Mules and Men
Zora Neale Hurston
With a Preface by Franz Boas,
A Foreword by Arnold Rampersad,
An Afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
and Illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias
To
my dear friend
Mrs. Annie Nathan Meyer
who hauled the mud to make me
but loves me just the same
Contents
Preface
Foreword
Introduction
Part I
Folk Tales
One
John and the Frog
Witness of the Johnstown Flood in Heaven
Two
How the Brother Was Called to Preach
How the Preacher Made Them Bow Down
Pa Henry’s Prayer
How the Church Came to Be Split Up
Why Negroes Are Black
Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men
Sue, Sal and That Pretty Johnson Gal
Three
The Quickest Trick
How to Write a Letter
A Fast Horse
“Ah’ll Beatcher Makin’ Money”
“The Workinest Pill You Ever Seen”
How Jack Beat the Devil
“John Henry”
Four
Ole Massa and John Who Wanted to Go to Heaven
Massa and the Bear
Why the Sister in Black Works Hardest
“De Reason Niggers Is Working so Hard”
Deer Hunting Story
Five
Big Talk
The First Colored Man in Massa’s House
What Smelled Worse
The Fortune Teller
How the Negroes Got Their Freedom
The Turtle-Watch
“From Pine to Pine Mr. Pinkney”
“God an’ de Devil in de Cemetery”
Praying for Rain
Kill the White Folks
“Member Youse a Nigger”
Six
“You Think I’m Gointer Pay You But I Ain’t”
Why the Mocking Bird Is Away on Friday
Man and the Catfish
How the Snake Got Poison
How the Woodpecker Nearly Drowned the Whole World
How the Possum Lost the Hair Off His Tail
How the ’Gator Got His Mouth
How Brer ’Gator Got His Tongue Worn Out
How the ’Gator Got Black
Seven
How Brer Dog Lost His Beautiful Voice
What the Rabbit Learned
The Goat That Flagged a Train
Shooting Up Hill
Tall Hunting Story
The Hawk and the Buzzard
Why They Always Use Rawhide on a Mule
Why We Have Gophers
How God Made Butterflies
How the Cat Got Nine Lives
The Son Who Went to College
Why the Waves Have Whitecaps
Eight
How the Lion Met the King of the World
Sermon by Travelling Preacher
Nine
Card Game
“Ella Wall”
“Ah’m Gointer Loose Dis Right-hand Shackle from ’Round My Leg”
Strength Test Between Jack and the Devil
Ten
Why the Porpoise Has His Tail on Crossways
Why the Dog Hates the Cat
How the Devil Coined a Word
How Jack O’Lanterns Came to Be
Why the East Coast Has Mosquitoes and Storms
How a Loving Couple Was Parted
“All These Are Mine”
How the Squinch Owl Came to Be
The Talking Mule
High Walker and Bloody Bones
Fight at Pine Mill
Part II
Hoodoo
One
Origin of Hoodoo
Eulalia—Ritual to Get a Man
Two
Turner and Marie Leveau
Marie Leveau—Confounding an Enemy
Marie Leveau—Putting on Curse
Turner—Initiation Ceremony
Turner—Routine to Keepa Husband True
Three
Anatol Pierre
Ritual—Initiation Ceremony
Ritual—To Make a Death
Ritual—To Swell with a Brick
Four
Father Watson
Ritual—Initiation Ceremony
Ritual—To Punish
Ritual—To Get a Person Out of the House
Ritual—To Keep a Person Down
Ritual—Getting the Black Cat Bone
Five
Dr. Duke
Ritual—To Help a Person in Jail
Ritual—To Silence Opposing Witnesses
Ritual—To Uncross
Ritual—To Send Away
Dr. Jenkins
Concerning the Dead
Six
Conjure Stories
Seven
Kitty Brown
Ritual—Ceremonial Dance to Put Away a Man
Ritual—To Make Love Stronger
Ritual—To Bring a Lover Back
Ritual—To Rule the Man You Love
Glossary
Appendix
I Negro Songs with Music
II Formulae of Hoodoo Doctors
III Paraphernalia of Conjure
IV Prescriptions of Root Doctors
Afterword
Selected Bibliography
Chronology
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
Ever since the time of Uncle Remus, Negro folklore has exerted a strong attraction upon the imagination of the American public. Negro tales, songs and sayings without end, as well as descriptions of Negro magic and voodoo, have appeared; but in all of them the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro has been given very inadequately.
It is the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such by the companions of her childhood. Thus she has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in his true inner life. Miss Hurston has been equally successful in gaining the confidence of the voodoo doctors and she gives us much that throws a new light upon the much discussed voodoo beliefs and practices. Added to all this is the charm of a loveable personality and of a revealing style which makes Miss Hurston’s work an unusual contribution to our knowledge of the true inner life of the Negro.
