. . . . Up there, mule-
angels would have people to ride on .. ." (95).
Clearly, Hurston is "signifying"-with her
mule-angels riding on people-on Western cul-
ture's definition of black women and men as
animals who, positioned below white human
beings, are created to support them. The joke is
two-faced, of course. On the one hand, the
reversal of the mules-people hierarchy-mules
on top-figures blacks on top, whites beneath.
On the other hand, readers laugh at the mule-
angels riding on people, because people are
supposed to be on top, and that laughter re-
inforces the symbolic hierarchy of the status quo.
On still another level, the images in this passage
are so wild and ludicrous (like the configuration
of mule and angel, itself a mockery of separate
spheres of body and spirit) that a kind of vertigo
begins-with a question: Might one dissolve the
idea of status, of hierarchy itself, by turning the
world upside down?
In early modern Europe, images of women
beating men-meant to reflect a disordered
world, because the disorderly sex, woman, is on
top-appeared in mimes, festival rituals, and
woodcuts. Echoing the response to the mule-
angels, but in reverse, such images reinforce the
status quo: women should submit to men; the
world is disordered when they do not. But, as
Natalie Zemon Davis has argued, these images
of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries also pro-
vide a powerful suggestion that real relationships
can be other than culturally correct hierarchies.
Although the two images, preindustrial
Europe's women on top and Hurston's mule-
angels, have opposite goals, they generate a
similar two-faced response: they signal danger,
in spite of their often comic circumstances, and
also possibility. A more overt opportunity for
exploding hierarchy itself-an echo of the third
response suggested by the mule-angels-occurs
in Hurston's Mules and Men and in the passages
that link the mule's funeral and Joe's funeral in
TheirEyes Were WatchingGod. In the introduc-
tion to Mules and Men Hurston says that the
folktales show how "the devil always outsmarted
God, and how that over-noble hero Jack or John
. .. outsmarted the devil" (5). The reversals in
Mules and Men create both laughter and a space
in which readers can imagine black above white,
woman above man, human above God. And
with that last reversal, the chain of being unrav-
els, opening up a space-at least a glimpse of
a space-in which "great chains" do not exist
at all.
Hurston's mule funeral in Their Eyes Were
Watching God provides a similar subtext. The
description of the ceremonies that "mocked
everything human in death" suggests that human
beings create hierarchies, systems of control, to
defend against death and exert power over life.
This same subtext shows that death makes all
hierarchiesultimately absurd, arbitrary.The im-
age of "top man" Joe Starks standing on the
dead mule's body, on death itself, making grand,
pompous gestures like the ones he makes every
day as mayor of the town, is profoundly disturb-
ing and evocative.
That picture of Joe "on the distended belly of
the mule" remains as an afterimage in the scenes
of Joe's own dying. The doctor Janie calls in says
that Joe is dying of kidney failure, but as several
 SharonDavie
commentators have pointed out, he seems to die
instead of Janie's words (B. Johnson, "Meta-
phor" 160). Pushed beyond endurance by his
ridiculing of her body and her mind, she talks
back to him in the store one day:
You big-belliesroundhereandput out a lot of brag,
but 'taint nothin'to it but yo' big voice. Humph!
Talkin''bout me lookin'old! Whenyou pull down
yo' britches,you look lak de changeuh life.
(123)
After Janie's signifying words underscore Joe's
lack of sexual power, his economic power and
class status count for nothing. The text moves
from big-bellied Joe, making arrogant gestures
as he stands on the big-bellied mule, to a Joe who
has lost his substance, belly and all. Earlier
images of Joe-that he has a belly like that of
"rich white folks" (56), that he struts around on
the distended belly of the dead mule, that Janie
mocks the false way he "big-bellies round"-
fade as his poor body is finally left wasted thin.
On his deathbed, Janie "could see what was left
of his belly huddled before him on the bed like
some helpless thing seeking shelter" (130-31).
