"He Can Read My Writing but He sho’ Can’t Read My Mind": Zora Neale Hurston’s Revenge in Mules and Men

Abstract

Abstract This reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men considers the nature of oppositional discourse when the form of critique is a genre likely unrecognized and unappreciated by members of the majority culture and those trained in majority ways. Through an examination of the history of the book’s production and a close reading of its opening and final tale, this article examines Mules and Men as an ethnography of communication in the form of a trickster tale.