Mules and Men
Page 28
September 1948
Falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy and arrested; case finally dismissed in March 1949.
October 1948
Seraph on the Suwanee published.
March 1950
Publishes “Conscience of the Court” in the Saturday Evening Post, while working as a maid in Rivo Island, Florida.
April 1950
Publishes “What White Publishers Won’t Print” in the Saturday Evening Post.
November 1950
Publishes “I Saw Negro Votes Peddled” in the American Legion magazine.
Winter 1950-51
Moves to Belle Glade, Florida.
June 1951
Publishes “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism” in the American Legion magazine.
December 8, 1951
Publishes “A Negro Voter Sizes Up Taft” in the Saturday Evening Post.
1952
Hired by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the Ruby McCollum case.
May 1956
Receives an award for “education and human relations” at Bethune-Cookman College.
June 1956
Works as a librarian at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida; fired in 1957.
1957-59
Writes a column on “Hoodoo and Black Magic” for the Fort Pierce Chronicle.
1958
Works as a substitute teacher at Lincoln Park Academy, Fort Pierce.
Early 1959
Suffers a stroke.
October 1959
Forced to enter the St. Lucie County Welfare Home.
January 28, 1960
Dies in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home of “hypertensive heart disease”; buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest, Fort Pierce.
August 1973
Alice Walker discovers and marks Hurston’s grave.
March 1975
Walker publishes “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” in Ms., launching a Hurston revival.
About the Author
ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include Dust Tracks on a Road; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Jonah’s Gourd Vine; Seraph on the Suwanee; Moses, Man of the Mountain; and Every Tongue Got to Confess.
WWW.ZORANEALEHURSTON.COM
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Copyright
MULES AND MEN. Copyright © 1935 by Zora Neale Hurston. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition January 2008 ISBN 9780061749872
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1 Have a child by the Kaiser.
1Negro story-hero name. See glossary.
2A bogey man.
3Noah.
4Loud talking, bullying, woofing. From French beaucoup.
5Aimless talking. See glossary.
6Hog intestines.
7Chicken. Preachers are supposed to be fond of them.
1Coon-can players. A two-handed card game popular among Southern Negroes.
2Important things are about to happen.
3See glossary.
4I ignore these preachers.
5Short for sugar.
6See glossary.
7The angels Raphael and Gabriel.
8Bogus.
1Keg.
2This story is of European origin, but has been colored by the negro mouth.
3Compound cathartic.
4Playing for small change.
5Risking nothing, i.e. hat, coat and shoes out the window so that the owner can run if he loses.
6Scared.
7See glossary.
8Funds.
9Playing the guitar.
10Dry land tortoise.
11See glossary.
12A fun house. Where they sing, dance, gamble, love, and compose “blues” songs incidentally.
1Roasted.
2Nothing.
3Have a good time.
4See glossary.
5The low-paid poor white section boss on a railroad; similar to swamp boss who works the gang that gets the timber to the sawmill.
6See glossary.
7West African word meaning white people.
1Guitars.
2The Sun.
3So you can be at ease. A hen is supposed to suffer when she has a fully developed egg in her.
4His hips.
1A dress very tight across the hips but with a full short skirt; very popular on the “jobs.”
2Very black person.
3I am standing my ground.
4When people used to get out logs to build a house they would get the neighbors to help. Plenty of food and drink served. Very gay time.
5Some say it is a jay bird.
6A young flea.
7Stake.
8Commercial fertilizer.
9Noah.
10Lightwood, fat pine. So called because it is frequently used as a torch.
1See glossary.
2Skimmed milk.
3A very hungry person is supposed to look ashy-gray around the mouth.
4To show off.
5Make a choice.
6Negroes are in similie children of Hagar; white folks, of Sarah.
7With great difficulty.
1Sound word meaning running.
2Things have come to critical pass.
3Don’t be out-done; or don’t be too slow.
4See glossary.
1Play the piano in the manner of the jook or “blues.”
2Get low down.
3See glossary.
4Waving ahead. A railroad term.
5He has arranged the cards so he can deal winning cards to himself and losing cards to others.
6See appendix.
7Risking nothing. Ready to run.
8A mythical place, like “ginny gall.”
9A piece of gamblers lucky hoodoo.
10Whispering.
11Sex.
12Never going to get along. As two horses pull together.