The words "helpless thing" bring back Janie's
first words about the half-starved mule; Joe's
essential helplessness is no different from the
helplessness of all living things in the face of
death. Hurston's image of Joe on the dead mule
melds with Joe's repressive gestures and his
desperate need to be a "big voice" like the white
folks; in a complicated twist of sympathy, I'm
made to mourn Joe's lost life, to mourn what
Janie calls "the making of a voice out of a man,"
the deathly oppression of the man by his own
need for status (134).
A last aspect of Janie's signifying is both the
most powerful and the most disturbing. She tells
Joe (and the front-porch crowd) that he is aging
and sexually impotent. Her words finally carry
as much power as they do, though, because she
has made him trade places with her: Joe is
imaged as a female ("When you pull down yo'
britches, you look lak de change uh life"). This
hierarchical reversal again has two sides. Janie
now has more power than Joe does, an indication
that women can signify their way out of oppres-
451
sion (Gates, "Blackness"290). But Joe is brought
down only when Janie labels him a menopausal
woman, an echo of the cultural devaluation of
women. The exhilaration I have experienced in
seeing Janie find her voice and use it to defend
herself is tempered by an uncomfortable edge:
my laughter seems to strut, like Joe, on a dead
mule. Reversals of hierarchies, "winning," in
that moment seem empty-like the sagging skin
of Joe, the "Little Emperor" of Eatonville, at the
end of his life.
Hurston conjures up a moment in which read-
ers lose their sense of rational control over the
text. The control slips away because one has to
juggle two competing realities that shimmer in
and out of ascendancy-it is as if the vase and
the face in the famous silhouette were shifting
back and forth before one's eyes. Janie's victory
is solid and satisfying: as Mary Helen Washing-
ton points out, Janie makes Joe the object of the
male gaze, an exposed position usually held by
women (241); Gates argues that Joe's hubristic,
"I god" male authority is satisfactorily under-
mined. Gates's term for Joe after Janie's words,
which Gates applauds, is "de/masculated" (Sig-
nifying 206-07).
Again, though, the vase and face shift:
"de/masculated" is another word for woman.
Joe's male body seems impotent because it is
imaged as a menopausal and aging, thus suppos-
edly nonsexual as well as nonreproducing,
woman's body. Emily Martin's The Woman in
the Body describes in detail the cultural view of
menopause as a negative breakdown of the fe-
male body, a body that is "working right"-and
valuable-only when it can have children. Mar-
tin contrasts women's own recounting of their
experiences of menopause with the cultural
stereotypes of atrophy and irrationality that are
associated with the "change of life." Lack of
status as a sexual object joins lack of sexual
function in the culture's view of menopause,
whereas women's own view may be of a newly
independent sexuality.
Janie's presence in the novel as an older
woman similarly contrasts with the "change of
life" epithet successfully flung at Joe. Janie is
gloriously sexual, both from her own perspec-
tive, in her relationship with the younger Tea
452 FreeMules,TalkingBuzzards,and CrackedPlates
Cake, and through the eyes of the men of
Eatonville, who cannot stop looking at her "pug-
nacious breasts" and buttocks like "grapefruits"
when she returns to town after Tea Cake's death
(11). This perspective on female sexuality-that
it does not disappear because Janie, who may
even be in "de change uh life" herself, is no
longer young-makes the moment of victory
that much more ambiguous.
The Buzzard Story
The free mule stories feature white stereotypes
of blacks as animals and black reversals of those
stereotypes, images that upset the human-animal
hierarchy. But the stories also portray the animal
as mortal, a condition all human beings share,
and suggest that, like children afraid of the dark,
people use posturing and rigid hierarchies to
cover up their fear of the uncertainty and lack
of control that mortality brings. After Janie's
signifying, Joe, who had "a bow-down command
in his face," becomes a "helpless thing" like the
skinny, hard-used mule (75). In an even more
subtle challenge of hierarchy, the very words
Janie speaks to bring Joe down reflect women's
own traditional oppression. The buzzard story
framed by the mule's funeral represents a related
undermining of hierarchy and rigid categoriza-
tion. If, as Kristeva argues, there are moments
in writing in which "the fragmentation of lan-
guage" is subversive, disrupting the ordinary
order of reality, Hurston's buzzard story is surely
one of those moments ("Oscillation" 165).
