The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  Like Tolkien and others who used gastronomical metaphors to capture how stories are as vital to our well-being as the food we eat and the air we breathe, Hurston understood that stories permeate daily lives. Their punchlines are encapsulated in pithy folk truths; they circulate in the form of neighborhood gossip; they animate conversations in their imaginative forms; and they remind us of the importance of “talk.”

  “I have tried to be as exact as possible,” Hurston wrote to Langston Hughes. “Keep to the exact dialect as closely as I could, having the story teller to tell it to me word for word as I write it. This after it has been told to me off hand until I know it myself.” The technique of writing down “from the lips” was designed to keep Hurston from letting herself “creep in unconsciously” (Hemenway 1980, 128). It was a strategy that refused to scorn “to do or be anything Negro.” (Wall 1995, 838–39). She wanted the exact words of the storyteller and nothing else would do. But she also added local color, creating a collection unique in its presentation of the social context for oral storytelling traditions. The folktales, as she put it, were “done over and put back in their natural juices.” Interestingly, Hurston explained to Franz Boas that she had inserted the “between-story conversation and business” for pragmatic reasons: “without it, every publisher said it was too monotonous” (Boyd 2003, 253, 259).

  Jitterbuggers in a juke joint in 1939 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the kind of site described in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men. Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, LIbrary of Congress.

  Using words alone to capture the performance of a story has many shortcomings, all of which Hurston understood. It seems all the more likely that her strategy for collecting was somewhat less “exact” and “word for word” than she had claimed. What she manages so successfully is to produce a “speakerly text,” words that sound spontaneous and conversational even as they are crafted and constructed with a literary sensibility. Mediating between “a profoundly lyrical, densely metaphorical, and quasi-musical, privileged black oral tradition on the one hand, and a received but not yet fully appropriated standard English literary tradition on the other,” Zora Neale Hurston brilliantly mimics, repeats, and revises, creating the “Talking Book” so prized by African American writers (Gates 1989, 174, 198).

  Men wait for a sawmill motor to cool off in this photograph taken by Marion Post Wolcott in Childs, Florida, in 1939. Hurston collected folklore at sawmill and turpentine camps in in neighboring Polk County, Florida, in 1928. Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

  Mules and Men did not meet with unanimous critical acclaim. Sterling A. Brown, a fellow collector, complained that the book seemed “singularly incomplete.” Hurston’s informants are depicted as “naïve, quaint, complaisant, bad enough to kill each other in jooks, but meek otherwise, socially unconscious.” If the book were “more bitter,” he added, it would be “nearer the total truth” (Y. Taylor 2012, 275). Hurston’s response can be predicted from what she once wrote in an essay entitled “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”: “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. . . . No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife” (Wall 1995, 827). But the full answer to Brown’s critique is more complicated, as Hurston would also have noted. Valerie Boyd, for instance, speculates in her biography of the writer that Hurston believed that it was just as important to celebrate “the verbal agility of her people as it was to rail against white racism and southern injustice” (282).

  Other reviewers were far more benighted, with Lewis Gannett writing in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review that he could not remember “anything better since Uncle Remus.” In The New Republic, Henry Lee Moon praised the volume as “more than a collection of folklore” and admired its “valuable picture of the life of the unsophisticated Negro in the small towns and backwoods of Florida.” The condescending tone of H. I. Brock’s review in the New York Times could not have escaped Hurston’s attention: “A young Negro woman with a college education has invited the outside world to listen in while her own people are being as natural as they can never be when white folks are literally present . . . when Negroes are having a good gregarious time, dancing, singing, fishing, and . . . incessantly talking” (King 2008, 110–12).

  Zora Neale Hurston at the New York Times Book Fair in 1937, reading from a book entitled American Stuff, an anthology of works produced by the Federal Writers’ Project. Zora Neale Hurston Papers, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

  More importantly, Hurston was pragmatic and strategic in her life and her art. She was writing at a time when magazines routinely produced instructions for their contributors, putting constraints on African American writers with rules, regulations, and restrictions. To be sure, she was not about to rattle her mentors and patrons with tales of bitterness, resentment, and exploitation, but still she spoke the truth in her own way. Sterling Brown failed to recognize how Zora Neale Hurston practiced a form of “signifying” that is broadcast in the book’s very title. Mules and Men may have signaled to some readers that the tales collected included lore about animals and men, but it also effectively equated the men of its title with beasts of burden, underscoring Southern culture in all its dehumanizing aspects even as it acknowledged the stubborn, disrespectful, laboring mule as brother and kin to the black man. The title is something of a trap set for readers, and Brown, like many critics, fell right into it. As Trudier Harris points out, under slavery mules and men were “interchangeable.” “Hurston’s title might therefore have been transformed to an equation: ‘mules are men’ or ‘men are mules’ (17).”

