HOLLY BLACKFORD HUMES

ISIS AS LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD: ILLUMINATING ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S “DRENCHED IN LIGHT”

HOLLY BLACKFORD HUMES

In “Drenched in Light” (1924), her second published story, Zora Neale Hurston focuses on a young Black girl’s rebellious perspective to establish a conflicted narrative situation that she would expand and reframe in her subsequent works: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), her controversial autobiography. This conflicted narrative situation involves a spirited, imaginative, artistic child and her grandmother, who embodies the past trauma of slavery and acceptance of oppression, which, in the grandmother’s view, makes the emboldened young girl’s behavior reckless and unsafe. Hurston’s own grandmother receives the writer’s comic ire in Dust Tracks: “God knows, grandmother would break me or kill me, if she had her way. Killing me looked like the best one, anyway” (1996, 54). Critics have pointed out the parallels between the child Isis in “Drenched in Light” and Hurston’s own lived experience. Indeed, Hurston continually represented her childhood conflict with older Black women who feared her high spirits and daring interactions with White passersby, in the context of a racist culture, for this conflict was not only her own, but also one through which she situated herself as a perpetually liminal

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figure in between Black communities and White patronage. Hurston’s liminality makes her a compelling but challenging figure of study, her rich oeuvre—fiction, nonfiction, drama, criticism—inviting a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives.

Although “Drenched in Light” has not received the same level of attention as Hurston’s subsequent works, critics agree that it offers an early, albeit ambiguous, statement on the complexity of becoming a Black female artist in a time when other Harlem Renaissance figures, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, advocated for scripted versions of Black childhood and so-called authentic Black voices. Connecting “Drenched in Light” to similar representations of Hurston’s childhood in “How it Feels to be Colored Me” and Dust Tracks, Ayesha K. Hardison (2013) reads Isis as a threshold figure who skirts the boundaries of acceptable (performance) and unacceptable (minstrelsy) in order to create her own pleasure in artistry and audience; however, she argues, this enterprise lacks critical awareness of what it means for Black bodies to perform for Whites. Doris Davis (2007) reads Isis a bit differently, linking her with Hurston’s account in Dust Tracks of losing her supportive mother in childhood, focusing on how “Drenched in Light”—like Their Eyes Were Watching God—creates “psychic space” for the Black female artist to navigate boundaries and unearth the silenced voices of Black women. Tina Barr (2002) discusses “Drenched” within the context of Hurston’s other work. Barr links the myth of Isis to both the Black child protagonist in the story and the Black women at the center of Their Eyes: these characters embrace a type of female artistry that defies the perceived limits imposed by the Black community. In “How it Feels to be Colored Me” and Dust Tracks, Hurston continually situates her child self on thresholds between Black and White communities to explore pleasure and profit in organic artistic expression. Whereas some readers see only the risk of racist exploitation, bringing a childhood studies perspective to the short tale and putting the Black child at the center of inquiry open up space for new interpretations of Isis’s journey, widening the literary context for Hurston’s constructions of Black girlhood. Such an approach asks that we bring a different set of traditions to bear on the Black girl’s journey as she navigates disciplinary boundaries, ecstatic freedoms, and vexed terrains of exploitation.

“Drenched in Light” is replete with symbolism based in the European folktale of Little Red Riding Hood. In her story, Hurston deploys the intertext of the folktale Red Riding Hood to portray the mischievous and transgressive nature of the child held back by

her grandmother. Equating the prior generation born into slavery with the wolf, the modern Black child simply cannot acquiesce to a racist culture that requires the performance of passivity and humility before White people. Isis, for example, notices that the grandmother has a hairy chin, which, she thinks, “No ladies don’t weah” (2008, 20). So Isis kindly tries to shave her while she sleeps, getting into much trouble. Isis then steals her grandmother’s new red tablecloth from Orlando—a cloth with some white in the fringe— to dance at a community celebration, attracting the notice of both her Black community and White patrons. The visibility of the red tablecloth, transformed into a cloak and trailing gown, only solidifies her preferred identity, for “everybody in the country, white and colored, knew little Isis Watts, the joyful.” She is always “the little brown figure perched upon the gate post,” looking “yearningly up the gleaming shell road that led to Orlando” (17). In Dust Tracks, Hurston discusses her desire for a journey beyond her own yard, an important child geography. The red tablecloth in “Drenched in Light” enables this journey for Isis. The red tablecloth from Orlando becomes a means for the Black girl to move through various communities and become a sort of centerpiece or host of the event, inviting us to read “Drenched in Light” as an active conversation with both a well-known folktale and, crucially, the very idea of folklore as communal expressivity.

