"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

Signifyin' may take an even more directly personal turn. At a number of junctures Walker virtually requires the reader to supplement the narrative. For example, she provides a literal blank instead of naming the song Gracie has sold to Traynor (7). This gap will be easily filled by readers operating from the covered Elvis story hoveringjust off-stage-providing one knows the details. But perhaps she is signifyin' on such facile inferential leaps. After all, the Ms. version of the story was prefaced with this "Author's Note": "This story is entirely fictional. All of the incidents are a product of the author's imagination" (55). "Incidents" is the crucial word here, since the broader parallels between Elvis and Traynor are extensive.16 In any case other, less obvious and more problematic opportunities to intervene lurk in the wings. When Grade's husband tells her, "Mama you sure looks good. . . . Wake me up when you git back" (15), a reader can justifiably guess that J.T. has love-making on his mind. But when they later take off in her new Cadillac and don't come back for two days (9), the reader may not be able to respond with such assurance. It is easy to speculate-to provide a cover, as I would have it. But one should also interrogate the basis for that cover. When I puzzle over Gracie's "unrealistic" diction (her use of "decibel" or "compliant" alongside "foots"), I notice that I am bringing to bear stereotypes based on my narrowly selective experience. That is, my cover replicates a stereotype rather than an individual. Has Walker been signifyin' on me? Baiting me? Is the fact that Gracie has two televisions in 1955 an authorial slip-or an author signifyin'? What I earlier called "the anxiety of expertise" might be reinscribed as the anxiety of being signified upon. Will I "pass" (a locution I use in its interracial as well as its academic sense)? The questions proliferating in this paragraph are troublingly genuine, not merely rhetorical. To successfully enter this unfamiliar niche, I must temporarily adopt another view of the world.

Gates (85) distinguishes between "third-party signifyin'" (where the target audience is unaware of the speaker's intent) and "metaphorical signifyin'" (where the target audience is aware of the speaker's intent). One might conceive of critical reading as an attempt to move from the first position to the second, and of cultural difference an obstacle for doing so in this narrative. Even the possibility of being signified upon highlights my self-consciousness about my minimal and largely literary exposure to the cultural context out of which Walker's story arises. Like Traynor, I too am guessing about meanings; like him I peer across what seems like an "unbridgeable gap." And my own struggle to uncover the subtleties of signifyin' leads me close to admitting that "I don't have the faintest notion what that [concept] means." Thus critics, too, may tumble from the pedestal, or never reach it.

This struggle to achieve familiarity evokes another term from popular music: crossover. A song popular in one market might "cross over" and succeed in another. While someone who is covering remains securely on her or his own turf, crossing over is a more ambitious and problematic activity.17 Mike Jahn has argued that "as 1955 unfurled, the notable factor in black music was the bleaching process" (11). Singers such as Nat "King" Cole, the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots, and later the Platters were all polished, "Northern," packaged in ways palatable to the pop market of the early 1950s. The reverse ("dyeing"?) might be said to apply in my attempt to cross over into (or at least toward) another culture, writing about an African American author and character by drawing upon an African American trope. As I have already suggested, this defamiliarizing process involves, however temporarily and superficially, an unsettling but welcome loss of hegemony.