Though Hurston's text shifts back and forth
from standard English to dialect, from third
person to first, the buzzard story introduces a
different kind of metamorphosis. The narrator
describes Sam Watson's tale about mule heaven
at the mule's funeral and then reports that the
people went home and left the mule to the buz-
zards. But the narrator goes on to tell the story
of the buzzards in a discourse similar to that used
to bring the reader into Janie's life. The story is
not told as a story, a fiction like Sam Watson's
tales of mule heaven; it has no frame other than
the transparent narrative voice, which speaks
with as much veracity as Janie does in her signi-
fying conversation with Joe or as Tea Cake does
in his courtship of Janie:
The flock had to wait the white-hairedleader,but
it was hard.Theyjostledeach otherand peckedat
heads in hungry irritation.. . . The Parson sat
motionlessin a deadpine treeabout two milesoff.
He had scentedthe matteras quicklyas any of the
rest, but decorumdemandedthat he sit oblivious
until he was notified.Then he took off with pon-
derousflight and circledand lowered,circledand
lowereduntil the othersdancedin joy and hunger
at his approach.
He finallylit on the groundand walkedaround
the body to see if it were reallydead. Peeredinto
its nose and mouth. Examinedit well from end to
end and leapedupon it and bowed,and the others
danceda response. (96-97)
A ceremonious call and response follows ("What
killed this man? . .. Bare, bare fat"), and it ends
with the buzzards pledging to "stand his fu-
neral," the Parson picking out the mule's eyes
"in the ceremonial way," and the feast of life
through death commencing.
Hurston's text plays with, teases, and fools
readers, who expect a story about talking buz-
zards to be labeled a fiction: Hurston does not
oblige. Instead she makes readers uncomfortable
with a tale that knocks the props out from
underneath the categories of truth and fiction.
The inner text seems eerily beyond proper
boundaries, somehow out of control.
One way to understand this discomfort (or,
alternatively, exhilaration) at the broken
boundaries is to recognize that the black folktale
is not something "in" the novel; it has escaped
confinement by achieving an equal status with
the novel. It is as true as literature is, as "true"
as fiction is. But while the inner tale escapes being
an "inner" tale, the comfortable categories of
truth and fiction built up as the novel has
progressed explode in the readers' hands. It is
suddenly obvious (though many readers may
suppress this awareness) that Janie's story is a
fiction that has come to seem true, partly because
this "true" story encloses tales clearly labeled
"fiction" (the free mule stories, Sam's mock
preaching, all the front-porch tales). But as that
 SharonDavie
awareness grows, and as the buzzard story
moves from inside out, for a moment any deline-
ation of true and false, truth and fiction, seems
to falter-and any hierarchy of true over false,
truth over fiction, seems meaningless.
The text simultaneously mocks proper
boundaries and hierarchies in another way, too,
with the carrion birds' rigid high-low ranking,
decorum, and propriety. It is no accident that
Hurston describes the ritual with the trappings
of hierarchical religion made comic: the Parson,
the male leader, is so deliberately regal, slow, and
"ponderous" in his ceremonious opening of the
feast that the congregation "peck[s]at heads" in
their frustration at the delay.
But what seems particularly apt about the
content of this passage, which undermines
"proper"ways of categorizing and ranking real-
ity (inner and outer narratives, animals and
humans, fiction and truth), is that it forcefully
reminds readers of their physicality: the buzzards
are about to eat the decomposing flesh of the
mule they have named "man." Once again, Their
Eyes Were Watching God links an acknowledg-
ment of physicality with a recognition of the
limits of rational truth telling, of the limits of
what Kristeva calls the controlling posture of
speaking subjects as the "mastersof their speech"
("Oscillation" 165). By frequently disrupting
hierarchies and categories-even categories like
truth and fiction-Hurston encourages her read-
ers to realize that, as Adrienne Rich has said,
"truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an
increasing complexity" (187).
