The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader
Page 35
The students devised a test to measure vocabulary mastery in street language. They sent ten copies to McGraw-Hill, where eight employees took the test, only to score C’s and D’s. One of the test’s questions, to which the Times’s article title refers, is an example of the most familiar mode of Signifyin(g). The question read, “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” The proper response to this question is, “Your mama.” It is difficult to explain why this response is so funny and why it is an example of Signifyin(g). “Your mama” jokes abound in black discourse, all the way from the field and the street to Langston Hughes’s highly accomplished volume of poems, Ask Your Mama, from which an epigraph to this chapter has been taken. The presence in the students’ test of this centuries-old black joke represents an inscription of the test’s Signifyin(g) nature, because it serves as an echo of the significance of the test’s title, “The In Your Face Test of No Certain Skills.” The title Signifies in two ways. First, “In your face” is a standard Signifyin(g) retort, meaning that by which you intended to confine (or define) me I shall return to you squarely in your face. And second, the title is a parody (repetition motivated to underscore irony) of test titles such as “The Iowa Test of Basic Skills,” which my generation was made to suffer through from the fourth grade through high school. The test itself, then, is an extended Signifyin(g) sign of repetition and reversal, a chiastic slaying at the crossroads where two discursive units meet. As the Times article observes, “The students’ point was that they did not look at things in the same way as the people at McGraw-Hill. The results of the ‘In Your Face’ test clearly show that McGraw-Hill and the ninth-graders at Hill High do not speak the same language.”34
The language of blackness encodes and names its sense of independence through a rhetorical process that we might think of as the Signifyin(g) black difference. As early as the eighteenth century, commentators recorded black usages of Signification. Nicholas Cresswell, writing between 1774 and 1777, made the following entry in his journal: “In [the blacks’] songs they generally relate the usage they have received from their Masters or Mistresses in a very satirical stile [sic] and manner.”35 Cresswell strikes at the heart of the matter when he makes explicit “the usage” that the black slaves “have received,” for black people frequently “enounce” their sense of difference by repetition with a signal difference. The eighteenth century abounds in comments from philosophers such as David Hume in “Of National Characters” and statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia, who argued that blacks were “imitative” rather than “creative.” All along, however, black people were merely Signifyin(g) through a motivated repetition.
Frederick Douglass, a masterful Signifier himself, discusses this use of troping in his Narrative of 1845. Douglass, writing some seventy years after Cresswell, was an even more acute observer. Writing about the genesis of the lyrics of black song, Douglass noted the crucial role of the signifier in the determination of meaning:
[The slaves] would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other . . . they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves.36
Meaning, Douglass writes, was as determined by sound as by sense, whereby phonetic substitutions determined the shape of the songs. Moreover, the neologisms that Douglass’s friends created, “unmeaning jargon” to standard English speakers, were “full of meaning” to the blacks, who were literally defining themselves in language, just as did Douglass and hundreds of other slave narrators. This, of course, is an example of both sorts of signification, black vernacular and standard English. Douglass continues his discussion by maintaining that his fellow slaves “would sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone,” a set of oppositions which led to the song’s misreading by non-slaves. As Douglass admits,
I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake.37
This great mistake of interpretation occurred because the blacks were using antiphonal structures to reverse their apparent meaning, as a mode of encoding for self-preservation. Whereas black people under Cresswell’s gaze Signified openly, those Douglass knew Signified protectively, leading to the misreading against which Douglass rails. As Douglass writes in his second autobiography, however, blacks often Signified directly, as in the following lyrics:
We raise de wheat,
Dey gib us de corn;
We bake de bread,
Dey gib us de cruss;
We sif de meal,
Dey gib us de huss;
We peal de meat,
Dey gib us de skin
And dat’s de way
Dey takes us in.38
As William Faux wrote in 1819, slaves commonly used lyrics to Signify upon their oppressors: “Their verse was their own, and abounding either in praise or satire intended for kind and unkind masters.”39
I cite these early references to motivated language use only to emphasize that black people have been Signifyin(g), without explicitly calling it that, since slavery, as we might expect. One ex-slave, Wash Wilson, in an interview he granted a member of the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, implies that “sig’fication” was an especial term and practice for the slaves:
When de niggers go round singin’ “Steal Away to Jesus,” dat mean dere gwine be a ’ligious meetin’ dat night. Dat de sig’fication of a meetin’. De masters ’fore and after freedom didn’t like dem ’ligious meetin’s, so us natcherly slips off at night, down in de bottoms or somewheres. Sometimes us sing and pray all night.40
This usage, while close to its standard English shadow, recalls the sense of Signification as an indirect form of communication, as a troping. The report of Wilson’s usage overlaps with Zora Neale Hurston’s definition of signify in Mules and Men, published in 1935. These two usages of the words are among the earliest recorded; Wilson’s usage argues for an origin of “sig’fication” in slavery, as does the allegorical structure of the Monkey poems and the nature of their figuration, both of which suggest a nineteenth-century provenance. I wish to explore, in the remainder of this section of this chapter, received definitions of Signifyin(g) before elaborating my own use of this practice in literary criticism.
