Folklore, Hurston said, is the art people create before they find out there is such as thing as art; it come from a folk's "first wondering contact with natural law"—that is, laws of human nature as well as laws of natural process, the truths of a group's experience as well as the principles of physics. These interpretations of nature, called "unscientific" or "crude," often turn out to be wise and poetic explanations for the ways of the world. The parable of the hog under the oak tree—he eats and grunts but never looks up to see where the acorns are coming from—teaches less about the laws of gravity than about the importance of looking for the sources of good fortune…. The folklorist learns to respect these wondering beliefs as artistic expressions which teach one how to live, and Hurston had learned a good deal about both art and life…. (p. 159)

She was faced, however, with a scholarly problem: what was her responsibility in explaining the lore? What stance should she take in relation to the folk? How could she make others see this great cultural wealth? The final answers came in Mules and Men. Not published until 1935, the book was largely completed between March, 1930 … and September of 1932…. By the time readers shared in her discoveries, some of her ideas were six years old, and Hurston had gone on to a career as a novelist and dramatist. As she organized her field notes during 1930–32, she conceptualized black folklore, exploring the ways black history affected folk narratives, hypothesizing about racial characteristics in traditional communication. This mature conception of folklore changed only slightly over the years, and it antedates her best work as an artist. Even though her first novel was published prior to Mules and Men, it was written after she had completed the folklore research. In a sense, her career as a folklorist ended when she finished with her field notes, and after the fall of 1932 she usually conceived of herself as a creative writer—even when writing about folklore. (pp. 159-60)

The intimacy of Mules and Men is an obtained effect, an example of Hurston's narrative skill. She represented oral art functioning to affect behavior in the black community; to display this art in its natural setting she created a narrator who would not intrude on the folklore event. A semifictional Zora Neale Hurston is our guide to southern black folklore, a curiously retiring figure who is more art than life. The exuberant Zora Hurston who entertained the Harlem Renaissance is seldom in evidence in Mules and Men. In her place is a self-effacing reporter created by Hurston the folklorist to dramatize the process of collecting and make the reader feel part of the scene. (p. 164)

It is easy to overlook Hurston's craft as she mediates between self and material in this presentation; yet she shaped Mules and Men in somewhat the same manner in which Henry David Thoreau created a unified experience in Walden. His two years of residence at Walden Pond were condensed into a book structured around one year's seasonal cycle. Hurston condenses a two-and-a-half-year expedition into one year and nine months, with a one-year segment (Florida) and a nine-month segment (New Orleans). Her two return trips to Eatonville in 1927 and 1928 are telescoped into a single dramatic homecoming. (p. 165)

Hurston had to provide a frame for the adventures and insights of a complicated experience; she had to select from a multitude of situations and personalities. One way to unify could have been, like Thoreau, to stress the personal significance of the various encounters. Yet Mules and Men is ultimately a book very different from Walden precisely because Hurston did not choose the personal option. Her adventures go purposely without analysis. While Henry David Thoreau embarks on a voyage of spiritual discovery, Zora Neale Hurston always remains close to the shore, her description directed away from the inner self toward the words of her informants.

The scholarly folklorist of the thirties was expected to subordinate self to material in the interests of objectivity. The intent was to leave the emphasis on the folklore texts that were being added to the "body of knowledge." After describing the corpse, the folklorist could perform an autopsy in order to learn how the living organism functions. The cold text, isolated on the page for scientific study, implied the living folk, but the folk themselves were secondary to the artifact collected…. Much of Mules and Men is a simple reporting of texts…. Yet Hurston also breathed life into her narrative by presenting herself as a master of ceremonies, a transitional voice. Instead of observing a pathologist perform an autopsy, the reader keeps in sight a midwife participating in the birth of the body folklore. The effect is subtle and often overlooked. Mules and Men does not become an exercise in romantic egoism; it celebrates the art of the community. Where the reader of Walden comes away with visions of separating from society in order to gain spiritual renewal, the reader of Mules and Men learns a profound respect for men and women perpetuating an esthetic mode of communication; the impulse is not to isolate oneself, but to lose the self in the art and wisdom of the group.

From the very first pages Hurston creates a self-effacing persona inviting the reader to participate in collective rituals. She arrives in Eatonville knowing … [her college degree means] nothing to the loafers on the store porch, for they will define their community in their own terms, identify people according to kin. They are like African griots who preserve the genealogy of a tribe which has not developed a written language. Hurston portrays herself as a town prodigal returned to collect "them big old lies we tell when we're jus' sittin' around here on the porch doin' nothin." She is an educated innocent whose memory of the village folklore has been diminished by her urban experience and academic study; she must renew community ties.