The history of Little Red Riding Hood is complicated. There are myriad versions, but they all, in different ways, raise questions about female agency, sexuality, desire, intergenerational dynamics, coming of age, and the patriarchy. Red Riding Hood, as Charles Perrault defined her in 1697, or Red Cap (the Brothers Grimm version of 1812) addresses the same conflicted narrative situation we see Hurston invigorating in her short story—being marked as special and, in fact, spoiled with a red cloak everyone knows marks the girl as distinct from her community. Red’s great sin, according to both Perrault’s and the Grimm’s tales, is her desire to make her own way through the forest, regardless of the prescriptive path to grandmother’s. The red clothing, introduced by Perrault, was not a feature of the oral tale, which focused on the (White) girl and her grandmother and generally ended happily. Versions by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm transformed the tale for White bourgeois audiences at the same time that “childhood” was being constructed as a protected period of development, tied to specific morals and codes for civilized behavior. Scholars such as Jack Zipes document that originally, Red

was more of a trickster and got out of her own situation, telling the wolf she has to defecate and, after he ties a rope around her so she can go outside, simply escaping (1993, 4, 28–30). The oral tale of the girl and her grandmother, whose blood she usually consumes before she outwits the wolf, empowered female tricksters, whereas the collected versions for children transformed Red into a passive (and punished) sexual object. In other words, Zipes argues, Red Riding Hood transformed from a hopeful (White) female coming-of-age story to a story of rape that blames the victim for straying from the path, or, in mythic logic, looking for the prettiest flowers in the wilderness.

Hurston signifies on this folktale, casting a Black child in the titular role. Other characters play the wolf and the huntsman, and some characters play multiple roles. Applying this folktale to the situation of a desiring Black child (Isis), who wants to imagine, socialize, dance, and flirt with performance, is already complex, but the ending of “Drenched in Light” raises particularly intriguing questions. Hurston inserts a White couple into the role of the “huntsman” (from the Brothers Grimm version). The White couple comes to protect Isis, challenge the grandmother, and enable Isis to dance for them at the hotel, a public space feared by the grandmother because of a history of sexualizing and commodifying Black female bodies. Why cast an obviously problematic White couple into the role of huntsman? Given the tale’s focus on Isis’s point of view, what racial implications emerge? A multivalent set of questions arises about the story’s announcement of cultivating White patronage to escape the constrictive grandmother, who equates Isis’s boldness with the public as “too ’oomanish jumpin’ up in everybody’s face dat pass” (2008, 17). The grandmother’s construction of public display as inappropriately “womanish” stems from a history of chattel slavery and the oversexualization of Black women. Hurston’s use of Red Riding Hood, however, establishes the tale’s problematic resonance with seduction and objectification, which as Zipes argues, is an artifact of how Red was adapted for a White bourgeois sensibility that rendered her more a passive victim complicit with her seduction, rather than the trickster she was in the oral tales of France (1993, 4–6, 18–26). While the ending of “Drenched in Light” provides an ominous account of being adopted by a White couple who wants to possess Isis Watts’s sunshine, it also emphasizes Isis as a trickster, following the Red of the oral tales.

Resituating Isis as Little Red, Hurston fashions her own model of Isis as a folkloric trickster who disrupts and revises the European

lineage that rendered Red both an object and victim. Closely reading the threshold spaces glossed in “Drenched in Light” and rooting them in the complex history and framework of Little Red, I argue that Hurston employed her interest in folklore and oral traditions to empower Isis rather than render her an exploited, passive object. The legacy of Isis as Red Riding Hood can also be distinguished in Janie Crawford, the female protagonist of Hurston’s most wellknown work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie, too, encounters a wolf in disguise: Janie’s revisions to Isis’s fabled story only deepening and underscoring the value of what Hurston accomplished in her eight-page story “Drenched in Light.”

TO GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE A collector of folklore and an anthropologist who studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University (Gates, 2018, xlii), Hurston appreciated folklore and myth. Further, she maintained an interest in the oral tale-telling practices and performances of Black communities, continually exploring the speech acts of gathered neighborhood residents often based in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, a town incorporated exclusively by people of color. The situation of telling folklore on the porch, exchanging gossip about the community, and passing judgment on those who turn against the community (or do things like hurt their mule) recurs throughout her fiction and autobiography, wherein the child Hurston would eavesdrop on communal stories at Joe Clarke’s store porch: Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world and the next one through their mouths. The right and the wrong, the who, when and why was passed on, and nobody doubted the conclusions. . . . But what I really loved to hear was the menfolks holding a “lying” session. That is, straining against each other in telling folk tales. God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Tiger, Buzzard, and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men. (Hurston 1996, 47–48) As folktales always have, the communal and familial context of sharing folklore dismantles the division between children and adults, the yard or porch space becoming a center of performed community that both polices and supports individuals through tales at once didactic and aesthetic. Famous for their trickster content, the Brer Rabbit tales are examples of “signifying” codes about how underdogs (enslaved Black people) use cunning to outwit those with power,

land, resources, and especially food. Hurston’s recollections in Dust Tracks explain how folklore, as a living cultural practice meeting communal needs, holds a different significance than the White, literary process of collecting, translating, editing, and framing folktales—of the sort done by Joel Chandler Harris for the Brer Rabbit tales. Robert Hemenway calls “Drenched in Light” Hurston’s manifesto celebrating the independence that the writer located in her Eatonville roots (1977, 10–11); Eatonville, both in fiction and fact, modeled for Hurston a communal, folkloric context. Hurston brings her interest in folklore and folkloric method to bear in her revision of Little Red, using the journey as a critical way to explore racialized, intergenerational boundaries.

