There is nothing in the title to indicate that ["Mules and Men"] is a picture of the negro mind revealed with commendable objectivity by a negro writer with a vivid pen. It is straining the term to call these stories folk-lore, since in themselves they are individual flights of fancy. Yet in sum they project, as it were, a composite image of the American negro's imagination with its whimsicality, its American love of exaggeration, and its under-dog's admiration of victorious cunning constantly pitted against the dominance of the white man. Two-thirds of the book consists of tales of varying degrees of tallness: there are tales of animals, parallel exploits to those of Brer Rabbit, tales telling why the porpoise has his tail on crossways, and how the possum lost the hair off his tail….
The book therefore reads rather like a compilation of stories for after-dinner speakers, but actually it is scientific in intention and in method. This applies also to the chapters on Hoodoo—the magic ritual practised by the Southern negros…. [Here the author] describes circumstantially the superstitious rites involving the slaughter of animals and the usual devices of sympathetic magic which are used to injure an enemy, compose a love dispute, or exert supernatural powers. Here was the scientific mind submitting itself to the most severe discipline in the study of superstition by becoming for the time being superstitious, but emerging with enough detachment to describe its position in a parable of the cat who washed its face and "used its manners" after it had eaten the rat.
A review of "Mules and Men," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 1779, March 7, 1936, p. 200.
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