a Mule,” “How the Church Came to Be Split Up,”
and “Sermon by Traveling Preacher.”
In Part II of Mules and Men Hurston presents
the origin of hoodoo and recounts not only her
experiences but also her fascination with a number
of Voodoo doctors. One of her most memorable
and lengthy initiation rites was with the popular
New Orleans hoodoo doctor Luke Turner, during
which she was completely naked and, after fast-
ing for 69 hours, was crowned with a consecrated
snakeskin. Hurston provided initiation ceremonies
by hoodoo practitioners, including Marie Leveau,
Eulalia, Anatol Pierre, Father Watson, Dr. Samuel
Jenkins, Dr. Duke, and Kitty Brown, that ranged
from how to put a curse on someone to how to
keep a husband true, and from how to keep a per-
son down to how to make love stronger. Though
Part II presents Hurston’s personal experiences,
it mirrors the religious and spiritual beliefs of a
larger black community, derived African beliefs
that survived the Middle Passage to take root in
America, that she discovered during her research
in Louisiana.
Despite its omissions and also despite its com-
plexity and controversy, which critics have noted,
Mules and Men still offers valuable insight into a
class of people and a way of life rich in history and
culture. More important, Hurston’s “interesting
and entertaining” collection has made the public
aware of the African American’s innumerable con-
tributions to American folk tradition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Faulkner, Howard J. “Mules and Men: Fiction as Folk-
lore.” CLA Journal 34 (1991): 331–339.
Ford, Nick Aaron. “A Study in Race Relations: A Meet-
ing with Zora Hurston.” In Zora Neale Hurston,
edited by Harold Bloom, 7–10. New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 1986.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J.
B. Lippincott, 1935. Reprinted with an introduc-
tion by Darwin T. Turner, New York: Harper and
Row, 1970.
Preece, Harold. “The Negro Folk Cult.” Crisis 43
(1936): 364, 374.
Loretta G. WoodardMullen, Harryette Romell (1960– )
An associate professor of English and African-
American studies at the University of California
at Los Angeles, Harryette Mullen was born in Al-
abama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, the daugh-
ter of teachers and the granddaughter and the
great-granddaughter of Baptist ministers, amidst
a varied racial and cultural setting. Mullen’s work
reflects the tensions engendered by those multiple
influences that form what critic Elisabeth Frost
calls the “miscegenated culture” of her poetry. A
strong scholarly voice as well, Mullen completed
her undergraduate work at the University of Texas
at Austin, where she received a B.A. in English in- She received a Ph.D. in literature from the
University of California at Santa Cruz in 1990.
Mullen’s poetic career began, she recounts, after
she won a poetry contest while she was a high
school student in Texas. Over the years, she has
continued to develop the impressive and excit-
ing poetic voice that readers have come to expect
and appreciate.
Mullen’s poetry interrogates the intersec-
tion of race and gender within the structure and
structuring forces of language. She combines
elements of Oulipo’s intriguing wordplay game
“N+7” (a technique that replaces each noun [N]
with the seventh [7] noun that follows it in the
dictionary) with the literary techniques of par-
ody, pun, hyperbole, and metonymy into her lyri-
cal poems—or, as Mullen calls them, “mongrel”
lyric poetry. Through this specific lens, Mullen
explores how the borders of language, culture,
and race have been undeniably blurred and opens
new spaces for interpretation of the processes of
writing. Additionally, Mullen’s work, particularly
Tall Tree Woman (1981), has strong connections
to that of earlier African-American writers and
poets, specifically JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, HAR-
LEM RENAISSANCE poet LANGSTON HUGHES, and
MELVIN B. TOLSON. She values as well the literary
voices and struggles expressed in the literature
of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, which sought to
deconstruct the hegemonic structure of the sta-
tus quo while positing and celebrating a viable
and important black life and world. In Trimmings
(1991) and S*PeRM*KT [Supermarket] (1992),
Mullen, Harryette Romell 373