I want to share information about a website that I just found out about. An E-text of 'Mules and Men' by Zora Neale Hurston HERE !

This high quality E-text and related files was created by Laura Grand Jean for the Amerian Studies Program at The Univeristy of Virginia {2001}. Thank you! Much Props!! Big Up to Laura Grand Jean and all those who worked on this project !!!

For those unamiliar with African American folklorist, anthropologist, and writer Zora Neal Hurston and her now classic book, "Mules and Men" here's an excerpt from the introduction to that website:

"There has been no greater tragedy in the construction of the American literary canon than the twenty year banishment of Zora Neale Hurston to the "Dustbin of History." In a career that spanned three decades Hurston published four novels, two collections of folklore, an autobiography, and no fewer than forty articles and essays on topics ranging from "How it feels to be Colored Me" to "Crazy for this Democracy." ....

In her hometown of Eatonville [Florida], Hurston was brought up in a culture in which lying, i.e. folk tale telling, was an artform. Hurston celebrated this culture of lying when she published a collection of "them big ole lies" told "on the store porch" by the working class African Americans of her hometown (Mules and Men ). …Mules and Men …demonstrate how Zora Neale Hurston used "lies" in order to redeem and recover the voice of working class African Americans.

…more than provide an optimistic account of the lives of working class southern blacks, Mules and Men argues for the re-evaluation of the black folk aesthetic on its own terms. In an age of African American literature when black artists were encouraged to "put their best foot forward" in the form of acceptable, middle class characters Hurston squarely defined that best foot as belonging to the lower classes of blacks from which came the blues, jazz, folktales and folk songs. Mules and Men testifies to Hurston's belief that "folk were creating an art that didn't need the sanction of art to affirm its beauty"(Hemenway 54)."

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This site also provides texts for Folksongs In Hurston's 'Mules To Men'

A glossary of Hoodoo phrases is also included and more!!

I'm VERY impressed with that website!


Azizi