Although I wrote about Hurston's integration of standard English and black vernacular in the previous chapter on free indirect discourse, it is important to note that she also explores the dichotomy of male and female expression. And although women signify, I believe that Hurston saw it clearly as a male's use of language. In Reading Zora, co-authors Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Barbara Johnson state that "Hurston's use of free indirect discourse is central to her larger strategy of critiquing what we might think of as a 'male writing' " (Bloom 73). This "male writing" of which Gates and Johnson speak is directly related to signifying.
Signifying may be defined as rhetorical games played out in the black vernacular tradition. It has also been called "playing the dozens," "giving a reading," or "specifying." In Black Literature and Literary Theory, Gates states that "Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in oppressive Western cultures" (6). And in Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston writes "The bookless may have difficulty in reading a paragraph in a newspaper, but when they get down to 'playing the dozens' they have no equal in America, and, I'd risk a sizable bet, in the whole world" (217).
For its eighth entry for the word "signify" The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition) gives the following definition: "To boast or brag; to make insulting remarks or insinuations." Also, following the definition, the OED includes a quotation from Zora Neale Hurston's collection of Negro folklore, Mules and Men, for its 1935 example of how the word "signify" was being used chiefly by blacks in the United States:
"Aw, woman, quit tryin' to signify."
"Ah kin signify all Ah please, Mr. Nappy-chin."
Hurston footnotes the above use of signify in her text; she glosses it as "To show off" (Mules and Men 124). The above exchange occurs between two lovers, Joe Willard and Big Sweet. The episode points out how signifying is often employed in the war between the sexes. A look at the entire conversation will illustrate this point:
"And speakin' 'bout hams," cut in Big Sweet meaningly, "if Joe Willard don't stay out of dat bunk he was in last night, Ah'm gointer sprinkle some salt down his back and sugar cure his hams."Joe snatched his pole out of the water with a jerk and glared at Big Sweet, who stood sidewise looking at him most pointedly.
"Aw, woman, quit tryin' to signify."
"Ah kin signify all Ah please, Mr. Nappy-chin, so long as Ah know what Ah'm talkin' about."
"See dat?" Joe appealed to the other men. "We git a day off and figger we kin ketch some fish and enjoy ourselves, but naw, some wimmins got to drag behind us, even to de lake." (124)
One of the "wimmins" happens to be Hurston, a professional anthropologist-folklorist, who is recording this conversation which continues with Big Sweet:
"You didn't figger Ah was draggin' behind you when you was bringin' dat Sears and Roebuck catalogue over to my house and beggin' me to choose my ruthers. Lemme tell you something, any time Ah shack up wid any man Ah gives myself de privilege to go wherever he might be, night or day. Ah got de law in my mouth""Lawd, ain't she specifyin'!" sniggered Wiley. (124)
Although the the above exchange depicts a man and a woman who are involved in a power struggle, a man's ability to signify well can prove sexually stimulating and endearing to a woman. The art of mimicry is an entertaining form of signifying at which Janie's third husband Tea Cake is especially skilled. In "Characteristics of Negro Expression" Hurston writes about how blacks are world famous as mimics: ". . . let us say that the art of mimicry ied in the Negro than in other racial groups. He does it as the mocking-bird does it, for the love of it, and not because he wishes to be like the one imitated" (60).
At one point during their courtship, Janie overhears Tea Cake "mimicking the tuning of a guitar. He frowned and struggled with the pegled with the pegs of his imaginary instrument watching her out of the corner of his eye with that secret joke playing over his face" (Their Eyes 96). And Janie enjoys Tea Cake's playful ways: " 'Crazy thing!' Janie commented, beaming out with light" (97). In Dust Tracks on a Road Hurston writes about her friendship with Big Sweet, also an accomplished signifier. Hurston writes that "she [Big Sweet] had told me, 'You sho is crazy!' Which is a way of saying I was witty" (188). Hurston was proud of her ability to signify, and some of her best friends and most memorable characters are skilled in the art of signifying. Hurston describes the crazy (witty) Tea Cake through Janie in free indirect discourse:
He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom - a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God. (101-2)
A discussion of signifying without mention of the signifying monkey would be incomplete. Hurston grew up hearing monkey stories, "in which the Negro, sometimes symbolized by the monkey, and sometimes named outright, ran off with the wrong understanding of what he had seen and heard" (Dust Tracks 224). Hurston continues:
There was a general acceptance of the monkey as kinfolks. Perhaps it was some distant memory of tribal monkey reverence from Africa which had been forgotten in the main, but remembered in some vague way. Perhaps it was an acknowledgment of our talent for mimicry with the monkey as a symbol. (224)
In order to define signifying in terms of the signifying monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Signifying Monkey, offers Roger D. Abrahams' definition. Abrahams, "a well-known and highly regarded literary critic, linguist, and anthropologist" (74) gives the following definition: "The name 'Signifying Monkey' shows [the hero] to be a trickster, 'signifying' being the language of trickery, that set of words or gestures which arrives at 'direction through indirection' " (74).
