Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston

Source of book: I own this.

 

Mules and Men is the first of my two official Black History Month selections this year. I have previously read two Zora Neale Hurston books: her best known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and her story of Oluale Kossola, one of the last Africans transported to the United States as an enslaved person, Barracoon.

 

Those two books encapsulate Hurston’s two careers. She is best known now as a novelist, but her work as a cultural anthropologist was arguably as important. Mules and Men is part of her work in the latter field. 

 

The book is divided into two parts. The first is all about the folk tales and stories she collected in her Florida hometown. The second is about Hoodoo (what white people call Voodoo) in New Orleans. Both are attempts to preserve black folk culture, but are rather different. 

 

The “Tall Tale” genre is really an American original, transcending race and geography. From the Paul Bunyan tales of the northern Midwest to the mining camp tales collected by Mark Twain and Bret Harte among others, to a modern version in Homer Price. (My wife pointed that one out…)  

 

But perhaps the best known are the tall tales told by African Americans as part of a coping mechanism - the stories of underdogs who outwit those in power. 

 

There are three antecedents for the genre. The Baron von Münchhausen tales of Germany contain many of the elements - the outrageous exploits, the impossible situations, the exaggeration. Both Native American and African cultures have “trickster” tales, featuring the coyote in the first case, and either the spider Anansi or the rabbit or the “Gopher” (meaning tortoise) in the latter. The trickster rabbit translated directly into Brer Rabbit, whose adventures were collected by Joel Chandler Harris. 

 

While there is some overlap in the types, the genre took on a distinct and unmistakable American form in the “lying” contests, the oneupmanship of who can tell the tallest tale, the most outrageous “lie,” concoct the most exaggerated idea. 

 

Hurston doesn’t just tell the tales, but she tells about how she collected them. Rather than appear as an academic, she went among her own folk, so to speak, and listened. The first part of the book is thus a story of her interactions with the tale tellers, the men and women themselves, with their own stories going on, from fishing to feuds, interspersed with longer tales and short one sentence tall tales and general banter. 

 

At the time, she was criticized for this format, although in retrospect it is a lot more fun to read - and arguably more complete - than a more formalized academic style would have been. 

 

The second part is more serious. Hurston apprenticed herself to several hoodoo practitioners, eventually becoming proficient enough to be offered an apprenticeship - which she turned down reluctantly. 

 

I have mixed feelings about the hoodoo section. On the one hand, it is an impressive bit of anthropology, a front-row view of a subculture that I was not all that familiar with. 

 

On the other, I am no fan of superstition, having been raised in a subculture that put a lot of stock in the unseen supernatural, with demons lurking around every corner, in every bit of secular culture, in books, in movies, in music, and it was all too easy to “catch” one and ruin your life. 

 

Hurston takes hoodoo very seriously, as if it actually worked, which is odd considering her rejection of religion and the supernatural in other contexts. 

 

My biggest problem with that belief is the obvious one that if hoodoo works, couldn’t someone have put a death curse on Donald Trump by now? All the hoodoo doctors, all the witches, all the supposed dealers in the supernatural, and nobody can put a hex on this guy? It’s not like he is a devout Christian - quite the opposite. 

 

And, for that matter, why were the white enslavers seemingly exempt? 

 

This, to me, is the problem with all superstition - from hoodoo to demonology to “alternative medicine” - between confirmation bias and the placebo effect and the fact that only people who believe seem to see any results, good or bad, there really isn’t any “there” there. There is no empirical evidence to back up the claims, despite it being VERY easy to set up controlled experiments. 

 

Hoodoo isn’t real for the same reason that witches aren’t real and homeopathy is bullshit. And I will stand by that until empirical evidence - controlled, repeatable studies - are produced. 

 

That said, setting aside the issues of veracity, as an account of what people believe, say, and do, it is quite fascinating. 

 

In the introduction, Hurston notes the problem of collecting folklore: 

 

Folk-lore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by.

 

In the case of black folk, they are particularly reluctant to give white folk an inside view. 

 

The theory behind our tactics: “The white man is always trying to know into somebody else’s business. All right, I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind. I’ll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I’ll have my say and sing my song.” 

 

Keep this in mind when it comes to commercial music as well. The real hip hop and the real blues aren’t made for white people to consume. (This is not to say that there is no value in commercial music - just don’t assume you are getting an inside look.) 

 

I want to mention a few stock characters in the folk tales. Brer Rabbit likely needs no introduction. I also mentioned that in this book, whenever you see “gopher,” it is referring, not to a member of the ground squirrel family, but to the Gopher Tortoise. As a character, Brer Gopher is a counterpart to Brer Rabbit - a trickster lacking speed but long on brains. Also, one of the funniest stories is where the Devil tries to imitate God and make a turtle, but ends up making a gopher instead. 

