Although his family moves from Denver to Chi-
cago to provide new opportunities for their son,
Nick cannot change. Knock on Any Door ends with
Nick being tried and executed for murdering a
Chicago police officer. Nick, the product of his
environment, like Bigger, cannot escape his fate.
But Motley is equally careful to critique Chicago’s
judiciary and penal system. In 1949, Columbia
Pictures converted Motley’s well-researched novel
into a movie, with Humphrey Bogart playing the
part of Nick’s attorney.
In his other works, We Fished All Night (191),
Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1958), and Let
Noon be Fair (1966), Motley continued to use an
array of ethnic characters, emphasizing his con-
cern with more than race and the African-Ameri-
can experience. For example, We Fished All Night
explores the physical and psychological impact
of war on its three central characters, while Let
No Man Write My Epitaph returns to the Romano
family and examines the devastating effect of
drugs on Nick Jr. and his mother, who are drug
addicts. In the end, however, Nick Jr. takes con-
trol of his life after completing a detoxification
program. Columbia Pictures also made a movie
of this novel.
Motley, who received high critical acclaim for
his first novel, died of gangrene in Mexico City
on March 4, 1965. His last novel, Let Noon Be Fair
(1966), was published posthumously.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tra-
dition. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts
Press, 1987.
Wilfred D. Samuels
Mules and Men
Zora Neale Hurston (1935)
ZORA NEALE HURSTON’s anthropological study
Mules and Men is one of her most significant con-
tributions to African-American culture. Generally
regarded as the first authentic collection of Afri-
can-American folklore, Mules and Men is drawn
mainly from Hurston’s hometown culture in
Eatonville, Florida, an all-black community. As-
sisted by a research fellowship from the Asso-
ciation for the Study of Negro Life and History
(ASNLH), Hurston became immersed in the cul-
ture, collecting and documenting the folktales,
spirituals, work songs, sermons, blues, children’s
games, and “hoodoo,” traditional African reli-
gious practices and beliefs among southern blacks
throughout Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana from
1927 to 1932. Mules and Men, which includes an
introduction by Hurston’s professor, the anthro-
pologist Franz Boas, is the result of this research.
It was followed by Tell My Horse, Hurston’s sec-
ond volume of ethnography, which grew out of
her research in Haiti and Jamaica, where she stud-
ied Vodun (Voodoo) practices.
Divided into two parts, Mules and Men, which
is narrated in the first person, employs fictional
techniques to re-create and shape the work. In
Part I, Hurston records folklore gathered in her
own hometown of Eatonville, reported usually in
“lying sessions” created as setting by Hurston on
store porches, backwoods churches, and turpen-
tine camps or during contests among lumber-
jacks. Although most of the tales throughout Part
I are told for the sake of storytelling, a number of
other stories are adaptations of the popular Brer
Rabbit stories known in the South and the tales of
High John de Conqueror, the black folk hero who
is the embodiment of the strong, even bad, black
man. In the glossary, which Hurston includes at
the end of her collection, she describes John as
“the wish fulfillment hero of the race. The one
who nevertheless, or in spite of laughter, usually
defeats Ole Massa, God and the Devil. Even when
Massa seems to have him in a hopeless dilemma
he wins out by a trick” (305). Also, while Hur-
ston makes little or no effort to classify or analyze
her simple tales in Part I, they all provide a better
glimpse into a way of life that Hurston consid-
ered “priceless art.”
Some of the stories include “The Talking Mule,”
“John Henry,” “How Jack Beat De Devil,” “The
Fortune Teller,” “Why the Sister in Black Works
Hardest,” “How the Negroes Got Their Freedom,”
“How Brer ’Gator Got His Tongue Warn Out,”
“Card Game,” “Why They Always Use Rawhide on372 Mules and Men