Khephra Burns echoes Harrison in her assertion that dance is part of African American cultural experience:

We bring dance to just about everything we do.  We air dance à  la Jordan on the basketball courts, Ali shuffle in the ring, rock and roller-skate our way through the rush-hour jam, and can twist and shout just directing traffic.  Dance.  It’s what sisters do with their necks when they want to get you told.  And it’s there in the rhythmic gait of the young brothers on the block.  Even our hands dance when we “slap five.”  And when we dance, body and soul, we proclaim our cultural identity, distilled and stylized in rhythm and gesture.  We don’t just do the Watusi, we are the Watusi.  (44)

In her essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (date), Hurston qualifies dance as part of the “drama” and performance that is African American culture:

A Negro girl strolls past the corner lounger.  Her whole body panging and posing. A slight shoulder movement that calls attention to her bust, and that is all of a dare.  A hippy undulation below the waist that is a sheaf of promises tied with conscious power.  She is acting out “I’m a darned sweet woman and you know it.” (emphasis added, 50)

This same element of dance and performance characterizes Daisy as she “dances” before the porch-sitting men in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937):

Daisy is walking a drum tune. You can almost hear it by looking at the way she walks.  She is black and she knows that white clothes look good on her, so she wears them for dress up.  She’s got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too.  Her hair is not what you might call straight.  It’s Negro hair, but it’s got a kind of white flavor. . . . It was spread down thick and heavy over her shoulders and looked just right under a big white hat.   (105-6)

Daisy’s movements before her drooling male audience are as choreographed as any ballet, and the males respond both to her movement and her costume with ritualized competition for her attention. 

Isis’s subsequent physical movements in the first half of the story — “shaking herself” (“Isis” 9), “prancin’” (17, 18), “waving” (9), “hailing” (9), “bolting” (11, 15), “racin’ an’ rompin’ (11), “sliding down, and down, until she all but sat on her own shoulder blades” (11), “dashing” out to a cattlehand and being “lifted up” (10), “executing flank movements” (10)  —  reveal unconscious dance that defines her spirit of resistance and self-empowerment.  Such movement, Hurston presents, shows Isis’s “reaffirmation of a cosmic unity” (Harrison 67) between herself and her world.  Even as she performs the domestic tasks required of her, she dances:  She “waved the rake” (“Isis” 10) and “did a cart wheel and a few fancy steps on her way to the front” (10) where she “flung herself upon the steps” (11).  When she runs off to the carnival specifically to dance, dance for her is more choreographed, more formal, as crowds throng about to experience her power.

Isis’s free spirit -- she is “drenched in light” of self-awareness and female resistance --will not be contained or subdued, even as she realizes the past and potential violent consequences of her defiance.  She doesn’t vocalize her resistance with sassy back talk, as she knows the physical dangers of such.  Offering a cultural context for Isis’s nonverbal resistance, bell hooks explains:

In the world of the southern black community I grew up in, “back talk” and “talking back” meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure.  It meant daring to disagree and sometimes it just meant having an opinion. . . .To make yourself heard if you were a child was to invite punishment, the back-hand lick, the slap across the face that would catch you unaware, or the feel of switches stinging your arms and legs. . . . [T]he punishments for these acts of speech seemed endless.   They were intended to silence me — the child — and more particularly the girl child.  Had I been a boy, they [adult authority figures] might have encouraged me to speak believing that I might someday be called to preach. There was no “calling” for talking girls, no legitimized rewarded speech.  (5-6)

Isis nevertheless orchestrates defiance and exercises agency through her instinctively rhythmic physical movements, movements which “allow the body to communicate with the expressive subtlety of the word” (Harrison 77).  Isis’s spirit “urges [her] body toward images which produce the power of language” (Harrison 77).  Her physical movements speak what cannot be said without repercussion.  Contextualizing this motion language culturally and historically, Shange adds that, for black people collectively, dance has been a way of “remember[ing] what cannot be said” (emphasis added). 

