Mules and Madmen: On the Disabling Habitats of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer 1

A prevailing narrative in disability studies—or, at least, in what Chris Bell named White Disability Studies—purports that Black writers, critics, and activists throughout U.S. history have disavowed disability in their demands for human rights. 2 Foundational texts in the field lament that disability solidarity has been a hard sell among minority groups that have been pathologized and characterized as disabled in order to justify their subjugation. For instance, Douglas Baynton claims that "disability figured prominently not just in arguments for the inequality of women and minorities but also in arguments against those inequalities. Such arguments took the form of vigorous denials that the groups in question actually had these disabilities; they were not disabled, the argument went, and therefore were not proper subjects for discrimination." 3 The myth that nonwhite activists have historically distanced themselves from disability often arises from genuine attempts to grapple with why disability studies and activism have been dominated by white disabled people, and there is no doubt that the history of racist pathologization has engendered some reluctance to theorize disability and race together. 4 Still, this narrative's primacy in disability studies lets the field off the hook for neglecting other, equally important narratives, such as the robust history of Black disabled people who have advanced both racial and disability justice. 5 Examples include Fannie Lou Hamer, who became a Civil Rights and anti-eugenics activist after being involuntarily sterilized in 1961; Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, the sisters whose parents brought the class action Relf v. Weinberger (1973), which resulted in a ban on federal funds being used for involuntary sterilization; and the seven students who were plaintiffs in Mills v. Board of Education (1971), which resulted in a ruling that compelled public schools to accommodate students with disabilities.

Meanwhile, white disability studies' discussions of the tensions between disability and civil rights movements tend to cite either contemporary identity politics or nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse as evidence, leaving both the early-to-mid-twentieth century and the realms of art and literature underexplored. But a close examination of fiction by Black authors in the early twentieth century can offer important counterpoints to these claims. Some of the most influential works of literature by Black authors during this period offer profound—if necessarily ambivalent—reckonings with disability and disablement under racial capitalism, even as they tend not to use the word "disability" or its most obvious analogs. 6 Instead, what we might think of as disability-inflected language and imagery—such as weakness, madness, bodies that are "broken," minds that "don't fit in"—resonate with Jasbir Puar's concept of debility as a complement to disability, which refers to the "slow wearing down of populations" by state and capitalist violence that creates various forms of incapacitation. 7 Moreover, these invocations of debility occur in a variety of contexts ranging from debilitation to survival to resistance. Rather than disavowing affiliations with disability, these texts refuse the pathologization of Black people as inherently disabled while remaining open to complex and fruitful affiliations with disability as a site of subjugated knowledge and oppositional spirit. 8

This essay reads the work of two major Harlem Renaissance authors as underacknowledged sites of disability politics and aesthetics as well as ecological critique, arguing that texts by Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer were attuned to the intertwined vulnerabilities of Black people disabled by early-20th-century labor exploitation and more-than-human ecologies debilitated by the same industries. Hurston's fictional and anthropological narratives are set against agrarian backgrounds where humans and nonhumans live with forms of disablement that attend work mostly done by Black laborers, such as the building of new highways and migrant farming. For instance, Their Eyes Were Watching God's (1937) oft-cited "mule of the world" metaphor finds literal representation in the form of a work-disabled mule, whose appearance in the narrative occasions one of Hurston's most memorable aesthetic interventions: the incorporation of folklore into the realist novel. Meanwhile, a story in Toomer's Cane (1923) follows a Southern Black man named Dan Moore who, having recently migrated to a Northern city, compares his feelings of captivity and rage to a zoo animal's and then experiences symptoms of psychosis while watching a boxing match between two "dwarfs" at a vaudeville show. But rather than casting Dan as a tragic figure, Toomer positions Dan's atypical mental state—represented by voiceover-like internal monologues—as both aesthetically generative and materially responsive to the commodification of racialized, disabled, and nonhuman spectacle. For both authors, disability represents not only vulnerability to the machinations of racial capitalism, but also creative invention and formal refusal of the conventions of white literary aesthetics and anthropocentric Humanism. That is, there is a formal current underlying this essay's argument about the literary history of disability and race: crucial moments of aesthetic innovation in two of literary modernism's most influential texts, Cane and Their Eyes Were Watching God, arise directly out of their authors' efforts to account for the material conditions of disablement in the Jim Crow economy. The Harlem Renaissance is as much a part of the story of "disability aesthetics" as modernists like Faulkner, Stein, Joyce, and Woolf, but as yet has received little critical attention in the field's recent turn toward formalism. 9

Disability's history as an instrument of dehumanization has led to many places other than disavowal on the part of Black fiction writers; these are but two examples. Others can be found in the foundational work of Black disability scholars including Dennis Tyler on Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson; La Marr Jurelle Bruce on Amiri Baraka, Gayl Jones, and Ntozake Shange; Sami Schalk and Therí Alyce Pickens on Black speculative fiction; and Michelle Jarman on Toni Morrison and Victor LaValle. 10 I offer these readings of Hurston and Toomer's novels to build upon this archive and, further, to attend to how these two writers offer particularly ecological understandings of disablement as a tool of white supremacy. They show how the dehumanization of Black and disabled people necessarily entails consequences for the world beyond the human, as it requires a fundamental devaluation of that which is not human. Recognizing what Nirmala Erevelles has called a "tripartite constitution of Otherness—be-coming disabled, be-coming animal, be-coming Black," Hurston and Toomer employ figures of human and nonhuman disability to contest the human/nonhuman binary that serves as architecture for the inextricable projects of racial capitalism, ableism and state-sanctioned disablement, and ecological destruction. 11