It is worth stressing that Hurston's disruption
of the text's realistic form with the buzzard story
not only unsettles the hierarchy of truth over
fiction but also challenges the domination of
realistic fiction over black folk forms. Robert
Hemenway, among others, emphasizes Hur-
ston's "grappling with the problems of affirming
black performance aesthetics in the midst of a
predominantly white culture" ("Flying Lark"
146). TheirEyes Were WatchingGod deliberately
breaks the linear plot progression of a traditional
novel by including not just the buzzard tale but
also tales from the front-porch crowd, courtship
play rituals, and contests in hyperbole, which do
453
nothing to advance the plot. Hurston seems to
portray three kinds of accomplishments during
the time of Janie's marriage to Joe Starks. Joe
founds the post office of Eatonville as a black
institution, erects the street lights, and forcefully
shoves through needed improvements like decent
roads and drainage systems. Janie, in a hard-won
struggle, finds her own voice. And there are
accomplishments of creativity, play, and plea-
sure, created not by a single individual but by a
community. Hurston clearly presents the com-
munity's "adornments" of language at such
length that they cannot be viewed as simply
background.3
The buzzard tale, though, goes one step fur-
ther than the other community tales do in
thumbing its nose at the ascendancy of the
realistic fiction that surrounds it, as it breaks its
frame and steps out on center stage. In 1938,
Alain Locke criticized Hurston's novel for mak-
ing folklore its "main point" and insisted that
Hurston instead should "come to grips with
motive fiction and social document fiction" (qtd.
in Hemenway, Hurston 241). More telling than
her immediate reply to Locke-a furious per-
sonal attack-are the words she had written four
years earlier, in 1934, in response to critics who
thought her folk dramas were too "primitive."
She called the denial of African American folk-
lore and black dialect "intellectuallynching" and
argued that imitating white literary forms was
futile: "[U]ntil we have placed something upon
his street corner that is our own, we are right
back where we were when they filed our iron
collar off" (qtd. in Hemenway, Hurston 206). In
a sense, the shifting of the buzzard story from
tale told to tale telling places readers on the front
porch of Joe's store-momentarily moving
them, as Barbara Johnson says Hurston sug-
gests, away from "a reified 'art'" to "a living
culture in which the distinctions between specta-
tor and spectacle, rehearsal and performance,
experience and representation, are not fixed"
("Metaphor" 159). That the buzzard tale blurs
the lines between experience and representation
helps readers participate, even briefly, in that
living culture.
Hurston's text comes full circle to death: sig-
454 FreeMules, TalkingBuzZards,and CrackedPlates
nificantly, again, the one folktale that achieves
this powerful stance is the story of the buzzards
eating "man." The scene foreshadows the burial
scene toward the end of Janie's narration, in
which conscripted poor men are forced at gun-
point to bury the dead after a hurricane and
flood. The workers are told to separate whites
from blacks, so that the whites can be buried in
coffins and the blacks thrown into dirt holes, in
a grotesque assertion of hierarchy. When the
men object, arguing that the rotting corpses all
look the same, the white men with guns rasp out,
"Look at they hair" (253). The buzzard tale, with
its mockery of hierarchies, must come to mind.
Perhaps, too, for some readers and perhaps even
for Hurston, a game might come to mind: the
buzzard lope game described by Bessie Jones, the
former leader of the Georgia Sea Island Singers,
and recorded by Beverly Robinson. Jones's
grandfather played the game in the 1850s and
passed it down to his grandchildren. It consists
of the "mimicked movement of a buzzard and
powerful call-and-response singing: 'Throw me
anywhere, Lord, in an old field. Just so Jesus
hold me, in an old field."' Jones, Robinson
reports, explains the game as masked defiance of
the practice of throwing dead slaves into dirt
holes rather than burying them in coffins:
We'll act just like those buzzardsand those white
peoplewill thinkwe learntit in Africa.But we are
tellingthemthatwe don'tcareif you put ourbodies
down in the woods just like you did them horses,
themdogs that was dead.Justmightas well let the
buzzardspicks the meat off my bones becauseit
doesn't make no difference,you not buryingme
rightnohow. You see, I'm throwedout anyway.