When in the second part of the story Isis escapes to dance formally at the carnival, she is celebrated as the Goddess of motion that she perceives herself to be.  With no relation to the world of consequence, Isis becomes “the Grand Exalted One” (“Isis” 15), displacing the speaker the crowd has come to hear.  Her dancing controls the crowd of children and adults who are mysteriously drawn to her performance: 

Isis danced because she couldn’t help it.  A crowd of children gathered admiringly about her as she wheeled lightly about, hand on hip . . .. Some grown people joined the children about her . . .. The band was hushed, but Isis danced on, the crowd clapping their hands for her.  No one listened to the Exalted one, for little by little the multitude had surrounded the small brown dancer.  (“Isis” 15)

With the crowd of black, white, male, female, old, and young thronged about her, Isis controls.⁶  She is the center of their world, just as she is the center of her own world.  As she “imitates a Spanish dancer she had seen in a medicine show some time before” (“Isis” 14), rules and consequences are no more.  In this moment and under these circumstances, Isis seems the inspiration for Shange’s Hispanic dancer, Sechita, who, consciously subverting her southern white male audience’s perception and treatment of her as degraded and worthless, becomes in her mind the “sechita / egyptian / ‘goddess of creativity’ 2nd millenium / . . . sechita / goddess / the recordin of history” (fcg 24).  In Sechita’s mind, she is not the lowly tent dancer whom the drunken men use to vent their passions, but rather “nefertiti / approachin her own tomb / . . . sechita / goddess / of love / egypt / 2nd millenium / performin the rites / the conjuring of men / conjuring the spirit” (fcg 25-26).  Sechita’s imagination will not allow her to become the men’s surrogate prostitute as they toss coins between her dancing thighs.  Rather, she transforms herself psychologically into the conjuring woman commanding the arrogant and condescending men to give up their coins to her against their wills.  So, too, as she dances before “a gaping crowd” (“Isis” 15), Isis is a spirit exalted, a spirit that transcends circumstances and magnetically pulls the crowd toward her.  In this moment, Hurston equates Isis’s dance to “religious ritual . . . that . . . affirm[s] the social organization of the community” (Harrison 68).  Isis’s dance is not practiced but a spontaneous one derived from a free spirit and an internal rhythm that the world around her lacks or refuses to legitimize.   

Isis’s grandmother is the primary force demanding of Isis a different order.  Her grandmother sees in Isis a waywardness, moral and otherwise, that she feels is dangerous to the child.  Early in the story she tells Isis she is “too ‘oomanish  jumpin’ up in everybody’s face dat pass” (emphasis added, “Isis” 9).  Because Isis is behaving too grown or womanish⁷ -- becoming a woman physically and exhibiting a free spirit that threatens patriarchy — she is reminiscent of the young Hurston who describes herself as a “sassy little colored girl who just had to talk back at established authority and that establishment hated back talk worse than barbed-wire pie” (Dust Tracks 68).  Such behavior and attitude can mean only harm to the young girl, at least in Grandma Potts’s mind, and Grandma tries to become Isis’s masculinized owner and protector, setting down rules specifically for girls that Isis boldly ignores: 

Now there are certain things that Grandma Potts felt no one of this female persuasion should do — one was sit with the knees separated, ‘settin’ brazen’ she called it; another was whistling, another playing with boys.  Finally, a lady must never cross her legs.  (“Isis” 11)

These same injunctions -- how to live “like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming” -- are tonally and thematically reminiscent of the admonitions offered to a young Caribbean girl presumably from an adult woman in Jamaica Kincaid's much anthologized story “Girl” (1984).  In the adult woman's litany of commands on successful living as a “lady” -- how to wash clothes, how to walk, how to talk, how to iron her father’s pants, how to cook, how to make a blouse, how to set a table, how to smile, how to conduct herself around men -- the young girl boldly is reminded that she is “not a boy” and will never be allowed an opportunity to think or to act independently.  Allegedly for the little girl’s own safety and survival, the instructions and commands from the older woman become boxes that restrict and restrain the little girl’s thinking, actions, and free spirit.

Grandma Potts — whose name suggests her desire to restrict Isis’s spiritual growth by restricting her physical movement, as well as to confine Isis to domestic duties — is herself unwilling to follow her natural bent toward dance.  “Potts” as an anagram for “stop” further suggests the literal and figurative limits the grandmother tries to impose on Isis’s independent and instinctive movements.  Although Grandma herself sleeps and complains of rheumatism, she, too, has potential as a dancer.  Her sewing is a form of dancing, as is her  “bolting” (“Isis” 14) in one part of the story.  Yet Grandma has lost the urge to move, or has chosen to replace her natural urges with materialistic values and patriarchal ideals. 

