The Problem of Invisibility - Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston

The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston
Author(s): Wendy Dutton

Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies , 1993, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1993), pp. 131-152
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346733
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Wendy Dutton
The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and

Zora Neale Hurston
In a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation, Zora Neale Hursto

wrote in 1937, "The proper voodoo book has never been done, and it
is waiting for me to write it."' At the height of her literary career
Hurston also relentlessly pursued her interest in voodoo through "t
spy-glass of Anthropology."2 She was initiated under at least a doze
voodoo doctors. She wrote extensively on the topic. In fact, the last
thing she wrote was a column on "Hoodoo and Black Magic" for t
Fort Pierce Chronicle that ran from 1957 to 1959, the year before sh
died. It was a subject to which she would return again and agai
Voodoo was Hurston's wild card.
It was because of voodoo, in fact, that Alice Walker "discovered"
Hurston while Walker was doing research for her story "The Revenge
of Hannah Kemhuff." Walker reports, "A number of white racist an-
thropologists of the period had, not surprisingly, disappointed and
insulted me. They thought blacks inferior, peculiar, comic, and for me
this undermined, no, destroyed, the relevance of their books. Fortu-
nately, it was then that I discovered Mules and Men."3 Mules and Men is
Hurston's folklore book that ends with a large section on voodoo.
Thus, it was Hurston's work on voodoo that began the literary love
affair between Walker and Hurston that brought Hurston to contem-
porary readers. Since then she has been analyzed, anthologized - one
could even say canonized. Despite this enthusiastic resurrection, Hur-
ston's work on voodoo has been largely overlooked.
To begin with, Hurston never wrote the definitive voodoo book.
Instead she wrote Tell My Horse. Composed at the same time as Their
Copyright ? 1992 by Frontiers Editorial Collective.
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XIII, NO. 2
Eyes Were Watching God, Tell My Horse was published in 1938

lukewarm reception. The most disappointing aspect of the boo
that it barely addressed the topic of voodoo. Part 1 provided a
logue to Jamaica, while Part 2, "Politics and Personalities," att
to give a history of Haiti but came across more as a presentat
folklore. It is not until Part 3 that she tackled voodoo head-on. In the
introduction to the Turtle Island edition of Tell My Horse, Bob Callahan
calls the book "controlled and very, very modest," with voodoo as its
"secret core."4
Hurston herself qualified her writing. She wrote, "This work
does not pretend to give a full account of either voodoo or voodoo
gods.... I am merely attempting to give an effect of the whole in the
round."5 She claimed (rightfully) that it would take several volumes to
explain the gods and practices of one region alone. Her task was
Herculean.
Somewhere along the line, she let her work fall far short of its
promise. It could be that she was overwhelmed. It could be that she
lost interest in the subject. It could be that she curtailed her research
and didn't have enough material for a more thorough book. It could
even be that she was exaggerating in her letter to the Guggenheim
people. Considering her long-term devotion to the subject, all of these
possibilities are highly unlikely. The true stumbling block for Hurston
came in the dilemma of how to present her material.
She chose anthropology. In fact, she found herself poised to be-
come an expert in the field. She had contacts both in the voodoo world
and at Columbia, where she had studied anthropology with Franz
Boas. And yet, the choice to use anthropology would prove disastrous.
She refused to employ formal research techniques - no cross-refer-
ences, no citing. In fact, she wrote in the first person, showing off her
poetic mastery of language whenever she could.
The voodoo section in Tell My Horse begins, "In the beginning
God and His woman went into the bedroom together to commence
creation. That was the beginning of everything and Voodoo is as old as
that."6 Here Hurston's literary impulse is thinly disguised. Although
her subject is nonfiction, her writing style is a mix of folklore, poetry,
humor, and twang. Each chapter ends melodramatically with the ex-
claimation, "Ah Bo Bo!!" In her tirade in the chapter "Women in the
Caribbean," she mocks herself with, "Now Miss America, World's
champion woman, you take your promenading self down into the
cobalt blue waters of the Caribbean and see what happens."7 Clearly,
this is not the stuff of standard research.
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Though her writing style disqualified her from being taken

ously as an academic, this never seemed to be her goal. She wa
change the popular perception of voodoo. She wanted to tell the
so anyone could understand it. Although Tell My Horse fails as
anthropology, it doesn't fly as fiction either. Hurston's voodo
dwells in the murky middle ground between fiction and anthr
ogy, not fully aligned with either.
The choice of writing style was not the only thing that inh
Hurston; the realities of her subject, the world of voodoo, also
ited her. As an initiate and practitioner, she had vowed to
voodoo's strict secrecy laws. This was nothing to take ligh
religion as powerful as voodoo.
Thus, what she doesn't tell is as significant as what she do
subtext, the clouded-over part of Tell My Horse, is the story of
She is a character who wanders in and out of voodoo ceremonies and
rented huts, lugging her typewriter. But just when the reader gets a
taste of her, she pulls back and switches to a more scientific vein,
leaving the reader hungry. She only hints at how terrifying her posi-
tion was. Facing scorn from both the intellectual world and the under-
ground world of voodoo, her confusion about the appropriate mode
of telling is almost palpable in her writing. Even in her autobiography,
her involvement with voodoo is whitewashed. Voodoo remains Hur-
ston's untold story.
A Religion of Creation and Life
Voodoo began in the 1700s with the Maroons of Haiti, an under-

