Bily is an instructor of English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In the following essay, she examines "Spunk" as a story about story-telling.
When Zora Neale Hurston was growing up in Eatonville, Florida, she was surrounded by people who did not value books as much as she did, but who carried within their heads great story collections from the African-American oral tradition. Skillful story-tellers could hold their listeners spellbound for hours, with tales that combined elements of African tradition, the history of slavery, and current events. In Eatonville, as she explains in the introduction to Mules and Men (1935), she compiled her first collection of folklore, as everyone knew the same stories. "From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch.....
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