The Mule-Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts Review

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(More customer reviews)Aside from the controversy of the dispute between Hughes and Hurston, I deal with the story and play itself.
The play "Mule Bone" is based on "The Bone of Contention," a 1930 short story by the Queen of Black Folklore (ZNH) based on a folktale from her hometown of Eatonville Fla. about two men who fight over a turkey. One uses a Mule bone to assault the other, and the town's Black Baptists and Methodists split over the issue as Mayor Joe Clarke tries to settle the matter.
The play by Hughes and Hurston is similar, only the two men are now a song and dance team fighting over the affections of a local vamp and an epilogue is added to the ending.
Overall, it's mildly amusing. It does a decent job in capturing some subtleties of Black rural life in 1930 such as the courting rituals and the "dozens" insults between the Black Baptists and Methodists (one Baptist insults a Methodist as a "half-washed Christian." Anyone familiar with the competing theologies will have a good laugh at this one). But those familair with Hurston's work will see a lot of "The Eatonville Anthology" and the later "Mules and Men" here. Nothing really outstanding to the Hurston fan, but worthy of a few chuckles.
However, had this play been performed in 1930, I doubt very seriously that it would have been considered as revolutionary as the authors intended. It would have surely set off a firestorm of controversy. Given the fact that few literate Blacks who attended plays wanted anything to remind them of their rural Southern origins, this play would have been damned and dismissed by the African-American elite and white liberals of the day. While the heavy dialect, the use of the n-word, the casual attitude toward domestic violence, the illiteracy and pompousness of many characters, etc. were realistic aspects of Black rural life at the time, this was a side of Black life that many feared would be exploited by bigots to prevent their inclusion into mainstream society. In fact, I have read where these issues accompanied the play upon its actual performance in 1991.
But even a so-so effort by Hughes and Hurston proves to be far more interesting than many other efforts by others at the time.

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