(213-14)
"Throwed out" means "dead";imposing human
hierarchy on me, the game says, is meaningless
in the face of death. The buzzard story, the
buzzard game Hurston plays on the reader, says
the same thing.
An Imagery of the Body
Hurston's insistent use of bodily imagery further
underscores the limitations of a discourse of rigid
hierarchies and closed categories. The physical
imagery is a linguistic mirror of Janie's relation-
ship with Tea Cake, which is often linked to
desire, to play: "Somebody wanted her to play.
Somebody thought it natural for her to play.
That was even nice" (146). Their relationship
also suggests openness rather than closure. At
the beginning of the relationship, after the two
first make love, and later, after Tea Cake has
died, Hurston adopts the same image: that of
Tea Cake's spirit flying out an open window
(163, 286). Like the free mule story's displace-
ment of societal hierarchy and the buzzard
story's dislocation of narrative hierarchy, the
predominant physical imagery in Their Eyes
Were Watching God points the reader toward
that same openness.-
Hurston's bodily metaphors have several
effects. First, most obviously, they help readers
acknowledge the tactile, the physical, which
Western culture devalues: "Betcha he off wid
some gal so young she ain't even got no hairs"
(10). "But nobody moved, nobody spoke, no-
body even thought to swallow spit until after her
gate slammed behind her" (11). "Her voice began
snagging on the prongs of her feelings" (27). The
women "have got that fresh, new taste about
them like young mustard greens in the spring
..." (105). "'Ah jus lak uh chicken [in the ability
to keep a confidence]. Chicken drink water, but
he don't pee-pee" (173). Nanny tells Janie, "Ah
tried not to feel de breeze off her face, but it got
so cold in dere dat Ah was freezin' to death under
the kivvers" (33). Human beings have bodies,
ways of knowing other than the cerebral. These
images remind one of that.
Second, Hurston's physical images move read-
ers away from labels and names, toward the
shifting and multiple openness of experience.
Nanny says, "Put me down easy, Janie, Ah'm a
cracked plate"; if she had labeled her state of
mind "fragile" instead, that word would have
different meanings to different people and shift-
ing meanings to the same person (37). But when
she calls herself a "cracked plate," the possibili-
ties open up like the window that Tea Cake's
spirit flies through: she may be vulnerable, frag-
ile, nearly broken, damaged, not useful for much
longer, delicate. Readers understand, each in his
 SharonDavie
or her own way, what Nanny means, and they
understand that words cannot pin down experi-
ence. As Janie says to Pheoby, "It's uh known
fact . . . you got tuh go there tuh know there"
(285). Of course, all poetic language opens read-
ers' minds to the multiple, sliding relation be-
tween language and experience. But Hurston's
repeated use of imagery focused either on bodily
experiences (like swallowing spit, tasting new
mustard greens, feeling chilled by someone's
hatred) or on physical action and its results (the
"cracked plate") stretches the openness, opens it
wider. For such imagery questions reason's place
at the top of the Western hierarchy of values and
insists that readers recognize other ways of
knowing.
Perhaps paradoxically, the text's emphasis on
the physical, the visceral, the bodily, links Hurs-
ton's readers to mystery. I do not agree with
Washington, who says that Janie's words about
having "tuhgo there tuh know there" "cast doubt
on the relevance of oral speech." According to
Washington, "Janie's final comment that expe-
rience is more important than words is an im-
plicit criticism of the culture that celebrates
orality to the exclusion of inner growth" (247).
On the contrary, I believe that Hurston's novel
endorses the "oral speech" of this black culture
by recognizing that much of experience always
escapes language.
