Migrant Labor, Folklore, and Resistance in Hurston's Polk County: Reframing Mules and Men

Abstract

sets out to find the "hidden transcript" of a "dissident political culture" in the urban South during the 1930s and 1940s (77).2He explains his rationale for doing so:Beneath the veil of consent lies a hidden history of unorganized, everyday conflict waged by African-American working people.Once we explore in greater detail those daily conflicts and the social and cultural spaces where ordinary people felt free to articulate their opposition, we can begin to ask the questions that will enable us to rewrite the political history of the Jim Crow South to incorporate such actions and actors.(76) Kelley's article discusses forms of resistance as they occurred at home, at work, at play, and in the public at large so as to force a reconsideration of how action in daily life contributed to political change in the South.My aim in this article is to use Kelley's study of working-class resistance to launch a revisionary reading of the narrative frame of Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935).Indeed, Kelley's article begins with an epigraph from Hurston's book in which she debunks the "seeming acquiescence" of the smiling Negro laborer.In Hurston's collection of folklore, I will argue, the "hidden transcript" of everyday resistance is exposed through the narrative frame with which she surrounds her transcription of "folk"3 tales.This articulation of resistance through folklore is most evident in the middle pages of her book, in which Hurston describes her visit to a lumber camp in Polk County, Florida.In this section, Hurston at first experiences the workers' efforts to resist her intrusion on the scene because they think she is a detective.As she gains their acceptance, however, she is able to record their tales.She displays the migrant laborers telling tales on the job, and in so doing she shows how the tales form a discourse of dissent relating to the conditions of labor in the company town.