Work · African & Africana Philosophy
Mules and Men
Folktales, songs, sermons and hoodoo practices that Hurston collected from 1927 in Eatonville, a Polk County sawmill camp and New Orleans; she renders the narrators’ Southern Black English as spoken and frames it with her own account of the fieldwork; preface by Franz Boas.
Introduction
Mules and Men appeared in 1935 with a preface by Franz Boas, who saw its merit in Hurston’s having entered the everyday life of Southern Black people as one of them. The first part gathers folktales – “lies”, as the tellers called them – about God, the Devil, animals and the trickster John and his master, which Hurston heard on porches in Eatonville and in a sawmill camp at Loughman; the second describes her apprenticeship with hoodoo doctors in New Orleans. Unlike most ethnographies of the time, the book keeps the narrators’ voices and dialect and shows the collector herself at work. Long read mainly as folklore, it is now also read as an early example of anthropology done from within one’s own community.
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