The black oral language that holds a central
place in Hurston's novel (despite the assertion of
Hurston's contemporary James Weldon John-
son that "the passing of traditional dialect" had
occurred [3]) constantly points back to experi-
ence. In an essay on black folk expression,
Hurston argues that black language is physical,
action-oriented:
Frequentlythe Negro, even with detached [i.e.,
more abstract] words in his vocabulary-not
evolved in him but transplantedon his tongue by
contact-must add action to it to make it do. So
we have "chop-axe,""sitting-chair,""cook-pot,"
and the like becausethe speakerhas in his mindthe
pictureof the objectin use. Action.
All southern dialect, white and black, she con-
tinues, has been affected by the visceral expres-
455
siveness of black speakers who "made new force
words out of old feeble elements. Examples of
this are 'ham-shanked,' 'battle-hammed,' 'dou-
ble-teen,' 'bodaciously,' 'muffle-jawed"'("Char-
acteristics" 49-50, 51).
In the same essay, Hurston identifies the three
elements of "the Negro's greatest contribution to
the language" and uses physical imagery in her
examples of each: metaphor and simile ("[r]egu-
lar as pig-tracks," "[t]oput yo'self on de ladder");
the double descriptive ("[k]ill-dead,""[h]ot-boil-
ing"); and verbal nouns ("Sense me into it," "She
won't take a listen") (51-53). In another essay,
"Spirituals and Neo-spirituals," she focuses on
the "adornment" of black religious expression,
and again her examples stress the bodily:
In the mouth of the Negro the Englishlanguage
loses its stiffness,yet conveys its meaningaccu-
rately."Theboomingbounderriesof this whirling
world"conveysjust as accuratea pictureas mere
"boundaries,"and a little music is gainedbesides.
"The rim bones of nothing"is just as truthfulas
"limitlessspace." (81)
"Just as truthful" seems like a typically ironic
Hurston understatement. She glories in the
adorned, active, physical language of black folk
expression, much as Janie glories in the playful
sensuality of her relationship with Tea Cake. The
affirmation of desire in that relationship and
throughout the novel does not suggest physical-
ity as a new absolute-physical experience at the
"top" of some new hierarchy-but, rather, sug-
gests the experiential quality in human life that
cannot be translated into absolutes, hierarchies,
or named categories.
Janie, "stretchedon her back beneath the pear
tree," has a visionary experience that comes to
her in an "inaudible voice." The experience es-
capes words, and it is orgasmic, not cerebral.
She saw a dust-bearingbee sink into the sanctum
of a bloom;the thousandsister-calyxes
archto meet
the love embraceand the ecstaticshiverof the tree
from root to tiniest branch creaming in every
blossom and frothingwith delight.So this was a
marriage!She had been summonedto behold a
revelation.ThenJaniefelt a pain remorselesssweet
that left her limp and languid. (24)
456 FreeMules,TalkingBuzzards,and CrackedPlates
She gets up from under the tree to seek
"confirmation of the voice and vision."
Throughout the novel, the pear tree and Janie's
experiences there are associated with the sensual,
fertile relationship-a nonhierarchical relation-
ship, rooted in desire-that Janie wants with the
world. But part of the pear tree vision-its other
Janus face-is the flood that comes toward the
end of Hurston's novel and brings the madness
that kills Tea Cake. If orgasm speaks of the limits
of rational control, so does death. The flood
levels all hierarchy, too: "But above all the drive
of the wind and water. And the lake. Under its
multiplied roar could be heard a mighty sound
of grinding rock and timber and a wail.... The
monstropolous beast had left his bed" (238-39).
This statement-that the flood levels all hier-
archy-both is and is not true. Or, rather,
Hurston shows both the lack of hierarchy in the
face of the death-dealing flood and the uneasy
dance of people trying to impose hierarchy even
when confronted with death. During the flood,
whites occupy the "high ground" of the tall
bridge, forcing Janie and Tea Cake to seek refuge
in the more dangerous territory below. After the
flood, when despite this strategy many whites as
well as blacks are drowned, the macabre hierar-
chical system of burial mentioned earlier is im-
posed-whites are buried in coffins, blacks
thrown into a common grave.
