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Mules and Men

Zora Neale Hurston




  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.