Joe Bliven

Mules And Men
By Zora Neale Hurston

September 29th, 2018

I was excited to read this book because I understood it was a collection of African-American oral tradition, and I love Zora Neale Hurston from what I've read of hers. I was expecting tall tales and fables along the lines of American pioneering tales like Paul Bunyon and Pecos Bill. It turned out to be a sort of fly-on-the-wall account of a form of small talk used among the black men and women from Hurston's native region when they have time to kill. Hurston approaches them to record their "lies" which is exactly how they refer to these anecdotes. It's a very fun and unique variety of spinning tall tales and is a great feat of anthropological record for Hurston to have undertaken, history thanks her. Unfortunately her writing surrounding the "lying" sections is very precise and lacks color. Fortunately the "lies" themselves are jam packed full of colorful language and expressions. Footnotes are provided for strange terms but many of the terms are still used today while many of the terms without notes are foreign to me and without explanation. The book continues in the same way for half the book and starts to get a little stale and then completely shifts gears as she moves from Florida to Louisiana in the second part of the book. The second part is a fascinating account of Voodoo culture and practices. It turns out that during her research for this book she became an ordained witch doctor of sorts. The subject matter in this section is much more interesting but the writing is no more colorful than the last section and is rarely spiced up by stories collected from other people. The records she keeps in this section are very scientific and essentially in the form of a list.

If you're reading this to be taken away by the beauty of human story telling you may be disappointed but if you're looking for a purely anthropological and historical account of two little recorded pockets of Early 20th Century Southern black culture you're in for a real treat.