This double-sided, antiuniversalizing vision is
constant in Hurston's text. Almost nothing re-
solves into single, monological truth. Hurston
sees multiplicity,contradictoriness,change, the yes
and the no. Joe Starks, a repressive categorizer,
does a deathly imitation of "richwhite folks," but
he is also creative and energetic. Tea Cake is
loving, sensual, generous, and playful, but he
whips Janie because it "reassure[s]him in posses-
sion" when he is threatened by Mrs. Turner's
light-skinned brother (218). Janie and Tea Cake
choose not to be defined by material goods, but
they find not only pleasure on the Florida muck
but also "[p]eople ugly from ignorance and bro-
ken from being poor" (196). The front-porch
talkers are a linguistically creative community of
speakers, but when they become jealous of Janie,
they make "burning statements with questions,
and killing tools out of laughs" (10).
Again, the novel does not offer physical expe-
rience as a new absolute, or as a value that
replaces reason at the top of some invisible
hierarchy, or even as a more basic version of
reality that grounds all other versions. Rather,
physical experience acts like the "trace" that
Derrida argues is always left in "arche-writing":
it serves as a reminderthat human beings cannot
know, much less control, everything with their
rational minds; reality is too slippery for that (Of
Grammatology 60-61). Language that forces
readers to juggle multiple and contradictory
meanings can enact this reminder too, as can
language that does not completely make sense,
though it does make the reader "sense." In
Derrida's terms, such language "exceeds mean-
ing" (Bass 20).
Like "boogerbooing" and "woofing," which
Hurston says in Mules and Men are "aimless
talking" (16). They are excessive, pleasurable
talking, filled with flourishes just for the hell of
it, like the woofing that goes on when Tea Cake's
friends Ed, Bootyny, and Sop-de-Bottom play
cards:
Everybodywas watchingthatnextcardfall. Ed got
readyto turn. "Ah'mgointuhsweepout hell and
burnup de broom.".. . Tea CakenudgedSop not
to bet. "You gointuhgit caughtin uh bulletstorm
if you don't watch out." Sop said, "Aw 'tain't
nothin'tuh dat bearbut his curlyhair.Ah can look
thoughmuddywaterand see dry land." (201)
Political Vision and Ignorance
The brilliance and usefulness of this novel seem
linked with the constant shimmering movement
that characterizes Their Eyes Were Watching
God. The text will not stand still, and neither will
its imagery, characters, or meanings. Hurston
seems to lead readers to a vivid experience of
what Bakhtin calls, in "Discourse in the Novel,"
the "centrifugal"aspect of language, the multiple
conversations always going on in any utterance.
But how are moments that disrupt the expec-
tation of a hierarchy of meanings-the expecta-
tion that one meaning will stand still on top
politically useful? In my experience with political
change, profound surprise is of value. When
 SharonDavie
readers have one meaning jerked out from be-
neath them, when they have to replace it with
another meaning and then another, they may
begin to accept that the master narrative is one
of many, that the Master is a relative, and
relative to themselves. This realization in turn
can be politically useful if it helps people make
the boundaries- of the inevitable hierarchical
categories they live by more porous. Barbara
Johnson suggests that acts of deconstruction are
powerful not as ideas but as experiences of
ignorance:
Whatthe surpriseencounterwith othernessshould
do is lay baresome hint of an ignoranceone never
knewone had. Muchhas beenmadeof the factthat
"knowledge"cannot be taken for granted. But
perhapsratherthan simplyquestioningthe nature
of knowledge,we shouldtodayreevaluatethe static,
inertconceptwe have alwayshad of ignorance.
("Nothing"16)
This encounter will not necessarily occur
through any literary experience and will not
likely occur from literary experiences alone.