In her autobiography, Hurston remembers receiving a book of Brothers Grimm tales as a gift from two White women who noticed her in school when she read aloud the myth of Persephone (1996, 39). The significance of this gift, and the memory of it, speaks to the way in which she later used White patronage to situate herself as a bard of African American voices. She, along with Langston Hughes, was supported by a White patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who preferred the two writers call her Godmother. Hurston’s feelings on White and Black audiences for her fiction are tricky to discern; in her essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me” (1928), for example, she is outspoken about the need to move beyond the Black/White binary and render other artistic subjects rooted in Black communities and relationships. She is known for doing just that in her literary works, focusing on the role of orality and storytelling in the Black community—voices that are simultaneously empowering and judgmental, but always authentic and artistic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the highly vocal grandmother figure of “Drenched in Light,” who distills this paradox of empowerment and judgment. Black grandmothers in Hurston’s work present the paradoxical influence of nurturance and judgment, embodying characteristics of independence, empowerment, and strength alongside voiced messages of conservatism and the need to accommodate racist restrictions. In her autobiography, Hurston contextualizes the grandmother’s point of view:

My grandmother worried about my forward ways a great deal. She had known slavery and to her, my brazenness was unthinkable.

“Git down offa dat gate post! You li’l sow, you! Git down! Setting up dere looking dem white folks right in de face! They’s gowine to lynch you, yet. And don’t stand in dat door—way gazing out at ’em neither. Youse too brazen to live long.” (Hurston, 1996, 34)

Notwithstanding the justification offered in the grandmother’s voice, a chastisement that at once promotes brazen behavior while discouraging it, fictional grandmothers in Hurston’s work promote the idea that spectating and performance are context- and audience-based. Davis notes that the grandmother in “Drenched in Light” is a trickster herself, scoring from the White couple money that far exceeds the cost of the ruined tablecloth (2007, 278). The ambiguity in these Black grandmothers, when it frames the young Black girl’s experience, is encapsulated in the Red Riding Hood tale, wherein the grandmother and wolf are in fact disturbingly interchangeable. The traditional strip tease in the tale, when the wolf disguised as the grandmother tells Red to take off her clothes one by one, is a classic scene of revelation staged by the trickster wolf, who typically demands Red strip but is really revealing his own disguise. The yard and fences where Hurston’s girls “hang” embody an unusual meeting between domesticated and wild, Black and White. From a childhood studies perspective, yards, fences, and porches in Hurston’s work signify a situation of domesticity on proper display. Not only does Grandma chastise Isis for not raking the yard, a symbol of how the space embodies a negotiation between domestic and public in which the grandmother is supposed to domesticate nature (as tame herself), but she also reprimands Isis for sitting with her legs open, after commanding her to sit on the porch. You behave like a lady in the yard so people can see you as a lady in the yard. In order for any sense of “private” woman to emerge, as opposed to the “womanish” behavior despised by the grandmothers, the home becomes a contested site of conspicuous consumption in which proper nineteenth-century standards of closed-leg womanhood are to be performed. Akin to the performances of tales and judgments occurring in community porch settings throughout her fiction, Hurston tests her female characters as threshold figures learning lessons and navigating boundaries as they are forced to display being a nice girl, which Red—in all versions of the tale—never really was. Crucially, the threshold boundary of the fence or gate between yard and road defines the fictional girls’ ambitions and longings. Isis continually perches on her fence post, watches the road, runs alongside travelers and rides with them, including White cattlemen who look for her when they pass. Boundaries between culture and nature, or civilization and forest, are always significant in folk tales and female development, for crossing from private into public space is seen as a risk to virtue, dangerously close to becoming a commodity. Through

the lens of children’s geographies, yards are liminal spaces to negotiate boundaries between the social and the domestic, the middle landscape of “nature” and the cultivated space of socialization.

