Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Lisa Drew Books) by Valerie Boyd

Author:Valerie Boyd [Boyd, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2011-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

Mules, Men, and Maroons

When Mules and Men was published to critical acclaim in October 1935, Zora Neale Hurston must have felt as if she could write her own ticket—to Jamaica, Haiti, or wherever else she wished to go.

With a preface by Franz Boas, and a dust jacket endorsement by Melville Herskovits, Hurston’s second book inspired a plethora of praise. “A bold and beautiful book, many a page priceless and unforgettable,” Carl Sandburg cheered. “To read Mules and Men is a rich experience,” Lewis Gannett concurred in his New York Herald Tribune review.

Hurston’s lively recounting of her fieldwork in the South in the late 1920s, Mules and Men is part folklore, part hoodoo chronicle, and part immersion journalism. That these disparate elements come together so seamlessly, and successfully, is a testament to the author’s narrative skill.

Hurston devotes the second half of her book to describing her apprenticeships with the hoodoo masters of New Orleans, material that continues to compel even though it had been published before, in her 1931 “Hoodoo in America” article. At the core of Mules and Men, however, are seventy Negro folktales, gathered on Eatonville porches, in Loughman work camps, and in Polk County lying contests. But Hurston “did more than record these tales,” as the black critic Henry Lee Moon noted in his New Republic review. “Alert and keenly observant, she studied the mores, folk-ways, and superstitions, the social and economic life of these people as an essential background for her book.” As a result, Mules and Men was, in Boas’s words, “an unusual contribution to our knowledge of the true inner life of the Negro.”

Inserting herself into the narrative as a semifictional and self-effacing Zora, Hurston effects as much intimacy with the reader as she achieved with Big Sweet, Mack Ford, Luke Turner, and all the men and women who vividly populate her book. Or, as Moon put it, “the intimacy she established with her subjects, she reproduces on the printed page, enabling the reader to feel himself a part of that circle.”

Like Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Mules and Men offered a glimpse of what black southern life was like when white people weren’t watching. “She has plunged into the social pleasures of the black community,” The New York Times summarized, “and made a record of what is said and done when Negroes are having a good gregarious time, dancing, singing, fishing, and above all, and incessantly, talking.”

It’s fair to say that no book—certainly not the “Uncle Remus” tales, to which it was sometimes compared—had ever given such precedence, such loving regard, to black speech; to what black people had to say, and how they said it. As with Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston’s skill at recording black dialect in Mules and Men is extraordinary. As Times reviewer H. I. Brock noted, “a very tricky dialect has been rendered with rare simplicity and fidelity into symbols so little adequate to convey its true value that the achievement is remarkable.”

Even captious critic Sterling Brown praised Hurston’s “sensitive ear.” But Brown, a Washington, D.

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