These texts' attunement to the interspecies dynamics of racialized labor exploitation presents a challenge not only to the dominant narratives of white disability studies, but also to similar narratives that obscure the history of Black thought and activism in the realm of interspecies justice. Sociologist David Nibert, for example, has insultingly alleged that "Many civil rights and liberation activists… perceive the movement for the liberation of other animals as disconnected from their own struggles, and they are unaware of the profound economic entanglements of these various forms of oppression and their relationship to the capitalist system." 12 Many prominent voices in the animal liberation and environmentalist movements have yet to heed Alexander Weheliye's admonition against the notion that "black subjects—rather than, say, slave owners—must bear the burden of representing the final frontier of speciesism." 13 While disability and animal liberation politics have historically been at odds in a number of ways—in no small part thanks to animal rights philosopher Peter Singer's contention that some nonhuman animals have greater moral significance than some disabled infants 14 —they share a largely unexamined conviction that their majority-white constituencies can be explained away by a narrative in which people of color have been too invested in gaining access to the category of the human to question whether the vaunted status of the able-bodied human might itself be a tool for subjugation.

And so, in demonstrating that a capacious, ecologically oriented disability politics is central to the history of Black cultural production, authors like Hurston and Toomer contest the oversimplification of Black liberation politics as uniformly invested in the goal of "full humanity," where humanity is defined in terms of ability such as reason and intelligence. It is true, as Pickens has argued, that "we can no longer remark that [Black studies and disability studies] do not speak to each other"—and, I would add, literatures of Blackness, disability, and ecological critique were speaking to each other well before they became academic fields. 15

Their Eyes Were Watching God: The Highway vs. The Mule

Long before Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God, ever meets a mule, she is well-primed to reject any kinship with it. In an oft-quoted passage at the start of the novel, Janie's grandmother, Nanny, warns Janie that to be a Black woman is to be the mule of the world—a position that has had disabling mental and physical effects on Nanny, who figures herself as psychologically broken. Pleading with her granddaughter to put her mind at ease by marrying a respectable farmer, for instance, Nanny implores Janie, "Put me down easy, Janie, Ah'm a cracked plate." 16 Though Nanny endured numerous traumas as an enslaved woman impregnated by a slaveholder, the novel does not dwell on these horrors, instead foregrounding a lack of narrative agency as the primary disabling factor in Nanny's life:

Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah'd take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world. So whilst Ah was tendin' you of nights Ah said Ah'd save de text for you. (31)

The notion that there was no pulpit for Nanny plays on the kinds of environmental concerns that characterize the social model of disability. It is not that Nanny has no sermon because of any intrinsic capacities or incapacities, but that there is no place for someone like her to deliver a sermon. Though written literacy was not necessary for preaching in the Southern Black churches of her time, it was certainly a sought-after skill and vaunted status that had been denied to Nanny, and she lacks any other signifiers of respectability or authority that might otherwise give her access to textuality. 17 Her lack of access to a pulpit is enforced by gendered and racialized expectations of what a sermon-giving bodymind looks like.

While Nanny may or may not be recognizably disabled (though she shows signs of chronic psychiatric conditions), she has been subject to debilitation by a social and economic system that strips her of opportunities to engage her capacities. To consider this kind of debility, one that is entirely structurally imposed, within the framework of disability reveals a kind of impasse: whereas disability politics tend to deprioritize the event of disablement and any accompanying impulses toward the prevention of disability, anti-racist politics demand attention to the sources of race-related debilitation as injustices that must be abolished. 18 The fact that the question "What happened to you?" is a mostly irrelevant inquiry in disability studies—associated with the prying of strangers rather than future-oriented work toward access—may well be an indicator of the field's whiteness. Rather than assuming that "disabled identity always occurs outside historical context," the "what happened" of disabilities connected to racism and poverty is inseparable from the continuing lived experience of debilitation. 19

With this framework of debility in mind, the metaphor of a highway through the wilderness becomes telling as the mindset against which Janie will define her own, as it proposes an individualized solution to the systemic debilitation of Black women's narrative capacities. Nanny's vision of empowerment, imagined for a single person (her daughter, then her granddaughter), is premised on mastery over and debilitation of other lives, most obviously nonhuman ones. A highway offers humans social mobility at the expense of the wilderness—the habitats, food sources, and living beings—that preceded it. Though Nanny speaks of her escape from slavery as the choice to travel among unknown animals to avoid certain violence on the plantation—"Ah knowed de place was full uh moccasins and other bitin' snakes, but Ah was more skeered uh what was behind me"—she finds nothing worth preserving in the wilderness (34). The wilderness is, ultimately, an obstruction of her and her daughters' access to textual agency, a frightening mess that must be built over so that they may find space in human community. But readers are not meant to accept Nanny's worldview uncritically; this is, after all, the woman whom Janie comes to hate for having "pinched [Janie's horizon] in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her" (138). Nanny's impulse toward empowerment, though born out of subjugation, nonetheless has undesirable consequences for humans with less power.

Indeed, to return to Nanny's original metaphor: the building of a highway has material implications not just for nonhuman beings, but also for the humans and nonhumans who build it. Roads in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South were largely constructed by low-wage or unpaid, often imprisoned, Black men, 20 while horses and mules were also put to work drawing "slip scrapers" and wagons on site. 21 The image of throwing up a highway through the wilderness, then, carries with it the tense relationship between under-compensated Black workers and the nonhuman dwellers of habitats they were paid to destroy. While both human workers and nonhuman animals were debilitated in this process that exploited both groups' labor, the early part of Hurston's novel invokes a tension between them. 22 This tension appears even more explicitly in Mules and Men, where the antagonism is palpable between swamp workers and the animals whose habitat is their workplace:

Cliffert Ulmer told me that I'd get a great deal more by going out with the swamp-gang…. My own particular crowd [of workers] were to look out for me and see to it that I didn't get snake-bit nor 'gator-swallowed. The watchman, who sleeps out in the swamps and gets up steam in the skitter every morning before the men get to the cypress swamp, had been killed by a panther two weeks before, but they assured me that nothing like that could happen to me; not with the help I had. 23

Clearly, working-class life in the rural South did not lend itself to easy affiliations with other species, when impinging on the habitats of other animals could result in violence. To "throw up a highway," then, was to cleave a hard division between human and nonhuman beings, which Nanny hoped would grant her daughters the textual agency they had been denied through the debilitating and dehumanizing violence of slavery.

