SOURCE: Andrews, Adrianne R. “Of Mules and Men and Men and Women: The Ritual of Talking B[l]ack.” In Language, Rhythm and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-First Century, edited by Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews, pp. 109-20. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Andrews explores the tradition of verbal assertiveness amongst African American women through an analysis of Mules and Men.

Patterns of negotiating respect through verbal assertiveness, through the power of the word, are a part of a living tradition among black women in the African diaspora, including the United States. Evidence of the historicity of this behavior can be found in sociological literature as well as in fiction and folklore. In this essay I explore this tradition as it occurs in gender relations represented in the ethnographic data and folklore contained in part 1 of Zora Neale Hurston's Mules...