The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  H. Rap Brown earned his byname because he was a master of black vernacular rhetorical games and their attendant well-defined rhetorical strategies. Brown’s understanding of Signifyin(g) is unsurpassed by that of any scholar. In the second chapter of his autobiography, Die Nigger Die!, Brown represents the scenes of instruction by which he received his byname. “I learned to talk in the street,” he writes, “not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and all that simple shit.” Rather, Brown continues, “we exercised our minds,” not by studying arithmetic but “by playing the Dozens”:

  I fucked your mama

  Till she went blind.

  Her breath smells bad,

  But she sure can grind.

  I fucked your mama

  For a solid hour.

  Baby came out

  Screaming, Black Power.

  Elephant and the Baboon

  Learning to screw.

  Baby came out looking

  Like Spiro Agnew.

  Brown argues that his teachers sought to teach him “poetry,” meaning poems from the Western tradition, when he and his fellows were making poetry in the streets. “If anybody needed to study poetry,” he maintains, “my teacher needed to study mine. We played the Dozens,” he concludes, “like white folks play Scrabble.” “[They] call me Rap,” he writes humorously if tautologically, “’cause I could rap.” To rap is to use the vernacular with great dexterity. Brown, judging from his poetry printed in this chapter of his autobiography, most certainly earned his byname.54

  Brown’s definitions and examples are as witty as they are telling. He insists, as does Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, that both men and women can play the dozens and Signify: “Some of the best Dozens players,” he writes, “were girls.” Whereas the dozens were an unrelentingly “mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words,” Signifyin(g) was “more humane”: “Instead of coming down on somebody’s mother, you come down on them.” Brown’s account of the process of Signifyin(g) is especially accurate:

  A session would start maybe by a brother

  saying, “Man, before you mess with me

  you’d rather run rabbits, eat shit and

  bark at the moon.” Then, if he was talking

  to me, I’d tell him:

  Man, you must don’t know who I am.

  I’m sweet peeter jeeter the womb beater

  The baby maker the cradle shaker

  The deerslayer the buckbinder the women finder

  Known from the Gold Coast to the rocky shores of Maine

  Rap is my name and love is my game.

  I’m the bed tucker the cock plucker the motherfucker

  The milkshaker the record breaker the population maker

  The gun-slinger the baby bringer

  The hum-dinger the pussy ringer

  The man with the terrible middle finger.

  The hard hitter the bullshitter the poly-nussy getter

  The beast from the East the Judge the sludge

  The women’s pet the men’s fret and the punks pin-up boy.

  They call me Rap the dicker the ass kicker

  The cherry picker the city slicker the titty licker

  And I ain’t giving up nothing but bubble gum and hard times and I’m fresh out of bubble gum.

  I’m giving up wooden nickels ’cause I know they won’t spend

  And I got a pocketful of splinter change.

  I’m a member of the bathtub club: I’m seeing a whole lot of ass but I ain’t taking no shit.

  I’m the man who walked the water and tied the whale’s tail in a knot

  Taught the little fishes how to swim

  Crossed the burning sands and shook the devil’s hand

  Rode round the world on the back of a snail carrying a sack saying AIR MAIL.

  Walked 49 miles of barbwire and used a Cobra snake for a necktie

  And got a brand new house on the roadside made from a cracker’s hide,

  Got a brand new chimney setting on top made from the cracker’s skull

  Took a hammer and nail and built the world and called it “THE BUCKET OF BLOOD.”

  Yes, I’m hemp the demp the women’s pimp

  Women fight for my delight.

  I’m a bad motherfucker. Rap the rip-saw the devil’s brother’n law.

  I roam the world I’m known to wander and this .45 is where I get my thunder.

  I’m the only man in the world who knows why white milk makes yellow butter.

  I know where the lights go when you cut the switch off.

  I might not be the best in the world, but I’m in the top two and my brother’s getting old.

