Dramatic Deception and Black Identity in the First One and Riding the Goat
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Department of English English Faculty Publications Florida Atlantic University Libraries Year Dramatic Deception and Black Identity in The First One and Riding the Goat Taylor Hagood [email protected] This paper is posted at DigitalCommons@Florida Atlantic University. http://digitalcommons.fau.edu/eng faculty pub/2 Dramatic Deception and Black Identity in The First One and Riding the Goat hile the Harlem Renaissance marked a point of freedom from literary oppression for African American writers, W Taylor Hagood is Assistant black women still struggled to make their voices heard on the Professor of American stage of newfound black expression. Many black women play- Literature at Florida Atlantic wrights during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s responded to the one- University. His essays have act play contests created by W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. appeared recently in The Johnson in their respective journals. Crisis and Opportunity, out- Mississippi Ouarteriy, The numbering black men in competing in them, and winning. Southern Literary Joumal, Additionally, such developments as the Little Negro Theatre and The Walt Whitman Movement, the Krigwa Players, and the Howard Players brought Quarteriy Review. black women playwrights into public or at least semi-public fora. But, as Kathy A. Perkins asserts in her introduction to Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950, "black women were not in any leadership position as compared to black men" (7). And while these venues helped promote African American women's work, black female writers of the Harlem Renaissance were and have remained largely ignored until their recent re-introduction in such works as Perkins's anthology. Two important figures whose drama has been disturbingly overlooked are Zora Neale Hurston and May Miller.^ Close friends, Hurston and Miller shared ideas regarding blackness and black womanhood as well as similar approaches to the craft of composing drama. As a result, certain similarities and connec- tions can be found between their dramatic subject matter, themes, and techniques, and two plays in particular illustrate this similar- ity: Hurston's The First One and Miller's Riding the Goat. The important common element in these plays is tiheir depiction of markers or signifiers of blackness as defined by white American conventions, myths, and stereotypes of African Americanness, such as prescribed black dialect, idiom, physicality, and disposi- tion as arbitrary rather than accurate markers of race. A particu- larly useful tool for exposing the arbitrariness of racial signifiers is the trope of the goat—a creature of complex signification asso- ciated with blackness in westem tradition. Hurston and Miller dramatize these traditionally negative markers as in fact arbitrary and even false. They subvert white- and male-defined signifiers of blackness by exposing the tenuous status of the goat as signifi- er and wresting it from patriarchal definitions. In doing so, they recover past and assert new positive definitions of the goat as long-rooted in traditionally westem values and as culturally legit- imate.^ With its rich history of various sigrufications, the goat provid- ed Hurston and Miller with a figure useful for dealing with the arbitrariness of blackness signifiers. The goat has been a signifi- cant animal throughout the history of westem civilization, serv- African American Review, Volume 39, Numbers 1-2 © 2005 Taylor Hagood 55 ing as both a positive and negative nifier in pagan ideology and to some symbol. As a pagan figuration, it car- extent Jewish thinking, in Christianity, ried positive associations. Tbe Greek it became a signifier of blackness and god of forests and animals. Pan, had all of the things it represented—sexual goat's hooves, a tail, goatee, horn, and freedom, merriment, and earthiness— large phallus. And Bacchic rites, with and thus registered sexual and cultural their wine-filled laurel alters of wild threats to white control. Although by and flowing corporeality, were predi- the twentieth century no longer a dis- cated on the sexual freedom that the tinctly visible element in the construc- goat symbolized because in this ancient tion of stereotyped blackness, the culture, the goat carried the favorable goat/SatanA>lackness figuration in part connotations of youtb, merriment, composed the groundwork for the boundlessness, freedom, earthiness, image of the "Black Beast," which reg- energy, love, involvement, and inter- istered the threat of a black man's rap- course. These Dionysian festivals ing a white woman, and in its sexual included dramas—the very word licentiousness the goat remained in tragedy (tragoidia) meant "goat-song."^ alignment with racist notions of essen- In a Judaic context, the goat represent- tial blackness.