week 11, entry two

11/10

From Mule-Bone and from “Long Gone” by Sterling Brown

Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes’ collaboration on Mule-Bone explores similar themes to Sterling Brown’s poem “Long Gone.” The two works detail men who have some spirit that resists conventionality and the usual means of living. In “Long Gone” the speaker talks about a restlessness preventing him from planting any permanent residence. Troubling about the speaker’s lifestyle are the occupations seemingly available, options Hurston and Hughes bring to the forefront in Mule-Bone. Both Jim and Dave reject hard labor, which consequently rules out any future with Daisy, a woman who works as a house servant for a white Southern family. Jim seems content to play music for the rest of his life; Dave seems content to dance for the rest of his life.

The restlessness that leads the speaker from Brown’s poem and Jim and Dave to reject some life security are perhaps the lasting effects of slavery, prejudice, and a poor quality of life in the South for blacks. Jim and Dave’s ambition to make the town feel jealous, boiling a mule bone down to gravy, is on some levels a symbolic gesture, but the basic level ludicrous and almost another comedic line in a short excerpt full of one liners. Their ambition falls short in the foresight because both men are painted as constant consumers. Dave had his fill of Daisy last night, Jim got into exile from wanting too much. The two characters’ day-to-day existence and consumption definitely defies the Talented Tenth ethos. The speaker in “Long Gone” seems to have greater ambitions because there is the recognition that his present actions can lead to an uncertain future: “I don’t know which way I’m travelin’…” The poem on one hand glorifies the immense possibility of uncertainty and mystery but at the same time underneath that optimism is the nagging conscience that being a vagabond denies stability.

Week 11, entry one

Bontemps’ and Hughes’ poetry each identify in nature some artifact of black heritage. In Hughes’ poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the speaker traces his toiling to rivers and the accompanying civilizations that rose along those rivers. The slave identity is linked to the richness of those civilizations but the perspective seems to be from the outside looking in. Responsible for the grandeur we can still recognize those civilizations for today but never really credited for it nor ever really benefited from the civilizations.

Bontemps seems to be reminded of suffering when he looks at nature as telling the history of black people. While Hughes explicitly marks the effect of meditating on history and heritage through nature with the line: “My soul has grown deep like rivers,” Bontemps seems to have an implied ruefulness when he writes: “It would be great / To touch the pieces of glory with our hands.” That ruefulness than colors the line “All of them get big in time and people forget / What started them at first” with a disdain. Bontemps seems to point at systems that empower some while leaving others causalities of history with their stories untold. Bontemps writes: “Oh the world is covered with mountains! / Beneath each one there is something buried: / Some pile of wreckage that started it there.”

In some ways Bontemps seems distrustful of the heritage Hughes speaks of. The line “Dust shall yet devour the stones / But we shall be here when they are gone” seems sarcastic and that heritage is perhaps only a lie people tell themselves to make them feel better in light of their deplorable circumstances—chiefly, slavery.