  And ain’t nothing bad ’bout you but your breath.

  Whereas the dozens were structured to make one’s subject feel bad, “Signifying allowed you a choice—you could either make a cat feel good or bad. If you had just destroyed someone [verbally] or if they were just down already, signifying could help them over.”55

  Few scholars have recognized this level of complexity in Signifyin(g), which Brown argues implicitly to be the rhetorical structures at work in the discourse, rather than a specific content uttered. In addition to making “a cat feel good or bad,” Brown continues, “Signifying was also a way of expressing your own feelings,” as in the following example:

  Man, I can’t win for losing.

  If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.

  I been having buzzard luck

  Can’t kill nothing and won’t nothing die

  I’m living on the welfare and things is stormy

  They borrowing their shit from the Salvation Army

  But things bound to get better ’cause they can’t get no worse

  I’m just like the blind man, standing by a broken window

  I don’t feel no pain.

  But it’s your world

  You the man I pay rent to

  If I had you hands I’d give ’way both my arms.

  Cause I could do without them

  I’m the man but you the main man

  I read the books you write

  You set the pace in the race I run

  Why, you always in good form

  You got more foam than Alka Seltzer . . .56

  Signifyin(g), then, for Brown, is an especially expressive mode of discourse that turns upon forms of figuration rather than intent or content. Signifyin(g), to cite Brown, is “what the white folks call verbal skills. We learn how to throw them words together.” Signifying, “at its best,” Brown concludes, “can be heard when brothers are exchanging tales.” It is this sense of storytelling, repeated and often shared (almost communal canonical stories, or on-the-spot recounting of current events) in which Signifyin(g) as a rhetorical strategy can most clearly be seen. We shall return to Brown’s definition in the next section of this chapter.57

  One of the most sustained attempts to define Signifyin(g) is that of Roger D. Abrahams, a well-known and highly regarded literary critic, linguist, and anthropologist. Abrahams’s work in this area is seminal, as defined here as a work against which subsequent works must, in some way, react. Between 1962 and 1976, Abrahams published several significant studies of Signifyin(g). To track Abrahams’s interpretative evolution helps us to understand the complexities of this rhetorical strategy but is outside the scope of this book.58

  Abrahams in 1962 brilliantly defines Signifyin(g) in terms that he and other subsequent scholars shall repeat:

  The name “Signifying Monkey” shows [the hero] to be a trickster, “signifying” being the language of trickery, that set of words or gestures which arrives at “direction through indirection.”59

  Signifyin(g), Abrahams argues implicitly, is the black person’s use of figurative modes of language use. The word indirection hereafter recurs in the literature with great, if often unacknowledged, frequency. Abrahams expanded on this theory of Signifyin(g) in two editions of Deep Down in the Jungle (1964, 1970). It is useful to list t
he signal aspects of his extensive definitions:

  1.Signifyin(g) “can mean any number of things.”

  2.It is a black term and a black rhetorical device.

  3.It can mean the “ability to talk with great innuendo.”

  4.It can mean “to carp, cajole, needle, and lie.”

  5.It can mean “the propensity to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point.”

  6.It can mean “making fun of a person or situation.”

  7.It can “also denote speaking with the hands and eyes.”

  8.It is “the language of trickery, that set of words achieving Hamlet’s ‘direction through indirection.’”

  9.The Monkey “is a ‘signifier,’ and the Lion, therefore, is the signified.”

  Finally, in his appended glossary of “Unusual Terms and Expressions,” Abrahams defines “Signify” as “To imply, goad, beg, boast by indirect verbal or gestural means. A language of implication.”60

  These definitions are exemplary insofar as they emphasize “indirection” and “implication,” which we can read as synonyms of figurative. Abrahams was the first scholar, to my knowledge, to define Signifyin(g) as a language, by which he means a particular rhetorical strategy. Whereas he writes that the Monkey is a master of this technique, it is even more accurate to write that he is technique, the literariness of language, the ultimate source for black people of the figures of signification. If we think of rhetoric as the “writing” of spoken discourse, then the Monkey’s role as the source and encoded keeper of Signifyin(g) helps to reveal his functional equivalency with his Pan-African cousin, Esu-Elegbara, the figure of writing in Ifa.