We can gain some appreciation of the complexity of Signifyin(g) by examining various definitions of the concept. Dictionary definitions give us an idea of how unstable the concepts are that can be signified by Signifyin(g). Clarence Major’s Dictionary of Afro-American Slang says that “Signify” is the “same as the Dirty Dozens; to censure in 12 or fewer statements,” and advises the reader to see “Cap on.” The “Dirty Dozens” he defines as “a very elaborate game traditionally played by black boys, in which the participants insult each other’s relatives, especially their mothers. The object of the game is to test emotional strength. The first person to give in to anger is the loser.” To “Cap on” is “to censure,” in the manner of the dozens. For Major, then, to Signify is to be engaged in a highly motivated rhetorical act, aimed at figurative, ritual insult.41
Hermese E. Roberts, writing in The Third Ear: A Black Glossary, combines Major’s emphasis on insult and Roger D. Abrahams’s emphasis on implication. Roberts defines “signifying,” or “siggin(g),” as “language behavior that makes direct or indirect implications of baiting or boasting, the essence of which is making fun of another’s appearance, relatives, or situation.” For Roberts, then, a signal aspect of Signifyin(g) is “making fun of” as a mode of “baiting” or “boasting.” It is curious to me how very many definitions of Signifyin(g) share this stress on what we might think of as the black person’s symbolic aggression, enacted in language, rather
than upon the play of language itself, the meta-rhetorical structures in evidence. “Making fun of” is a long way from “making fun,” and it is the latter that defines Signifyin(g).42
Roberts lists as subcategories of Signifyin(g) the following figures: “joning, playing the dozens, screaming on, sounding.” Under “joning” and “sounding,” Roberts asks the reader to “See signifying.” “Screaming on” is defined as “telling someone off; i.e. to get on someone’s case,” “case” meaning among other things “an imaginary region of the mind in which is centered one’s vulnerable points, eccentricities, and sensitivities.” “Screaming on” also means “embarrassing someone publicly.” “Playing the dozens” Roberts defines as “making derogatory, often obscene, remarks about another’s mother, parents, or family members. (‘Yo’ mama’ is an expression used as retribution for previous vituperation.)” Roberts, in other words, consistently groups Signifyin(g) under those tropes of contention wherein aggression and conflict predominate. Despite this refusal to transcend surface meaning to define its latent meaning, Roberts’s decision to group joning, playing the dozens, screaming on, and sounding as synonyms of Signifyin(g) is exemplary for suggesting that Signifyin(g) is the trope of tropes in the black vernacular.
Mezz Mezzrow, the well-known jazz musician, defines “Signify” in the glossary of his autobiography, Really the Blues, as “hint, to put on an act, boast, make a gesture.” In the body of his text, however, Mezzrow implicitly defines signifying as the homonymic pun. In an episode in which some black people in a bar let some white gangsters know that their identity as murderers is common knowledge, the blacks, apparently describing a musical performance, use homonyms such as “killer” and “murder” to Signify upon the criminals. As Mezzrow describes the event:
He could have been talking about the music, but everybody in the room knew different. Right quick another cat spoke up real loud, saying, “That’s murder man, really murder,” and his eyes were signifying too. All these gunmen began to shift from foot to foot, fixing their ties and scratching their noses, faces red and Adam’s apples jumping. Before we knew it they had gulped their drinks and beat it out the door, saying good-bye to the bartender with their hats way down over their eyebrows and their eyes gunning the ground. That’s what Harlem thought of the white underworld.43
Signifying here connotes the play of language—both spoken and body language—drawn upon to name something figuratively.
Mezzrow’s definitions are both perceptive and subtle. Signifyin(g) for him is one mode of “verbal horseplay,” designed to train the subject “to think faster and be more nimble-witted.” Mezzrow, then, is able to penetrate the content of this black verbal horseplay to analyze the significance of the rhetorical structures that transcend any fixed form of Signifyin(g), such as the verbal insult rituals called the dozens. Indeed, Mezzrow was one of the first commentators to recognize that Signifyin(g) as a structure of performance could apply equally to verbal texts and musical texts. As he summarizes:
Through all these friendly but lively competitions you could see the Negro’s appreciation of real talent and merit, his demand for fair play, and his ardor for the best man wins and don’t you come around here with no jive. Boasting doesn’t cut any ice; if you think you’ve got something, don’t waste time talking yourself up, go to work and prove it. If you have the stuff the other cats will recognize it frankly, with solid admiration. That’s especially true in the field of music, which has a double importance to the Negro because that’s where he really shines, where his inventiveness and artistry come through in full force. The colored boys prove their musical talents in those competitions called cutting contests, and there it really is the best man wins, because the Negro audience is extra critical when it comes to music and won’t accept anything second-rate. These cutting contests are just a musical version of the verbal duels. They’re staged to see which performer can snag and cap all the others musically. And by the way, these battles have helped to produce some of the race’s greatest musicians.44
Signifyin(g) for Mezzrow is not what is played or said; it is rather a form of rhetorical training, an on-the-streets exercise in the use of troping, in which the play is the thing—not specifically what is said, but how. All definitions of Signifyin(g) that do not distinguish between manner and matter succumb, like the Lion, to serious misreading.
