Dramatic deception and black identity in The First One and Riding the Goat

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Taylor Hagood

While the Harlem Renaissance marked a point of freedom from literary oppression for African American writers, black women still struggled to make their voices heard on the stage of newfound black expression. Many black women playwrights during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s responded to the one-act play contests created by W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson in their respective journals, Crisis and Opportunity, outnumbering black men in competing in them, and winning. Additionally, such developments as the Little Negro Theatre Movement, the Krigwa Players, and the Howard Players brought black women playwrights into public or at least semi-public fora. But, as Kathy A. Perkins asserts in her introduction to Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950, "black women were not in any leadership position as compared to black men" (7). And while these venues helped promote African American women's work, black female writers of the Harlem Renaissance were and have remained largely ignored until their recent re-introduction in such works as Perkins's anthology.

Two important figures whose drama has been disturbingly overlooked are Zora Neale Hurston and May Miller. (1) Close friends, Hurston and Miller shared ideas regarding blackness and black womanhood as well as similar approaches to the craft of composing drama. As a result, certain similarities and connections can be found between their dramatic subject matter, themes, and techniques, and two plays in particular illustrate this similarity: Hurston's The First One and Miller's Riding the Goat. The important common element in these plays is their depiction of markers or signifiers of blackness as defined by white American conventions, myths, and stereotypes of African Americanness, such as prescribed black dialect, idiom, physicality, and disposition as arbitrary rather than accurate markers of race. A particularly useful tool for exposing the arbitrariness of racial signifiers is the trope of the goat--a creature of complex signification associated with blackness in western tradition. Hurston and Miller dramatize these traditionally negative markers as in fact arbitrary and even false. They subvert white- and male-defined signifiers of blackness by exposing the tenuous status of the goat as signifier and wresting it from patriarchal definitions. In doing so, they recover past and assert new positive definitions of the goat as long-rooted in traditionally western values and as culturally legitimate. (2)

With its rich history of various significations, the goat provided Hurston and Miller with a figure useful for dealing with the arbitrariness of blackness signifiers. The goat has been a significant animal throughout the history of western civilization, serving as both a positive and negative symbol. As a pagan figuration, it carried positive associations. The Greek god of forests and animals, Pan, had goat's hooves, a tail, goatee, horn, and large phallus. And Bacchic rites, with their wine-filled laurel alters of wild and flowing corporeality, were predicated on the sexual freedom that the goat symbolized because in this ancient culture, the goat carried the favorable connotations of youth, merriment, boundlessness, freedom, earthiness, energy, love, involvement, and intercourse. These Dionysian festivals included dramas--the very word tragedy (tragoidia) meant "goat-song." (3) In a Judaic context, the goat represented possibilities of atonement and thus served as a sacrificial animal. Hebrews depended on the scapegoat as the creature to bear the sins of a generation and onto which sins were cast. As a sacrificial figure, the goat was a vessel of salvation. Christian ideology, however, endowed the pagan and Jewish goat with negative associations. Christianity stressed the goat's sexual licentiousness and the threat and Satanic impulses it registers. Iconographically, Pan evolved into Satan, with goat's tail, feet, and horns. Jeffrey Burton Russell asserts that in the Middle Ages, "Animals and monstrous demons tended to follow the forms suggested by scripture, theology, and folklore, such as snakes, dragons, lions, goats, and bats.... The symbolism was intended to show the Devil as deprived of beauty, harmony, reality, and structure.... Among the common bestial characteristics given them were tails, animal ear, goatees, claws, and paws..." (131). Ultimately, the goat became a signifier of blackness. As Russell further notes, "Demons [among other things] were blacks, who were popularly associated with shadow and the privation of light" (49). These medieval figurations of devil-black-goat transferred to the New World and ultimately informed racist figurations of blackness in America. Where the goat had originally been a positive signifier in pagan ideology and to some extent Jewish thinking, in Christianity, it became a signifier of blackness and all of the things it represented--sexual freedom, merriment, and earthiness--and thus registered sexual and cultural threats to white control. Although by the twentieth century no longer a distinctly visible element in the construction of stereotyped blackness, the goat/Satan/blackness figuration in part composed the groundwork for the image of the "Black Beast," which registered the threat of a black man's raping a white woman, and in its sexual licentiousness the goat remained in alignment with racist notions of essential blackness. (4)