ground culture of escaped slaves living in the caves of Haiti's hills.
There, secrets of medicine from Africa were preserved. In this clandes-
tine environment, voodoo flourished as an amalgam of tribal religions
and force-fed Catholicism. Voodoo revolves around ritual and posses-
sion as the voodoo gods are invoked to administer justice.8
In the 1920s and 1930s while Hurston was writing, voodoo was
still widely regarded as a cult of superstition that involved ritual
orgies and serpent worship. What was most disturbing was the con-
cept "of God being called upon deliberately to take a hand in das-
tardly enterprises."9 Even more damning, at a voodoo ceremony
presided over by the legendary New Orleans priestess Marie Leveau,
"a large number of white women of respectable middle-class families
were found almost completely disrobed."'0
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Appalled at the caricatured treatment of voodoo, Hurston's

search became "something of a personal crusade."" She wrote,
of the other men of education in Haiti who have given time t
study of voodoo esoterics do not see such deep meanings in
practices."12 She, on the other hand, claimed, "Voodoo is a rel
creation and life. It is the worship of the sun, the water and
natural forces."'13 So this is Hurston's starting point in the st
voodoo: naming it a religion of creation and life. For the time
even for today, this is a revolutionary approach to one of the
caricatured religions in the world.
Regardless of Tell My Horse's pitfalls, Hurston's contribut
the study of voodoo - indeed to anthropology as a whole -
be underestimated. She did ground-breaking work on zomb
was, in fact, the first person to photograph a zombie. In additio
perception of voodoo as a religion, she also examined female p
voodoo. Hurston's writing style, too, need not be seen as flawe
as unprecedented, innovative, and ahead of its time.
The Interrupted Journey
In 1928, fresh from her undergraduate work at Barnard an

nanced by a patron,'4 Hurston embarked on a story-gatheri
through the South. Her first venture was a disaster. She s
"Barnardese," asking people whether they knew any folktales, o
be greeted with blank stares. Her discoveries were "not eno
make a flea a waltzing jacket."15 She returned in tears to Boas
mentor, who sent her back to the South.
This time she went undercover. Hurston disguised herse
bootlegger's woman on the run to explain her car and nice cloth
moved among the rough sawmill communities, collecting stori
songs.'6 In the resulting book, Mules and Men, the circumstan
Hurston's collecting are told as vignettes in between the tales
selves. They are every bit as compelling as the stories she colle
Mules and Men presents a pattern of sister texts, one the story of h
and one the stories she gathered. It was a pattern that would c
over into all her writing on voodoo.
Hurston's travels in the South led to New Orleans, the seat of
voodoo in America. There Langston Hughes set her up with some
contacts,'7 and Hurston found herself swept into the hush-hush cul-
ture of voodoo. She immediately began studying to be initiated and to
learn all that she could on the topic. In 1931, she published her findings
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in an article called "Hoodoo in America" in the Journal of Amer

Folklore.'" More than one hundred pages long, the article repre
the first study of voodoo by a black folklorist.19 It also was one
first studies to treat voodoo in a nonracist way.
Four years after "Hoodoo in America" appeared, Hurston
lished Mules and Men. The book was divided into two sections, on
folklore tales and the other on voodoo. Occupying only fift
pages of the book, the voodoo section was a disappointing follow
to the JAF article, especially because it used almost identical m
Hurston herself agreed that more time needed to be spent
subject.
The same year Hurston published Mules and Men (1935), she also
decided to return to Columbia to earn a doctorate in anthropology. It
had been seven years since she had received her B.A. from Barnard
and first fell under the influence of Boas. After leaving Barnard, she
traveled, wrote incessantly, and taught theatre sporadically. She came
back to academia with the big idea of researching voodoo.
She was not well received. Hurston scholar Gwendolyn Mikell
reports, "Her final attempt at Ph.D. work was frustrated by the failure
of the Rosenwald Foundation to see the relevance of her proposed
study of voodoo in Haiti; her application for fellowship and research
support was rejected in 1935." In fact, she seldom attended the
classes she had signed up for.21 Thus, her ties to academia had already
eroded considerably by the time she received funding from the Gug-
genheim Foundation for the research. She arrived in Jamaica in 1936
and a year later traveled to Haiti for six months. Later, in 1937, she
returned with a renewed Guggenheim for another three months.
In Mules and Men Hurston announced, "Hoodoo, or Voodoo as
pronounced by the whites, is burning with a flame in America."22 In
truth, she encountered a largely nickle-and-dime voodoo industry in
New Orleans that revolved around the buying and selling of luck balls
and love potions and, for a higher price, "killing by remote control."23
Hurston published recipes like the one "to make people love you,"
which included nine lumps of sugar, starch and steel shavings mixed
with Jockey Club cologne.24
Haiti was different. Voodoo was in the drums she heard at night.
It was in the bizarre signs that crossed her path during the day.
Voodoo was zombies and secret societies. She noted how possession
by the gods happened in the marketplace as well as within a ceremo-
nial context. If voodoo was a flame in America, it was an inferno in
Haiti. It was everywhere.
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Just as she began to probe into the secret societies of Haiti, H