When Isis is missing and then returned by the “kind” suspicious white folks, Grandma’s attention is not on Isis’s safety and wellbeing, as she earlier implies, but on the value of her new red tablecloth which Isis has symbolically transformed into an elaborate dancing costume.  In this action, Isis demonstrates her bold rejection of domesticity, and her ability to create life for herself out of the mundane and the restrictive.  When Grandma literally accepts money for the tablecloth and Isis, we see that she is a conspirator in trying to restrict her granddaughter’s motion(s), much like Nanny of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, who “sells” her granddaughter Janie Mae Crawford to Logan Killicks because of his land and mules.  Both grandmothers embody feminized patriarchy driven by capitalist gain.  Potts’s and Nanny’s complicity with patriarchy and awareness of their granddaughters’ transgressiveness are not analyzed.  Perhaps these similar but different characterizations are a matter of genre, or a consequence of Hurston’s own development as a writer, or both.  What remains common to both women is their focus on materialism and their desperate attempts to control their granddaughters’ lives.  

In a parent-child reversal of authority, Isis sees herself as the instrument to liberate her metaphorically potted and sleeping grandmother when she tries to shave off Potts’s beard: Isis “saw the straggling beard on Grandma’s chin . . .. They were long gray hairs curled every here and there against the dark brown skin.  Isis was moved with pity for her mother's mother” (“Isis” 12).  Granny Potts violently refuses Isis’s efforts to save her.  Potts’s threats of violence, and those of Isis’s father (“Isis” 16), are largely the impetus for Isis’s adventure outside the yard, outside the home, and into the world. 

Grandma Potts’s fears about Isis and her dancing are also reminiscent of  Hurston’s Nanny.  In the novel, Nanny fears for Janie when the young woman discovers “marriage” under the pear tree and then sees “shiftless” Johnny Taylor in an attractively different light (25).  Nanny's efforts to “save” Janie from her sexuality, however contextualized within her own personal history as a former slave available sexually to her master’s whims, become prescriptions that Janie follows publicly for awhile but rejects spiritually.  Her spirit is freed when Nanny dies, and when she is ultimately able to experience with Tea Cake the feelings from her pear tree revelation.  There is no sense, however, that Isis on any conscious level connects her dancing and free spirit with sexuality.  Rather, Hurston’s narrator makes this connection implicitly through details of Isis’s relations with men:  “The Robinson brothers, white cattlemen, were particularly fond of her and always extended a stirrup for her to climb up behind one of them for a short ride, or let her try to crack the long bull whips . . . at the cows” (“Isis” 10).  On another occasion, Isis is described as “snuggling down behind [Jim Robinson] in the saddle” (“Isis” 10).  Isis’s freedom is that of Jean Toomer’s twelve-year-old Karintha who is also sexualized by men who “wish to ripen a growing thing too soon” (1).⁸  


Notes

 * A slightly different version of this essay is in The Imagined Self: Re-visioning the African American Text, ed. Wilfred D. Samuels (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, forthcoming1999), the proceedings of the American Literature Association’s 1997 Symposium on African American literature.  

¹  Shange, for colored girls, xv.  Subsequent references to this choreopoem will be cited parenthetically in this essay as fcg with page number.

2  In this popular and controversial essay, Hurston proclaims her life as one not molded or controlled by her ancestral slave past.  With other such statements and sentiments, many of her generally black male contemporaries questioned her racial allegiance and solidarity.

³  Hurston, “Isis,” in Spunk: The Selected Stories (1985), 9.  Subsequent references to this story will be cited parenthetically in the text as “Isis” with page number.  

⁴  Hurston’s association of dance with bird imagery directly connects with Paul Carter Harrison’s discussion of the African dance Sokadae that is “intimately connected with the oral tradition of the people.”  In a song that explains the meaning of the dance, “The Weaver bird’s child, the orphan, comes to dance a dance that belongs to it (which [it] owns)” (69).  Like the Weaver bird’s child, Isis is socially and spiritually orphaned, and is literally orphaned at the story’s end.  

