‘Tire trouble’: Mules and Men and automobiles

Abstract

Cars were important to Zora Neale Hurston, whose extensive folklore-collecting trips in the US South in the 1920s and 1930s would have been impossible without them. The book in which she presented this research, Mules and Men (1935), has often been praised for the way that it describes her own practice as a college-educated anthropological fieldworker as well as recording the vernacular culture of African Americans in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana. Accordingly, her Chevrolet figures prominently in her account, but its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Those who have paid it attention tend to find in Hurston's references to her car signs of an ambivalent relation to the people she studied. She sometimes gave rides to her informants, and the car brought her closer to them but marked her distance from them as well. Drawing on related, recently published, material including her letters, folk-tale transcriptions, and a dramatic sketch entitled ‘Filling Station’, this essay tries to extend these reflections. If the way the car functions in Hurston's text tells us something about the social relations of her fieldwork, then her fieldwork uncovers a number of conflicting responses to the car, at a time when the automobile was securing its dominance as the main form of transport in all areas of the country. Celebrated for the freedom it offered from the indignities of segregation and male patronage, the car was an object of desire for both Hurston and her informants. But cars were not valued uncritically. The essay closes by examining one folk-tale in particular which points us towards the darker – dangerous, anti-social – side of automobility that Hurston's passion does not quite manage to conceal.