To the student of cultural history the material presented is valuable not only by giving the Negro’s reaction to everyday events, to his emotional life, his humor and passions, but it throws into relief also the peculiar amalgamation of African and European tradition which is so important for understanding historically the character of American Negro life, with its strong African background in the West Indies, the importance of which diminishes with increasing distance from the south.
FRANZ BOAS
FOREWORD
On December 14, 1927, according to her biographer Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston boarded a midafternoon train at Pennsylvania Station in New York City, bound for Mobile, Alabama. From Mobile she would travel on to Florida and then to Louisiana, in a major effort to gather material on African-American folklore and other folk practices, including voodoo.
Hurston did not begin her project with the utmost confidence. After all, her first significant venture as a collector of folklore in the South had ended earlier that year with a frank admission on her part of failure. That professional setback was particularly galling f
or two reasons. First, Hurston was no stranger to the South, having been born and reared in Eatonville, Florida; as she later boasted in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she had “the map of Dixie on my tongue.” Secondly, she had carried out this first project collecting folklore in the South with the solid backing and encouragement of Franz Boas, unquestionably the dominant figure in American anthropology and Hurston’s most influential professor at Barnard College, which she had entered as a student in 1925.
Still, Hurston had been unable to make the most of these advantages and had returned to New York with raw material in her notebooks rather than with a mature, complex grasp of the implications of that material that would have enabled her to move from being simply a transcriber to becoming a profound interpreter of Southern folklore’s place in the culture of black America. She had returned to Boas with little to show for her efforts. However, her second expedition into the South as a gatherer of folklore would end differently, even though several years passed before its success was crowned with the publication in 1935 of Mules and Men. Filtered through a matured consciousness, and organized according to effective journalistic and literary strategies, the material she gathered mainly between 1927 and 1928 (with additional work up to 1931 and 1932) resulted in one of the outstanding books of its kind ever published in the United States. In 1960, the year Hurston died, the celebrated American collector Alan Lomax appraised Mules and Men as “the most engaging, genuine, and skillfully written book in the field of folklore.”
Although Hurston is far better known for the publication of her feminist novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), no understanding of her mind and her art, or of her contribution to African-American culture or to the study of folklore, can ignore the achievement of Mules and Men. Almost certainly, there would have been no Their Eyes Were Watching God without the process of growth and maturation that resulted first from Mules and Men. In this book, Hurston first effected a genuine reconciliation between herself and her past, which is to say between herself as a growing individual with literary ambitions on the one hand and the evolving African-American culture and history on the other. Here, in an extended literary act—her most ambitious to date—she found at last the proper form for depicting herself in relationship to the broad range of forces within the African-American culture that had produced her, as well as for portraying the people of which she was but one member. Here she came to terms at last with the full range of black folk traditions, practices, expressions, and types of behavior, and began to trust her understanding of their multiple meanings as an index to the African-American world. “From the earliest rocking of my cradle,” she wrote in Mules and Men, “I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.”
In the case of Zora Neale Hurston, one speaks of this “coming to terms” with black folk culture carefully or not at all. Struggling to find a lofty place for herself in the world, she nevertheless arrived in New York in 1925 displaying from the start little ambivalence about traditional black culture. She was one of W.E.B. Du Bois’s talented tenth—the gifted and educated leadership of the race on whom Du Bois based his hopes for African-American ascendance—without seeing herself, as members of the tenth often saw themselves, as victim caught tragically between two worlds, black and white. Instead, she draped black folk culture about herself like a fabulous robe, creating an inimitable and unforgettable personality, according to virtually everyone who recalled her, based on her mastery of jokes and stories, insights and attitudes, that derived almost directly from the black folk experience. As a fledgling writer, too, her earliest stories depended proudly—and shrewdly—on the black voices she had heard as a child growing up in Florida, the people who had taught her how to speak. She moved ambitiously among whites, often with guile and not infrequently in a servile manner; but consistently she offered herself as a child of the black South who had little desire ever to forget, much less repudiate, her folk and country roots.
