Mule Bone

In 1931 Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes began to collaborate on a comedy called Mule Bone. They worked in secret because their patron, Charlotte Mason, disapproved of theatrical ventures. Hughes and Hurston were exploring a new concept of theater, free of the distortions of minstrelsy, to be based on daily rituals of life in African American communities and performed with music and dance. The collaboration produced bitter recriminations and charges of plagiarism but no play. Hurston and Hughes never spoke again, and their dream of a “real Negro theatre” was stillborn.

Based on a folktale, “The Bone of Contention”, which Hurston had collected and Hughes adapted, Mule Bone was a series of oral and musical performances connected by the slenderest of plots. Guitar-playing Jim and dancing Dave are rivals for a woman, Daisy. When their musical and verbal dueling turns physical, Jim hits Dave with a mule bone. In the second act a trial divides the loyalties of the Eatonville townspeople: the Baptists versus the Methodists. The Baptist pastor demonstrates Jim's guilt by proving, according to scriptural citation, that a mule bone is a lethal weapon. Jim is expelled from Eatonville. In the final act Jim, Dave, and Daisy meet outside of town, and the two men reaffirm their friendship.Mule Bone was finally produced by New York City's Lincoln Center in 1991, featuring veteran black performers and directed by Michael Schultz. A Hurston figure, dressed in the coat, hat, and fur skins familiar to many from an often reproduced photograph by Carl Van Vechten, provided a new prologue and coda. Crafted by editor George Bass, these monologues echo the introduction to Hurston's book of folklore, Mules and Men. Blues musician Taj Mahal composed the score, with most of the lyrics taken from Hughes's poetry. Reviews were mixed.

Bibliography

• —Cheryl A. Wall

Zora Neale Hurston

LANGSTON HUGHES 1930

Mule Bone was written in 1930. It was a joint collaboration between noted African-American authors Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, who joined forces to write a play based on a folktale, “The Bone of Contention,” that Hurston had discovered in her anthropological studies. Both writers conceived the play as representative of authentic black comedy. Shortly after the play’s creation, however, Hurston copyrighted the play in her name only. The two authors had a falling out and did not speak to one another again. A legal battle ensued and, because of those legal issues, the play could not be produced during either writer’s lifetime.

Mule Bone remained locked away. Few people read the play and it was largely forgotten until critic and historian Henry Louis Gates discovered the play in the early-1980s. Mule Bone was not performed on stage until 1991.

In many ways, Mule Bone has the ability to evoke both discussion and controversy. Hurston and Hughes felt that by incorporating a black folktale and southern black vernacular English into their play, they could refute a racist tradition of black characters as ignorant. However, when the play was finally developed for the stage more than sixty years later, there were concerns that this comedy might, instead, recall stereotypes and bring back the very issues that the authors had hoped to refute. It was thought that the play, as viewed by a audience in the 1990s, might appear to cast blacks as backward or ignorant. The director sought to mitigate that problem by including a section of Hurston’s writings that explained her views on black vernacular English. Each writer brought separate talents to the writing of Mule Bone. Hughes was primarily a poet; Hurston was an essayist and novelist. Their quarrel ended what might have been a successful collaboration. As it stands today, Mule Bone is still considered a significant work of drama and is notable as an early work of African-American theatre.