“Gathering & Gabbing” ZORA! Book Club

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Miles and Men:
Mules and Men is a 1935 autoethnographical collection of African-American folklore collected and written by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. The book explores stories she collected in two trips: one in Eatonville and Polk County, Florida, and one in New Orleans. Hurston’s decision to focus her research on Florida came from a desire to record the cross-section of black traditions in the state.

In her introduction to Mules and Men, she wrote, “Florida is a place that draws people—white people from all over the world, and Negroes from every Southern state surely and some from the North and West”. Hurston documented 70 folktales during the Florida trip, while the New Orleans trip yielded a number of stories about Marie Laveau and other voodoo traditions.

The book embraces both her own re-immersion in the folklore of her childhood, and a desire to document those traditions as part of the emergent anthropological sciences.

Subsequently, the book has been described as an important text for the canonization of Hurston in both American and African-American literature, and in developing fields such as ethnography and critical race theory.