Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God 9780810166585, 9780810129085

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Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God Edited by

La Vinia Delois Jennings

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2013 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2013. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and Their eyes were watching God / edited by La Vinia   Delois Jennings.   p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8101-2908-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)   1. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their eyes were watching God. 2. Hurston, Zora Neale—Knowledge—Vodou. 3. Hurston, Zora Neale—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Vodou in literature. I. Jennings, La Vinia Delois. PS3515.U789T539 2013 813.52—dc23 2012050069 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

In long memory of my mother, Ara Belle, Florida native and my first storyteller

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Variations in Spelling

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Introduction: Zora Neale Hurston, Seven Weeks in Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God La Vinia Delois Jennings

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1 Remembering the Sacred Tree: Black Women, Nature, and Voodoo in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God Rachel Stein

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2 The Myth and Ritual of Ezili Freda in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Derek Collins

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3 Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Daphne Lamothe

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4 “Black Cat Bone and Snake Wisdom”: New Orleanian Hoodoo, Haitian Voodoo, and Rereading Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Pamela Glenn Menke

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5 “Papa Legba, Ouvrier Barriere Por Moi Passer”: Esu in Their Eyes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Diasporic Modernism Edward M. Pavli´c

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6 “Come and Gaze on a Mystery”: Oya as Rain-Bringing “I” of Zora Neale Hurston’s Atlantic Storm Walkings Keith Cartwright

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7 “Legba in the House”: African Cosmology in Their Eyes Were Watching God Mawuena Logan

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8 Voodoo and the Black Vernacular as Weapons of Resistance: Liberation Strategies in Their Eyes Were Watching God Babacar M’Baye

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9 “All Those Signs of Possession”: Love and Death in Their Eyes Were Watching God Cynthia Ward

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10 Zora Neale Hurston’s Vodun-Christianity Juxtaposition: Theological Pluralism in Their Eyes Were Watching God Nancy Ann Watanabe

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Hurston’s second novel, I extend my deepest gratitude to the individuals who assisted in the production of Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in order to enlarge critical insights into an underinvestigated topic that has major importance to twentieth-century American literature and life. I thank the contributors for kindly granting permission to reprint their essays or for diligently writing and revising new ones. I thank Roscoe Thomas Mack for his unwavering interest in Haiti and Hurston and for providing insightful feedback on representations of West and Central African traditional beliefs and symbols in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I also thank Donna Sully for her thoughtful suggestions and Ignatius Gettelfinger for supporting me in the final stages of conducting research and editing this manuscript. I thank Meredith McCarroll for scanning and formatting the manuscript and the Nathalia Wright Research Grant for making her services possible. The monetary support of the John C. Hodges Better English Fund and the anonymous patron of the Jefferson Prize, a research award that I had the good fortune to be awarded, allowed me to travel to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University to compare the published text of Their Eyes Were Watching God with the holograph manuscript that Hurston wrote in Port-au-Prince, to recruit contributors in Eatonville, Florida (at the nineteenth annual Zora! Festival), and to present papers in Ghana, Brazil, Haiti, and Cuba. I am eternally grateful to Nicole Grégoire in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Haiti who guided me through the streets of Port-au-Prince, who took me to the cemetery on the Day of Ghede, and who, although it was closed when we arrived, arranged my entrance to Trinity Chapel so that I might contemplate the beauty of its murals. She introduced me to Serge Jolimeau and his atelier of steel drum art and made it possible for me to visit remote communities tucked in the hills surrounding the capital city. Thank you, Nicole, for showing me the best of Haiti. I felt an immediate kinship with everyone I met. I think of you all often in these post-earthquake days.



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Ayida Hwedo, also Ayida Ouedo—the wife to Damballah whose symbol is the rainbow Damballa, also Damballah Ouedo, Damballah, and Danbala—the serpent divinity Erzulie—the loa or divinity of love Erzulie Freida, also Ezili Freda—the manifestation of Erzulie, the divinity of love, who is mulatta and childless Erzulie ge-rouge—red-eyed Erzulie Esu, also Esu-Elegba, Eshu-Elegbara, and Esu-Elegbara—the trickster and master linguist divinity from the Yoruba tradition Ezili Danto, also Ezili Dantò—the manifestation of Erzulie, the divinity of love, who is dark-complected and maternal Ghede, also Guedé, Gede, and Gude,—the divinity of death houngan, also oungan—a Voudoun priest, from the Fon tradition Legba (Papa Legba), also Lecbah and Letbah—the divinity from the Fon tradition who is guardian of the crossroads and opener of the gate for other divinities to enter during a mounting ceremony loa and lwa (s. and pl.), also loas and lwas—a divinity or divinities of Haiti Ogun, also Ogou and Ogu—the divinity of iron and war Petro, also Petwo—aggressive and feared rites and divinities of Voudoun Vodun, also Vodou and Vodu—the West African traditional beliefs that gave rise to Voudoun (Haiti) and Voodoo or voodoo (North America)



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Introduction Zora Neale Hurston, Seven Weeks in Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God La Vinia Delois Jennings

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)—the story of Janie Mae Crawford, an African American woman who finds an independent voice and a conscious selfhood during her quest for a fulfilling love—quickly became for a latter-twentieth-century readership, which was largely female and in the midst of a burgeoning women’s movement, Zora Neale Hurston’s most celebrated work. A graduate of Barnard College and a student of the cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and more than fifty shorter works “between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean war, when she was the dominant black woman writer in the United States” (Gates, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 289–90). In the Fort Pierce, Florida, county welfare home where she died in obscurity on January 28, 1960, the manuscript of yet another book was among her personal effects.1 Literary critic Cyrena N. Pondrom states that before Hurston’s death Their Eyes Were Watching God “was often skirted or misjudged by the black male critics who provided the preponderance of comment on black literature” (“Role of Myth,” 181). Alain Locke and Richard Wright, luminaries of and beyond the Harlem Renaissance, panned the novel, whose plot spanned the turn of the twentieth century, because it neither met the black aesthetic prescriptive of racial uplift nor centered its primary action on protesting interracial inequality. After Hurston’s death the novel drew readers who by and large hailed it as a “bold feminist” work, “the first to be explicitly so in the Afro-American tradition.” Critics of the revived work proclaimed Janie Mae Crawford the premier African

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American feminist subject and asserted that the novel, set in central and south Florida, contained “many of the themes that inspirit Hurston’s oeuvre as a whole” (Gates, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 291). Alice Walker’s 1975 Ms. magazine essay recounting her search for Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave in a Fort Pierce cemetery accelerated the popular revival of Hurston’s fiction and folklore that was already in progress. Adele S. Newson, who annotated most of the writings about the Florida writer published between 1931 and 1986, states that Hurston’s literary revival “began, ironically, with a sympathetic obituary,” published nine months after her death. Its writer, folklorist Alan Lomax,2 “described Hurston as being ‘far ahead of her time.’ ” She points out that the following year, novelist Theodore Pratt, in the Florida Historical Quarterly, “lamented the fact that Hurston ‘suffered literary obscurity’ while pleading for the recognition that she deserved” (Newson, xxvii). The first of Hurston’s works to be recalled from obscurity was Their Eyes Were Watching God. Fawcett Publications issued a reprint in 1965 that, in a brief comment it contained on the writer’s life, cited the work as her “ ‘more important novel.’ . . . Critics who later reevaluated Hurston’s works,” states Newson, “presumably had in their undergraduate work this reprint to whet their appetites . . . [and] began to consider Hurston in a new light” (xxvii–xxviii). Between Fawcett’s reprinting of Their Eyes and Walker’s publication of “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” Richard Barksdale, Keneth Kinnamon, James O. Young, June Jordan, and Roger Rosenblatt, among others, praised the feminist and folk elements in the novel. Mary Helen Washington, in her introduction to Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women, posited that Hurston’s story of Janie “is probably the most beautiful love story of a black man and woman in literature” (xi). After 1975, Robert Hemenway’s definitive Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography (1977), which had taken him eight years to research and write; a second reprinting of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1978) by the University of Illinois Press containing an introduction by Sherley Anne Williams; and Alice Walker’s editing of the Hurston reader, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (1979), made information about Hurston’s life and work readily available for her rapidly increasing popular and academic readership. While criticism that emerged during the first two decades of its revival praises Their Eyes’s strong feminist stance, its serious portrayal of black love, and its realistic treatment of southern, rural, black folk culture, a 1979 essay by Ellease Southerland in Sturdy Black Bridges:

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Visions of Black Women in Literature stands apart. Her essay, “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” pays discreet attention to the West and Central African traditional beliefs and symbols blended in Haiti and dispersed throughout the Americas that Hurston subscripts—subtextually embeds—in the novel.3 Southerland catalogues the numerous allusions Hurston makes to the neo-African religions Voodoo and Voudoun,4 respectively the United States and Haitian derivatives of Vodun—the West African religion of the Fon people of Dahomey (now Benin). Enslaved Fon practitioners during the transatlantic slave trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries brought Vodun (a word meaning Spirit or God) to the Caribbean, where they creolized it with the religious beliefs and practices of the Yoruba, Bakongo, and other West and Central African peoples. The creolized religion also incorporated the beliefs and practices of the Arawaks, the people that were indigenous to the Caribbean when Christopher Columbus arrived there in 1492 but whom the Spanish and the French later rapidly decimated. It is said that Haiti is 90 percent Catholic and 100 percent Voudoun, yet a historical tension between the two religions has led to the latter one occupying a submerged role in Haitian life and religious practice. In an enslaved and colonized Saint Domingue, the name the French gave to the western third of the island of Hispaniola that would later emerge as the independent Haiti, serviteurs or devotees of Voudoun juxtaposed African traditional beliefs, practices, and symbols with the Roman Catholicism of their French enslavers. They did so primarily because they saw continuities between the two religions and used those continuities as masks for their own religious rituals when the French prohibited the practice of the African-descended religion, desecrated its religious paraphernalia, and mutilated practitioners who defied its prohibition. In postrevolutionary Haiti Voudoun remained underground in the nineteenth century in spite of the fact that the religion was the spiritually empowering force behind the Haitian Revolution.5 After the volatile revolution from 1791 to 1804, the 1805 constitution of the new nation under black rule sanctioned Catholicism and a string of successive presidents rigorously suppressed Voudoun’s practice. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s first president and emperor, and Henri Christophe, the elected leader of the Haitian northern region between 1807 and 1820, “feared not only the latent potential” of the religion “as a catalyst for revolution, but also the effects of [sympathetic] magic done against them” (Desmangles, 45). Under Christophe and Alexandre Pétion, the concurrent king of the southern region, Catholicism was the official religion. Reuniting leadership of the north and south, Jean-Pierre Boyer acknowledged Catholicism

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as the national religion from 1818 until 1843. From 1847 to almost the end of the next decade Faustin Soulouque who, like Dessalines, served as Haiti’s president and then emperor, “curried favor with the masses by allowing the open practice of Vodou while officially claiming Haiti to be a Catholic nation” (Largey, Vodou Nation, 14). His successor FabreNicolas Geffrard, a Catholic, denounced Voudoun during his presidency from 1859 to 1867. Ironically, because few foreign priests came to Haiti between 1804 and 1860 the number of Vatican-appointed clerics decreased and the growth of Roman Catholicism faltered (Largey, 14). Rapidly changing leadership in the final third of the century also did not assist in garnering public sanctioning for the practice of Voudoun that had “anchored itself tacitly in Haitian religious life” (Largey, 47). Public rejection of Voudoun both outside and inside Haiti’s borders continued in the twentieth century. During the United States’s occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 Voudoun remained a submerged religion. While the U.S. Marines stood guard over America’s economic interest in Haiti despite President Woodrow Wilson’s assertion that their presence was necessary to ensure democracy for the island nation, the Vatican spearheaded an “anti-superstition” campaign which sought to quash its African religious practices. Sténio Joseph Vincent, whose presidency of Haiti from 1930 to 1941 overlapped with the country’s occupation by the United States, supported the prohibition of superstitious beliefs. Later, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who controlled Haiti successively between 1957 and 1986, brought Voudoun openly into the political process but did not legitimize it. When the younger Duvalier’s political reign toppled, anti-Duvalier forces executed their Voudoun supporters. Only as recently as April 4, 2003, Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, encouraging practitioners of Voudoun to emerge from secrecy and declaring its practice “a religion in its own right” and an essential part of Haitian identity, officially sanctioned the African-descended faith as a state religion and elevated it to the same legal status as other religions in the country (“Haiti Recognises Voodoo Religion”). Aristide’s declaration as a head of state situates Haiti as the only country ever to recognize Voudoun officially. Scholars, lay persons, and the entertainment industry have also failed to give Voudoun and the revolution that it birthed proper historical recognition. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the liberated colony a free republic, making it the first postcolonial, independent, black-led nation in the Western Hemisphere, and the only nation to gain its independence as part of a successful slave rebellion.6 Sibylle Fischer observes

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that written accounts by and large omit the Haitian Revolution from its rightful place in the historical record: One might have expected that the Haitian Revolution would figure prominently in accounts of the revolutionary period, on a par with the revolution in France and the events that led to the foundation of the United States of America. That is not so. To this day, most accounts of the period that shaped Western Modernity and placed notions of liberty and equality at the center of political thought fail to mention the only revolution that centered around the issue of racial equality. (Modernity Disavowed, ix)

Similarly, one might have expected that the Haitian religion would figure prominently in historical accounts of world religions but that is also not so. Its detractors have maligned and disrespected it, invalidated it as a religion, and even deemed it unworthy of capitalization. Moreover, its underground status and decentralized structure have allowed unscrupulous persons to exploit it for personal gain and commercial profit, scandalizing both its true practice and practitioners who today number more than sixty million worldwide. And while Voudoun has many sensational attributes in its own right, Hollywood voodoo and other cinematic, carnivalized representations, pandering to the exotic and the demonic, have disseminated inaccuracies about its doctrines and its practice globally. Anthropologist Alfred Métraux explains that the amalgamated religion that arose in Haiti, like its African precursor, has “no national church . . . no written dogma . . . no missionization” (Voodoo in Haiti, 13). Because it lacks a centralized governing body, most of its hounforts— parishes—exemplify their own particular localized traits, but there are basic beliefs and practices that characterize the religion throughout the world. There is one high God, Le Bon Dieu or Le Gran Maît, the creator of the universe and resident of the sky, whose characteristics parallel those of the Christian God and who is too remote and too high above humans to be concerned with earthly affairs. Serviteurs, therefore, invoke the loa—a pantheon of lesser divinities analogous to Catholic saints that have specific personalities, symbols, days of the week on which they are honored, and sacred colors—to provide intercessory aid since the administration of human affairs falls under their purview. Houngans and mambos, priests and priestesses respectively, officiate at worship services where loa “mount horses”—speak and act through devotees—to address the spiritual needs of a particular individual or to provide spiritual uplift and edification for the community at large. Because the loa have the

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ability to mount serviteurs at will at any time and in any place to bring forth information that is not generally known, African cultural historian Robert Farris Thompson has called the spiritual frequency by which their communications travel “the CNN of the Cosmos” (“Robert Farris Thompson Speaks”). The terminology of Voudoun that a loa mounts a person is a metaphor equating a divinity’s possession of a serviteur with the control a rider exercises over his horse. The actions and events that result from a loa’s mounting of a serviteur are the expression of the will of the loa, the divine horseman. The Bakongo contributed the primary signage of Voudoun that emerged in Haiti, a cross-within-a-circle ancestral cosmogram known as the Yowa.7 Drawn on the ground or represented by a tree or center post that serviteurs circle counterclockwise during a Voudoun ceremony, the cross-within-acircle cosmogram symbolizes the crossroads, the intersection of spirit and flesh, and the indestructibility and circularity of the human soul. Serviteurs’ counterclockwise circling of a tree or center post imitates the east-west rising and setting of the sun, which mirrors the directional flow of time spiraling “backward” into the infinite past where all who ever were are. Zora Neale Hurston’s early readers were aware of the Voodoo signs and beliefs in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), but many of the religious elements that Ellease Southerland substantively identified in her second novel went unnoticed. The critical oversight may have occurred because of the subtlety of Hurston’s allusions or because many American readers simply did not recognize the African-derived elements. In addition, Hurston never mentions Haiti directly in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Nanny, Janie’s grandmother, makes a veiled allusion to the island nation, speculating that maybe there is “some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power” (Their Eyes, 29). Hurston’s knowledge of Voodoo in the United States and her direct exposure to and study of Voudoun in the Caribbean and principally in Haiti, where she wrote Their Eyes, informed her textual and subtextual representations. “Zora’s studies demanded years of personal participation,” asserts Southerland. “And one would expect her knowledge of this art to find expression in her fiction. And it does” (“The Influence of Voodoo,” 172). Southerland’s claim that the novel’s recurring tree imagery, color symbolism, and numerology had Voodoo origins was slow to gain critical traction. Because Southerland did not cite her sources, her essay seemed more anecdotal than scholarly; thus scholars and lay readers did not grant her assertions the serious consideration that they deserved. Almost two decades would pass before other substantial critical essays would appear connecting

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Hurston’s physical presence in Haiti and the research she gathered there for Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica with submerged Haitian Voudoun elements in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s first expedition to conduct research on Haitian culture, funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, began in September 1936, two years after the end of the United States’s nineteen-year occupation of Haiti. She had spent the six months prior to her arrival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, gathering folk material in Jamaica. Her initial field trip to Haiti coincided with the religious observance of the Day of Ghede (also spelled Guedé or Gede), held annually on November 2. On this day, also called Fête Ghede and All Souls’ Day, Haitians visit the graves of those who have passed on and invoke mountings by the loa Ghede, the Lord of the Dead and Keeper of the Cemetery, and the confederates of the Ghede family.8 From early November through the third week of December, Hurston gathered material for an anthropological study that she originally had planned to devote “half and half” to Jamaica and Haiti. She initially named it “BUSH” but changed the title to Tell My Horse in order to draw a comparison between the boundless information she felt compelled to report and “the Gude [Ghede] . . . spirit speaking throught [sic] the person possessed” (Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 389). During a period that Haitians are most reverential toward the divinities of the Voudoun pantheon, Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God over a seven-week period (Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 778; Hurston, Dust Tracks, 155). Her presence in Haiti at a time of religious fervor infuses the details of Janie’s spiritual quest for selfhood and love with West and Central African traditional relevance. In the holographic manuscript of Their Eyes Were Watching God, archived in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the final folio bears Hurston’s signature and the location and date of the story’s completion: “Port-auPrince, Haiti, December 19, 1936” (“Their Eyes,” fol. 108). Throughout the manuscript Hurston subscripts details that covertly reference Haiti and that are definitive expressions of African traditional religious beliefs. In most instances the subscriptions of Voudoun in the published Lippincott text are verbatim or nearly verbatim transcriptions from the written manuscript that Hurston carefully prepared in pencil in Port-au-Prince. Hurston wrote the passage containing Nanny’s veiled allusion to the island nation on the verso of folio 9 in the manuscript. Therefore Hurston included the reference to Haiti after she had completed the scene in which it appears yet nevertheless inserted it during her initial drafting. The handwritten manuscript, as well as the published novel, also contains another indirect allusion to Haiti. In a conversation with her friend Pheoby, Janie

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states that the “faker” root-doctor that Joe Starks, her second husband, hires to cure him of a wasting illness is from “Altamonte Springs” (“Their Eyes,” fol. 46; Their Eyes, 126), a town that in real life is located five miles north of Eatonville. “Altamonte” translates as “high mountain” as does “Haiti” or “Ayiti,” the name that the indigenous people of the island called their native land prior to Spanish and French colonizations. In the manuscript Hurston writes “Altamonte” over an erasure, suggesting that she initially erred in its spelling or had entered another name for the root doctor’s hometown in the space. Hurston also includes allusions to and gives the traits of the Voudoun divinities to her principal characters in the manuscript that the published version retains. “Merely attempting to give an effect of the whole in the round,” Hurston imbues her characters with various aspects or emanations of the loa (Hurston, Tell My Horse, 123, 131). Janie exemplifies characteristics of the beautiful, mulatta, and childless Erzulie, the loa of love, through her many associations with the color blue, desserts and sweet drinks, blossoms and flowers, the heart (her honorary symbol), a “strong and binding love,” and the Virgin Mary (Tell My Horse, 120–22). Also like Erzulie, Janie behaves as a tearful infant (“Their Eyes,” fol. 7; Their Eyes, 32), has an ideal conception of the love bed, has “strange eyes” (fol. 75; Their Eyes, 193), is intolerant of rivals and therefore is most jealous (fol. 78–80; Their Eyes, 203–6), and whirls around a “newel post” before being “lit up like a transfiguration” (fol. 59, 159; Their Eyes, 159). Like Pheoby who welcomes Janie’s return to Eatonville with a bowl of mulatto rice in chapter one of the novel, devotees salute Erzulie with cooked rice— “a portion sufficient for one person only” (Hurston, Tell My Horse, 124). Janie has three husbands like Erzulie, who wears three wedding bands simultaneously to symbolize her three lovers that are major loa (Deren, 139, 142), and Janie (or the sun, since the passage is ambiguous) configures “lacy patterns” or symbolic vevers “made on the ground” under “a Live Oak tree” (“Their Eyes,” fol. 19)—“a fine oak tree” in the published version (Their Eyes, 47)—just before Joe, who verbally proclaims himself “I god,” strolls down the road near her first husband’s—Logan Killicks’s—sixty-acre farm. Hurston’s giving Joe the title “the Little Emperor of the cross-roads” after he dies also invokes the loa Legba who presides over the crossroads (“Their Eyes,” fol. 50; Their Eyes, 136). After his arrival in the all-black town of Eatonville, Joe carves a clearing under a big live oak tree where he builds his store with “two roads running each way” (Their Eyes, 65–66). Hurston alludes again to the vever—a pattern made by a devotee to honor a loa—when Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods walks for the first time into the crossroads store. Janie, now a widow, is

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“making aimless pencil marks on a piece of wrapping paper” (Their Eyes, 144). His designation twice as the “Son of the Evening Sun” in both the handwritten version (“Their Eyes,” fol. 99, 106) and the published version (Their Eyes, 264, 281) links Tea Cake with both the loa Legba and Ghede. Hurston states, “Legba’s altar is a tree” and he “is a spirit of the fields, the woods, and the general outdoors” who enjoys tobacco and soft drinks (Tell My Horse, 128). Tea Cake buys cigarettes and a Coca-Cola when he first meets Janie, and he later works in the bean fields in the Everglades. At Tea Cake’s passing on the ontological stance Janie takes that he “could never be dead” as long as she had feeling for and memory of him has provenance in Voudoun belief. Janie’s invocation of the African traditional philosophy concerning death is not in Hurston’s holograph of Their Eyes Were Watching God, thus Hurston added it during the subsequent reworking of the text. The book’s dust jacket features a celestial male god clutching arrows in his left hand and hurtling a lightning bolt over a water-deluged, wind-swept village with his right hand. Excited by her findings in Haiti but running low on funds, Hurston wrote to Dr. Henry Allen Moe, the secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation. In a letter dated January 6, 1937, she asked for renewed financial support. She also reported on the seemingly endless information that she was gathering on Voudoun and included a list of the “Haitian gods and demi-gods with their signs, animals, colors and ceremonies, and meanings.” Damballah, Legba, Loco, Maitresse Ezilee, Aida, Baron Cimetière . . . the Lord of the Dead, and Cilla were among the loa that she catalogued (Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 389–90). She also expressed her “wish” that she “might go to West Africa some day to check up on certain religious manifestations” that she had found in Haiti and in Jamaica (391). In March 1937 Hurston went back to New York before returning to Haiti on May 23, where she remained through September on extended Guggenheim support to complete her research for Tell My Horse. She disclosed to Moe in a July 6 letter from Port-au-Prince that Lippincott had scheduled a September 16 publication for a novel that Guggenheim assistance had made possible for her to write entitled Their Eyes Were Watching God. In a letter dated August 26 to the Guggenheim secretary from Hinche, Haiti, Hurston announced that she was “planning to set sail for New York on Sept. 22,” and would miss the “coming out of [her] new book” by Lippincott (Kaplan, 402–4). Hurston showed her gratitude to Henry Allen Moe for granting her Guggenheim assistance. It is to him that she dedicates Their Eyes Were Watching God. Before traveling to Haiti, where in addition to collecting research she “went Canzo”—became an initiate—“in Voodoo ceremonies . . . that

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were both beautiful and terrifying” (Hurston, Dust Tracks, 169), Hurston had researched as well as experienced Haiti’s Voudoun a decade earlier in its New Orleans diasporic form. Between 1791 and 1804 French colonialists in Saint Domingue fled with enslaved servants of African descent to New Orleans, Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and other nearby port cities. Those enslaved servants brought the practice of Voudoun with them. In 1809 when Cuba expelled French nationals after the island received word that Napoleon Bonaparte had taken control of Spain, a second wave of French colonials with enslaved peoples carrying West and Central African beliefs migrated to New Orleans. After Hurston finished her course work at Barnard College, Franz Boas arranged for her to “go South and do research in folklore” between the fall of 1928 and the end of 1929. In New Orleans, she “delved into Hoodoo, or sympathetic magic” while she “studied with the Frizzy Rooster, and . . . other noted ‘doctors.’ . . . In order to work with these ‘two headed’ doctors,” she “had to go through an initiation with each” (Hurston, Dust Tracks, 143, 156). Before her direct immersion in African-derived religions, Hurston had read Greco-Roman mythologies and Judeo-Christian narratives as a child. These myths and biblical narratives stimulated her imagination and undoubtedly fueled her adult study of sacred, African-centered stories of origins and divinities. She writes in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), her autobiography published five years after her expeditions to Haiti and the writing of Their Eyes, that as a fledgling student in Eatonville, Florida, she was “exalted” by the death and resurrection myth of Pluto and Persephone, which was one of her favorites. Two philanthropic women who visited her school presented her with books of Greek and Roman myths and Norse tales that became “her best of all.” Hurston questioned, “Why did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I do not know, but they did. . . . Of the Greeks, Hercules moved me most. . . . My soul was with the gods and my body in the village. People just would not act like gods” (Dust Tracks, 39–41). The sermons of her father, John Hurston, a Baptist minister, and the talk on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store in the all-black, incorporated Eatonville, the central Florida town that literary critics would later parallel to the independent, black republic of Haiti, also engaged her mythic imagination and interrogations of saints and gods. Pondrom writes: In this same context, Hurston declared her fascination with the robust and mythic narrative of the Old Testament. . . . The title character of her earliest story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” drifts cruciform down

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river after his death; the central character of “Drenched in Light” is named Isis [as is John Buddy Pearson’s daughter in Jonah’s Gourd Vine]; and the very titles of . . . [her four] novels [Jonah’s Gourd Vine; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Moses, Man of the Mountain; and Seraph on the Suwanee] suggest her explicit concern with the crosscultural significance of Biblical figures. (“Role of Myth,” 183–4)

In the foreword to the 1990 reprint of Tell My Horse, Ishmael Reed, who published his own Voudoun-inspired novel, Mumbo Jumbo, in 1972, asserts that Hurston’s “greatest accomplishment is in revealing the profound beauty and appeal of a faith older than Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, a faith that has survived in spite of its horrendously bad reputation and the persecution of its followers” (xv). Hurston consistently subscripts allusions to Haitian Voudoun rituals and symbols in her fiction based on ancient African beliefs and modern reinforcements of those beliefs that she often juxtaposes with Christianity. In doing so, she constructs “ ‘alternative modes for perceiving reality,’ and never just condescending depictions of the quaint” (Gates, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 295). She also imitates the practice of Haitians and other Voudoun practitioners in the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean of conflating loa imagery with images of the biblical patriarchs of Roman Catholicism. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, a title that references the fourth chapter of the Book of Jonah in the Old Testament, the Reverend John Buddy Pearson blends African religion and Christianity, calling his “Congo Gods by Christian names” (89). The depictions of Moses as Egyptian, and therefore as African and not Hebrew, and as a “hoodoo man”9 in Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) seem misguided to readers whose familiarity with the Judeo-Christian representation of Moses forecloses a variant rendering of the Old Testament patriarch who, working at the behest of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had the supernatural might to transform his wooden staff into a snake and to part the Red Sea. Figuring Damballah, the most powerful loa whose symbol is the serpent, with Moses, Haitian practitioners of Voudoun illustrate him with drawings and icons of the Exodus patriarch (Hurston, Tell My Horse, 116).10 In Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), a title that invokes a celestial being, characters of European descent in central Florida perform a figurative tree circling and Hurston veils decipherable allusions to the loa (37, 49–51). Even in Dust Tracks, which at moments reads more like the imaginary details of fiction rather than the factual accounts of autobiography, personified trees—one called “the loving pine” and another with malevolent intent—circular imagery coded in

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invocations of the sun, and the horizon to which Hurston wanted to ride on horseback in her youth are all central Voudoun symbols. The ten essays composing this collection represent the best past and new essays on the presence of Haitian Voudoun elements in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Collectively, they advance a range of readings and assertions. The first five essays appeared in print between 1996 and 2005 and their authors draw primarily from Haitian culture, history, and religion to explicate their assertions. Providing substantive critical support for Ellease Southerland’s claim of Voodoo allusions in the novel, Rachel Stein calls for a rereading of Their Eyes against Tell My Horse. When the two are read in concert, Stein asserts, the articulation of an African-derived spirituality rooted in Haitian Voudoun emerges, affording “black women an alternative paradigm through which to recast oppressive social-natural relations.” Derek Collins maintains that Janie Mae Crawford resembles the Haitian loa of love Ezili Freda “with regard to her physical beauty, her barrenness, her focus on erotic love, and the lack of permanence in her relationships with men.” The nexus between Janie and Ezili Freda, Collins contends, disallows an exclusive or primary reading of the novel within the context of American racial and gender politics because of the undeniable Haitian dimension. Daphne Lamothe complements Collins’s reading by arguing that Hurston infuses Janie with the characteristics of two contrasting identities of the loa of love—the childless, privileged, mulatta Ezili Freda and the maternal, working-class, black-skinned Ezili Danto. Hurston’s drawing on Haitian Voudoun imagery and her reluctance to abandon African American tradition, states Lamothe, acknowledges modernity rather than rejects it and demonstrates her efforts both to resist and to confirm the popular demand of the day for the primitive. Next, Pamela Glenn Menke affirms that both Mules and Men—an ethnographic study that Hurston published in 1935—and Tell My Horse are essential companion texts to Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes in order to interpret the novels’ Voodoo content. Menke postulates that Hurston disguises secret knowledge with half hints in Their Eyes as she does in her Voodoo initiations recorded in her ethnographic studies. And Edward Pavlic´ posits that the figurative appearance of Esu-Elegbara, the Fon and Yoruba divinity, at each of the novel’s symbolic crossroads signals that Their Eyes is “a key text in an alternate modernist tradition” which he calls “diasporic modernism.” The five new essays in this collection directly reference West and Central Africa to discuss the influence Zora Neale Hurston’s knowledge of the Haitian religion had in informing the text of Their Eyes. Keith Cartwright

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asserts that the “God” to which the novel’s title alludes is Oya, the Yoruba divinity of storms. He contends that the ambiguity of the “God” being watched in the storm scene serves as a hermeneutic key to Hurston’s mythic visioning and blurring of national, disciplinary, and psychic boundaries. Mawuena Logan challenges the readers of Hurston’s novel to expand their understanding of African myths and divinities in order to interpret their characteristics and functions from objective positions that have not been undermined by African and European science and sophistication. Logan centers on the representation of Legba or Eshu/EsuElegbara, the Fon and Yoruba divinity of the crossroads that is thought of primarily as a lawless trickster, emphasizing that his greater roles are supreme linguist/interpreter and critical thinker. Babacar M’Baye argues that Voodoo in the novel operates on the vernacular level as a liberating weapon of resistance against gender, race, and class oppression. He parallels the vernacular resistance in the text with that implemented by Haitian leaders during the Haitian Revolution and as a liberation strategy against European patriarchal domination. Cynthia Ward maintains that if Janie, as Lamothe argues, figures two complementary identities of Erzulie (Ezili), the Haitian loa of love, then there is textual support that Hurston models the persona of Tea Cake on Guedé, the loa of death and poverty. Their Eyes then becomes, Ward stresses, a narrative as much about death as about love, one that mounts a lower-class black critique of the upperclass, mixed-raced black. Finally, calling Jonah’s Gourd Vine Hurston’s “West African Vodun male novel” and Their Eyes her “Haitian Voudoun female novel,” Nancy Ann Watanabe asserts that the ancient African religion accommodates Christianity and that its coexistence alongside other denominations sociopoliticizes religious pluralism in African American Southern Baptist, Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Pentecostal Holiness cultures. As global and cross-cultural approaches to literary studies have expanded, so has interdisciplinary knowledge of Africa and its diaspora. A dearth of historical and anthropological scholarship about African beliefs available at the novel’s inaugural publication and early in its revival impeded critical discussions of the roles Voudoun played in the plot formation of Their Eyes. In Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston, expressing her disappointment in the lack of published research that would illuminate the African-derived Haitian religion, censures a particularly capable Haitian scholar for not compiling the information that would have made identifying and understanding Haitian beliefs more accessible. “It is unfortunate,” she writes, “for the social sciences that an intelligent man like Dr. Dorsainville11 has not seen fit to do something with Haitian mysticism

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comparable to Frazer’s The Golden Bough” (Tell My Horse, 131). In the present moment Hurston scholars and Caribbean studies specialists are only beginning to acknowledge the novel’s subverted Voudoun elements. Admitting his own oversight, Hurston scholar John Lowe states, “I always knew of Hurston’s interest in hoodoo/vodun, especially in terms of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Mules and Men, and Tell My Horse, but had never understood what a central foundation it lays for the narrative Their Eyes Were Watching God, even though I knew Hurston wrote it in Haiti” (ii). One reason for that critical oversight might have been that the prevailing dominations of Greco-Roman mythologies and Christianity in the Western academic consciousness12 have taken their toll on disenabling Haitian and African-centered literary interpretations. The conventional practice of applying the myths of the Greeks and the Romans as the default interpretations for a broad swath of American literatures regardless of those literatures’ discrete cultural underpinnings has been equally if not more responsible for obscuring the African traditional undercurrents in Hurston’s and other African American writers’ fiction. Moreover, it is problematic to use the word “myth,” defined as “a widespread but untrue or erroneous story or belief” (Oxford English Dictionary), with respect to Haitian Voudoun, since the loa in their pantheon manifest themselves daily through mountings in the twenty-first-century lives of their servi­ teurs. Classical interpretations of Their Eyes have been useful but may have forestalled Haitian and African investigations since the perception may have prevailed that the novel’s connections to the ancient world had been made. Literary critics moved to connect Hurston’s novel written in Haiti with Africa and to formulate a mythic frame for her treatment have also turned to the Middle East and northeast Africa for non-European interpretations. In “The Role of Myth in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1986), Pondrom foregrounds in her argument the Babylonian story of Ishtar and Tammuz but acknowledges syncretic parallels to the Egyptian tale of Isis and Osiris as well as the Greek myth of Aphrodite and Adonis:13 Critics have not previously discussed, however, an extraordinarily important feature of Hurston’s most widely acclaimed novel: structure, symbol and incident replicate ancient myth. The story of Janie Killicks Starks Woods—with her capacity to fascinate men, her sometimes startlingly brutal treatment of two husbands, her blameless slaying of a third (the “Son of Evening Sun,” whom she

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greatly loves and laments), her restoration of this third to life in her memory and commemoration of him by planting seeds—is a modern reinterpretation of the ancient Babylonian myth of Ishtar and Tammuz, with syncretic allusion to its analogues, the Greek story of Aphrodite and Adonis and the Egyptian tale of Isis and Osiris. It bears the unmistakable marks of the mythology of a questing, regenerative lover / wife / sister / mother and a dead and resurrected god whose ritual relationship interprets the seasonal destruction of plants by both harvest and winter, the setting of the sun, and the death of human beings. (182)

The Babylonian and Egyptian tales, like the Greek myth, relate the love story of an older woman and a younger man that parallels the story of Janie, who at almost forty years old falls in love with Tea Cake, who is twelve years younger. In a 1994 essay, Elizabeth T. Hayes reconnects Janie with Greek myth by paralleling her with Persephone, but eight years later, Tina Barr, firmly grounding Janie and Tea Cake’s story in the northeastern African tale, delineates Plutarch’s account of the Egyptian Isis and Osiris in her “ ‘Queen of the Niggerati’ and the Nile: The Isis-Osiris Myth in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” (2002). Barr proclaims Hurston’s “use of a mythic subtext that modifies and develops the text itself,” and she calls for a need “to differentiate Hurston’s method from T. S. Eliot’s description of the mythic method” that he references with respect to James Joyce’s implementation of Greek myth in Ulysses (101).14 Not finding the religious ceremonies of Voudoun “any more invalid than any other religion” (Hurston, Dust Tracks, 169), Hurston followed Their Eyes with the satirical treatment of the Old Testament Moses in Moses, Man of the Mountain to interrogate the ways myths enter into the daily accounts of men as fact. From Miriam, who comes to believe her own embellishments of Moses being a foundling of the pharaoh’s daughter despite her falling asleep and failing to witness the actual fate of the infant Moses adrift in the basket ark, to the divinely chosen Moses, who leads the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage, staging his disappearance to ensure that his followers do not come to regard him as a mere mortal and overturn his good work, Hurston affirms that men make myths; myths make gods. Zora Neale Hurston is not the only twentieth-century writer to draw upon and subscript in her fiction African traditional beliefs and practices that passed through the black Atlantic and Haiti into African American culture and to imbue her characters with the personalities of Haitian and African divinities. African American writers before and after her have

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done so and in myriad genres. Charles Chesnutt executes numerous embedded allusions to the religion in his collection of short stories, The Conjure Woman (1899).15 In the inauguration of an African American operatic tradition, its first composer and librettist, H. Lawrence Freeman, penned and revised his “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” entitled Voodoo, between 1906 and 1928.16 Freeman advised composer and librettist Scott Joplin on his second opera, Treemonisha (1910), which pays subscripted homage to West and Central African traditional beliefs.17 In 1936 Langston Hughes set the plot of the libretto for William Grant Still’s opera Troubled Island in newly emancipated Haiti. Performed by the New York City Opera in 1949, Still’s opera contains Voudoun priest and priestess figures that the religion inspired.18 Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), a naturalistic protest novel and the first by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies, juxtaposes Christian and Voudoun cross signs and beliefs in her mid-twentieth-century Harlem setting. Science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s canon and Colson Whitehead’s “noir” detective/science fiction novel The Intuitionist (1999) also contain allusions to the neo-African religion. Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Toni Morrison—from neo-slave narrative to libretto—has consistently woven images of West and Central African traditional rituals and symbols that were creolized in Haiti in her literary landscapes, her interior spaces, and on the bodies of her characters.19 Like Hurston who has the character Nanny allude to Haiti, Morrison subliminally invokes Haiti in her libretto for Richard Danielpour’s opera, Margaret Garner (2005). The judges who officiate at the trial of the title character respond to Carolina Gaines’s argument that Margaret Garner’s children belong to their mother and not her (Caroline’s) slaveholding father, Edward Gaines: “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, MADAM? / ON AN ISLAND IN THE SEA? / YOU ARE SPEAKING OF A SLAVE, / NOT SOMEONE LIKE YOU OR ME” (act 2, scene 3). The libretto contains precedents for reading Garner as a figuration of Erzulie, the loa of love. It is noteworthy to point out that Julie Dash, who wrote and directed Daughters of the Dust (1991), also subscripts African-derived traditional elements in her independent film that the Library of Congress has listed among a select group of American films as a National Treasure in the National Film Registry. Dash assigns the members of the fictional Peazant family—who migrate from the South Carolina Sea Islands to the United States mainland—the personalities of the West African Yoruba divinities.20 The intertextual subscriptions of Haitian Voudoun, West African Vodun, and various traditional beliefs from Central Africa in the literary and visual texts of twentieth-century African American writers arise from

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a shared history, culture, and tradition. Critics, for example, have noted similarities in the mythic treatments of Hurston and Toni Morrison, who mirrors Hurston’s literary acclaim by being the dominant black woman novelist in the United States from the end of the Black Arts Movement to the present. Morrison, however, has stated that she “did not read Zora Neale Hurston until after [she’d] written Song of Solomon” (1977), her third novel: I don’t look back and see what A, B, C, and D did, and decide to do it. I don’t work that way. I know the tradition; it’s some way that I cannot articulate. I remember hearing people screaming, back in the sixties, that we need our own myths, we have to make our own myths. . . . Well, I think that indeed some of us have done that, but I didn’t make any, I just tried to see what was already there, and to use that as a kind of well-spring for my own work. Instead of inventing myths . . . I was just interested in finding what myths already existed. . . . I used it as a springboard out of which to say something which I thought had contemporary implications. (Brown, 114)

Being an ethnographic researcher of the tradition that Morrison alludes to enabled Hurston in Their Eyes to reflect the same submerged “already there” presence of Haitian and African beliefs in African American life and culture. Her blending of the modern with the ancient reclaims an essential religious foundation of the American experience, while allowing her to say something that has very contemporary implications. More than a quarter of a century before the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, there was a similar call to find what was unique to African American culture, to search for relics, mythical or material, that would reclaim an “ancestral” past for African Americans (Hemenway, 75). As a creative strategy, Hurston turned to African traditional beliefs and practices that enslaved people amalgamated in Haiti and brought to the North American mainland, folding them into Their Eyes Were Watching God and throughout her fictional canon. She did so not solely for background, or as an objective correlative for blackness, or for verisimilitude, or as local color, or as a celebration of a diasporic patrimony; she saw an ancient spiritual tradition adaptable to and adapting the demands of the modern. As Maria T. Smith points out, “through endorsing specific aspects of the Vodun legacy, Their Eyes becomes a critique of Western materialism, classism, and sexism . . . as they have infiltrated or informed African diasporic communities” (21). Hurston demonstrates

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that living in the modern world does not require members of African diasporic cultures to leave their ancient traditional world behind. From a creative standpoint her fiction is true to the philosophical, ideological, and spiritual resources diasporic people brought forward to the present moment to mediate modern social, political, and psychic dis-ease and transformation. From a critical standpoint the essays contained in this volume discussing Hurston’s creative implementations of Voudoun are not alternative or exotic readings. They represent a seismic step toward forwarding the important work of democratizing socioreligious perspectives both inside and outside the academy and revisioning the definition of modernism to include vast omissions wrought by the shifting demographics of African peoples and what they brought with them as they were forcibly dispersed throughout the world to the four cardinal points and to the points between those points. From a humanitarian standpoint, both Hurston’s fiction and the critical essays herein restore the black subject’s rightful traditional remembrances and interpretations and validate the totality of his or her reality in American and global postenslavement, postcolonial literatures, and life.

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Notes

1. At the time of her death Hurston was working on “a life of Herod the Great,” whom Matthew mentions in his New Testament gospel, 2:16–18. Magi go to Judea in search of the newborn king of the Jews, having “seen his star in the east.” The star directs them to Bethlehem, and Herod asks the Magi to let him know who this king is when they find him. They find Jesus and honor him, but an angel in a dream tells them not to alert Herod, and they return home by another route. Joseph, the husband of Mary, receives a similar warning in a dream and flees with his family to Egypt. Outwitted by the Magi, Herod, who fears a usurper in the newly born king, gives orders to kill all boys of two years of age and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding area. Joseph and his family remain in Egypt until Herod’s death, then move to Nazareth in Galilee to avoid living under Herod’s son, Archelaus. No other source from the period makes reference to Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents. The massacre parallels those of Pharaoh’s charge to his Egyptian soldiers to drown Hebrew male infants in the Nile River. His determination to oppress Israelites extended to infanticide and gave rise to the foundling narrative that the parents of the Hebrew infant Moses, Amram and Jochebed, placed him in a basket on the Nile in fear of the Egyptians discovering him. The newly widowed daughter of Pharaoh then rescues Moses from the floating ark and raises him as her son and potential successor to the Egyptian throne. One can speculate that Hurston’s fascination with Moses’s appearances in African lore and her interest in the intersection of Judeo-Christian stories and the construction of mythology and divinity propelled her to pen a satirical narrative of the role Herod played in the divination of Jesus in order that she might forward a plausible and all-too-human account of Jesus’s ascension to the godhead. Hurston was unsuccessful in finding a publisher for the manuscript. See Carla Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 729–42, 771–72, 784. 2. As a college student, Alan Lomax (1915–2002), in the summer of 1935, conducted field research on St. Simon’s Island and in Eatonville and Belle Glade, Florida, with Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, a New York University professor. 3. Southerland’s article was unavailable for reprint in this collection of essays. 4. Ishmael Reed, in his 1990 foreword for Tell My Horse, calls these amalgamated, Vodun-derived religions “Neo-African religions.” 5. See recent accounts by Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004), and Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (2007). 6. Suppressed slave revolts in the Americas include the New York Slave Revolt, 1712; St. John’s Slave Revolt, 1733; the Stono Rebellion (South Carolina),

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1739; the New York Conspiracy, 1741; Tacky’s War (Jamaica), 1760; Gabriel Prosser (Virginia), 1800; Chatham Manor (Virginia), 1805; the German Coast Uprising (Territory of Orleans), 1811; George Boxley (Virginia), 1815; Denmark Vesey (South Carolina), 1822; Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Virginia), 1831; the Baptist War (Jamaica), 1831–32; the Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation (southern United States), 1842; and John Brown’s Raid (Virginia), 1859. The Amistad, off the coast of Cuba, 1839, and the Creole, off the coast of the southern United States, 1841, are examples of successful slave ship revolts. 7. See Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen (1953) and Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet’s The Four Moments of the Sun (1981). 8. Maya Deren, in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, lists Baron Samedi, Baron Cimetière, and other members of the Ghede family (102–14). 9. Hurston is not alone in her assertion about Moses’s East African ancestry. Sigmund Freud hypothesizes that Moses was of Egyptian nobility in Moses and Monotheism (1939). In the popular imaginary, the terms “hoodoo” and “voodoo” mean evil magical practices. 10. Drawings of Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland also symbolize Damballah. 11. J. C. Dorsainvil (Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil, 1880–1942), born in Port-au-Prince, worked as a teacher and wrote books on science, politics, history, and Haitian society. Several of his books explore Voudoun: Vodou et Nevrose (1913), Une Explication Philologique du Vodou (1924), and Vodou et Magie (1937). 12. Robert E. Hood, in Must God Remain Greek? (1990), asserts that the Christian world’s “reliance on classical Greek and Roman patterns of thought have been pervasive and overwhelming, even by those who joined in protest against the legacy” (xi). 13. The syncretic analogues and obfuscations among Greco-Roman myths and East, West, and Central African tales and origin narratives may in fact point to a common African root. The fifth-century b.c. Greek historian Herodotus writes, “almost all of the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt” (99), while Diodorus, writing after him in the first century b.c., supports his assertion that Greece owed its rites, religions, and gods to the Nile Valley civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia. Memnon, Tithonus, Andromeda, Medea, Proteus, Phaeton, and Circe are a few of the divinities numbered among the Greek pantheon who are Ethiopian in origin. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (1970), the landmark study by classicist Frank M. Snowden Jr., has contributed significantly to documenting through visual art the African presence in the ancient Greco-Roman world, offering up proof in sculpture and vase paintings of Greeks’ knowledge and treatments of various African divinities. In addition, classicists and Africanists argue that there are ancient ties between northeast Africa and West Africa in the same way that Greece influenced Roman culture. Northeastern and western African linkages, for example, may explain similarities between the Egyptian god Shu and the West African divinity Esu and between the Egyptian hieroglyphics and

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the Yoruba Ifa system of divination. See Martin Bernal, Cheikh Anta Diop, D. Olarimwa Epega, and Theophile Obenga. 14. In his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Eliot describes the “mythical method,” stating, “In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . . Psychology . . . , ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method” (177– 78). See Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. 15. See La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (2008), 183–84. 16. While operatic historians cite Scott Joplin’s operas written in 1903 and 1910 as the first by an African American composer, H. Lawrence Freeman’s first operas, Epthelia and The Martyr—the latter an Egyptian opera—were performed in 1893. Freeman composed scores and wrote the libretti for more than twenty operas, fourteen of which were grand operas. His most celebrated opera, Voodoo, appeared in various lengths and venues from its composition in 1906 to its May 20, 1928 broadcast on New York City radio station WGBS and its full performance at the Palm Garden Theatre on West 52nd Street on September 10 of the same year. According to Celia Elizabeth Davidson, Freeman’s “one consuming non-musical interest was a life-long fascination with Africa. He read voraciously about the continent, and went to every movie— good, bad, or indifferent—that had an African theme and/or locale. He prized his complete set of Ryder [sic] Haggard books” (24). Freeman influenced a young William Grant Still, and the two composers were in contact during their operatic careers. 17. Joplin lost the libretto and musical scores for A Guest of Honor (1903), his first opera, that depicted President Theodore Roosevelt’s hosting the civil rights activist and educator Booker T. Washington at a White House dinner in 1901. Although Treemonisha received little more than a reading at its 1911 debut and was over time forgotten, Marvin Hamlisch’s light adaptation of Jop­ lin’s piano rag, “The Entertainer,” to score the movie The Sting (1973), which won Hamlisch an Academy Award, led to Treemonisha’s rediscovery in the 1970s. Operatic groups since then have performed the celebrated ragtime composer’s second opera with moderate success. 18. Voodoo characters and allusions to African traditional religion and Haiti appear repeatedly in the musical, literary, and performing arts in the first half of the twentieth century. Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga (1932), with John F. Matheus serving as the librettist, and Shirley Graham’s Tom-Tom (1932) are two additional operas composed by African Americans during the first third of the twentieth century. See Edward Ellsworth Hipsher, American Opera and Its Composers. To date a book-length critical study on the topic of Voodoo in twentieth-century American literary studies across the genres has not been published. 19. See Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (2008).

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20. Dash models the persona of Nana Peazant, the great-grandmother, on the Yoruba sky orisha (divinity) Obatala. The pregnant Eula Peazant has the personality of Oya Yansa, the spirit of the winds of change. Eula’s husband Eli, the family blacksmith, personifies the orisha Ogun, the divinity of iron and war. And the unborn child who tells their story has the characteristics of Eshu-Elegbara, trickster, linguist, and guardian of the crossroads. See “Notes on Daughters of the Dust.”

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Works Cited

Barr, Tina. “ ‘Queen of the Niggerati’ and the Nile: The Isis-Osiris Myth in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Journal of Modern Literature 25, no. 3/4 (Summer 2002): 101–13. Bell, Madison Smartt. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography. New York: Pantheon, 2007. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Brown, Cecil. “Interview with Toni Morrison.” In Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard, 107–15. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Davidson, Celia Elizabeth. “Operas by Afro-American Composers: A Critical Survey and Analysis of Selected Works.” Dissertation, Catholic University, 1980. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. 1953. New York: Dell, 1970. Desmangles, Leslie. The Faces of The Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Diop, Cheikh Anta. African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1974. ———. Precolonial Black Africa: A Comparative Study of the Political and Social Systems of European and Black Africa, from Antiquity to the Formation of Modern States. Trans. Harold Salemson. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1987. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The History of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 175–78. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1975. Epega, D. Olarimwa. The Basis of Yoruba Religion. Nigeria: Ijamido, 1971. Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Culture of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. New York: Knopf, 1939. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Afterword (“Zora Neale Hurston: ‘A Negro Way of Saying’ ”) to Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston, 289–99. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. “Haiti Recognises Voodoo Religion.” Agence France-Presse (English). May 2, 2003. http://www.afp.com/afpcom/en/. Hayes, Elizabeth T., ed. “ ‘Like Seeing You Buried’: Persephone in The Bluest Eye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple.” In Images of

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Persephone: Feminist Readings in Western Literature, 170–94. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Robin Waterfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. The History of Herodotus. Trans. George Rawlinson. New York: Tudor, 1928. Hipsher, Edward Ellsworth. American Opera and Its Composers. Philadelphia: Theodore Presser, 1934. Hood, Robert E. Must God Remain Greek?: Afro Cultures and God-Talk. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. ———. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990. ———. Seraph on the Suwanee. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. ———. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. ———. “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Unpublished manuscript, Beinecke Library Collection, 1936. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Library. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. ———. “To Henry Allen Moe.” In Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan, 388–92, 402, 403–4, 404–5. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Jennings, La Vinia Delois. Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Largey, Michael D. Vodou Nation: Haitian Art, Music and Cultural Nationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Lowe, John. Foreword to African Religious Influences on Three Black Woman Novelists: The Aesthetics of “Vodun” (Zora Neale Hurston, Simone SchwarzBart, and Paule Marshall), by Maria T. Smith, i–iv. New York: Mellen, 2007. Métraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti. 1959. New York: Schocken, 1972. Morrison, Toni. Libretto. Margaret Garner: Opera in Two Acts. New York: Associated Music, 2004. Newson, Adele S., ed. Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide, xv–xxxiii. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. “Notes on Daughters of the Dust.” Dec. 2, 2009. http://geechee.tv/ddnotes. html. Obenga, Theophile. Ancient Egypt and Black Africa. London: Karnak House, 1996. Oxford English Dictionary. S.v. “myth.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. CD-ROM. Pondrom, Cyrena N. “The Role of Myth in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” American Literature 58, no. 2 (May 1986): 181–202.

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Reed, Ishmael. Foreword to Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston, xi–xv. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. “Robert Farris Thompson Speaks: Daughter of the Dust.” Floyd Webb. Dec. 27, 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b30HaCi5fq4. Smith, Maria T. African Religious Influences on Three Black Woman Novelists: The Aesthetics of “Vodun” (Zora Neale Hurston, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Paule Marshall). New York: Mellen, 2007. Snowden, Jr., Frank M. Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. Southerland, Ellease. “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.” In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 172–83. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1979. Thompson, Robert Farris, and Joseph Cornet. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981. Walker, Alice. “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” Ms. (March 1975): 74–79, 85–89. Washington, Mary Helen. Introduction to Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women, ix–xxxii. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.

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Remembering the Sacred Tree Black Women, Nature, and Voodoo in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God Rachel Stein

Artist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, her classic novel of a black woman’s quest for selfhood, while she was in the Caribbean in 1936–37 collecting the ethnographic materials that she would later publish as Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Taken together, Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God articulate Hurston’s analysis of the conjunction of colonial conceptions of race, sex, and nature, and demonstrate her conclusion that African-derived spirituality affords black women an alternative paradigm through which to recast oppressive social-natural relations. Long dismissed as a work of uneven anthropology,1 Tell My Horse deserves recognition as a pioneering ethnographic study of Afro-Caribbean society and religion,2 notable in particular for Hurston’s biting analysis of the harsh effects of colonialism upon black women. Hurston suggests that Caribbean racial and sexual inequities are grounded in the representation of black women as animals; because Caribbean black women are viewed as subhuman “donkeys,” their sufferings can be dismissed as inevitable, and the social pyramid which rests upon their backs can be justified as only natural. However, as Hurston describes in Tell My Horse, Voodoo ritual and belief offer black women an alternative spiritual model that counters the colonial hierarchies that operate within the denigration of black women as nature incarnate. Through rituals that locate the sacred within nature and within female sexuality, Voodoo challenges This article was originally published in Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 465–82.

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the degradation of black women as “donkeys.” Furthermore, when these “donkeys” become “horses” ridden by the loa during Voodoo spirit possession, colonial class and color lines are called into question. Beyond its import as ethnography, Tell My Horse provides an invaluable context for rereading Their Eyes Were Watching God. I argue that Hurston “embalmed” her growing knowledge of Voodoo spirituality within the nature imagery of this novel. Much as Caribbean black women are formatted by Voodoo ritual, Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes, is inspired to resist society’s conception of black women as “mules of the world” through her Voodoo-informed vision of the blossoming pear tree fertilized by golden bees as a fecund “marriage” of polarities. This vision of nature as the site of fertile possibility and egalitarian exchange inspires Janie to re-create herself as a self-possessed, erotically fulfilled woman. Their Eyes Were Watching God clearly develops the revolutionary potential that Hurston perceived within Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief. The Caribbean conception of black women as donkeys that Hurston analyzes in Tell My Horse is, of course, only one instance of the historic representation of blacks, particularly black women, in terms of animals. Beginning with early European explorations of the African continent, European popular and scientific speculations about the relations between Africans and Europeans generally posed Africans as a questionable form of humanity, ranked along the Great Chain of Being between whites and apes, below fully intelligent life and suspiciously close to lower animals. The simultaneous European contact in Africa with blacks and tailless apes such as orangutans* further spurred the European belief in the close genetic or evolutionary association between blacks and apes, an association that was cemented in the European imagination by the belief that sexually aggressive orangutans sometimes engaged in intercourse with African women. Historian Winthrop Jordan notes that Europeans imagined this transgressive sex-coupling as occurring only between apes and black women: “the sexual union of apes and Negroes was always conceived involving female Negroes and male apes. Apes had intercourse with Negro women” (White Over Black, 238).3 This view of African women as sexual beasts was epitomized in the treatment of Sarah Bartman, a Hottentot woman captured in Africa in *Editor’s Note: While orangutans have been forwarded in the popular imaginary and scholarship as native to Africa, they are exclusively Asian, native to Indonesia and Malaysia.

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1810 and exhibited in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus.”† Medical scientists were fascinated with Bartman’s “primitive” genitalia, which they compared to those of the female orangutan as a sign of the distinct and debased nature of the black race. Believing that the configuration of Bartman’s genitalia demonstrated black women’s likeliness to couple sexually with apes, the scientists concluded that blacks were more closely related to animals than humans. As Sander L. Gilman notes, all medical discussions of Bartman were limited to her buttocks and to her genitalia, which were removed during the autopsy performed after her early death and which still remain on display at the tellingly named Musée de l’Homme in Paris;‡ European scientists literally reduced Sarah Bartman to a sexual curiosity (“Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 85–90). In this defining racist image of black women as sexual beasts, both race and gender were naturalized simultaneously and were based on the belief in fixedly ranked categories: man was defined over and against woman, white over and against black, human over and against nature, with the “animality” of black women serving to affirm the higher “humanity” of white men. It is this image of the black woman as sexual beast and beast of burden that Zora Neale Hurston finds operating within Caribbean social relations at the time of her visits to Jamaica and Haiti in the 1930s. In a chapter of Tell My Horse titled “Women in the Caribbean,” Hurston describes the conjunction of racism, sexism, and classism in the utter social powerlessness of poor black women who are considered the dregs of Caribbean society. She notes that black colonials themselves reinforce the European derogation of blackness, particularly as embodied by black women, as they themselves continue the conflation of black women with lower nature as opposed to higher, whiter European culture. Hurston acerbically describes Caribbean mulattoes who regard English manner and appearance as the key to social advancement, and who thus prize any infusion of white blood into their family lines, shunning darker Negroes as retrograde. Mulattoes with adequate white blood, status, and money may have themselves declared legally white upon the official census records, thus †Editor’s Note: “Hottentot,” the name from Afrikaans and of uncertain origin that the Dutch gave to the Khoikhoi peoples of South Africa, is now considered an offensive term. ‡ The Musée de l’Homme in Paris removed Bartman’s skeleton, genitals, and brain from display in 1974. A cast of her body continued to be shown for two years. President Nelson Mandela called for the return of her remains to South Africa. France acceded to the request in March 2002. The author here passes on Gilman’s assertion from his own article that Bartman’s remains were still on display in 1985.

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literally erasing their black forebears—usually the black mothers who bore children by lighter-skinned fathers; “Black skin is so utterly condemned that the dark mother is not going to be mentioned nor exhibited” (Hurston, Tell My Horse, 8). Poor black women, who are seen as outside the pale of progressive whiteness, live in extreme hardship and servitude, because they are viewed as nature incarnate—as “donkeys” created for nothing more than brute labors and sexual service. Hurston emphasizes that black women’s social disempowerment is rooted in their conflation with animals: If she is of no particular family, poor and black, she is in a bad way indeed in that man’s world. She had better pray to the Lord to turn her into a donkey and be done with the thing. It is assumed that God made poor black females for beasts of burden, and nobody is going to interfere with providence. . . . It is just considered down here that God made two kinds of donkeys, one kind that can talk. (Tell My Horse, 58)

Hurston describes in painful detail the crippling effects of the backbreaking labors, such as loading boats, transporting loads down mountain paths, or hammering large rocks into piles of gravel that these “talking donkeys” must perform for their meager sustenance. Through these descriptions, Hurston delineates the circular process through which brute labors “distort” the women into pathetic, subhuman forms, de-creating them into the prevailing image of black women-as-animals. Her tone in this passage is strikingly ambivalent, mingling repulsion at the women’s “wretched” bodies with ironic outrage at their bitter fate: They look as wretched with their bare black feet all gnarled and distorted from walking barefooted over rocks. The nails on their big toes thickened like a hoof from a life time of knocking against stones. All covered with the gray dust of the road, those feet look almost saurian and repellent. . . . It is very hard, but women in Jamaica must eat like everywhere else. And everywhere in the Caribbean women carry a donkey’s load on their heads and walk up and down mountains with it. (Tell My Horse, 59)

By emphasizing the causal connection between hard labor and the women’s hooflike or saurian feet, Hurston attacks the prevailing assumption that black women are innately subhuman, and she demonstrates that social stigma, rather than divine intent, is responsible for their miserable condition.

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Aside from brute laborer, the other role assigned to Caribbean black women is that of sexual object. Hurston observes that while all women in the Caribbean are viewed primarily as sexual companions of men, black women are seen as disposable sexual commodities to be used and abandoned by men of higher class or paler color who bear no legal obligations to women below their rank. Hurston describes the utter powerlessness of the black woman seduced by a higher-ranking man: She has no rights which he is bound to respect. What is worse, the community would be shocked if he did respect them. Fatherhood gives no upper class man the license to trample down conventions and crash lines, nor shades of color lines, by marrying outside his class. (Tell My Horse, 59–60)

Hurston repeats several tragic tales of dark women whose lives are destroyed when they are seduced and cavalierly abandoned by mulatto men. Such women have no legal recourse, no financial security, no social protections because they are regarded as no more than available sexual prey. Like the “Hottentot Venus,” black women in these stories are seen as subhuman, sexual curiosities whose fate is irrelevant to Caribbean society: “but what becomes of her is unimportant” (Hurston, Tell My Horse, 61). Hurston comments ironically upon the Caribbean response to the death of a woman who was tricked into marriage by a man who abandoned her immediately after consummating the union: “Perhaps she suffered some, but then he was a man and therefore sacred and his honor must be protected even if it takes forty women to do it” (Tell My Horse, 62). As this anecdote demonstrates, in colonial culture black women are literally sacrificed to sustain the honor of European-identified men. However, much of Tell My Horse concentrates upon Hurston’s research into Afro-Caribbean religion, and many of the spiritual beliefs and practices that Hurston describes directly challenge the colonial denigration of black women.4 Voodoo, the Caribbean transposition of the African religion Vodun which was brought to the islands by enslaved blacks, is, at the time of Hurston’s research, the unofficial national religion of Haiti.5 Hurston argues against previous researchers who had interpreted Voodoo as an aberrant form of Catholicism, or dismissed it as barbaric superstition. She insists (rightly) that Voodoo reconstructs a pantheon of African-derived deities to which new deities, particular to the Caribbean, have been added. As Hurston notes, while Voodoo is openly practiced by black working-class adherents, it is somewhat of an embarrassment to upper-class believers, who attempt to hide their faith from Western eyes.

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Voodoo is a retention of African culture, more widely preserved within the least Westernized black underclass than among the English-aspiring mulatto upper crust. A syncretic religion, constantly evolving in response to changing cultural and social conditions, Voodoo encourages a view of human transformative possibilities, rather than of externally fixed, eternally static identities.6 Crucially, Voodoo spirituality contests the binaristic hierarchies within colonial structures that prove so damaging to black women. In contrast to prevailing colonial stratifications in which one term is defined as over and against the other—such as male over and against female, white over and against black, spiritual over and against sexual, and culture over and against nature—Voodoo practices and beliefs emphasize a border-crossing intermingling of polarities, paradigmatic of feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s “cyborg myth” of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities” (Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 154). Haraway imagines her “cyborg”—a creature part human, part animal, part machine—as symbolizing a vital alternative to the increasingly deadly Western divisions between those deemed fully human and those who are seen as less-than-human resources for profit and consumption. She argues that in breaching assumed boundaries, the cyborg has the potential to disrupt stratified colonial orders that depend upon binaristic differentiation. I suggest that Voodoo works in just this fashion, breaching colonial class and color lines by refiguring the negative association of black women and nature as a promising cyborgian interpenetration that disturbs racial and sexual hierarchy. Voodoo is thus a powerful means of indigenous Afro-Caribbean resistance to colonial strictures. Voodoo refigures the very representation of black women as sexual beasts exemplified by the “Hottentot Venus.” While Christianity, the prevailing Western religion, generally condemns nature and carnal existence as antithetical to the transcendent spiritual realm, in Voodoo, nature and the sacred interpenetrate, as followers worship natural phenomena and hold ceremonies at particular natural sites. Hurston explains: “Voodoo is a religion of creation and life. It is the worship of the sun, the water and other natural forces” (Tell My Horse, 113). Natural elements such as water and fire are central to many Voodoo rituals, and throughout Haiti ceremonies are held at sacred trees and stones, and in particular springs, grottos, and waterfalls inhabited by loa, or spirits. While in Western theological tradition worshippers must forswear the natural world and carnal existence in order to gain the transcendent realm, in Voodoo bodily proximity to nature is a means to the divine.

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Voodoo adherents, many of them black women, make a yearly pilgrimage to the most famous waterfall, Saut d’Eau, even though the local priest has had police stationed at the falls to discourage this “pagan” practice. In contradiction to the church’s disparaging view, Hurston presents the celebratory ascension to the falls as a transfiguration of the worshippers from “sordid” objects to “ecstatic” beings: After discarding their clothes, hundreds of people entering the eternal mists from the spray and ascending the sacred stones and assuming all possible postures of adoration made a picture that might have been painted by Dore. . . . It was a moving sight to see these people turning from sordid things once each year to go into an ecstasy of worship of the beautiful in water forms. (Tell My Horse, 232)

The bodily, ecstatic immersion into the sacred waters ceremonially frees the black worshippers from their “sordid” existence within the colonial order and transforms them into a beautiful tableau rivaling even Dore’s classic portrait of sacred transport.7 It is as though in stepping into the waters the participants depart from the colonial frame of reference which casts them as “things,” and enter the Voodoo perspective which frames them as members of a sacred order of nature. Little wonder, then, that the Western church wishes to prohibit this yearly escape from colonialism. The clash between colonial-Christian and Voodoo views of nature and of black women is also evident in the history of a legendary sacred palm tree that had been visited by the apparition of a “beautiful, luminous virgin.” The palm tree becomes a popular Voodoo religious shrine whose worship affronts the Catholic church. A battle between church authorities and the tree ensues: People came to the palm tree and were miraculously cured and others were helped in various ways. The people began to worship the tree. The news spread all over Haiti and more and more people came. The Catholic Church was neglected. So the priest became so incensed at the adoration of the people for the tree that he seized a machete and ran to the tree to cut it down himself. But the first blow of the blade against the tree caused the machete to bounce back and strike the priest on the head and wound him so seriously that he was taken to the hospital in Port-au-Prince, where he soon died of his wound. Later on the tree was destroyed by the church and a church was built on the spot to take the place of the palm

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tree, but it is reported that several churches have burned on that site. One was destroyed by lightning. (Tell My Horse, 230–31)

The people’s worship of the miraculous tree poses a clear threat to Catholic authority, and the priest’s animosity toward the tree attempts to destroy this source of spiritual nourishment and bodily healing. The priest’s religious jealousy becomes a literal battle against nature, and while the palm tree is eventually destroyed, nature continues, through fire and lightning, to thwart church suppression.8 The battle between church and tree is clearly a power struggle between African heritage and Western religious domination; the tree represents the resurgence of the sacralization of nature and also indicates the powers of Voodoo spirituality to unsettle Western dominance.9 The tree, like the waterfall, heals and reaffirms the black bodies so despised by the colonial order. The spot, now marked by the blackened ruins of a church, remains a site of Voodoo worship and bodily healing. Hurston notes the physical assurance of the black women anointing their bodies at this shrine: “They anointed their faces and legs and their bare breasts. Some had ailing feet and legs, and they anointed them. Several women were rubbing their buttocks and thighs without self consciousness at all” (Tell My Horse, 230). The tree-shrine affords these women an opportunity for affirming their bodies and for healing physical ailments that sound remarkably like the painful physical “distortions” of the “donkey” women described above. The worship of nature overturns church fears of “the flesh” and soothes colonial distortions of black women’s bodies.10 Hurston comments that the women are remarkably unselfconscious about their nakedness and about publicly touching sexual areas of their bodies. Unlike standard Christian asceticism which abhors women’s sexual pleasure, the ritual of the tree embraces female sexuality as a natural manifestation of spirit.11 The tree, as Hurston would have known, is a central Voodoo symbol and often signifies the sexual and spiritual union of the primary male and female deities. Robert Farris Thompson notes that the tree is central to many Voodoo ceremonies and religious icons and that it is symbolized by the center post of the hounfort, or place of worship, which is circled in ritual dances. Thompson also traces the recurring Voodoo image of a palm tree entwined by two serpents, representing the sacramental sexual embrace of the primary deity, Damballah, and his wife Ayida Hwedo, joined in an “ecstatic union” of male and female principles (Flash of the Spirit, 187).12 The sacred tree, then, as an image of spiritual and sexual ecstasy, counters the Judeo-Christian images of the tree of knowledge

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and the crucifix-tree that represent the dangers of bodily knowledge and the painful renunciation of physical existence. Whereas Christian dogma would forswear the sexual, and whereas colonial structures would despise black women as repositories of sexuality, in the image of the serpenttwined sacred tree, the sexual embrace manifests divine union. This treeand-serpent emblem symbolizes a spiritual healing of the damaging divisions of body and soul, sex and spirit, male and female, animal and divine. Voodoo belief and ritual subvert the Western belief that sexuality is merely animalistic and that black women’s sexuality epitomizes bestial bodily desire. In the Western religious view, sexuality was associated with lower, animal creatures, while spirituality approached transcendent, disembodied ranks of being. Voodoo refuses such distinctions between spiritual and carnal, and views sexuality as sacred, to be worshipped as the divine source and ultimate mystery of life. Whereas Western views despised black women as the repository of bestial sexual desire, and even—as in the case of Sarah Bartman—regarded their genitals as scientific evidence of their kinship with apes, Voodoo ceremonially worships black women’s sexuality as the female aspect of the deity. Hurston describes a ceremony in which the Mambo, or priestess, is questioned “What is truth?”: She replies by throwing back her veil and revealing her sex organs. The ceremony means that this is the infinite, the ultimate truth. There is no mystery beyond the mysterious source of life . . . It is considered the highest honor for all males participating to kiss her organ of creation, for Damballah, the god of gods, has permitted them to come face to face with truth. (Tell My Horse, 113–14)

Voodoo does not permit the sorts of literal and symbolic dissections that Western science inflicted upon Sarah Bartman—it would be unthinkable, in Voodoo spirituality, to split spirit from body, or to actually excise and treat as specimen the female genitalia that is a living mystery. A similar challenge to colonial ideology is posed by spirit-possession, in which the Voodoo worshipper, or “horse,” is “ridden” by a spirit, or loa. Again, this Voodoo rite complicates the negative conception of black women as animals, when the women’s bodies denounced as “donkeys,” or mere laboring flesh, become manifestations of spirit, “horses” of the loa. Possession is a common Caribbean religious experience, the most forceful instance of communion between Voodoo spirit and human.13 In possession the spirit enters the “horse,” who is then transfigured by the visitant, becoming impervious to physical pain, gesturing, moving, and speaking in ways characteristic of the loa, and performing extraordinary

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physical feats.14 Possession challenges belief in fixed identity and crosses dichotomies between flesh and spirit, self and other, in that during possession the spirits become incarnate in the bodies of the believers, temporarily replacing the individual subjectivity with the character of the loa and inducing striking behavioral changes. Spirit and body interpenetrate, and identity is transformed by the presence of the gods. Possession crosses other boundaries as well, pointedly transgressing the divisions of race, gender, and class that confine Caribbean black women to the lowest social ranks. Gender is challenged as worshippers are often possessed by loa of the opposite sex: thus a body of one gender becomes a receptacle for a differently sexed spirit. Certain loa, such as the “facetious” Baron Samedi, make a burlesque of gender; he requires his “horses” to cross-dress: Women dressed like men and men like women. Often the men, in addition to wearing female clothes, thrust a calabash up under their skirts to simulate pregnancy. Women put on men’s coats and prance about with a stick between their legs to imitate the male sex organs. (Tell My Horse, 224)

Race and color divisions are also crossed as the loa of one racial background may possess believers of a different racial composition. For example, because the primary female loa Erzulie is mulatto, when blacks impersonate her they cover their faces with white powder (Tell My Horse, 122). Hurston explains that the black lower classes have their own particular loa, the “boisterous Guede,” who is “as near a social criticism of the classes by the masses as anything in all Haiti” (Tell My Horse, 219). She explains that “the people who created Guede needed a god of derision. They needed a spirit who could burlesque the society that crushed him” (220). During possession, Guedé ventriloquizes through his “horse” all sorts of impermissibly bold and pointed social comments prefaced by the phrase “tell my horse,” which Hurston takes as the title of this study. Possession by Guedé permits the despised lower-class blacks to talk back to their otherwise invulnerable social superiors. In fact, Hurston suspects that peasants at times feign possession in order to speak their minds: The phrase “Parlay cheval ou” is in daily, hourly use in Haiti and no doubt it is used as a blind for self-expression . . . a great deal of the Guede “mounts” have something to say and lack the courage to say it except under the cover of brave Guede. (Tell My Horse, 221)

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Possession is, then, a means of self-possession in the midst of extremely limiting social structures. It is a mode of black women’s self-redefinition, a reformation of identity and self-image, and a means of voicing social protest and criticism. It is also a means of retaining and reformulating an Africanderived cultural identity in the midst of colonial cultural assumptions. Overall, Tell My Horse presents Voodoo as countering the denigration of Caribbean black women, in particular by revising the terms of their negative Western association with nature. Voodoo undermines the ground of racist and sexist colonial hierarchies and provides black women a means of redefining themselves in positive and defiantly fluid terms. The revisionary potential of Voodoo spirituality becomes even clearer in Hurston’s classic novel of a black woman’s struggle for self-creation, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God during her first trip to Haiti while she collected materials on culture and religion. She explains in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, that she wrote the novel in order to “embalm” her passions for a recent lover; I suggest that Hurston also “embalms” her accumulating knowledge of Voodoo spirituality within the nature imagery and the plot of Janie’s development within this novel.15 “Embalm” is a highly ambivalent word implying both death and preservation,16 and it aptly describes Hurston’s use of Voodoo in a novel that is dismissive of Voodoo on a conscious level, but that is imagistically suffused with Voodoo belief. In Their Eyes, as in Tell My Horse, black women are defined as “the mules of the world,” and it is Janie’s Voodooinformed vision of the blossoming pear tree that offers her the means of rewriting her life beyond the narrow terms of her culture. Within the pear tree, Hurston has embalmed the transgressive possibilities of the sacred Voodoo tree, described in Tell My Horse, which defies colonial suppression and revalues black women’s association with nature. Although Their Eyes is set in the rural southern United States, rather than in the Caribbean, racial and gender stratifications in this novel correspond to those that Hurston had described in Haiti and Jamaica, and the mule image that Nanny uses to describe black women’s lowly position within American society echoes the negative Caribbean identification of black women with donkeys. Nanny, a former slave who has been used by white men as both “a work ox and a brood sow,” explains black women’s position at the foot of the social pyramid to her granddaughter Janie: “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able to find out. . . . So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but

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he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule of de world so fur as Ah can see.” (Their Eyes, 29)

Much as Caribbean black women find respite from their role of “talking donkeys” in Voodoo ritual, Janie will resist this negative view of black women as sexual objects and beasts of burden through her revelation of the blossoming pear tree. Like the sacred Voodoo tree in Tell My Horse, Janie’s pear-tree image radically revises the binary oppositions informing the definition of black women as mules, by refiguring nature as an intermingling of dichotomies: It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf buds; from leaf to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. . . . This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell . . . She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage? She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. (Their Eyes, 22–24)

In this passage the sexual is mingled with the sacred, the physical with the immaterial, the human with the natural, pain with pleasure, and gender division all but disappears in Janie’s revelation of marriage. Much of the language is overtly ceremonial and biblical: “mystery,” “barrenness,” “snowy virginity,” “rose,” “alto chant,” “gold,” “the sanctum,” and “revelation.” At the same time the revelation is sensuously physical and explicitly sexual: “the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree . . . creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight,” “pain remorseless sweet.” This mingled description conflates the sexual and the sacred, and locates both within nature, as in the Voodoo image of the serpent-twined tree, symbolic of Damballah and his wife in sacred intercourse. As in the Voodoo icon, Janie’s profound identification with this sacred tree, which culminates in her empathetic orgasm, works metonymically to inscribe Janie’s desire as

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revelatory like the Voodoo ceremony described above, during which the priestess’s vagina is revealed as source of sacred truth, this passage presents black female sexuality as sacred mystery, as the “rose of the world.” Janie’s vision of the pear tree gives her a sense of life’s pleasure and fulfillment that counters Nanny’s vision of inevitable degradation and drudgery. As in Tell My Horse, the tree vision affirms black women’s erotic energy as a vital source of life.17 Similar to Voodoo ritual and belief, this inscription of the sacred tree unsettles normative Western dichotomies so detrimental in the social conception of black women. Nature, rather than base object of scientific scorn, is sacred. Female sexuality, rather than bestial, is revelatory. The tree’s desire, which is rendered female through the implication of the word “sister” (although the passage is actually largely gender-neutral), is presented as both active sensuality and engaged receptivity. Human and natural are merged, not hierarchically separated. Pain and pleasure are indivisible. This image of the tree intertwines the supposed opposites which cast women as mules. Throughout the novel, Janie uses this image of the tree as a vision of possibility that opens up the limiting assumptions of her culture. The blossoming pear tree is, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. suggests, “Janie’s master trope on her way to becoming” (Signifying Monkey, 186). The tree sustains Janie through her disastrous first two marriages, and in her final, more egalitarian and playful marriage to Tea Cake Woods, Janie literally becomes a tree—Mrs. Woods—fulfilling the vision of marriage that she had long ago perceived in the union of bee and blossom. Following Tea Cake to the muck, Janie participates in an agricultural folk community that defies many of the limiting boundaries of the dominant society, much as in her vision of the pear tree. Similar to Voodoo spirit possession, which crosses the boundaries of race, class, and gender, the muck confounds the social divisions that pervade the surrounding society: men and women dress, work, flirt, and fight alike, diminishing gender distinctions; ethnic and racial groups meet and mingle, sharing cultural traditions and rites; and all participate in the folk culture games, music, dance, and stories which challenge white dominance. On the muck, Janie comes into her own as an active participant in the folk community—dancing, playing, telling stories, even fighting over Tea Cake as well as with him. Within this marriage and this setting, Janie asserts herself as a full person, refusing stereotypes of gender, class, and color. Yet, as Cheryl Wall observes, the relatively nonhierarchical relations within the muck community are disturbed by Mrs. Turner’s insistent class and color consciousness (Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 190–91).

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Like the Caribbean mulattos in Tell My Horse, Mrs. Turner argues that light-skinned blacks should “class off.” Janie refutes Mrs. Turner’s divisive racial categorization by noting that “we’se ah mingled people and all us got black kinfolks as well as yaller kinfolks” (Their Eyes, 210). Unfortunately, Tea Cake and his cohorts distrust Janie’s heterogeneous views and her full allegiance to the itinerant black community, and the idyll on the muck falters with Tea Cake’s beating of Janie and his semi-comic but destructive revenge against the Turners. The beneficent pear-tree vision of harmonious and mingled relation is not, finally, fully impervious to the antagonisms of race and class divisions. If the tree and the muck exemplify a beneficent Voodoo disruption of the false oppositions enforced by white culture, the hurricane enacts the devastatingly chaotic face of divine power, wreaking havoc upon the bounds of colonialism. The storm literally washes away the screen of white values that stands between the black community of the muck and the face of divine power. While Tea Cake and his friends stubbornly imitate the white bosses’ resistance to the hurricane, rather than the wise retreat of the Indians and Bahamians, the storm eventually forces them to look to God,18 rather than to false white authority, for guidance. As the storm gathers strength, the narrator comments: “The time was past for asking the white folks what to look for through the door. Six eyes were questioning God” (Their Eyes, 235). And in the title passage, the darkness of the storm replaces the image of white domination: “they seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God” (236). Colonial ideology is driven awry by the hurricane. The power of the wind and lake soon overthrow the normal order, causing all sorts of frightful reversals and transgressions much like the disruptive border-crossings of Voodoo spirit possession, in which boundaries between classes, races, sexes, human and nature, living and dead, no longer hold. Nature rages out of control, ferociously destroying the complacencies of human domination. Chaos reigns, refusing the normal distinction between life and death: “the wind and water had given life to lots of things that folks think of as dead and given death to so much that had been living things” (Their Eyes, 236). The separation of humans and animals, too, disappears before the storm: “They passed a dead man in a sitting position on a hummock, entirely surrounded by wild animals and snakes. Common danger made common friends. Nothing sought a conquest over the other” (243). Apparent racial differences are erased by the ravages of death: decomposing white and black corpses are essentially indistinguishable to the men forced to attempt to sort them into segregated mass graves.19 The city of Palm Beach, symbol of progressive

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human dominion over nature, as well as a site of extreme racial segregation, is decimated by the hurricane, while the more adaptable and fluid community of the muck survives the ravages more or less intact.20 Throughout her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie has acknowledged the interpenetration of polar extremes, professing her willingness to risk pain in order to approach bliss. As she told him at the onset of the hurricane: “If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk” (Their Eyes, 236). Venturing with Tea Cake into the rough and rich life of the muck, surviving the horrendous trials of the storm, and enduring the final trauma of Tea Cake’s death, Janie has, as she tells her friend Pheoby, been to the “far horizon,” that place at which all lines of distinction converge into a single point, where seeming oppositions meld into new complexities. In the final moment of the novel, as Janie “pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder” (286), she enfolds herself within the meshes of all the vast and contradictory array of existence. Having pursued her pear-tree vision even through the turbulence of the storm, Janie has fulfilled her desire to “utilize herself all over”—not only to actualize every imagined aspect of herself, but also to refuse the deadly boundaries of the dominant society and to grasp that horizon where everything becomes inextricably intermingled and one may roam “all over,” free of imprisoning demarcations. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, as in Tell My Horse, the Voodooinformed vision of nature as the site where supposed oppositions merge in fertile exchange counters the prevailing negative conflation of black women with animals, which had naturalized divisive and unequal racial and gender positions. Within Afro-Caribbean spiritual beliefs, Hurston discovered an alternative view of nonpolarized social-natural relations that might refigure and reform the limiting terms of the dominant culture; the sacred Voodoo tree, that continues to thwart Western suppression, offers black women an alternative image of freedom and self-love, rooted within African-derived belief.

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Notes

1. See, for example, the lukewarm critical reception of Tell My Horse that Robert Hemenway notes in Zora Neale Hurston, and more recent critical dismissals of this text, such as Lillie Howard’s Zora Neale Hurston and Hazel Carby’s “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” 2. Gwendolyn Mikell’s “When Horses Talk: Reflections of Zora Neale Hurston’s Haitian Anthropology,” published in 1982, was one of the first positive analyses of Hurston’s Caribbean work. Mikell notes that Hurston’s ethnographic work was originally dismissed because of her authorial “double vision,” through which she eschews anthropological objectivity for historical analysis of social inequities and insider accounts of religious practices. Yet Mikell argues that this “double vision” is the crucial feature of Hurston’s work. She suggests that Hurston’s social analysis of class, color, and gender divisions offers readers a social context for interpreting the Voodoo beliefs and ceremonies which Hurston presents from an internal perspective. Mikell views Hurston as a forerunner of contemporary ethnography rather than as a failure. Similarly, Ishmael Reed’s foreword to the 1990 Harper and Row edition of Tell My Horse acknowledges Hurston as a major pioneering Voodoo scholar and proto-postmodernist. Reed terms her authorship of Tell My Horse “skeptical, cynical, funny, ironic, brilliant and innovative” (xv). 3. Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black traces the way that the European slave trade enforced this association of black women with beasts. While suppositions of African bestiality and “brute” endurance served to justify black enslavement, the practices of slavery institutionalized this subhuman status, robbing Africans of legal and social personhood and employing blacks at brute labors, thus further reinforcing the association of blacks and animals in the minds of white slave owners. Furthermore, because animalistic sexual desire was attributed to slave women, they were held responsible for the sexual relations forced upon them by white men. As “chattel,” black women could not legally resist overt rape or other forms of forced sexual relations with designated black or white men. Although the propensity of white men to engage in sexual relations with black women actually contradicted and undermined clear racial distinctions, producing offspring who literally intermixed black and white, representations of black women’s wild, bestial sexuality and brute physical strength were used to categorically distinguish the white and black races, conflating blacks with animals, rather than humans. Jordan discusses the contradictions within this conception of black women’s sexuality. He notes, for example, that if the women had really been conceived as subhuman, then miscegenation would have been viewed as bestiality, which it was not. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins argues that this conception

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of black women’s sexuality still holds sway in the pornographic representation of black women as animalistic sexual objects. 4. Cheryl Wall and Houston Baker have both written about the empowering effects for black women and Hoodoo, the mainland U.S. form of Vodun. In “Mules and Men and Women” Cheryl Wall analyzes the gender politics of Hurston’s initiations into Hoodoo. Wall argues that Hoodoo offered women empowerment which offset their lack of social control: Metaphysically decentered and clerically nonhierarchical, hoodoo offered some women a more expansive vision of themselves than did Christianity. Within hoodoo, women were the spiritual equals of men. They had like authority to speak and to act. (672) Houston Baker has a chapter on Hurston and Hoodoo in his book on AfroAmerican women writers, Workings of the Spirit. He argues that Hoodoo heals the violent rifts among blacks that Hurston describes in the early sections of Mules. Luisah Teish’s Jambalaya is also of interest here, as a first-person, contemporary account of her empowerment through her experiences as a Voodoo initiate. 5. In his foreword to the 1990 edition of Tell My Horse, Ishmael Reed notes that Voodoo was driven underground in Haiti shortly afterward, by the time Hurston’s study was first published in 1938 (xi). 6. Robert Farris Thompson argues that Voodoo is not derivative of Catholic iconography, but is instead an African-derived tradition which absorbed and altered these Western icons, transforming them into the framework of African symbolism, and thus changing the colonial “readings” of the images. 7. It is at many points in Tell My Horse hard to determine exactly where Hurston as speaker is positioning herself in relation to the subjects of her narrative and in relation to Caribbean assumptions. At times she is clearly quoting and criticizing the tone of Caribbean views of race and gender, such as in the passages above about black women as donkeys, but in this passage I am uncertain of exactly how she may be using the terms “sordid” and “things”: is this her outsider’s view, or is this a quotation of church or colonial views of these bodies? While she has been criticized as an anthropologist for her uneven tone and perspective on Caribbean culture, I think the unstable tone and position are actually of great interest, revealing her complicated and problematic relationship to this material, and also exposing the impossibilities of detached, objective realist narrative. 8. This passage is very like the story of the Sojourner tree in Alice Walker’s novel Meridian. 9. While my reading of Tell My Horse emphasizes the subversive effect of Voodoo on colonial views, I believe it also would be fruitful to read this relation in reverse, similar to Merlin Stone’s speculative analysis of Judaism’s revisions of pagan beliefs in When God Was a Woman. It strikes me that Western conflations of black women with nature may in fact be a suppression and reversal of Voodoo’s sacralization of nature and sexuality. Perhaps Voodoo appears to subvert Western views because those views were themselves a reversal of Voodoo tenets. Obviously, Vodun predates colonial black-white relations, and

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while this article emphasizes the use of Voodoo to withstand colonialism, it would be an error to conceive of Voodoo as simply a response to this situation. 10. I am reminded here of Baby Suggs’s sermon in the clearing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Baby Suggs enjoins her followers to love their bodies, which are despised and destroyed by the surrounding white culture. 11. See, for instance, the apostle Paul’s representations of women as sexual temptresses and his low regard for marriage as a necessary evil. 12. The Voodoo drawings of the serpents twining the tree, which Thompson includes, look remarkably like the insignia of the medical profession, and I would wonder if it is possible that this image was transported from Africa to Greece in the cultural exchange that Martin Bernal posits in Black Athena. 13. Spirit-possession is indigenous to African religions. Both Hurston and Louis Mars note that a form of possession also occurs in Afro-American churches in which worshippers “get the spirit” or “speak in tongues.” See Hurston’s “Hoodoo in America” and The Sanctified Church, and Mars’s The Crisis of Possession in Voodoo. 14. For example, Hurston describes “horses” who do not react to red pepper and alcohol thrown into their eyes, those who walk through fire, those who perform feats of strength and endurance, and the physical and performative transformations that occur during possession. Louis Mars’s The Crisis of Possession in Voodoo also presents many case studies of possession in which the possessed person is physically altered and performs extraordinary feats. Mars describes possession as a psychological crisis induced by group belief and social circumstances. Like Hurston, he argues that the loa are a reflection of social conditions and psychological states. 15. Ellease Southerland is one of the few critics to read the nature imagery in this novel as informed by Hurston’s work on Voodoo. In Women of the Harlem Renaissance, Cheryl Wall traces parallels between the descriptions of Hurston’s Hoodoo initiations in Mules and Men and the storm passages of the novel. 16. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in Writing Beyond the Ending, and Susan Willis, in Specifying, discuss the dual implications of the word “embalm.” 17. This sense of the erotic is very like Freud’s view of eros as the life force, and is also strikingly similar, as Cheryl Wall notes in Women of the Harlem Renaissance, to Audre Lorde’s description in “Uses of the Erotic” of the erotic as sexual, spiritual, even political life-energy (Sister Outsider, 53–59). 18. While most readers have assumed that “God” denotes the Christian god, the word might also refer to a primary Voodoo deity, such as Damballah, or perhaps to one of the maleficent and fearsome Petro Voodoo deities. 19. In “Power, Judgment, and Narrative in a Work of Zora Neale Hurston,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis emphasizes the conflict between the storm’s dissolution of racial difference and the white society’s attempted reassertion of difference. She reads Tea Cake’s comment, “Looks like dey think God don’t know nothin’ ’bout the Jim Crow law” (Their Eyes, 254), as also simultaneously erasing and asserting racist structures. 20. Motor Boat, who safely sleeps out the storm in a house carried away by the flood, is perhaps most emblematic of the saving nonresistance of the muck dwellers.

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Works Cited

Baker, Houston. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Carby, Hazel. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” In New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” ed. Michael Awkward, 71–93. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Beacon, 1990. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Power, Judgment, and Narrative in a Work of Zora Neale Hurston: Feminist Cultural Studies.” In New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” ed. Michael Awkward, 95–123. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., 223–61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 1991. Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Howard, Lillie. Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Arno, 1969. ———. “Hoodoo in America.” Journal of American Folklore 44 (1931): 317– 418. ———. The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981. ———. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Freedom Crossing, 1984. Mars, Louis. The Crisis of Possession in Voodoo. Berkeley: Reed, Cannon and Johnson, 1977.

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Mikell, Gwendolyn. “When Horses Talk: Reflections on Zora Neale Hurston’s Haitian Anthropology.” Phylon 43, no. 4 (1982): 218–30. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: New American Library, 1987. Reed, Ishmael. Foreword to Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, by Zora Neale Hurston, xi–xv. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Southerland, Ellease. “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.” In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann Bell, 172–83. New York: Anchor, 1979. Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. New York: Dial, 1976. Teish, Luisah. Jambalaya. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage, 1984. Walker, Alice. Meridian. New York: Washington Square, 1976. Wall, Cheryl. “Mules and Men and Women.” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 4 (1989): 661–80. ———. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

2

The Myth and Ritual of Ezili Freda in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Derek Collins

The subtext of this paper asks the difficult question of how best to treat the literary output of an American author like Zora Neale Hurston who consciously employed ethnography and folklore in her work. Literary criticism that is insensitive to folklore research will not succeed, because it tends to prioritize Hurston’s novels, short stories, and dramatic work over her ethnographic studies of southern American and Caribbean cultures. Yet this important author is easily misunderstood when her folklore is not included in a consideration of her fiction. Even more significantly, Hurston’s complex blending of black American and Caribbean lore is overlooked when her novels are read on the surface as novels of merely black American experience. Her sophistication as an artist is misjudged, in fact, when we cannot see that many of her fictional characters are layered cultural entities who can simultaneously be southern black American, West Indian, and West African. This paper explores one of these characters, Janie Crawford, the central figure in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in an effort to demonstrate the complexities of Hurston’s art.

This essay was originally published in Western Folklore 55, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 137–54. My wife Kate Evanchuk Collins deserves more gratitude than I can express for her help on this paper. Tossach sodchaid dagben. I wish also to thank Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University and Professor Donald Cosentino of the University of California, Los Angeles, for their unstinting encouragement and advice.

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Before we come to this particular novel, however, we need briefly to highlight Hurston’s background and interest, especially her formal interest, in folklore studies. Her exposure to folklore can be traced back to her childhood, as she tells us in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, when she read Greek and Roman myths, Norse tales, fairy tales, and the Bible (61–63). From 1925 to 1927, Hurston attended Barnard College and studied anthropology with the great German-born, American anthropologist Franz Boas. In 1926 she began her fieldwork under Boas’s supervision in Harlem. Nine years later, in 1935, she made an attempt to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University working again with Boas, but was unable to complete her coursework.1 Hurston would subsequently collect folklore in various southern American states, including Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama, as well as in Jamaica, British Honduras, the Bahamas, and Haiti, the last of which she visited twice. Although the nature and goals of Hurston’s anthropological and folkloristic work would change over time, the force behind her original interests can best be summed up by Hurston herself: “The major problem in my field as I see it is, the collection of Negro folk material in as thorough a manner as possible, as soon as possible.”2 Needless to say that for Hurston, the term “Negro” was not limited to America but embraced all black peoples descended from the West African diaspora. Much of Hurston’s early collecting passion (between 1927 and 1932) culminated in essays, articles, and eventually a book of southern black American folktales, Mules and Men (1935). The results of her research on hoodoo in the southern United States, with special attention given to New Orleans (where she began research in August 1928), were published in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) late in 1931, and this remains the first scholarly treatment of hoodoo by a black American folklorist (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 77). Her article is a massive compilation of spells, charms, rituals, beliefs, reports of conjurers, and definitions of magical terms taken from the various practitioners whom she interviewed. The relevance of this early research cannot be underestimated for the whole of Hurston’s ethnographic and literary work, since one of the threads that runs through her entire oeuvre is her fascination with Negro magic and religion. As she states confidently near the beginning of her JAF article: “Shreds of hoodoo beliefs and practices are found wherever any number of Negroes are found in America” (“Hoodoo in America,” 318). This folkloristic appraisal of American Negroes must, in my judgment, cast the background against which Hurston’s novels are read. Two brief examples will suffice to illustrate the point. In Hurston’s first novel,

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Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), the setting for the preacher-protagonist John Pearson’s story may be an imaginary rural, southern black American town, but the community is certainly no ordinary southern black one. The community may be, in Larry Neal’s words, “a formerly enslaved communal society, non-Christian in background, where there is really no clean-cut dichotomy between the world of spirit and the world of flesh” (Introduction, 6). Yet in a description of a local dance one evening, Hurston gives her black community a distinctly West African air: So they danced. They called for the instrument that they had brought to America in their skins—the drum—and they played upon it. With their hands they played upon the little dance drums of Africa. The drums of kid-skin. With their feet they stomped it, and the voice of Kata-Kumba, the great drum, lifted itself within them and they heard it. The great drum that is made by priests and sits in majesty in the juju house. (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 59)

Not only has Hurston managed to convey the layered sense of identity of the members in her imaginary southern town, who in this case share a blending of southern black and West African heritage, but she has also given the great drum a magico-religious aura by mentioning its construction by West African priests and the juju house where it sits. Hurston is not merely using these references to West Africa for metaphorical effect, but she is presenting her audience with her peculiar vision of southern black culture. In terms of anthropology, Hurston views southern American blacks as simply the end-link in a chain that stretches in time back through the West Indies to West Africa.3 But on a literary level they can be composites of this whole heritage, as Hurston sees it, and therefore demand to be interpreted as the culturally complex figures they are. Even the novel’s preacher-protagonist, John Pearson, who seems to derive solely from the southern Baptist preaching tradition with which Hurston was intimately familiar, has been compared to a hoodoo conjurer like those whom Hurston described in her “Hoodoo in America” article for JAF (Thomas, From Folklore to Fiction). One of the most culturally blended figures Hurston ever “created” was her Moses, in Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Here her fondness for imbuing a character with different layers of Negro culture reaches its culmination. The novel is a retelling of the Judeo-Christian legend, yet Moses is a figure concocted from Hurston’s own brand of alchemy. He is not Hebrew but Egyptian—in other words, African—and not merely endowed with magical powers from God, but a hoodoo conjure man. In

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the author’s introduction to the novel, Hurston explains that Moses is important not only to Judeo-Christian tradition, but also to Asia and all the Near East. Then she describes how legends of Moses persist in Africa, and how in Haiti, the highest god of the Haitian pantheon, Danbala, is also identified with Moses. Indeed, she says, “Wherever the children of Africa have been scattered by slavery, there is the acceptance of Moses as the fountain of mystic powers” (Moses, xxii). To understand Hurston’s project in this novel, therefore, is to see it as more than the dramatic retelling of a biblical legend. By remaking Moses as an African–West Indian–American cloaked in biblical dignity, she creates a figure who is not merely relocated in African American tradition (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 258), but who stands within and at the same time outside of all of these traditions. Moses becomes for Hurston a kind of semiological entity whose meaning cannot be resolved only in terms of one culture. I have presented these examples to give some indication of what an interpreter is faced with when dealing with Hurston’s literary work. The most fruitful approach to it has to include a consideration of Hurston’s folkloristic and ethnographic interests, or it will fall short of grappling with her multilayered vision of black people.

A New Interpretation The characterization of Janie Crawford, the central figure of Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937),4 resembles to a significant degree the Haitian goddess Ezili Freda, whom Hurston writes about in her folkloristic work Tell My Horse.5 The correspondences between the fictional character Janie and the mythical goddess Ezili Freda are too striking to have been coincidental. Indeed, Hurston wrote Their Eyes in seven weeks while collecting research material in Haiti for Tell My Horse, which was published one year after the novel (1938). Because of this geographical and chronological convergence, and given Hurston’s enthusiasm for folklore research, it should not surprise that these two books share material. However, the connections between them have never been made in Hurston literary scholarship.6 Yet Hurston’s contact with Vodou, and with the mythology and folklore of the Haitian lwa, or pantheon deities, provided essential background material for the novel as a whole. As I will show, one of these lwa, the love goddess Ezili Freda, unmistakably parallels Janie with regard to her physical beauty, her barrenness, her focus on erotic love, and the lack of permanence in her relationships with men.

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At least one other critical attempt has been made to uncover the role of myth in Their Eyes. In her 1986 article, Pondrom’s thesis is that Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake and Tea Cake’s subsequent death and “resurrection” in Janie’s memory “is a modern reinterpretation of the ancient Babylonian myth of Ishtar and Tammuz, with syncretic allusion to its analogues, the Greek story of Aphrodite and Adonis and the Egyptian tale of Isis and Osiris” (“The Role of Myth,” 182). However parallel the stories may be, I contend that there are more immediate sources in Haitian religion and folklore to which Hurston was exposed that should be considered first, before we relate Their Eyes arbitrarily to a more abstract classical Greek or Egyptian mythological framework. We can infer from the tone of her descriptions in Tell My Horse that Hurston admired Ezili Freda, whom, Hurston tells us, Haitians themselves regard as their most important goddess (143–44). At the most general level, Janie’s characterization embodies the springtime spirit represented by Ezili. Small wonder that springtime and flowers constitute the dominant metaphors Hurston uses throughout Their Eyes to express Janie’s thoughts about love and marriage.7 Indeed, each of Janie’s relationships (with Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Vergible Tea Cake Woods) is described at critical moments in terms of flower metaphors.8 It is even arguable that Janie’s love in Their Eyes is distinctly conceptualized by way of flower and springtime metaphors. In any case, the consistent and pervasive usage of such metaphors initially suggests the flowery love goddess, Ezili Freda, as a “mythic” model for Janie. I frame the word “mythic” in quotations because Haitian mythology and ritual intersect in ceremonial experience, and the lwa or pantheon deities actually “come down” and visibly “mount” an initiate in a state of possession. Ezili Freda, as with the other lwa, does not merely exist in myth but can manifest herself from within the body of a worshipper. With regard to Haitian religious ritual, the term “mythic” that I use to describe the lwa needs a special conception that includes their depictions in oral tradition (folktales, legends, myths, etc.), as well as their temporary incarnations during ritual experience. Thus, the phrases “mythic” or the “myth of Ezili Freda” are used in the present paper with this understanding, and do not refer merely to literary conceptions. Hurston writes about her experiences with the lwa in the Haitian pantheon in the chapter entitled “Voodoo and Voodoo Gods” in Tell My Horse (137–54). However, before we come to her descriptions of Ezili and proceed with our comparison, we need first to overview schematically the lwa of the Haitian pantheon as expressed both in myth and in ritual. In Haitian mythology, there are numerous lwa, or intermediary spiritual

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entities, at work between the divine and mortal worlds. For example, there is Papa Legba, lord of the crossroads; Gede, lord of death and life (through coarse sexuality); Danbala, the essence of all life and creation, who is manifest in this world as a serpent; Agwe, lord of the seas; Ogou, god of war and of iron; Loko, god of healing; and Ezili, the Rada spirit who personifies different aspects of womanhood. Ezili is comprised of several feminine spirits, the most important being Lasyrenn, the mermaid; Ezili Dantò, the hardworking and sometimes angry mother; and most importantly for our purposes, Ezili Freda, who represents romantic love and erotic sexuality (Brown, Mama Lola, 220–57). Each of the lwa has been refracted in Haitian tradition into a spectrum of personalities, like Ezili, many of which are local and specific to particular regions. Each figure has essentially a good and a sinister manifestation, often with grades of personality in between. On ceremonial occasions, each of the lwa can be called down to “mount” an initiate like a horse and take possession of his or her body and mind temporarily. With a priest (oungan) or priestess (Mambo) officiating, initiates make elaborate preparations of food, music, ritual consecrations, and animal sacrifices to arrange for the lwa to make his or her appearance. As Alfred Métraux explains in his classic study of Haitian religion, once the lwa “comes down” and has entered the initiate’s body: He [the initiate] then becomes not only the receptacle of the god, but its instrument. It is the personality of the god and no longer his own that expresses itself in his behavior and words. His changing expressions, his gestures and even the tone of his voice reflect the character and temperament of the divinity that has come down on him. (Le Vaudou Haïtien, 106, my translation)

Often the lwa will enact a brief ritual, or be asked questions by onlookers, or perform a series of rites, while occupying the body of the initiate. As Métraux explains, each lwa has a characteristic personality and disposition, extending even to mannerism and facial expression, and can be easily recognized by the participants. Furthermore, it does not matter whether the lwa is male or female, or whether the initiate is male or female; either gender of lwa may mount either gender of initiate. Whether Hurston herself became possessed while in Haiti is an open question that reaches tantalizingly beyond the scope of this paper. Hurston did participate in ceremonies of various kinds, however, and speaks of many of these experiences in Tell My Horse (see especially 232–50). For our purposes, we are interested in what Hurston has to say about

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Ezili Freda, about whom she says more, in fact, than any of the other Haitian lwa: Nobody in Haiti ever really told me who Erzulie Freida [sic] was, but they told me what she was like and what she did. From all of that it is plain that she is the pagan goddess of love. In Greece and Rome the goddesses of love had husbands and bore children; Erzulie has no children and her husband is all the men of Haiti. That is, anyone of them she chooses for herself. But so far, no one in Haiti has formulated her. As the perfect female she must be loved and obeyed. She whose love is so strong that it cannot tolerate a rival. She is the female counterpart of Damballah [sic]. But high and low they serve her, dream of her, have visions of her as of the Holy Grail. Every Thursday and Saturday millions of candles are lighted in her honor. Thousands of beds, pure in their snowy whiteness and perfumed are spread for her. Desserts, sweet drinks, perfumes and flowers are offered to her and hundreds of thousands of men of all ages and classes enter those pagan bowers to devote themselves to this spirit. (Tell My Horse, 143–44)

We can begin to see that for Haitians, as Hurston reports, Ezili Freda represents an idealized vision of erotic and unchallengeable love that does not include children. She is the very incarnation of a physical beauty that men find irresistible and women find threatening. In a word, these descriptions also characterize the attraction Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, Tea Cake, and others have for Janie Crawford. Each of them will find Janie irresistible, and each of them will need to involve themselves in a relationship with her. Like Ezili Freda, Janie will have no children, which is a choice that apparently remains unformulated in the novel. Her relationships with Logan Killicks and Joe Starks are based primarily on marriage, progressively moving to include love with little emphasis on marriage with Tea Cake, but no mention is ever made of children. A little later in Tell My Horse, Hurston comments on Ezili Freda’s idealization as the sexual woman, as opposed to the life-giving mother: Erzulie is not the passive queen of heaven and mother of anybody. She is the ideal of the love bed. She is so perfect that all other women are a distortion as compared to her. (144)

This is a point to which we shall return, because it has direct implications for the nature of the love Hurston is dramatizing in Their Eyes. For

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now, we can underscore the erotic rather than the procreative nature of Ezili Freda’s love. And the love for which Janie searches, while we may call it spiritual, is certainly not a love that leads to motherhood. For this and other reasons to be discussed below, I suggest that the love that Janie is seeking is primarily a sexual or erotic love which, although conceived within the bounds of a heterosexual relationship, is nevertheless free from any greater social or biological impulse. It is not that Janie chooses love without children—there is no explicit choice made in the novel—but that, like Ezili Freda, the cultivation and existence of her love for another is an end in itself. This view of Ezili Freda’s love accords with her appearance as everyouthful, lush, and overtly sexual. In a key passage from Tell My Horse, Hurston’s description of Ezili Freda in some respects vividly recalls her description of Janie: Erzulie is said to be a beautiful young woman of lush appearance. She is a mulatto and so when she is impersonated by the blacks, they powder their faces with talcum. She is represented as having firm, full breasts and other perfect female attributes. She is a rich young woman and wears a gold ring on her finger with a stone in it. She also wears a gold chain about her neck, attires herself in beautiful, expensive raiment and sheds intoxicating odors from her person. To men she is gorgeous, gracious and beneficent.9 (145)

With the exception of clothing, Janie shares Ezili Freda’s complexion, pulchritude, and after Joe Starks’s death, even her wealth. Janie’s grace and beauty are the envy of other women, and ultimately she, like Ezili Freda, will be both a gift and a bane for the men with whom she becomes involved. Janie’s physical beauty can be directly related to Ezili Freda in more ways than one. Not only does Hurston describe Janie as beautiful, but the envy she excites among other women is reminiscent of Hurston’s description of Ezili Freda. When Janie returns to Eatonville after the trial, “the porch couldn’t talk for looking”: The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a

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weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day. (Their Eyes, 2)

So both Janie and Ezili Freda are strikingly beautiful, have flowing tresses and firm, young figures. In the words of Métraux regarding Ezili Freda, both women are “a personification of feminine beauty and grace” (Le Vaudou Haïtien, 97, my translation). Turning back to Ezili Freda, Hurston writes: Toward womankind, Erzulie is implacable. It is said that no girl will gain a husband if an altar to Erzulie is in the house. Her jealousy delights in frustrating all plans and hopes of the young woman in love. (Tell My Horse, 145)

Janie is not just a beautiful woman who returns to town and in so doing stirs up community interest. She is the envy of her entire home town by virtue of her beauty, and woos all of the men just as easily as she incites jealousy in the women. Similarly, Ezili Freda is the most important goddess in the pantheon, not least because her beauty causes Haitian men ardently to desire her, and causes Haitian women the frustration of losing the affection of their men. These attractive and divisive qualities of feminine beauty that characterize Janie and Ezili Freda, I suggest, are markedly similar and much too close in form to have escaped Hurston’s notice. Critics have often asked why Janie commits bigamy when she marries Joe Starks, and why there are no children produced from any of her relationships. For the latter point, to which we shall return, I have offered the answer that it is not in the nature of Janie’s / Ezili Freda’s love to produce children. As to marriage, both Janie and Ezili Freda seem to value it very little. Claire Crabtree argues that, through Janie, Hurston explores the “twin themes” of feminism and black self-determination. She suggests that these themes are manifest, for instance, when Janie leaves her marriage with Logan Killicks and marries Joe Starks, in part because the former expected her to fulfill a “traditional” woman’s role that includes bearing children (“Confluence of Folklore,” 57). In addition, the question of bigamy, like that of childbirth, is never explored in the novel. Yet while Janie’s bigamy and barrenness may be indicative of a feminist response to social convention, as Crabtree suggests, these qualities are also highly relevant to an understanding of Ezili Freda. We have seen that Ezili Freda is explicitly not a mother figure like her counterpart Ezili Dantò, but is nevertheless the potential lover, like a queen bee, of all the men of Haiti.

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Speaking of the Haitian men who become initiated into Ezili Freda’s cult, Hurston writes: To women and their desires, she is all but maliciously cruel, for not only does she choose and set aside for herself young and handsome men and thus bar them from marriage, she frequently chooses married men and thrusts herself between the woman and her happiness. (Tell My Horse, 145)

Thus, it is Ezili Freda’s practice to take even married men as her initiates. She is a polyandrist par excellence. As Hurston explains, no woman is allowed to touch the man who is being initiated into her cult, or to enter the chamber set aside for Ezili Freda on the day consecrated to her (144). On such days, the institution of marriage is subordinated to the religious (and erotic) love bond between Ezili Freda and her male devotees (Laguerre, Voodoo Heritage, 77). In a similar way, Janie’s marriage relationships are clearly secondary to her love relationship with Tea Cake. Her marriage to Logan Killicks has been discussed by critics as a capitulation to Nanny’s materialistic worldview, and her desire for Janie to have a better life. The commentaries on Nanny’s motives by Crabtree, “Confluence of Folklore,” 57, 60–61; Washington, “Black Woman’s Search,” 69; and King, “Naming and Power,” 687–88, are examples. Yet the significance of this marriage for Janie’s progression toward self-awareness seems to crystallize when she decides to leave Logan for Joe Starks. She leaves because she decides not to use the mule he gives her, and to be for him all that his gift implies. In Janie’s movement toward self-determination, marriage with Logan is merely the staging ground for a transformative conflict (Urgo, “The Tune,” 40–54). When that self-determination emerges and Janie leaves, her legal bond with Logan loses all significance. If Janie did not fully understand marriage when she wedded Logan Killicks, she does not foresee the difficulties and dead end she will have in marriage with Joe Starks. Yet the marriage with Joe Starks will similarly provide Janie with an opportunity for further self-discovery. Her triumphal scene (Their Eyes, 74–76) in Joe’s store, when she criticizes his manhood, marks the imminent decline of her marriage with him, but also marks the next step she will take toward self-fulfillment. Once again, marriage becomes the staging ground for Janie’s self-discovery and is not an institution that is very meaningful in itself. Confirmation for this suggestion can be found in Janie’s third and most important relationship, with Tea Cake. In this relationship, Janie comes as close as she ever will to

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freely and fully expressing her conscious desires while living with a man. And although their bond is consecrated by marriage, it is clearly their love for each other that predominates.10 The overall point here is that Janie’s marriages to Logan Killicks and Joe Starks are not given much weight in themselves in the novel, relative to her ultimate love relationship with Tea Cake. That Hurston appears to privilege a relationship sanctioned more by love than by a mere legal union suggests that she places a premium on voluntary devotion between individuals. It turns out that this premium on voluntary devotion also characterizes the men who give themselves to Ezili Freda: Numerous men in Haiti do not wait to be called. They attach themselves to the cult voluntarily. It is more or less a vow of chastity certainly binding for specified times, and if the man is not married then he can never do so. If he is married his life with his wife will become so difficult that separation and divorce follows. (Tell My Horse, 146–47)

As a binding legal union, then, marriage for both Janie and Ezili Freda cannot be a meaningful bond. What counts is the willingness and capacity to give oneself fully to another person, transcending any past or future attachments, with all of the loyalty that such self-sacrifice entails. The sacredness of the bond is then bestowed not by legal institution, but by the strength of mutual devotion.11 Perhaps as a result of the demands placed on the love bond between individuals, apparently it need not, should not, lead to bearing children. If marriage for Janie and Ezili Freda is not a condition of genuine love, then children are not a crowning expression of love either. To put this another way, although Ezili Freda is certainly within childbearing age, bearing children implies that she will have been possessed, so to speak, by a man, and that she will no longer be able to attract other men. So it is told in most versions of her myth that she has had love relationships with most of the male gods, only to see each of her relationships end, among other things, without children (see Deren, Divine Horsemen, 138; Métraux, Le Vaudou Haïtien, 98–99; D’Anna, Le religioni afroamericane, 49; Laguerre, Voodoo Heritage, 71; and Brown, Mama Lola, 248). However, the condition of Ezili Freda’s affection is that she belongs to all Haitian men and to none of them individually. Her fertility ever remains a secondary, if dimly felt, quality next to her overt sexuality. And in comparison, the fact that Janie separates from two men (she leaves Logan Killicks, and Joe Starks dies), and that her most deeply

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satisfying relationship with Tea Cake involves no children and will end in Tea Cake’s death, suggests that Janie, too, belongs to all of her men and to none of them, especially as they relate to her search for love and personal fulfillment. At bottom, it is worth speculating whether the fundamental difficulty for Janie and Ezili Freda is that they are both attempting to define their worth and identity through their relationships with men (Brown, Mama Lola, 248). That Janie’s love is sexual and not merely spiritual, and that to this extent it compares with Ezili Freda’s love, emerges from the fact that her lack of love for Joe Starks and her fulfillment in love with Tea Cake are both tied to explicitly sexual references. When Janie finally criticizes Joe in anger over his lack of consideration for her, her criticisms culminate in a reference to his poor sexual performance.12 The birth of Janie’s erotic sexuality as an expression of her love and personal growth proceeds directly from the emergence of her newer, more fully realized self in the context of her relationship with Tea Cake. This connection between sex and personal satisfaction is most vividly expressed by the fact that Janie’s only love scene occurs with Tea Cake (Their Eyes, 132). Yet while all would seem well with Janie’s blossoming self, the puzzle remains that Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake is destined to come apart, tragically. It is as if Janie’s love were somehow inherently unable to be fulfilled while Tea Cake is alive.13 In so many words, this describes exactly the fate of Ezili Freda. Haitians use the figure of Ezili Freda as a symbol of all that is innocent and good and noble about love, as well as all that is unattainable or painful, even tragic about it. But this tragic quality, which is a central feature of her mythical persona, is conspicuously absent from Hurston’s account in Tell My Horse. Indeed, in Haitian tradition, Ezili Freda is identified with the Mater Dolorosa (Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley, 279; Marcelin, Mythologie Vodou, 77; Métraux, Le Vaudou Haïtien, 288; Hurbon, Dieu dans le Vaudou Haïtien, 104; D’Anna, Le religioni afroamericane, 49; Brown, Mama Lola, 221), which is the Virgin Mary represented as sorrowing for the passion of Christ. Ezili Freda’s ceremonial manifestations follow a set pattern after she has “come down” in an initiate,14 and it is unlikely that Hurston did not witness this. However, for some reason she chose not to describe it. In any case, another important field worker, Maya Deren, visited Haiti more than a decade after Hurston and describes Ezili Freda in her classic work, Divine Horsemen (1953). In Deren’s description of Ezili Freda’s tragic aspect, I believe we can find an answer to an issue that has troubled critics about Their Eyes: the termination of all of Janie’s relationships.

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After Ezili Freda takes possession of an initiate, her ritual includes preening and pampering herself, making the rounds within the peristyle greeting and flirting with the men, condescending to the women, generally exuding an air of luxury and immense generosity.

And then: In the midst of the gaiety she will inexplicably recall, as women sometimes do, some old, minor disappointment. . . . She who has been loved by all the major loa (and it is not they who were promiscuous) is convinced, by some curious inversion, that they have each betrayed her. . . . She, who is the most complimented, most beloved, most often wedded in the sacred marriage of devotee and divinity—she who is Goddess of Love—protests that she is not loved enough. Inevitably then—and this is a classic stage of Erzulie’s [sic] possession—she begins to weep. Tenderly they would comfort her, bringing forward still another cake, another jewel, pledging still another promise. But it would seem that nothing in this world would ever, could ever answer those tears. It is because of these tears that the women, who might otherwise resent her, are so gentle. In their real, reasonable world there is no grief like this. (Deren, Divine Horsemen, 138, emphasis in original)

According to Deren, Ezili Freda is thus intrinsically unable to be satisfied by, or truly able to satisfy, another in love. Although she may offer men the most bounteous and perfect love, it is fleeting, perhaps because such a full and overflowing love is beyond the capacity of men to keep. Her grief is not the grief of mortal tragedy so much as of godly, immortal imperfection. Ezili Freda’s love and her ability to be loved are flawed. In the words of another ethnographer, Andrea D’Anna, Ezili Freda is unable to translate the dream of her desires into reality, the myth into deed: Erzulie, after having made a display of all her womanly charms, realizes suddenly that her own attempt to embody an ideal of beauty and of impossible, unattainable perfection, of translating the dream into reality, the myth into deed, is destined to failure: everything— charm, luxury, passion—Erzulie seems to say with her disconsolate sadness, is illusion . . . fleeting appearance, deception of the senses. (D’Anna, Le religioni afroamericane, 49, my translation)

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We can bring D’Anna’s and Deren’s observations of Ezili Freda to bear on Janie, and offer some resolution to the ending of Their Eyes, which several scholars believe is either unresolved or unsatisfactory. Claire Crabtree suggests that the ending of the novel is weak, and that “Hurston, as a feminist, did not want Janie to find fulfillment in a man, but rather in her new-found self” (“Confluence of Folklore,” 65). In light of Ezili Freda’s tragic aspect, however, I suggest that Hurston endowed Janie with a love that was inherently doomed and incapable of permanent fulfillment. The sadness that pervades the myth of Ezili Freda is Janie’s sadness too, in that no matter how intense or passionate her love for Tea Cake, in the words of D’Anna, its fulfillment remains a “fleeting appearance, deception of the senses.” Since no man can truly possess either the goddess Ezili Freda or the woman Janie, nor can their love ever become completely fulfilled by men, the seal of fate destines them both to be alone. Certainly there are features in the myth of Ezili Freda that differ from Janie’s circumstances, such as the absence of real violence in her relationships with men—unlike what we observe in Janie and Tea Cake’s relationship—or the fact that Ezili Freda is not engaged in the kind of odyssey toward progressive self-discovery that characterizes Janie. Nevertheless, Janie and Ezili Freda share several fundamental qualities. Like Ezili Freda, Janie is a beautiful mulatto who is seeking deep fulfillment in love. While Janie’s marriages fail to give her that fulfillment, she comes closest to gaining it in a relationship with a man based principally on love. Haitian men may “wed” themselves in ritual to the goddess of love, Ezili Freda, and their devotional bond to her transcends and may even dissolve their very own marriages. In none of Janie’s relationships is the desire for children expressed, while sex is alluded to with Joe Starks and eventually described with Tea Cake. This suggests that the focus of the novel is on the link between Janie’s self-development and her experience of erotic love. To put this another way, we might say that, for Janie, there is a strong sexual component to her personal growth. Ezili Freda similarly personifies erotic love and not motherly love; she too will have no children. Finally, all of Janie’s relationships end in separation brought about by one cause or another, leaving her alone. Ezili Freda’s relationships are likewise destined to end since, speaking metaphorically, she cannot turn her dreams of love into reality. It is as if Hurston were speaking of both Janie and her mythical prototype, Ezili Freda, when she says, at the beginning of Their Eyes, that for women “the dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (1). I contend that all of these shared qualities must perforce change the ways in which scholars have studied Their Eyes. No longer can the novel

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be read exclusively or even primarily within the context of American racial and gender politics (as in Walker, I Love Myself), because it undeniably contains a Haitian dimension.15 Although Janie has become for many scholars representative of African American women’s struggles, she is in fact a more complex pastiche of Caribbean and southern American culture. As I argued earlier, the overlaying of several black cultures in the representation of a person or community is a common literary device for Hurston, especially given her unified vision of West African, Caribbean, and southern American blacks. The similarities between Janie and Ezili Freda demonstrate the importance of incorporating Hurston’s fieldwork experiences into the study of her novels. What remains is to discover which others of her characters are similarly drawn from the mythic and religious figures she encountered in her ethnographic investigations of Afro-Caribbean cultures.

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Notes

1. For more background on Hurston’s graduate research, see Hemenway (Zora Neale Hurston, 206–15). 2. Letter to Carl Van Vechten, Thanksgiving Day, 1934, quoted in Hemenway (Zora Neale Hurston, 207). 3. For Hurston’s thoughts on the genealogy of American Negroes, see her article on hoodoo in America (“Hoodoo in America,” 317–19). 4. The edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God used in this chapter is the First Perennial Library edition published in 1990. Subsequent references to this edition occur in the text. Hereafter the text will be referred to only as Their Eyes. 5. For Creole orthography I follow the official orthography adopted by the Haitian government in 1979. See Brown’s (Mama Lola, x) judicious remarks on this subject. 6. The literature on Their Eyes is enormous. What follows can only purport to be a sampling: Washington (“Black Woman’s Search”), Hemenway (Zora Neale Hurston, 231–43), Johnson (“Metaphor, Metonymy”), Crabtree (“Confluence of Folklore”), Gates (Signifying Monkey, 170–217), Urgo (“The Tune”), and Dalgarno (“Words Walking”). 7. On the youthful Janie’s imaginings about (erotic) love and marriage, see the often-quoted “bee-in-the-calyx” passage in Their Eyes (10–11). Note especially that this tone-setting scene also describes Janie’s first sexual experience. 8. See Their Eyes (23–24) on the end of Janie’s relationship with Logan Killicks; 68 on Janie’s despair over her marriage with Joe Starks; 182 on her memory of Tea Cake. Each of these passages employs flower metaphors that capture some essential feeling about the love Janie has, or has had, for each man. 9. For ethnographic confirmation of this view, see Herskovits (Life in a Haitian Valley, 279), Marcelin (Mythologie Vodou, 77), Métraux (Le Vaudou Haïtien, 97), D’Anna (Le religioni afroamericane, 48), Hurbon (Dieu dans le Vaudou Haïtien, 104), Brown (Mama Lola, 248), and most recently the summary by Dayan (Haiti, History and the Gods, 59–65, 106). 10. Janie’s marriage to Tea Cake is mentioned only once in passing in Their Eyes: “So it came around that she had been married a week and sent Pheoby a card with a picture on it” (112). 11. For a contemporary example of a Haitian man who “married” Ezili Freda, and in this case also Ezili Dantò, see René and Houlberg, “Double Mystic Marriages,” 287–99. 12. See Their Eyes (74–76). Note Janie’s stinging remark: “When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life” (75). This is the only scene in which Janie expresses her intense dissatisfaction over life with Joe.

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13. After returning home, Janie freely speculates to Pheoby about her love for Tea Cake, but this is only in retrospect: “Dat’s all right, Pheoby, tell ’em. Dey gointuh make ’miration ’cause mah love didn’t work lak they love, if dey ever had any. Then you must tell ’em dat love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (Their Eyes, 182). 14. Some of the best descriptions of Ezili Freda’s entire ceremonial performance are to be found in Deren (Divine Horsemen, 135–38), Métraux (Le Vaudou Haïtien, 97–98), D’Anna (Le religioni afroamericane, 48–50), and especially the lively description by Marcelin (Mythologie Vodou, 81–94). 15. This is not to deny that the novel may also have had other impetuses. For example, Hurston states in her autobiography that her feelings for a man whom she calls A.W.P. made their way into the novel: “The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ ” (Dust Tracks, 268). Hemenway claims that this was a man of West Indian parentage whom Hurston had first met in 1931, and then found again during graduate school (Zora Neale Hurston, 231).

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Works Cited

Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Crabtree, Claire. “The Confluence of Folklore, Feminism and Black SelfDetermination in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Southern Literary Journal 17 (1985): 54–66. Dalgarno, Emily. “ ‘Words Walking Without Masters’: Ethnography and the Creative Process in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” American Literature 64 (1992): 519–41. D’Anna, Andrea. Le religioni afroamericane. Italy: Editrice Nigrizia, 1972. Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London: Thames and Hudson, 1953. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Herskovits, Melville. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937. Hurbon, Laënnec. Dieu dans le Vaudou Haïtien. Paris: Payot, 1972. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969. Originally published in 1942, J. B. Lippincott. ———. “Hoodoo in America.” Journal of American Folklore 44 (1931): 317– 417. ———. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971. Originally pub­ lished in 1934 by J. B. Lippincott. ———. Moses, Man of the Mountain. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Originally published in 1939, J. B. Lippincott. ———. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935. ———. Tell My Horse. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Originally published in 1937, J. B. Lippincott. Johnson, Barbara. “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes.” Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., 205–21. New York: Methuen, 1984. King, Sigrid. 1990. “Naming and Power in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Black American Literature Forum 4 (1990): 687–88. Laguerre, Michael. Voodoo Heritage. London: Sage, 1980. Marcelin, Milo. Mythologie Vodou. Port-au-Prince: Les Éditions Haïtiens, 1949. Métraux, Alfred. Le Vaudou Haïtien. Paris: Gallimard, 1958.

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Neal, Larry. Introduction to Jonah’s Gourd Vine, by Zora Neale Hurston, 5–7. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971. Pondrom, Cyrena N. “The Role of Myth in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” American Literature 58 (1986): 181–202. René, Georges, and Marilyn Houlberg. “My Double Mystic Marriages to Two Goddesses of Love: An Interview.” In Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J.Cosentino, 287–99. Hong Kong: Regents of the University of California, 1995. Thomas, H. Nigel. From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Urgo, Joseph. “ ‘The Tune Is the Unity of the Thing’: Power and Vulnerability in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Southern Literary Journal 23 (1991): 40–54. Walker, Alice, ed. I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. New York: Feminist, 1979. Washington, Mary Helen. “The Black Woman’s Search for Identity.” Black World 21 (1972): 68–75.

3

Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Daphne Lamothe

Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 while in Haiti collecting folklore on Vodou.1 A year later, she published Tell My Horse, which documents the findings from that expedition. While the history of these publications suggests that, for Hurston, folklore and fiction converge in Haiti, few critics have adequately explored that juncture. Most acknowledge Hurston’s interest in Haitian Vodou, but their analyses of the impact of this belief system on her work frequently do not extend beyond perfunctory glosses. A notable exception is Ellease Southerland’s essay, “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in the 1979 collection Sturdy Black Bridges. Southerland’s article makes an important contribution to readings of Hurston’s integration of folklore and fiction. The essay discusses the appearance and significance of various “voodoo” signs, symbols, and rituals in Hurston’s fiction; and more specific to this paper, it identifies the use of

This essay was originally published in Callaloo 22, no. 1 (1999): 157–75. I would like to thank Mitchell Breitwieser, VèVè Clark, and Katherine Bassard for their careful readings of earlier drafts of this essay. I am also indebted to Cynthia Dobbs, AnnMarie Harvey, and Theresa Tensuan for their long-standing support and their many valuable suggestions for the improvement of this essay.

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Vodou symbolism in Their Eyes Were Watching God very early in the history of the novel’s criticism. But Southerland does not cite her sources for certain voodoo rituals, or for the significance of various numbers and colors which appear repeatedly in Hurston’s fiction. Her analysis therefore seems based on anecdotal evidence and it ignores the cultural distinctions among Haitian, Louisianan, and other kinds of voodoo and hoodoo. These aspects of the essay contribute to the failure, or refusal, of succeeding generations of literary critics to further examine the cultural influences that Southerland found in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Some— although certainly not all—critics have categorized Hurston’s study and incorporation of Vodou as an intriguing curiosity, perhaps considering it to fall within the purview of anthropology and not literature. Reading the novel within such narrow parameters, however, has resulted in a general inability on the part of Hurston’s readers to identify the extent to which her use of Vodou ethnography in her literature enables her exploration of female empowerment and African American cultural identity. In this paper, I focus specifically on Hurston’s use of Haitian Vodou imagery in Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I argue that the folklore enables her confrontation of various kinds of social and personal transformation. Her use of Vodou imagery enables her to analyze the relationship among migration, culture, and identity that lies at the heart of the African diaspora. In contrast to those critics who read Hurston’s use of folk culture, such as Vodou, as a sign of nostalgia, I view it as her means of comprehending transformation. Within traditional cultural forms lies a structure which encourages and enables dynamic change. Therefore, Hurston’s reluctance to abandon African American tradition does not signal a rejection of modernity; rather, it becomes a vehicle for her to acknowledge modernity. I concern myself here specifically with Vodou because Their Eyes Were Watching God alludes to similarities between the protagonist, Janie Killicks Starks Wood, and the Vodou goddess Ezili. Janie’s physical appearance, her romantic relationships, and her interactions with the Eatonville community mirror in a multitude of ways the characteristics of that spirit (lwa). These allusions are so embedded in the foundation of the narrative that they are virtually invisible, compelling us to ask what it was about Hurston’s experiences in Haiti that compelled her to relate Vodou to her characters. Perhaps her instincts as a folklorist and writer led her to a cultural experience in which the self-expression of a displaced people comes to the fore. Perhaps because she was raised in the self-contained all-black community of Eatonville, Florida, she looked to a belief system that addressed black people’s capacity for self-determination. Hurston

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found in Haitian Vodou a syncretic cultural production that spoke to both of those interests and more. Her anthropological research revealed that the ways in which Haitian people worked out their political, social, and psychic conditions in the spiritual plane resonated with the concerns and experiences of African Americans in the United States. Because the Vodou gods’ and goddesses’ appearances and actions speak to the concerns and experiences of their worshippers, one finds that Vodou alludes to the heroic and the rebellious; reflects mundane jealousies, desires, and hierarchies; illustrates the ravages of slavery on a collective consciousness; and provides a means of self-expression for that same collective. Hurston was very aware of Haiti’s symbolism for African Americans, and implicit references to its significance are scattered throughout the text. For example, Joe Starks dreams of a place where he can be a “big voice” and settles on Eatonville because “de white folks had all de sayso where he come from and everywhere else, exceptin’ dis place dat colored folks was buildin’ theirselves” (Their Eyes, 27). This reference to a place where black people live independent of white authority alludes to postrevolution Haiti, the first black independent republic in the Western Hemisphere; and it underscores the revolutionary notion of a town in the United States built and run by black people. Nanny makes a similar allusion to the black republic and the collective desire for autonomy and empowerment. She dreams of “some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power,” revealing Haiti’s significance as a place where the potential for black autonomy has been realized (14). Nanny’s musings also address a desire for female empowerment. For it is in that “place way off in de ocean” that she also imagines that a black woman might not have to be “de mule uh de world” (14). Anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown writes in Mama Lola about the possibilities for empowerment afforded to Haitian women by Vodou: The adaptability of Vodou over time, and its responsiveness to other cultures and religions; the fact that it has no canon, creed, or pope; the multiplicity of its spirits; and the intimate detail in which those spirits reflect the lives of the faithful—all these characteristics make women’s lives visible within Vodou in ways they are not in other religious traditions, including those of the African homeland. This visibility can give women a way of working realistically and creatively with the forces that define and confine them. (221)

Through the use of a Vodou subtext, Hurston comments on and rebels against the forces that “define and confine” black women as sexual

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beings, workhorses, and mothers. She also uses Vodou philosophy to shed light on the characters’ views of poverty, class, community, and displacement. Building on the work of those critics who investigate the political implications of Hurston’s cultural work, I argue that her use of Vodou imagery provides her with a vehicle for political engagement and social commentary.

Folklore, Literature, and the Lure of the Primitive In order to fully comprehend the significance of the text’s Vodou imagery, it is crucial to understand the context in which Hurston wrote. I believe she submerged the Vodou images in the novel beneath more accessible folk images of the black South in a dual effort to conform to and resist popular demands for the primitive. Unlike the performance of the dozens, the telling of folktales, and other aspects of African American folk culture which the reader can easily identify and separate from the plot, Hurston’s use of Vodou is not as easily discerned. Its presence in the text has no stylistic markers, nor can we categorize the Vodou elements as mere ornaments for the central narrative.2 Hurston’s more obvious use of African American folk culture made her vulnerable to criticisms of pandering to the then popular taste for “the minstrel stereotypes of the lazy, sensual, ignorant, laughing darky” (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 154). As one of the stars of the Harlem Renaissance, courted and funded by white benefactors, Hurston juggled her literary aspirations with the often racist expectations of her patron and audience. For example, Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason was a generous benefactor; but “as perhaps with all patrons . . . she expected some return on her money. In Hurston’s case it was a report on the aboriginal sincerity of rural southern black folk . . . Her black guests were either primitive, or they were not being themselves” (Hemenway, 107). Many of Hurston’s critics viewed this external pressure as a handicap to her literary production. H. Nigel Thomas, for example, counts Hurston as one of a school of writers (including Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar) who could not meet the challenge of simultaneously satisfying the demand for “minstrel-type buffoonery” and “ensuring that she did not compromise the dignity of the black race” (From Folklore to Fiction, 175). Thomas mistakes Hurston’s humor for buffoonery, and fails to recognize the dignity of her lowly characters. Furthermore, his dismissal of her work arises from the notion that a successful narrative seamlessly blends folklore with fiction. Thomas marks the 1930s as, in

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general, a time in which African American writers mastered the art of incorporating those elements of folklore that were necessary to their fiction, without pandering to the audience’s “baser instincts” or hindering their art. From the 1930s on, black writers produced literature in which “rituals are not allowed to remain a thing apart or as caricatured quaint antics; instead they are integral aspects of the characters’ struggle to survive” (From Folklore to Fiction, 175). According to Thomas, Hurston is an exception to this rule, but he fails to acknowledge that her attempts to set apart and highlight some elements of the folklore (like the stories told by the townsfolk) may be deliberate. Rather than judging the obvious seams between the novel’s third-person, standard English narration and its first-person, African American vernacular as a sign of Hurston’s failure as a writer, it is possible to view it as an emotionally powerful juxtaposition of two very different kinds of language. Furthermore, like many other critics, Thomas does not recognize that she makes Ezili, a figure from Caribbean folklore and ritual, a central, yet nearly invisible, aspect in Janie’s struggle for survival. Hurston achieves a double triumph over those in her audience who demanded primitive images. First, by setting apart the African American folklore within the central narrative, she makes a case for the recognition of the literary possibilities of folklore. Second, her use of Vodou achieves the harmonious blending of folklore and fiction that Thomas holds as a standard of successful, black creative expression. During the 1920s and 1930s, the widespread desire for the primitive extended beyond a demand for minstrel stereotypes of “happy darkies” into the world of the exotic primitive. These demands dovetailed with Harlem Renaissance writers’ struggles to define what was unique to African American culture. One way they did so was by attempting to articulate and define blacks’ African heritage. But when imagining African culture’s relevance to African American culture and identity, Hurston and her contemporaries often used stereotypical images of beating drums and the jungle, feeding American society’s perceptions of Africa as a savage, primal, and uncivilized place. Hemenway writes: Such tom-tom beats were almost a cliché in Harlem Renaissance writing, and both blacks and whites became enmeshed in the cult of exotic primitivism. For the whites it was the idea that Harlem was an uptown jungle, a safari for the price of cab fare, with cabarets decorated in jungle motifs. They went to Harlem to see the natural rhythm and uninhibited grace of America’s link with the heart of darkness. For the black artists it was a much more serious

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concern, an attempt to establish a working relationship with what Locke called in The New Negro the “ancestral” past. (Zora Neale Hurston, 75)

Harlem Renaissance writers’ uses of African images frequently held a dual significance as expressions of a serious attempt to articulate the relevance of an African past to African Americans’ present and futures, and as a base appeal to racist demands for exotic entertainment. Hurston’s literary forays into blacks’ ancestral past often made use of the clichés mentioned above. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, for instance, and in her 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she makes prodigious use of the metaphor of the drum to invoke an ancient African heritage as the foundation of African American identity. One could view Hurston’s turn to Vodou as another example of her exploitation of the primitive because, historically, representations of Vodou in the United States have been rife with clichés. For example, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones contains numerous stereotypes in its depiction of a voodoo cult of savages: Brutus Jones, the noble savage; the tom-toms beating incessantly in the background to foreshadow evil; and natives using black magic to depose their emperor. However, Hurston’s weaving of Vodou imagery in Their Eyes completely evades such predictable stereotypes, delving instead into the complexities of the belief system, the culture from which it springs, and the ways in which those complexities address African American (and Afro-Caribbean) social and political concerns. The Vodou subtext represents a facet of the primitive that exceeds the scope of the plantation and jungle bunny stereotypes that dominated the Harlem Renaissance era. It links the southern folk with a black Atlantic experience rooted in slavery, armed revolution, and African spirituality.

Vodou Imagery and Female Agency The primary Vodou element in this novel is the implicit presence of the goddess Ezili. Hurston infuses Janie with the characteristics of two aspects of this spirit: Ezili Freda, the mulatta goddess of love, and Ezili Danto, the black goddess who is associated with maternal rage. These two spirits display attributes that are completely opposed. Freda is of an elite class; she is a mulatta, self-possessed and materialistic. Danto is working class, black, and associated with motherhood. These contradictory qualities reside in one spirit, and in the case of the novel, they also lie

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in one body—Janie’s. The tensions that stem from these oppositions reflect the conditions and desires of African Americans; and while they cannot always be assimilated or resolved, they frequently result in cultural and individual expressiveness that is dynamic and powerful. Therefore, Hurston uses Vodou imagery, in particular the image of Ezili, in order to implicitly enter a discourse on the present and future of African American culture. Just as all Vodou ceremonies begin with songs, dances, and prayers in honor of Legba, the novel starts with an implicit invocation of him. Janie calls forth the power of Legba, the keeper of the crossroads, which is the gateway between the spiritual and material worlds, as she searches “as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps” (Their Eyes, 11). And when she walks “down to the front gate”—the symbolic crossroads— “and [leans] over to gaze up and down the road” (11), her air of expectation invokes the potential embodied by Legba. In Tell My Horse, Hurston calls Legba the “opener of gates”; he symbolizes opportunity (115).3 As Janie stands at the gate, “looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made,” she feels acutely this sense of opportunity (Their Eyes, 11). This invocation of Legba, a black Atlantic god, takes place in a text marked by its multiple references to the Christian God, most notably in its title. During the storm that erupts near the end of the narrative, the folks stranded on the muck stare into the darkness, putting themselves at the mercy of a Christian God. But throughout the narrative, as they gaze upon Janie’s body, they have also been looking to a New World goddess rooted in African spirituality. Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes that “there are a number of substitutions for God made in this book, usually in the form of big talkers—‘Mouth Almighty’ of the rural folk, and ‘I god’ for Joe Starks’s comic blasphemous condensation of political and economic power.”4 The temporal powers of Jody and the gossiping Eatonville folk give scant competition to the all-encompassing power of God to whom Janie, Tea Cake, and their friends silently appeal as they wait for the storm to arrive. But the novel refers in passing only to these false gods, and to the ultimate authority, the God who controls the potentially devastating forces of nature. This God is Ezili’s primary challenger in the competition for the characters’ allegiance. Janie resembles Ezili Freda physically. In Voodoo in Haiti, anthropologist Alfred Métraux describes Freda, the goddess of love, as “a pretty Antillean half-caste . . . a personification of feminine grace and beauty. She has all the characteristics of a pretty mulatta: she is coquettish, sensual, pleasure-loving, and extravagant” (110). Freda can make any man she

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chooses her husband, a characteristic that finds its parallel in Janie’s search for a suitable mate. Janie dresses in blue (Their Eyes, 2), Freda’s favorite color.5 The description of Janie’s return to Eatonville echoes Métraux’s description of Ezili’s entrance into a Vodou temple. Hurston writes: The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets; the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. (Their Eyes, 2)

Métraux writes: At last, in the full glory of her seductiveness, with hair unbound to make her look like a long-haired half-caste, Ezili makes her entrance to the peristyle. She walks slowly, swinging her hips, throwing saucy, ogling looks at the men or pausing for a kiss or a caress. (Voodoo in Haiti, 111)

Janie’s long hair and sensuality mark her as the object of sexual desire. Although, unlike Ezili Freda, Janie does not actively solicit male attention, Freda’s desire for sensuality and love blooms in Janie as she muses under the pear tree in her grandmother’s garden. And finally, the celebration of love and sexuality symbolized by Freda culminates in Janie and Tea Cake’s playful, loving relationship. The text celebrates female sexuality by its sensuous prose and its positioning of Janie’s quest for love at its center. By linking Janie’s sexuality with Freda’s, Hurston radicalizes it by associating it with the ritual of possession in which a god mounts an initiate. The goddess is said to “ride” her horse. The implicit sexuality in this terminology is self-evident, and Ezili’s desire for numerous “husbands” is well documented in the anthropological literature. The image of a woman, either human or spirit, “mounting” a man proves significant because it implies the woman’s control over her own sexuality and over the man’s pleasure as well. For Hurston, representing a woman’s sexuality in full bloom is not just affirmative, it is revolutionary. But Freda’s presence also represents a desire for wealth and status, which eventually leads to conflict for Janie. After joining in a loveless marriage with Logan Killicks, Janie tells her grandmother, “Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think . . .” (Their Eyes, 23). Janie’s desire for “things sweet” corresponds

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with the mythology surrounding Ezili Freda, who also desires sweets.6 Janie eventually satisfies that desire when she marries a man with a sweetsounding name, Tea Cake; but that only occurs when she shucks off her grandmother’s belief that a secure, middle-class home should take precedence over romantic love. Nanny responds to Janie’s rejection of the economically stable and physically unattractive Logan Killicks in the following way: .

If you don’t want him, you sho oughta. Heah you is wid de onliest organ in town, amongst colored folks, in yo’ parlor. Got a house bought and paid for and sixty acres uh land right on de big road and . . . Lawd have mussy! Dat’s de very prong all us black women gits hung on Dis love! (Their Eyes, 22)

The similarities between Janie and Freda go only so far because, ultimately, Janie rejects the aristocratic ideal that Freda embodies (represented by her love of jewelry, brushes, and combs; the valorization of her light skin and long hair; and her preference for French over Creole, the language of the lower classes in Haiti). She laments to Pheoby the fact that “Jody classed me off,” and rejoices when she finds in Tea Cake not only romantic love, but also the connection with the folk from which she has so often been discouraged. Janie finds no satisfaction in Logan Killicks’s possessions, resents the fact that Jody sits her on the front porch like “a pretty doll-baby” (Their Eyes, 28), and rejoices when Tea Cake asks her to work in the muck with all the “common” folk. Although Janie resents being “classed off,” most of the other characters crave and envy the status that comes with having material possessions and a light-skinned wife. They worship and desire the materialistic and elitist lifestyle represented by the mulatta Freda, which eventually proves their downfall. While most of the folk share these desires, Mrs. Turner, Janie’s “visiting friend” in the muck, proves the most egregious example of this mindset because her worship of Janie’s mixed-race features borders on self-hatred. Mrs. Turner “didn’t cling to Janie Woods the woman.” She paid homage to Janie’s Caucasian characteristics as such (Their Eyes, 139): Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they

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would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

Mrs. Turner worships Janie’s Caucasian features like an initiate worships the lwa—with blood sacrifices and an awareness that the gods can sometimes be arbitrary in their cruelty. This critique of Mrs. Turner’s misplaced faith in whiteness is not a condemnation of Vodou, however. Rather, it is an honest assessment of the religion’s tendency to respond to and reflect all of its worshippers’ desires, including those that may be self-destructive. While the other characters are not as virulent in their internalized racism as Mrs. Turner, Nanny, Logan, Jody, the townsfolk, and even Tea Cake show signs of being color-struck and materialistic. Thus, the text’s condemnation of Mrs. Turner implicitly extends to a critique of other characters who share her views. Despite the popular tendency to worship that which Ezili Freda represents, Janie eventually rejects the elitist trappings that characterize the lwa and embraces the working-class, folk identity of Ezili Danto. When she returns to Eatonville, the women remark on the changes in her appearance. “What she doin’ coming back here in dem overhalls? . . . What dat ole forty year ole ’oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her back lak some young gal?” (Their Eyes, 2). While their vituperative comments reflect their envy of Janie’s appearance and wealth, the changes in her appearance reflect a profound change in Janie’s self-perception and a departure from the iconography of Ezili Freda.7 The references to Janie’s “overhalls” and age place her in the province of Ezili Danto, the Petwo spirit, at the same time that her long hair and sensuality continue to align her with Freda. This passage resonates on multiple levels, positioning Janie as two kinds of women: one who benefits from and reaffirms gender, class, and color biases (signified by Freda), and one who is noted for her willingness to work and for her maturity (signified by Danto). Brown describes Ezili Danto as an independent woman with an unconventional sexuality. She has “dark black skin” and is “not too proud to work” (Brown, Mama Lola, 229). Although the fair-complexioned, relatively well-off Janie must convince Tea Cake that she is not above working in the fields with the other migrant laborers, she soon proves to be an enthusiastic worker. Danto’s black skin mirrors the blackness of the muck and that of the people in whom Janie finds fulfillment. Unlike the light-skinned Mrs. Turner who says she “can’t stand black niggers” (Their Eyes, 135), or the mulatta Ezili Freda who detests those with black skin,

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Janie loves Tea Cake, his dark skin, and the affirmative connection with her community that blackness represents. But Danto also has the power to destroy, which earns her the reputation of being “red-eyed,” or evil. Hurston calls her “the terrible Erzulie, gerouge . . . an older woman and terrible to look upon” (Tell My Horse, 123).8 That destructive force makes itself known during the hurricane, which erupts in order to convey Danto’s displeasure. This spirit, who represents working-class values and an affirmative blackness, violently objects to the African Americans’ deference to white cultural, racial, and economic supremacy at the expense of their own autonomy. The danger of such attitudes becomes clear when the folk remain in the path of the storm, despite the warning signs they receive, because they are making “seven and eight dollars a day picking beans.” In contrast to the Native Americans who know how to read the signs that nature gives them—“Sawgrass bloom. Hurricane coming,” they say as they flee the Everglades—the African Americans ignore the warnings (Their Eyes, 146). They stay where they are because “de white folks ain’t gone nowhere. Dey oughta know if it’s dangerous” (148). This implicit trust in white people’s authority proves their downfall and results in the deaths of scores of people. Tea Cake’s “possession” by the rabid dog that bites him is the most graphic example of the consequences suffered by black folks who blindly worship whiteness. Vodou stands in this novel as a reminder of black independence and expressiveness, and the Vodou goddesses demand payment when proper attention is not paid to these principles. Janie’s deferral to Tea Cake, who insists that they follow the example of the white landowners, runs against her own instincts. Her acquiescence to his will mirrors the African American community’s subordination to white authority and underscores the notion that their flaw is in the refusal to read the situation and interpret its meaning for themselves. When we first meet the young Janie, we learn that she can communicate with nature and understand its signs: Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. . . . She had been summoned to behold a revelation. (Their Eyes, 11, emphasis added)

Janie’s ability to “read” nature’s signs mirrors that of the Native Americans who warn her and her friends to leave before the hurricane strikes.

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But her unwillingness to heed her own internal barometer results in a terrible price paid to nature’s forces. Karla Holloway writes in The Character of the Word: Nature has bowed to human forces throughout the novel. Here she shows that she is a power that can control, as well as be controlled. Perhaps her fury is a lesson for Janie, who has been linked with natural imagery throughout the story and who needs to learn the potential strength of her own independence. (65)

All of the folks living in the Everglades, and not just Janie, need to learn to honor their independence. Ezili Danto makes her angry presence known at this point in the narrative. She is connected with water; a gentle rainfall signals her presence and a deluge signals her rage.9 The hurricane is described as a terrifying and cosmic force that extracts the blood sacrifice that “real gods” demand: “Ten feet higher and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains” (Their Eyes, 153). Danto’s rage erupts as a violent reminder to the folk that their passive faith in Euro-Americans, or Christianity, to determine their fate is misguided. The events leading up to the hurricane vividly illustrate the need for self-determination in the collective black consciousness. This lesson comes too late for Tea Cake to learn; but his death is an example for other individuals. Likewise, Janie suffers for her passivity not only in losing Tea Cake, but also in having to act as the agent of his death. Ezili Danto’s brutal insistence that the folk maintain their independence defies Christian doctrine, which traditionally advocated submission to authority.10 The passiveness of the folk as they wait for the onslaught to begin underscores Christianity’s traditional call for submissiveness: “They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God” (Their Eyes, 151). In contrast to this situation, which forces the folk to assume a posture of defeat, Hurston saw Vodou as facilitating a peasant self-expression that often subverted authority. Her account in Tell My Horse of the events that take place when Gede, the peasant god of death, mounts an individual, highlights the potential threat in the Vodou tradition to upend hierarchies and disrupt social order:

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On several occasions, it was observed that Guedé [sic] seemed to enjoy humbling his betters. On one occasion Guedé reviled a welldressed couple in a car that passed. Their names were called and the comments were truly devastating to say the least. With such behavior one is forced to believe that some of the valuable commentators are “mounted” by the spirit and that others are feigning possession in order to express their resentment general and particular. That phrase “Parlay cheval ou” is in daily, hourly use in Haiti and no doubt it is used as a blind for self-expression. (221)

When Gede speaks through the possessed, political, economic, and social injustices come under attack in ways that could never be possible in Haitian society under ordinary circumstances. If an individual pretends to be possessed by the lwa, in effect putting on a mask of Gede, that attack becomes even more threatening than one from a possessed individual because it is a willful expression of anger, disgust, or defiance. In Gede’s burlesque antics we find the most striking, but not the only, example of peasant self-expression which threatens the stability of a social order. While possession by Gede results in the subversion of class hierarchies, the presence of Ezili Freda and Danto illustrates the ways in which class identity and female agency are expressed in Haitian society (and, by extension, within Eatonville society as well). Vodou’s implicit stress on self-expression echoes the novel’s more explicit celebration of black expressiveness through the storytelling that takes place. Storytelling and, by extension, other forms of self-expression have the capacity to liberate Janie from the many constraints placed on her. Powerful truths about life and love exist in Janie’s story, which she recounts to her friend Pheoby while they sit on the back porch of her house. Janie’s story takes on a mythic dimension and her words transcend even the limitations of her own life. Mary Helen Washington aptly describes those limitations: One can hardly make . . . an unequivocal claim for Janie’s heroic posture in Their Eyes . . . Her friendship with Pheoby, occurring apart from the community, encapsulates Janie and Pheoby in a private dyad that insulates Janie from the jealousy of other women. Like the other women in the town, she is barred from participation in the culture’s oral tradition. When the voice of the black oral tradition is summoned in Their Eyes, it is not used to represent the collective black community, but to invoke and valorize the voice of the black male community. (“I Love the Way,” 99)

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While I concur that the novel primarily celebrates the black male oral tradition, I would reassert the significance of the frame story told by Janie to Pheoby. The frame story takes on the power and status of myth, which Leslie Desmangles describes as possessing “a paradoxical capacity to express complex truths in everyday language, to use common words and familiar objects to reveal what is most sacred in life” (Faces of the Gods, 61). Janie’s gender and race certainly circumscribe her experiences, but her story speaks to the potential she carries within. Desmangles notes that “myths are . . . powerful vehicles which can transcend the limitations of profane existence” (61). While Janie may not fully realize her voice and agency in the time frame of the narrative, her mythic tale underscores the potential which exists within all black women. Janie entrusts Pheoby with the responsibility of passing on her story and “de understandin” that goes along with it: “You can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat’s just de same as me ’cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf” (Their Eyes, 6). With this exhortation, the promise arises that a ritualized sharing of stories and experiences between women will develop. Pheoby will recount Janie’s tale, but she will also revise it as she grows and experiences new things. She may inspire future listeners, just as Janie has inspired her. Janie’s experience, her story, functions as myth for the folk, teaching them the value of self-expression and the necessity for self-determination.

Critical Schools: Tradition and Transformation Hurston’s incorporation into her novel of a religious tradition which she viewed as ancient and African does not preclude the text’s relevance to the condition of modern African Americans. The Vodou intertext in Their Eyes actually enabled Hurston to grapple with issues which preoccupied black intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, such as class, gender, and inter- and intraracial conflicts. Critical responses to the text failed to perceive, however, its immediate relevance to current events and modern political thought. Because Hurston positioned herself as an authority on black culture in her lifetime, she practically instigated others to attack her representations of black people and black culture for their lack of authenticity or legitimacy. Alain Locke chastised Hurston in his annual literature review for Opportunity magazine for creating “those pseudoprimitives whom the reading public still loves to laugh with, weep over, and envy” (Review, 18). More biting than Locke’s review was the critique by the leading black novelist of the day. Richard Wright wrote that the novel, like minstrelsy, “carries no theme, no message, no thought,” and

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functioned only to satisfy the tastes of a white audience for the simple and exotic primitive (New Masses review, 17). Locke and Wright registered their conviction that Hurston’s characters are too cartoonish, simple, and docile to be real. Locke and Wright expressed their squeamishness with Hurston’s portrayal of local color during a time in which northern black newspapers regularly instructed those in their readership who were newly arrived from the South on proper etiquette in public places. Their discomfort with her portrayal of folk characters echoed the sensitivity of many African American intellectuals to the public’s perception of black culture. In his introduction to New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Michael Awkward notes: Sensitive to the need to improve white America’s perception of AfroAmericans, some powerful black intellectuals, including Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, believing that literature represented the most effective means by which to begin to dispel racist notions that black Americans were morally and cognitively subhuman, insisted that Afro-American writers were obligated to present Afro-Americans in the most favorable—and flattering—light possible. (10)

Although Wright was subjected to similar criticisms upon the publication of Native Son, his review of Their Eyes reflects a touchiness regarding the proper strategy for depicting the African American lower classes. Although Locke and Wright couch their criticism in a rhetoric of authenticity, they seem to object more strenuously to Hurston’s seemingly apolitical depiction of poor, uneducated blacks to a presumably racist white audience. Hurston’s reputation has benefited from a surge in scholarly interest since the publication in the early 1970s of Alice Walker’s essay “Looking for Zora.” To this day, however, some critics retain a residual discomfort with her often flamboyant and controversial statements about black culture. For example, in The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy asserts that Hurston’s romanticization of “the folk” and idealization of rural, southern black culture prevent her from acknowledging African American cultural transformation. Gilroy’s critique of Hurston assumes that the desire to preserve a sense of tradition automatically marks one as antagonistic to change. Hurston’s forays into Vodou symbolism illustrate her respect for a tradition and culture which she considered ancient and African. But more importantly, her appropriation of this African diasporic tradition allowed her to participate in an ongoing dialogue about social and cultural change within black communities in the United States, which preoccupied

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her contemporaries during and after the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was absolutely interested in exploring the extent and effect of cultural transformation within African American communities; and Vodou was the primary avenue for accomplishing this exploration. To illustrate his point, Gilroy teases out a compelling analysis of Hurston’s contempt for the operatic performances of spirituals by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, focusing on her theories of authenticity and black culture: For Hurston, the success of the Fisk choir represented the triumph of musicians’ tricks over the vital, untrained, angular spirit of the rural folk who “care nothing about pitch” and “are bound by no rules.” . . . She attacked the choir’s performances as inauthentic. (Black Atlantic, 91–92)

Gilroy goes on to say: I would emphasise that as far as this chapter is concerned, whether Hurston was right or wrong about the Fisk Singers is not the primary question. The issue which interests me more than her correctness is her strongly felt need to draw a line around what is and isn’t authentically, genuinely, and really black. (92)

The implied critique in Gilroy’s observation is that by insisting on an authentic way of singing the spirituals, Hurston resists an inevitable and dynamic change that is an inherent part of the black Atlantic experience. In order to make this point, he understates the desire for upward class mobility that motivated individuals and groups like the Fisk Singers to elevate a lowly folk art into “high” culture. I think it important, however, to focus on the reasons for her objections to what she considered the loss of integrity in a black cultural production. Hurston’s criticism was directed primarily toward a group of formally educated African Americans who attempted to transform a rough, improvisational musical form born of illiterate blacks into an operatic, and therefore more “cultured,” form of music.11 Her refusal to see the operatic performances of spirituals as authentic stems from her resistance to an aesthetic which continued to view poor black culture as inferior, even as it attempted to rehabilitate and transform that culture for a wider audience. While Hurston grappled with the significance and consequences of transformed cultural experiences, she was not willing to define a “New Negro” who was completely ignorant of, or free from, the influences of the past. Karla Holloway accurately notes that “Hurston’s was an ancient

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spirit in an age that demanded modernism, that called the Negro ‘new’ and expected that Negro to be male” (Character of the Word, 17). Hurston refused to submit to the demands of modernism and progress without question because she feared the loss or repression of African cultural fragments. Her objection to the choir’s innovations was not so much that they diluted the music’s blackness with their injection of class and educational privilege; rather, she objected to the compromise, or abandonment, of the principles on which the music was based. In an essay entitled “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” Hurston describes such unique characteristics of Negro singing as “jagged harmony,” disharmony, shifting keys, “broken time,” and improvisation (80–81). She was very much aware that most of these musical characteristics were African in origin. Eric Sundquist’s comparison of black English and black music proves illuminating in understanding the rationale behind Hurston’s supposed resistance to change. He asserts that the perceived strangeness of the language and the music (which we could also call African-ness) often led to anxiety in and ridicule from the dominant culture: “For whites’ complaints about the ineffability of black dialect, which led in turn to the grotesque caricatures of minstrelsy and some plantation romance, repeated comparable observations by musicologists . . . that the intonations of the black spiritual were difficult to transcribe” (Sundquist, Hammers of Creation, 60). The elements of the spirituals that seem wrong to the ear trained in Western music (like the polyrhythms and blue notes that Hurston called broken time and disharmony) are the very elements that Hurston sought to preserve. Her critique of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was directed as much at the Westernization of the spirituals at the expense of their African elements as it was toward the elegant concert halls and bourgeois performers and audience members. Hurston expressed her rejection of white cultural supremacy through her insistence on an authentic mode of performance, which Gilroy reads as a rejection of modernity. While some might argue that Westernization is an inevitable and not necessarily negative cultural transformation, to do so without reservation is problematic because it does not challenge the then widely held assumption that European values were superior to and more sophisticated than African ones. Unlike Gilroy, Hazel Carby acknowledges Hurston’s investment in deflating class-driven pretensions; but like Gilroy, she finds Hurston too quick to delineate who the folk might be, as if such a homogenous group identity ever existed. In “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston,” Carby notes that Hurston avoids any mention of the newly emergent northern, urban black and chooses to focus on an almost mythical South:

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Hurston was concerned to establish authenticity in the representation of popular forms of folk culture and to expose the disregard for the aesthetics of that culture through inappropriate forms of representation. She had no problem in using the term “the people” to register that she knew just who they were. But critics are incorrect to think that Hurston reconciled “high” and “low” forms of cultural production. Hurston’s criticisms were not reserved for the elitist manner in which she thought the authentic culture of the people was reproduced. The people she wanted to represent she defined as a rural folk, and she measured them and their cultural forms against an urban, mass culture. (75)

Carby concludes that Hurston displaces the migration of blacks to the urban North with a nostalgic discourse about the rural South, resisting the cultural transformation that resulted from that migration. Carby stresses the need to recognize the transformation of black culture and warns against the impulse to romanticize a homogenous experience. Her critique, like Gilroy’s, is facilitated by Hurston’s many assertions of the genuine and authentic in black culture.12 But Hurston’s polemics do not preclude an active engagement in her literature with African American social and cultural change. While Carby astutely observes that, in Their Eyes, Janie reverses the direction of most black migrants, moving deeper south rather than north, she does not investigate the reasons for and implications of this movement.13 She notes that Hurston situates “the southern, rural folk and patterns of migration in relation to the Caribbean rather than the northern states,” viewing that migration ever southward as yet another displacement (“Politics of Fiction,” 82). Hurston’s evocation of the Caribbean through Vodou, however, allows her to grapple with many of the issues being debated in cosmopolitan, intellectual circles during the Harlem Renaissance.14 In Their Eyes, Hurston comments on issues of class, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity primarily through her use of Vodou imagery. The novel takes up many of the same issues being debated by her contemporaries during the 1920s and 1930s. For example, Harlem was frequently celebrated as unique because it was a gathering place for diverse people of the African diaspora. Alain Locke writes in The New Negro: Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian,

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the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the north and the Negro of the south; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another. (6)

In asserting that “their greatest experience has been the finding of one another,” Locke minimizes any social or cultural tensions that may have existed between the different groups gathered in Harlem and celebrates Harlem as a center of African diasporic culture. This emerging and changing culture, noted for its diversity, is but one of the social transformations Carby believes Hurston should have recognized. Locke’s optimism actually was shared by Hurston, however, and is implicitly echoed in an easily overlooked passage in the novel. In it she describes how the Bahamians and black Americans working in the Everglades overcome their initial trepidation over each other’s foreignness by dancing together. The Bahamians “quit hiding out to hold their dances when they found that their American friends didn’t laugh at them as they feared. Many of the Americans learned to jump and liked it as much as the ‘Saws.’ So they began to hold dances night after night in the quarters, usually behind Tea Cake’s house” (Their Eyes, 146). The relative ease with which these groups overcome their differences suggests that national and ethnic identification can be blurred with a greater awareness and cultivation of cultural similarities, and a greater tolerance of and interest in cultural difference. So, in the midst of their dances, we cannot distinguish between American and Bahamian as they make “living, sculptural, grotesques in the dance” (147). This reference to “sculptural grotesques,” African sculptures brought to life, evokes the dancers’ shared ancestry. This allusion to Africa and the passage’s naive suggestion that cultural, political, and economic differences can be easily eradicated by social interaction reveal that Hurston ascribed to the notion of a unified and idyllic African past. Carby and Gilroy have accurately identified Hurston’s tendency to romanticize the past in this novel, yet I argue that the allusions to Vodou reveal a more complex vision of black Atlantic cultures. Her immersion in tradition, specifically Haitian Vodou tradition, opens the novel up to politicized readings of contemporary African American racial, gender, and class politics. Just as Locke saw the social and political potential of Harlem because

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it was a site of “group expression and self-determination,” Hurston saw that same potential in Haitian Vodou. The elements of the text which Carby identifies as displacements to the South and to the Caribbean actually allow Hurston to explore through metaphor and symbolism the social and political concerns of African Americans in the North, South, and throughout the Caribbean. Hurston was not solely interested in elevating African American folk culture; she was also invested in collecting and recreating through fiction what black people had to say about themselves. Haitian Vodou provided Hurston with the ideal vehicle to voice African diasporic peoples’ (especially women’s) views on their social status and unique experiences, demonstrating that ancient tradition can effectively shape our comprehension of modern cultures that are constantly evolving.

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Notes

1. In The Faces of the Gods, Leslie Desmangles writes, “Thanks to Hollywood and the film industry, what average persons conjure up in their minds when they think of Voodoo is a picture of witches and sorcerers who, filled with hatred, attempt to inflict diseases or even death on other persons by making wax or wooden representations of them, and perforating them with pins. Another popular image of Voodoo or Hoodoo is that of a conglomeration of exotic spells celebrated clandestinely by blacks inebriated with blood” (1–2). Given that the terms “voodoo” and “hoodoo” are saddled with misleading and defamatory meaning, I have chosen to use in this paper the Creole spelling of Vodou and other terminology related to it, except when citing sources that may spell them differently. The Creole spelling also approximates the etymological root, the Dahomean term vodu or vodun, which means “spirit.” 2. Trudier Harris claims that Hurston “excessively packs in folk expressions and beliefs to the extent that the excessively metaphorical folk language becomes an added character, plugging up the cracks between theme and plot, not a smoothly woven, integral part of the whole; language and story seem to have mutually exclusive functions” (Fiction and Folklore, 6). Although the African American folklore functions separately from, and sometimes competes with, the narrative, the Haitian folklore blends in with and extends the narrative’s themes. 3. Hurston’s characterization of Legba as the master of potentiality is supported by other sources. For example, Robert Farris Thompson writes that “God granted Eshu [the Yoruba manifestation of Legba] the force to make all things happen and multiply (ashé) . . . He is . . . the ultimate master of potentiality” (Flash of the Spirit, 18–19). 4. References to God and godlike figures abound. DuPlessis notes that “the absolute beginning of the book begins playing with title materials and meanings by opening issues about words and the Word in relation to gender and racial power. The third paragraph starts with a revisionary articulation of Biblical rhetoric, ‘So the beginning of this was a woman,’ taking the world-creating place of Word or God” (“Power, Judgment,” 109). Lorraine Bethel writes, “Hurston’s first description of Nanny in Their Eyes establishes her as a representative of the religious experience that stands at the center of Afro-American folk tradition. She is described in terms suggestive of a Christ figure. Janie makes Nanny a wreath of ‘palma christi leaves,’ and the words ‘bore’ and ‘pierce’ used in this passage invoke images of the crucifixion” (“Infinity of Conscious Pain,” 13–14). Barbara Johnson and Henry Louis Gates Jr. note that “Joe Starks . . . fondly and unconsciously refers to himself as ‘I god.’ During the lamp-lighting ceremony . . . Joe is represented as the creator (or at least the purchaser) of light” (“Black Idiomatic Free Indirect Discourse,” 73).

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5. “Each loa has its representative colour—red for Ogu, white for Damballah, blue for Ezili etc.” (Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 167). 6. “Ezili being a white loa and a ‘woman of the world’ has a fondness for pale and sugary drinks” (Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 176). 7. Janie’s donning of the overalls can be read as a moment of symbolic transvestitism which disrupts and challenges Eatonville’s social order. In Vested Interests, Marjorie Garber argues that “transvestitism was located at the juncture of class and gender, and increasingly through its agency gender and class were revealed to be commutable, if not equivalent. To transgress against one set of boundaries was to call into question the inviolability of both, and the set of social codes—already demonstrably under attack—by which such categories were policed and maintained” (32). The townsfolk react to Janie’s transgression of class and gender boundaries, seeing the overalls as a violation of their social codes. 8. While some anthropologists mistakenly represent the Rada and Petwo spirits as symbolizing good and evil (Hurston included), the actual significance of these two Vodou pantheons is more complicated than suggested by this binarism. Brown writes: “The Rada spirits are sweet-tempered and dependable; their power resides in their wisdom. . . . They are intimate, familial spirits who are given family titles such as Papa and Kouzen [cousin]. . . . The Petwo spirits, in contrast, are hot-tempered and volatile. They must be handled with care and precision. Debts must be paid and promises kept, or they will badger and harass those who serve them. The power of the Petwo spirits resides in their effectivity, their ability to make things happen” (Mama Lola, 100–101). 9. “Danto’s anger can exceed what is required for strict discipline. At times, it explodes from her with an irrational, violent force. Ezili Danto, like Lasyrenn, has connections with water. A gentle rainfall during the festivities at Saut d’Eau, a mountain pilgrimage site for Ezili Danto (Our Lady of Mount Carmel), is readily interpreted as a sign of her presence; but so is a sudden deluge resulting in mudslides, traffic accidents, and even deaths. . . . Thus Danto’s rage can emerge with the elemental force of a torrential rain, which sweeps away just and unjust alike. This aspect of Ezili Danto might be described as an infant’s eye view of the omnipotent mother” (Brown, Mama Lola, 231). 10. Donald Petesch notes that during the period of enslavement, in sermons and catechisms, “grand moralizing gave way to immediate practical ends: the language of religion became the language of social control” (Spy in the Enemy’s Country, 60). 11. Arnold Rampersad’s assessment of the contributors to The New Negro, some of the most influential black intellectuals of the day, supports my suggestion that the desire to elevate the spirituals to a “higher” art form betrays a belief in the cultural inferiority of African Americans. Rampersad writes, “It is fair to say that, in the face of racial ‘science,’ most of the contributors to the volume accepted the notion of black racial and cultural inferiority compared to the standards of European civilization. Most also believed, however, that the African race was on the move forward, that politically, economically, and culturally, peoples of African descent around the world were engaged in the first

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stages of a transformation that would eventually lead to independence from Europe” (Rampersad, Introduction, xvi). Ironically, most believed that independence from Europe could only be achieved by successfully replicating, with minor adaptations, its cultural, social, and political paradigms. 12. For example, in “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” Hurston asserts, “There never has been a presentation of genuine Negro spirituals to any audience anywhere. What is being sung by the concert artists and glee clubs are the works of Negro composers or adaptors [sic] based on the spirituals” (80). 13. Carby is far from alone in perceiving the novel as being removed from history and reality. Robert Stepto writes, “The narrative takes place in a seemingly ahistorical world: the spanking new all-black town is meticulously bereft of former slave cabins; there are no railroad trains, above or underground, with or without Jim Crow cars; Matt’s mule is a bond with and catalyst for distinct tribal memories and rituals, but these do not include the hollow slogan, ‘forty acres and a mule’; Janie seeks freedom, selfhood, voice, and ‘living’ but is hardly guided—or haunted—by Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman, let alone Frederick Douglass” (“Ascent, Immerson, Narration,” 6). What Stepto calls an “ahistorical world,” Carby names a displacement. Carby remarks upon the text’s avoidance of the present, while Stepto focuses on its avoidance of the past. But just as Hurston implicitly signifies on then contemporary debates and experiences, so does she signify on African American history. One can read the fact that Logan Killicks owns not just forty, but sixty, acres and a mule not as a historicism, but as an ironic commentary on the nation’s unwillingness to realize its promise to the newly emancipated slaves. 14. Deborah E. McDowell makes a similar point about Hurston’s willingness to engage in political dialogue in an essay on Moses, Man of the Mountain. In it, McDowell discusses the ways in which the text’s symbolism critiques the United States’s rhetoric of liberation and reveals its hypocrisy by implicitly juxtaposing the United States’s oppression of African Americans with the ideology of racial purity which fueled Germany’s entry into a world war in 1939. McDowell concludes, “All too often Hurston’s readers have consigned her to Eatonville and left her there on the porch. . . . Even when readers stretch her province to New Orleans and the Caribbean, the sites of her fieldwork, they often read these migrations as extensions of Eatonville, seen as the repository of black folk culture on which all Hurston’s work is dependent. But reducing Eatonville and its symbolic geographic coordinates to the repositories of black ‘folk’ expression that Hurston mined so well regionalizes her work and ensures her removal from a more global context of cultural production and exchange” (“Lines of Descent,” 240).

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Works Cited

Awkward, Michael, ed. Introduction to New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1–28.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Bethel, Lorraine. “ ‘The Infinity of Conscious Pain’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition.” In Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Harold Bloom, 9–17. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Carby, Hazel. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” In New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” ed. Michael Awkward, 71–93. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Desmangles, Leslie. The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Power, Judgment, and Narrative in a Work of Zora Neale Hurston: Feminist Cultural Studies.” In New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” ed. Michael Awkward, 95–123. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Holloway, Karla. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals.” In The Sanctified Church, 79–84. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981. ———. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Originally published in 1938, J. B. Lippincott. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Originally published in 1937, J. B. Lippincott. Johnson, Barbara and Henry Louis Gates Jr. “A Black Idiomatic Free Indirect Discourse.” In Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Harold Bloom, 73–85. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” The New Negro, 3–16. New York: Athenaeum, 1992. ———. Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Opportunity, June 1, 1938. In Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives

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Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, 18. New York: Amistad, 1993. ———. “The New Negro.” The New Negro, 3-16. New York: Athenaeum, 1992. McDowell, Deborah E. “Lines of Descent/Dissenting Lines.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, 230–40. New York: Amistad, 1993. Métraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti. New York: Schocken Books, 1959. O’Neill, Eugene. The Emperor Jones. New York: Random House, 1921. Petesch, Donald A. A Spy in the Enemy’s Country: The Emergence of Modern Black Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. Rampersad, Arnold. Introduction to The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke, ix–xxiii. New York: Athenaeum, 1992. Southerland, Ellease. “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.” In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 172–83. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1979. Stepto, Robert B. “Ascent, Immersion, Narration.” In Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Harold Bloom, 5–17. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Sundquist, Eric. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern AfricanAmerican Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Thomas, H. Nigel. From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983. Walker, Alice. “Looking for Zora.” In I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. New York: Feminist, 1979. Washington, Mary Helen. “ ‘I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands’: Emergent Female Hero.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, 98–109. New York: Amistad, 1993. Wright, Richard. Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. New Masses, October 5, 1937. In Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, 16–17. New York: Amistad, 1993.

4

“Black Cat Bone and Snake Wisdom” New Orleanian Hoodoo, Haitian Voodoo, and Rereading Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Pamela Glenn Menke

When twenty-five-year-old Zora Neale Hurston “headed her toenails” to New Orleans in 1928, she began the mystical journey that would take her from New Orleans to the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Haiti—a journey that would deeply influence her fiction (Hurston, Mules and Men, 183). Although Hurston became familiar with conjuring and root work during her formative years in Florida, the catalyst for what John Lowe has described as Hurston’s “cosmic” consciousness was her four-month sojourn in New Orleans (Jump at the Sun, 334). There, she literally acquired what Moses obtains from the Ethiopian Jethro in Hurston’s biblical revision, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), “the black cat bone and snake wisdom” (280). She became deeply engaged in the voodoo1 worship, mystery, and ritual that would provide her mystical home, her site of legendary being, her place of creative power, and the source of an imagistic vocabulary to refigure her world. As Karla Holloway insists, Hurston’s “vodu” study opened for her the “potential of the black word to ‘know the thunder’ and ‘summon gods’ ” (Character of the Word, 111). Gained at great personal risk through disciplined preparation, ritual, sacrifice, and reverence, voodoo served as more than a metaphor for Hurston. It served as a dark and powerful alternative to the rigidity, hypocrisy, and formality This essay was originally published in Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana, ed. Suzanne Disheroon Green and Lisa Abney, 123–39. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001.

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of a white-inscribed Eurocentric worldview. To appreciate Hurston’s profound achievement and her subversive imagination, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse should be considered integral companion texts to Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God.2 Hurston’s immersion into black culture and religion was encouraged by the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas, with whom she studied at Barnard College from 1925 to 1927. Hurston idolized Boas, whom she called “Papa Franz,” and remembered the “sabre cut on his cheek, which is said he got in a duel at Heidelberg” (Dust Tracks, 170). With Boas’s assistance, Hurston secured funds for her initial trip to Florida and, more importantly, gained the academic “spy-glass” that enabled her to value the black folk culture that had formed her: “When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism. . . . But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at the garment” (Mules and Men, 1). Hurston returned to her home in Eatonville, Florida, to collect the vivid folk stories so familiar from her childhood; after a year of “gathering and culling over folk-tales,” she turned her attention to voodoo (Mules and Men, 183). Voodoo, insists Hurston, keeps “alive the power of Africa” (Mules and Men, 183). Hurston organized her fieldwork, accomplished over a series of years from 1927 and 1928 through the early 1930s, into Mules and Men (1935), a collection of black folktales, religious practices, and wisdom that noted American folklorist Alan Lomax praised in 1960 as “the most engaging, genuine, and skillfully written book in the field of folklore” (Mules and Men, 183; qtd. in Rampersad, xvi). As Hurston begins Mules and Men, she explains the way black folk protect their knowledge from curious white men by using “feather-bed resistance” (Mules and Men, 2). Her sense of protected and privileged information available only to the initiated reflects what will become her own artistic stance: “I’ll set something outside the door of my mind for him [the white man] to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind” (Mules and Men, 3). A study of hoodoo with its “thousands of secret adherents” is even more difficult, explains Hurston, because of its illegality in New Orleans (Mules and Men, 183, 192). Her solution was to become a hoodoo practitioner and priestess in New Orleans, which “is now and ever has been the Hoodoo capital of America” (Mules and Men, 183). The extensive “Hoodoo” section of Mules and Men is much more than a folklore collection for serious Hurston students. Mules and Men, in

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conjunction with Hurston’s account of Haitian voodoo in Tell My Horse (1938), provides the context for Hurston’s literary and spiritual project. These texts particularly contextualize her now canonical Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written during her immersion in Haitian voodoo, which led to her 1938 study Tell My Horse. Voodoo ceremonies and mysteries inform Hurston’s great creation of her own Mambo Janie3 in Their Eyes, but, as Hurston observes in Mules and Men, “mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing” (185). “Hoodoo,” the second part of Mules and Men, provides the starting place for this creation. Its seven sections are not manicured examples of scholarly objectivity, but instead offer a detailed and often personal account of Hurston’s various initiations, hoodoo practices, formulae, rituals, and conjure stories, as well as the history and miraculous deeds of nineteenthcentury New Orleans conjure queen Marie Laveau. Love problems, death curses, predictions, and root work spill over the pages, and actual prescriptions are included in the appendix. In Mules and Men, Hurston enters Louisiana as an empathetic scholar and a novice; when she departs, her scholarly mantle has been replaced by the coiled snake “crown of power,” and she has become a proficient hoodoo disciple and conjure woman (Mules and Men, 198). In the process, Boas’s scientific objectivity and Eurocentric consciousness are replaced by the African powers and complicated rituals of the “two-headed doctors” with whom Hurston studied, including Laveau’s nephew Luke Turner and Father Joe Watson. Studying hoodoo is one thing; living it and practicing it, another. From the many accounts Hurston offers in Mules and Men, two of these instances particularly suggest the intensity of her experiences. Turner helps her earn the crown of power. After cleansing herself, lying naked on Marie Laveau’s snake skin, and fasting for days, Hurston receives her spirit name, a name that will resonate in Their Eyes: “The Rain-Bringer. . . . The Great One was to speak to me in storms” (Mules and Men, 200). No gentlemanly sabre scar like Boas’s for Zora—she is painted in yellow and red, a line of lightning down her back, a sun on her head, and a pair of eyes on her cheeks, “a sign that I could see in more ways than one” (Mules and Men, 200). In the middle of the ceremonial altar among red and white bouquets, thirty-six yellow candles, and a bottle of holy water is “a huge communion candle” with her name. She mixes her blood with Luke’s and his colleagues’ in a cup of wine, and all drink from it. She shares a ceremonial meal of “five large iced cakes in different colors, a plate of honeyed St Joseph’s bread, a plate of serpent-shaped breads, spinach and egg cakes fried in olive oil, breaded Chinese okra . . . roast veal and wine” (Mules and Men, 201). Later that evening in a swamp with candles

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burning at the area’s four corners, she participates in a ritualistic killing of a sheep, her written petitions to the Great One stuffed in its mouth. In a later account, she receives from Father Joe Watson the power of invisibility and magic through the Magic Cat Bone so central to the philandering hero’s undoing in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, which was published in 1934 just before the publication of Mules and Men. After becoming Boss of Candles with the power “to work with the spirit anywhere on earth,” Hurston secures the magic cat bone (Mules and Men, 216). Under Watson’s tutelage, she catches a black cat, goes to a place in the woods with a circle of nine horseshoes, curses the cat, and drops it into boiling water. At midnight, she passes each of the cat’s bones through her mouth “until one tasted bitter.” Suddenly, she is seized with terror and sees “great beast­like creatures” thundering and hears “indescribable noises, sights, feelings. Death was at hand!” The next day, she is home “with a small white bone for me to carry” (221). By the end of Mules and Men, she has become proficient in the secret knowledge known only by hoodoo doctors. Her privileged position is made clear when Hurston describes her part in a secret and rare ceremonial hoodoo “death-to-­theenemy” dance in which “no layman ever participates” (239). Her identification with black folk practices and religion is evident as part 2 of Mules and Men commences; however, she maintains some objectivity as an observer and reporter. Artfully, she leads the reader through her initiations, insights, and knowledge as the text progresses. The reader, too, is initiated into the “burning . . . flame” of this “suppressed religion” (Mules and Men, 183). As the text ends, Hurston speaks not as a reporter, but as an enlightened black self. She explains her transformation through a simple folk anecdote about Sis Cat. Sis Cat is first fooled by a juicy rat who convinces her that proper manners dictate clean face and hands before a meal (in this case, the rat) is consumed. The wily rat escapes while the cat cleans herself. The trick does not work the second time. When the once-again trapped rat challenges her, the cat explains, “Oh, Ah got plenty manners. . . . But Ah eats mah dinner and washes mah face and uses mah manners afterwards.” So declares Huston in the closing line, “I’m sitting here like Sis Cat, washing my face and usin’ my manners” (Mules and Men, 245–46). Hurston’s literary manners result in the written text, but they cannot forestall, match, or fully reveal what her true nature has led her to consume. She has become one with mystery and with her own ancient religion. Following her study of West Indian Obeah practice in the Bahamas and Jamaica, Hurston’s quest for the fount of this ancient religion was most fully realized during her 1937 sojourn in Haiti where the American occupation (1915–34) had recently ended. Hurston comments

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on the immense significance of Haitian voodoo in her letter requesting the renewal of the fellowship that funded her Caribbean study: “It is more than the sympathetic magic that is practiced by the hoodoo doctors in the United States. It is as formal as the Catholic church anywhere. . . . you can see why a letter is difficult for me. It is like explaining the planetary theory on a postage stamp” (qtd. in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 246). Hurston is convinced about the mythic dimensions of voodoo and in Tell My Horse laments the absence of a study comparable to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, so central to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The account in Mules and Men of New Orleans hoodoo doctor Turner stands in stark contrast to the paternalistic ethnographer Boas, as does the concluding account of the white houngan, the voodoo priest Dr. Reser in Tell My Horse. Reser has Haiti deep within him. She describes his possessed speech: Whatever the stuff of which the soul of Haiti is made, he was that. You could see the snake god of Dahomey hovering about him. Africa was in his tones. He throbbed and glowed. He used English words but he talked to me from another continent. He was dancing before his gods and the fire of Shango [the important legendary god for Hurston who bore his spirit name] played about him. (Tell My Horse, 257)

As in Mules and Men, Hurston presents detailed portraits and accounts of voodoo ceremonies, practitioners, and “instances of miraculous cures, warnings, foretelling of events and prophecies” (Tell My Horse, 256). She begins with a detailed discussion of the pantheon of gods, particularly the Rada or healing, positive gods headed by Damballah and the Petro or the evil gods, who have the power of death. She provides details of initiation ceremonies, religious observances, and blood sacrifice: pigs, goats, and dogs. She reveals the presence of secret societies who eat human flesh, who create zombies (the walking dead whom Hurston believes were drugged), and who promulgate evil. Hurston was “a woman of uncommon courage . . . a pioneer,” remarks ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who draws heavily on Hurston’s work in The Serpent and the Rainbow (215), in his 1985 study of Haitian poisons, culture, and zombies. Tell My Horse is a far more protected account than Mules and Men. Even in Mules and Men, she demurs from sharing all she has learned: “I studied under Turner five months and learned all of the Laveau routines; but in this book all of the works of any doctor cannot be given” (202). However, she describes at length her own initiations and her active

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hoodoo work. In Tell My Horse, she is a terrified and impressed reporter of profound magic and is well aware of the reprisals, even death, “for the adept who talks” (217). Her own initiation as Canzo, a second and rarely sought step toward priesthood, is described from a distant, third-person vantage point as “the usual routine” and is mentioned only briefly in her mystical autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942): “I went Canzo in Voodoo ceremonies in Haiti” (Tell My Horse, 173; Dust Tracks, 205). She was convinced that her grave illness toward the end of her Haitian stay was related to her voodoo research (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 258). Clearly, Hurston believed not only that some information must be protected, but that revealing it placed her at risk. This reticence, indeed fear, may explain the overt absence of voodoo mysteries from Their Eyes and her diminution of voodoo as no more “invalid than any other religion” in Dust Tracks even as she notes its practice by “millions” (205). Additionally, Hurston must have believed that much of her reading audience could not truly hear or interpret what she had to tell. This lack of telling confirms Hurston’s allegiance to hoodoo/voodoo and her role as voudienne with authentic ancient knowledge and power. The process of disguising secret knowledge with half-hints becomes evident in Their Eyes, which seemingly is bereft of the catalytic hoodoo and Afrocentric material in Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Nonetheless, hoodoo/ voodoo mysticism and legend are central in Hurston’s first novel and are powerfully but subtly present in her second. The two texts work as fictional reflections of Hurston’s mystical quest. Both novels are about godly possession and dispossession. Both novels share Hurston’s home place, the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, as an important setting, and both contain characters modeled on actual people. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine Hurston refigures her parents John and Lucy. In Their Eyes, she refigures an important part of herself. These texts reflect Hurston’s crossings back and forth and among her childhood, her literary and anthropological materials, her autobiographical and mystical selves. Jonah’s Gourd Vine’s John, a high yellow, “punkin-colored bastard” is a bundle of crossings (10). He constantly crosses and recrosses rivers, jobs, boundaries, towns, and women. He is killed (as was Hurston’s father) at a railroad crossing. He is “mingled people,” an emblem of cultural mixtures and cultural changes (9). When John encounters the white Judge Pearson, who is most likely John’s biological father, Pearson’s first words—“What a fine stud! Why boy, you would have brought five thousand dollars on the block in slavery time!”—signal the white stereotype in which John is enclosed (17). His paternal heritage condemns him to

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act out that stereotype. Although John is powerful, a quick study, friendly, and eventually a popular and respected community leader, he is all mouth and physical action. John, who becomes a self-ordained and powerful preacher, defends his philandering behavior before his congregation by explaining, “Ahm uh natchel man” (122). His “nature” as white-inscribed “stud” and his possessive violence contribute to John’s downfall. He is jealously possessive of his wife, Lucy. Enraged by her accusations of his infidelities, he strikes her. In words that later reflect Tea Cake’s assurance in Their Eyes, John had assured Lucy of their marriage: “Jes’ you put yo’ pendence in me. Ah means tub prop you up on eve’y leanin’ side” (79). Ironically, it is bright, loyal Lucy and her keen understanding of the community who props John up time after time. Aware of his many, many relationships with other women, she finally confronts him. He slaps her; Lucy turns her face to the wall and soon dies. John’s biological paternity is white, but his spiritual and maternal heritage is West African. Early in the novel, the Pearson plantation blacks celebrate the end of cotton picking with a barbecue. They play games and dance to the fiddle until someone cries, “Hey you dere, us ain’t no white folks! Put down dat fiddle! Us don’t want no fiddles, neither no guitars, neither no banjoes. Less clap!” (29). All rejoice to the “furious music of the little drum whose body was still in Africa, but whose soul sung around a fire in Alabama” (30). John’s voice and his powerfully gifted preaching are conduits for this drum spirit: “He rolled his African drum up to the altar, and called his Congo Gods by Christian names. One night at the altar-­call he cried out his barbaric poetry to his ‘Wonder-workin’ God so effectively that three converts came to religion under the sound of his voice” (89). John’s death is commemorated in a requiem preaching, and the drum sounds again. This time, the ancient drum “O-go-doe, the voice of Death—that promises nothing, that speaks with tears only, and of the past. . . . He wuz a man, and nobody knowed ’im but God. . . . It was ended” (202). John is indelibly tied to mastery: a master God, a master white, and a master male self who disregards his beloved Lucy. He is the conduit of West African spirit, but as a Christian preacher, much like Hurston’s Macedonia Baptist Chruch preacher father, he is not a hoodoo initiate or practitioner. Instead, he is the victim of conjuring. John’s lover Hattie goes to a conjure woman, An’ Dangie Dewoe, whose use of the cat bone, candles, spells, and ritual result in the disastrous fight between John and Lucy as well as Lucy’s death. Three months later, John marries Hattie, who continues to control him through the powerful root of John de Conquer [sic], which she braids in her hair. Discovering Hattie’s subterfuge, John beats

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her to break the spell, but he is the one destroyed. Hattie divorces him. He loses the respect of the community, and John becomes confused and pitiful—the man with drum skin is only skin. He is not an agent of vision; he has no interior dream, no figurative imagination. He is all physical sensation, all “daily self” (142). On the final pages of the novel we are told “he was really searching for a lost self and crying like the old witch with her shed skin shrunken by red pepper and salt, ‘Ole skin, doncher know me?’ But the skin was never to fit again” (183). Although Hurston uses a biblical source for the novel’s title, John’s ancestral African father is High John de Conquer, whom Hurston identifies in Mules and Men as the “great human culture hero in Negro folklore” and in a 1943 essay as the spirit of Africa; his “singing-symbol was a drum-beat” (Sanctified Church, 69). “It is no accident,” she continues, “that High John de Conquer has evaded the ears of white people. . . . You can’t know what folks won’t tell you. If they, the white people heard some scraps, they could not understand because they had nothing to hear things like that with” (70). High John is freedom; he is interior and ever present. He gave enslaved blacks “gift song” memories (78). Those residual songs of African heritage are ones to which Hurston refers in the Haitian folktale that concludes Tell My Horse. In this tale, God calls Shango, “the god of thunder and lighting” to make a “shaft of lightning” for dancing, singing birds to slide down and to bring their “music and laughter” and joy “so the world can forget its troubles” (Tell My Horse, 261). Unlike John, whose words are infused with spirit while his soul is empty, Janie’s progression in Their Eyes is away from the culturally inscribed word to the lingual spirit that infuses it and her. Unlike John, Janie is not a community leader, a powerful preacher, a God speaker whom the God-watching congregation “bears up” as it does John. Hurston constructs herself and her imaged counterpart Janie as legendary figures within a site generated by African legend, myth, and ritual. This site is what Hurston calls “the inner heart of truth” (Dust Tracks, 277). Its substance is “soul-stuff’ (Dust Tracks, 322). John’s “natchel man” is Janie’s godself in mystical union with nature or, as Hurston describes it in Dust Tracks, a self who has struggled with life, who has conquered death, and so who has become “correlated to the world” (347–48). Janie is no longer part of the male Watcher world; she has entered into the “truth” dream. Janie’s remembering a “flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again” (Their Eyes, 23) in the opening section is an early sign of the sensory comprehension Janie rediscovers. Hurston wrote Their Eyes during her Haitian immersion in a sacred realm filled with astonishing mysteries far surpassing New Orleans

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hoodoo and Jamaican Obeah. She describes her compulsion to produce the novel: “It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks” (Dust Tracks, 212). Hemenway remarks that “Haiti released a flood of language and emotion,” but attributes a large part of the emotion to a passionate, “stormy,” and “doomed” love affair between Hurston and a West Indian, a response that Hurston herself prompts in Dust Tracks (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 230–31). Nellie McKay, who also notes the autobiographical elements, views the novel as emancipatory, “forging a new history constructed out of the handing down of one woman’s story of liberation to another” as does Susan Willis, who offers Pheoby’s decision to make Sam take her fishing as “the book’s radical single statement” that reconstitutes “domestic life and space” (“Crayon Enlargements,” 68; Willis, Specifying, 52, 159). Other critics also note the direct Haitian connection,4 but they focus on the rich complexity of the vernacular, authorial, and communal voices in Their Eyes and on the Afrocentric expressions central to Hurston’s narrative strategies. Baker and Holloway position their interpretations within the “image work” of conjure and Afrocentric word, but they do not pursue the intertextual resonances with Hurston’s hoodoo/voodoo allegiance and knowledge (Baker, Workings of the Spirit, 63). For example, Pheoby gains the ability from “Janie’s revealed images . . . to both read and write the world in new and liberating ways” as Baker suggests; however, Pheoby is at a remarkably vulnerable and early stage of her imagistic journey (Workings of the Spirit, 63). She may not be in Janie’s “still bait” (Their Eyes, 138) stage, but she is nowhere close to approaching Janie’s mystic power. While Pheoby will insist Sam take her fishing, Janie is gathering the entire mystic world in her “fish-net” (Their Eyes, 284, 286). Hurston enacts her fictional counterpart Janie as a legendary figure within a site generated by Afrocentric legend, myth, and ritual; in the process, Hurston creates a lingual mambo based on her Louisianan and Haitian hoodoo/voodoo initiations and her serious participation in conjuring. Their Eyes and Tell My Horse reveal and confirm Hurston’s spiritual, creative, and anthropological truth: the agents of vision are the people themselves; the spirit dreams and demons are those they themselves mouth. As she states in the one-­sentence introduction to the chapter that gives Tell My Horse its title, “Gods always behave like the people who make them” (219). Their Eyes becomes for Hurston a purging of male-dominant voodoo and an expression of her own sacredness, a making of her own Mambo. She creates a central female figure who first accepts and then releases the communal God, who engages in rituals of blood sacrifice. She then awards her the gift of tongue and the ability to conjure.

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As revealed in Tell My Horse, Hurston discovered her imagistic center in Haiti: woman’s “mouth” as the primal source of being. The first words of the opening voodoo chapter offer a sexual creation myth that she attributes to her spiritual guide and voodoo mentor, Dr. Holly, the head of the Société de Couleve (Snake Society): “in the beginning God and His woman went into the bedroom together to commence creation. That was the beginning of everything and Voodoo is just as old as that” (113). Holly’s ensuing account metaphorically privileges the sexual dominance of a master God and the life-giving womb of woman. Dr. Holly then asks Hurston, “What is the truth?” Knowing that she cannot answer, “he answered 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. There is no mystery beyond the mysterious source of life.” The priestess performs “a dance analogous to the nuptial flight of the queen bee. The Mambo discards six veils . . . falls . . . naked, and spiritually intoxicated. . . . It is considered the highest honor for all males participating to kiss her organ of creation” (Tell My Horse, 113–14). In Their Eyes, Hurston answers Holly’s metaphysical question with her own truth. In place of the Mambo and the Queen Bee dance, Hurston creates Janie, a blossom awaiting the bee. She affirms Janie’s sacredness by awarding her nature’s language: “the words of the trees and the wind” (Their Eyes, 44) reveal to Janie the destructive force and oppressive power of the male God and the sacred mysteries of sensual love. Hurston’s novel is about learning to conjure dreams: to undo the bad ones and to create the good ones. The “organ of creation” to be “kissed” in veneration in the novel is the power source of the literary conjure woman: not the sexual organs, but the telling mouth. As Hurston declares in Dust Tracks, “I heard the tongues of those who had speech and listened at the lips of books. . . . I am one with the infinite” (277, 279). Two separate, seemingly unconnected images of stones and mud-balls from Tell My Horse and Their Eyes place the legendary Shango, whose name Hurston carries in Mules and Men, at the center of her creative spirit. In Haiti, as she was completing Their Eyes, Hurston visited the Île de la Gonâve, a womanly place of special peace: “I found on this remote island a peace I have never known anywhere else on earth. La Gonave is the mother of peace. Its outlines, which from Port-au-Prince look like a sleeping woman, are prophetic” (Tell My Horse, 135). Hurston then repeats a Haitian legend about a sleeping goddess who has in her grasp the god’s message of peace: “When she wakes up, she will give it

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to the people” (134). On this island, Hurston learns about the “loa-” or spirit-invested stones. Some are stone implements of “gone aborigines,” and others are stones of a particular shape and color, but all are filled with the presence of Shango, “who hurls his bolts and makes stones that are full of power” (136). Explains Hurston, these stones, inhabited by and emblematic of gods and legendary ancestors, are ritually baptized, placed on family altars, and handed down from generation to generation. In Their Eyes, we again encounter the godly stones as Hurston transforms her image of La Gonave the sleeping woman into the awakening Janie. The mystical power of the magic stones has been submerged in the deadening “muck” of everyday existence, and Janie has become “still-bait” (138). Jealous angels have battered, fragmented, and beaten the God-made glittering humans; nothing is left but a “little spark” with a “shine and a song.” Still dissatisfied, the angels have encased each little spark in mud; the lonesome spark persists, but the “mud is deaf and dumb” (139). In her grandmother’s and Joe’s outside worlds, Janie is “still-bait,” a passive creature awaiting consumption (138). In her inside world, however, Janie has the magic stone power of shine. Chipping away the deaf and dumb mud of her obeisance to others, she is a “mud-ball” whose shine is beginning to glimmer. At the conclusion of the novel, she has contradicted her grandmother, Killicks, Joe, and Tea Cake and their destructive definitions of reality; she is at one with her dream vision. As Janie goes to her sacred bedroom, she carries a light “like a spark of sunstuff” (139, 285). Janie’s ability to discover, to make, and to be part of sacred meaning lights her way. She has the gift of creation, and the stuff of that creation lies within her memory. She fashions and embraces the living essence of Tea Cake. Another resonance with Tell My Horse is the aquatic images that conclude Their Eyes. La Gonave’s womanly shape is explained by a legend of the goddess Cilia, who is born on the back of a whale and who lies there sleeping. As Their Eyes closes, Janie, who was once a lure for others, has become a legendary fisherwoman, a Mistress of the Waters like Cilia. She pulled “in her horizon like a great fish-net . . . from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes” (286). Janie’s power releases her godly spirit from the mudstone, and her “daily self,” unlike preacher John’s, is transformed into mystical vision. Like Mules and Men, Tell My Horse is filled with the sacrificial use of chickens, pigeons, pigs, goats, and dogs. To assure domestic happiness, Damballah, “the highest and most powerful of gods,” requires a weekly sacrifice of a “pair of white chickens, hen and cock” (118–19). Hurston’s

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authorial voice in Their Eyes acknowledges the interplay of divinity, human fear, and blood sacrifice: “All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood” (216). Ritual sacrifice is performed to appease the gods, to secure favors, and to gain freedom from possession by an unfriendly god or demon. Janie’s historical self is enmeshed in a God image that requires blood sacrifice. To be coupled with a man requires worshipping his God-given dominance. She is “possessed” by him and by the male images of God; she must dispossess her “self” to secure her historical and spiritual freedom. The sacrificial rituals Janie performs to end this “possession” use the weapons of her victims. She first achieves her victims’ “dreams” and then cuts them away in the quest for her own. Janie first destroys the hope of her grandmother Nanny, who stands as the damaged “foundation of ancient power that no longer mattered” (26). Nanny, who lives through sacrifice, believes in the Christian Lord’s provisions: “De Lawd will provide.” Her dream is one of male protection; her fears are of male supremacy. “De white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. . . . Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you” (29). Janie’s marriage to Logan Killicks seems to fulfill Nanny’s dream: “you is wid de onliest organ in town, amongst colored folks, in yo’ parlor. Got a house bought and paid for and sixty acres uh land” (41). Janie’s subsequent disgust for Logan Killicks not only shatters Nanny’s dream of a proud married life, it also destroys Nanny. Dismayed by Janie’s continuing vision of romantic love, Nanny dies a broken woman. Janie then sacrifices Joe Starks and Tea Cake. Joe with his repetitive exclamation “I god” teaches her the killing power of words. Henry Louis Gates Jr. identifies Joe’s authorial power as “the figure of the male author . . . who has authored both Eatonville and Janie’s existences” (Signifying Monkey, 206). Joe has a dream of his own self-construction: “Ah told you in de very first beginnin’ dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice. You oughta be glad, ’cause dat makes uh big woman outa you” (Their Eyes, 74). Imprisoned by his male behavior, Janie learns to pretend and not to mix her “inside and her outside” (112–13): “Maybe he ain’t nothin’, . . . but he is something in my mouth. He’s got tuh be else Ah ain’t got nothin’ tuh live for. Ah’ll lie and say he is” (118). Increasingly disillusioned, she begins to challenge his supremacy. When he makes bitter fun of her sagging

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“rump,” she spits him out of her mouth: “Talkin’ ’bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life” (123). She rids herself of the lie and, figuratively, of him. According to her friend Pheoby, the power of Janie’s words is believed by some to be the result of conjuring, “a fix” (127). Distraught with Pheoby’s information about the town rumors, Janie goes to the ailing Joe and confronts him: “Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me” (133). She literally talks him into impotence and death: “Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness. . . . There was nothing to do in life anymore” (123–24). Janie’s final sacrifice is Tea Cake. Janie confesses to Tea Cake her fearful reluctance to trust him: “Oh, Tea Cake, don’t make no false pretense wid me!” He promises vigorously, “Janie, Ah hope God may kill me, if Ah’m lyin’ ” (165). Ironically and appropriately, God does just that. Tea Cake dallies with Nunkie and then, like his charismatic fictional predecessor preacher John, “whips” Janie for standing up to him. And two gods get him. The destructive hurricane God produces the mad dog whose bite robs Tea Cake of sense and self. Next the human Janie literally kills him and then consumes her sweet Tea Cake, awarding him eternal life in her truth dreams. Tea Cake, like Nanny, is fooled by a God who betrays him. Good times and laughter serve as Tea Cake’s god. A perpetual gambler, Tea Cake, grinning and shooting dice, discounts the hurricane. Janie hears the rolling thunder that heralds the destructive God enslaving them all: “Ole Massa is doin’ His work now” (Their Eyes, 235). Bitten by the mad dog, Tea Cake becomes a jealous “fiend” who takes a pistol and aims it at Janie. Tea Cake’s bullet misses Janie, but her sure shot destroys him. In that death-giving act, Janie proclaims her own transformation. As the narrator explains, Janie is no longer “her sacrificing self” (273). Tea Cake’s claiming of Janie is ended. Blood sacrifice completed, Janie’s historical self is eradicated. The male God of possession and the woman’s companion dream of self-sacrifice are concluded. Janie’s spiritual development encircles her historical development. The womb as “sexual organ” in the voodoo Mambo’s “truth” is replaced by “the mouth” as the source of creation. Womb images shape Hurston’s novel. Nanny’s “basin” and “spit cup” represent her sacred source and her history. Janie’s pear-blossom self is a sweet source for male tasting, and as Janie changes, her passive blossom self becomes a mouth in which she contains her men and which she offers to her woman friend, Pheoby. Nanny and her daughter have been “spit cups”: repositories of dominant male fluid. As a slave, Nanny is a concubine to her white master; her

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daughter is raped by a schoolteacher. She insists that Janie marry Logan Killicks for protection: “Ah can’t die easy thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white or black is makin’ a spit cup outa you” (Their Eyes, 37). In her dismay over Janie’s unhappy response to what Nanny views as a good marriage, she falls on her knees, prays to God, and enters her interior self, her mental “basin,” which holds an “infinity of conscious pain.” She prays to the Lord, but is not delivered. She falls “heavily across the bed” and is dead a month later (43). Her granddaughter’s womb image is more romantic and more pervasive. Janie’s womb is a blossom opening to a bee’s tasting again and again. Janie equates the beginning of her “conscious life” with sexual arousal (23), when she is enchanted by a blossoming pear tree. She watches as the “dust-bearing bee” sinks “into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight” (23). Upon her first kiss by young Johnny Taylor, Janie is ardently open to male possession. She becomes “flower dust.” Joe Starks is proclaimed as “a bee for her bloom” (54), but his constant emotional and physical abuse shatters her “blossomy” image (112). Tea Cake looks “like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom.” While Janie views his male stride as wondrous, the narrator images it as destructive: “He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world. . . . Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. . . . He was a glance from God” (161). The narrator describes his actions as godly, and Janie succumbs joyously to his “self-crushing love” (192). In the opening of her story, Janie accepts the “dissolution” in her grandmother’s voice. She removes herself from her bee and blossom dream, extends “herself outside of her dream and went inside of the house.” “That,” we are told, “was the end of her childhood” (26). Her sensual experiences with Tea Cake represent for Janie a second beginning. The bedroom they share becomes the Tell My Horse creation crucible as God and his woman enter the bedroom to begin creation. The bedroom is the sacred place: Janie’s sensual source of being. Janie eventually returns home to that dream. Her reentry, however, is not as the woman of a God, but as a goddess woman who can silence history and conjure dreams. Shadows of the water ritual Hurston describes in Tell My Horse fill the final pages of Their Eyes. The ceremony of Tete L’eau, which Hurston describes in Tell My Horse, is held late at night when the moon is shining. The participants eat fine food and then “drape their offerings of colored cotton cords” on a sacred tree. The shrine is surrounded by the legend of “a beautiful, luminous virgin” who “lit in the fronds of a

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palm tree . . . waved her gorgeous wings and blessed the people” (Tell My Horse, 230–31). The people “undress and climb the misted rocks [carrying candles] so that the sacred water may wet their bodies” (231). Janie, too, is a winged once-again virgin. In their shared joy, Tea Cake caresses Janie’s hair: “It feels jus’ lak underneath uh dove’s wing next to my face” (Their Eyes, 157). Tea Cake, whose given name is “Vergible Woods,” is the tree place on which the newly virginal Janie lights. Janie reveres the place of that love: “ ‘Dis house ain’t so absent of things lak it used tuh be befo’ Tea Cake come along. It’s full uh thoughts, ’specially dat bedroom’ ” (284). Like the water-ritual participants who fill themselves with food, the goddess/participant Janie later eats the much-appreciated food gift of Pheoby’s mulatto rice and tells her story. At the novel’s conclusion, Janie ascends to her sacred place. Carrying a light in her hand, Janie climbs the stairs and conjures Tea Cake, who appears draped with the “sun for a shawl.” Janie is wetted by the river, pulling in “her horizon like a great fish-net” (286). The final symbolic ritual is Janie’s dispossessing herself of others’ tales and claiming the authority of her own mouth. In the key Tell My Horse chapter, which gives her anthropological work its title, Hurston presents the invisible Guedé who “mounts” his subject and speaks through his subject’s mouth (220). Hurston explains the phrase “ ‘Parlay cheval ou’ is in daily, hourly use in Haiti and no doubt is used as a blind for selfexpression. . . . one is forced to the conclusion that a great deal of the Guedé ‘mounts’ have something to say and lack the courage to say it except under the cover of Brave Guedé. . . . It seems to be his mission to expose and reveal” (220, 223). Returning to her home place after burying Tea Cake, Janie describes the porch sitters as “Mouth-Almighty.” “Tongueless” in their white-dominated days, they are “lords of sounds” in the evening: “They chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish” (Their Eyes, 10). They gossip and demean and imprison others in their lies. Janie learns their weapon and uses it on Joe Starks. Tea Cake’s laughing, transforming, loving mouth and fluids fail him as well. Janie no longer needs to be “mounted” to create dreams. She no longer needs to hold “lies” in her mouth. She can enter her own creative mouth and conjure her own happiness. Tea Cake is literally in her mouth as she tells Pheoby the story. Her feast completed, she enters her bedroom at the novel’s conclusion, and “the place tasted fresh again” (285). Hurston describes her effort to explain Haitian voodoo as “an effect of the whole in the round” (Tell My Horse, 131). Their Eyes represents a similar effort. Janie’s mouth is fluid, mobile, and alive. Her mouth, like

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Hurston’s mouth, encircles the novel. Its liquidity signifies the original source of being, the mystic homeplace Hurston describes in the original conclusion to Dust Tracks: “I have found out that my real home is in the water, that the earth is only my stepmother. My old man, the Sun, sired me out of the sea” (347). The encroachments on this liquidity may attempt to contain it, define it, but it has the godly freedom to shape itself as it wills. Janie instructs Pheoby who will be doing her “telling” to the “Watchers.” Pheoby becomes the new initiate, the disciple of Mambo Janie. As Janie explains to her eager friend Pheoby, “You got tuh go there tuh know there” (Their Eyes, 285). The “there” to which one must journey is the site of what Hurston calls “the inner heart of truth”; its substance is “soul-stuff” (Dust Tracks, 277, 322). Janie becomes a god self in mystical union with nature. When Janie decides to acquiesce to Joe’s omnipotence and pretend his importance, Hurston’s authorial voice ironically explains, “She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop” (119). In the action preceding this commentary, Janie has accepted her own power to permit Joe’s dominance by becoming “reconciled to things” (119). Unlike the books that Janie has not read, this Hurston book reverses such artifice. In this book, Janie will not be a minuscule distillation of the heavens and the world, but a powerful and godlike being who is world. This book, by implication, is different from others. As its title suggests, it is a book filled with god signs awaiting interpretation. As a child, Janie recognizes the authenticity of the ancient “flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again” (23). She knows the language of natural creation, and she envisions its forms: “She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether” (44). Yet she cannot translate herself into the spiritual knowing. Her visionary powers increase as she begins to move toward dream vision and away from imprisoning images. Not long after her decision to hold the lie of Joe’s potency in her mouth, she notices his aging and acknowledges his attempt to encase her in the same temporal space. Her recognition of his need to image her in his own deteriorating time opens her to a vision of truth: “If he thought to deceive her, he was wrong. For the first time, she could see a man’s head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted out of the tunnel of his mouth” (120). Her truth vision releases her from his imagistic traps, and her verbal truth destroys him. Upon his death, she retrieves her “girl self,” now a handsome woman, from the “looking glass” (134). She re-pictures herself again through her sensual love of Tea Cake. As we reconsider the passage in which

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Janie revels in her early love for him, we find an important expression of her visionary power. After their lovemaking, she is able to make her own love vision: “she got up and opened the window and let Tea Cake leap forth and mount to the sky on a wind. That was the beginning of things” (163). Interior vision, like the “flute song,” is apprehended, but to experience its power you must “know your material so well you can sense the violation” (Dust Tracks, 197). Hurston explains her ability to collect Bahamian songs: “Even if you do not know the song that is being used for padding, you can tell the change in rhythm and tempo. The words do not count . . . The tune is the unity of the thing” (Dust Tracks, 197–98). In order for Janie to recapture the “tune,” she must rediscover her own image-making power. She must be open to the spirit source. Hurston explains her own artistry as the expression of a possessed spirit: “the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded” (Dust Tracks, 213). The artistic inhabitant of this site is god-privileged to catch the spiritual essence of being, to contain it, and to release it; thus, the inhabitant may dictate, may continually re-form the essence of human reality and the lingual phrasing of that essence. Harry M. Hyatt in his voluminous compilation of hoodoo lore defines the effect and process of hoodoo: “To catch a spirit, or to protect your spirit against the catching, or to release your caught spirit—this is the complete theory and practice of Hoodoo” (qtd. in Baker, Workings of the Spirit, 223).5 In this space, voudienne Hurston and her literary sister Janie are both channeling, discovering, and making the sacred language. This revelation is contained in Janie’s prophetic declaration to Pheoby, “Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves” (285). Each individual is in a coexistent state of spiritual seeking and existential experiencing. Janie is the source of dreamed spiritual truth, the one discovering that truth, and the one acting upon it. Unlike Pheoby whose visionary powers are unclear, Janie’s are revealed, and readers awarded access to her visionary journey become enlightened god Watchers. We see the Watcher eyes watching god, and we watch with Janie her “pictures of love and light” (286). Joining Pheoby in her “hungry listening,” we move through Janie’s “intimate gate,” entering into Janie’s mouth as “kissin’ friends.” Janie’s seemingly simple aphorism declares our destined transcendent site as “there”: “It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there” (285). The “there” is the fluid site of freedom and peace. Those who are in spirit and in vision, like Janie, become seers who know

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that life and death are contained in visions. The Watchers, on the other hand, are the dead ones, the nonparticipant observers: the porch sitters and the hurricane dead with their “eyes flung wide open in judgment” (9). Hurston, who was unable to respond to her Haitian voodoo spirit guide’s question in Tell My Horse, provides a response in the opening lines of Their Eyes. What is the truth? Says Hurston: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.” In these mortal slave vessels, the observers can never become part of the horizon. “Now, women,” Hurston tells us, “forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth” (9). Janie has learned that “waiting for the world to be made” is a deathgiving act concluding in a mockery of dreams (25). She has learned to remake the world through truth dreams, and she is as large as the horizon. The mortal Janie has arrived at the fluid “there,” at the sea place where she can adorn herself with an ultimate imagistic vision and invite her soul “to come and see” (236). In Tell My Horse, Hurston presents the voodoo symbol of God: “the uplifted forefinger in greeting in Voodoo is really phallic, and that means the male attributes of the Creator. The handclasp that ends in the finger of one hand encircling the thumb of the other signifies the vulva encircling the penis, denoting the female aspect of deity” (113). For Hurston, the love gift of penis and male approbation are essential in woman’s growth. But they are signs of dominant historical time and, as such, doom the women who receive them to spiritual and psychic death. In Hurston’s text, man’s dreams will fail as will the dreams of those who are encased within them. Hurston’s goddess woman no longer needs godly possession to speak. Once initiated into the mysteries of man and of self, the priestess will create eternal and life-sustaining dreams. She will become the source of truth that empowers others. As Janie explains to Pheoby, her womb mouth is ready for the Watcher others: “If they wants to see and know, why they don’t come kiss and be kissed? Ah could then sit down and tell ’em things” (18). Voodoo serves for Hurston as a secret, subversive, albeit unacknowledged, site of artistic identity. She transforms it to a transcendent site of active being doubly denied her as an African American and as a woman. In Hurston’s creational mouth, we are immersed in the truth. We recall the mystical eyes painted on Hurston’s cheeks during her New Orleans voodoo initiation ceremony, a symbol of her ability to see more than one

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way. With her, we too are seers through “her eyes,” as opposed to “their eyes.” We become not male God Watchers, but potential conjurers of true dreams. As the novel opens, the porch sitters are watching Janie: “The people all saw her come because it was sundown” (Their Eyes, 9). They do not have the necessary “sight” to understand what they are observing. Unknowingly, their eyes were watching the emerging creator, Mambo Janie. Their eyes were watching god. Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God serve as Hurston’s artistic channels for the mystical hoodoo/voodoo spirit work revealed in Mules and Men and Tell My Horse. Metaphorically, we must pass the cat bone of Hurston’s courageous and startling initiated knowledge through our mouths to gain the snake wisdom she sometimes offers directly and often disguises. Only then will we approach the “horizon” and understand the Afrocentric consciousness of Hurston, who proclaims in her original conclusion to Dust Tracks: “I have walked in storms with a crown of clouds about my head and the zigzag lightning playing through my fingers. The gods of the upper air have uncovered their faces to my eyes” (347). Only then will her word stones release Hurston’s fluid spirit and cultural imagination.

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Notes

1. This essay follows Hurston’s use of the terms “hoodoo” and “voodoo” as representing, respectively, New Orleanian and Haitian versions of West African vodu, a complex religious system of animism, ancestor worship, symbols, magic, and elaborate ritual. The transformative spiritual power of pervasive godbeing (represented in Haiti by Damballah, whose “signature” is the serpent) is infused into natural objects, into its highly trained devotees, and into its artifacts (Mules and Men, 118). Undoubtedly, Hurston was aware that by the 1930s “hoodoo” connoted not the religious practice of voodoo, but dark magic (charms, potions, spells, curses, rituals) that compelled people to act against their will. Noting this turn-of-the-century progression in Louisiana from voodoo as religious worship to hoodoo as magic practice (often with negative intent), Jessie Gaston Mulira points out that hoodoo, nonetheless, remains “part of the African religious system. . . . To be a good voodoo priest or priestess . . . one had to have a working knowledge of hoodoo” (“The Case of Voodoo,” 56). Hurston, however, avoids this distinction and reclaims the spiritual foundations of “hoodoo,” insisting in Mules and Men that “hoodoo” is a white mispronunciation of “voodoo,” that its rites “vie” with those of Haiti, and that it keeps “alive the powers of Africa” (183). 2. Substantial portions of this discussion appear in my article “ ‘The Lips of Books’: Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God as Metalingual Texts,” The Literary Griot 4, no. 1–2 (1992): 75–99. I thank Gina Rossetti for the reading of “god” as a reference to Janie in the title Their Eyes Were Watching God. 3. In Haiti, as Hurston’s Tell My Horse reflects, the female voodoo priestess is a Mambo just as the male priest is a houngan or “papa.” Milo Rigaud explains that the “houn’gan or mam’bo” are the “emperors and empresses of Voodoo” with a “role” that can only be compared to that of the Pope in Roman Catholicism. . . . Everything they do proceeds directly from the powers of the invisible—the loas or mysterés” (Secrets of Voodoo, 33). He points out that they are the central figures in their community and have immense powers and influence as “confessor, doctor, magician, confidential advisor to individuals and families, to politicians” (34). 4. Significantly, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gayl Jones, Michael Awkward, and John Callahan. 5. This Hyatt quote is from his book titled Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork (1970).

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Works Cited

Awkward, Michael. “ ‘The Inaudible Voice of It All’: Silence, Voice, and Action in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In Studies in Black American Literature: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker Jr. 57–66. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1988. ———. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Callahan, John. In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Gaston Mulira, Jessie. “The Case of Voodoo in New Orleans.” In Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway, 111–51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Holloway, Karla F. C. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Greenwood, 1987. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road, ed. Robert Hemenway. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. ———. Moses: Man of the Mountain. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. ———. Mules and Men, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. ———. The Sanctified Church, ed. Toni Cade Bambara. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1985. ———. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Hyatt, Harry M. Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork. Hannibal, Mo.: Western, 1970. Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. McKay, Nellie. “ ‘Crayon Enlargements of Life’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their

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Eyes Were Watching God as Autobiography.” In New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” ed. Michael Awkward, 51–70. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Menke, Pamela Glenn. “ ‘The Lips of Books’: Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God as Metalingual Texts,” The Literary Griot 4, no 1–2 (1992): 75–99. Rampersad, Arnold. Foreword to Mules and Men, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., xv–xxiii. New York: Harper and Perennial, 1990. Rigaud, Milo. Secrets of Voodoo. 1953. San Francisco: City Lights, 1985. Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

5

“Papa Legba, Ouvrier Barriere Por Moi Passer” Esu in Their Eyes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Diasporic Modernism Edward M. Pavlic´

Papa Legba, opener of gates [opportunities], is always the first to receive sacrifice in any ritual invocation of the loa. . . . [T]hey sing “Papa Legba, ouvrier barriere por moi passer.” —Hurston, Tell My Horse

She thought awhile and decided that her conscious life had commenced at Nanny’s gate. —Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Real gods require blood. —Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel of transitions. At one crucial moment, as Joe Starks’s funeral ends, Hurston marks the transition and images the “Little Lord of the Crossroads . . . leaving Orange County as he had come—with the outstretched hand of power” (Their Eyes, 246). To those who read Their Eyes as an American novel, this sentence voices This essay was originally published in African American Review 39, no. 1 (2005): 61–85.

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an ironic tribute to the pomp and failure of Joe Starks’s modern identity. This sentence, however, might make readers attuned to West African cultural traditions edgy, even suspicious. Tell these readers that Hurston wrote much of Their Eyes in the Haitian night, her mind full of images from her ongoing research into Voodoo cosmology and ritual, and the sentence begins to change. In Tell My Horse, Hurston published her research from the Caribbean. There, she records praise-names for the West African (Yoruba) messenger/trickster deity in Haiti. One of the names she records is “Baron Carrefour, Lord of the Crossroads. The way to all things is in his hands” (128). With this, we realize two things: the “Little Lord of the Crossroads” in Their Eyes is Esu-Elegba, and Esu’s “outstretched hand of power” signifies much more than Joe Starks’s modern American vision could fathom. A series of revela­tions follows as the novel sheds its skin, and its structure opens anew. In various guises, Esu appears at each of the novel’s cross­roads, and Their Eyes becomes a key text in an alternate modernist tradition, “diasporic modernism.” During her research in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston found that the crossroads of the black diasporic world were in the hands of a multifaceted figure: Esu-Elegba. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, she uses Esu as the modernist force of disruption and renewal, the frustrating key to the de- and interpersonal crossroads of redemption in the novel. Hurston’s insight into the connection between the psychological and cultural terrains of black American modernity and diasporic mythology and ritual— unremarked for over sixty years—is the fundamental link to this alter­nate approach to modernism. It does not constitute a “countermodernism,” since Hurston’s fully developed approach is what I would call “postoppositional.” The foundations of her diasporic alternatives are too expansive, their options are too fluid, to sustain the rigid identities requisite for opposition. Absorption is closer to Hurston’s rela­tionship to prevailing modernist insights than opposition. Hurston’s approach expands the ways we under­stand diasporic encounters with modernity. For Hurston, Esu-Elegba invokes black cultural confrontations with the dissonance at the modernist crossroads. In his poem “Confluence,” Yusef Komunyakaa echoes Hurston’s insight and reckons with a diasporic modernist meeting place, the cross­roads of “Bloodline and clockwork. / The X drawn where we stand” (Thieves of Paradise, 14). Most forms of modernism seek to disrupt conventional perceptions, par­ ticularly those regarding the relation­ ship between exterior (“objective”) and interior (“subjective”) realms of experi­ ence. Employing knowledge of West African cultural traditions gained from her ethnographic work in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching

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God, approaches this relation­ship in a manner that sounds the keynote of a specifically diasporic form of modernism. The key to understand­ ing Hurston’s vision lies in her use of the image of the “crossroads” and par­ticularly of the diasporic trickster/mes­senger usually known as EsuElegba. Where most modernisms invoke some sort of crossroads between external and internal realms, recognizing the presence of Esu-Elegba in Their Eyes helps to establish Hurston’s truly cen­tral importance in an expansive mod­ernist tradition that includes, but is not limited to, EuroAmerican writers such as Eliot, Pound, and H.D. Rather than claiming Hurston as a high modernist, this essay shows how Hurston herself claimed the insights of high mod­ernism and meshed them with her own dynamic flux of creative, ethnographic, and personal experience. The result is most clearly expressed in the vibrant and violent complexity of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s use of the crossroads image can be usefully understood in relation to the symbolic geography of black modernity theorized by Robert Stepto and Judylyn Ryan. In From Behind the Veil, Stepto establishes fun­ damental narrative patterns of black American life. In any era, these pat­ terns involve movement between a rel­atively enslaved “symbolic South” and a relatively free “symbolic North.” Stepto calls the journey to the symbolic North “ascent.” While the symbolic South is a place “of maximum oppres­sion,” it is also a place where important personal, familial, and communal bonds are established. While the “sym­bolic North” is a place of “relative free­dom,” these freedoms are primarily individual and often come at a cost of estrangement (geographical, cultural, and psychological) from the bonds of the symbolic South. Lonely and alien­ated ascent figures often attempt to reestablish bonds with a larger com­munity in the symbolic South, a journey Stepto calls “immersion” (167). The circular narrative, then, ends with a figure who is conscious of modern individuality, reconnected with community, and still living in relation to the unmitigated pressures of the sym­bolic South. In her dissertation “Water from an Ancient Well: The Recuperation of Double Consciousness,” Judylyn Ryan expands Stepto’s North-South para­digm of ascent and immersion at both ends. Ryan proposes narratives of dis­persion and recuperation that connect the pre- and postascent symbolic South with “African” cultural process­es. Ryan’s narrative of “dispersion” invokes African cultural origins, par­tially remembered and located in what she designates the “symbolic East.” Dispersion accounts for the psycholog­ical and cultural effects of the historical movement to a “symbolic West,” a foreign location of terror and bondage. Ryan’s narrative of “recuperation” charts a return, imagined or literal, to a “symbolic East.” In recuperation, fig­ures

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attempt to expand the communal forms of the symbolic South in relation to newly imagined African cultural codes and patterns. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston employs the figure of Esu-­ Elegba to provide a diasporic perspec­tive on modernist crossroads in rela­ tion to the symbolic locations of the black modern. Esu-Elegba is the mes­senger/trickster of the Yoruba diaspo­ra. A figure of constant disruption, Esu’s role is to challenge people’s abili­ty to connect with one another and communicate with the world. In Yoruba tradition, the spirits, orisas, are an integral part of the natural and social world. Meaningful connections involve effective relationships with one or more orisas. These connections require and produce sacred energy, asé. One of Esu’s principal roles as messen­ger is to take the sacrifices and prayers of humans to the intended orisas. In this respect, Esu is in charge of asé needed to support nearly every endeavor. Tales of Esu’s impish qualities, then, are themselves parables of an unpredictable world. Hurston’s treatment of Esu proceeds through a sequence of stages that parallel Janie’s movement among vari­ous regions of the symbolic geography. The first three stages reveal the pitfalls of attempting to live within a conven­tionally “modern” world structured around Stepto’s North-South polarity. Only when Janie reaches “the muck” does the full-fledged structure of a diasporic modernism begin to emerge in the interactions between the charac­ters and their place in the newly dawned symbolic East of the novel. Even then, however, Hurston is careful not to romanticize the symbolic East into a wholesome place of security. Instead, she demonstrates the prob­lems that continue to make black experiences of modernity perilous. At the start of the novel, when Janie occupies a place in the pre-ascent symbolic South, Esu’s role is negligible. He represents the gate holding Janie back from the threshold separating her from experiencing her own “modern” individuality. Once she ascends to the symbolic North of Eatonville via her marriage to Joe Starks, Esu reveals the flaws in Joe Starks’s modern design. Through Esu, the division between Janie and Joe Starks is exposed; through him, all attempts at reconcilia­tion are frustrated. Esu’s disruptions force Janie to investigate the depth and psychological complexity of her individuality in standard modernist terms. Emerging from her modernist iso­lation, Janie connects with Tea Cake. She begins to experience the nature of diasporic modernist experience when she arrives on the muck. The Caribbean workers and their rituals give meaning to the symbolic East, which resonates with West African diasporic energies. Yet even at a moment filled with immense promise, Esu intervenes in ways that caution against rejecting (as opposed to build­ ing on) modernist insights into the necessity of self-knowledge. Similar

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to Robert Hayden’s vision in his epic poem of modernist redemption, “Words in the Mourning Time,” Hurston’s symbolic East “demands obedience to all / the rigorous laws of risk, / does not pamper / will not spare” (Collected Poems, 96). Esu brings Tea Cake’s failure to understand himself to the sur­face in ways that point to problems in adapting diasporic culture to positions structured by Stepto’s South-North polarity. Hurston focuses specifically on the tendency toward male-centered­ness in the black American characters’ willful estrangement from both the nat­ ural world and the nascent diasporic community. Her black men fatally identify with the “bossman’s” owner­ship of land, money, and women. Specifically, Esu instigates hostility between the community and those ele­ ments of nature—wind and water—­ associated with female orisas. Hurston’s own education into diasporic culture focused on just these elements. In Mules and Men, Hurston tells how hoodoo practitioners in New Orleans introduced her to the diversity and intensity of diasporic energies. In one section, she is initiated into an intimate relationship to a specific energy with close affinities with the orisa Oya, the Yoruba energy of female force and ret­ribution. In the final stages of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the energy of Oya—the wind, Hurston’s own patron— thwarts Tea Cake’s final attempts to explore and express him­self. In the end, Esu succeeds in frustrating the recuperation of diasporic promise as sure­ly as he had Joe Starks’s modern ascent. Only Janie survives the diasporic modernist implications of the storm in the novel. She attains the skill required to survive the crossroads of her inter­nal and social experience. Janie’s inter­actions with Esu-Elegba at the cross­roads in the symbolic locations of the black modern allow Hurston to mesh standard modernist themes of individ­ual excavation and descent with West African, communal approaches to the flux of objective and subjective reality. As a result, Hurston fully realizes her vision of diasporic modernist descent and emergence.

Notes Toward a Diasporic Modernism In The Matrix of Modernism, Sanford Schwartz notes that many European and white American modernists explored how individual acts of per­ception can alter commonly agreed upon, “realistic” understandings of the meeting place between interior and exterior realities. Artists sought to escape habitual (personal) lines of sight, most often held in place by abstract social norms. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot describes a method that enables new artistic visions by becoming

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“deper­sonalized.” For Eliot, modernist poetics are produced by an artist working as “a medium and not a personality” (Selected Prose, 42). Demonstrating the paradoxical mod­ernist pursuit of deeper familiarity through greater objectivity, in poems like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot’s poetics withdraw from social interaction to image “visions and revisions,” the flux of internal/external realities in (usually visual) objects. Eliot calls these images of flux objective correlatives. As critics such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Adrienne Gosselin, Arnold Rampersad, and Craig Werner have noted, one major strain of black mod­ernist writing, known as Afro-modernism, follows this model closely albeit under drastically different social and political pressures. Afromodernist personae in works like Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground,” Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Robert Hayden’s poem “The Diver” achieve their unique modernist angles of vision by adopting secluded techniques similar to Eliot’s. Most Afro-modernists share (a racialized, amplified version of) their white counterparts’ view of social interaction as dangerous to the artist/hero. For instance, both Wright’s and Ellison’s Afro-modernist figures escape the pressures of social experience by with­drawing into the sewer. From this van­tage they engage a realm of depersonalized experience that offers new vantages on their former social and cultural lives. In part “VIII” of “Words in the Mourning Time,” Robert Hayden’s roll call of heroic personae includes “invisible man” and “the / man who / lives underground” (Collected Poems, 97). In part “IX,” he affirms the Afro­-modernist commitment to “go on struggling to be human / though monsters of abstraction / police and threaten us” (98). Afro-modernism relies on the unique and necessary disruptive, depersonalized processes of perception and meditation. In their respective writings, Wright, Ellison, and Hayden acknowledge a wide range of modernist influences, including Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Anderson, Eliot, Rukeyser, and Auden. At times, Afro-modernists attempt to put these depersonalized depth-perceptions to expan­sive democratic, and redemptive communal, purposes. The work of black artists such as Toomer, Hughes, Tolson, Hurston, Brooks, and a host of Black Power–era writers such as Larry Neal and Stephen Henderson show affinities with diasporic modernism. The connection is an understanding that, from many black cultural perspectives, deperson­alized, solitary, contemplative process­es can become their own kind of abstraction. Often, the immediate is social and cultural, a shared reality. In diasporic modernism, personae also get beyond habitual (personal) modes and establish new media of perception. Often grounded in images of sound (aural correlatives) as well as visual perception, rather than the with­drawals of Eliotic “depersonalization,” diasporic modernism

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depicts disrup­tive modernist modes constituted by social and cultural interaction. I call this approach interpersonalization. In the transcendental origins of diasporic modernist culture, Walden Pond has a barbeque pit and a dance floor. Much of Ellison’s and Baldwin’s work shows transitions between Afro- and diasporic modernist approaches to crossroads of disruption and renew­al. In “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin bears witness to how an artist’s deper­sonalized flux between interior and exterior perceptions can render the immediate social world distant, abstract, unreal. Of his own creative seclusion, blues/jazz pianist Sonny con­fesses: Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it, that I was with it, really, and I could play or I didn’t really have to play, it just came out of me, it was there. And I don’t know how I played, thinking about it now, but I know I did awful things, those times, sometimes, to people. Or it wasn’t that I did anything to them—it was that they weren’t real. (Going to Meet the Man, 134)

As Baldwin realized, for Afro-modernists figures like Sonny, who emulates Charlie Parker’s bebop persona, to be “with it” is to be aloof from the social world. Baldwin’s meditation on the dangers of “abstract” seclusion is most fully and fearfully rendered in his por­trait of Rufus Scott’s fatally deperson­alized withdrawal that opens Another Country. Unlike Rufus, later in “Sonny’s Blues,” Sonny turns his de­personalized flux to redemptive pur­poses and achieves a mode of creation that echoes aspects of Hurston’s diasporic insight into how to replace secluded reflection with communal presence. Assuming the “cup of trem­bling” (an image of collective suffering from Isaiah 51:17) in his final piano solo, Sonny echoes his mother’s advice: “You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you’s there” (141, 119). As Baldwin’s work makes clear, diasporic modernism involves shifting and caring forms of accompaniment. The underground man must come up into the crowd and be present. In contrast to Afro-modernists, diasporic modernists like Hurston dis­rupt abstractions with the immediate reality of experience in interpersonal­ ized, communal (as well as depersonalized, individual) terms. This distinc­tion results from both the combination of the politics of race in American modernity and the kinds of subjectivities supported by the West African cul­tural underpinnings of black diasporic culture. In his 1996 essay “Crossroads,” Yusef Komunyakaa marks the intersec­tion of modernist poetics and diasporic culture:

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The crossroads is a real place between imaginary places—points of departure and arrival. It is also a place where negotiations and deals are made with higher powers. In the West African and Haitian traditions of Legba, it is a sanctified place of reflection (mirrors are used in symbolic travel). The cross­roads is a junction. . . . There is an accrued bravery here. It is this cultural dualism, this ability to be two places at once, to be a shape changer, that strengthens the creative quest. . . . [At the crossroads, there’s] a jagged persistence that documents and duplicates the awkward reality of our contemporary lives and imaginations. (6)

The crossroads, then, is a location of constantly shifting connections. It’s a place of emergence at which depersonalized (internal) and interpersonalized (social) deals are made. At the crossroads, internal and social identi­ties are disrupted, broken, reimagined, and possibly renewed. Diasporic modernist artists know that the universe doesn’t offer stable locations for people to “be” themselves. But, resist­ing secluded meditations on nothing­ness, they situate modern subjectivity in shared spaces patterned to support improvised, interpersonal methods of becoming. Hurston documents many such nonresolving patterns of pres­ence in her essay “The Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The realities of modern life are flu­idly shared in diasporic modernism. This shared presence is ambiguous; it holds new possibilities and dangers. In her 1989 song “Come In,” contempo­rary jazz singer Dianne Reeves medi­tates on the risks and potentials of shared presence. Calls can elicit responses from which are woven shared existential terrains. These are sites of communion and conflict. Calls can also fall on deaf or hostile ears. Reeves sings: “If you think they’re ready to hear you / you may tell one or two what you know.” Reeves’s warning describes the dilemmas that inspired and assaulted Zora Neale Hurston’s creative life. Long before Bakhtin’s work was translated into English, Hurston was perfectly aware of what he called the dialogic condition. In Mules and Men, she warns that “mouths don’t empty themselves until the ears are sympathetic and knowing” (185). In her work, Hurston confronted the political, cultural, and epistemolog­ical implications of this crucial sen­tence. Therefore, diasporic modernism views interpersonal dynamics (tested by Esu-Elegba) in epistemological and ontological, as well as social and psy­chological, terms. The work of Abimbola, Abiodun, Barber, Drewal, Yai, Pavlic, ´ Thompson, and Kubitschek shows that diasporic epistemologies are reciprocal (truths are derived and maintained through interactive processes) and diasporic ontologies are plural (all “identities” lead back

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to hybrid origins, a diaspora of shifting relations). In such a fragmented and fluid cosmology, a trickster/mediator like Esu-Elegba is important to every level of cultural and psychological life. Although many of her writings predate the work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Robert Hayden, we are only now beginning to hear Hurston’s call, the keynote call of diasporic modernism. Reorienting the nature of Eliot’s modernist meeting between “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Hurston’s crossroads is something closer to the individual and traditional talent. Her technique in Their Eyes combines the excavation of culture and conscious­ness with an improvised relationship to a vibrant, transnational tradition, which she encountered during her research in Florida, New Orleans, and Haiti. Whereas Eliot’s depersonalized approach to “mythic method” sought a stable foundation free from modern “futility and anarchy,” Hurston’s own interpersonalized mythic method draws directly on the twin forces of disruption and renewal signified by Esu-Elegba in diasporic mythology (Eliot, 177). In “The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston,” Wendy Dutton notes that “Hurston, in fact, worked on her voodoo material side by side with her fiction, often doing both kinds of writing in the same day. . . . Often she worked on [Their Eyes] late at night after a long day of collecting Voodoo material for Tell My Horse” (146). In Haiti, Hurston discovered the ubiquitous presence of Esu-Elegba. In Tell My Horse, Hurston writes that “Legba Attibon is the god of the gate. He rules the gate of the hounfort, the entrance to the cemetery, and he is also Baron Carrefour, Lord of the crossroads. The way to all things is in his hands” (128). In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston uses Esu-­Elegba’s presence as “gate-keeper,” by turns challenging and providing pas­sage through the “gates” of intra- and interpersonal connections. The innovative mixture of depersonalized and interpersonalized processes accompa­nies Janie’s journey through the sym­bolic locations of black modernity and her excavation into diasporic modernist descent and emergence. According to Yoruba practice, human beings make sacrifices and approach Esu-Elegba with humili­ty and caution. Esu-Elegba waits at every transition, crossroad, and margin to challenge the crossing. A figure of contrast and disruption, he is most articulate in our silences, most calm in the heart of our anger, honest in our deceit. For an immediate example, con­sider contemporary southwestern Nigeria (the section of Nigeria most highly populated by Yoruba people), where driving is an act of constant con­trast and disruption. The curious oscil­lations of red and green in the stop­lights fail to draw the attention of most drivers, but one rarely finds an inter­section that lacks an altar to Esu. Conceptually, Esu-Elegba is

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always implying, then suggesting, now imploring the shifting strangeness on the hither side of our most stable and familiar understandings. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, the multi-leveled system Volosinov and Bakhtin characterized as the dialogic condition aptly frames Esu-Elegba’s linguistic and cultural importance: Word is a two-sided act. It is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener . . . I give myself verbal shape from anoth­er’s point of view, ultimately from the point of view of the community to which I belong. . . . A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shaped by both addresser and addressee. (86)

Esu-Elegba waits on the bridge. His presence invokes the shifting sands underneath relationships across any suggested or perceived schism. An ever-present challenge to the founda­tions of identity logic, he prevents sys­tematized, ideological understandings that rely on fixed identities and rigid representations. A ubiquitous figure of multiplicity and nonresolution, Esu­-Elegba’s energy is endemic to the vibrant and violent dialogic patterns of Hurston’s diasporic modernism in Their Eyes. Esu-Elegba’s primary job is to pre­serve the necessity for, and challenge the viability of, intra- and interperson­al connection. As the keeper of the vibrant energy of possibility, asé, Esu­-Elegba has been described by Henry J. Drewal and John Pemberton III as the agent of effective action, who also reminds one of the unpredictable nature of human experi­ence. Esu’s constant and often unset­tling activity reminds humans of the need for guidance in lives of engaged action. Esu, who bears sacrifices of humans to the orisas and other spirits, is the guardian of the ritual process. A verse from Ifa warns that if Esu is not acknowledged, “life is the bailing of waters with a sieve” (Drewal and Pemberton, 15). Resisting the common Christian and Islamic characterization of Esu as the devil, E. M. McClelland’s Cult of Ifa Among the Yoruba situates Esu-Elegba in Yoruba cosmology: We may see in the myths of Esu a parable. . . . Mankind, without the prompting of evil, would cease to strive and society would stagnate; the Yorùbá say that, without the interven­tion of Esu, the gods would starve and vanish [from lack of sacrifice] without storm, the land would not have sea­sons of growth, harvest or hunting. These analogies are all in accord with a more general axiom—that all

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extremes generate their opposites and that, fur­ther, through avoiding the suppression of conflict and by containing it instead in a state of balance, society makes it valuable and constructive. (15)

Because of Esu-Elegba’s intermediary role in this cosmology, the symbols associated with him tend to be metaphors for connection and trans-­action. Esu-Elegba operates at the crossroads, the marketplace, the equinox. His walk and the dances which summon his presence are char­acterized by a pronounced limp which invokes his stride, with each foot in a different dimension. In Black Gods: Orisa Studies in the New World, Gary Edwards explains that Esu-Elegba complicates the meetings of the gen­ders and is often pictured with extend­ed breasts and an erect penis, testimo­ny to his “insatiable appetite and boundless possibility” (11). In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s reading of Their Eyes locates Esu­-Elegba’s realm at the margin between black English and Standard English. Gates’s reading represents a crucial moment in Hurston scholarship, but he misses Esu’s role in the novel. In fact, Hurston’s free-indirect narration explicitly employs Esu-Elegba and his diasporic “gates” as modernist metaphors for interior and exterior fracture and transition. As such, Esu-­Elegba situates himself at the center of things, at the crossroads of words and worlds. In Tell My Horse Hurston notes the ubiquity of references and sacrifices to Esu-Elegba in Haiti. She explains that Esu-Elegba, or “Papa Legba, opener of gates (opportunities), is always the first to receive sacrifice in any ritual invocation of the loa” (Tell My Horse, 119). For this reason, she adds, unlike other loa, “Papa Legba has no special day. All of the days are his, since he must go before all of the ceremonies” (129). Hurston even uses Esu-Elegba to satirize anthropological terminology and underscore the accu­racy of the Haitian rituals. Describing the ritual invocation of Esu-Elegba, she explains ironically “that while the peo­ple say and sing ‘Legba,’ the scholars tell me that the African word is Lecbah or Letbah. Perhaps the people are in error. All I know is they sing ‘Papa Legba, ouvrier barriere por moi passer’ (Esu Elegba, open the gate, let me pass)” (148). Hurston recorded several variants of Esu-Elegba’s invocation during her fieldwork in Haiti, includ­ing “Afrique-Guinin Atibon Legba, ouvrir barriere pour nous” (Esu, open the gate for us) and “Ce Letbah, qui ap vini, ce papa Legba laissez barriere l’our” (Esu, come here and leave the gate open) (152–53). Importantly, her transcriptions include the notion of Esu-Elegba keeping the gate in differ­ent dimensions of experience. The invocation “ouvrier barriere por moi passer” (‘for me’) signifies Esu-­ Elegba’s role in interior and personal passages. The chant “ouvrir barriere

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pour nous” (‘for us’) indicates his rele­vance to communal matters. In fact, Hurston often positions Esu-Elegba as a figure of disruption on the multi-­ valenced bridge between the two.

Esu and the Gates of Hurston’s Symbolic South As Stepto notes, the pre-ascent symbolic South is a place of sta­sis and immobility for the questing fig­ure, “the narrative’s most oppressive social structure” (From Behind the Veil, 167). For postascent figures, however, it can become a place of newly meaningful energy sum­moned in vibrant interpersonal exchanges. Their Eyes Were Watching God refers to both dimensions of this symbolic location. The novel opens with Janie’s return to the scorn and envy of “Mouth Almighty,” the women of Eatonville (178). The interpersonal narrative itself depends upon Pheoby’s ability to hear Janie’s story with sympathetic and knowing ears. Appropriately to the diasporic modernist setting of the framing narra­tive, Pheoby enters the ritual ground through a gate. Appropriately, she bears sacrifice in the common form of food: “Pheoby Watson didn’t go in by the front gate and down the palm walk to the front door. She walked around the fence corner and went in the inti­mate gate with her heaping plate of mulatto rice” (177). By now, a fully experienced Janie, with “lamps filled and the chimneys cleaned” no less, understands the complexities of Esu-Elegba’s dialogic gates. She warns that an “envious heart makes a treacherous ear” and confesses that the success of the telling depends on Pheoby “for a good thought” (179–80). In a shifting play of identity, the narrative converts each reader into a Pheoby. In the words of rapper Rakim Allah, Their Eyes is written “to the listeners, for those that have a ear for this,” which I suppose makes Esu his “state of the art, engineer for the mix.” In the framed narrative, Hurston’s description of Janie’s conscious awak­ening invokes Esu-Elegba’s gatekeeper imagery in relation to the mix of per­sonal and cosmological stasis of the symbolic South: “Nanny’s gate . . . [which she] leaned over to gaze up the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made” (182, 184). The relation­ship of Nanny’s gate to Janie’s interior life becomes clearer when she senses a division, a creation, a mysterious mes­sage embedded in her body. By means of her immediate sensory experience, Janie approaches the first crossroads in her consciousness. She hears the inaudible, remembers the not-forgot­ten, and encounters sensations of expe­ riences she has yet to have. She approaches the crossroads in her interi­or as “the inaudible voice of it all came to her” (183). Hurston’s narration of

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Janie’s experience at the interior gates echoes the call to Esu-Elegba from Tell My Horse, “ouvrier barriere por moi passer”: It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness. (183)

Merging (exterior) “outside observa­tion” with (“deep in the flesh”) internal realities, Hurston’s imagery calls Janie to cross back and forth, and leaves room for Esu-Elegba’s transitional role in her coming to consciousness. Still, in her pre-ascent experience, “gates” are restrictive challenges to her mobility. Confined to her grandmother’s vision of the traditional experience of black women and the boring “abstraction” of marriage, Janie “began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn’t know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. . . . The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off” (194). When Janie embarks on her ascent, “out of the front gate,” Hurston invokes her modernist mantra of improvisation in relation to Esu­-Elegba’s challenges to come: “New words would have to be made and said” (200).

Ascent and Esu in the Symbolic North Unlike Stepto’s idea of ascent, Janie’s ascent doesn’t take place in relation to a white mainstream world, but her marriage to Joe Starks and eventual place in Eatonville mirror the individuation and estrangement from communal interaction at the core of his concept. For Stepto, the symbolic North involves the dawn of a figure’s modern individuality in relation to the “least oppressive environment—at best one of solitude; at worst one of alienation” (From Behind the Veil, 167). In chapter 5, Hurston shows at great length how Joe Starks’s vision of progress transforms Eatonville into a black version of a modern system. Starks becomes an earthly “I god,” and Eatonville becomes a black-owned plantation. He buys and resells the land at a profit, establishes himself as mayor, and

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even brings the “light” down from “Sears, Roebuck, and Company” to deal with the problem of “ ‘de dark and de roots’ ” (Their Eyes, 209). Commemorating the replace­ment of the metaphysical with the modern symbol of light, Starks quotes from the famous gospel tune “This Little Light of Mine” when he instructs Eatonville to “let the light penetrate inside of yuh, and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine” (210). Hurston doesn’t quote the third verse of the song, which gives the point of the pas­sage away plainly. Starks’s speech twists the meaning of the song. Now a song about replacing the traditional/metaphysical with the modern/eco­nomic, the third verse says, “This little light of mine, my god gave it to me.” Starks turns the eyes of Eatonville from the dark roots that give life to an elec­tric light out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. In this section of the novel, Hurston uses explicit references to Esu­-Elegba’s power to thwart relationships based on “abstract,” modern formulae. By instigating the decisive break in Janie’s marriage to Starks, Esu-Elegba’s logic compels Janie’s depersonalized, psychological descent in the symbolic North. In this standard modernist withdrawal from social presence, Janie excavates the uncharted and ambiva­lent interiors of her individuality. Like the Afromodernist figures of Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and Hayden, Janie emerges into the paradoxical reality that the irreplaceable gains and the irretrievable costs of withdrawal are inextricably bound together. Esu’s “gates” in the pre-ascent symbolic South work passively. They symbolize internal and external transi­tions that Janie negotiated before embarking on her ascent. In Hurston’s symbolic North, Esu-Elegba’s active instigation exposes the relationship between interior depth and interpersonal connections when he forces Janie to confront her failing relationship with Joe Starks. The newly active role requires more specific insight into Esu-­Elegba’s significance in diasporic inter­personal processes. In the following passages, Hurston draws directly on the West African mythology in framing the conflict. Easily the most famous parable of Esu-Elegba’s disruptive force in rela­ tionships is the story of Esu and his multicolored hat. The parable is recorded in Ayodele Ogundipe’s dis­sertation entitled “Esu-Elegbara, the Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty.” The parable also informs the title of Donald Constantino’s study of Esu-Elegba’s proliferation through the West African diaspora: “Who Is That Fellow in the Many-Colored Cap?: Transformations of Eshu in Old and New World Mythologies.” The version of the parable in Ogundipe’s work warrants quotation in full: Everyone knows the story of the two friends who were thwarted in their friendship by Esu. They took vows of eternal friendship to one

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another, but neither took Esu into consideration. Esu took note of their actions and decided to do something about them. When the time was ripe, Esu decided to put their friendship to his own little test. He made a cloth cap. The right side was black, the left side was white. The two friends were out in the fields, tilling their land. One was hoeing on the right side, the other was clearing the bushes to the left. Esu came by on a horse, riding between the two men. The one on the right was on the black side of his hat. The friend on the left noticed the sheer whiteness of Esu’s cap. The two friends took a break for lunch under the cool shade of the trees. Said one friend, “Did you see that man with the white colored cap who greeted us as we were working? He was very pleasant, wasn’t he?” “Yes, he was charming, but it was a man in a black cap that I recall, not a white one.” “It was a white cap. The man was riding a magnificently caparisoned horse.” “Then it must be the same man. I tell you, his cap was dark— black.” “You must be fatigued or blinded by the hot rays of the sun to take a white cap for a black one.” “I tell you it was a black cap and I am not mistaken, I remember him distinctly.” . . .  The two friends fell to fighting. The neighbors came running but the fight was so intense that the neighbors could not stop it. In the midst of this uproar, Esu returned, looking very calm and pretending not to know what was going on. “What is the cause of all the hulla­baloo?” he demanded sternly. “Two close friends are fighting,” was the answer. “They seem intent on killing each other and neither would stop or tell us the reason for the fight. Please do something before they destroy each other.” Esu promptly stopped the fight. “Why do you two lifelong friends make a public spectacle of yourselves in this manner?” “A man rode through the farm, greeting us as he went by,” said the first friend. “He was wearing a black cap but my friend tells me it was a white cap and that I must have been tired or blind or both.” The second friend insisted that the man had been wearing a white cap. One of them must be mistaken, but it was not he. “Both of you are right,” said Esu.

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“How can that be?” “I am the man who paid the visit over which you now quarrel, and here is the cap that caused the dissension.” Esu put his hand in his pocket and brought out the two-colored cap say­ing, “As you can see, one side is white and the other is black. You each saw one side and, therefore, are right about what you saw. Are you not the two friends who made vows of friendship? When you vowed to be friends always, to be faithful and true to each other, did you reckon with Esu? Do you know that he who does not put Esu first in all his doings has himself to blame if things misfire?” And so it is said, “Esu, do not undo me, Do not falsify the words of my mouth, Do not misguide the movement of my feet. You who translates yesterday’s words Into novel utterances, Do not undo me, I bear you sacrifices.” (“Esu-Elegbara,” 135)

Their Eyes charts the process through which Hurston realized that the dias­poric question is always, “Did you reckon with Esu?” But what does reck­oning with Esu imply? Why does a dis­pute over a perception result in vio­lence? To reckon with Esu-Elegba is constantly to re-create language. Static phrasings and clichés aren’t enough. To reckon with Esu, one must impro­vise and push past pleasantries. In The Trickster in West Africa, Robert Pelton discusses how Esu’s presence requires constant attempts “to speak . . . new word[s] and to disclose a deeper gram­mar . . . to restore . . . a conversation that speaks more accurately and mean­ingfully of life” (161). These insights point toward the redemptive role of disruptionas-renewal in a vibrant communal space. Building on Ellison’s insight in A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America, Craig Werner discusses such an orien­tation toward experience in terms of a “jazz impulse” in black culture (132). Building on the implicitly diasporic logic of his gospel-driven modernism in “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin’s description of artists’—in this case jazz musicians’—role in such a constantly improvised language of perception re-creates the most famous modernist commandment: make it new. Emphasizing the communal/redemp­tive importance of modernist disrup­tion, Baldwin writes: “He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is

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never new, it always must be heard” (139). The violent conflict over the color of a stranger’s cap is a symptom of failed reckonings. In a world of unreck­oned interiors, the color of a stranger’s hat can get you killed. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Esu-Elegba creates trouble and insti­ gates division inside and between emblematic modern American individ­uals. As he establishes his version of American modernity (sans racism) in the black South, Joe Starks relies on his rationalized design for power. Starks’s ascent is empty. In this respect Starks’s modern comes to resemble another version of the male, ego-driven Southern modern; in fact, there is a stunning resemblance between “Sutpen’s hundred” from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Joe Starks’s Eatonville. Both make themselves “gods” with mechanistic approaches to progress. The novels of Faulkner and Hurston both have an interactive narrative structure, a veiled importance of Haiti, and several key images, similarities which allow a glimpse at how Hurston’s use of diasporic mythology advances themes in modernist conversations. Quentin Compson’s father describes Sutpen’s naive vision of progress with the following metaphor: “Wait, wait” now because it was that­innocence again, that innocence which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of a pie or a cake and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was all finished and nothing but pie or cake could come out. (Absalom, 211–12)

Playing the changes of identities like a divination priest in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner creates layers of embedded narration that rival the most complicated jazz dynamics and produce an almost holographic playground for Esu-Elegba’s dynamics. Bringing interpersonal processes to their limits and beyond, Quentin tells Shreve about his father’s telling him about Quentin’s grandfathers telling Quentin’s father about Sutpen’s telling the grandfather, until readers can hardly hang on to whose telling is whose. This is, of course, exactly the diasporic epistemological and ontological point about inherent pluralities. Bringing the Sutpen/ Starks connection into bold relief, Faulkner gives us someone’s version of somebody’s version of Sutpen’s thoughts: “You see, I had a design in my mind. . . . I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife” (212). While the period of Their Eyes prevents Starks from attaining actual slaves, Hurston establishes Starks as the symbolic plantation owner par excellence, complete with white “big house,” annual celebrations, and

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the power to make people like Henry Pitts leave town “after [Starks] caught [him] with a wagon load of his ribbon cane” (212). Hurston’s first explicit invocation of Esu-Elegba echoes Quentin’s father’s culinary metaphor for Sutpen’s design while subtly echoing his mysterious Haitian experiences. Underscoring modernism’s insight into a post-Newtonian world in which “things” are more than the sum of their parts, she invokes Esu’s ability to complicate identities and relationships as Janie prepares a meal for Joe Starks. First, Hurston describes a gap in the relationship as Joe attempts to force Janie’s submission to his authority. Given Joe’s unrelenting attempts, Janie begins to withdraw. She “pressed her teeth together and learned to hush” (232). In a passage that nearly repeats Faulkner’s text verbatim, Hurston inserts an explicit reference to Esu-Elegba into the space created by this hush. Incidentally, the significance of dinner in the gendered roles of marriage adds to the pressure of Hurston’s Esu-Elegba parable. Invoking Esu-Elegba’s legendarily impish qualities by describing him as a “fiend,” Hurston writes: It happened over one of those dinners that chasten all women sometimes. They plan and they fix and they do, and then some kitchendwelling fiend slips a scrochy, soggy, tasteless mess into their pots and pans. Janie was a good cook, and Joe had looked forward to his dinner as a refuge from other things. So when the bread didn’t rise, and the fish wasn’t quite done at the bone, and the rice was scorched, he slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears and told her about her brains before he stalked on back to the store. (Their Eyes, 232)

Like the parable of the multicolored cap, Hurston echoes Faulkner’s image of American, mechanistic naïveté and inserts Esu-Elegba into an “un-reckoned” abstract relationship based on a husband’s “design,” an incidental wife, and the “spirit of the marriage” (232). She also shows how the violent pres­sure relates to Joe’s unreckoned interi­or: Joe “looked forward to the meal as a refuge from other things.” Just as he donned his many-colored hat and rode his horse through the field, Esu-Elegba enters as instigator. The resulting fail­ure of the couple to reckon with EsuElegba’s provocation destroys the bridge. It is never reestablished. Joe recedes into his futile attempt to seal himself off from the empty abstractions of his ascent. Janie decides to “bow to the outside of things” and ceases to look for a connection (233). Esu-­Elegba’s playground ensues. While Joe flees the rift in the mar­riage and seeks refuge in meaningless connections that support his empty public image, Janie pursues an

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Afro-modernist (depersonalized) excava­tion of interior crossroads. Janie’s con­frontation with “her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered” in Esu-Elegba’s parable space reveals her own unreckoned interior. From her (clichéd modernist) position of bourgeois privi­lege turned prison, in the first moments of her excavation, she real­izes that Jody Stark is merely “something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over” (233). She also uncovers a strik­ingly modern ambivalence for her fam­ily and origins: “Digging around inside of herself like that she found that she had no interest in that seldom-seen mother at all. She hated her grand­mother and had hidden it from herself all these years under a cloak of pity” (247). Putting the Afro-modernist withdrawal to the test, Janie begins to uncover “thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emo­tions she had never let Jody know about. . . . She had an inside and an outside and suddenly she knew how not to mix them” (233). As with all withdrawals, no matter how necessary or revelatory, the costs accrue. Janie’s depersonalized excavation invites Esu-Elegba’s instigation along the line between the inside and outside which don’t mix. In Hurston’s diasporic modernism, however, even solitary excavations can link depersonalized revelations to interpersonal aware­ness. Janie’s descent links her with the substructure of Hurston’s mythic method and freeindirect—profoundly interpersonal—narration. She explores her interior in relation to timeless rhythms of natural phenomena “like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun” (Their Eyes, 236). Janie’s vanguard self directly recalls T. S. Eliot’s modernist poetics of deperson­alization. In his 1917 short story “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” Eliot writes that the “artist is part of him a drifter, at the mercy of impressions, and another part of him allows this to happen for the sake of making use of the unhappy creature” (Selected Prose, 19). Mirroring this technique, Janie “watched the shadow of herself going about tending the store and prostrating itself before Jody.” She observes herself in terms similar to Eliot’s “unhappy creature,” from an altered state that “was like a drug,” and through a medium of detached observational objectivity that “recon­ciled her to things. . . . She got so she received all things with the stolidness of the earth which soaks up urine and perfume with the same indifference” (Their Eyes, 236). As Eliot’s recently published notebooks in Inventions of the March Hare show plainly, there are psycho­logical residues to this “indifference.” Robert Frost named the residue for a similarly indifferent American “shore” in his modernist classic “Once By the Pacific”: “Someone had better be pre­pared for rage” (Poetry of Robert Frost, 250). Far from solip­sism, however, Janie’s descent connects her to the interpersonal levels of the text and allows new appraisals of Joe Starks behind the “I god” identity logic supported by his modern design.

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Janie’s insight into Starks’s identity echoes diasporic mythology. From her position of depersonalized withdraw­ al, Janie catches a revelatory glimpse of Starks which uncovers his weakness and foreshadows his downfall. Hurston writes that for “the first time she saw a man’s head naked of its skull. . . . She saw that he was hurting inside” (237). In “Ìwàpèlé: The Concept of Good Character in Ifá Literary Corpus,” Wande Abimbola notes one of “the important philosophical con­cepts” of Yoruba cosmology is orí. Literally, orí means “head,” but as Abimbola notes, orí relates to the “inner or spiritual head” (Yorùbá Oral Tradition, 390). Sometimes this conceptual head is referred to as orí-inu, “inner-head.” In “Ifá Art Objects: An Interpretation Based on Oral Traditions,” Rowland Abiodun discusses the concept of orí as a person’s destiny. Abiodun reveals that orí constitutes “the divinity of the Head, is the embodiment of a man’s / past, present, and future and is the essence of his personality” (Yorùbá Oral Tradition, 422). Although there is no record of Hurston’s awareness of these concepts, Janie’s insight into the destinies of the men who surround her bears an uncan­ny resemblance to them. Furthermore, in Yoruba tradition, Ajàálà is known as the potter who makes heads, orí. Before birth, each Yoruba person visits Ajàálà’s storehouse of heads and makes an ambiguous choice of destiny from the supply. The catch is that Ajàálà is trifling. A chronic debtor and gambler, he spends most of his time hiding from creditors on the roof of his house. Understandably, this fugitive status detracts from his performance as a potter. Consequently, many orí are damaged. Obviously a mythological parable about human imperfection, the individual’s choice from damaged communal goods is a foundation of tra­ditional Yoruba conceptions of good character, such as the axiom Sùúrù ni bàbá ìwà (Patience is the father of char­acter). With a humorous streak that grows richer with the diasporic resonance, Janie shows her lack of “tradi­tional” character and patience, which compels her ascent into modern, indi­vidual identity. As with her insight into Starks’s orí, complaining to Nanny about her “traditional” place in Killicks’s design, Janie criticizes Killicks in terms which mirror exactly the images and intent of the parable of Ajàálà. Listing the reasons she wishes to leave Killicks and her traditional role subordinated (in Nanny’s eyes, protected) by his destiny, Janie says: “Cause Ah hates de way his head is so long one way and so flat on de sides.” Invoking the traditional diasporic wisdom, Nanny answers, “He never made his own head. You talk so silly.” To which Janie responds, “Ah don’t keer who made it, Ah don’t like the job” (193). After a time the rage appears. Hurston shows the chaos and figura­ tive violence which often accompany emergence from depersonalized withdrawal. Jody’s role in Esu-Elegba’s parable drama eventually forces

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Janie’s attempt to reconnect. Despite the humor and Edenesque surface and tone of much of the novel, which drew the ire of generations of left-leaning readers, Hurston is nobody’s romantic. She consistently witnesses the deeply ambiguous potential of interpersonal connection. Full of newly excavated ambivalence and provoked by Jody’s incessant attempts to belittle her, Janie finally ridicules him in front of Sam Watson and Lige Moss. Putting her interpersonal awareness to hostile—in terms of Haitian voodoo energy, Ge­rouge or Petro—purposes, she retaliates in a way that shocks others. To Janie’s Petro imagism, Sam responds, “Great God from Zion!” and while Joe looks to the men to deflect the power of Janie’s attack, none can refute the accuracy of Janie’s comment. “You heard her, you ain’t blind,” Walter says. The immediate impact of her remark reveals Hurston’s multi­leveled critique of abstract modern identity and the curse of bearing the burden of Ajàálà’s flawed traditional destiny, alone. Split off from the others, his image shattered, Starks fears that the townspeople will “look with envy at the things and pity the man who owned them.” The narration then grav­itates toward the unmasked persona of Joe Starks, trapped between his shal­low public world and tragically limited personal awareness thwarted by Esu­-Elegba’s parable. Joe realizes that there “was nothing to do in life anymore. Ambition was useless. And the cruel deceit of Janie! Making all that show of humbleness and scorning him all the time! Laughing at him, and now putting the town up to do the same.” As with Nanny before him and Tea Cake after, the narration signs Joe’s death note by confronting him with an experience which he cannot articulate, a crossroads he cannot imagine: “Joe Starks didn’t know the words for all this, but he knew the feeling” (239). Hurston’s depiction of the conse­ quences of Janie’s Afro-modernist excavation anticipates the difficulties of emergence experienced by the charac­ters of Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and Hayden. She emphasizes the exponen­tial magnification of distance between depersonalized and interpersonalized connections. When she emerges, she attempts to talk “to a man who was ten immensities away” (243). The scene of Janie’s futile emergence recounts com­mon Esu-Elegba imagery of inverted intent and masked hostility. As Hurston notes, the relationship gave the appearance of calm, but “the still­ness was the sleep of swords,” in which Esu-Elegba’s force is most dev­astating (240). Like the figures’ oppos­ing perceptions of color in the many­-colored hat parable, when Janie and Joe talk, each hears the opposite of what the other intended to say. Trapped in EsuElegba’s parable of inversion, the conversation bears witness to a fully thwarted “reckoning,” a dialogic night­mare. First Joe asserts that Janie “ain’t got the right feeling for nobody,” to which Janie responds, “But,

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Jody, Ah meant to be awful nice.” Jody: “No sympathy.” Janie: “Naw, Jody, it wasn’t because Ah didn’t have no sym­pathy. Ah had uh lavish uh dat. Ah just didn’t never git no chance tuh use none of it. You wouldn’t let me.” Joe: “Ah wouldn’t let you show no feelin’! When, Janie, dat’s all Ah ever wanted or desired. Now you come blamin’ me!” Janie: “Ah ain’t here to blame nobody” (243–44). After Joe’s death, Esu-Elegba apparently leaves Eatonville in triumph. Hurston’s description of Starks’s funeral recalls one of the Haitian praise-names for Esu she recorded in Tell My Horse: “Baron Carrefour, Lord of the Crossroads” (128). Recasting the praise-name in Their Eyes, she twins Esu-Elegba’s exit with an ironic reference to Joe Starks’s demise: The “Little Emperor of the cross-roads was leaving Orange County as he had come—with the outstretched hand of power” (246). In Their Eyes, the danger created by Esu’s disruptive presence is clear. Through Hurston’s eyes, we can glimpse its redemptive potential.

Esu-Elegba, Inter-Personalization, and Immersion Hurston understood the potential of Esu-Elegba’s challenges in relation to Janie’s (and undoubtedly her own) postascent “immersion” nar­ratives. In Stepto’s concept of immersion, estranged ascent figures “return” to reestablish connections to the inter­ personal cultural languages and rituals of the symbolic South. For Stepto, dur­ing immersion, the figure “forsake[s] highly individualized” identity in the “narrative’s least oppressive social structure” for “the new found balms of group identity” which can partially “ameliorate . . . the conditions imposed by solitude” (From Behind the Veil, 167). Hurston’s presenta­tion of Janie’s immersion takes place in relation to Tea Cake and draws on pat­terns and details of her ethnographic work. In part 2 of Mules and Men, while working with “Kitty Brown, a well known hoodoo doctor in New Orleans,” Hurston participates in an aggressive (Petro) ritual to avenge and redeem the marital suffering of a woman she calls Rachel Roe. Hurston hypothesizes the communal good that might follow the vengeful ritual enact­ment: “If he were dead she could smile again, yes—could go back to her work and save some money, yes. Perhaps she might even meet a man who could restore her faith in menfolk” (240). The connection between Rachel Roe and the newly widowed Janie Starks is obvious. The final portion of Their Eyes Were Watching God shows the full depth and range of Hurston’s diasporic modernist vision in relation to such an emergence. Tea Cake appears in the novel to help Janie “reckon” her way out of her withdraw­al

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amid the ruins of Starks’s design beset by the riddles of Esu-Elegba’s parable. His willingness to break abstract social customs, brilliance as a performer, and skillful and loving insight into Janie’s state of mind accompany Janie out of her sequestered place as the late mayor’s incidental wife and into a renewed and vibrant encounter with social and per­sonal experience. While Tea Cake is a perfect complement to Janie’s reckon­ing with Esu-Elegba, the advantage isn’t reciprocal. In the end, like Nanny and Joe Starks before him, Tea Cake cannot improvise de- or interpersonal connections which enable him to exca­vate and articulate his experience. Compelled by, among other things, his unexamined masculine need to protect Janie, he dies in a horrific parable of inverted intention. Gripped in mad­ness, he’s shot by his beloved wife (whom he taught to shoot) while attempting to kill her out of the warped impulse to control and protect “the only living thing he saw” (325). Initially leaving no silences in which Esu-Elegba’s insinuations could take hold, Tea Cake’s confrontation with Janie’s real and imagined fears and attitudes is forthright. Upon their first meeting, Tea Cake buys Janie a Coke and asks her why she stays in the store when everybody is at a baseball game in Winter Park: Janie replies that she doesn’t have to stay in the store but she’s “worried ’bout [Tea Cake] uh lit­tle.” In his reply, Tea Cake gauges Janie’s sensibility, probing whether or not she holds his lack of social standing against him: “How come? ’Fraid Ah ain’t gointuh pay fuh dese drinks?” (253). After Tea Cake’s first overt advances toward Janie, she suggests that his flattery is part of a routine and that he “done told plenty women all about it.” Not backing off, Tea Cake replies, “Ah’m de Apostle Paul tuh the Gentiles. Ah tells ’em and then agin Ah shows ’em.” But when Janie attempts to mask her disappointment at Tea Cake’s reply by telling him how sleepy she is, Tea Cake confronts the deception: “Naw, you ain’t sleepy, Mis Janie. You jus’ want me to tuh go. You figger Ah’m uh rounder and a pimp and you done wasted too much time talkin’ wid me” (259). Tea Cake’s ability to confront Janie’s doubt leaves EsuElegba scant opportunity to insti­gate at the silent crossroads of class and abstract social custom. Even with Esu’s antics in mind, Hurston shows how interpersonal presence can open the gates to social and personal awareness. With insight similar to Janie’s perception of Starks’s and Killicks’s “heads” and unconscious destinies, Tea Cake repeatedly per­ceives aspects of Janie’s consciousness of which she is unaware. However, unlike Janie’s hostile (Petro) invocation of her awareness in her Rachel Roe–like ritual slaying of Starks’s image, Tea Cake employs his insight with a heal­ing tact. As Hurston notices in Mules and Men and notes explicitly in Tell My

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Horse, these healing (Rada) energies are used in reestablishing and maintaining healthy personal and communal relationships. Nonetheless, after their first night together, Esu-Elegba, “the fiend,” returns to disrupt the connec­tion that allows Janie, even in Tea Cake’s absence, to “feel him and almost see him.” Drawing on a West African sense of coolness (noted by Thompson and Abiodun and by Hurston in Mules and Men) as a state of receptive connection (in Yoruba, ìtútù), even in the mounting heat of the Florida sun, Janie experiences Esu­-Elegba’s arrival as an interruption of “the cool of the afternoon” (262). Hurston’s description of Esu-Elegba again emphasizes his ability to insti­gate division: In the cool of the afternoon the fiend from hell specially sent to lovers arrived at Janie’s ear. Doubt. All the fears that circumstance could provide and the heart feel, attacked her on every side. This was a new sensation for her, but no less excruciating. If only Tea Cake would make her certain! He did not return that night or the next and so she plunged into the abyss and descended to the ninth darkness where light has never been. (262)

When Tea Cake returns to take Janie to the “Sunday school picnic” he deals with Esu-Elegba’s instigations and brings Janie back out of the depth of the “ninth darkness” (262). Janie speaks through Esu-Elegba’s parable. She lies about her attitude: “If there’s somebody else you’d ruther take, it’s all right wid me.” Tea Cake confronts Esu-Elegba’s work head on, “Naw it ain’t all right wid you. If it was you wouldn’t be sayin’ dat. Have de nerve tuh say whut you mean” (263). Score: Tea Cake 1, Esu-Elegba 0. In relation to Tea Cake, Janie nego­tiates the crossroads, crosses all the divisions “that circumstances could provide and the heart feel,” and con­ nects with a fuller range of her experi­ence (262). Drawing her out of her de­personalized self and into the inter­personal medium, Tea Cake doesn’t allow Janie to withdraw, sit off in the distance, and watch through deper­ sonal visions and revisions like she did with Starks. Janie learns from Tea Cake’s perception of her head naked of its skull, parts of her consciousness masked from her awareness. In response to Tea Cake’s presence, Janie’s interior depth and interperson­ al awareness resist Esu-Elegba’s multi­leveled instigations. Tea Cake’s forth­right attitude and ability to allay Janie’s suspicions enable them system­atically to dismantle confines of the symbolic North and South, the empty modern roles of Eatonville and the rigid traditional attitudes of Nanny and Logan Killicks. There are fewer fiends in the ovens on the muck. In fact, there are fewer ovens. Janie works alongside Tea Cake by day and Tea Cake “would help her

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get supper after­wards.” For the first time, Janie feels fully involved in a community. With a “crowd of people around her and a dice game on her floor!” Janie “could listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to” (284). In relation to these connections, new (Eastern) horizons of a recupera­ tion narrative emerge. While Tea Cake helps thwart Esu-Elegba’s instigations in Janie’s head, he fails to internalize the lessons. For her part, Janie is unable fully to reciprocate Tea Cake’s accom­paniment. In the context of Hurston’s diasporic modernist vision, Tea Cake’s demise underscores how interpersonal connections are a key transition between disruption and renewal. In the recuperation section of the novel that follows, Hurston embeds the symbolic geography of black modernity in a diasporic metaphysical world. In so doing, she undoes the rationalizations of the symbolic North and South, reveals a newly free and volatile world of possibility, and reminds readers why the novel isn’t titled Their Eyes Were Watching a Dice Game.

The Symbolic East, the Diasporic Muck, and Tea Cake’s Metaphysical Blue As noted above, Judylyn Ryan expands Stepto’s North-South paradigm of ascent and immersion at both ends, proposing a narrative of “dispersion” which accounts for the psychological and cultural effects of a movement to a “symbolic West,” a for­eign location of terror and bondage, and a narrative of “recuperation” which charts a movement toward an imagined or literal “symbolic East” of reconnection with African culture. For the novel as a whole and in relation to Janie’s quest, Hurston’s “the muck” is a symbolic East. In her symbolic East, Hurston imagines new cultural and psychologi­cal patterns that reconnect the inter­personal dynamics of the symbolic South (symbolized in Janie and Tea Cake’s connection) to a more expansive diasporic community. Such a bond might repair the rift between the natural/ metaphysical world created by the black modern symbolic North (imaged in Joe Starks’s design). Evidently, this is what Hurston had in mind, but her characters had other ideas. While Janie seems to be ready for the psychological realities of recuperation, Tea Cake and others can’t make the transition from the logic of the symbolic South to the symbolic East. Apparently lacking the individual depth Janie develops during her ascent and depersonalized descent, Tea Cake’s contradictions sur­face on the muck in ways he can’t han­dle. While black literature has made much of

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the existential, modernist implications of the blues, Tea Cake doesn’t see it that way. Despite his bril­liance as a performer in the symbolic South, Hurston shows how he is undone by the realities of love and life in the newly dawned symbolic East. While the connection between Tea Cake and Janie initially resonates with cultural victory (what Alice Walker has called “racial health”) in immersion, Tea Cake’s downfall betrays the pat­ tern of recuperation and signals the destruction of the nascent diasporic community. In the end, Esu singles Tea Cake out for a more horrific twist of orí than even Joe Starks experienced. Tea Cake plays the guitar, but he has no blues. In his famous essay “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Ralph Ellison emphasizes the psychological reckonings implicit in the blues tradition of “fingering the jagged grain” of experience (Shadow and Act, 79). Expanding Ellison’s lit­erary blues impulse in many poems and several essays, Yusef Komunyakaa emphasizes the psychological overlays between modernist poetics and blues performance. In his essay “Langston Hughes + Poetry = The Blues,” Komunyakaa characterizes “the bedrock of the blues [as] (vertical music)” (32). In a 1998 interview, he makes explicit the connection between blues and reckonings at the modernist crossroads: This involves our search into our own psyches that is an attempt to align the external with the internal. I do see the blues as confrontation. So, truth is always taking a step back—and it keeps us moving ahead—and there comes a point when what we really discover is, in essence, our own selves. . . . And I do see the blues as confrontation. I’m not talking about in a strict political sense, but confrontation with one’s mortality, confrontation with the essence of just being human. Pain, cel­ ebration—all those things mixed together—not creating a flotsam but creating a kind of relation if possible. (Barnstone and Garabedian, “The Body Is Our First Music,”120–21)

Despite his genius in the social world, Tea Cake is unable to excavate his internalization of abstractions, such as the problematic cultural significance of Janie’s appearance, her social class, and the nearly metaphysical prestige of money derived from the white-owned economy. His unacknowledged, deep-seated attachment to these abstractions comes as grimly ironic in light of his gift as a blues singer. However popular Tea Cake’s performances may be on the muck, and however useful they have been to Janie’s emergence (in ways alarmingly similar to Starks), he can’t imagine his own crossroads. Having no voice for that level of expe­rience is a lethal affliction in Hurston’s diasporic modernism.