Isis longs to cross this boundary. Like Hurston reflecting on her childhood in Dust Tracks on a Road, Isis spends her time at the gate of her yard, watching for passersby, including White travelers with whom she can “go a piece of the way” (Hurston 1996, 34), as she intuits the road and horizon that lies before her. This “piece of the way” is not the “whole” way, argues Hardison, indicating a migratory negotiation with White patrons through space and performance (2013, 222). In “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Hurston expresses this space as both performative and spectating, a space in between the public world of commodification and the private world of desire:

Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. . . . The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: “Howdydo-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?” Usually, automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in farthest Florida. (Hurston 2020)

Imperializing the boundary between yard and road, yet perching in a way adults usually cannot, Hurston constructs a childhood self who operates as both spectator and participant, a subject and an object, in a broader gallery performance of race and curiosity about boundaries. Her essay also explains how White people for whom she would sing, recite, or dance would give her money. This monetary reward marked their difference from Black people and stood apart from her love of performance; she actually loved to perform and would need payment to stop, she observes. The yard becomes a contact zone between expectations of Black and White communities, between commodification and self-expression. Inhabiting a “crossroads of interracial social interaction and exchange” (Hardison 2013, 217), the

child’s performance fluidly moving between paid and unpaid means the activity itself is the value. This is one of the definitions of play: non-instrumental activity in which “play has its own instrumental behaviors” (Sutton-Smith 2009, 189), but such behaviors are only instrumental insofar as they aspire to goals or outcomes. Isis’s public play engenders a conflict between the child’s perspective on her performance and her grandmother’s assertion that the very things the child sees as play are too womanish, within the context of a racist culture that exploits Black (female) bodies.

Glossing the importance of this threshold space for both Isis and young Hurston posits a major difference between this early work of Hurston’s and her last novel Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), in which a Black child is coaxed to perform for a White audience and, in the course of doing so, inadvertently reveals her genitals. Hurston’s early work refuses a critical stance on the girl’s joy in performance:

[Hurston’s] threshold figure, a black child who does not anticipate any danger in performing in the presence of whites, walks the line between artistry and minstrelsy. Generally, the discourse on interracial cultural exchange and intraracial difference in Hurston’s work celebrates white patronage of black folk art and condemns the black community’s critical stance toward black bodies performing for white audiences. (Hardison 2013, 219–20) This critical stance, taken by grandmothers, stems from a long history of idealizing White womanhood and sexualizing Black women. Hazel Carby’s work on the binary opposition between perceptions of White women and Black women deconstructs these assumptions. Carby argues that White women were “glorified” in their purity and motherhood, whereas Black women were seen as “breeders,” associated with the unbridled sexuality of White slaveholders as if Black women were somehow complicit with their own sexual assault under the longstanding policy of being forced to submit to slaveholders (1987, 30–37):

Any historical investigation of the ideological boundaries of the cult of true womanhood is a sterile field without a recognition of the dialectical relationship with the alternative sexual code associated with the black woman. Existing outside the definition of true womanhood, black female sexuality was nevertheless used to define what those boundaries were. The contradictions at a material and ideological level can clearly be seen in the dichotomy between repressed and overt representations of sexuality in the simultaneous existence

of two definitions of motherhood: the glorified and the breeder. (Carby 1987, 30) The idea of Black girls as sexually precocious was likewise deeply entrenched in racist pseudoscience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; myths of menstruating early were as familiar as myths about Black male youths as overly sexual, inverting actual realities of who was raping whom. Isis’s grandmother is thus justified in fearing that Isis’s actions could be equated with the myth of precocity, or at least a level of daring that a White passerby may crush. These fears give Isis both a performative boundary to transgress and be curious about and an experience of oppression within which Isis navigates trickery to survive. She deploys trickery against her grandmother: although she rides with white men “a piece,” she hides in the backyard and lies about where she has been when her grandmother comes to scold her and see if her raking is complete.

The red tablecloth plays a significant role in “Drenched,” providing the strongest visual and symbolic link to the Little Red Riding Hood tale. Young Isis dons her grandmother’s bright red tablecloth, which was purchased in Orlando (the endpoint of the road outside Isis’s yard), and journeys into the community to join the festivities and dance, attracting and reveling in the public attention that shames her grandmother:

Grandma had returned to the house and missed Isis and straightway sought her at the festivities expecting to find her in soiled dress, shoeless, gaping at the crowd, but what she saw drove her frantic. Here was her granddaughter dancing before a gaping crowd in her brand new red table-cloth. . . . [Isis] heard her cry: “Mah Gowd, mah brand new table-cloth Ah jus’ bought f’um O’landah!” as [Isis] fled through the crowd and on into the woods. (Hurston 2008, 22) It is hard to discern which is more shocking for Grandma Potts— the display of Isis or the display of the tablecloth. The tablecloth came from the “hosting” center of her grandmother’s household, representing the disjunction between a girl’s desire to ascend and the authority figures who both mark her “specialness” (the red cloak) and yet test her readiness and daring. In the lens of child development theory, the tablecloth acts as what D. W. Winnicott defines as a transitional object, an object usually from a child’s home that mediates between fantasy and reality, or internal and external reality. Winnicott explains that transitional objects are paradoxical because they are both “found” and “created” by the child (1971, 4).