1See appendix.
2He was a conjure doctor. They are always referred to as “two-headed doctors,” i.e. twice as much sense.
3Screech owl, sometimes known as a shivering owl.
4Panting.
510,000 “faces” in the turpentine woods, i.e. tree trunks that have been cut on one side to make the sap run from which turpentine is made.
6A damaged pocke
t knife.
7I give you one point.
8A panther had killed the other one a week earlier.
1Peas and rice cooked together.
2A root, extensively used in conjure.
1Four Thieves Vinegar. For paraphernalia of conjure, see appendix.
2Dirt taken out of a grave.
3The Spirit.
4A conjure mixture. See Paraphernalia of Conjure.
1See appendix.
1A West African nation from which many slaves came to America.
2See Appendix for superstitions concerning sudden death.
1The old French quarter of New Orleans.
2Told by Pierre Landeau of New Orleans.
1Manufacturing certain luck charms.
2Magnetic iron ore.
*Gun.
1The formulae, paraphernalia and prescriptions of conjure are reprinted through the courtesy of the Journal of American Folklore.
1Menstruation.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1934.
Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935.
Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937.
Tell My Horse. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938.
Moses, Man of the Mountain. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1939.
Dust Tracks on a Road. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942.
Seraph on the Suwanee. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948.
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…& Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Edited by Alice Walker. Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1979.
The Sanctified Church. Edited by Toni Cade Bambara. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981.
Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1985.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, pp. 15–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
——-, ed. Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Byrd, James W. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Novel Folklorist.” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 21 (1955): 37–41.
Cooke, Michael G. “Solitude: The Beginnings of Self-Realization in Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.” In Michael G. Cooke, Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century, pp. 71–110. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Dance, Daryl C. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, edited by Maurice Duke, et al. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Speakerly Text.” In Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, pp. 170–217. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Giles, James R. “The Significance of Time in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Negro American Literature Forum 6 (Summer 1972): 52–53, 60.
Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Holloway, Karla. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Holt, Elvin. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900, edited by Joseph M. Flura and Robert Bain, pp. 259–69. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Howard, Lillie Pearl. Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
——-. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 51, edited by Trudier Harris, pp. 133–45. Detroit: Gale, 1987.
Jackson, Blyden. “Some Negroes in the Land of Goshen.” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 19 (4) (December 1953): 103–7.
Johnson, Barbara. “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes.” In Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., pp. 205–21. New York: Methuen, 1984.
——-. “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston.” In “Race,” Writing and Difference, edited by Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Jordan, June. “On Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.” Black World 23 (10) (August 1974): 4–8.
Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. “‘Tuh de Horizon and Back’: The Female Quest in Their Eyes.” Black American Literature Forum 17 (3) (Fall 1983): 109–15.
Lionnet, Françise. “Autoethnography: The Anarchic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road.” In Françise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, pp. 97–130. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Lupton, Mary Jane. “Zora Neale Hurston and the Survival of the Female.” Southern Literary Journal 15 (Fall 1982): 45–54.
Meese, Elizabeth. “Orality and Textuality in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes.” In Elizabeth Meese, Crossing the Double Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism, pp. 39–55. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Newson, Adele S. Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
Rayson, Ann. “Dust Tracks on a Road: Zora Neale Hurston and the Form of Black Autobiography.” Negro American Literature Forum 7 (Summer 1973): 42–44.
Sheffey, Ruthe T., ed. A Rainbow Round Her Shoulder: The Zora Neale Hurston Symposium Papers. Baltimore: Morgan State University Press, 1982.
Smith, Barbara. “Sexual Politics and the Fiction of Zora Neale Hur-ston.” Radical Teacher 8 (May 1978): 26–30.
Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Walker, Alice. “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” Ms., March 1975, pp. 74–79, 85–89.
Wall, Cheryl A. “Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words.” In American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Fritz Fleischmann, pp. 370–93. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Washington, Mary Helen. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow.” Introduction to I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, edited by Alice Walker. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1979.
——-. “‘I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero.” In Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960. New York: Anchor Press, 1987.
Willis, Miriam. “Folklore and the Creative Artist: Lydia Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston.” CLA Journal 27 (September 1983): 81–90.
Wolff, Maria Tai. “Listening and Living: Reading and Experience in Their Eyes.” BALF 16 (1) (Spring 1982): 29–33.