ston fell dramatically and mysteriously ill. Her biographer, Rob
Hemenway, asserts, "Zora Hurston was convinced that her illnes
her voodoo studies were related."25 Fearing death, she cut her re
short and fled the island.
The Sacred Black Cow
Of her academic life Hurston wrote, "The Social Register crow

at Barnard soon took me up, and I became Barnard's sacred bl
cow. If you had not had lunch with me, you had not shot from taw
Her attitude reflected her full awareness of herself as "the other" in
academia.
"Two-headed doctor" is a term for a voodoo doctor, or bocor or
houngan. Commenting on Hurston's "sacred black cow" remark,
Renato Rosaldo writes, "Hurston's ironic self-portrait enables her to
depict the two-sidedness of her status."27 While Hurston was a two-
headed doctor when she got initiated, she also was a two-headed
doctor in a more figurative sense. Rosaldo explains, "The term partici-
pant-observation reflects even as it shapes the fieldworker's double
persona."28 The most frequent manifestation is that the field-worke
has one foot in one culture with the other foot back at the university.
Hurston is usually analyzed using this "double vision"29 proto
type. Hemenway refers to the clash between her fiction and anthropol
ogy as "a vocational schizophrenia."30 Another critic panned
Hurston's work for its "constant conflict between anthropologica
truth and tale telling."31 Mikell asserts, "Her fluctuations betwee
literature and anthropology caused some to consider her an anthropo
logical dilettante."32
However, the style of Tell My Horse resulted from her break with
academia. The book was not written for academic consumption, and
this goes far to explain its tone. Her goal was to demystify voodoo; sh
wanted to tell it so anyone could understand. Nonetheless, her anthro-
pology has been continually disregarded because it does not meet
formal (read: academic) standards.
At the same time that Hurston was doing her research, there was
a handful of professional women anthropologists who were carving
out careers for themselves under the tutelage of Boas. They went
much the same Barnard-Columbia route that Hurston did. Elsie Clews
Parsons, whom Hurston mentioned in Tell My Horse, first taught Ruth
Benedict, and Benedict was teaching Margaret Mead at Columbia
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graduate school while Hurston was a student at Barnard un

dys Reichard. As women, these anthropologists were anomalie
they nonetheless formed a woman's voice in early twentieth-c
anthropology. Benedict and Mead, too, felt the pull of the litera
both writing poetry, often to each other.33 At least on some lev
seemed to experience some of the "two-headedness" that
Hurston.
And yet, Hurston was excluded from the circle of these women,
although she encountered them professionally. Benedict was the edi-
tor of the Journal of American Folklore when they published Hurston's
hoodoo piece. Benedict's biographer, Margaret Caffrey, reports, "Later
Benedict was fired from the position over a division in folklore of the
1930s between anthropological and literary folklore,"34 a division that
would also snare Hurston.
The Self-Made Hoodoo Man
One of the early researchers of voodoo was a woman na

Mary Alisha Owen, writing amid the rash of literature on the top
the late 1800s. Although she was well regarded in folklore circle
book Voodoo Tales is a female version of Uncle Remus, only
stories are told by "Granny," the old negress, and her friends, "
aunties." They gather in Granny's cabin to tell tales to "the tow
Granny cares for. Hurston copied this circumstances-of-telling
nique, not only in her texts, but in her lifestyle. While in v
circles, she acted like the towhead; back at the ivory towers, she
Granny, telling tales.
Drawing from Owen and writing just two years before Hurs
arrived in New Orleans was the ridiculous Newbell Niles Puckett,
who, frustrated with paying his sources for information, disguised
himself as a voodoo doctor, explaining, "No, I have no whopple-jaw
nor blue gums, but I do have a startling collection of red flannel rags,
rabbit's feet,... graveyard dirt, voodoo charms." He claimed, despite
the race barrier, that he "soon convinced even the hard-shelled hoo-
doos that I was one of the gang."35 It came as no surprise, then, when
Puckett reached the conclusion that, according to his research, voodoo
was dead in New Orleans. He saw the city as full of imposters.
Hurston encountered the same ludicrous approach in literature
about the Caribbean. Hurston arrived in Haiti two years after the
American military occupation (1915-1934) ended. It was a time when
books like Cannibal Cousins and Black Baghdad were being published,36
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reinforcing the perception of Haitian peasants as primitive, or,

