SOURCE: “Why the Mule Bone Debate Goes On,” in Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Gloria L. Cronin, G. K. Hall & Co., 1998, pp. 225-28.

[In the following review, originally published in the New York Times on February 10, 1991, Gates considers Hurston's desire to portray authentic black culture in Mule Bone.]

Controversy over the play Mule Bone has existed ever since it was written by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in 1930. Not only did an authors' quarrel prevent the play from being produced, but its exclusive use of black folk vernacular has also provoked debate. In 1984, when the play became part of the publishing project of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editor of Hurston's complete works, he sent a copy of it to Gregory Mosher, then the artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago. When Mr. Mosher moved to the Lincoln Center Theater in New York, he brought the play with him, and eventually the theater decided to mount it. Dr. Gates and George Houston Bass, the literary executor of the Hughes estate, edited the play and served as consultants to the production. Mule Bone is being published this month to coincide with its world premiere Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway. Dr. Gates, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of English at Duke University, was elected to the board of Lincoln Center Theater last spring.

For a people who seem to care so much about their public image, you would think blacks would spend more energy creating the conditions for the sort of theater and art they want, rather than worrying about how they are perceived by the larger society. But many black people still seem to believe that the images of themselves projected on television, film and stage must be policed and monitored from within. Such convictions are difficult—even painful—to change. And never more so than in the case of Mule Bone, the controversial 1930 Langston Hughes-Zora Neale Hurston play that is only now being produced for the first time, almost 60 years to the day after it was originally scheduled to open.

Why should a folk comedy about the residents of a small Florida town in the 1920's cause such anxiety? Because of its exclusive use of black vernacular as the language of drama.

In analyzing the discomfort Mule Bone has aroused over the decades, the playwright Ntozake Shange has said that Hurston's language “always made black people nervous because it reflects rural diction and syntax—the creation of a different kind of English.”

“Are we still trying to figure out what is real about ourselves that we know about that makes it too dangerous to say it in public?” she asked.

Ms. Shange was speaking at a 1988 forum at Lincoln Center at which the play was read and the merits of staging it debated—“in a post-Tawana Brawley decade,” as the theater's artistic director, Gregory Mosher, put it. Few occasions have brought together more prominent black actors, directors, writers and critics than that November reading: the actors Ruby Dee, Paul Winfield, Giancarlo Esposito and Joe Morton, and the playwrights Ed Bullins and Ron Milner were among the nearly 100 people present, along with Hughes's biographer, Arnold Rampersad, the literary executor of the Hughes estate, George Houston Bass, who died last September, and myself.

As each speaker commented, often passionately, it seemed incredible that the debate was occurring in the first place. Why would anyone believe there are still aspects of black culture that should be hidden because they are somehow “embarrassing”?

Mule Bone is a revelation of life “behind the veil,” in the words of W. E. B. DuBois. It portrays what black people say and think and feel—when no white people are around—in a highly metaphorical and densely lyrical language that is as far removed from minstrelsy as a Margaux is from Ripple. It was startling to hear the play read aloud and enjoyed by actors who weren't even alive when it was written. The experience called to mind sitting in a black barbershop, or a church meeting—any one of a number of ritualized or communal settings. A sign of the boldness of Hughes (1902-1967) and Hurston (1891-1960) was that they dared to unveil one of these ritual settings and hoped to base a new idea of theater on it. Would the actors and writers in the late 1980's find poetry and music in this language, or would it call to mind minstrelsy, vaudeville and Amos ’n’ Andy? Was it Sambo and Aunt Jemima, or was it art?

Sixty years after Mule Bone was written, many black Americans still feel that their precarious political and social condition within American society warrants a guarded attitude toward the way images of their culture are projected. Even a work by two of the greatest writers in the tradition cannot escape these concerns, concerns that would lead some to censorship, presumably because of “what white people might think,” as if white racists attend black plays or read black literature to justify their prejudices. While the causes of racism are legion, literature hardly looms large among them.

Yet much of the motivation for the creation of what is now called the Harlem Renaissance—that remarkable flowering of black literature and the visual arts that occurred during the 20's, when Mule Bone was conceived—was implicitly political. Through the demonstration of sublime artistic capacity, black Americans—merely 60 years “up from slavery,” as Booker T. Washington described it—could dispel forever the nagging doubts that white Americans might have about their innate intellectual potential. Then, the argument went, blacks could easily traverse the long and bumpy road toward civil rights and social equality.