Isis’s extravagant fantasies, articulated throughout the story, are realized when she touches the tablecloth and also when she wears it. As both found and created objects, transitional objects occupy a space between being an active subject and a public object. The red cloak enables a liminality between public and private, positing a journey into forest and change. The red cloak may be “too ample for her meager form” (Hurston 2008, 22), but through investing it with new meaning, Isis has, in her grandmother’s words, “done traipsed all over the woods, uh dancin’ an uh prancin’ in it” (24).

The donning of the tablecloth can be theorized as what Hurston calls “the will to adorn” in her 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The “will to adorn” is the impulse to move beyond convention with adornment that satisfies the soul of the creator: “The stark, trimmed phrases of the Occident seem too bare for the voluptuous child of the sun, hence the adornment. It arises out of the same impulse as the wearing of jewelry and the making of sculpture—the urge to adorn” (Hurston 1997). Crucially, Isis’s grandmother already bought this item to signal her own “will to adorn”; embodying the artistic and consumptive practices of her grandmother, the tablecloth embeds her grandmother’s own pretense at status, artistry, and beauty. The tablecloth is practically a magical object from the story’s beginning; even before Isis wears it, she takes shelter under it (from her grandmother) and begins to imagine herself “various personages,” including ones that “rode white horses with flaring pink nostrils to the horizon” (2008, 19). The beckoning horizon appears in both Dust Tracks and Their Eyes as a boundless essence to the dreams of Black girls. Importantly, these dreams are already made tangible in household items and the grandmother’s decor. For Isis, as for Red and her cloak, the tablecloth represents both shelter and ambition; the grandmother’s shock represents the politics of respectability: proper girlhood and ambition lie exclusively in the home as decorative display.

In “Drenched in Light,” Hurston resituates the tale of Little Red Riding Hood in the context of White patriarchy and the economic exploitation of Black bodies. Originally a French tale, Red was first a trickster who got herself out of her precarious situation (Zipes 1993, 23). Male editors changed the story. Perrault had her stray from the path for the prettiest flowers, and then be summarily eaten. The Brothers Grimm version introduced the huntsman rescuer, taking away Red’s agency with a different objectification. In one perspective, we can see that Hurston situates her Isis as the original trickster

Red. After all, Isis has a blade and holds it against her grandmother’s chin, deciding to shave her hair while she sleeps! She claims to the White couple she meant well and draws their sympathy for both trying to shave her hairy grandmother (no lady would want those gray hairs) and ruining the tablecloth, for which the White couple pay $5 and promptly witness a dramatic change in the grandmother’s demeanor and tone. In another perspective, the White couple as huntsman introduces the history of White male editorial changes to the tale, applying them to race relations and suggesting different generations have different means of coping with structures of racism. Isis is delighted the White woman Helen wants her to dance for her, to the point that Helen’s husband notes that Isis has, in fact, adopted the White woman. Yet the “sale” of Isis—her grandmother agreeing she can accompany the couple to their hotel—and the ominous tone of Helen needing Isis’s light for herself are disturbing and conflict with the tone of Isis’s own response to the situation. While Isis seems to believe she has tricked her grandmother/wolf with a White huntsman who enables her much greater freedom of expression, the narrator is less certain. In fact, in the ominous ending, the White couple pays the grandmother more than the tablecloth was worth, and as Helen looks “hungrily” into the distance, Isis rides off with her and her husband Harry/hairy, multiplying the possibilities of how wolves come in myriad disguises.

The question of what this “adoption” by or of a White woman means, along with the risk of minstrelsy in the performing Black child Isis, is haunted by the cultural iconography of Topsy, a fictional character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Topsy took off in a life of her own in minstrel shows (Meer 2005) and dolls (Bernstein 2011). In Stowe’s novel, Topsy is both a minstrel figure and a playful, intelligent, and imaginative trickster who perpetually challenges and disrupts Aunt Ophelia’s sense of domestic order. A New England spinster, Aunt Ophelia considers it her duty to help her brother St. Clare with the household operations at his Louisiana plantation. Ophelia’s racism becomes apparent when her brother purchases Topsy for her. Seen by both characters and the narrator as an incorrigible example of the slave system, Topsy vocally and performatively embraces her sinful nature and does her best to unsettle Aunt Ophelia’s housekeeping. Stowe’s narrator takes pains to point out how “smart and energetic” Topsy is, how quickly she could learn “the proprieties of Miss Ophelia’s chamber,” and how her “scenic performances” are Topsy’s choice rather than actual incompetence.