  Abrahams’s work helps us to understand that Signifyin(g) is an adult ritual, which black people learn as adolescents, almost exactly like children learned the traditional figures of signification in classically structured Western primary and secondary schools, training one hopes shall be returned to contemporary education. As we shall see below, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, an anthropologist-linguist, shares an anecdote that demonstrates, first, how Signifyin(g) truly is a conscious rhetorical strategy and, second, how adult black people implicitly instruct a mature child in its most profound and subtle uses by an indirect mode of narration only implicitly related in form to the Monkey tales, perhaps as extract relates to the vanilla bean, or as sand relates to the pearl, or, as Esu might add, as palm wine relates to the palm tree. Black adults teach their children this exceptionally complex system of rhetoric, almost exactly like Richard A. Lanham describes a generic portrait of the teaching of the rhetorical paideia to Western schoolchildren. The mastery of Signifyin(g) creates homo rhetoricus Africanus, allowing—through the manipulation of these classic black figures of Signification—the black person to move freely between two discursive universes. This is an excellent example of what I call linguistic masking, the verbal sign of the mask of blackness that demarcates the boundary between the white linguistic realm and the black, two domains that exist side by side in a homonymic relation signified by the very concept of Signification. To learn to manipulate language in such a way as to facilitate the smooth navigation between these two realms has been the challenge of black parenthood, and remains so even today. Teaching one’s children the fine art of Signifyin(g) is to teach them about this mode of linguistic circumnavigation, to teach them a second language that they can share with other black people.61 Black adolescents engaged in the dozens and in Signifyin(g) rituals to learn the classic black figures of Signification. As H. Rap Brown declares passionately, his true school was the street. Richard Lanham’s wonderful depiction of the student passing through the rhetorical paideia reads like a description of vernacular black language training:

  Start your student young. Teach him a minute concentration on the word, how to write it, speak it, remember it. . . . From the beginning, stress behavior as performance, reading aloud, speaking with gesture, a full range of histrionic adornment. . . . Develop elaborate memory schemes to keep them readily at hand. Teach, as theory of personality, a corresponding set of accepted personality types, a taxonomy of impersonation. . . . Nourish an acute sense of social situation. . . . Stress, too, the need for improvisation, ad-lib quickness, the coaxing of chance. Hold always before the student rhetoric’s practical purpose: to win, to persuade. But train for this purpose with continual verbal play, rehearsal for the sake of rehearsal.

  Use the “case” method. . . . Practice this re-creation always in an agonistic context. The aim is scoring. Urge the student to go into the world and observe its doings from this perspective. And urge him to continue his rehearsal method all his life, forever rehearsing a spontaneous real life. . . . Training in the word thus becomes a badge, as well as a diversion, of the leisure class.62

  This reads very much like a black person’s training in Signifyin(g). Lanham’s key words—among which are “a taxonomy of impersonation,” “improvisation,” “ad-lib quickness,” “to win,” “to persuade,” “continual verbal play,” “the ‘case’ method,” “the aim is scoring”—echo exactly the training of blacks to Signify. Even Lanham’s concept of a “leisure” class applies ironically here, since blacks tend in capitalist societies to occupy a disproportionate part of the “idle” unemployed, a leisure-class with a difference. To Signify, then, is to master the figures of black Signification.