Yet Arna Bontemps testified that many of the Mules and Men tales were a vivid part of Hurston's storytelling repertoire when she arrived in New York, well before she ever studied or collected folklore…. The Zora Neale Hurston of Mules and Men, then, is deliberately underplaying her knowledge of Eatonville so that the reader will not feel alienated. Because she saw from a dual perspective, both from within the community and from without, Hurston the writer could select those experiences which would attract the reader and let the folk speak for themselves. Hurston the narrator admits only to a desire to hold a microphone up to nature. (pp. 165-67)

There is an ambivalence here that has sometimes been criticized. Is Mules and Men about Zora Hurston or about black folklore? If the former, the self-effacement makes the reader want to know more about what was going on in her mind, more about her reaction to the communities that embraced her. If the latter, there is a need for folklore analysis. Are hoodoo candles a form of fire worship comparable to the use of fire in Christian ritual? What is the cross-cultural structure of the folktale? These deficiencies are the price Hurston paid for her two-fold purpose. On the one hand, she was trying to represent the artistic content of the black folklore; on the other, she was trying to suggest the behavioral significance of folkloric events. Her efforts were intended to show rather than tell, the assumption being that both behavior and art will become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.

Hurston presents the artistic content in the communication by stressing how "facile" is the "Negro imagination." The participants in a tale-telling session are all capable of verbal adornment…. A story-teller is someone who can "plough up some literary and lay-by some alphabets." The scholar never steps in to stress the ingenuity of a particular metaphor or the startling effectiveness of an image. She wants to reveal, in her words, "that which the soul lives by" in a rural black community; although there was a need for a transitional voice, only by stepping to the background could she allow unhampered expression. She did not want her readers reminded too often that a folklorist was there to take it all down…. [Hurston's technique] was to become one of the folk, a position which did not allow for the detachment of the analytical observer.

This deliberate lack of analysis places a special responsibility on the reader. The tales of Mules and Men are not quaint fictions created by a primitive people. They are profound expressions of a group's behavior. (pp. 167-68)

Mules and Men is not all folktales and hoodoo. It also contains many sayings, fragments of songs, rhymes, and legends. There is little explanation, however, of how all this folklore assumes any significance beyond the immediate entertainment…. Rhyme as a creative response to a prosaic world goes unanalyzed. Brer Rabbit is not discussed as an allegorical figure symbolizing black cunning. Hoodoo as an alternative science with a worldview as valid as any other goes unexplored. The universality of trickster figures like John goes unanalyzed. There is deliberately no cross-cultural reference, although many of the tales also appear in other cultures. There is no reference at all to the scholarship in the field.

These remarks are not necessarily criticisms, for Hurston makes Mules and Men a very readable folklore book. But the subordination of Hurston the scholar to Hurston the narrator can cause the reader to miss her attempts to provide the data for scholarly study. There is a consistent and subtle attempt, for example, to demonstrate how traditional tales are perpetuated. A small boy is encouraged to speak, then praised for the "over average lie" he contributes to the lying session. Presumably he will grow up a storyteller. When Joe Wiley asks if anyone has heard the story about "Big Talk," the reply is, "Yeah, we done heard it, Joe, but Ah kin hear it some 'gin." When a man says he will tell a tale for his wife, his listener responds, "Aw, g'wan tell de lie, Larkins if you want to. You know you ain't tellin no lie for yo' wife. No mo' than de rest of us. You lyin' cause you like it." There is psychic satisfaction in the repetition of narratives. (pp. 172-73)

[Hurston] had written earlier about the dramatic properties of black expression. She saw drama permeating "the Negro's entire self" and felt that "every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how joyful or sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out."… (p. 174)

Mules and Men, for all her attempts to indicate a context for each tale and to hold together the disparate experience, left out much of the drama. The storyteller gestured, postured, winked, and laughed during the story; yet it was difficult to present these actions without distracting from the texts themselves. At the time, Hurston considered the presentation of texts her primary responsibility. (p. 175)

The immediate reception of Mules and Men was mixed. The nature of both the praise and the dissatisfaction came to characterize Hurston's public reputation for the next twenty years. Reviewers liked the book and recommended its lively stories. The Saturday Review called it "black magic and dark laughter," stressing the "entertainment" value. But Zora had not intended the book as light reading, and some reviewers accepted her invitation to a more serious interpretation. Written by a black author, about black people, it was assumed to reveal "what the Negro was really like," a subject of immense fascination to whites and of obvious vested interest to black readers…. Henry Lee Moon of the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] reviewing the book in the New Republic, urged a larger meaning. Zora had not presented the life of the race as he lived it in New York City, but he was willing to assert that "Mules and Men is more than a collection of folklore. It is a valuable picture of the life of the unsophisticated Negro in small towns and backwoods of Florida."

