Mules and Men

The collector is in the car

The first sentence of Mules and Men is a woman arriving somewhere: as I crossed the Maitland to Eatonville township line I could see a group on the store porch. Nothing in that sentence belongs to the folklore monograph of 1935. A monograph opens with a region, a method and a sample. Hurston opens with a car, a township line and people she can already see.

The consequence runs through the whole first part. Every tale in the book is told by somebody with a name, in a place, to an audience that argues with it. A reader gets the story and the room at once. That is the opposite of the practice Hurston had been trained out of, where a collector arranges tales by type, footnotes the variants, and leaves no trace of the visit.

Her first attempt in the field had used the other method and failed. She asked, in what she later called carefully accented Barnardese, whether anyone knew any folk tales or songs, and nobody had any. Hurston's fix was to stop being a visiting scholar in the scene and become a woman from Eatonville with a car. What the book documents is partly what a stranger cannot be told.

A lying contest, and who wins it

The tales of Part One come out of competition. People on the store porch and in the work camps try to beat each other, and the word for what they are doing is lying. The contents list reads like a scoreboard. How Jack Beat the Devil. Why Negroes Are Black. Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men. Ole Massa and John Who Wanted to Go to Heaven. How the Snake Got Poison. Why the Sister in Black Works the Hardest.

Read the titles in order and a structure appears that nobody designed. There are origin tales that explain the world, a long cycle about a man called John who outwits his enslaver, animal tales, church tales, and jokes about money and work. Hurston does not sort them into those categories. She lets them arrive in the order a night of talk produces them, which is how a reader learns that one kind sets up another.

The John cycle carries the book's sharpest material. John gets the better of Ole Massa again and again, by nerve and by pretending to be simple. One tale is called Ole Massa and John Who Wanted to Go to Heaven; another, blunter, is Kill the White Folks. Hurston prints them without commentary. A reader who wants an argument about what these tales did for the people who told them has to build it from the tales.

Preaching sits beside the jokes. How the Brother Was Called to Preach and How the Preacher Made Them Bow Down and Pa Henry's Prayer are in the same run as the animal tales. Hurston had grown up hearing the sermon as a performed form with its own rules, and she treats it as one. The church is not a separate subject in this book. The church is more of the same talk.

New Orleans, and the part where she gets initiated

Part Two changes country and method. Hurston goes to New Orleans to study hoodoo and does not stay a spectator. She apprentices to conjure doctors, undergoes initiations, and reports the ceremonies from inside them. The book's four appendixes exist because of this section: songs with music, the formulae of hoodoo doctors, the paraphernalia of conjure, and the prescriptions of root doctors.

The choice to be initiated is the same choice as the opening sentence, carried further. Hurston's position is that some knowledge is only available to a participant, and that a researcher who insists on standing outside will collect the version reserved for outsiders. Franz Boas praised exactly this in his preface, calling the book the first real attempt at the inner life rather than the surface.

The method also has a cost, and the appendixes are where it shows. A formula printed as a formula is stripped of the room, the voice and the argument that Part One insists on. Hurston keeps the two registers apart rather than blending them: narrative in the body, data at the back. A reader can see her being two things in one volume and can see where the seam is.

Who paid, who owned it, and what that did to the book

Charlotte Osgood Mason financed the collecting on terms that are hard to read now. Hurston received two hundred dollars a month and a camera, and Mason owned the material she gathered. A wealthy white patron therefore held the legal claim to Black folklore collected by a Black anthropologist from Black communities. Hurston's letters call her Godmother. When the arrangement ended she wrote that she had kicked loose from the Park Avenue dragon and was still alive.

The support also had a shape in time. Mason's money thinned after the stock market crash, and Hurston's fieldwork ran in bursts that follow the funding. Florida from February 1927. Then the long stretch from 1928 into 1930, through the turpentine camps and New Orleans and the Bahamas. Then back to New York in the spring of 1930. Publication came five years after that, in 1935.

The book has been earning its keep ever since without earning her much. The largest royalty any Hurston book ever produced was 943 dollars and 75 cents. Mules and Men stayed the standard collection of Black American folklore, and the folklorist Roger D. Abrahams called it simply the most exciting book on Black folklore and culture he had ever read. Alice Walker came to Hurston through this book before she came to the novel.