SOURCE: Wall, Cheryl A. “Mules and Men and Women: Zora Neale Hurston's Strategies of Narration and Visions of Female Empowerment.” Black American Literature Forum 23, no. 4 (winter 1989): 661-80.

In the following essay, Wall contends that Hurston's narrative strategy in Mules and Men allows her to represent the ways in which women are relegated to subordinate roles in African American culture.

Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston's first book of folklore, is a widely recognized if underdiscussed classic in Afro-American literature and American anthropology. Unlike many of its predecessors in the field, it presents lore not to patronize or demean Afro-American culture, but to celebrate it. The shift of purpose is encoded in the book's title, with its dual reference to the status accorded blacks from without and the status they assume within their own community. Of course, the title also privileges the male. Analyzing its narrative strategy rather than...