Mules and Men is a 1935 autoethnographical collection of African-American folklore collected and written by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. The book explores stories she collected in two trips: one in Eatonville and Polk County, Florida, and one in New Orleans. Hurston's decision to focus her research on Florida came from a desire to record the cross-section of black traditions in the state. In her introduction to Mules and Men, she wrote, "Florida is a place that draws people—white people from all over the world, and Negroes from every Southern state surely and some from the North and West". Hurston documented 70 folktales during the Florida trip, while the New Orleans trip yielded a number of stories about Marie Laveau, voodoo and Hoodoo traditions. Many of the folktales are told in vernacular; recording the dialect and diction of the Black communities Hurston studied. The book embraces both her own re-immersion in the folklore of her childhood, and a desire to document those traditions as part of the emergent anthropological sciences. Subsequently, the book has been described as an important text for the canonization of Hurston in both American and African-American literature, and in developing fields such as ethnography and critical race theory. Summary Frame Stories Hurston adopts a semi-autobiographical narration of someone who is sent out to collect Black folklore from Hurston’s real home town of Eatonville, Florida. Hurston chose Eatonville as the location for her Folklore collection because she knew the people there would not consider her diploma or credentials and instead would treat her as another local. Hurston’s frame story persona does not record the folktales themselves, but rather context in which Hurston supposedly heard the stories. She describes life in Eatonville township and the daily life of its Black population as they play games such as “Florida-Flip,” go to work in the local saw mill, fall in love and countless other ordinary experiences. The dialogue of Hurston’s frame stories is vernacular, recording the way people spoke in Eatonville at the time. When B. Mosely asks Hurston, “are you going to stay a while, Zora?” Hurston records it as, “You gointer stay awhile, Zora?” Hurston’s frame stories are often broken up by Folktales, as the characters in Eatonville stop what they’re doing to tell a folktale that is applicable to the situation at the time. Black men on the way to work in the difficult conditions of a sawmill