tractable. In his recollection of the event, which he
included in his 1940 autobiography THEBIGSEA,
Hughes remembered that Hurston “would not talk
about the play! Not at all. She would speak only of
things that did not concern the drama in question,
one way or another. She spoke passionately, long,
and loud, until the Jelliffes begged to be excused.
They went home. Miss Hurston then got the last
word and left without saying good-bye to my
mother, whom she had known for years. That made
my mother angry, so she pursued Miss Hurston into
the hall to give her a piece of her mind. I had to get
up out of bed and restrain my mother. It was an ex-
citing afternoon for a tonsillectomy patient,” he
concluded dryly (Hughes, 248).
The play was not performed during the Harlem
Renaissance era nor during the lifetimes of Hurston
or Hughes. In 1991, some 60 years after its comple-
tion, the play debuted at Lincoln Center in NEW
YORKCITY. The show ran from January through
April, and its cast included Vanessa Williams,
Kenny Neal, and Samuel E. Wright. Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., who worked as a consultant with
Hughes’s literary executor, George Houston Bass,
on the production, suggests that the controversy
surrounding the play had much to do with the fact
that it presented black vernacular as “the language
of drama” (Gates, 225). He goes on to address the
anxieties about representation of black life that fre-
quently overshadow discussions of the work, assert-
ing that “Hughes and Hurston develop their drama
by imitating and repeating historical black folk ritu-
als. Black folklore and southern rural black vernac-
ular English served as the foundation for what they
hoped would be a truly new art form” (225).
Bibliography
Bernard, Emily. Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of
Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.New York:
Knopf, 2001.
Berry, Faith, ed. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond
Harlem.Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Com-
pany, 1983.
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora
Neale Hurston.New York: Scribner, 2003.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Why the Mule BoneDebate Goes
On.” In Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston,
edited by Gloria Cronin, 225–228. New York: G. K.
Hall & Co., 1998.
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biog-
raphy.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea, an Autobiography.New
York: Knopf, 1940.
Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.New
York: Doubleday, 2002.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too,
Sing America. Vol. 1: 1902–1941.New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986.Mules and MenZora Neale Hurston(1935)
The first published anthropological work by ZORA
NEALEHURSTON. Published by the PHILADELPHIA
company J. B. LIPPINCOTT,Mules and Menis a col-
lection of 70 folktales. In her acknowledgements,
Hurston paid special tribute to her patron, CHAR-
LOTTEOSGOODMASON. She thanked Mason, the
“world’s most gallant woman,” for her providing a
“hearty” and “spiritual” backing and for “financ[ing]
the whole expedition in the manner of the Great
Soul that she is.” The artist Miguel Covarrubias
provided 10 illustrations for the volume.
Hurston solicited FRANZBOAS, her COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITYanthropology professor and mentor, to
write the introduction to the volume. Boas agreed
to do so and praised Hurston for her “true work”
and her “unusual contribution to our knowledge of
the true inner life of the Negro.” Boas also insisted
on the high cultural and intellectual value of the
primary materials that Hurston had assembled. The
collection, he proposed, “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 In-
dies, the importance of which diminishes with in-
creasing distance from the south.”
Hurston divided the book into two parts. The
first, “Folklore,” was made up of 10 chapters. The
second, “Hoodoo,” consisted of seven chapters.
Also included in the book were classic folk stories,
rituals on how to strengthen or revive love and to
expel unwanted people from one’s home, and meth-
ods for undoing curses. Hurston also included glos-
saries of folklore and hoodoo terms, folk song lyrics
and music, and prescriptions from root doctors.
Hurston scholar Robert Hemenway suggests
that Mules and Men“celebrates the art of theMules and Men 357