  In Mules and Men, Hurston redefined the relationship between the spoken and the written word, capturing the poetry of folk wisdom (what she famously called the “will to adorn”) and elevating the vernacular (what Hurston called the “Negro’s poetical flow of language”) to reveal its textured complexities. The tellers, like the author, sometimes speak in tongues, channeling folk wisdom through the ages, but they also employ a discourse that both conceals and reveals, lies and speaks the truth, offers straight talk yet also misrepresents. Specializing in lies as well as in the lives of the folk raconteurs who told them, Hurston furnished her readers with the higher truths of fiction even as she struggled with the question of whether to reveal and publish or conceal and protect what one critic has called “cultural secrets of the vernacular tradition” (Ladd 2007, 109). The prodigal daughter became, through Mules and Men as well as in her other writing, what Alice Walker put on the tombstone erected many decades after Hurston’s death: “Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist” and also “A Genius of the South.”

  FRANZ BOAS, PREFACE TO MULES AND MEN

  Boas was the founding father of American anthropology, and, at Columbia University, he chaired the first PhD program in anthropology in the United States. A firm advocate of cultural relativism, he was deeply committed to understanding human diversity in all its manifestations and rejected evolutionary approaches that created false hierarchies. Below he declares his faith in Hurston’s ethnographic research, noting that she could operate as both insider and outsider to the culture she explores. Boas’s comments about Hurston and the “charm of a loveable personality” read as dismissive to us, suggesting that he does not fully appreciate the seriousness of his student’s research. Contrary to his belief that Hurston’s recorded stories will reveal the “true inner life” of her observed subjects, Hurston herself famously pointed out the impossibility of reading minds through words spoken or written: “He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind.”

  Ever since the time of Uncle Remus, Negro folklore has exerted a strong attraction upon the imagination of the American public. Negro tales, songs and sayings without end, as well as descriptions of Negro magic and voodoo, have appeared; but in all of them the intimate
setting in the social life of the Negro has been given very inadequately.

  It is the great merit of Miss Hurston’s work that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such by the companions of her childhood. Thus she has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in his true inner life. Miss Hurston has been equally successful in gaining the confidence of the voodoo doctors and she gives us much that throws a new light upon the much discussed voodoo beliefs and practices. Added to all this is the charm of a loveable personality and of a revealing style which makes Miss Hurston’s work an unusual contribution to our knowledge of the true inner life of the Negro.

  To the student of cultural history the material presented is valuable not only by giving the Negro’s reaction to everyday events, to his emotional life, his humor and passions, but it throws into relief also the peculiar amalgamation of African and European tradition which is so important for understanding historically the character of American Negro life, with its strong African background in the West Indies, the importance of which diminishes with increasing distance from the south.

  FROM ZORA NEALE HURSTON, WORKS-IN-PROGRESS FOR THE FLORIDA NEGRO

  Folklore is the boiled-down juice of human living. It does not belong to any special time, place, nor people. No country is so primitive that it has no lore, and no country has yet become so civilized that no folklore is being made within its boundaries. . . .

  In folklore, as in everything else that people create, the world is a great, big, old serving-platter, and all the local places are like eating-plates. Whatever is on the plate must come out of the platter, but each plate has a flavor of its own because the people take the universal stuff and season it to suit themselves on the plate. And this local flavor is what is known as originality. So when we speak of Florida folklore, we are talking about that Florida flavor that the story- and song-makers have given to the great mass of material that has accumulated in this sort of culture delta. And Florida is lush in material because the State attracts such a variety of workers to its industries. . . .

  [Art] is a series of discoveries, perhaps intended in the first instance to stave off boredom.

  SOURCE: Cheryl A. Wall, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 825–26.

  FROM ZORA NEALE HURSTON, “NEGRO FOLKLORE”

  Negro Folklore is not a thing of the past. It is still in the making. Its great variety shows the adaptability of the black man: nothing is too old or too new, domestic or foreign, high or low, for his use. God and the Devil are paired, and are treated no more reverently than Rockefeller and Ford. Both of these men are prominent in folklore, Ford being particularly strong, and they talk and act like good-natured stevedores or mill-hands. Ole Massa is sometimes a smart man and often a fool. The automobile is ranged alongside of the ox-cart. The angels and the apostles walk and talk like section hands. And through it all walks Jack, the greatest culture hero of the South; Jack beats them all—even the Devil, who is often smarter than God.

  SOURCE: Cheryl A. Wall, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 836.

  FROM ZORA NEALE HURSTON, “CULTURE HEROES”

  The Devil is next to Jack as a culture hero. He can outsmart everyone but Jack. God is absolutely no match for him. He is good-natured and full of humour. The sort of person one may count on to help out in any difficulty.

  Peter the Apostle is third in importance. . . . Now of all the apostles Peter is the most active. When the other ten fell back trembling in the garden, Peter wielded the blade on the posse. Peter first and foremost in all action. . . .

  The rabbit, the bear, the lion, the buzzard, the fox are culture heroes from the animal world. The rabbit is far in the lead of all the others and is blood brother to Jack. In short, the trickster-hero of West Africa has been transplanted to America.

  John Henry is a culture hero in song, but no more so than Stacker Lee, Smokey Joe or Brad Lazarus. There are many, many Negroes who have never heard of any of the song heroes, but none who do not know John (Jack) and the rabbit.

  SOURCE: Cheryl A. Wall, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 836–37.

  FROM ZORA NEALE HURSTON, “RESEARCH”

  Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.

  Two weeks before I graduated from Barnard College, Dr. Boas had arranged a fellowship for me. I was to go south and do research in folk-lore.

  I was extremely proud that Papa Franz felt like sending me. As is well known, Dr. Franz Boas of the Department of Anthropology of Columbia University, is the greatest Anthropologist alive for two reasons. The first is his insatiable hunger for knowledge and then more knowledge; and the second is his genius for pure objectivity. He has no pet wishes to prove. His instructions are to go out and find what is there. He outlines his theory, but if the facts do not agree with it, he would not warp a jot or dot of the findings to save his theory. So knowing all this, I was proud that he trusted me. I went off in a vehicle made out of Corona stuff.

  SOURCE: Cheryl A. Wall, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 687.

  HOW THE CAT GOT NINE LIVES

  Cliff hauled away and landed a large gar1 on the grass.

  “See, Ah told you, Gran’pa. Don’t you worry. Ah’m gointer ketch you mo’ fish than you kin eat. Plenty for Mama and Gran’ma too. Less take dis gar-fish home to de cat.”

  “Yeah,” said Jim Presley. “Y’ take de cat a fish, too. They love it better than God loves Gabriel—and dat’s His best angel.”

  “He sho do and dat’s how cats got into a mess of trouble ’bout eatin’ fish,” added Jim Presley.

  “How was dat? I done forgot if Ah ever knowed.”

  “If, if, if,” mocked Jim Allen. “Office Richardson, youse always iffin’! If a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his rump so much.”

  “Grand’pa is right in wid de cats,” Cliff teased. “He’s so skeered he ain’t gointer git all de fish he kin eat, he’s just like a watch-dog when de folks is at de table. He’ll bite anybody then. Think they cheatin’ ’im outa his vittles.”

  Jim Presley spat in the lake and began:

  Once upon a time was a good ole time

  Monkey chew tobacco and spit white lime.2

  Well, this was a man dat had a wife and five chillun, and a dog and a cat.3

  Well, de hungry times caught ’em. Hard times everywhere. Nobody didn’t have no mo’ than jus’ enough to keep ’em alive. First they had a long dry spell dat parched up de crops, then de river rose and drowned out everything.4 You could count anybody’s ribs. De white folks all got faces look lak blue-John5 and de niggers had de white mouf.6

  So dis man laid in de bed one night and consulted with his piller.7 Dat means he talked it over wid his wife. And he told her, “Tomorrow less git our pole and go to de lake and see kin we ketch a mess of fish. Dat’s our last chance. De fish done got so skeerce and educated8 they’s hard to ketch, but we kin try.”

  They was at de lake bright and soon de next day. De man took de fishin’ pole hisself ’cause he was skeered to trust his wife er de chillun wid it. It was they last chance to get some grub.

  So de man fished all day long till he caught seven fishes. Not no great big trouts nor mud-cats but li’l perches and brims. So he tole ’em, “Now, Ah got a fish apiece for all of us, but Ah’m gointer keep on till Ah ketch one apiece for our dog and our cat.”9

  So he fished on till sundown and caught a fish for the dog and de cat, and then they went on home and cooked de fish.

  After de fish was all cooked and ready de woman said: “We got to have some drinkin’ water. Less go down to de spring to git some. You better come help me tote it ’cause Ah feel too weak to bring it by myself.”

  So de h
usband got de water bucket off de shelf and went to de spring wid his wife. But ’fore he went, he told de chillun, “Now, y’all watch out and keep de cat off de fish. She’ll steal it sho if she kin.”

  De chillun tole him, “Yessuh,” but they got to foolin’ round and playin’ and forgot all about de cat, and she jumped up on de table and et all de fish but one. She was so full she jus’ couldn’t hold another mouthful without bustin’ wide open.

  When de old folks come back and seen what de cat had done they bust out cryin’. They knowed dat one li’l fish divided up wouldn’t save their lives. They knowed they had to starve to death. De man looked at de cat and he knowed dat one mo’ fish would kill her so he said, “Ah’m gointer make her greedy gut kill her.” So he made de cat eat dat other fish10 and de man and his wife and chillun and de dog and cat all died.11

  De cat died first so’s he was already in Heben when de rest of the family got there. So when God put de man’s soul on de scales to weigh it, de cat come up and was lookin’ at de man, and de man was lookin’ at de cat.

  God seen how they eye-balled one ’nother so he ast de man, “Man, what is between you and dis cat?”