Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Mules and Men

Part I: I really enjoyed all of the folktales in this half of the book. Some even managed to get me to chuckle out loud. I did have to keep telling myself that the narrative was nonfiction even though Hurston wrote it in a fictional style.

Also, the end was crazy! What happened to Big Sweet!?

Part II: I think I enjoyed this section slightly less, mostly because

of the sheer amount of graphic animal killing there was throughout. I understand that it was ritualistic in order for the hoodoo to work, but c'mon.

I did, however, find the rituals of all of the different hoodoo practitioners to be extremely intriguing. The how-to steps in the Appendixes made me really want to try it, too.

Content Warnings

ceallaighsbooks's review

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funny informative lighthearted mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

“Zora, don’t you come here and tell de biggest lie first thing. Who you reckon want to read all them old-time tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear?”
“Plenty of people, George. They are a lot more valuable than you might think. We want to set them down before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Before everybody forgets all of ‘em.”
“No danger of that. That’s all some people is good for—set ‘round and lie and murder groceries.”

TITLE—Mules and Men

AUTHOR—Zora Neale Hurston

PUBLISHED—1935

GENRE—African American folklore & ethnography

SETTING—the American South (Florida & Louisiana)

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—folk tales, African American history & culture (stories, language/dialect, food, games, and songs), ethnography, racism, hoodoo (“or voodoo, as pronounced by the whites”, p183), magic & spiritual traditions

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—This book was a combination of all of my loves and interests: folktales, language, real magic, and that particular brand of anthropology—“her work celebrates rather than moralizes” (Gates Jr., p293)

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Well, once upon a time was a good ole time. Monkey chew tobacco and spit white lime.”

In spite of its status as a work of anthropological nonfiction, Mules and Men reads like a novel in two parts. Part I is a story about an ethnographer who returns to her hometown to collect the folklore, songs, games, and traditions of her heritage. It is beautiful, insightful, hilarious and completely absorbing. Part II is about the ethnographer’s journey to New Orleans and the land of hoodoo where she studies to become a hoodoo doctor with various influential practitioners of the time.

“Belief in magic is older than writing. So nobody knows how it started.”

As a lover of folklore and fairy tales, this book held an obvious goldmine of interest for me but what I didn’t expect was the additional layer of interest it held for me as a onetime anthropology student. Hurston’s descriptions of her ethnographical fieldwork and collection strategy was extremely fascinating.

My favorite stories from Part I were the ones about “How the Snake Got His Poison” and “How the Lion Met the King of the World”. Those made me laugh the hardest. 😂 I also loved “How the Devil Coined a Word”, and of course “How Jack O’Lanterns Came to Be.”

Something else that I thought was really special is that Hurston preserves and represents the dialect that these stories were told in when she collected them which is what I’ve read the Grimm brothers also did in their collecting of German folk and fairy tales but which I’ve never been able to appreciate before since that is all lost in their translation into English. So it was really cool to be able to read these folktales in their proper English dialect. In fact, in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Afterward to this collection, he discusses Hurston’s use of language and says: “It is this concern for the figurative capacity of black language…that unites Hurston’s anthropological studies with her fiction.” (p292)

But alongside all the folktales is also information about various games, songs, and traditions as well as glimpses of what daily life was like for Black people in communities in Florida and Louisiana in the early 20th century. (This would make an INCREDIBLE movie btw. Can we start a petition or something?)

Part II is about Hurston’s time in New Orleans and the surrounding area learning about the spiritual and cultural traditions of hoodoo and African American spiritualism. This section reads more like an ethnographer’s notebook but the material is so interesting and so powerful that you truly do get the sense that you are being made privilege to something so ancient and sacred that you end up reading it in a kind of quiet reverence. I felt like I should be in the cubicle of some mystical library reading her words in this part.

And of course, the last lines are 😚👌🏻. I could see this book potentially winning my favorite read of the year this year.

“That’s what the old ones said in ancient times and we talk it again.”

