Mules and Men

Mules and Men Review

Mules and Men was published in 1935 with a preface by Franz Boas, Hurston’s anthropological mentor at Barnard, and an introduction by Hurston herself that is one of the most elegant accounts of a fieldworker’s method and purpose in twentieth-century nonfiction. The book collected folklore during two extended fieldwork trips — one to Eatonville, Florida and the surrounding communities, one to New Orleans — and presented the material inside a frame narrative that showed how the collection happened: who told what story, in what context, with what response from the community.

This frame narrative is Hurston’s most important methodological and literary innovation. Earlier collectors of Black Southern folklore — most of them white scholars — had presented the material decontextualised, stripped of the social life that gave it meaning and function, as if the tales existed independently of the people who told them. Hurston’s frame restores the context: she returns to Eatonville as a neighbour rather than a researcher, is accepted on those terms, and records what people tell her in the places and situations where they tell it. The tales are embedded in scenes of community life — on the porch, at the jook joint, during work — and the scenes are as important as the tales.

The tales themselves are the riches that the book’s reputation rests on. The John and the Devil cycle — in which a Black man outsmarts the Devil repeatedly, usually through wit and verbal dexterity — is presented across multiple variants, each variant illuminating what the others leave in the shadows. The animal tales, the creation stories, the tales of origin for racial difference — all of them are sophisticated cultural technologies, doing the work that a community without access to institutional power does through narrative: preserving memory, encoding values, processing grievance, maintaining dignity.

The second half of the book, covering Hurston’s time in New Orleans learning voodoo under a series of hoodoo doctors, is the most unusual and the most contentious section — the first extended sympathetic account of voodoo as a coherent spiritual system rather than a dangerous superstition in American nonfiction. Mules and Men is simultaneously a work of scholarly anthropology, a work of literary nonfiction, and a statement about the intellectual and cultural sophistication of a community that white American culture had systematically undervalued.

The Anthropologist as Artist

What makes Mules and Men unique is the fusion of two roles that the academy of the 1930s kept rigidly separate: the trained anthropologist and the literary artist. Hurston studied under Franz Boas, the founder of American cultural anthropology, and brought genuine scholarly rigor to her fieldwork — but she was also a novelist with an incomparable ear for Black Southern speech, and she refused to flatten her subjects’ voices into the deadened transcription of academic ethnography. The result reads like literature because Hurston understood that the way a story is told is inseparable from what it means. She was, in effect, an insider conducting fieldwork in her own culture, and she turned the supposed liability of that position — her closeness to her subjects — into the book’s greatest strength. Decades before anthropologists began debating the ethics of the outside observer, Hurston had already modeled a different practice: research as an act of love and belonging rather than extraction.

Its Long Influence

Mules and Men has only grown in stature. As the first major collection of African American folklore assembled by a Black writer from inside the community, it became a foundational text for the study of Black oral tradition, and its frame-narrative method anticipated approaches to ethnography that scholarship would not formally embrace for another half-century. Its influence runs through the work of later Black writers — from Toni Morrison’s use of folklore and myth to Alice Walker’s recovery of Hurston herself — and through the entire field of folklore studies. The book also stands as a crucial act of cultural preservation: much of the oral material it captured, rooted in a rural Black South that has since transformed, survives because Hurston wrote it down. For readers interested in the Harlem Renaissance, American folklore, anthropology, or simply the pleasure of brilliantly told tales, it remains both an essential historical document and a genuinely delightful read — best approached not as a dry collection but as a guided visit, in Hurston’s company, to the porches and jook joints where these stories lived.

A note for new readers on how to approach it: Mules and Men is not a book to be read for plot, and it rewards a relaxed, dip-in attitude over a cover-to-cover march. The pleasure is in the voices — the rhythm of the tale-telling, the back-and-forth of the porch and the jook joint, the humor and competitive one-upmanship of the storytellers — and in Hurston’s framing scenes, which are as vivid as anything in her fiction. Read a few tales at a sitting, attend to the dialect she so lovingly preserved, and the book opens up as a guided immersion in a vanished world. Those who come to it from Their Eyes Were Watching God will recognize the same ear and the same affection at work; the folklore and the fiction are two expressions of a single project. For students of American culture and for general readers alike, Mules and Men remains both an irreplaceable historical record and a continual delight.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — One of the most unusual and valuable books in American literary history — essential for understanding Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance, and Southern Black oral culture.