Mules and Men

The theme of honesty is one of the book’s most salient themes and is inextricably linked to the folklore elements of Mules and Men. In Part 1, Hurston introduces the term “lies” to refer to the folklore stories, which engages the role of honesty—or perhaps more accurately, factuality—as it relates to folklore. In Part 2, much of the lore surrounding hoodoo is steeped in lies: The practice is identified as being “private,” thus reserved for in-group members, rendering it the object of mass speculation from non-members. Finally, Hurston’s own role in the work is one that relates to honesty and dishonesty, particularly in relation to the nonfiction genre and her portrayal of real events. This work does not aim to take a stance on the role of honesty and dishonesty as it pertains to cultural representation; rather, it grapples with the question of whether being honest and telling the truth are the same thing.

Part 1 deals primarily with the recording of folklore to establish a larger body of work representing Black and African American traditions in the American South. These folktales, as Hurston recognized in her research, are most often a culture’s first attempts to understand the intricate workings of the world. Because folklore comprises a community’s initial conceptualizations of the world, many of the tales that proliferate across generations are fantastical or mythical; they are, in one sense, untrue because they are not factual assessments. The communities portrayed in this work are aware of this aspect of folklore, calling the stories “lies.” Yet the discussions held around these “lies” are often embroiled in a debate over their validity: When Big Sweet tells a story about a talking goat in Chapter 7 of Part 1, Jim Allen tells her, “You know damn well dat goat ain’t broke a breath wid you and nobody else” (112). The pattern of telling a folktale being met with discussion about its validity, and the underlying element of myth involved in folklore as a whole, illustrate the complex relationship these communities have with their “lies.” These “lies” do not aim necessarily to assess the workings of an ancient, lesser developed world, as is often the case for folklore, because the enslaved Africans who began these oral traditions were forced to establish a new communal mythos in the 16th-19th centuries. Instead, the function of many of these “lies” is to remember and maintain ancestral oral traditions that have been altered and mixed over time.

In Part 2, honesty and truth play a different role. The information about hoodoo is relayed as factual, and there is no reason to doubt the validity of the vast majority of Hurston’s record. There are some smaller instances of potential dishonesty, such as the various claims of relation to Marie Laveau: Luke Turner and Anatol Pierre say they are related to Laveau but do not provide concrete proof. The larger role of truth in this portion of the work, however, involves the validity of the hoodoo practices. Hurston does not directly assess the material she records in terms of its validity, but she often offers very subtle commentary about this aspect. When describing Father Watson’s practice in Chapter 4 of Part 2, he sells “keys that were guaranteed to unlock every door and remove every obstacle” to the holder for “five dollars each” (214), which equates to over $80 in 2022. Although she offers no judgment about Father Watson’s honesty in this claim, her choice to mention the price specifically implies that she questions his honesty, perhaps going so far as to suggest that it is a scam. By not assessing the abstract truth of hoodoo and whether the rituals actually produce the results they claim, Hurston frames the discussion around the practitioners themselves: It is their own honesty or dishonesty that impacts the truthfulness and authenticity of their practice.

Finally, honesty relates directly to Hurston. The context in which she produced this work is heavily entwined in the author’s personal life: From her choice to begin the research process in her own hometown, to her overt presence in the work itself, Mules and Men is deeply personal. In his Foreword, Arnold Rampersad assesses Hurston’s relationship to the work and finds that the folklore is an “ineradicable part of herself” (xxiii). Hurston’s entire body of work outside of Mules and Men blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, fact and falsehood, and honesty and dishonesty. This delicate balance of the real and fake anchors her work firmly in the modernist literary tradition. This is the source of much of the debate about whether she fictionalized any portions of Mules and Men. Ultimately, she negotiates the space between honesty and dishonesty, coming to the conclusion that very few things in the world are true or false—there is much gray area between these two extremes. This stance allows Hurston to truthfully and authentically represent the people recorded in Mules and Men without relying on complete honesty.