But Janie doesn't buy it, and instead inaugurates her own story through a trancelike communion with the sexiest bumblebee and pear blossom known to literature. But Nanny's attempt to protect Janie from getting "lost offa de highway" plunges Janie into narrative obscurity: she is forced to marry the farmer Logan Killicks, who works her like a mule, followed by a second marriage to the domineering Jody Starks, an enterprising uplift politician. Jody bars his wife from public speaking and even chides the townspeople when they call for her to orate, saying, "mah wife don't know nothin' 'bout no speech-makin'." (69). He also stymies her interest in the "lies" the men of the town entertain each other with on the store's porch. Janie's marriage to Jody is defined by a lack of direct access to any textual or narrative selfhood; as Susan Willis puts it, "If Janie was a beast of burden in her first life, she has, in her bourgeois life, become a domestic pet." 24

In contrast to Nanny's contention that claiming a textual voice must involve disassociation from animal life, however, Janie first nudges her way into narrative subjectivity through her relationship to a sick, weak, and noncompliant mule. Though Jody does his best to shield her from the stories men tell in front of the store, through small moments of resistance Janie manages to catch them lying on this mule regularly, at the expense of both the mule and its owner, Matt Bonner. The stories emphasize the mule's puniness and lack of ability to resist domination and abuse: in one, a man catches his wife and her friends using the mule's ribs as a washboard; in another, the animal is blown over by the wind; in another, the mule feebly attacks whomever it can because "he thinks everybody he hear comin' is Matt Bonner comin' tuh work 'im on uh empty stomach" (83). This narrative activity is a dependable basis of community-building in Eatonville, where "Everybody indulged in mule talk. He was next to the Mayor in prominence, and made better talking" (85). Because of the prohibitions Jody has placed on Janie, she does not enter the storytelling community directly, but she "loved the conversation and sometimes she thought up good stories on the mule" (85). And from the sidelines, she murmurs a rant that becomes a turning point in the mule's story:

Everybody was having fun at the mule-baiting. All but Janie.

She snatched her head away from the spectacle and began muttering to herself. "They oughta be shamed uh theyselves! Teasin' dat poor brute beast lak they is! Done been worked tuh death, done had his disposition ruint wid mistreatment, and now they got tuh finish devilin' 'im tuh death. Wisht Ah has mah way wid 'em all."

She walked away from the porch and found something to busy herself with in the back of the store so she did not hear Jody when he stopped laughing. She didn't know that he had heard her, but she did hear him yell out, "Lum, I god, dat's enough! Y'all done had yo' fun now. Stop yo' foolishness and go tell Matt Bonner Ah wants tuh have uh talk wid him right away." (89)

In short order, Jody buys the mule from Bonner and declares that it will live out the rest of its days free from the human-driven work it is clearly unable to do. The townspeople praise Jody for his compassionate ingenuity, claiming they never would have thought to do such a thing—the irony being, of course, that Jody wouldn't have, either. Janie is the only storyteller who could have imagined a free mule, because she is the only "mule uh de world"—the only Black woman—among them. Meanwhile, her intuition that the mule is not simply unruly, but has had its "disposition ruint wid mistreatment," resonates with her own condition, in which the denial of an expressive outlet has relegated her to an alienated, sputtering state. Janie's empathy for the broken-down, abuse-disabled mule is enabled by her intergenerational knowledge of narrative debilitation, in which gendered barriers to participation have kept the women in her family unable to communicate with their own communities.

Again, I do not use the word "debilitated" here to make a simple analogy between gender discrimination and disability. Rather, I see Janie's exclusion from the world of verbal expression and community-building as literally a debilitating system, in which Janie and other silenced women are subject to a "slow wearing down" as a population through a lack of access to social participation. Though Puar uses the concept of debility to think about the ways populations are systematically maimed and made ill through war or debt or labor exploitation, I propose that this concept also describes processes of denying a population's abilities, such as the prohibition of women's speech or the denial of written literacy to enslaved Black people: that is, the systematic stripping of populations' capacity to express and advocate for their needs. This is evident as Janie's externally imposed silence becomes internalized over the course of her decades-long marriage and she sinks into what can only be understood as a depressive state, almost nonverbal and unable to experience the excitement she once could. 25 We might think of Janie's position in her first two marriages as a narrative debility, a forced incapacity to narrate the self.