Malachi Andrews and Paul T. Owens, in Black Language, acutely recognize two crucial aspects of Signifyin(g): first, that the signifier invents a myth to commence the ritual and, second, that in the Monkey tales at least, trinary structure prevails over binary structure. “To Signify,” they write,
is to tease, to provoke into anger. The signifier creates a myth about someone and tells him a third person started it. The signified person is aroused and seeks that person. . . . Signifying is completely successful when the signifier convinces the chump he is working on, that what he is saying is true and that it gets him angered to wrath.45
Andrews and Owens’s definition sticks fairly closely to the action of the Signifying Monkey tales. While Signifyin(g) can, and indeed does, occur between two people, the three terms of the traditional mythic structure serve to dispel a simple relation of identity between the allegorical figures of the poem and the binary political relationship, outside the text, between black and white. The third term both critiques the idea of the binary opposition and demonstrates that Signifyin(g) itself encompasses a larger domain than merely the political. It is a game of language, independent of reaction to white racism or even to collective black wish-fulfillment vis-à-vis white racism. I cannot stress too much the import of the presence of this third term, or in Hermese E. Roberts’s extraordinarily suggestive phrase, “The Third Ear,” an intraracial ear through which encoded vernacular language is deciphered.
J. L. Dillard, who along with William Labov and William A. Stewart is one of the most sensitive observers of black language use, defines Signifyin(g) as “a familiar discourse device from the inner city, [which] tends to mean ‘communicating (often an obscene or ridiculing message) by indirection.’”46 Dillard here is elaborating somewhat upon Zora Neale Hurston’s gloss printed in Mules and Men, where she writes that to signify is to “show off.”47 This definition seems to be an anomalous one, unless we supply Hurston’s missing, or implied, terms: to show off with language use. Dillard, however, is more concerned with the dozens than he is with Signifyin(g). In an especially perceptive chapter entitled “Discourse Distribution and Semantic Difference in Homophonous Items,” Dillard ignores the homophone signify but suggests that so-called inner-city verbal rituals, such as the dozens, could well be contemporary revisions of “the ‘lies’ told by Florida Blacks studied by Hurston and the Anansi stories of the southern plantations,” sans the “sex and scatology.” “Put those elements back,” Dillard continues, “and you have something like the rhymed ‘toasts’ of the inner city.”48 The “toasts,” as Bruce Jackson has shown, include among their types the Signifying Monkey tales.49 There can be little doubt that Signifyin(g) was found by linguists in the black urban neighborhoods in the fifties and sixties because black people from the South migrated there and passed the tradition along to subsequent generations.
We can see the extremes of dictionary and glossary definitions of Signify in two final examples, one taken from The Psychology of Black Language, by Jim Haskins and Hugh F. Butts, and the other from the Dictionary of American Slang, compiled by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner. Haskins and Butts, in a glossary appended to their text, define “to signify” as “To berate, degrade.”50 In their text, however, they define “signifying” as “a more humane form of verbal bantering” than the dozens, admitting, however, that Signifyin(g) “has many meanings,” including meanings that contradict their own glossary listing: “It is, again, the clever and humorous use of words, but it can be used for many purposes—‘putting down’ another person, making another person feel better, or simply expressing one’s feelings.”51 Haskins a
nd Butts’s longer definition seems to contradict their glossary listing—unless we recall that Signifyin(g) can mean all of these meanings, and more, precisely because so many black tropes are subsumed within it. Signifyin(g) does not, on the other hand, mean “To pretend to have knowledge; to pretend to be hip, esp. when such pretentions cause one to trifle with an important matter,” as Wentworth and Flexner would have it.52 Indeed, this definition sounds like a classic black Signification, in which a black informant, as it were, Signified upon either Wentworth or Flexner, or lexicographers in general who “pretend to have knowledge.”
There are several other dictionary definitions that I could cite here. My intention, however, has been to suggest the various ways in which Signifyin(g) is (mis)understood, primarily because few scholars have succeeded in defining it as a full concept. Rather, they often have taken the part—one of its several tropes—as its whole. The delightfully “dirty” lines of the dozens seem to have generated far more interest from scholars than has Signifyin(g), and perhaps far more heat than light. The dozens are an especially compelling subset of Signifyin(g), and its name quite probably derives from an eighteenth-century meaning of the verb dozen, “to stun, stupefy, daze,” in the black sense, through language.53 Let us examine more substantive definitions of Signifyin(g) by H. Rap Brown, Roger D. Abrahams, Thomas Kochman, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Geneva Smitherman, and Ralph Ellison, before exploring examples of the definition of Signifyin(g) that I shall employ in the remainder of this book.