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

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.