The mule, however, presents an opportunity to shift Janie's undesired narrative state to a new mode of narration that challenges the norms of the storytelling tradition in which she wishes to participate. When Janie is denied access to her social world via exclusion from the storefront lying sessions, the mule provides her with an alternate entryway into narrative personhood and community. Even though Janie can't access the lying sessions on the porch, she can speak alongside them in a way that alters the stories they tell. Indeed, after Janie speaks the mule into freedom, its role in the community's narrative changes drastically:

Anyhow a free mule in town was something new to talk about…. New lies sprung up about his free-mule doings. How he pushed open Lindsay's kitchen door and slept in the place one night and fought until they made coffee for his breakfast; how he stuck his head in the Pearsons' window while the family was at the table and Mrs. Pearson mistook him for the Rev. Pearson and handed him a plate…. He did everything but let himself be bridled and visit Matt Bonner. (92)

Where once the lies about the mule turned on jokes about its abjection and subjugation, after Janie's intervention, the mule becomes a trickster figure, manipulating the rituals and societal norms that would typically exclude nonhuman animals to assert his own agency and desires on par with his former oppressors'. And so, we might think of the relationship between Janie and the mule as one of mutually enhanced access: Janie advocates for the mule to have a work-free lifestyle more suited to his age and physical limitations, and the mule gives Janie an alternative route to social participation. This is quite a different route to human community than building a highway through the wilderness (which would no doubt put the mule to work). Unlike her grandmother, Janie is interested in a liberation that extends beyond the elevation to a human status defined as "on high," able to dominate. She deals a blow to her own dehumanization by liberating the mule, because she knows that being treated "like an animal" is only possible in a world that accepts the degradation of nonhuman animals.

This is not the only instance in which Janie comes into narrative capacity through an encounter with a disabled animal. Most famously, in a moment of absurd interspecies assemblage during the hurricane in the Everglades, Janie and Tea Cake find themselves in a face-off with a rabid, "mad" dog astride a swimming cow. In order to understand where this chaotic moment gets us, it's important to step back and consider the relationship between these figures preceding the hurricane. This isn't the first time humans and nonhuman animals have crossed paths on the swampy bean farms known as "the muck," and the prior results weren't always harmonious. Consider the first appearance of dogs in this section of the novel:

Day by day now, the hordes of workers poured in. Some came limping in with their shoes and sore feet from walking. It's hard trying to follow your shoe instead of your shoe following you.… Permanent transients with no attachments and tired looking men with their families and dogs in flivvers.… Skillets, beds, patched up spare inner tubes all hanging and dangling from the ancient cars on the outside and hopeful humanity, herded and hovered on the inside, chugging on to the muck. People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor. (196)

The debility of this group of people is evident, their alleged ugliness invoking the "ugly laws" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which criminalized visible disability and impoverishment and banished them from public view. 26 Even before they have begun the laborious work of bean picking on the muck, this is a population literally hobbled by the difficulty of securing seasonal work. Their nomadic precarity leaves little time or space for healing between one job and the next, continually producing a vulnerable workforce that may well be too weak to flee in the face of the hurricane's even greater risk of danger. Puar tells us that "debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves, with moving neither toward life nor toward death as the aim." 27 In an environment like the agricultural Everglades, workers moving toward death can't produce a profit, but workers moving toward life won't stay put when their lives are under threat. The bean farms profit most if their workers are in a debilitated middle state like the one Hurston describes.

Though there is no way to know for sure that the dog perched on the cow—who ultimately bites Tea Cake and infects him with rabies—is one of these dogs carted to the Everglades in a flivver, their appearance here is suggestive. It is not unlikely that Tea Cake's downfall comes at the hands of one of his coworkers' dogs, as the debilitating effects of the bean farms extend beyond the humans who work for them: workers' canine companions, too, must live in this wild habitat teeming with all kinds of unfamiliar animals and possible carriers of disease. This is especially true given the limitations that economic precarity placed on nomadic travelers' ability to provide shelter and ongoing companionship to domestic animals; as Hurston noted in an unpublished photo essay documenting a migrant worker community in Florida, "Under-fed, unwashed puppies are too common. They are asked for and played with proudly for a short period. When they get thin and dirty-looking, they are left to their own devices." 28 The Everglades to which such dogs would then turn are also home to bats, raccoons, skunks, and foxes, some of the most notorious carriers of rabies. 29 In short, we can presume that both Tea Cake and the dog were made vulnerable to injury by their environment before the hurricane even hit, and Tea Cake's altercation with the dog dramatizes the chilling effect that a scarcity economy can have on sympathies between similarly affected populations.

This is not a particularly celebratory take on interspecies affiliation, to be sure. But, again, rather than cast her characters' vulnerabilities as simply degrading or stereotypical, Hurston mines this moment of proximity for possibility as well as tragedy. Though Tea Cake contracts the rabid dog's illness and endures a harrowing transformation that leads to his death, Janie's encounter with madness and animality ends differently: it occasions her fully coming into her own as a narrator. While Janie does physically contract the dog's illness when Tea Cake bites her, this may be the least meaningful aspect of her becoming-mad-dog, as she likely gets treated immediately and faces no risk of the behavioral transformation that accompanies late-stage rabies. Other moments of transformation have more lasting implications. Just before Tea Cake bites her, Janie "[s]aw the ferocious look in his eyes and went mad with fear as she had done in the water that time" (272). This leads her to shoot Tea Cake, her beloved but often abusive husband, which the townspeople later characterize as a form of madness: "Tea Cake had done gone crazy. You can't blame her for puhtectin' herself. She wuz crazy 'bout him" (282). In both of these formulations, Janie's killing of her husband is implied to be the result of a transmittable mad-dog state.

