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 so
urce 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 the mountains. When I was rounding Lily Lake I was remembering how God had made the world and the elements and people. He made souls for people, but he didn’t give them out because he said:
“Folks ain’t ready for souls yet. De clay ain’t dry. It’s de strongest thing Ah ever made. Don’t aim to waste none thru loose cracks. And then men got to grow strong enough to stand it. De way things is now, if Ah give it out it would tear them shackly bodies to pieces. Bimeby, Ah give it out.”
So folks went round thousands of years without no souls. All de time de soul-piece, it was setting ’round covered up wid God’s loose raiment. Every now and then de wind would blow and hist up de cover and then de elements would be full of lightning and de winds would talk. So people told one ’nother that God was talking in de mountains.
De white man passed by it way off and he looked but he wouldn’t go close enough to touch. De Indian and de Negro, they tipped by cautious too, and all of ’em seen de light of diamonds when de winds shook de cover, and de wind dat passed over it sung songs. De Jew come past and heard de song from de soul-piece then he kept on passin’ and all of a sudden he grabbed up de soul-piece and hid it under his clothes, and run off down de road. It burnt him and tore him and throwed him down and lifted him up and toted him across de mountain and he tried to break loose but he couldn’t do it. He kept on hollerin’ for help but de rest of ’em run hid ’way from him. Way after while they come out of holes and corners and picked up little chips and pieces that fell back on de ground. So God mixed it up wid feelings and give it out to ’em. ’Way after while when He ketch dat Jew, He’s goin’ to ’vide things up more ekal’.
So I rounded Park Lake and came speeding down the straight stretch into Eatonville, the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jail-house.
Before I enter the township, I wish to make acknowledgments to Mrs. R. Osgood Mason of New York City. She 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.
PART I
FOLK TALES
ONE
As I crossed the Maitland-Eatonville township line I could see a group on the store porch. I was delighted. The town had not changed. Same love of talk and song. So I drove on down there before I stopped. Yes, there was George Thomas, Calvin Daniels, Jack and Charlie Jones, Gene Brazzle, B. Moseley and “Seaboard.” Deep in a game of Florida-flip. All of those who were not actually playing were giving advice—“bet straightening” they call it.
“Hello, boys,” I hailed them as I went into neutral.
They looked up from the game and for a moment it looked as if they had forgotten me. Then B. Moseley said, “Well, if it ain’t Zora Hurston!” Then everybody crowded around the car to help greet me.
“You gointer stay awhile, Zora?”
“Yep. Several months.”
“Where you gointer stay, Zora?”
“With Mett and Ellis, I reckon.”
“Mett” was Mrs. Armetta Jones, an intimate friend of mine since childhood and Ellis was her husband. Their house stands under the huge camphor tree on the front street.
“Hello, heart-string,” Mayor Hiram Lester yelled as he hurried up the street. “We heard all about you up North. You back home for good, I hope.”
“Nope, Ah come to collect some old stories and tales and Ah know y’all know a plenty of ’em and that’s why Ah headed straight for home.”
“What you mean, Zora, them big old lies we tell when we’re jus’ sittin’ around here on the store porch doin’ nothin’?” asked B. Moseley.
“Yeah, those same ones about Ole Massa, and colored folks in heaven, and—oh, y’all know the kind I mean.”
“Aw shucks,” exclaimed George Thomas doubtfully. “Zora, don’t you come here and tell de biggest lie first thing. Who you reckon want to read all them old-time tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear?”
“Plenty of people, George. They are a lot more valuable than you might think. We want to set them down before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Before everybody forgets all of ’em.”
“No danger of that. That’s all some people is good for—set ’round and lie and murder groceries.”
“Ah know one right now,” Calvin Daniels announced cheerfully. “It’s a tale ’bout John and de frog.”
“Wait till she get out her car, Calvin. Let her get settled at ‘Met’s’ and cook a pan of ginger bread then we’ll all go down and tell lies and eat ginger bread. Dat’s de way to do. She’s tired now from all dat drivin’.”
“All right, boys,” I agreed. “But Ah’ll be rested by night. Be lookin’ for everybody.”
So I unloaded the car and crowded it into Ellis’ garage and got settled. Armetta made me lie down and rest while she cooked a big pan of ginger bread for the company we expected.
Calvin Daniels and James Moseley were the first to show up.
“Calvin, Ah sure am glad that you got here. Ah’m crazy to hear about John and dat frog,” I said.
“That’s why Ah come so early so Ah could tell it to you and go. Ah got to go over to Wood Bridge a little later on.”
“Ah’m glad you remembered me first, Calvin.”
“Ah always like to be good as my word, and Ah just heard about a toe-party over to Wood Bridge tonight and Ah decided to make it.”
“A toe-party! What on earth is that?”
“Come go with me and James and you’ll see!”
“But, everybody will be here lookin’ for me. They’ll think Ah’m crazy—tellin’ them to come and then gettin’ out and goin’ to Wood Bridge myself. But Ah certainly would like to go to that toe-party.”
“Aw, come on. They kin come back another night. You gointer like this party.”
“Well, you tell me the story first, and by that time, Ah’ll know what to do.”
“Ah, come on, Zora,” James urged. “Git de car out. Calvin kin tell you dat one while we’re on de way. Come on, let’s go to de toe-party.”
“No, let ’im tell me this one first, then,
if Ah go he can tell me some more on de way over.”
James motioned to his friend. “Hurry up and tell it, Calvin, so we kin go before somebody else come.”
“Aw, most of ’em ain’t comin’ nohow. They all ’bout goin’ to Wood Bridge, too. Lemme tell you ’bout John and dis frog:
It was night and Ole Massa sent John,1 his favorite slave, down to the spring to get him a cool drink of water. He called John to him.
“John!”
“What you want, Massa?”
“John, I’m thirsty. Ah wants a cool drink of water, and Ah wants you to go down to de spring and dip me up a nice cool pitcher of water.”
John didn’t like to be sent nowhere at night, but he always tried to do everything Ole Massa told him to do, so he said, “Yessuh, Massa, Ah’ll go git you some!”
Ole Massa said: “Hurry up, John. Ah’m mighty thirsty.”
John took de pitcher and went on down to de spring.
There was a great big ole bull frog settin’ right on de edge of de spring, and when John dipped up de water de noise skeered de frog and he hollered and jumped over in de spring.
John dropped de water pitcher and tore out for de big house, hollerin’ “Massa! Massa! A big ole booger2 done got after me!”
Mules and Men Page 2