Hurston, Zora Neale - Susan Edwards Meisenhelder (essay date 1999)
Susan Edwards Meisenhelder (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards. “‘Fractious’ Mules and Covert Resistance in Mules and Men.” In Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston, pp. 14-35. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 1999.
[In the following essay, Meisenhelder analyzes the narrative techniques that Hurston utilizes to explore racial and sexual issues in Mules and Men.]
In an oft-quoted passage from her introduction to Mules and Men, Hurston stresses the difference between her childhood unreflective immersion in black folklife and her later understanding of it:
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...
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