Abrahams calls the signifying monkey a trickster; in black folklore the devil, a culture hero, is also considered a trickster. Robert Hemenway in Zora Neale Hurston states:
The origin of the identification between black story-teller and devil trickster is almost impossible to discover and may even be an African survival. Its human logic is self-evident. Confronted with the hypocrisy and paradox of white Christianity's sanction of slavery, the slave might naturally identify with an opposing power. The linguistic effects of this identification, adapted through history, can be striking. (224)
Because of this strong identification between the devil and the storyteller, it is not so surprising that Hurston, a black pagan storyteller, says that she made a covenant with the devil during a hoodoo initiation ceremony in New Orleans.
Hurston comes to realize that signifying can be very cruel to the person signified upon. Hurston writes: "I found the Negro, and always the blackest Negro, being made the butt of all jokes - particularly black women" (Dust Tracks 225). An example of this is when Joe Starks, Janie's second husband and mayor of Eatonville, ridicules her about her age in front of customers at his store. What he is doing, in fact, is trying to conceal his own advancing age by pointing out Janie's age while she is still a relatively young woman. Joe Starks signifies on Janie in direct discourse: "I god amighty! A woman stay round uh store till she get old as Methusalem and still can't cut a little thing like a plug of tobacco! Don't stand dere rollin' yo' pop eyes at me wid yo' rump hangin' nearly to yo' knees!" (Their Eyes 74). We know that Joe Starks is lying about Janie's "rump," because years later when she returns to Eatonville after the death of her third husband, Tea Cake, "The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets . . ." (2).
Although the men take mental note of Janie's firm buttocks, they do not comment on it orally; when Hurston's characters speak in their own voices in direct discourse they tend to signify. Janie's grandmother Nanny, Janie's three husbands - Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake Woods - the porch sitters of Eatonville, and the migrant workers in the Everglades all signify, and they diminish Janie as they do so. Tea Cake signifies on Janie after he becomes ill with rabies and believes that she has conjured him. While Tea Cake is charming Janie by comparing her to a patch of roses, he is concealing a gun under his pillow, a gun with which he will eventually attempt to shoot her:
" . . . Everytime Ah see uh patch uh roses uh somethin' over sportin' they selves makin' out they pretty, Ah tell 'em 'Ah want yuh tuh see mah Janie sometime.' You must let de flowers see yuh sometimes, heah, Janie?""You keep dat up, Tea Cake, Ah'll b'lieve yuh after while," Janie said archly and fixed him back in bed. It was then she felt the pistol under the pillow. It gave her a quick ugly throb . . ." (Their Eyes 172)
Michael Awkward in Inspiriting Influences comments on how Tea Cake's actions fail to complement his voice:
At this point, however, his actions do not complement his words. Just after he delivers his charming suggestion that Janie exhibit her beauty to a patch of egotistical roses, she "felt the pistol under [his] pillow. . . . Never had Tea Cake slept with a pistol under his head before" . . . . His subsequent actions, then, like Joe Starks' during his lingering physical deterioration, fail to authenticate his voice. (42)
Not only are the signifiers in Their Eyes engaged in a futile struggle for power, they also fail to see that their words do not reflect reality. In Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century, Michael Cooke points out that "the signifier is the one who as best he can makes up for a lack of social power with an exercise of intellectual or critical power. . . . But signifying harbors a danger. . . . Signifying and sheer wishful thinking tend to coincide . . ." (26-29).
There was a time when Janie enjoyed the signifying of the porch-sitters whom she considered quite harmless; signifying was a pleasant pastime "When the people sat around on the porch and passed around pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see . . ." (Their Eyes 48). But when she returns from the Everglades after the hurricane and after Tea Cake's death, Janie sees the porch-sitters differently:
But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed notions through their mouths. They sat in judgment. . . . They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. (1-2)
Nanny was cruelly signifying when she told Janie that love comes with marriage in order to convince the young Janie to marry a much older man with property. At first Janie believes Nanny's lie so she attempts to make a life with Logan Killicks, who looks "like some ole skullhead in de grave yard" (13), but "She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman" (24). It is at this moment that Janie sees through signifying and begins her metamorphosis into becoming a conjurer, creator of art.
