SOURCE: Boxwell, D. A. “‘Sis Cat’ as Ethnographer: Self-Presentation and Self-Inscription in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men.” African American Review 26, no. 4 (winter 1992): 605-17.

In the following essay, Boxwell assesses Hurston's achievement as ethnographer in Mules and Men.

One of the most striking photographs ever taken of an African-American woman writer can be found in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. It depicts Zora Neale Hurston clad completely in white—dress, stockings, and shoes—standing in front of the Chevrolet she used on her folklore-collecting travels throughout the American South in the late 1920s. The arresting thing about this photographic image is that her garments are neatly and contrastively accessorized by a gun belt, a shoulder holster, and a ten-gallon hat. She is posing for the camera eye, very much in her “performance mode,” with her hands on her hips, thumbs assertively on the belt...