precisely, savage, largely through distortions of voodoo.
In reaction to this, Hurston commented on "the attitude of
majority of the Haitian elite who have become sensitive to any
ence to voodoo in Haiti,"37 adding to the prickly nature of her su
Back in the United States, although Hurston was embraced b
Harlem Renaissance crowd on literary grounds, black intelle
were much more dubious of her anthropology. One scholar
claims, "Many of the black elite considered her folk approach dem
ing."38 Another maintains Hurston's ethnography earned her
scorn of the intellectual community."39 In addition, there is a vi
and raunchy side to voodoo; Hurston must have felt ambivalent
portraying it. She set out to rewrite the popular image of voodo
the possibility of sensationalism and misinterpretation haun
writing.
Her own role was problematic as well. Even the most complacent
reader cannot help noticing that Hurston had become much more of a
participant than an observer. One critic points out, "The information is
conveyed to us in the logic of one who practices and believes."40
Further, having been initiated, she was bound by secrecy. Having seen
the long arm of voodoo in action, she knew full well what the punish-
ment was for talking.
Hurston explained, "Believers conceal their faith. Brother from
sister, husband from wife. Nobody can say where it begins or ends.
Mouths don't empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and
knowing."41 Not only was Hurston the sympathathetic ear, but when
she reversed roles and lived as a writer, she became the cautious teller.
The choked language of Tell My Horse comes from a heightened aware-
ness of what it means "to tell." Whatever the case, Hurston remained
"a pioneer in a complete vacuum."42
The Black-Cat Bone
A year after Hurston began her work in voodoo, Charl

Seabrook published The Magic Island (1929). In fact, in many ways T
My Horse reads like a deliberate rewrite of The Magic Island. Both ha
chapters on Celestine Simon, the Haitian first lady who was als
voodoo high priestess. They both have chapters on the Isle de
Gonave as well as "peeps at personalities in the Black Republic."
Although some considered Tell My Horse sensationalist, it far s
passed The Magic Island with its seriousness. One of Seabrook's cere
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monial descriptions reads, "In the red lights of torches which m

the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies,
maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirle
danced their dark saturnalia."44
Hurston knew there was much more to this "dark saturnalia." In
the following passage, she describes a pivotal voodoo ceremony called
the Black-Cat Bone: "Maybe I went off in a trance. Great beast-like
creatures thundered up to the circle from all sides. Indescribable
noises, sights, feelings. Death was at hand! Seemed unavoidable! I
don't know. Many times I have thought and felt, but I always have to
say the same thing. I don't know. I don't know."45 Hurston's emotion-
less language, typical of Tell My Horse, is glaring. She says "maybe"
she went into a trance. She says the things around her are "indescrib-
able" and ultimately she does not know, does not know.
For this ceremony, Hurston had to catch a black cat and throw the
screaming creature into a pot of boiling water. At midnight after the
cat's flesh had boiled off its bones, she had to pass each of the bones
through her lips until one tasted bitter. The bitter bone was supposed
to give its keeper the power to become invisible. (In "Hoodoo in
America," possessing the black-cat bone also makes it so that white
folks can't refuse the bone keeper.)46 The reader yearns to know how
Hurston felt having to first kill a cat, then pass all those cat bones
through her lips. However, Hurston's narration skimmed over the
event, and she glibly concluded, "Before day I was home, with a small
white bone for me to carry."47
Hurston never said whether the black-cat bone worked - that is,
whether the bone made her invisible or whether it gave her power
over white folks, for that matter. She was rendered invisible in many
other ways - as a woman and an African American in a white,
male-dominated field. This problem of invisibility went beyond barri-
ers of race and gender and expressed itself in her writing style, shot
through with otherness, both in content and textuality.
In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston briefly, but
more explicitly, described the black-cat bone ceremony: "Strange and
terrible monsters seemed to thunder up to that ring while this was
going on. It took months for me to doubt it afterwards."48 On the one
hand, Hurston was professing the potency of voodoo. On the other
hand, she was admitting she came to doubt the thundering monsters.
Nonetheless, she found herself on a threshold. Here she describes
her immersion into the realm of possession during one initiation cere-
mony: "On the third night, I had dreams that seemed real for weeks.
In one, I strode across the heavens with lightning flashing from under
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my feet, and grumbling thunder following in my wake."49 That