Given this burdensome role of black art, it was inevitable that debates about the nature of that art—about what today we call its “political correctness”—would be heated in black artistic circles.

These debates have proved to be rancorous, from that 20's renaissance through the battles between social realism and symbolism in the 30's to the militant black arts movement in the 60's. More recently, there have been bitter arguments about sexism, misogyny and the depiction of black women and men in the works of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Michele Wallace and Ms. Shange, as well as controversies about the writings of such social critics as Shelby Steele and Stanley Crouch. “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?”—the subject of a forum published by DuBois in The Crisis magazine in the mid-20's—can be identified as the dominant concern of black artists and their critics for the last 70 years.

Black art in the 20th century, then, is a pivotal arena in which to chart worries about “political correctness.” The burden of representing “the race” in accordance with explicitly political programs can have a devastating impact on black creativity. Perhaps only black musicians and their music, until rap arose, have escaped this problem, because so much of what they composed was in nonverbal forms and because historically black music existed primarily for a black market. Categorized that way, it escaped the gaze of white Americans who, paradoxically, are the principal concern of those who would police the political effects of black art.

But such fears were not for the likes of Zora Neale Hurston. In April 1928 she wrote Hughes about her interest in a culturally authentic African-American theater, one constructed on a foundation of black vernacular: “Did I tell you about the new, the real Negro theater I plan? Well, I shall, or rather we shall act out the folk tales, however short, with the abrupt angularity and naivete of the primitive 'bama Nigger.” It would be, she assured him, “a really new departure in the drama.”

Hurston and Hughes did more than share the dream of a vernacular theater. They also established themselves as creative writers and critics by underscoring the value of black folk culture, both in itself and as the basis for formal artistic traditions. But the enormous potential of this collaborative effort was never realized, because, as Hughes wrote on his manuscript copy of the play's text, “the authors fell out.”

Exactly why they “fell out” has never been clear, but the story of this abortive collaboration is one of the most curious in American literary history. For whatever reason, Hurston would copyright Mule Bone in her own name and deny Hughes's role in its writing.

The action of their play turns on a triangle of desire between a guitarist, Jim Weston (played by Kenny Neal), and an unnamed dancer (Dave Carter Eric Ware), who are best friends as well as a musical duo, and their growing rivalry for the affections of Daisy Taylor (Akosua Busia). Directed by Michael Schultz, Mule Bone has a score by Taj Mahal, who has set five Langston Hughes poems to music and composed four songs for the Lincoln Center production.

Eventually, the two friends quarrel and Weston strikes Carter with the hock bone of an “ole yaller mule.” He is arrested and his trial forms the heart of the play. The trial, and most of the second act, takes place in the Macedonia Baptist Church, converted into a courthouse for the occasion, with Mayor Joe Clark (Samuel E. Wright) presiding. The resolution of the case turns upon an amusing biblical exegesis: Can a mule bone be a criminal weapon? If so, then Weston is guilty; if not, he is innocent.

Using Judges 18:18, Carter's “attorney” (his minister, played by Arthur French) proves that since a donkey is the father of a mule, and since Samson slew 3,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, and since “de further back you gits on uh mule de more dangerous he gits, an' if de jawbone slewed 3,000 people, by de time you gits back tuh his hocks it's pizen enough tuh kill 10,000.” Therefore, “I ask y'all, whut kin be mo' dangerous dan uh mule bone?” Weston is banished from the town, which was based on Hurston's own Eatonville, Fla. The final scene depicts the two friends' reconciliation after both reject Daisy's demand that her husband get a proper job.

What is so controversial about all this? Hughes and Hurston develop their drama by imitating and repeating historical black folk rituals. Black folklore and Southern rural black vernacular English served as the foundation for what they hoped would be a truly new art form. It would refute the long racist tradition, in minstresly and vaudeville, of black characters as ignorant buffoons and black vernacular English as the language of idiots, of those “darkies” who had peopled the American stage for a full century before Mule Bone.

This explains why they subtitled their play A Comedy of Negro Life and why they claimed that it was “the first real Negro folk comedy.” By using the vernacular tradition as the basis of their play—indeed, as the basis of a new theory of black drama—Hurston and Hughes sought to create a work that would undo a century of racist representations of black people.

It is clear that Hurston and Hughes believed the time had come to lift the veil that separates black culture from white, allowing black art to speak in its own voice, without prior restraint. Had they not fallen out, one can only wonder at the effect that a successful Broadway production of Mule Bone in the early 1930's might have had on the development of black theater.