 

There are some human stock characters. John Henry was originally an African American character, akin to Casey Jones - the legend that grew out of the real-life person. 

 

In contrast, John is a stock character going further back and based entirely on mythology. John is the ur-trickster, the cunning man who can outwit the Devil - and indeed God himself on occasion. 

 

It is John who becomes Johnny in “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” While Charlie Daniels claimed he made up the story, it appeared in print in a poem by Stephen Vincent Benet, who in turn borrowed whole phrases in the poem from well-known tall tales. There is a tale in this book that is fairly similar to the song, and it is clear enough that the tale has been around a long time. 

 

Another note on this: There has been a tendency for white people to focus on the European roots of Bluegrass music and Country music, while ignoring the black roots. I recently had a brief argument with a friend of a friend about this, who disputed that Country had its roots in swing and blues. This is an easy mistake to make. The genre we recognize today is indeed a fusion of “old time” music by European immigrants and swing and blues. This fusion occurred in the 1930s and 40s, and is obvious in the music by the big names of the era such as Bob Wills and Roy Rodgers. But only the white branch counts, right? 

 

A similar thing happened with Bluegrass, which is another fusion genre. Irish and Scottish immigrants to the Appalachians brought their folk music with them, but Bluegrass differs from either of those because of certain elements that came in from black musicians. The banjo is an African instrument, modified to use local materials. The fiddle styles that are uniquely Bluegrass were developed by black fiddle players during the slavery era. It was the fusion of the two branches that created what we have today, and tracing only the white branch is an inaccurate whitewashing all too typical of white America. 

 

John appears in many of the tales in this book. Sometimes he is a slave outwitting his enslaver. Sometimes he is a poor man outwitting the Devil. Sometimes he is an average guy trying to get away from a nagging wife. But he lives by his wits throughout, and could be seen as a less metaphorical version of Brer Rabbit - always the plucky black folk finding a way. 

 

I’ll mention another where John is played for humor as much as anything. John becomes a victim of the Johnstown Flood, and goes to heaven. To his surprise, nobody wants to hear his story. St. Peter eventually realizes that he was trying to tell Noah about it, and “You can’t tell him nothin’ ‘bout no flood.” 

 

I also enjoyed a particular passage where Hurston recounts a conversation about preachers. 

 

“Aw, Ah don’t pay all dese ole preachers no rabbit-foot. Some of ‘em is all right but everybody dats up in de pulpit whoopin’ and hollerin’ ain’t called to preach.” 

“They ain’t no different from nobody else. They mouth is cut cross ways, ain’t it? Well, long as you don’t see no man wid they mouth cut up and down, you know they’ll lie jus’ like de rest of us.” 

 

I appreciated that Hurston includes stories told by women as well. It isn’t just the good old boys shooting bull, but a whole community that enjoys telling tall tales - and pushing back at the men. Here is the opening of one of the “just so stories” told by one Mathilda:

 

You see in de very first days, God made a man and a woman and put ‘em in a house together to live. ‘Way back in them days de woman was just as strong as de man and both of ‘em did de same things. They useter get to fussin’ bout who gointer do this and that and sometime they’d fight, but they was even balanced and neither one could whip de other one. 

 

My personal belief is that every single one of our cultural myths about male supremacy and gender roles comes directly from the fact that human males are - on average - bigger and stronger. When we evolved to the point of rationality, males still wanted dominance, but needed better reasons than “I’m bigger and stronger.” Hence, millennia of religious, philosophical, and intellectual justifications for the subordination of women. 

 

I also have to include this story, of Hurston’s experience visiting a lumber camp:

 

They all thought I must be a revenue officer or a detective of some kind. They were accustomed to strange women dropping into the quarters, but not in shiny gray Chevrolets. They usually came plodding down the big road or counting railroad ties. The car made me look too prosperous. So they set me aside as different. And since most of them were fugitives from justice or had done plenty time, a detective was just the last thing they felt they needed on that “job.”

I took occasion that night to impress the job with the fact that I was also a fugitive from justice, “bootlegging.” They were hot behind me in Jacksonville and they wanted me in Miami, So I was hiding out. That sounded reasonable. Bootleggers always have cars. I was taken in. 

Later, she is with a group of people waiting for a “job” from the mill, which never comes. They end up going fishing, because, he, got eat, right? Anyway, this line is hilarious:

 

“Must be something terrible when white folks get slow about putting us to work.”