If unsupervised, Topsy would hold “a perfect carnival of confusion” and enact a histrionic scene with Ophelia’s clothing or pillow feathers as inspiration: “On one occasion, Miss Ophelia found Topsy with her very best scarlet India Canton crape shawl wound round her head for a turban, going on with her rehearsals before the glass in great style” (Stowe 2018, 238). However, the descriptions of Topsy engaging in grotesque drollery embed an easily exploited comic element; the comedy derives from the battle with the ironically named “Miss Feely,” who eventually adopts her. In minstrel traditions, Topsy quickly transformed into the stereotypical “pickaninny” mocked for her outlandish behavior and performance. For example, in the film in which Shirley Temple performs a stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, audiences laugh when Topsy comes on stage and eats the fresh flowers from the table (Seiter 1936). Topsy’s comic presence in the sentimental drama of the White child Evangeline buttresses the division by which a binary opposition marked Black and White childhoods, echoing the perception of Black women as public and sexual whereas White women were seen as private and pure. Robin Bernstein links the history of Topsy and topsy-turvy dolls to show that their lineage in material culture cultivated violence and the denigration of Black female bodies (2011, 69–90). Facing this lineage head-on, Hurston has Isis court the affection of a White woman so the young girl can dance unimpeded.

EYES WATCHING WOLVES: JANIE CRAWFORD AS HUNTSMAN

For Hurston’s young Black girls and women, wolves come in different forms, their journeys taking them a “piece of the way” with myriad moments of constriction and freedom. Although Hurston used the situation and name of Isis in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, it is really in her masterwork Their Eyes Were Watching God where she shows her ongoing consideration of Little Red confronting grandmothers and wolves in a quest for self-expression. Understanding how the skein of Little Red unwinds strands of racism and intergenerational conflict in “Drenched” sets the stage for tracing Janie’s journey in Hurston’s 1937 novel. Tension between the teenage Janie and her grandmother preoccupies the novel’s opening sections, framing Janie’s subsequent quest to find a true partner. Her grandmother, born in slavery, explains to Janie, “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out” (1990, 14), and to keep Janie safe, marries her off at sixteen. Janie’s grandmother has framed Janie’s

life in a certain way, but when Janie meets Tea Cake at age forty, she decides, “Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means tuh live mine” (108). Living her own way does not mean, however, that she will bypass wolves. When Tea Cake takes on the characteristics of a wolf after being bitten by a rabid dog, the folktale morphs into a sexual paradigm. Hurston’s use of an older protagonist allows fuller expression of Little Red’s journey to sexual maturity.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a substantial revision, expansion, and aging of Red Riding Hood in “Drenched.” The voice accepting White domination in Their Eyes is the grandmother’s, and it frames Janie’s journey into nature and the important boundary of her grandmother’s gate: “[Janie] thought awhile and decided that her conscious life had commenced at Nanny’s gate” (1990, 11). The yard and threshold space define Janie’s burgeoning desires, and Janie’s time in the yard and at the gate engender conflict with the grandmother. Janie’s grandmother slaps Janie for kissing a boy at the gate, although the actual symbolic logic of the novel suggests that the slap is a reprimand for Janie’s autoerotic awakenings under the pear tree in the yard, a scene replete with thinly veiled allusions to multiple orgasms as Janie contemplates marriage and nature. The grandmother’s solution of marrying off Janie is meant to keep her safe, given the rape of her own daughter, but is experienced as cruel and an end to the natural excursions and curiosities of childhood. Marrying Logan, Janie is unable to feel what she felt on her own under the pear tree, the “pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid” as she watches the “dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom” (10–11). By turning the yard into an autoerotic sexual space of play, Hurston solidifies a child’s geography as a negotiation for self-expression.

Janie bears out the Red Cap situation of the text, particularly in the way her grandmother marks her as liminal yet denies her freedom, recognizing risk in self-expression. Nanny has raised Janie with a White family and continually dressed her differently from the children of her own race. As Red learns, being singled out is dangerous. Young Hurston in Dust Tracks is sent in a red and white dress to perform for the White ladies at school. Isis of “Drenched in Light” is at an earlier stage than Janie—eleven years old—and she is not dressed in the tablecloth by anyone else but seizes it with her own idea of playing the gypsy for the community. Janie, in contrast, wears a wine-colored dress when Jody displays her as his trophy wife and prevents her from giving a speech to the community, demonstrating

