Three plays — Themes and Context

Courtroom Comedy and Verbal Play

In Lawing and Jawing, Hurston uses the courtroom as a stage for comic exaggeration and linguistic invention. Judge Dunfumy’s opening threat—“I’d give a canary bird twenty years for peckin’ at a elephant”—sets a tone of absurd authority. The dialogue is full of wordplay: a character describes himself as “a much-right man,” and another retorts, “Dis ain’t Gimme, Ga. Dis is Waycross.” The play’s humor arises from the gap between official legal language and the characters’ inventive, rhythmic speech. The judge’s “honor” is repeatedly undercut by his own flirtatious glances at a pretty girl in the front row. The manuscript’s handwritten notations, transcribed as [Handwritten:(text)], suggest Hurston revised these lines carefully, perhaps testing their oral effect.

Checkers, Courtship, and Street Scenes

The second excerpt shifts from the courtroom to a street-corner checkers game. The dialogue is fast-paced and competitive: “Come on, Good Black, lemme wrap dis checker roun yo’ neck.” The players are surrounded by onlookers who offer advice, and the scene is punctuated by flirtatious exchanges with passing women. A girl named Bee Ethel asks for five dollars for stockings; Cliff responds with a string of metaphors: “I’m just lak de cemetery. I takes in but never no put out.” The play Woofing (not excerpted) likely continues this pattern of verbal dueling. The excerpts show that Hurston’s drama is built on call-and-response, rhythmic insults, and the physical comedy of characters who “git hot real quick” but cool down when confronted by someone bigger. The setting is deliberately casual—a porch, a street—suggesting that the real drama is in the talk itself.

Music, Dance, and Communal Performance

Hurston integrates music and dance directly into the action. In one scene, a character named Lonnie tunes a guitar and sings “Cold Rainy Day,” and others join in dancing the Lindy Hop. The men cry out ecstatic phrases: “Shimmy! If you can’t shimmy, shake your head.” The dance is communal, with couples and soloists, and the women exit “switching it and looking back at it.” These moments are not interludes but part of the narrative flow—the checkers game pauses for a song, then resumes. The manuscript’s stage directions are minimal but vivid: “They couple off as far as possible and Lindy.” Hurston, a trained anthropologist, embeds folk performance within the plays’ structure, making the dialogue and movement inseparable. The catalog subject “African Americans – Drama” is accurate, but the excerpts reveal a specific focus on vernacular culture as performance.

These plays were transcribed from original manuscripts held by the Library of Congress, and the Project Gutenberg edition preserves handwritten corrections and underlinings. Readers should attend to the rhythm of the dialogue and the stage directions, which are as much a part of the drama as the words. The plays reward reading aloud, and the incomplete excerpts leave open how Forty Yards and Woofing extend the patterns of verbal play and social observation found here.

The rain that afternoon blurred the courtroom comedy in Lawing and Jawing into something almost tender, the voices curling like smoke. I kept thinking how Hurston’s ear caught the rhythm underneath the joke. Later, drying my hands, I pulled an old fourth-grade reader from a pile, and the same simple music was there, just waiting. Children's Classics in Dramatic Form, A Reader for the Fourth Grade — Key Ideas to Explore sat open on the sill, its dialogues humming, familiar as a lullaby.