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150 Hemingway’s Religious Odyssey The Afro-Cuban Connection in Two Stories and The Old Man and the Sea larry grimes In the summer of 1995, as I toured Hemingway’s home, I saw in the upper right quadrant of the desk in his study off the little bedroom at the Finca Vigía a curious cluster of articles: a card printed with “The Prayer of St. Ignatius,” a small carved African mask, and an ashtray containing lucky stones and curative buckeyes. Later, this “accidental altar” would call to my mind the larger, more elaborate altars maintained by practitioners of the Afro-Cuban religions.1 Such faiths evolved in Cuba before the end of slavery, as the African religions of Yoruba and Kongo slaves evolved to express themselves through the hagiography and ritual of the Catholic Church. The Afro-Cuban connection settled more firmly in my mind when my Afro-Cuban guide through the Finca Vigía in the village of San Francico de Paula, Hemingway specialist Joaquín Bernado Gómez Borrego, pointed from the desk to an African antelope skin visible under Hemingway’s typewriter in the little bedroom. There, he told me, Hemingway would stand on the skin as he wrote, to absorb special powers. Bernado also pointed out a walking stick of wood from Africa said to have healing properties . Life in the Finca was regulated, at least in part it seemed, by the spirit that pulses through Afro-Cuban religions in the Caribbean.2 Hemingway first incorporates Afro-Cuban religion into his fiction in two short stories from the 1930s set in Cuba. The first, “One Trip Across,” initially appeared in Cosmopolitan in April 1934 and later was subsumed, with only minor revisions, as part 1 of Hemingway’s 1937 novel To Have and Have Not. The second story, “Nobody Ever Dies,” appeared in Cosmopolitan in March 1939. Hemingway brings in Afro-Cuban religion by including a similar minor character (perhaps the same one) in both stories: a black man with blue Voodoo beads.3 Appearing first in “One Trip Across,” this Afro-Cuban religious devotee Hemingway’s Religious Odyssey 151 literally launches the story: “Just then this nigger we had getting bait comes down the dock and I told Eddy to get ready to cast her off” (385). “Just then” and “cast off,” both action markers, accompany the entrance of a man who is described as “a real black nigger, smart and gloomy, with blue voodoo beads around his neck under his shirt, and an old straw hat” (385). Upon his arrival, the fishing expedition begins. With his departure, it ends, and like his entrance, his exit is emphatic. Hemingway writes: “The nigger gets his ball of twine he used for tying baits and his dark glasses, puts on his straw hat and goes without saying good-by. He was a nigger that never thought much of any of us” (391). Between his entrance and exit, Harry Morgan says, “I gave the nigger the wheel” (386), and he is at the wheel when the boat passes the Morro on its way back to the dock. Although the man with the voodoo beads is outside and above the action during most of the fishing expedition, as Harry says to Johnson , “He’s necessary” (385). To understand just how “necessary,” matters of race and ethnicity must be addressed directly. First, I think it important to neutralize the term nigger and move the discussion beyond charges of racism against Hemingway. The word, as used in this story, seems precise and loaded with powerful, positive meaning. Henry Louis Gates Jr. begins a groundbreaking essay with this epigram: “Signification is the nigger’s occupation” (Gates 285). So it is in “One Trip Across,” and to understand the necessity, the significance, and the signification of this black man in the story, he must be placed in his ethnoreligious context. Gates’s examination of the type to which Hemingway’s character belongs links him with a spirit Gates terms “the trickster figure in Yoruba mythology, Esu-Elegbara in Nigeria, Legba among the Fon of Dahomey, whose New World figurations— [include] . . . Echu-Elegua in Cuba” (286). The primary function of this type, which Gates embodies in the African American folk character of the Signifying Monkey, is to mediate meaning. “The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey,” Gates notes, “ . . . is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope for chiasmus itself, repeating...

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