his ideological continuity with Janie’s grandmother, which leaves Janie in unsatisfying relationships. In “Drenched,” there is a subtle suggestion that the grandmother’s tablecloth, at least in Isis’s view, is a symbol of status-seeking; in Their Eyes, Hurston seems to have faced head-on the problem of how “the will to adorn” risks putting oneself at odds with community.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston also explores more deeply the sexualization of Black girls. Isis’s grandmother calls her granddaughter “womanish,” and Janie’s grandmother announces her granddaughter’s womanhood after witnessing her kiss a boy—both pronouncements the result of the history of chattel slavery. Whereas Janie’s grandmother in Their Eyes is clearer about wishing to prevent Janie from the same fate as her mother, raped by the schoolmaster, the grandmothers in these two narratives veil their fears and make their admonitions seem arbitrary to the children. The intense fear of being sexualized and therefore compromised in the yard drives Janie’s grandmother’s diatribe against Janie throwing herself away on “trash” and needing to marry immediately. The engagement with the pear tree and “marriages” between bees and blossoms, which result in Janie’s orgasms, clarify the yard as a space of distinction between a “budding” girl and separation from the grandmother’s house and expectations, into the unknown. It is now, in contemporary literature and media, quite accepted and even fashionable to equate the wolf in Red’s tale with Red’s own burgeoning desire. For example, in the television series “Once Upon a Time” (ABC, 2011–2018), Red is the wolf, and in the three Red tales by Angela Carter (first published 1979) the wolf stands for a White girl’s metamorphosis as well as the desire she has for male companionship and sexual expression. In “Drenched in Light,” Isis tries to shave her grandmother, knowing full well ladies do not want facial hair: “They were long gray hairs curled here and there against the dark brown skin. Isis was moved with pity for her mother’s mother” (2008, 20). In this moment of attempted cleansing, which captures how the body and the lady differ, the narrator calls the grandmother “her mother’s mother,” positing a lineage linked with the missing mother of the tale that we find important elsewhere in Hurston’s work. This moment also embeds a mixed desire for feminine and masculine; just as the grandmother is both male and female, human and animal, here, Isis is moved by familial connection yet dying to hold the phallic blade: “The thing with her was to hold the razor—sufficient in itself” (21). Just like Little Red, whose encounter with the wolf is

an opportunity to confront something within herself, in the shaving scene, Isis becomes aware of her desire to gender-bend, something she recognizes in her grandmother.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston explores more fully the value of wolves for Black female creative expression. Although he beckons a path far from grandmother’s house, Tea Cake becomes the most obvious wolf in Hurston’s oeuvre. Admittedly, Janie’s desire for Tea Cake in Their Eyes stems from her deep desire to pursue the pleasures of passion, playfulness, and egalitarian work alongside of her lover. Tea Cake is introduced after Janie’s first marriage to an old man who cannot satisfy her and her subsequent marriage to a class-conscious man (Jody) who forces Janie into a quasi-White marital role of submissive wife. Rather than a hairy grandmother veiling the wolf, it is Janie’s true love who transforms into a mad dog and threatens to kill her. Fearful “of this strange thing in Tea Cake’s body,” Janie loads her pistol, hoping she will not have to use it but realizing “that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all” (1990, 169). When she shoots Tea Cake dead, Janie has become her own huntsman, prepared to cope with the demonic disguise in her beloved. When Janie faces murder charges, White women come to her defense, whereas her own community nurses old grievances and withholds their support. The continual marginality of the Black female who stands out from her community and makes her own way provided Hurston with an artistic subject that could encompass unending complexities and vacillations between voice and silence.

The metaphor of Tea Cake’s transformation into a menacing dog raises questions about how Hurston reconfigured the trope of the disguised wolf through time, just as she reenacted a Black child’s performance in Seraph on the Suwanee. As Mark Anthony Neal notes (2012), Tea Cake was probably based on Hurston’s research into High John the Conqueror, the trickster folk hero upon whom Brer Rabbit is based, and which appears in her collection The Sanctified Church (1981). However, Tea Cake also symbolizes an unrealized potential of partnership: The rabid dog becomes a useful metaphor for the challenges of realizing a progressive black manhood, especially in regard to the realities of antiblack racism, poverty, and white supremacy. But [his death means] . . . Tea Cake exists as a literal fantasy of the possibilities—unrealized in Hurston’s novel—of a black feminist manhood. (Neal 2012, 261)

Although a controversial figure (Mesa El Ashmawi 2009, 203–6) whose violence against Janie is as meaningful as the fact that he teaches her to play checkers and shoot a rifle, Tea Cake distills the problem of sorting through the sexual implications of the Little Red tale once Janie articulates that life with Tea Cake is living her own rather than her grandmother’s way. Barr notes that the goddess Isis links both the characters named Isis and Janie, who is literally back from the dead and who has, like the goddess, resurrected and put together the body of her husband, in some sense (2002, 104–5). As the goddess Isis is a trickster, so, too, are Isis and Janie. Returning to Eatonville, Janie walks past the “wagging tongues” on Joe Clarke’s old store porch and tells her story to Pheoby, as a sort of healing wives’ tale. Women comprise the audience for such intimate tales, not the broader community who judges Janie for leaving, wearing certain clothes, parading her status above them, and refusing to share all her business—the downside of communal eyes always watching. As Hurston’s intergenerational conflict deepened and shifted, her consideration of wolves and huntsmen shifted too; they became symptoms of how a woman must negotiate and eventually reject nineteenth-century prescriptions and define womanhood for herself.

