Me and the Mule

Langston Hughes’s “Me and the Mule” makes a powerful statement in few words. With the intense focus on rhythm and sound that Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance poets are known for, “Me and Mule” comments on the dehumanization inherent in racism and the importance of having pride in one’s racial identity and insisting on one’s dignity in the face of mistreatment or societal prejudice. “Me and the Mule” uses the figure of the mule, a common symbol associated with enslaved people, poor people, and laborers, to address Racial Inequality and call for Racial Pride.

The poem opens with the speaker’s smiling beast of burden: “My old mule, / He's gota grin on his face” (Lines 1-2). The image is immediately striking because of its anthropomorphism (giving human characteristics to nonhuman objects or animals). Mules are domesticated for heavy labor, and are typically thought of as stubborn and intellectually limited. Thus, it is surprising that the speaker’s mule grins—we don’t know why this creature is capable of human expression. One reading of the image of the mule is that it stands for an unintellectual Black laborer only capable of hard physical labor; in this interpretation, the grinning mule is a dehumanizing comparison to a Black worker. However, the speaker’s description of the mule carries a warm, affectionate tone. The phrase “my old mule” suggests friendship and camaraderie, while the colloquial “gota” implies a shared mode of casual expression between owner and animal. This reading makes the grin on the mule’s face sly and knowing—the animal is expressing its inner life despite its social station, projecting its mind onto the world regardless of the opinion of others. This reclaiming of the mule makes it a symbol of underestimation—unlike stereotypes have it, this is not a stupid animal doomed to toil, but an intelligent being whose intellectual life can flourish even in the face of the outward treatment it receives at the hands of others; the grin gives indication that the animal has its own opinions about the world and its place in it.

“Me and the Mule” makes a dramatic turn in lines three and four: “He's been a mule so long / He's forgotten about his race” (Lines 3-4). While the first line seems to imply an obvious, literal reference to the mule, line four immediately calls that into question with the use of the term “race”—we do not typically consider animals as having racial categories. Possibly, then the “he” of both lines refers instead of the mule to the poem’s speaker. The mule has ceased to be an actual animal and has fully become a symbol of the speaker himself; the lines thus refer to the effect racism has had on his sense of self and identity. In other words, the speaker, a Black man, has been used as a “mule” so long by white society that he has “forgotten about his race.” This act of forgetting is two-fold. First, the speaker implies that because he has been made into a mule, he has forgotten to feel pride in his identity as a Black man; instead, he has been defined by those who see him and others like him as “grinning mules.” The second implication takes the “forgetting” even further—becoming a “mule” has stripped the speaker of his identity as a member of the human race. By transforming the Black man literally and figuratively into a mule, white society has taken away his humanity—a tragic Loss of Identity.

However, the second stanza of “Me and the Mule” takes yet another turn, this one reclaiming the speaker’s authority and agency. Rather than allowing racist assumptions dehumanize him into the mule’s position, the speaker establishes the link with the animal on his own, completely different terms. Owning his power as a Black man, he exclaims, “I'm like that old mule— / Black—and don't give a damn!” (Lines 5-6). The stanza break marks a change in rhythm, speeding up the meter—a transformation that aligns with the thematic shift. While the first half of the poem held the mule as arm’s length in third-person, the second stanza collapses speaker and animal into analogues of each other. Adopting the beast’s mulish (pun intended) grin, the speaker articulates his determination not to give up his racial identity or sense of self no matter how these are perceived by the outside world. Instead, he will no longer “give a damn” how his pride in his Blackness comes across to others.

The final two lines of “Me and the Mule” focus outward, giving a command to the reader: “You got to take me / Like I am” (Lines 7-8). Having regained his personhood, the speaker assumes the power to assert himself as an independent being with agency. Then, the speaker calls on the reader “to take me”—a demand of acceptance and inclusion. The speaker is a fellow human being who deserves the right to be his own person (“Like I am”) regardless of his race. This act of demanding the reader to view the speaker how he wishes to be viewed is a move of power and pride. Hughes rewrites the connotation of the mule—its obstinacy is not a sign of stupidity, but just the opposite, a measure of its insistence on dignity and fair treatment. The mule grins because he is proud of who he is—and the speaker seeks to do the same no matter what happens to white society’s view of Black people.