Cheryl Warren Mattox’s rendition of “Little Sally Walker,” from the collection Shake it to the One that You Love the Best (1989), offers a second verse that connects Sally’s self-healing with dance and flying:

Little Sally Walker, sittin’ in a saucer,

Cryin’ for the old man to come for the dollar.

Ride, Sally, ride.

Put your hands on your hips

And let your backbone slip.

And fly to the east, and fly to the west,

And fly to the one that you love the best.

Ah, shake to the east, ah, shake it to the west,

Ah, shake to the one that you love the best.  (emphasis added, 8)  

It would not be inappropriate to connect dancing with flying, as in the African American folktale, “The People Could Fly,” wherein slaves escape the troubles of their lives through flight.  See the tale in Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985), 166-73.  And when rhythm and blues singer Patti LaBelle offers her all-consuming rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” one of her signature gestures during the performance is to flap her hands and arms as though she is flying during number.  

⁵  “Who Says Black Folks Could Sing and Dance?” 78.  Shange offers that for black people collectively, “Our music and dance is our answer to our interaction with the world—all of it” (80).  She sees a body in motion as text and speech.  

⁶  Cheryl Yvette Hunt’s poem, “When She Danced,” from her unpublished collection As Women Will (1984), conveys this same cosmic and spiritual energy derived through and from a female’s dance:

When Caldonia danced

Earths would quake

Tidals would wave

Death would wake

She was freedom

She was fame

When Caldonia danced

When Caldonia danced

Hills would mountain

Lightning would strike

Volcanos  would fountain

It was saintly

It was sin

When Caldonia danced

When Caldonia danced

The Hungry would nourish

Cactus would flower

Love would flourish

She was laughter

She was life

When Caldonia danced.   

Notice the blurred lines between the sacred and the sexual, between the religious and the sensual, the physical and the spiritual — lines all blurred and complicated in dance, or physical movements of the body.  Aretha Franklin’s pop/soul tune “Spirit in the Dark,” released originally on 6 May 1970, reveals the blurred lines between the sexual and the sacred.  The song’s narrator urges her sisters and brothers to dance as Little Sally Walker does — “to move and groove with the spirit,” especially in the dark.  As the narrator loses herself in the spirit and in the dance, the spirit gets all in her hands and in her knees and becomes celebration. 

⁷  Alice Walker offers a cultural context for behavior attributed to young black females:  “Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.  Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for [a young black girl].  Interested in grown-up doings.  Acting grown up. Being grown up” (In Search, xi).  In his Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (1994), Clarence Major defines “womanish” as a term used during the 1900s-1940s describing “a [black] female child acting like an adult” (513).  Both definitions reveal boundary-overstepping in racial and gender-specific terms.  According to some adult perspectives, womanish little girls are acting too grown for their own good.  Walker further clarifies that womanist consciousness involves a black female’s love of music, dance, the Spirit, and herself.   

⁸  Like Karintha, Isis is a “tomboy”; they both torture dogs and cows and possess a “wild” spirit that will not be controlled by others around them.  

⁹  Earlier in the autobiography, Hurston alludes to Mrs. Mason’s “power” over her and other minority writers under her “advisory.”  Mason “summons” them, and she chastises Hurston particularly for thinking certain thoughts (128-29).  

¹⁰  Shange uses the Little Sally Walker play song in for colored girls to structure and signal the young girls’ move from childhood innocence to adult female experience (fcg 4).  

¹¹  See Lawrence W. Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977).  “Little Sally Walker” is a womanish African American revision of “Little Sally Water,” a little white girls’ play song of the 1890s:

Little Sally Water,

Sitting in a saucer,

Weeping and crying for some one to love her.

Rise, Sally, rise,

Wipe off your eyes;

Turn to the east,

Turn to the west,

Turn to the one that you love the best.