After Tea Cake's death, the distance between Janie's voice and the novel's narrator becomes almost nonexistent. Though the text continues in the third person, the free indirect discourse of the courtroom scene that follows Tea Cake's death reads as if Janie herself is testifying—a near-identical closeness of voice that belies readings of the scene as evidence of Janie's having been silenced by a patriarchal society. 30 The extent to which the narrator's voice resembles Janie's suggests that this is the point at which Janie has become a narrator not only of her defense in a courtroom, but also of the text as a whole—her own version of the text her grandmother envisioned for her. Though we don't see Janie's words in quotation marks, we can hear her addressing the court in her own words, as she "tried to make them see how terrible it was that things were fixed so that Tea Cake couldn't come back to himself until he had got rid of that mad dog that was in him and he couldn't get rid of the dog and live. He had to die to get rid of the dog" (278). This combination of dialect and syntax enacts a rapid shift of perspective from the beginning of this passage to the end: "She tried to make them see" locates the narrator and reader at an observational distance from Janie's viewpoint, but "how terrible it was" endorses that viewpoint, and "until he had got rid of that mad dog that was in him" seems to inhabit the voice of that viewpoint entirely. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that the entire passage starting with "things were fixed…" is not identical to Janie's testimony. This is a critical moment in Hurston's development of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has called the "speakerly text," in which the narrator's standard English blends with the protagonist's vernacular English almost completely over the course of the novel. 31

It is no coincidence that this intensification of Janie's connection with the narrator congeals around Janie's identification of Tea Cake with the mad dog. It is especially "terrible" that Tea Cake couldn't get rid of the mad dog and live because, as Janie now knows from experience, becoming a disabled animal does not have to be fatal. Indeed, Janie's ability to step into the novel's narratorial voice is the direct result of her identification with the mule, and with her and Tea Cake's becoming-dog. If not for these encounters with interspecies debility, Janie would not be back on her front porch in the novel's frame narrative, telling her friend Phoeby "how everything wuz." She would have no story about how she came to be a single woman "back home agin and… satisfied tuh be heah" after having "been tuh de horizon and back," with a rich life narrative to keep her "full uh thoughts" (284). Nor would she have entered into the position of the "speakerly" narrator which, according to Gates, was the first attempt in literary history to incorporate Southern African-American oral narration into free indirect discourse. This constituted a significant disruption in the normative aesthetics of the novel, which were grounded in white supremacist conceptions of literacy, intellect, and ability. There is, then, a disability politics to Hurston's aesthetics; as Pickens has put it, "To trouble notions of how a text speaks is to allow for the possibility that cognition, communication, and ability upend or cocreate said text." 32

Through encounters with nonhuman beings who have been debilitated within the same racialized and gendered divisions of labor that would render Janie a "mule uh de world," she puts pressure on those divisions, as well as on the conventions of narration that would exclude human "mules uh de world" from the role of "narrator" as much as they would exclude actual mules.

Cane: From the Sawmill to Vaudeville

While Hurston's novel is focused on the industrial-agricultural habitats of the American South, this is not the only context in which Harlem Renaissance authors located forms of interspecies disablement that defined racialized labor exploitation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Jean Toomer's experimental novel Cane, whose series of fictional vignettes follow a Great Migration trajectory from South to North and back again, 33 illustrates that structural disablement is limited neither to the human species nor to rural environments. The novel begins in a rural environment similar to Hurston's Florida, a Southern small-town community where smoke from the nearby sawmill hangs over cane fields and railroad tracks. Through a series of short stories and poetic interludes that draw connections between different forms of disability manufactured by industry and agriculture, from maimed rats to workers "blinded" and "deafened" by exhaustion, Toomer deploys the rhetoric and imagery of disability to characterize these economies' debilitating effects on human and nonhuman life. In the second section of the novel, which takes place in Washington, D.C., labor exploitation and racism are no less harmful to the environments of Toomer's characters, who feel constrained by a culture of professional respectability and upward mobility that one character describes as "zoo-restrictions" and "keeper-taboos" (83). In the city, racial capitalism domesticates and commodifies difference in spaces of spectacle, surveillance, and enclosure such as the zoo and the theater, shoring up the middle class's sense of its own normalcy while creating new forms of disablement among those who fall outside it. In contrast to the rural South, where overwork and over-extraction of the natural world are the mechanisms of debilitation, in the urban North, it is exclusion from the bourgeois class and alienation from the natural world that create disabling environments. Even so, Toomer also positions disability as a potential space of transgression, resistance, and solidarity among socially debilitated groups, developing a complex and structural picture of Black disability that cannot be reduced to either stigma or pride.

Though the sawmill is only ever part of the backdrop to the action of the novel, its presence is a persistent reminder of the everyday toll of industry on both human and nonhuman life. In the poem "Georgia Dusk," the buzzing noise and destruction of the sawmill are contrasted with its' workers' evening activities at a barbeque, where "Their voices rise… the pine trees are guitars, / Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain… / Their voices rise… the chorus of the cane / Is caroling a vesper to the stars…." 34 Even as the workers' voices combine with the "sacred whisper of the pines" in a transcendent multispecies chorus, the sawmill looms as the material evidence of ecological violence and habitat destruction: "Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile / Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low / Where only chips and stumps are left to show / The solid proof of former domicile" (19). The chorus itself, while beautiful, also reflects the intertwined positions of trees and humans as the raw materials of "cut-and-get-out" lumber production; as Rebekah Taylor-Wiseman has written, when the pines "'whisper to Jesus' … they protest institutional racism as well as destructive environmental practices, for the impetus behind both is this same." 35 Smoke from the mill also follows the novel's opening character Karintha who, besieged with male attention since childhood and implied to have been "ripened too soon" by sexual assault, ultimately gives birth next to the sawmill where "[the] pyramidal dust pile smouldered" (5). Sawdust, the product of Black men's labor in the sawmill, is imbued with the violence that attends the reproductive labor of Black women—that is, the labor that supplies and sustains the industry's workforce. "Meanwhile, the smoke curls up and hangs in odd wraiths about the trees, curls up, and spreads itself out over the valley," Toomer writes, linking that reproductive labor concretely with the ecological impacts of industrial production. "Weeks after Karintha returned home the smoke was so heavy you tasted it in water" (5).