 

Later:

 

“Don’t never worry about work. There’s more work in de world than there is anything else. God made de world and de white folks made work.”

 

And, another observation on white folk:

 

“You bad as white folks. You know they say a white man git in some kind of trouble, he’ll fret and fret until he kill hisself.” 

 

I can’t resist mentioning that there is a story in here about a goat. Most of us know it through the old nursery song. But yep, that one is also an African American folk story.

 

Another line that stood out was this one:

 

“You gittin’ old, Jim, when you can’t stand good lyin’. It’s jus’ like sound doctrine. Everybody can’t stand it.”

 

The final chapter of this section involves a visit to a “jook joint,” which culminates in a general brawl. Between the card games, the music, and the booze, things get a bit heated. This book was researched during prohibition, so it was all illicit stuff. And the recipe sounds ghastly:

 

Somebody had squeezed the alcohol out of several cans of Sterno and added sugar, water, and boiled-off spirits of nitre and called it wine. 

 

In case it wasn’t obvious, DO NOT DO THIS! Sterno contains a proportion of methyl alcohol, which is toxic and can cause death or blindness. Blues musician Tommy Johnson sang about this back in the day, with “Canned Heat Blues.” And yes, the band Canned Heat took their name from the old blues song. 

 

Spirits of nitre - aka Ethyl nitrite - is bad stuff too, even if it has been used as a folk remedy for cold and flu. 

 

During the brawl, a woman who has taken an inexplicable dislike to Hurston tries to attack her with a knife. Another woman, Big Sweet, defends Zora, and ends up defusing the situation. 

 

“You wuz noble!” Joe Williard told her. “You wuz a whole woman and half uh man.” 

 

I didn’t note that much from the hoodoo section. As I said, it was interesting, but not as fun as the folk tales. I did want to note some observations that Hurston had about hoodoo and religion generally. 

 

Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites, is burning with a flame in America, with all the intensity of a suppressed religion. It has thousands of secret adherents. It adapts itself like Christianity to its locale, reclaiming some of its borrowed characteristics to itself. Such as fire-worship as signified in the Christian church by the altar and the candles. And the belief in the power of water to sanctify as in baptism. 

 

Nobody knows for sure how many thousands in America are warmed by the fire of hoodoo, because the worship is bound in secrecy. It is not the accepted theology of the Nation and so believers conceal their faith. 

 

There are some fascinating truths here. First of all, there is no such thing as a “pure” religion. Every single religion that we have knowledge of is syncretistic - it combines elements of old and new, and mixes and matches from the traditions that came before. 

 

Christianity is not exempt, and neither is Judaism. From the very first pages of scripture, there is a borrowing from the pagan Ancient Near East myths - the creation, the flood, the battle between chaos and order, the rituals of fire and water, animal (and human) sacrifices, the cycles of sun, moon, and stars. Even polytheism survives well into the Hebrew scriptures. 

 

Likewise, the Christianity we see around us has borrowed liberally from pagan European beliefs and rituals. Our holidays were largely stolen from older cultures, our symbols and rituals owe much to pre-Christian symbols and rituals. If you want to look at more modern examples, American Christianity draws on uniquely American myths, from the supposed inspiration of the Founding Fathers to the syncretistic worship of Capitalism and the Market which is ever-present in our civic religious expression. 

 

There is no such thing as a pure religion. It is all bound to culture, the past, and the traditions that are a part of both. 

 

And that’s BEFORE you look at supposedly core theological beliefs such as the subordination of women, gender essentialism, heterosexual supremacy, and all that goes with that. 

 

Hurston’s stories about her experience with hoodoo makes it clear that there is a syncretism here too - the blending of Christianity with African traditions. Again, this is no different from the way that Christianity blended with European traditions. 

 

Both are thoroughly superstitious, just in different cultural expressions. There is no meaningful difference in believing that you will catch a demon through reading Harry Potter and that a hoodoo doctor put a curse on you. 

 

The fact that hoodoo only “works” within the community of those who believe it, and that only a certain subculture of fundamentalist Christians ever experiences “demon possession” makes it clear that the real effect is psychological. What we believe affects our psyches, and superstitious beliefs can create very real effects in our brains and bodies. 

 

Deprogramming from superstition has been a part of my deconstructive process, which is probably why the hoodoo section struck me as a bit too credulous and not skeptical enough. But, I understand that Hurston, whatever her personal beliefs, couldn’t have gained access to the rituals she wanted to describe without fully going along with the beliefs. 

 

Mules and Men is an interesting book, effectively written, and with a true “insider” perspective that is rare. It is worth a read.