Lords of Sounds and Lesser Things
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Work might be better conceptualized by examining the range of work that African-American women actually perform. Work as alienated labor can be economically exploitative, physically demanding, and intellectually deadening—the type of work long associated with Black women's status as "mule." Alienated labor can be paid—the case of Black women in domestic service, those Black women working as dishwashers, dry-cleaning assistants, cooks, and health-care assistants, as well as some professional Black women engaged in corporate mammy work; or it can be unpaid, as with the seemingly never-ending chores of many Black grandmothers and Black single mothers. But work can also be empowering and creative, even if it physically challenging and appears to be demeaning.
—Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought1
My principal question, phrased plainly, is: what different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?
—Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human2
Let's face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. "Peaches" and "Brown Sugar," "Sapphire" and "Earth Mother," "Aunty," "Granny," God's "Holy Fool," a "Miss Ebony First," or "Black Woman at the Podium": I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.
—Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book"
Throughout Zora Neale Hurston's corpus, we find any number of moments marked by the presence of nonhuman animals that buck expectations rooted in a normative zoological framework for creaturely behavior—consider the goat that flags a train in Mules and Men or the revenge-seeking rattlesnake in her short story "Sweat"—but nowhere is this desire to render the insurgent potential of animal life more vividly on display than [End Page 29] in her 1937 masterwork Their Eyes Were Watching God. Therein, Hurston crafts a world in which animals perform species in a fashion that destabilizes and defamiliarizes normative expectations around not only animal interiority but also animal sociality. My aim herein is to offer an alternative reading of the way that the figure of the mule, in particular, appears in the text, one that strains against the grain of how the mule has historically been marked in twentieth-century literary criticism and elsewhere, that is, as largely or solely a site of gendered oppression, labor that is taken for granted and rendered imperceptible. Though I will argue that these regulatory forces are often at work when the mule appears on the scene as a signifier, I will also argue that such forces are never the totality of what is present, that muleness indeed represents otherworldly duress but also the potential for an otherwise world, that is, a radically different set of social and political relations, in the midst of and in spite of that constraint.
Hence, what follows is an extended reading of the way that muleness moves through the text as an analytic of power, how Hurston returns to the figure of the mule again and again—sometimes even when there are no mules as such present in a given scene—in order to elucidate the power relations that produce the mule as a form of animal life, which is also to say, a creature invented for the sake of labor and labor alone, as well as a useful metonym for describing the experiences of black women living under patriarchy's unremitting pressures. Through a close reading of several key scenes from the text and an engagement with black feminist thinkers such as Hortense Spillers, I intend to make an argument for the mule as an especially generative site of inquiry and imagination not only in Hurston's oeuvre but in the field of black literary theory more broadly. I seek to illuminate the ways in which a critical engagement...
