Mules and Men

[1] The book explores stories she collected in two trips: one in Eatonville and Polk County, Florida, and one in New Orleans.

[1][2][3] Hurston's decision to focus her research on Florida came from a desire to record the cross-section of black traditions in the state.

In her introduction to Mules and Men, she wrote: "Florida is a place that draws people—white people from all over the world, and Negroes from every Southern state surely and some from the North and West.

[4] The book embraces both her own re-immersion in the folklore of her childhood, and a desire to document those traditions as part of the emergent anthropological sciences.

[5][6] Subsequently, the book has been described as an important text for the canonization of Hurston in both American and African-American literature, and in developing fields such as ethnography and critical race theory.

Hurston chose Eatonville as the location for her Folklore collection because she knew the people there would not consider her diploma or credentials and instead would treat her as another local.

The dialogue of Hurston’s frame stories is vernacular, recording the way people spoke in Eatonville at the time.

Black men on the way to work in the difficult conditions of a sawmill tell stories about John, an enslaved man who outwitted the devil, his white master, and tried to trick God himself.

In part two of Mules and Men, Hurston travels to New Orleans to collect folk tales, learning from various practitioners of hoodoo, each with their own specialties.

Instead, the section is seen entirely through the Hurston's authorial persona, recounting the events of each hoodoo ritual with a first person perspective.

Others are part of the oral tradition of enslaved people in the United States and offer a look at the forms of resistance and culture developed in the antebellum south.

John realizes the trick, and when his master comes to his door, tells 'God' that he's too dirty to be in the presence of God and he needs to change his pants and his shirt.

The character Hurston presents, unassuming and non-threatening, allowed her to write about Black folklore in a way that would not upset white audiences at the time.

Indeed, some white reviewers found the book a "straightforward, nonthreatening depiction of the humorous and exotic side of Black culture in the rural south.

Hurston's unique narrative devices created a work that the contemporary scientific establishment judged as childlike and ill-advised.

Franz Boas, her academic mentor the father of American anthropology, wrote in its preface that "It is the great merit of Miss Hurston's work that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro" with the "charm of a loveable personality and of a revealing style.

"[1] Boas's introduction gave some credence to Mules and Men but at the cost of Hurston's authorial autonomy.