  Few black adults can recite an entire Monkey tale; black adults, on the other hand, can—and do—Signify. The mastering of the Monkey tales corresponds to this early part of Lanham’s account of Western rhetorical training. Words are looked at in the Monkey tales because the test of this form of poeisis is to arrive at a phonetic coincidence of similar parts of speech, as I have shown above. The splendid example of Signifyin(g) that I have cited in Ralph Ellison’s anecdote about Hazel Harrison, and the anecdote of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan’s that I shall discuss below, conform to Lanham’s apt description of the mature capacity to look through words for their full meaning. Learning the Monkey tales, then, is somewhat akin to attending troping school, where one learns to “trope-a-dope.”

  The Monkey is a hero of black myth, a sign of the triumph of wit and reason, his language of Signifyin(g) standing as the linguistic sign of the ultimate triumph of self-consciously formal language use. The black person’s capacity to create this rich poetry and to derive from these rituals a complex attitude toward attempts at domination, which can be transcended in and through language, is a sign of their originality, of their extreme consciousness of the metaphysical. Abrahams makes these matters clear.

  In Talking Black, published in 1976, Abrahams’s analysis of Signifyin(g) as an act of language is even more subtle than his earlier interpretations. Abrahams repeats his insightful definition that Signifyin(g) turns upon indirection. Black women, he maintains, and “to a certain extent children,” utilize “more indirect methods of signifying.” His examples are relevant ones:

  These range from the most obvious kinds of indirection, like using an unexpected pronoun in discourse (“Didn’t we come to shine, today?” or “Who thinks his drawers don’t stink?”), to the more subtle technique, of louding or loud-talking in a different sense from the one above. A person is loud-talking when he says something of someone just loud enough for that person to hear, but indirectly, so he cannot properly respond (Mitchell-Kernan). Another technique of signifying through indirection is making reference to a person or group not present, in order to start trouble between someone present and the ones who are not. An example of this technique is the famous toast, “The Signifying Monkey.”63

  These examples are salient for two reasons: first, because he has understood that adults use the modes of signification commonly, even if they cannot recite even one couplet from the Monkey tales, and, second, because he has realized that other tropes, such as loud-talking, are subtropes of Signifyin(g). His emphasis on the mature forms of Signifyin(g)—that is, the indirect modes—as more common among women and children does not agree with my observations. Indeed, I hav
e found that black men and women use indirection with each other to the same degree.

  Next, Abrahams states that Signifyin(g) can also be used “in recurrent black-white encounters as masking behavior.” Since the full effectiveness of Signifyin(g) turns upon all speakers possessing the mastery of reading, what Abrahams calls “intergroup” Signifyin(g) is difficult to effect, if only because the inherent irony of discourse most probably will not be understood. Still, Signifyin(g) is one significant mode of verbal masking or troping.64

  Abrahams’s most important contribution to the literature on Signifyin(g) is his discovery that Signifyin(g) is primarily a term for rhetorical strategies, which often is called by other names depending on which of its several forms it takes. As he concludes, “with signifying we have a term not only for a way of speaking but for a rhetorical strategy that may be characteristic of a number of other designated events.”65 I would add to this statement that, for black adults, Signifyin(g) is the name for the figures of rhetoric themselves, the figure of the figure. Abrahams lists the following terms as synonyms of Signifyin(g), as derived from several other scholars, and which I am defining to be black tropes as subsumed within the trope of Signifyin(g): talking shit, woofing, spouting, muckty muck, boogerbang, beating your gums, talking smart, putting down, putting on, playing, sounding, telling lies, shag-lag, marking, shucking, jiving, jitterbugging, bugging, mounting, charging, cracking, harping, rapping, boo-kooing, low-rating, hoorawing, sweet-talking, smart-talking, and no doubt a few others that I have omitted.66 This is a crucial contribution to our understanding of this figure because it transcends the disagreements, among linguists, about whether trope x or y is evidenced by speech act a or b. What’s more, Abrahams reveals, by listing its synonyms, that black people can mean at least twenty-eight figures when they call something Signifyin(g). He represents a few of the figures embedded in Signifyin(g) in Chart 1: