Jesse’s Reviews > Mules and Men > Status Update
Jesse
is on page 50 of 368
I didn’t know but am not surprised that the format of this collection of folk tales is not presented like other collections but as Zora actually hearing them from, in the beginning, her Eatonville familiars while hanging out and partying with them, because this is how the stories were being told in the cultures where they circulated. This makes the book way more immersive a read than many collections I’ve read.
— May 19, 2025 09:48AM
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Jesse
is on page 207 of 368
Wrapping up Hurston’s time gathering folklore with a woman bearing her deceased mother’s name attempting to murder or mutilate her and moving onto the hoodoo portion of the book, which has an account of Hurston’s becoming an ordained practitioner of hoodoo, and most of what that ritual entails. It also has a few accounts of her assisting her maker, Turner, in conjuring a few spells.
— May 28, 2025 08:40AM
Jesse
is on page 150 of 368
The folk tales are a broad mix of folk stories, some of which are the genealogical origins of exaggeration jokes / insults (yo momma). The more or less understated account Hurston gives of her time while she’s just in the company of folks like the railway and mill workers is excellent, and even with some tension as Hurston has to work herself into the graces of the people she is hanging out with.
— May 27, 2025 07:31AM
Jesse
is on page 100 of 368
One of the best parts here is the story of how Hurston works to gain the confidences of the mill workers where she visits, given how her dress and car put her apart from them, they assuming that she is some sort of government agent. She has to pose as a bootlegger before she can finally reveal that she is there to collect what “lies” they know and can think to tell.
— May 21, 2025 10:19AM
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May 19, 2025 09:50AM
A lot of these have the punch-line format of jokes. The two longest ones that I’ve read so far are in the style of fairy tales that I’ve seen before, though I think the one with the horse-hide I first read in the Russian Folk-Tales.
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