Much as smoke and sawdust function as metonyms for the debilitating effects of industry on their surrounding (human and extrahuman) habitats, the tools of agricultural production become metonyms for the disablement of workers' bodies. In the poem "Reapers," "Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones / Are sharpening scythes" while "Black horses drive a mower through the weeds, / And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds" (6). Here, it is a nonhuman animal who is disabled by the work of harvesting cane, but elsewhere it is human laborers; in the poem "Harvest Song," a reaper is blinded and deafened by dust in his eyes and ears, and too fatigued to feed himself or commiserate with fellow workers: "I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters / whose throats are also dry" (93). Though deafness functions metaphorically here, it also communicates a material truth about labor exploitation, which is that the deliberate disablement and exhaustion of workers' bodies keep them alienated from one another and thus unlikely to organize. 36 Taken together with the novel's ominous representations of the sawmill, the invocations of disablement in its two representations of sugarcane reapers reveal that Toomer is finely attuned to the disablement of both Black laborers and nonhuman life within the economic systems of the Jim Crow South. Moreover, Cane's attention to the impacts of agricultural and industrial production on extrahuman ecologies shows how racial capitalism depends on the debilitation of its workers not only directly via bodily impairment from overwork or dangerous work, but also indirectly via the destruction of workers' environments. Given the events of "Karintha," one might imagine that the reaper in "Harvest Song" suffers from a dry throat not only because he has worked all day, but also because his water supply is infused with smoke from the sawmill.

There is no doubt, then, that ecological disablement constitutes a significant site of conceptual and aesthetic engagement for Black authors at the beginning of the twentieth century. But, just as nature doesn't only exist in the country, this phenomenon was and is not limited to the sprawling fields and forested towns of the South. In fact, it is when Cane turns its gaze to urban environments that its investment in the connections between human and nonhuman disablement becomes especially vivid. This happens in the story "Box Seat," which follows a man named Dan who has migrated to a Northern city from the South and either struggled or refused to find work, and whose class anxiety over the bourgeois sensibilities of his love interest, Muriel, builds up to a hallucinatory rage over the course of the narrative. Muriel, meanwhile, is torn between her obvious desire for Dan and her disdain for his joblessness and social impropriety. The story's form shifts regularly from third-person narration to free indirect discourse to a kind of voiceover effect, in which Dan's inner monologue, preceded by the signpost "Dan:", reveals the turmoil and violent impulses he is feeling while engaged in polite activities and conversation. Consider the first such "voiceover," which takes place while Dan is struggling to find the doorbell on Muriel's house:

Dan: Break in. Get an ax and smash in. Smash in their faces. I'll show em. Break into an engine-house, steal a thousand horsepower fire truck. Smash in with the truck. I'll show em. Grab an ax and brain em. Cut em up. Jack the Ripper. Baboon from the zoo. And then the cops come. "No, I aint a baboon. I aint Jack the Ripper. I'm a poor man out of work. … I am Dan Moore. I was born in a canefield…." (77)

Dan's rage is rooted in the stereotyping of Black masculinity, as his fantasy of inhabiting the racist figure of the baboon arises out of anxiety that someone might think he is trying to break into Muriel's house. But while the figure of the baboon operates on one level as a recognizable caricature, it is not just any baboon; it is, importantly, an animal from the zoo. Though today's readers might be inclined to interpret the zoo as a metaphor for human subjugation, its resonances would have been different at the time of Toomer's writing, when the exhibition of Black people in zoos and world's fairs were still very recent history. Cane was published only 17 years after the New York Times editorial board called Ota Benga, a formerly enslaved Mbuti man then on exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, "very low in the human scale" and justified his captivity on the basis that he "doesn't think very deeply." 37 Forced to sleep in the zoo's monkey house and tormented by jeering visitors, Benga eventually made headlines when he "got hold of a knife and brandished it about the park." 38 The question of whether madness is an appropriate frame for understanding the damaging effects of captivity—or whether it is simply a white supremacist projection of stigma onto people who act reasonably under autonomy-denying conditions—is one of the driving tensions in "Box Seat." But by invoking the figure of the baboon in the zoo, an animal that also can develop obsessive and aggressive behaviors in captivity, Toomer signals that Dan has been the object of genuine psychological disablement as a result of his social position. 39

And so, the "baboon from the zoo" of Dan's inner monologue represents a resistance to the authority of bourgeois values like scientific racism and spectacle, values that were used to justify the forced captivity and debilitation of both human and nonhuman subjects on the basis of racial difference and perceived intellectual disability. Dan's psychological distress is grounded not only in the harms of racist stereotyping, but also in the historical connections between the captivities of chattel slavery, Progressive Era custodial institutions, modern spectacle, and psychiatric disability. It gestures toward a particular kind of psychiatric distress, observed in all manner of animals in captivity, brought about by a lack of freedom of movement, autonomy, and play. 40 Indeed, this sense of totalizing captivity that characterizes Dan's experience of the North is contrasted with the cane fields of his childhood, which in the early parts of the novel are shown to provide cover for various kinds of transgression, pleasure, and wildness, even as they are managed under the disabling authority of racial capitalism. 41 This origin story aligns Dan with nonhuman animals in captivity not only in terms of psychological harm, but also in terms of the injustice of being alienated from one's habitat. Dan's captivity within the logics of upward mobility and urban surveillance (i.e., the threat that "Some one might think he is trying to break in") keeps him alienated from the ecological connections he might have felt as a child in the South, which are also invoked when, later in the story, Dan hallucinates that a woman seated in a theater is growing roots that "sink down and spread under the river and disappear in blood-lines that waver south" (85).