This degree of identification set her apart from virtually all other writers, black and white. In his landmark study The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois had delved into folk culture to illustrate his thesis of black dignity and historicity. However, he had concentrated almost exclusively, in the area of psychology and philosophy, on approaches by blacks to Christianity; in the area of art, he clung almost entirely to the noble and transcendent music of the spirituals. Other black writers, such as William Wells Brown and Charles Chesnutt, had drawn on black folkways, including both in music and in religion, in certain areas of their work, but none approached Hurston’s knowledge of and commitment to folk culture. By far the best-known explorer of the black folk tradition among writers was Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus stories, in tying animal tales to the plantation tradition, severely limited their applicability to black culture as a whole. Within what passed in those days for folklore science (as Hemenway points out, not one American university then boasted a department of folklore), efforts by white collectors to gather black material were often stymied by preconceptions about black character and by the reticence of blacks to lower their guard before such strangers. Notable among such work available in Hurston’s days as a student were Guy Johnson and Howard Odum’s The Negro and His Sons (1925) and Negro Workaday Songs (1926), as well as the white Mississippi folklorist New-bell Niles Puckett’s Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1927), in which Puckett had masqueraded as a voodoo priest himself in order to gain information.
As her letters to her academic mentor Franz Boas attest, Hurston had little regard for the work of these writers, especially Odum and Johnson, whom she saw as presumptuous in their confidence that they understood fully the black folk material. “Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds,” she warned. “The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest.” She was fortunate in that Boas, although a white man himself, was perhaps the outstanding champion of the notion of cultural relativism. He urged that cultures be seen on their own terms and not according to a scale that held European civilization to be the supreme standard. For all her advantages, however, Hurston still found it difficult to effect a breakthrough. In part, this was owing to the complexity of the task of understanding the material; in part, it derived from Hurston’s personal life experience, and especially from the fact that she was living at least one major lie as a student at Barnard. The two elements—the scholarly or intellectual, on the one hand, and the “purely” personal, on the other—were perhaps finally inseparable.
Hurston was born in the black town of Eatonville, Florida, on January 7, 1891—but so willfully misrepresented herself later that even her diligent biographer believed that her year of birth was 1901. This lost decade is perhaps only the major mystery of her life. What happened to Hurston between 1891 and 1917, when she started high school at Morgan Academy (later Morgan State University) in Baltimore, Maryland, is barely illuminated either by independent research or by her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Both, however, tell of a loving mother who urged her to “jump at de sun” and a dominating father, an Eatonville preacher and carpenter, whose remarriage following his wife’s death began a long season of sorrow for Hurston. Apparently unable to find common ground with her new stepmother, Zora was passed around among relatives before she struck out on her own. She worked variously as a maid and a waitress, and may even have been married for a while, before she entered Morgan Academy in 1917. After being graduated from Morgan, she briefly attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., before going to New York in 1925 to study at Barnard College. Mules and Men is dedicated to Annie Nathan Meyer (“who hauled the mud t
o make me but loves me just the same”), the founder and a trustee of the college and the person directly responsible for Hurston’s presence there.
As Hurston wrote, “the spy-glass of Anthropology” offered at Barnard and Columbia, especially in the persons of Boas and his associates Melville Herskovits and Ruth Benedict, enabled her to begin to see her Southern black culture accurately and comprehensively. And yet her deliberate obscuring of a decade of her life suggests that she could have approached her past, which is to say the wellspring of her folkloric knowledge, only with a certain amount of caution, perhaps even distaste. In dropping a decade from her life, she was almost certainly denying the existence of experiences and involvements that, however unpalatable to her later on as she strove for success, had been a major part of her knowledge of her world. However, one other person was at least as important as these academics in pushing Hurston not only back into the arms of her past, as exemplified by her literal reentry into Eatonville to gather the material for the first part of Mules and Men, but also toward the radical belief in parapsychology and occultism, in voodoo and other forms of African religion, that generated the second, even more extraordinary part of the volume. That person was her patron Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, as Hurston reveals in Mules and Men, who “backed my falling in a hearty way, in a spiritual way, and in addition, financed the whole expedition in the manner of the Great Soul that she is. The world’s most gallant woman.”
This tribute appears at the end of Hurston’s introduction, which places her in a motorcar (paid for by Mrs. Mason) precisely on the border of Eatonville—home. The wealthy septuagenarian widow of a doctor who had been himself an expert in parapsychology, Mrs. Mason was already “Godmother” to various Harlem Renaissance figures, including Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, when she took up Zora Neale Hurston and bankrolled her second folklore expedition into the South. As with Langston Hughes, whose novel Not Without Laughter (1930) Mrs. Mason virtually commissioned and edited, she did much more than provide Hurston with money. Volatile in personality, contemptuous of European rationalism and radically devoted to the idea of extrasensory communication, and a champion of the notion of the artistic and spiritual superiority of the darker races, Mrs. Mason, more than any of Hurston’s academic advisers, paved the way for Hurston’s plunging not simply into the Eatonville community of her childhood but, far more radically, into voodoo and black magic in Louisiana.