"seemed real for weeks" represented a stunningly powerful
where fantasy mixed easily with reality, where the divine was ev
day, where she dragged around thunder and lightning when
walked.
Zombies and Secret Societies
Zombies are created as an act of revenge. A houngan is paid

invoke the god's hand in causing someone to fall suddenly ill and the
appear dead. After the burial, the voodoo practitioners dig up t
body, which is then brought back to consciousness. The zombie, vo
of all memory, is usually turned into a slave. Sometimes when
houngan died, his zombies were set free and gained the reputation
homeless "sneak thieves" with "invisible hands."50
In her chapter on zombies in Tell My Horse, Hurston flatly state
that she knew zombies existed because she had met one. She was
indeed the first person to photograph a zombie.51 She visited with
Felicia Felix-Mentor in a mental hospital, where she had been placed
after Felix-Mentor's brother found her wandering the streets in 1936
twenty-nine years after he had buried her. Although Hurston gave a
fascinating account of zombies, again the nagging feeling that she wa
withholding something pervaded the text. Tell My Horse raised - bu
did not answer - the question of why someone would turn someone
else into a zombie.52
In 1981, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate named Wade Davis traveled to
Haiti with the ambitious goal of discovering the poison used to induce
the deathlike state of zombies. He credited Hurston for much of the
groundwork that led to his research. Davis states, "Since Hurston, the
few anthropologists to consider zombies have rejected the poison
hypothesis," calling it myth or fable.53 Hurston, on the other hand,
wrote, "It was concluded that it is not a case of awakening the dead,
but a matter of the semblance of death induced by some drug known
to few. Probably some secret brought over from Africa."54 More than
forty years later, Davis was left to discover the significant secret, the
proof of which lends renewed credence to Hurston's view that voodoo
held crucial secrets of nature. In his book Passage of Darkness (1988),
Davis printed the actual recipe for the zombie poison. It includes
puffer fish, poisonous toad, local plants, and the crushed remains of
human bone (fresh).55
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Davis believes that "Hurston was unduly influenced by

warnings she received from Haitian medical authorites, who had
viously sought the formula in a completely inappropriate mann
prisoning and threatening houngans. Davis concludes, "From
same authorities Hurston received the dire warnings that may h
prevented her from pursuing the mystery."56 Hurston articulate
confusion: "It was not possible for me to know who to trust wi
advice.... Some things were good to know and some things
not."57 She went on to describe a series of signs that fell across
path, new to her, presumably of a secret society, and she ch
interpret those as warnings rather than invitations.
This business of warning people about the secret societie
repeated pattern in the study of voodoo. The rhetoric as well as
frequency of these warnings has a weird, conspirational tone. Par
is that the warnings are the same coming from both sides. Davi
example, got the same warning from his advisors back at Harva
he got from his voodoo sources in Haiti. Both feared that if he we
far, he would be killed. Therein both camps served to prote
Bizango, the secret society in Davis's book The Serpent and the R
(1985), which could not exist without a brutally enforced system
secrecy.
Davis began his studies funded by a fellowship. Back at Harv
to seek more funds, Davis's advisors were loathe for him to con
imbued as they were with the same kind of skepticism Hurston f
Then Davis's advisors died. Without funding, Davis returned to
on his own. Seeing his devotion, his sources finally opened
houngan, after first giving the ritual-like warning, then quite su
ingly led him to a Bizango ceremony. The houngan's warning, t
fore, served as an invitation, a dare, a test of devotion.
In a description that eerily mimics Hurston's description of
Black-Cat Bone ceremony, this same houngan paints a dire pictu
what happens when an outsider intrudes on the society: "'Do
want to see beasts fly? Yes, I suppose you do. Well, if you are lu
they shall only frighten you. On the side they'll have a pot of oil
cooking meat floating on the surface. Only they'll have a finger
and you will not know if the meat comes from your mother. The
judge you, and you pray that the president says you're innocen
The secret societies were said to take to the country roads at
wearing red robes, killing those they encountered. Consequently
tians were warned to stay inside at night. Hurston equated one so
with the Ku Klux Klan and called it an evil sect disguised as voo
rumored to be cannibalistic.59
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This was the party line in Haiti, and Hurston apparently bou
it. Since then, much has been illuminated. Michel Laguerre, H
anthropologist now at the University of California, Berkeley, h
scribed the secret societies as the veiled heart of voodoo. He named
voodoo as a legal and political branch of society designed to grant
justice to peasants. The secret societies, therefore, act as a kind of court
system and create an underground network that sustains much of
Haiti.60
This system works something like this: A member of a Bizango
secret society could report a wrong. The Bizango would then abduct
the accused, if not in the flesh, then in spirit. With the help of a
particular god, the society's president judges the accused's guilt or
innocence. If innocent, the accuser must take the punishment. Davis
claims zombification, therefore, is a kind of "capital punishment."61
The perception of voodoo as some kind of legal system is a far cry
from the cannibalistic myth of voodoo. According to Davis, these are
the punishable acts in the world of voodoo: (1) excessive material
wealth, (2) lack of respect for one's fellows, (3) denigrating the Bi-
zango society, (4) stealing another man's woman, (5) spreading loose
talk, (6) harming members of one's family, (7) land issues.62 Punish-
ment was severe, but if all went well for a Bizango member, he or she
could seek refuge, empowerment, and protection within the safety of
the society.
Davis also concludes, "Each [society] was loosely attached to a
hounfour (the place where a voodoo doctor lives and works, also
called a hounfront) whose houngan was a sort of 'public relations
man' acting as a liason between the clandestine society and the world
at large."63 This changes the whole view of voodoo, placing the houn-
gan not as an authority but as a middleman. This offers yet another
tangible explanation for Hurston's research: she failed to dig deep
enough. By Laguerre and Davis's view, she was only dealing with the
public relations man. It is quite possible that the houngans put on an
act for Hurston, or, more likely, allowed her only limited access to the
society.
Thus, Hurston's biggest mistake in her voodoo research was not
trying to infiltrate these secret societies. She did attend at least one
ceremony of what she calls the Sect Rouge. Hurston did begin to
describe the judiciary function of the societies: "There is swift punish-
ment for the adept who talks. ... If he is found guilty, the executioners
are sent to wait on him."64 She then added, "A violent blow with a rock
behind the ear stuns him and at this time serves to abraise [sic] the
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skin. A deadly and quick-acting poison is then rubbed into the