Again, whether it is appropriate to characterize such a vision as "madness" is questionable—particularly given the elements of surrealism in this story, an artistic movement whose folkloric and mystical values, as Robin D.G. Kelley has written, "were present in Afrodiasporic culture before surrealism was ever named." 42 Still, Dan's vision is perceived as madness within his social sphere. The vision occurs while Dan is taking his seat in a theater before a vaudeville show, and the eyes of the woman in question "look at him unpleasantly," and shortly thereafter an annoyed audience member asks him to stop talking to himself (85). According to the narrator, Dan "fidgets, "disturbs his neighbors," steps on people's feet, and ultimately is called "crazy" after an outburst during the show (86, 91). This series of events casts Dan in the position of what La Marr Jurelle Bruce calls "psychosocial madness," or "radical deviation from the normal within a given psychosocial milieu." 43 In contrast to "medicalized madness," Bruce notes, "[t]he arbiters of psychosocial madness are not elite cohorts of psychiatric experts, but rather multitudes of avowedly Reasonable people and publics who abide by psychonormative common sense." 44 Whether or not Dan has a diagnosis or experiences his own perceptions as madness, his "unruliness of will" certainly "resists and unsettles reigning regimes of the normal" among the theatergoers. 45

Moreover, the narrator relies on a telling refrain in which Dan "dont fit in," or "doesnt fit" (80, 85). This concept of the "misfit" is one that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has suggested is aligned with disability, in that it describes "the discrepancy between body and world, between that which is expected and that which is, produces fits and misfits." 46 Garland-Thomson cites the Oxford-English Dictionary definition of misfit, which emphasizes unfitness for work: "This condition of mis-fitting slides into the highly negative figure of a 'person unsuited or ill-suited to his or her environment, work, etc.; spec. one set apart from or rejected by others for his or her conspicuously odd, unusual, or antisocial behaviour and attitudes.'" 47 When read through this lens and in relation to Dan's refusal or incapacity to hold down a job, Dan's not-fitting-in becomes a matter of not just social, but also economic, exclusion, on the basis of behaviors that do not serve the productivity demands of modern capitalism. In this sense, Dan presages Sylvia Wynter's discussion of "jobless young Black males" who are "made to pay the 'sacrificial costs'… for the relatively improved conditions" of middle-class Black Americans, in a nation-state whose functioning depends on the existence of a disposable Deviant class. 48 Wynter locates this figure in the post-Civil Rights period, but "Box Seat" suggests that the category of the jobless scapegoat has a longer history, encompassing an earlier moment of upward mobility among Black people in the U.S. Those who were mad—and thus purportedly unemployable—were dysfunctional within the systems of production and thus rendered disposable.

But just as Dan avows an affiliation with animality under the confining conditions of white supremacist modernity, Dan does not shy away from the outcast status of disability. To the contrary, Dan imagines himself allied with several figures of disability as his mental state becomes more and more visibly atypical, and each one strengthens his revolutionary spirit against the suffocating air of liberal respectability that has defined his time in the North. First he identifies with a pair of boxers with dwarfism who fight in the vaudeville show. "He imagines that Muriel shudders" when she looks at them, much as she is afraid of his unmannered desire for her and his resistance to middle-class ambition. The boxing match becomes an extension of Dan's rage toward Muriel and the larger theatergoing middle class, as the choreography of the fight is interspersed with Dan's increasingly associative voiceovers. Finally, when the "house wants more" from the exhausted performers and one is forced to perform a song while wiping blood from his nose, Dan begins to fantasize about destroying the theater:

Dan: I am going to reach up and grab the girders of this building and pull them down. The crash will be a signal. Hid by the smoke and dust Dan Moore will arise. In his right hand will be a dynamo. In his left, a god's face that will flash white light from ebony. I'll grab a girder and swing it like a walking-stick. Lighting will flash. I'll grab its black knob and swing it like a crippled cane. (89)

This is no typical delusion of grandeur. In Dan's heightened imagination, he is both all-powerful and physically disabled, two things that would likely seem incompatible to much of the world around him. He demolishes the theater—a house of spectacle, conspicuous consumption, and exclusionary pretension—with the swagger of one who walks with a cane. 49 Reminiscent of Esu-Elegbara, the Yoruba deity whose "legs are different lengths because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the gods while the other rests in this, our human world," Dan's revolutionary alter ego invests atypicality with sacred purpose. 50

The climax of "Box Seat" coincides with an outburst on Dan's part that cements his affiliation with disability. As the singing boxer approaches Muriel with a rose, she recoils in revulsion, while Dan hallucinates words "form[ing] in the eyes of the dwarf" that tell Muriel not to be afraid because the boxer, too, "was made in [God's] image" (90). When Muriel reaches out to accept the rose, Dan stands up and shouts, "JESUS WAS ONCE A LEPER!" (91). He then proceeds out of the theater, followed by an audience member who wants to fight him over his disruptive antics, as well as a mob of onlookers. But Dan, having found and voiced his alignment with the outcast status of disability, is now "cool as a green stem that has just shed its flower" and is no longer compelled to fight. As the man from the audience removes his coat to exchange blows, "Dan, having forgotten him, keeps going on" (91).

By the end of the story, Dan has aligned himself with all three of the exemplary categories of disability that Garland-Thomson notes have "historically occupied positions as outcasts or misfits": "lepers, the mad, [and] cripples." 51 Literary scholar Michael Davidson has written of this moment that "Dan experiences a restorative identification with the different body, one that marks his racial ostracism but also his identity within a larger community of suffering and beauty." 52 This is certainly true. But to define such a community in terms of only suffering and beauty obfuscates the structural forces that bring these subjects into affiliation. It is the same system of capitalistic norm-enforcement that excludes the boxer from typical employment due to his size, and that excludes Dan from typical employment due to his neurodivergence and alienation from the norms of politesse. Neither Dan nor the boxer "fit in" with the standardized biometrics of the assembly line, or with the aesthetic and behavioral norms of the office. And in the middle-class theater, where the not-always-visible nature of Dan's misfit bodymind initially affords him the tenuous position of spectator rather than exploited performer, both Dan and the boxer ultimately become spectacles. There, as in a freak show, their difference affirms the theatergoers' sense of belonging within societal norms. 53 Much like the exhausted reaper in "Harvest Song," who appeals to metaphors of disability like blindness and deafness to illustrate his own debilitated position, Dan affiliates with other disabled figures in ways that illuminate the material connections among their positions under the debilitating structural forces of racial capitalism.

