Mule Bone Kills De Turkey: Hurston and Hughes’s Artistic Contention on Black Folk Comedy

Abstract

Mule Bone (1931), Zora Neale Hurston’s collaboration with Langston Hughes, has been credited as the ‘first’ attempted by African Americans to create black folk comedy. The proposed research is driven from a question to the recent scholarship’s tacit consent on such historic importance imposed on the play. This paper suggests a possibility that De Turkey and De Law (1930), Hurston’s edition of the collaboration work,could be the truly first attempt in the tradition of American black folk comedy. By illuminating a series of historical moments in which Hurston first expressed her dream for writing a real black folk comedy that would be a really new departure in the African American drama, then collaborated with Hughes on the dream play project, and eventually quit the collaborationship due to artistic dispute with Hughes, this paper explains why Hughes edition Mule Bone came to remain ‘unfinished’ and, more importantly, fall short of Hurston’s original goal and expectation from the collaboration. On the other hand, this paper sheds light on the significance of often-ignored Hurston’s edition De Turkey and De Law by demonstrating how this play, compared to Mule Bone, fulfills her original idea of black folk comedy in terms of contents and themes compared with Mule Bone. Adding to the knowledge about little known behind story related to the Mule Bone controversy and the subsequent birth of the two different editions of the Hurston-Hushes collaboration project,supplementing the dearth of the related research with a critical comparison of the two editions, and discussing the validity of Hurston’s edition as the real sense of black folk comedy, this paper argues for the necessity of reconsidering the origin of the mentioned genre. This paper finally concludes that De Turkey and De Law, replacing Mule Bone, deserves a right to be truly the first American black folk comedy genre in the sense that it was completed and copyrighted three months earlier than Mule Bone and that, more importantly, it cherished the original aim and artistic vision of black folk comedy Hurston first planned and expected through the collaboration with Hughes.