Down South

 Mules and Men was the actual Zora Neale Hurston recommendation I got from a friend of mine, I just started with Every Tongue Got to Confess for reasons. And frankly, the first half of this volume is pretty much like the stories in the latter, the difference being instead of just reading the story, we're instead sitting with Ms, Hurston as she collects the stories from old men drinking beer, men on their way to the swamps to cut lumber, people going to a different neighborhood around Orlando for a toe dance...

Which adds a new layer on to the stories, since it's a but easy to slip into a head space where you're sitting next to the teller, listening to them tell their tales. 

The second half involves Ms. Hurston's time in New Orleans, collecting and writing down the knowledge of the two headed doctors, the conjure men, the root workers, the Hoodoo priests. Much like what I've read about Haitian Voudon, it looks like most of this was syncretic with either Catholic or Baptist/Methodist theology, to the point where the Bible is the biggest tome of Conjure, and Moses was the GOAT conjureman. Most of this is fascinating, filled with lots of coring vegetables and stuffing people's names in them to curse them, finding out goofer dust is basically cemetery dirt, and one or two rituals that may have been practiced in era, but these days would likely be written off as either sensationalism or satanic. (At least two cats get killed during her various apprenticeships.) 

It is all fascinating reading, and a picture of an era that has passed, even if the legacy of that era and the preceding ones still linger on in contemporary society. Really happy I found these. 

The Holy Spirit can WALK!

 So, a friend of mine I will hopefully get to see however briefly in November posted a bit about Zora Neale Hurston, and her books on pre depression era African-Americans along the Gulf Coast. (There's a lot more to it than that, but that definition at least narrows down the scope.) At any rate, this lead to me finding her Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro folk-tales from the Gulf States, which prints a manuscript she had assembled but never gotten published. (She had several published, this one seems to have gotten blocked/mislaid/filed incorrectly.) 

There are several categories of tales in here, and one of the appendixes lists which state and a bit about the narrators of the tales. Which is helpful, since the dialect changes by region of narrator. (One Alabama narrator talks about  "Br'er [animal]" quite a bit, while ones from Florida and Louisiana use the full "Brother [Animal]".) And, not all of the tales are funny, although quite a few of them had me laughing. (Indeed, the title of this post comes from one early on where the Preacher is getting the "Hallelujah Corner" all riled up, causing one parishioner to constantly yell "The Holy Spirit can RIDE!". When the preacher puts out the offering plate at the end of his sermon, the same lady yells, "The Holy Spirit can WALK!" In the mean time, the book title comes from the same section of Preacher tales, in which the preacher says "Every Tongue Got to Confess!", which leads to a skinny parishioner yelling, "I confess I wish I had a bigger butt!") 

More than a few tales in here involve someone outsmarting the Devil, and more often than not stealing the Devil's Daughter away from him and his wife. (This must be a southern thing, since I've heard a few idioms from my southern friends and husband about the Devil and his wife.) There's a section of Tall Tales that read like proto-"YO MAMA!" jokes. More than a few tellers use the "N-word" quite a bit, which kind of shook me. And occasionally, a teller has a device they use that clues you in to who is telling it. (The most noticeable one is the gent who ends his tales with "And that when I put on my hat and left.") 

While I enjoyed this collection, and indeed will likely be telling a few of these as occasions arise, the forward by John Edgar Wideman has me wanting to do more reading into the era this came out of.  Seems Ms Hurston came out of the Harlem Renaissance, with a white sponsor who wanted to edit the tales as she saw fit (make the black folks look like noble savages or some such) and an African-American mentor who wanted to edit them to make the the tellers come off as good as white. Indeed, his talk of the Harlem Renaissance reminded me quite a bit of David Carter's book on Stonewall wherein the poor folks got the ball rolling, and the middle class stepped in to try to shape it to better benefit them. (That's a gross oversimplification, but close enough.)

Any rate, a good read filled with good stories.