"Box Seat" makes clear that, on one level, not serving the capitalist values of productivity and upward mobility—whether because of neurodivergence or classed/regional difference—is both socially and materially disabling. On another level, though, the solidarity Dan forges with the "misfit" status of disability is a healing experience; Dan leaves the theater unencumbered with either the rage that had consumed him up to that moment or the overwhelming concern with how others view him. Disablement occupies a complex position, then, both as the product of violent economies and alienating environments and as a source of revolutionary fervor against (and potential liberation from) the confining ideologies of disabling systems.

Moreover, Dan's neurodivergence is fundamental to the aesthetics of the short story, whose narration explodes the novelistic convention of free indirect discourse with its intrusions of internal monologues directly from Dan's consciousness. In most cases of free indirect discourse, the narrator is positioned as a relatively stable (if unreliable) observer who is granted entry into the characters' consciousness even as they experience what might be called madness. But alongside the multiple altercations that drive the action of "Box Seat," the story is also a formal drama in which the narrator's authority is constantly fought over. The back-and-forth of the boxing match is mirrored by the text, in which paragraphs alternate between third-person narration of the action and Dan's interjections, each preceded by his name and a colon to indicate that it is coming directly from Dan. While the third-person narration occasionally reflects Dan's voice and judgments, it never fully represents Dan's consciousness; only Dan gives voice to his fantasies, associations, and reflections. Meanwhile, the form of Dan's voiceovers resembles the formal conventions of a play more than prose fiction, destabilizing genre as well as narrative convention. It is as if Dan refuses to be ventriloquized by the standards of narration, which represent the very values—rationality, objectivity, adherence to convention—that have made him a misfit. And while his visions may be violent and at times misogynist (particularly those involving rage toward Muriel), they also offer profound moments of escape from the confinements and alienations of his environment. These visions include a woman whose roots reach out toward the South, an old man born into slavery with whom Dan imagines he can commune with the heavens, and the fantasy of tearing down the theater—all visions that exceed the agreed-upon reality of the other theatergoers not only because they are signs of madness, but because they contest the logics of upward (northward) mobility, secular progress, and urbane spectacle that structure their bourgeois reality. Dan's madness, then, is not simply a symptom of a disabling social and economic world; like surrealism, it "breaks the chains of social realism and rationality, turning to poetry as a revolutionary mode of thought and practice." 54 For Toomer, as for Hurston, disability is foundational to an aesthetic capable of imagining a different kind of world.

Conclusion

For Hurston and Toomer, exploring affiliations with disability, in their many possible and sometimes contradictory iterations, is the only way to dislodge the logic of dehumanization. In these texts, weakness, illness, disability, and madness are the catalysts for innovations in the art of narration—a capacity only humans have. If disability is what makes a good narrator, it becomes a lot harder to dehumanize any group of people by alleging their proximity to disability.

At the same time, Toomer's and Hurston's narratives of disability do not fall into the trap of romanticizing disability's insurgent potential. While they challenge the assumed status of muleness and madness as signifiers of narrative incapacity and explore the potential for resistance within them, they also do not wholeheartedly embrace these affiliations as emancipatory. The weak mule, the mad dog, and the madman are affiliations inherited from many generations of dehumanization, and these authors' ambivalent engagements with these figures do not negate or obscure that inheritance. The mule is simultaneously a metaphor for Janie's subjugation under her first marriage and a literal living being whose life circumstances make Janie into a storyteller. The mad dog is the culmination of the white-owned labor exploitation that leads to Tea Cake's preventable death, at the same time that it sets into motion Janie's becoming a narrator. Dan Moore's madness delivers him from the confining expectations of bourgeois respectability, but it also carries the trauma of his displacement from his home and fuels a rage toward Muriel that is inflected with misogyny and masculinist domination. Both authors understand disability in multifaceted ways that presage La Marr Jurelle Bruce's "mad methodology," which recognizes that madpersons "can be critical theorists and decisive protagonists in struggles for liberation" but "neither vilifies the madperson as evil incarnate, nor romanticizes the madperson as resistance personified, nor patronizes the madperson as helpless ward awaiting aid. Rather, mad methodology engages the complexity and variability of mad subjects." 55

These complexities in Hurston's and Toomer's work also foreshadow the historical materialist approaches of contemporary disability scholars. Like Puar, they reflect one of the core differences between an abolitionist politics of contending with debility and white disability activism's focus on representation and inclusion. They are keenly aware that no amount of inclusion in the circuits of racial capital can undo or prevent the violence that produces debility, though the misfit terrain of disability can be grounds for strategizing and imagining otherwise. Like Erevelles, they understand disability "not as the condition of being but of becoming," where "becoming" is an historical process rather than simply the acquisition of a personal identity. 56 This approach to understanding historical disablement demands a more careful accounting of Black literary perspectives than has been undertaken in disability studies at large, which, in Pickens' words, "often thinks of Blackness as a contribution [to the field] rather than part of its construction." 57 Suggesting that people of color have been more dismissive of their discursive and material relationships to disability than the white people who dominate the field contributes to this error, as well as obscures the ways in which white supremacy is materially responsible for the lack of disability scholars of color. 58 To redress this flawed and whitewashed narrative of the field's origins, disability studies must account for the robustness with which the Black literary tradition has conceptualized disability as a matter of social construction and structural injustice—long before the social model had a name.