Mules and Men

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

An Excerpt from Barracoon

Chapter I

About the Author

Books by Zora Neale Hurston

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 for 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 to 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.

Although the voodoo section (a slightly edited version of her 1931 article Hoodoo in America in the Journal of American Folklore) was added at the last minute to the book in 1934 to please its publisher, Lippincott, the two sections are intimately related. The world of Eatonville and Florida in general—the world of tales spun by black men and women—is linked directly in this book to the world of New Orleans and Louisiana, where two-headed doctors preside over a community that believes devoutly in spells and conjures, hexes and divinations. Linking Eatonville and New Orleans is the communality and adaptability, the indomitable resilience of the imagination of Africans terrorized in the New World by objective reality in the form of slavery, segregation, and poverty. And both elements, I believe, were linked integrally to Hurston’s interior world, to the fantastic personality and the altered personal history she had created for herself. I thought about the tales I had heard as a child, Hurston recalled fancifully but pointedly during her approach by car to Eatonville. "How even the Bible was made over to suit our vivid imagination. How the devil always outsmarted God and how that over-noble hero Jack or John—not John Henry, who occupies the same place in Negro folklore that Casey Jones does in white lore and if anything is more recent—outsmarted the devil."

She who had been living to some extent by her wits, by her imagination, by the lies she created for her empowerment and salvation, as well as by her more structured, conventionally disciplined intelligence as a college student, now had begun to see her personal predicament and her imaginative response to it in a broader historical and cultural sense. To her black sources, their marvelous tales were—lies. (‘Zora,’ George Thomas informed me, ‘you come to de right place if lies is what you want. Ah’m gointer lie up a nation.’ ) In one sense, it is possible to say that Hurston had become more of an African-American cultural nationalist, seeing more of the world and herself in terms of race and her own blackness. This would be true only to a limited degree, as Hurston’s later involvement with reactionary political forces and personalities suggests. The power she gained from seeing her life in coherence with the storytelling imagination of country blacks and with the world of conjure and black magic represented by voodoo was placed largely in a different service—self-empoweringly, to facilitate her emergence as a writer of fiction. Even before Mules and Men appeared in 1935, she published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), which drew on her parents’ history for inspiration. Two years after Mules and Men came Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which she effected her most harmonious blending of the themes of folklore and individualism, in a story now recognized as one of the main foundations of African-American literature.

In both main sections of Mules and Men—the seventy stories that make up Folk Tales and her encounters with five doctors in Hoodoo—the most fertile single device is the portrait of the narrator, Hurston herself. In both cases, she is both familiar with the culture into which she is moving and also an initiate. She is known in Eatonville, but everywhere else she must ingratiate herself into the confidence of the people, her great source. (I stood there awkwardly, knowing that the too-ready laughter and aimless talk was a window-dressing for my benefit. The brother in black puts a laugh in every vacant place in his mind. His laugh has a hundred meanings.) So, too, with the world of hoodoo, which she approaches not as a scientific scholar, taking notes, or fraudulently, as Newbell Niles Puckett had done for his own book in representing himself as a conjure man. None may wear the crown of power, she writes of her initiation, "without preparation. It must be earned. Instead, she would be a true believer. Belief in magic is older than writing, she declared tellingly. In the end, her teacher Luke Turner (called elsewhere Samuel Thompson by Hurston), who offered himself as the grandnephew of Marie Leveau, the most fabled figure in New Orleans hoodoo lore, invites Hurston to devote her life to the field. He wanted me to stay with him to the end, she soberly reveals. It has been a great sorrow to me that I could not say yes."

Much has been made about Hurston’s scholarly shortcomings in compiling Mules and Men. It seems certain that not all the stories and anecdotes in the book originated in the course of her research. Some of them, picked up elsewhere, may have been substantially ornamented by Hurston, and perhaps she invented a few. Rival versions of certain passages, published elsewhere by her, raise questions about her scholarly integrity. For the sake of symmetry, she appears to have telescoped certain periods of time into more convenient arrangements. I had spent a year in gathering and culling over folk-tales, she wrote, when in fact she had spent a much longer period. Above all, some readers find Hurston insufficiently analytical and too much a part of her text, without that text revealing her definitively. Her shifts from the third person to the first are sometimes disconcerting. Scientific purists may find her language at times too colloquial and even racy, her sense of humor often reckless, her poetic license too frequently invoked. Her approach, some would say, was journalistic rather than scientific, self-indulgent rather than profound.

I would respond that the key to Mules and Men is precisely Hurston’s finding of herself in the black folk world she described, and finding that black folk world, approached first by her as a student of anthropology, finally to be an unmistakable, ineradicable part of herself, her intimate psychology and history, and her desires, especially her desire to be an artist.

ARNOLD RAMPERSAD

INTRODUCTION

I was glad when somebody told me, You may go and collect Negro folklore.

In a way it would not be a new experience for me. When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism. From the earliest rocking of my cradle, 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.

Dr. Boas asked me where I wanted to work and I said, Florida, and gave, as my big reason, that 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. So I knew that it was possible for me to get a cross section of the Negro South in the one state. And then I realized that I was new myself, so it looked sensible for me to choose familiar ground.

First place I aimed to stop to collect material was Eatonville, Florida.

And now, I’m going to tell you why I decided to go to my native village first. I didn’t go back there so that the home folks could make admiration over me because I had been up North to college and come back with a diploma and a Chevrolet. I knew they were not going to pay either one of these items too much mind. I was just Lucy Hurston’s daughter, Zora, and even if I had—to use one of our down-home expressions—had a Kaiser baby,¹ and that’s something that hasn’t been done in this Country yet, I’d still be just Zora to the neighbors. If I had exalted myself to impress the town, somebody would have sent me word in a match-box that I had been up North there and had rubbed the hair off of my head against some college wall, and then come back there with a lot of form and fashion and outside show to the world. But they’d stand flat-footed and tell me that they didn’t have me, neither my sham-polish, to study ’bout. And that would have been that.

I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm or danger. As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times. As a child when I was sent down to Joe Clarke’s store, I’d drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more.

Folklore 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. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, Get out of here! We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.

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 say my say and sing my song.

I knew that even I was going to have some hindrance among strangers. But here in Eatonville I knew everybody was going to help me. So below Palatka I began to feel eager to be there and I kicked the little Chevrolet right along.

I thought about the tales I had heard as a child. How even the Bible was made over to suit our vivid imagination. How the devil always outsmarted God and how that over-noble hero Jack or John—not John Henry, who occupies the same place in Negro folk-lore that Casey Jones does in white lore and if anything is more recent—outsmarted the devil. Brer Fox, Brer Deer, Brer ’Gator, Brer Dawg, Brer Rabbit, Ole Massa and his wife were walking the earth like natural men way back in the days when God himself was on the ground and men could talk with him. Way back there before God weighed up the dirt to make