"You Ain't Never Caught a Rabbit": Covering and Signifyin' in Alice Walker's "Nineteen Fifty-Five"

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2004 by Mickelsen, David J

As noted earlier, all of this information about Traynor is recorded by Gracie Mae's first-person narration. Traynor has covered her song, but she is covering him, too-with her (similarly incomplete) narrative. That account carries the familiar limitations of first-person narrative, including myopia and bias. For example, she is not as savvy about money as she thinks. Grade tells Traynor's agent, "that's gonna cost you" (5), asserting that "I'm not so stupid as to let them [use my song] without making 'em pay." She does indeed "make them pay," but soon Traynor is making thousands a day from the song she sold for a flat $500. Her husband, J.T., had liked the way she had been "fast and flashy and always on the go from one town to another" (6), but they now have settled contentedly into a modest lifestyle. Her perspective from this radically circumscribed world seems quite level-headed and straightforward, even serene, hence her preference for domesticated "rocking." Her descriptions of Traynor are generally non-judgmental, though she is impressed by neither his fans ("One day this is going to be a pitiful country" [20]) nor his manager ("nobody I'd like to know" [5]). I would not claim that Gracie's report is utterly neutral, but overall she seems genuinely, even maternally sympathetic to the "boy," an attachment that Walker fosters by making the age gap between Gracie and Traynor much wider than that separating Willie Mae and Elvis. She makes no pretense of fully grasping (covering) Traynor, and her account, while sometimes sardonic and even patronizing, seems generally free of irony (signifying. Indeed, part of her appeal may be precisely her stolid refusal to "play" (although my conditional anticipates a margin of uncertainty to be uncovered shortly). When we shift to the perspective of the author, however, play becomes much more important. Walker's cover gives a selective and altered version of one of the icons of mid-fifties United States popular culture, and it signifies in the process. In what follows, I want to explore the ways Walker has revised and transformed that history-and complicated it.

The year 1955 was also important for other major rock 'n' roll stars, Little Richard and Chuck Berry among them, but only Elvis ascended to iconic status (hence the bald sufficiency of his given name).8 In Walker's telling, however, the star is afflicted by existential emptiness and is far from mythic. (She even diminishes him physically, to 5'8'', from Elvis's 6'2''.) Yet Walker's demythifying cover of the star story is conventional in its own right: the exploitation of African Americans, the emptiness of stardom, and the contrasting satisfactions of "everyday use" (to allude to another Walker story) are all well-worn, albeit well-worthwhile, themes. They seem to make for an easy read. Traynor's mansion, isolation, and weight problems correspond to the familiar image of Elvis caught up in the star system, surrounded by an entourage and equipped with a trophy wife-though now these features are often conventionalized on another, mythologizing register. Army life, by Traynor's own admission, makes him more "awake" than he has been in years (10), but otherwise he lapses into somnolent, perhaps drug-induced vacuity.9 The story predictably implies that his desire to grasp the sources of Gracie's song arises from the hollowness of his own life.