BEYOND CHILDHOOD COLLECTIONS

Hurston amalgamates European traditions that contributed to shaping passive childhood and pits them against African American traditions that emphasize the cunning of Brer Rabbit against Fox and Bear. You might say that the collection of the Brothers Grimm tales she received from two White women as a child transformed, in Hurston’s literary imagination, from a symbol of exploitation to a means of empowerment and intergenerational collaboration. “Drenched in Light” positions Isis as a willful, independent trickster willing to gamble herself as a White-possessed object against her grandmother. In Isis’s view of the game, the tablecloth already embodied her grandmother’s aspirations in class and culture, ones that already had white fringes. In myriad ways, the girls of African American women’s fiction are empowered by these vocal and dominant grandmothers, who are merely aghast at what they might have created. By marking them apart from their communities with fine clothing and domestic arrangements, the older Black women have both made conditions dangerous (red stands out in a forest)

and special for the ambitious young women on the path. The tablecloth, already a central element of the grandmother’s house and a stimulant to Isis’s imagination, is paid for by the White couple, paid more than its value, which is a purchase of Isis as well. Hardison argues, “The white couple and the grandmother in the story function as a ‘triad [that] suggests a metaphor for the struggle to control black art. . . . Isis, the subversive artist, remains true to her self and emerges triumphant: She has gotten the best of all three” (2013, 222). Isis wants to dance and does not care who defines it, as long as she occupies center stage.

Along with winning the game against the grandmother, who wants to privatize and domesticate Isis, comes the grandmother’s public acquiescence to whatever the White couple want. Grandmother wants Isis to bathe before going, and Helen prefers her as she is and does not imagine Isis would want to be scrubbed, which, of course, illustrates a racist view of “folk authenticity.” In some ways it is impossible to discern the attitude of the end of the story, even while Helen’s vampiric need for Isis’s light is clearly ominous. What remains ambiguous is whether the White patron’s vampiric need rules the day. Does Helen adopt Isis, or does Isis adopt Helen? Writing about the lineage of the trickster in African American writing, William Andrews defines the trickster as an interstitial figure morally beholden to no one but the self: The African trickster’s interstitial relationship to all community makes him or her a perpetual anomaly and ambiguity with no steady alliances to either side of the basic binary oppositions—order/disorder, creation/destruction/good/evil, life/death—that structure culture. The trickster’s interstitiality enables him or her to play both sides of these oppositions against the middle, which the trickster alone occupies, not in order to reconcile opposites but to embody their coexistence in a kind of irreducible dialogue. This dialogue can serve many functions, not the least of which is the stimulation of free thinking about the necessity of any traditional opposition or hierarchy valorized by culture. (Andrews 1988, 206) At the end of “Drenched in Light,” Isis occupies the center position, and the adults around her represent binary oppositions between and within which she dances. Isis’s own excursion as an artist symbolizes the destruction of the tablecloth and the creation of something new, centering Black and White communities as all gather to watch. Significantly, Isis’s performance destroys the boundary between

children and adults: “Some grown people joined the children about her. . . . the crowd clapping their hands for her. No one listened to the Exalted one, for little by little the multitude had surrounded the brown dancer” (2008, 22). The emphasis on destroying boundaries, rather orgiastically, suggests a template for reading the ending as demolishing boundaries between self-expression and exploitation.

While Hurston often pits women against each other—mistresses, women from different classes, grandmothers and granddaughters— she usually does so at the expense of one woman’s expressivity and the abundance of the other. Isis’s expressivity comes at the expense of her grandmother’s, this pattern recurring throughout Hurston’s fiction. However, the grandmother’s voice and even her profit off the ruined tablecloth signify, in subtle form, the deep connection between survival and the trickster role under conditions of oppression. As Davis writes, “Hurston herself is the ultimate trickster, creating characters whose sharp tongues, deceptions, equivocations, and chicanery secure their survival. In her seminal use of the female signifying character, Hurston is, as Gates notes, the ‘first author of the tradition to represent signifying itself as a vehicle of liberation for an oppressed woman’” (2007, 272). By extension, liberation of the Black female child is presented as a destruction of boundaries and an embrace of centers and thresholds, where signifying practices undergo rehearsal and revision, tablecloths become gypsy garments, and Black bodies are neither completely free nor completely commodified.

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HOLLY BLACKFORD HUMES (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of English and Communication at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches and publishes literary criticism on American and children’s literature. Her books include Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls (2004), Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee’s Novel (2011), The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (2011), Alice to Algernon:

The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel (2018), and edited volumes 100 Years of Anne with an ‘e’: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables (2009) and Something Great and Complete: The Centennial Study of My Antonia (2018). Her next project is Beyond Womanish: The Black Female Bildungsroman.