What seems crucial is that this profound aware-
ness of an ignorance is a surprise; it is not a
"mastery of understanding," not an act of ra-
tional analysis ("Nothing" 13). Instead, perhaps
the primary characteristics of this experience are
puzzlement, confusion, an emotional lurch that
may be pleasurable or nauseating, fascinating or
terrifying. The experience-literary or extralit-
erary-may be frightening because it implies a
need for change: "If I perceive my ignorance as
a gap in knowledge instead of an imperativethat
changes the very nature of what I think I know,"
writes Johnson, "then I do not truly experience
my ignorance" ("Nothing" 16; emphasis added).
The value of any political action is contingent,
not absolute. But I appreciate Rorty's descrip-
tion of "the citizens of [his] liberal utopia" as
"people who combined commitment with a sense
of the contingency of their own commitment"
(61); I suggest we can become those people. Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick points out that categories of
race, class, gender, sexual orientation, national-
ity-while representing a crucial political ad-
vance over a neutral humanism that seems to
457
equate human with white heterosexual male
are crude when compared with the complexity of
human beings. There is still no way to talk about
the radical idiosyncracy of human beings that
does not seem threateningly close again to a neu-
tral humanism.The categoriesthat do exist, Sedg-
wick says, a "tiny number of inconceivablycoarse
axes of categorization," are "indispensable":
But the sisteror brother,the best friend,the class-
mate, the parent,the child, the love, the ex-: our
families,loves, and enemiesalike, not to mention
the strangerelationsof our work, play, and activ-
ism, provethat even peoplewho shareall or most
of our own positionsalong these crudeaxes may
still be differentenough from us, and from each
other,to seemlike all but differentspecies. (22)
Hurston's text suggests that an "imperative of
ignorance" might at times be particularlyhelpful
for people involved in political action that uses
"coarse axes of categorization" like race and
gender. The women's center I direct, for in-
stance, uses the word "women" without examin-
ing the complicated questions raised by that
choice of term. This familiar strategic move-a
political act-paradoxically signals to women
who have been categorized as "women" and then
raped, battered, harassed, paid less, or not pro-
moted that this "center" is a place for them, a
place that might offer them the possibility of
change in their own lives. At other moments-
for example, at a United Nations international
conference for women that took place in Nairobi
in the mid-1980s-such a strategic alignment
with unquestioning classifications seems deadly.
On that occasion, feminists from the United
States feuded with Third World women over
whether concerns like the availability of fresh-
water wells were "gender specific" enough to be
appropriate for a "women's" conference.
The risk is to choose: to utilize these "axes of
categorization" when politically useful or pas-
sionately necessary. But when one is able to
stumble into an ignorance so profound as to
form an imperative, one might let go-and be
surprised, then, into a complexity beyond those
categories.
A last comment from Zora Neale Hurston: she
458 FreeMules,TalkingBu.Zards,and CrackedPlates
seems to laugh a little about double seeing, about
how it fascinates and threatens; her words sound
like an invitation and a warning:
It was bad enoughfor whitepeople,but whenone
of your own color could be so differentit put you
on a wonder.It was like seeingyoursisterturninto
a 'gator.A familiarstrangeness.You keep seeing
yoursisterin the 'gatorandthe 'gatorin yoursister,
and you'd rather not. (Their Eyes 76)
Notes
1For an extended discussion of this portrayal in Western
texts of Africans and African Americans, see Gates, "Writ-
ing."
2For useful insights on this point, see Hemenway, Hurston
228, 238-39. See also Davis's discussion of the extent to
which Western culture historically has associated women and
"lower" animalistic aspects of life.
3Gates goes so far as to suggest that "the very subject of
the text would appear to be not primarily Janie's quest but
the emulation of the phonetic, grammatical, and lexical
structuresof actual speech, an emulation designed to produce
the illusion of oral narration" (Signifying 196).
For all Joe's rigidity and self-centeredness, Hurston wants
readers to admire his accomplishments. A reliable witness,
Sam Watson, defends Joe when the other men of the town
rail against his arrogance: "'We bend which ever way he
blows,' Sam Watson agreed, 'but at dat us needs him. De
town wouldn't be nothin' if it wasn't for him"' (78).
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