There is nothing in the title to indicate that ["Mules and Men"] is a picture of the negro mind revealed with commendable objectivity by a negro writer with a vivid pen. It is straining the term to call these stories folk-lore, since in themselves they are individual flights of fancy. Yet in sum they project, as it were, a composite image of the American negro's imagination with its whimsicality, its American love of exaggeration, and its under-dog's admiration of victorious cunning constantly pitted against the dominance of the white man. Two-thirds of the book consists of tales of varying degrees of tallness: there are tales of animals, parallel exploits to those of Brer Rabbit, tales telling why the porpoise has his tail on crossways, and how the possum lost the hair off his tail….

The book therefore reads rather like a compilation of stories for after-dinner speakers, but...