There is no antidote for this poison and the victim knows it."
Davis claims Hurston was actually witnessing the administ
of the zombie poison.66 Not only was there an antidote, but th
was not really dead. He or she would be dug up at midnigh
being buried and would then be ritualistically awakened fr
dead into a zombie stupor. Hurston saw the hitting-over-th
and she also saw the digging up; but she never made the conne
at least not in her writing.
There remains, too, the hypothesis that Hurston did in fact
stand what she was seeing: a man was being punished for t
That was her job: talking. Her own work became a warning
effectively spooked, she cut off her research and returned
United States. Tell My Horse feels incomplete because her resear
just that - incomplete. "The indomitable Zora Neale Hurston
met her match in voodoo.
Textual Ambition
Apparently, Hurston toyed with the idea of writing two different

voodoo books, one for the anthropological world and one "'for the
way I want to write it."'68 Tell My Horse is a compromise. It suffers by
comparison to the conviction with which she writes experimentally in
works such as Their Eyes Were Watching God and Moses, Man of the
Mountain.69 Nonetheless, the textuality of her voodoo research was an
attempt to merge the two forms, literature and anthropology, a textual
ambition well ahead of its time.
James Clifford writes, "The notion that literary procedures per-
vade any work of cultural representation is a recent idea in the
disipline."70 Similarly, literature itself has begun to shift away from
"strict" fiction, incorporating autobiography, confessional poetry, etc.
In short, the writer puts herself or himself into the story more openly
now. And the same applies when people see that a lot of what defines
anthropology is writing. In fact, all ethnographies could be construed
as fiction, considering their contrived perspective.
Clifford asserts that this new kind of ethnographer is different:
They assume that academic and literary genres interpenetrate and

that the writing of cultural descriptions is properly experimental
and ethical. Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to high-
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light the constructed, artificial nature of accounts. It undermin

overly transparent modes of authority, and it calls attention to th
historical predicament of culture.71
Although this description is used to describe the new crop of t

appearing in Clifford's Writing Culture (1986), it is also a pict
Hurston's ethnography.
Mules and Men, for example, pointed up the two kinds of m
ologies Hurston entertained. On the one hand, she had the
written beautifully according to sources. On the other hand, H
had this wacky tale that starred herself, spliced in between the
tales. This subplot, unfortunately, was reduced to a lover's tri
Hurston was forced to flee town because of a jealous woman
vignettes about Hurston's shenanigans belie the weight of the
tales. And yet they are pure Hurston - serious in their intent
flip and flamboyant as her fiction.
Hurston, in fact, worked on her voodoo material side b
with her fiction, often doing both kinds of writing in the same
1937, while visiting the Isle de la Gonave outside Port-au-Princ
ston wrote her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God
astonishing seven weeks. It was inspired by the five-day hurric
endured at Nassau, the first place she went on her Caribbean od
Often she worked on the novel late at night after a long day of
ing voodoo material for Tell My Horse. By the time she returne
United States, her novel had already been accepted for publica
In addition to Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston wa
working on a second novel during her voodoo research. Compl
1939, this novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, is a serious atte
weave voodoo into a fictional context. According to souther
folklore, Moses is considered the original conjure man. Desp
bizarre dialogue problems (again the trouble came in the tellin
book is extremely radical in its intent to portray Moses as "the
hoodoo man in the world."72 However, voodoo is seldom ment
and, in fact, is called by name only twice. The third reference,
in its context, reads Moses "can walk out of sight of men. He
black-cat bone and snake wisdom. He's a two-headed man."73 Voodoo
remains the unnamed inspiration behind much of Hurston's writing
in this period, the most productive time of her life.
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The Female Aspect of Deity
In the voodoo section of Tell My Horse, Hurston began w