“Biddy, biddy, bend my story is end. Turn loose de rooster and hold de hen.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

TW // brief mentions: slavery, use of the n-word; moderate: knife fighting, racism/colorism; graphic: animal cruelty & sacrifice (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, by Zora Neale Hurston—TBR
Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston—TBR
Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston—TBR
Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark
Root Magic, by Eden Royce
I, Tituba, by Maryse Condé

Favorite Quotes…

FOLKTALES:

“Let her get settled at ‘Met’s’ and cook a pan of ginger bread then we’ll all go down and tell lies and eat ginger bread. Dat’s de way to do.”

“Zora,” George Thomas informed me, “you come to de right place if lies is what you want. Ah’m gointer lie up a nation.”

“They mouth is cut cross ways, ain’t it? Well, long as you don’t see no man wid they mouth cut up and down, you know they’ll all lie jus’ like de rest of us.”

“Ah got to say a piece of litery (literary) fust to git mah wind on. Well Ah went up on dat meat-skin / And Ah come down on dat bone / And Ah grabbed dat piece of corn-bread / And Ah made dat biscuit moan.”

“So Ah stepped on a pin, de pin bent and dat’s de way de story went.”

“At night time, at de right time, Ah’ve always understood it’s de habit of de rabbit to dance in de wood.”

“Y’ take de cat a fish, too. They love it better than God loves Gabriel—and dat’s His best angel.”

“Nope, Ah ain’t got to do nothin’ but die and stay black.”

HOODOO:

“New Orleans is now and has ever been the hoodoo capital of America. Great names in rites that vie with those of Hayti in deeds that keep alive the powers of Africa.”

“Many a man thinks he is making something when he’s only changing things around.”

“Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.”

“We needs help. Somebody that can hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.”

“Speak gently to ghosts, and do not abuse the children of the dead.”

“It is not good to answer the first time that your name is called. It may be a spirit and if you answer it, you will die shortly. They never call more than once at a time, so by waiting you will miss probable death.”

(Last lines:) “Once Sis Cat got hongry and caught herself a rat and set herself down to eat ‘im. Rat tried and tried to git loose but Sis Cat was too fast and strong. So jus’ as de cat started to eat ‘im he says, “Hol’ on dere, Sis Cat! Ain’t you got no manners atall? You going set up to de table and eat ‘thout washing yo’ face and hands?”
Sis Cat was mighty hongry but she hate for de rat to think she ain’t got no manners, so she went to de water and washed her face and hands and when she got back de rat was gone.
So de cat caught herself a rat again and set down to eat. So de Rat said, “Where’s yo’ manners at, Sis Cat? You going to eat ‘thout washing yo’ face and hands?”
“Oh, Ah got plenty manners,” de cat told ‘im. “But Ah eats mah dinner and washes mah face and uses mah manners afterwards.” So she et right on ‘im and washed her face and hands. And cat’s been washin’ after eatin’ ever since.
I’m sitting here like Sis Cat, washing my face and usin’ my manners.”

AFTERWARD, by Henry Louis Gates Jr.:

“The deeply satisfying aspect of the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston is that black women generated it primarily to establish a maternal literary ancestry.”

“Always more of a novelist than a social scientist, even Hurston’s academic collections center on the quality of imagination that makes these lives whole and splendid.”

“As Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s biographer, concludes, “Such passages eventually add up to a theory of language and behavior.” Using “the spy-glass of Anthropology,” her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that “both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading”… The myths she describes so accurately are in fact, “alternative modes for perceiving reality.”

on Dust Tracks, Hurston’s autobiography: “Hurston’s achievement in Dust Tracks is twofold. First, she gives us a writer’s life, rather than an account, as she says, of “the Negro problem.” So many events in this text are figured in terms of Hurston’s growing awareness and mastery of books and language, language and linguistic rituals as spoken and written both by masters of the Western tradition and by ordinary members of the black community. These two “speech communities,” as it were, are Hurston’s great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but all in her autobiography.”

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