* ed possibilities of atonement and tbus Tbe goat thus stands as a figura- served as a sacrificial animal. Hebrews tion rife with traditional significance, depended on the scapegoat as the crea- and Hurston and Miller utilize the ture to bear the sins of a generation multiple symbolic aspects of tbis ani- and onto which sins were cast. As a mal to fashion a trope by which to por- sacrificial figure, the goat was a vessel tray problems of African American of salvation. Christian ideology, how- female identity. In Hurston's The First ever, endowed the pagan and Jewish One and Miller's Riding the Goat, goats goat with negative associations. take center-stage in dramatizing Qie Christianity stressed tbe goafs sexual difficulties and arbitrariness of black- licentiousness and the threat and ness signifiers. Realizing that goats Satanic impulses it registers. (can) signify blackness and carry nega- Iconographically, Pan evolved into tive connotations, Hurston and Miller Satan, with goat's tail, feet, and horns. strive to expose them as arbitrary Jeffrey Burton Russell asserts that in material signs of oppression rather the Middle Ages, "Animals and mon- than natural representations of some strous demons tended to follow tbe imagined essence of blackness. For forms suggested by scripture, theology, these women writers, the goat repre- and folklore, such as snakes, dragons, sents a set of values considered either lions, goats, and bats.... The symbol- positive or negative according to pre- ism was intended to show the Devil as vailing belief systems rather than deprived of beauty, harmony, reality, something positive or negative in itself: and structure.... Among the common it represents a colonized and oppressed bestial characteristics given them were entity. tails, animal ear, goatees, claws, and paws..." (131). Ultimately, the goat The goat in fact serves as a mal- became a signifier of blackness. As leable enough emblem to permit Russell further notes, "Demons [among Hurston and Miller to equate it with other things] were blacks, who were black womanhood. As an animal vic- popularly associated with shadow and timized by western civilization's the privation of light" (49). These whims, the goat mirrors the mule, medieval figurations of devil-black- which Hurston posits as suffering at goat transferred to the New World and the hands of both white and male ultimately informed racist figurations patriarchy and thus representative of of blackness in America. Where tbe black womanhood. The goat also car- goat had originally been a positive sig- ries possibilities of female empower- ment—perhaps most significantly in 56 /AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW the Biblical incident of Rebekah and is the Valley of Ararat, three years after Jacob's deception of Isaac to steal the Flood. The scenery should be Esau's blessing. In the Genesis 27 story, arranged as follows: the patriarch Isaac promises to bless The Mountain is in the near distance. his older and favorite son Esau if Esau Its lower slopes grassy with grazing will kill a deer, prepare the meat, and herds. The very blue sky beyond that. bring it to him. Isaac's wife, Rebekah, These together form the background. hears this promise and, as Esau goes On the left downstage is a brown tent. A few shrubs are scattered here and off to hunt the desired game, plots a there over the stage indicating the tem- scheme that will help the younger son, porary camp. A rude altar is built cen- Jacob (whom she favors) gain that ter stage. A Shepherd's crook, a goat blessing. Her plan is to have Jacob pre- skin water bottle, a staff and other evi- tend to be Esau and visit his father. To dences of nomadic life lie about the entrance to the tent. To the right fool the nearly blind Isaac, she has stretches a plain clad with bright flow- Jacob dress in Esau's clothes as she pre- ers. Several sheep or goat skins are pares venison. To complete the effect, spread about on the ground upon she makes Jacob wear goatskin to which the people kneel or sit whenev- approximate Esau's hairiness, a er necessary. (80, emphases added) maneuver that successfully deceives Significantly, the left (traditionally sin- Isaac and results in Isaac's mistakenly ister) side of the scenery is associated blessing him instead of Esau. Hurston with darkness and coldness, with its and Miller read this story as an exam- dingy tent and mountainous land- ple of a woman's subversion of (west- scape, while the right side is low and em) patriarchy, using the goat—which warm and full of brightness and life the two authors would have recog- and fertility. From the outset, "goat" nized as a signifier of blackness—as a represents positive order—the goat vehicle of deception. By constructing skin bottle orders the material, water, plots of Rebekah-like deception, these that when unordered constituted the writers could usurp patriarchal defini- recent force of destruction, the Flood: tions of blackness by reclaiming goats goat skin thus designates a space of as positive signifiers. domesticity and containment, which Utilizing this trope of deception- differs from the pagan figuration of by-goat/goat-as-arbitrary-signifier, goats representing wild and unre- Zora Neale Hurston's The First One strained pleasure and bestiality.