shocking, sexually charged ceremonial description:
"What is the truth?" Dr. Holly asked me, and knowing that I could
not answer him he answered himself through a Voodoo ceremony
in which the Mambo, that is the priestess, richly dressed, is asked
this question ritualistically. She replies by throwing back her veil
and revealing her sex organs. The ceremony means that this is the
infinite, the ultimate truth.... It is considered the highest honor for
all males participating to kiss her organ of creation, for Damballa,
the god of gods has permitted them to come face to face with
truth.74
This beginning set the tone for Hurston's ethnography, announcing

that it was something radically different from the previous repre-
sentations of voodoo. In addition to the groundwork she laid for
ethnographers like Davis, Hurston's other leading contribution to the
study of voodoo is her accentuation of "the female aspect of deity,"75
an approach that had certainly never been used. For example, Hurston
spoke of Erzulie, the voodoo goddess whom many male practioners
"marry." Hurston called her "the goddess of everything feminine"
and "the perfect female."76 Maya Deren, a filmmaker and choreogra-
pher intent on photographing ceremonial dance, experienced posses-
sion and transcendence much the same as Hurston described in the
Black-Cat Bone ceremony. Deren significantly expanded on Hurston's
view of Erzulie. She wrote:
Voudoun [Voodoo] has given woman, in the figure of Erzulie, ex-

clusive title to that which distinguishes humans from all other
forms: the capacity to conceive beyond reality, to desire beyond
adequacy, to create beyond need. In Erzulie, Voudoun salutes
woman as the divinity of the dream. ... In a sense, she is that very
principle by which man conceives and creates divinity.77
This is not to say Erzulie is a mere muse or inspiration. She rules over
her converts almost tyrannically and actively engages in their lives.
She is the essence of female power, not only as the origin of life, but as
the origin of divinity.
For Hurston, this kind of female power was entirely new, no-
where seen in her previous frame of reference. In Hurston's day, many
of the creative foremothers were not writers at all. They were quilt-
makers, fine cooks, gardeners, seamstresses. For the black woman
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writer, the conjure woman could also serve as a model. As one

states, "Zora Neale Hurston took conjuring a great leap for
and with it, transposed the terms of literary authority fo
women writers."78
Therefore, she established a tradition of black women writers at
the same time that she illuminated the tradition of black women in
conjure. She eulogized priestesses like Marie Leveau as if they were
role models. And she also produced a portrait of herself, a woman on
her own, moving amid magic with ease. She served as a kind of bridge
for an imaginative matrilineage extending from the tradition of con-
jure to the literary genius of black women writers in the last two
decades.
She also set a precedent for the way voodoo must be studied.
Fearless immersion proved absolutely necessary. But writing the ap-
propriate methodology proved especially problematic, as it is even
today. Like Tell My Horse and Mules and Men, Davis's The Serpent and
the Rainbow included dueling stories: the one about voodoo and the
one about himself as a dashing "man of action as well as intellect"79
going on an incredible research journey resulting in the find of a
lifetime. He cuts close to the film character Indiana Jones, the average
academic turned wily world traveler, casting an almost comic slant to
the "double persona" problem of anthropologists. The result, The Ser-
pent and the Rainbow reads as easily as fiction as it does as science,
which was also the case with Tell My Horse. The Serpent and the Rainbow,
in fact, was made into a Hollywood movie, and the book falls into the
fuzzy realm of literary anthropology previously reserved for writers
like Carlos Castenada and Florinda Donner. Tell My Horse was written,
and also received, in much the same dubious manner.
In actuality, Hurston called for a radical rethinking of voodoo,
and her contributions to its study are major. Because it does not fit into
any category, her voodoo writing has confounded readers. Her writ-
ing strained toward fiction while she reined it back toward science,
therein killing the wildness of her finds. It is true her writing on
voodoo is her weakest, especially compared to her fiction - which is
as it should be. All of Hurston's writing, step by step, was moving
toward a home in literature.
Hurston sought to humanize voodoo, and it was only appropri-
ate, then, that she used an experimental voice, one never before heard,
one fit to rival the ribaldness of her subject. She called research "for-
malized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a
seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the
world."? Where most anthropologists are content to gain an under-
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standing of one culture, Hurston strove for "the cosmic secre

was not disappointed in voodoo.
It was with love that Hurston wrote Tell My Horse and Mul
Men and even her hoodoo articles. She did not tell it the whit
She filled her accounts with color, conjecture, folklore, and p
accounts, with plenty of imperfection, plenty of questions le
swered. It was as if she wanted to keep the world she found in
to herself, keep it close and keep it safe. This is, after all, an im
preservation: a woman holding a world to her chest.
NOTES
1. Quoted in Bob Callahan, "Zora Neale Hurston: Visionary Anthropologist,

Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (1938; reprint, Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island
1983), xii. Also, Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biograp
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 246, contains a slightly different qu
2. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana
sity Press, 1978), 3.
3. Alice Walker, "A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan's Review" in In Search
Mother's Gardens (London: The Woman's Press, 1984), 83.
4. Callahan, xiii.
5. Hurston, Tell My Horse, 138.
6. Ibid., 137.
7. Ibid., 75.
8. For more background, see Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken
Books, 1972). As long ago as 1953, Metraux first wrote "Medicine et Vaudou en
Haiti" in Acta Tropica (1953), 28-68.
9. Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negroe (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1926), 175.
10. Ibid., 175, citing Journal of American Folklore, vol. 3, 1890.
11. Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 254.
13. Ibid.,137.
14. Mules and Men, the training ground for Tell My Horse, was financed by Mrs. R.
Osgood Mason, who herself had dabbled in enthnography with the Plains Indians.
Although Hurston claims in Dust Tracks on a Road (see note 15) that they had a
"psychic bond" (129), she also felt "like a rabbit at a dog convention" (129) in
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Mason's Park Avenue apartment. When Hurston returned from the field,
required to sing the songs and dance the dances and tell the tales aloud
Mason - made to ape, as it were, to finance her travels. Mason went so f
withhold Mules and Men from immediate publication.
15. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; reprint, New York: Harp
nial, 1991), 128.
16. Ibid., 127-128. Like Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a Road is an often-underrat
Here, too, she combined the lyrical with the factual, creating a product that
quite fiction and not quite autobiography, either.
17. Hemenway, 117.
18. Zora Neale Hurston, "Hoodoo in America," Journal of American Folklore
Dec. 1931).
19. Hemenway, 77.
20. Gwendolyn Mikell, "Zora Neale Hurston," in Woman Anthropologists, ed.
Aisha Kahn, Jerrie McIntyre, Ruth Weinberg (Westport, Conn.: Greenwoo
1988), 161.
21. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 275.
22. Hurston, Mules and Men, 193.
25. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 248.
27. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989), 180.
28. Ibid.
29. Gwendolyn Mikell, '"When Horses Talk: Reflections on Zora Neale Hurston's A
thropology," Phylon 43, no. 3 (1982): 219. See also Mikell, "The Anthropologica
Imagination of Zora Neale Hurston," The Western Journal of Black Studies 7, no.
(1983).
30. Hemenway, 63.
31. Harold Courlander, review of Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston, in The Saturd
Review (15 Oct. 1938): 6.
32. Mikell, "Zora Neale Hurston," 164.
33. Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 87-90.
34. Margaret M. Caffrey, A Stranger in This Land (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1989), 280.
35. Puckett, 206.
36. Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, 253-255. Melville Herskovits, whose Life in a
Haitian Village (New York: Alfred A. Knoph) appeared in 1927, was the only con-
temporary ethnographer in Hurston's field whom she respected. In Tell My Horse,
she called him the "one exception." Further, Caffrey mentions Herskovits was
calling for more due given literary interpretations, a movement that doubtless
encompassed Hurston.
38. Mikell, "Zora Neale Hurston," 162.
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39. Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, 262.

40. Mikell, "When Horses Talk," 226.
44. Charles S. Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace), 42. In fact,
Harold Courlander's 1938 review called Tell My Horse "sensationalist reminiscent
of Seabrook" as well as "a melange of misinterpretation."
46. Hurston, "Hoodoo in America," Journal of American Folklore 44, (Oct.-Dec. 1931):
327.
47. Hurston, Mules and Men, 228-229.

49. Ibid., 139.
51. Ibid., 205-207.
52. Ibid., 189-209.
53. Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 66.
55. Davis, Passage of Darkness, 75.
58. Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, 270-271.
60. See Michel Laguerre, Afro-Caribbean Folk Medicine (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin &
Garvey Publishers,1987), where Laguerre asserts the study of folk medicine in the
Caribbean is still in "an embryonic state." Laguerre's master's thesis at Roosevelt
University was "Nativism in Haiti: The Politics of Voodoo" (1973). See also
Laguerre, Voodoo Heritage (London: Sage Publications, 1980).
62. Ibid., 312.
63. Ibid., 258-259.
64. Hurston, Tell My Horse, 230-231.
65. Ibid., 231.
66. Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, 257-258.
67. Ibid., 261.
68. Hemenway, 248.
69. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; reprint, Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 1978) and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939; reprint, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1984).
70. James Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1986), 4. See also Clifford, The Predicament of Culture:
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Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

versity Press, 1988).
71. Clifford, Writing Culture, 2.
72. Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, 145.
73. Ibid., 280.
74. Hurston, Tell My Horse, 137-138.
75. Ibid., 137.
76. Ibid., 144.
77. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen (New York: McPherson, 1953), 138.
78. Marjorie Pyrse, "Introduction: Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the 'A
Power' of Black Women," in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tra
ed. Marjorie Pyrse and Hortense Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University P
1985), 10.
79. Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, book jacket.
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The Problem of Invisibility - Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston

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