Discussed on this basis for a few months, the book finally drew the public attention of Sterling Brown. (pp. 218-19)

Brown stressed Zora's academic training and praised her rendering of the tales. He disliked some of the "sensationalism" in the hoodoo section, but on the whole found it worthy. He was less certain than Moon about the book's value as a portrait of black life. It was authentically done as far as it went, but the portrait of the South was incomplete; missing were the exploitation, the terrorism, the misery…. He concluded, "Mules and Men should be more bitter; it would be nearer the total truth."

Many black intellectuals believed that books by black authors needed to tell the "total truth" to white America. Books about the race should aim to destroy the absurd beliefs and racist fantasies of the suppressing culture, and such books would necessarily at times be bitter. But even if Hurston had consciously tried to avoid bitterness, Brown's criticism was important. She had not been writing for pure entertainment—although publisher's demands may have veered Mules and Men in that direction—and she had offered a portrait of the race meant to be taken as a behavioral example. Her preface promised access to the interior of the black mind, a report on what blacks deliberately kept from whites. But if this was her purpose, why had she excised the sharper edges, the harsher tones, of her rural informants? (pp. 219-20)

Mules and Men has a disembodied quality about it, as if it came from a backwoods so far to the rear that American social history of the twentieth century had not touched its occupants. At a time when the Communist party was recruiting large numbers of black people, primarily because it was the only political party in America advocating an end to segregation, and when Richard Wright and Langston Hughes were creating a proletarian literature, Zora Hurston had deliberately chosen not to deal with the resentment of the black community. Why?

The reasons were strategic and philosophic, although she later admitted that publisher's restrictions also played a part. Hurston had a conception of the black image in the popular mind, and she felt that it derived largely from a mistaken notion of the black folk. The total truth was relative, making the class struggle seem less important than the need for an altered perception of black folklore…. She once complained about the "false picture" created by black writers dwelling on the race problem, producing writing "saturated with our sorrows." This picture was false because it distorted: "We talk about the race problem a great deal, but go on living and laughing and striving like everybody else." By leaving out "the problem," by emphasizing the art in the folkloric phenomenon, Hurston implicitly told whites: Contrary to your arrogant assumptions, you have not really affected us that much; we continue to practice our own culture, which as a matter of fact is more alive, more esthetically pleasing than your own; and it is not solely a product of defensive reactions to your actions. She felt that black culture manifested an independent esthetic system that could be discussed without constant reference to white oppression.

The price for this philosophy was an appearance of political naïveté and the absence of an immediate historical presence…. Zora's approach was oblique and open to misinterpretation. She chose to write of the positive effects of black experience because she did not believe that white injustice had created a pathology in black behavior…. (pp. 220-21)

Zora had begun collecting folklore in the twenties with the conscious intent of celebrating the black folk who had made a way out of no way, like their folk heroes. She liberated rural black folk from the prison of racial stereotypes and granted them dignity as cultural creators. A black social scientist trying to destroy racial stereotypes held by the majority culture, she simultaneously urged black people to be proud of the folk heritage. This may sound commonplace today, but it was unusual then, since a common tactic for destroying white stereotypes was to document black literacy, cite the number of black college graduates, and describe the general black movement into the middle class. (The other side of the coin was to document all the discriminatory practices that denied equal opportunity and kept the black middle class from growing larger.)

Zora was concerned less with the tactics of racial uplift than with the unexamined prejudice of American social science. She became a folklorist at a time when white sociologists were obsessed with what they though was pathology in black behavior, when white psychologists spoke of the deviance in black mental health, and when the discipline of anthropology used a research model that identified black people as suffering from cultural deprivation. Hurston's folklore collections refuted these stereotypes by celebrating the distinctiveness of traditional black culture, and her scholarship is now recognized by revisionist scientists questioning the racial assumptions of modern cultural theory. (pp. 329-30)

[Hurston's collections] defiantly affirmed the cultural practices manifest in the folkore of "the Negro farthest down." She provided, as [John] Szwed has suggested, an alternative view to the pathological theories, even before some of them were formulated. Because she was not a formal theorist, and because her books were meant for a popular audience, her theoretical assumptions about the distinctiveness of Afro-American culture were often masked, and did not receive the attention they deserved. Zora's method was presentational. She saw black Americans as cultural creators, and she documented the creation, not by amassing statistics for behavioral studies, but by presenting examples of oral tradition that expressed a behavioral system. Her attempt to distinguish black culture from white forecast the direction of much subsequent research; in the last thirty years the social sciences have begun to systematically collect the data that Zora Hurston indicated was there all along. We now have a body of "scientific" literature that provides evidence for the existence of a number of distinctive Afro-American cultural domains, including that domain of black esthetics which so interested her. (pp. 330-31)

Robert E. Hemenway, in his Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, University of Illinois Press, 1977, 371 p.