While there is defiance in this version, it lacks the raw defiance, the sensuality, and the “attitude” of the black girls’ version, with its hip shaking and backbone slipping as contrasted with the milder, gentler “turning” here.  Clara Yoffie distinguishes: “[The black girls] have syncopated the rhythm, and they accompany the hand-clapping with a ‘jazz’ and ‘swing’ rhythm of the body” (39-41).  This womanish attitude is also expressed in a version provided me by an undergraduate African American female student in a Spring 1996 English course I taught at the University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa, entitled “Zora Neale Hurston and the African American Literary Imagination.”  Kenya Lavendar says that she grew up singing and dancing to this raw, sassier version:

Lil’ Sally Walker,

Walkin’ down the street.

She don’t know what she doin,’

But she always followin’ me.

I said, “No! Go ‘n girl!

Shake that thang!

Shake that thang! Stop!

Go ‘n girl!

Shake that thang!

Shake that thang! Stop!” 

In her commentary on the play song, Cheryl Warren Mattox speculates, “If the character ‘Sally Walker’ had been a real little girl, she would have been described as ‘old beyond her years.’  The motions indicated by the lyrics require sassy, sophisticated steps” (8).  Mattox includes two other “Sally” play songs that involve and deal with dancing: “Here Comes Sally,” which presents Sally “steppin’ back” and “struttin’ down the alley all night long” (17); and “Old Lady Sally Wants to Jump,” which presents a lady “prancin,’ flouncin,’ and flirting” to attract male attention.

In their book, Juba This and Juba That (1996), Darlene P. and Derek S. Hopson include the “Little Sally Walker” game with instructions and drawings on its playing and singing (132-33).  

References

Burns, Khephra.  “Legacy.”  Essence 23 (Feb. 1993): 44.

Franklin, Aretha. “Spirit in the Dark.”  Aretha Franklin: 30 Greatest Hits.  Atlantic Recording Corp., 1985.

Hamilton, Virginia.  The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales.  New York: Knopf, 1985.

Harrison, Paul Carter. The Drama of Nommo.  New York: Grove, 1972.

hooks, bell.  Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.  Boston: South End, 1989.

Hopson, Darlene P., and Derek S. Hopson.  Juba This and Juba That: 100 African American Games for Children. New York: Fireside, 1996.

Hunt, Cheryl Yvette.  “When She Danced.”  In  As Women Will (unpublished manuscript, 1984). Rpt. in Essence (Feb. 1989): 149.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.”  19--.  In The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981.Pp.

---.  The Collected Stories.  New York: HarperPerennial, 1995.

---.  Dust Tracks on a Road.  1942.  Rpt. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

---.  “How It Feels to be Colored Me.”  1928.  In  I Love Myself When I am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Ed. Alice Walker.New York: Feminist P, 1979. Pp. 152-55.

---. “Isis.” 19--.  In Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston.  Place: publisher, 1985.  Pp. 9-16.

  ---.  Their Eyes Were Watching God.  1937.  Rpt. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1978.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1927.In Three Negro Classics. Ed.? New York: Avon, 1965.391-511.

Kincaid, Jamaica. “Girl.”  In Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories.  Ed. Clarence Major.  New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.  454-5.  

Levine, Lawrence W.  Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom.  New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Major, Clarence, ed.  Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang.  New York: Penguin , 1994.

Mattox, Cheryl Warren.  Shake It to the One that You Love the Best: Play Songs and Lullabies from Black Musical Traditions.  El Sobrante, CA: Warren-Mattox Publications, 1989.

Shange, Ntozake.  for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.  1976.  Rpt. New York: Bantam, 1980.

---. “Who Says Black Folks Could Sing and Dance?” Dance Magazine 57 (Aug. 1983): 78-80.

Toomer, Jean. “Karintha.” In Cane. 19--.  New York: Liveright, 1975. 1-2.

Walker, Alice.  In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose.  New York: Harcourt, 1983.

Walker, Barbara G.  The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects.  San Francisco: Harper, 1988.

Yoffie, Clara.  “Three Generations of Children’s Singing Games in St. Louis.”  Journal of American Folklore 60 (1947): 1-51.

Neal A. Lester is Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he teaches African American literature.  He has published Understanding Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (press, 1999), and Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays (press, 1995), the first comprehensive examination of the theater of the contemporary poet/playwright.   In addition, he has written on rap, African American children's literature, hair, angels of color, and black female sexuality.

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