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Echoing Hurston’s findings in Tell My Horse, Henry J. Drewal and John Pemberton III note that, as divine messenger, Esu-Elegba also challenges connections between humans and the orisas. Tea Cake’s fall and the brutal Judgment Day destruction of the muck signal the inability of Hurston’s imagined diasporic commu­nity to reckon with Esu-Elegba’s multi­leveled challenges in relation to the interpersonal and metaphysical dilem­mas of recuperation narratives. In his failure to deal with Esu’s personal gates, Tea Cake falls prey to his inter­nalization of stock motifs of main­stream American modern life. Succumbing to the rift between mod­ern man and nature, he leads the black Americans on the muck into a rift with the natural and emerging diasporic cultural and metaphysical worlds around them. Interestingly, the forces of nature that destroy the muck, the wind and water, are the elements of feminine deities in the Yoruba pan­theon of orisas. All in all, despite Tea Cake’s momentary success dealing with Esu’s instigations in Eatonville, the final section of the novel shows the danger and even chaos that threaten Hurston’s imagined diasporic world. Hurston envisioned the muck as a location free from the constraints inherent to black-mirrored versions of American modernity. Echoing Faulkner’s depiction of the demise of Sutpen’s hundred in Absalom, Absalom!, Starks’s rise and fall voices Hurston’s critique of modernity’s emphasis on economic centers. In Starks’s Eatonville, he reasons, “everything is got tuh have uh center and uh heart tuh it, and uh town ain’t no different from nowhere else” (206). Starks identifies the black ascent position in the American modern, aptly, as “no dif­ferent from nowhere else.” He con­cludes that it “would be natural fuh de store tuh be the meetin’ place fuh de town” (206). In relation to its moorings in the modern, Starks’s store is, literally, the middle of nowhere. If Eatonville is “nowhere else,” Hurston envisioned the muck as somewhere East: a symbolic place of repatriation and renewed presence, a proto-dias­poric community in which, “during the summer when she heard the subtle but compelling rhythms of the Bahaman drummers, she’d walk over and watch the dances.” Citizens of the proto-diaspora now, Hurston images Janie and Tea Cake’s sympathy with and interest in the diasporic cultural flow. Having stayed on after the money was made “in season,” Janie is not economically motivated. She “did not laugh the ‘Saws’ to scorn as she had heard the people doing in the season. She got to like it a lot and she and Tea Cake were on hand every night till the others teased them about it” (288). In Hurston’s off-season diasporic world, the terrain is organized in cultural and metaphysical, instead of rationalized, economic terms. More naturally than Starks’s store, Tea Cake’s house becomes “the unauthorized center of the ‘job.’ The way he would sit in the doorway and play his guitar made

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people stop and listen and maybe dis­appoint the jukes for a night” (282). After “Tea Cake and Janie had friended with the Bahaman workers,” a trans­national diasporic community emerges on the muck as “the ‘Saws’ had been gradually drawn into the American crowd.” After “many of the Americans” learned the diasporic dances and “liked it as much as the ‘Saws,’ . . . they began to hold the dances night after night . . . behind Tea Cake’s house” (300). The first sign of trouble in Hurston’s symbolic East appears in Tea Cake’s failed interior reckoning. As Gary Edwards points out above, Esu is a cross-dresser. In the face of Mrs. Turner’s color-coded disdain for him, the signs of Tea Cake’s unreckoned interior surface. Janie’s casual response to Tea Cake’s paranoid suggestion that Mrs. Turner intends to arrange a liaison between Janie and her brother doesn’t assuage his fear. In fact, showing a lack of interpersonal awareness, and to Esu-Elegba’s delight, Janie seems not to realize that the problem has more to do with Tea Cake’s feelings than her own. She replies: “If dat’s her notion she’s barking up de wrong tree. Mah hands is full already” (291). Rather than the improvised reckoning of the blues singer, Tea Cake’s response to issues which confront his interior, “Thanky Ma’am,” quickly becomes a trope of his stasis and the couple’s thwarted excavation of Tea Cake’s blues. Hurston continues to emphasize Tea Cake’s brilliance as a performer while his sense of himself erodes from the inside. As the diasporic storm approaches the muck, Janie, Tea Cake, Motor Boat, and Muck-Boy pit black American cultural rituals against its metaphysical force. Gravitating toward the anxious mood of the group, the narration asks Tea Cake “how come he couldn’t playa lick or hit that box a lick or two?” and responds, “Well, all right now, make us know it” (302). Later, MuckBoy goes “crazy through the feet and dance[s] himself and everybody else crazy.” Tea Cake and Motor Boat throw a “show-off game” of dice and, for a moment, the folks “forgot the work and the weather watching them throw. It was art” (303). But imaging the rift between the black performers and the orisa symbolized in the storm, the narration slips out of sync with the metaphysical frame Hurston has established between time­less rhythms of sunrise and sunset. During the storm, “it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands” (303–4). In their modern selves, out of sync with the orisas and natural patterns, the group is surrounded by modernist metaphysi­cal nothingness. A conflict arises between images that structure Hurston’s diasporic awareness and her imagination of the full range of Tea Cake’s consciousness in the plot of the novel. As James Baldwin showed so compellingly

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in his work, often one’s suspicion of others reveals one’s self. This insight applies with great rigor to attitudes and fears which appear in Tea Cake but also mir­ror those of figures to whom he’s con­trasted in the plot: Mrs. Turner and Joe Starks. Despite Tea Cake’s hatred for Mrs. Turner’s colorstruck adoration for Janie’s physical appearance, Tea Cake was himself drawn to the same Janie that Mrs. Turner sees. This under­current casts new light on Tea Cake’s ostensibly endearing and romantic fas­cination with, among other things, Janie’s soft, long hair: “Ah ain’t been sleepin’ so good for more’n uh week cause Ah been wishin’ so bad tuh git mah hands in yo’ hair. . . . It feels jus’ lak underneath uh dove’s wing next to mah face” (258). That’s why people of Mrs. Turner’s ilk—and plenty of oth­ers—call it “good hair.” The contradic­tory overlap between Tea Cake’s and Mrs. Turner’s perceptions fans the flames of his ambivalence and para­noia. Of Mrs. Turner, Tea Cake says, “Ah ain’t mad wid her for whut she done, ’cause she ain’t done me nothin’ yet. Ah’m mad at her for thinkin’ ” (295). After identifying with money and “the bossman” instead of the nat­ural world and the diasporic communi­ty of Bahamians and Indians, during the storm Tea Cake mouths more of Starks’s class-conscious and patriarchal point of view. He tells Janie: “Ah reckon you wish now you had of stayed in yo’ big house ’way from such as dis.” Janie replies, “Ah’m wid my husband in uh storm, dat’s all.” Despite his now-for­mulaic “Thanky Ma’am,” Tea Cake remains unconvinced. Attempting to return to the rhythmic frame of sunrise and sunset, Janie’s response is still focused on herself: “If you kin see the light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never see de light at all” (304). But, instead, “it stayed night.” Despite his perfor­mances, the storm goes on and Tea Cake’s doubt reappears. As the storm continues, the pat­terns and diasporic energies (orisas) begin to emerge out of the modernist metaphysical abyss. These images depict the dissonance between secular­ized perspectives of the black Americans led by Tea Cake and the fluid and volatile diasporic structure of Hurston’s recuperation narrative. The sympathetic, indeed heroic, portrait of Tea Cake in the plot masks a danger­ous dash of energies in the emerging diasporic modernist metaphysics of Hurston’s mythic method. The diasporic modernist mythic method in the novel appears from an understand­ing of how energies from Mules and Men and Tell My Horse overlap with images in Their Eyes and moments from Hurston’s life. Showing the dias­poric structure of her ethnographic research in Mules and Men, Luke Turner’s initiation of Hurston into con­nection with the spirits of hoodoo con­nects the rituals of New Orleans to the loa or orisas of Haiti and West Africa. Turner clearly initiates Hurston into a spirit/

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energy related to Oya, wife of Shango, and the feminine energy of force and angry retribution in Yoruba­-derived pantheons. In Nigeria, Oya’s energy is invoked in the mighty waters of the Niger River and in the wind and rain of thunderstorms. Consequently, Turner chants to Hurston: “You must come to the spirit across running water. . . . I see her conquering and accomplishing with the lighting and making her road with thunder. She shall be called the Rain-Bringer.” Hurston remembers that “Turner painted the lightning symbol down my back from my right shoulder to my left hip. This was to be my sign forever. The Great One was to speak to me in storms” (Mules and Men, 200). Hurston was well aware of Esu-Elegba’s role in the connection between people as well as between people and the loa or orisas. In Tell My Horse, she notes that “Papa Legba is always the first to receive sac­rifice in any ritual invocation of the loa” (119). Esu’s dissonance widens the rift between the people of the muck and the orisa; the storm gathers force, and most of the muck takes notice. Signaling precisely the syncretic mix of West African and Christian cosmolo­ gies she found in Haiti, Hurston’s thunder and lightning join Gabriel’s trumpet and Shango’s (bata) drums: “Gabriel was playing the deep tones in the center of the drum” (Their Eyes, 303). Most of the residents of the symbolic East were ready to heed the first signs. First a “band of Seminoles” passes by. They inform Janie that they are “going to high ground. Saw-grass bloom. Hurricane coming” (300). In response, the free-indirect narration carries a black communal voice obsessed with modern forms of ownership, attached to dollars, and rife with prejudice against American Indians: Still a blue sky and fair weather. Beans running fine and prices good, so the Indians could be, must be, wrong. You couldn’t have a hurricane when you’re making seven and eight dollars a day picking beans. . . . Indians don’t know much uh nothin’, tuh tell de truth. Else they’d own dis country still. De white folks ain’t gone nowhere. Dey oughta know if it’s dangerous. (300)

Hurston’s comic/tragic portrait of false consciousness is nothing that a few lis­tens to Bessie Smith’s “Back Water Blues” couldn’t demystify. But, as we know, Tea Cake’s blues don’t provide the necessary confrontations in existen­tial insight or social critique. The black American indifference contrasts with the subtle and inclusive call-and-response rhythms of the symbolic East. Animals follow in the exodus as “the palm and banana trees began that long distance talk with rain.” Finally, when the Bahamian

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folks begin to leave as well, Lias warns Tea Cake once more, “De crow gahn up, man.” Tea Cake’s response shows his tragic identification with the rulers of the economy: “Dat ain’t nothin’. You ain’t seen the boss­man go up, is yuh?” (Their Eyes, 301). Lias’s ironic response hints at the diasporic meta­physics of Hurston’s recuperation nar­rative, “If Ah never see you no mo’ on earth, Ah’ll meet you in Africa” (302). As Tea Cake fails to reckon with Esu-Elegba’s interior gates, he falls out of sync with Janie and the metaphysics of the diasporic world. In a passage that shows the collisions in the deep structure of Hurston’s mythic method, Tea Cake’s first attempt to confide in Janie occurs in a pause allowed by Hurston’s own patron energy, Oya. Tea Cake momentarily finds his voice amidst “a little wind-lull.” Recalling Hurston’s statement that the wind and storm “was to be my sign forever” shows the significance in the timing of the exchange. When Tea Cake claims that Janie has given him new reason to believe in their relationship, he is cut off in mid-thought by the storm and “wind [which] came back with triple fury.” Tea Cake’s nascent excavation shows the confusion Esu-Elegba can work in silence as he responds, “Well then, Janie, you meant what you didn’t say ’cause Ah never knowed you wuz so satisfied wid me lak dat. Ah kinda thought—” (304). The furious winds cut him short. Of course, Tea Cake’s problems are not about Janie any more than her initial insecurities in Eatonville were about Tea Cake. The problems emanate from Tea Cake’s unreckoned interior and the misalign­ments they cause in the exterior world. As the storm begins, the feminine energies of the diaspora assault the muck. The danger of the couple’s inability to penetrate to the source of Tea Cake’s fear grows in intensity and specificity. As if imaging the author’s rage at Tea Cake’s shortcomings, in the long night that “stayed night,” the storm and wind (Oya, Hurston’s own spiritual alter ego) thwart the final beginnings of Tea Cake’s descent. As they always do, unreckoned blues return. In this case, Hurston uses classic blues imagery that could have been drawn directly from Robert Johnson’s “Hell Hound on My Trail.” Esu-Elegba’s margins are chal­ lenges to intra- and interpersonal con­ nections. Hurston’s narration and Janie’s consciousness enter into several combinations which allow these spaces to interact freely. As noted above, inability to choose a course of action transforms Esu-Elegba’s playful chal­ lenge into dissonant futility, a figura­ tive, personalized instance of hell. Tea Cake’s internalized ambivalence about Janie’s appearance and social class and his need to protect her are, through Esu’s positioning of barriers, effective­ly off-limits to both of them: they cannot begin to talk about what ails him. As if from the unconscious, the danger returns in a surrealist’s set of images. Emphasizing that Janie’s personal con­frontations with Esu-Elegba

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don’t make her safe in the diasporic (inter­personal) logic of the recuperation nar­rative, the scene invokes forces that neither of the characters controls. As if overtaken by the patron energies of an author now frustrated by Janie’s satis­faction with her own awareness, Janie is blown off into deep water by a gust of wind; as she clings to the tail of a cow swimming to safety, a rabid dog stand­ing on the cow’s back attacks her; Tea Cake is bitten before he saves Janie and sends “the dog to the bottom to stay there” (310). Force and violence, how­ever, aren’t effective methods for reck­oning with Esu. Like the blues images in the psyche, the dog won’t stay down. In response to each of Esu-Elegba’s instigations in Janie’s consciousness, Tea Cake shows his interpersonal skill and speaks to Janie’s state of mind. These connections thwart Esu-Elegba’s meddling. In contrast, Janie’s response to Tea Cake’s doubt is nearly solipsis­tic; she tells him about herself. Speaking out of the storm from which he couldn’t protect her, Tea Cake says, “reckon you never ’spected tuh come to dis when you took up wid me, didja?” Janie’s response again fails to connect with Tea Cake’s interior, “Ah’m thankful fuh anything we come through together.” Signaling the repetitive stasis, Tea Cake responds predictably: “Thanky Ma’am.” In a final image of the “hellhound,” Janie recollects that the dog “wuzn’t noth­ing all over but pure hate. Wonder where he come from?” (311). Finally, Tea Cake succumbs to the clichéd “dog in him.” The jealousy mixes with the madness resulting from the “rabid dog” bite—syphilis?—and Tea Cake asks Janie about the rumors surround­ing Mrs. Turner’s brother. Referring back to herself, again Janie responds as she had in the past. Tea Cake, now gripped in stasis and mounting mad­ness, again replies predictably, “Thanky Ma’am” (322). From this point, Hurston’s use of the repetitive “Thanky Ma’am” phrasing resonates backward through the story. This is not the improvised disruption of Tea Cake’s interpersonal performative brilliance. Rather it signals a thwarted reckoning with Esu’s most intimate margins, an impotence in the face of the need for interpersonal excavation trapped in a shallow and static cliché. Where are the new words? The plot of Hurston’s Their Eyes has no space for Tea Cake’s internal reckon­ing. Providing the structure of her mythic method, the images in the final section of the novel betray an unforgiv­ing contempt for the figure instrumen­tal in Janie’s emergence. No one responds to anyone’s call. Cut off by the wind, Tea Cake’s calls hang in open air like the angular gestures of the Harlem dancers Hurston described in “The Characteristics of Negro Expression.” But, like a performance in an empty hall, there’s no longer any reciprocity in Hurston’s antiphonal epistemics. Janie’s responses them­selves fail the interpersonal logic Hurston crafted with such care. Esu-Elegba’s relation to the images

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at the crossroads of Janie and Tea Cake’s efforts to connect to themselves and each other catches Hurston’s work-in-progress and illuminates the brilliant flux of her design: the struggle to improvise language to chart the interi­or and interpersonal crossroads of black modern and diasporic life. As in Robert Johnson’s life and music and Komunyakaa’s poetry, in Hurston’s work, reckoning with “the Little Emperor of the cross-roads” isn’t abstract (Their Eyes, 246). It’s a life-and-death struggle. As for the figure in Komunyakaa’s diasporic modernist lyric “Confluence,” in relation to Tea Cake, Hurston’s voices “break open the pink magnolia / when struggle is home to the beast in us” (Thieves of Paradise, 14). From her first protagonist in “John Redding Goes to Sea” through Lucy and John in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston’s characters die when they can no longer improvise languages to artic­ulate their experience. Although it offers a much more complicated set of reckonings than anything before it, Their Eyes Were Watching God fits the pattern with shocking fidelity. When Nanny confronts the generational dif­ferences in Janie’s changing expecta­tions, she cannot frame them with any meaning. Hurston’s final image of Nanny shows her futile search for meaning in the depths of her own uncharted interior. Nanny’s deperson­alized medium instantly falls into nothingness: She “stayed on her knees so long she forgot she was there her­self. There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought. Nanny entered this infinity of conscious pain again on her old knees.” Without means to articulate the depths of her experience, Nanny gives up the search and prays, “Lawd, you know mah heart. Ah done the best Ah could do. De rest is left to you.” Obviously, for Hurston, the traditional abstractions are not enough: “A month later she was dead” (194). Joe Starks meets a similar fate as his crumbling prestige and Janie’s pinpoint retalia­tion combine to face him with the inad­equacy of his voice: “Joe Starks didn’t know the words for all this, but he knew the feeling” (239). Soon after, Starks is dead. Despite Tea Cake’s genius as a performer and his ability to help reveal Janie to herself, the novel doesn’t allow him a mode of descent. Something suggests that Nunkie just isn’t the answer.* The full implications of Tea Cake’s need to protect Janie, as well as the source of his attraction to her, are beyond the crossroads of the novel’s reckoning. From the first instance of violence between *Editor’s note: Pavlic’s ´ stream-of-consciousness line references Nunkie, a young girl who flirts with Tea Cake in the muck in the Everglades, causing Janie to experience jealousy.

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them, Hurston notes that Tea Cake didn’t beat Janie “because her behavior justified his jeal­ousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him” (294). As with all the other failures in Esu-Elegba’s parable space, Tea Cake’s true love and masculine need to protect intensify into their opposites: pure hate and a masculine compulsion to make conquests, to abuse, and, finally, to kill. During the storm, the angered feminine orisa put a momentary stop to the madness: “The wind and water had given life to lots of things that folks think of as dead. . . . Common danger made common friends. Nothing sought a conquest over the other” (305, 308). The peace doesn’t last. Eventually, Tea Cake is overcome by the “fiend,” returned as the worst possible invocation of Esu-­Elegba’s presence: “She saw him stiffen himself all over as he leveled and took aim. The fiend in him must kill and Janie was the only living thing he saw” (325). Tea Cake isn’t willing or able to make proper sacrifices to Esu-Elegba. Hurston sacrifices him to show that the personal and communal stakes that diasporic modernism unearths are high. Hurston’s ethnographic research into diasporic cosmology discovered energies that unlocked the keys to Janie’s personal and cultural self-real­ization. At the novel’s close, Janie is poised for a full meditation on the ancestors. But it won’t be pretty. Seen in this light, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a dangerous and unforgiving text. The orisas apparently haven’t read the New Testament. As Hurston understood, the energies that emerge from what amounts to the archetypes of the diasporic unconscious are vital and violent, and (buy a map of the genome if you like) resolutions are beyond the ships on the internal and external horizons. Drawing insights from high modernism, black folk tradi­tions, and a wide range of diasporic ethnographic and experiential material, Hurston shows, through Janie, the immediate necessity of both deperson­alized attention to individual interiors and vigilant interpersonal connection to others attempting to do the same. This essay aims to illuminate the struc­ture of her design in this regard. More importantly, I hope it bolsters respect for the bottomless mysteries of the cre­ative process in general and Hurston’s great novel in particular. Perhaps, I’m even after a little healthy fear in the face of the cultural, psychological, and metaphysical terrains of the diaspora. In reckoning with these energies, “fear is the most divine emotion,” Hurston writes. “It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood” (Their Eyes, 293). As I tell my students, we’re after engaging concepts, but we go in fear of abstrac­tions and role models. It’s not enough to praise Zora and emulate Tea Cake. The author died with her diasporic vision completely unrecognized, and brother Woods died like a god spelled backward.

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Works Cited

Abimbola, Wande, ed. “Ìwàpèlé: The Concept of Good Character In Ifá Literary Corpus.” In Abimbola, Yorùbá Oral Tradition: Poetry in Music, Dance, and Drama, 389–420. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1975. Abiodun, Rowland. “Ifá Art Objects: An Interpretation Based on Oral Tradition.” In Yorùbá Oral Tradition: Poetry in Music, Dance, and Drama, ed. Wande Abimbola, 421–69. Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1975. Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” In Going to Meet the Man, ed. James Baldwin, 103–41. New York: Dial, 1965. Barber, Karin. I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Village.Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1991. ———. “Polyvocality and the Individual Talent.” In The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, edited by Rowland Abiodun, Henry Drewal, and John Pemberton III, 150–60. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1994. Barnstone, Tony and Michael Garabedian. “The Body Is Our First Music.” Poetry Flash 227 (1998): 107–25. Constantino, Donald. “Who Is That Fellow in the Many-Colored Cap?: Transformations of Eshu in New and Old World Mythologies.” Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 161–275. Drewal, Henry J. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought. New York: Center for African Art, 1989. Dutton, Wendy. “The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 8, no. 2 (1996): 131–52. Edwards, Gary. Black Gods: Orisa Studies in the New World. Brooklyn: Yoruba Traditional Archministry, 1985. Eliot, Thomas Sterns. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, 1975. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1964. Eric B. (Eric Barrier) and Rakim Allah (William Michael Griffin Jr.). Follow the Leader. UNI Records Inc, 1988. CD. Frost, Robert. “Once By the Pacific.” In The Poetry of Robert Frost, 250. New York: Holt, 1969. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Looking for Modernism.” In Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara, 200–207. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gosselin, Adrienne Johnson. “Beyond the Harlem Renaissance: The Case for Black Modernist Writers.” Modern Language Studies 26, no. 4 (1996): 37–45. Hayden, Robert. Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher. New York: Liveright, 1985.

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Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 1935. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. ———. Tell My Horse. 1938. New York: Harper, 1990. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. In Novels and Stories, 175–333. New York: Library of America, 1990. Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Crossroads.” Ploughshares 23, no. 1 (1997): 5–6. ———. “Langston Hughes + Poetry = The Blues.” In Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, ed. Radictani Clytus, 31–35. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. ———. Thieves of Paradise. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. “ ‘So You Want a Story, Do You?’: Epistemologies and The Chaneysville Incident.” Mississippi Quarterly 49 (1996): 755–74. McClelland, E. M. Cult of Ifa Among the Yoruba. London: Ethnographica, 1982. Ogundipe, Ayodele. “Esu Elegbara, The Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty: A Study of Yoruba Mythology.” 2 vols. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1978. Pavlic, ´ Edward. “Syndetic Redemption: Above-Underground Emergence in David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident.” African American Review 30 (1996): 165–84. Pelton, Robert. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Rampersad, Arnold. “Langston Hughes and Approaches to Modernism in the Harlem Renaissance.” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, ed. Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin, 49–71. New York: Garland, 1989. Reeves, Diana. Never Too Far. EMI, 1989. CD. Ryan, Judylyn. “Water from an Ancient Well: The Recuperation of DoubleConsciousness.” Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1990. Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Thompson, Robert Farris. “The Aesthetics of the Cool.” African Arts 7, no. 1 (1973): 43–44, 64–67. ———. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. 1983. New York: Vintage, 1989. Volosinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. New York: Seminar, 1973. Werner, Craig. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America. New York: Plume, 1998. ———. Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Yai, Olabiyi. “Toward a New Poetics of Oral Poetry in Africa.” Ife: Annals of the Institute of Cultural Studies 1 (1986): 40–56.

6

“Come and Gaze on a Mystery” Oya as Rain-Bringing “I” of Zora Neale Hurston’s Atlantic Storm Walkings Keith Cartwright

. . . ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. —Janie beneath the blossoming pear tree, in Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

I was to walk with the storm and hold my power, and get my answers to life and things in storms. The symbol of lightning was painted on my back. This was to be mine forever. —Hurston on her New Orleans initiation as Rain-Bringer, in Dust Tracks on a Road

Oya who causes the leaves to flutter Oya, strong wind who gave birth to fire while traversing the mountain Oya, please don’t fell the tree in my backyard Oya, we have seen fire covering your body like cloth. —Praises of Oya collected by Fela Sowande and Fagbemi Ajanaku, reprinted in Judith Gleason’s Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess

“What is the truth?” Zora Neale Hurston was asked while undertaking her service to the spirits of Haitian Voudoun that would find publication in 1938 as Tell My Horse. The answer she received—the ritually unveiled vagina of the Mambo—gave unforgettably authoritative witness: “There is no mystery beyond the mysterious source of life” (Tell My Horse, 376).

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This flash of revealed truth would soon inform the language and blooming pear of erotic vision in Hurston’s best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written as she was doing her fieldwork and initiatory seeking in Haiti in 1936. This authorizing encounter with truth and the sublime, however, also finds significant precedent and preparation in Hurston’s earlier ritual seeking. In the winter of 1928, she underwent a series of Voodoo initiations in New Orleans, including one that culminated in her being crowned storm-walking “Rain-Bringer.”1 Later, while writing Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti—and after having witnessed the 1929 hurricane that wrought havoc in the Bahamas—Hurston would script her novel’s concluding action around the destruction caused by the second deadliest hurricane in American history, the 1928 Florida storm that killed over 2,500 people, most of them migrant agricultural workers drowned when the levees holding Lake Okeechobee gave way. The re-presentation of that storm in Their Eyes Were Watching God— with its attentiveness to hubristic dismissals of storm warnings, economically driven decisions to stay in place rather than seek a ride out, control of the high ground commandeered by whites, and a racially charged aftermath of segregationist burial crews—will be read with new poignancy following Hurricane Katrina’s exposure of many of our nation’s old racial wounds and gulfs. Clearly, Their Eyes Were Watching God calls for revitalizing readings, responses that connect Hurston’s dynamic womanism with a spiritual and political vision born of her long circum-Caribbean seeking after sacral truths. But whoever would bow and kiss the mysterious source of the life of Their Eyes Were Watching God would do well to consider what the author as Rain-Bringer brought from her earlier initiation in New Orleans and reconsider then its storm-walking manifestation in her subsequent body of work. My rereadings of Hurston while teaching a University of North Florida seminar on her work following the perspective-changing 2004 hurricane season (when Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne struck Florida)—and again while attempting to respond to Hurricane Katrina in the following year—have convinced me that the coastal South’s most celebrated author found signature authority in her New Orleans initiation into Afro-Atlantic repertoires of the orisha Oya, a female Yoruba divinity of hurricanes, death rites, and shape-shifting wilderness transformations.2 Of the New Orleans initiations represented in Mules and Men (1935), Hurston seems to have been most affected by “the crown of power” she received from Luke Turner (188), who lay claim to being “crowned” by a famous aunt, Marie Leveau, in a storm-dominated narrative of his ritual descent. After accepting entry into this ritual family and undergoing three

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days of intensifying visions in ritual isolation, Hurston emerged to receive Turner’s spirit-divined renaming: “I see her conquering and accomplishing with the lightning and making her road with thunder. She shall be called the Rain-Bringer” (191). She describes how Turner, working with red and yellow paint brushes, “painted the lightning symbol down my back from my right shoulder to my left hip.” This was her sign: “The Great One was to speak to me in storms” (191). Hurston would reinvoke this initiation years later in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), insisting that “it was not only elaborate, it was impressive. I lay naked for three days and nights on a couch, with my navel to a rattlesnake skin which had been dressed and dedicated to the ceremony,” all of which led to sky-walking “dreams that seemed real for weeks,” full of “lightning flashing from under my feet, and grumbling thunder following in my wake” (699). Mules and Men, then, presents a young “Zora” much like the Janie of Their Eyes Were Watching God who must go there to know there—in an initiating encounter with the sublime, from which both Rain-Bringer and the straight-shooting, storm-surviving widow, Janie Crawford, speak with ritual and narrative authority. Hurston’s storm-walking initiation as Rain-Bringer appears to have left its mark on all the writing that followed, inscribing itself most forcefully in the storm of Their Eyes Were Watching God but signifying as well in every book she authored. The spirited daughter of a Baptist minister, Hurston undertook her “seeking” from strong Afro-Florida roots and looked southward to engage subalternized authority in New Orleans, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Haiti. Although she presented herself as agnostic, she found deep satisfaction in the swinging, embodying rites of Afro-Atlantic congregations and spirit houses. Despite the fact that her first published story, “John Redding Goes to Sea” (1921), featured a deadly Florida hurricane, it was only after her crowning as Rain-Bringer that her signature zigzag lightning sign and storm motif found steady inscription in her work. Her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), opens with God “grumbling his thunder and playing the zigzag lightning thru his fingers” (3). A muck-raising hurricane gives the title to her second and best-known novel, whose storm-struck characters “seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God” (Their Eyes, 305). Hurston ends the sacral travels of Tell My Horse with a tale referring to her old lightning sign: God summons “Shango, the god of thunder and lightning,” to fashion “a shaft of lightning,” allowing storm-music of the cosmos to land in “Guinea” to work its rhythms throughout the danced world (261). Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) signs off as Moses lifts his hoodoo rod, “and the zig-zag lightning above him joined the muttering thunder” (595). Dust Tracks

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on a Road places Rain-Bringer’s ritual signature in its final paragraph, signifying to and upon its readers: “You who play the zig-zag lightning of power over the world, with the grumbling thunder in your wake, think kindly of those who walk in the dust” (769). And Hurston’s final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), has at its narrative center Jim Meserve’s courting tale of “a terrible thunderstorm come up all of a sudden” with lightning “zigzagging around something awful,” a tale in which taming husbandry and anti-Puritan irreverence find flashpoint: “It’s a habit of mine, Miss Arvay, when I catch a streak of lightning aiming at me, to stand in my tracks and slap it right back where it come from” (623). An initiate spiritual authority thus roots the work of one of our most celebrated authors, whose ritual death as Zora and rebirth as Rain-Bringer transformed what got authored through her as she reassembled a dismembered corpus of mythic agency. When Rain-Bringer is read in dialogue with Judith Gleason’s articulation of the Afro-Atlantic orisha Oya’s primary manifestations—as “I” of the storm’s winds and lightning flashes, “diva” of death and ancestral representation, and spirit of shape-shiftings deep in wilderness—these Oya domains emerge to provide hermeneutic keys to Hurston’s writing. Ellease Southerland suggested in 1979 that “perhaps the culmination of Zora’s folklore is the form it gave her religious thought,” adding that “if one were to trace her religious thinking in her fiction, there would be discovered a new dimension of religious thought” (“Influences of Voodoo,” 182). Since Southerland’s provocative call, relatively few contributors to the booming Hurston critical industry have followed up on Hurston’s immersions in circum-Caribbean ritual communities and her ministration of those rites in fiction. Most notably, Daphne Lamothe has examined the Haitian Vodou divinity Ezili as a model for Janie and as a key agent in the book’s narrative structure. Edward M. Pavlic´ has recognized that Hurston was “clearly initiated into a New Orleans version of the cult of Oya,” but his exemplary crossroads modernist reading of Esu-Elegba’s presence in Their Eyes Were Watching God leads him away from fuller attention to the primary agency of Hurston’s patron Oya (Crossroads Modernism, 193). More recently, Teresa Washington drew Yoruba-informed attention to Hurston’s fostering role as “African America’s Iyá-Iwé, or Mother of Letters” (Our Mothers, 101) and offered a fuller picture of Oya typologies and Oya’s energetic presence in the narrative formation of Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God.3 My own focus here on Oya as hermeneutic key to Hurston’s mythic vision calls attention to the real powers of storm read through folk narrative, fiction, and divination repertoires, but I also seek to point out how Hurston’s

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Afro-conservative, preservationist Voodoo aesthetic moves in her corpus from another kind of conservatism—born of creolization’s complex balancing acts and New World transformations. Her grounding in the creole history, culture, and landscapes of Florida fed her efforts to muddy the water of national, disciplinary, and psychic boundaries, reopening the coastal South to an Oya-swept muck of Caribbean-Gulf currents of flow and exchange that have imparted to the region much of its cultural vitality as well as its foundational navigations of trauma. Rain-Bringer’s conservation and textual reassemblies of “Ájé,”—of the truth’s womanborn power and mystery—may indeed bring us new dimensions of old religious thought, new coastal ground “baffled” by the retentions and reroutings of many different spirit house traditions.4

“De Wind Is a Woman” Although we may identify Rain-Bringer as a “road” of Oya, her energies share much with the fiery domain of the male orisha Shango, husband of Oya, with whom Hurston also likely identified. Miguel Ramos describes Shango as owner of “lightning and thunder” (“Afro-Cuban Orisha Worship,” 65), while Oya wields and enables much of his repertoire. Oya is the divinity “of the winds and tempests . . . represented by the lightning rod which she gave as a present to her husband” (67). Aptly situated for such work, Hurston’s home in Eatonville lies in a region of Florida that gets more lightning storms per year than any other North American location.5 Moving off the African coast in trade winds that carried Africans to the Americas, Oya’s hurricanes work the most dramatic physical and traumatic links between Africa, the Caribbean, and the coastal American South. Hurston’s initiations into Oya-energies led her to many mentors. Big Sweet, for example, models Oya’s warrior role in Florida’s Polk County jooks. In Mules and Men, she warns Zora: “If anything start, Little-Bit, you run out de door like a streak uh lightning and get in yo’ car” (147). The sermons of Reverend C. C. Lovelace of Eau Gallie (recharging memories of her father John Hurston’s Baptist preaching) were sampled for Jonah’s Gourd Vine and offer another source for Hurston’s ritual signature: You are de same God, Ah Dat heard de sinner man cry. Same God dat sent de zigzag lightning tuh Join de mutterin’ thunder. (76)6

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Along with the devastating 1929 Nassau hurricane that Hurston witnessed months after her Rain-Bringer crowning and recounted in Dust Tracks on a Road (702), she received many Jamaican and Haitian pointers into the sublime in her Caribbean travels. Instructed by teachers ranging from Bessie Smith to Mambo Etienne, Hurston put a special significance on her New Orleans initiation under Luke Turner. In the Haiti of Tell My Horse, “Mambo Etienne,” Hurston writes, “tied my red and yellow handkerchief on my head in the proper loose knot at the back of my head” (418). These were the colors of Turner’s earlier crowning of her head’s inner storms. There remains, however, reason to doubt Hurston’s account of her Rain-Bringer initiation. She was such an accomplished fabricator and mythmaker that it can be difficult to judge when she is telling the truth, when she is telling mythopoetic truths, and when she is telling bold-faced or evasive lies. Harry Hyatt, a widely successful white collector of hoodoo repertoires, was stunned enough by Hurston’s account of her initiations that he traveled twice to New Orleans to confirm the vitality of religious Voodoo there, only to be told such rites no longer existed in the practice of the 1930s. Other factors suggest fabrication of the Turner initiation. Aside from Hurston’s plagiarism of material on Cudjo Lewis published in 1927, the year before her New Orleans studies, the May 1928 publication of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” shows her reaching what is either a jazz-fed oracular divination of her upcoming New Orleans initiation or a fictionalizing pattern of initiatory desire: “My face is painted red and yellow, and my body is painted blue” (828).7 The colors that would be painted on her face half a year later in New Orleans, red and yellow, also happen to be—along with blue and white—fundamental colors used to paint the crowned head in Afro-Cuban orisha initiations (Mason, Living Santeria, 64–65). But if we couple this earlier body-painted “Colored Me” with Reverend Lovelace’s sermonic zigzag lightning and consider possible liftings of source material from ethnographic texts, the cynic may read a self-crowning story of Voodoo initiation fabricated for literary consumption. The bottom line is that Luke Turner could well have been teaching vital ritual traditions received from Marie Leveau via Haitian refugees who came to New Orleans after an informative six-year exile in Cuba.8 Given the importance of New Orleans as a port serving the Caribbean and the Gulf coast, Afro-creole religious knowledge likely found continual lines of transmission in the Gulf South. The presence in the area of people such as the Cuban Tata Gaitán, a key Lucumi babalawo (diviner) and Ochosi priest in Havana who, according to David Brown, “was a

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tabaquero by trade and is believed to have worked in Tampa, Florida, during the 1890s” (Santeria Enthroned, 71), could have contributed to initiations such as those Hurston describes. Surely Gaitán was not the only Caribbean priest who may have been crowning godchildren in the South during this time. In the end, Hurston’s investment in her initiation as Rain-Bringer bears its own witness to the Oya authority inscribed in her life’s work. We can see that the primary object of seeking in Mules and Men is an initiatory quest for authority, making that text, as Cheryl Wall argues, “a paradigmatic immersion narrative” in which the narrator, “Zora,” finds transformation under the jook tutelage of Big Sweet and spiritual repertoires of a storm-ruling Marie Leveau (“Mules and Men and Women,” 53). Mules and Men intuits a unified field reading of African American folk narrative and religious practice.9 Traces of the ritual domains of Afro-creole divinities emerge from folktales Hurston collected, several of which feature diviners, and the agency of Oya herself. These tales are a bridge between the authority of dismembered divination corpora (such as Ifa) and the remembering mythic vision of Hurston’s fiction. When we turn in Judith Gleason’s Oya monograph to a Yoruba Ifa narrative associated with the divination figure Ofun Osa (one of 256 odu or narrative windows on life), we hear how Oya in whirlwind form destroys many houses until she is finally pacified with a sacrifice. Welcomed by a diviner, she then vomits her storm-swept riches upon his floor. Gleason writes that the oracle “stages the bringing in or ‘owning’ of one’s own violence, thereby transforming its capricious, destructive aspects into creative, libidinal energy” (Oya, 40). Divination presents Oya as cosmic house-cleaner: “Sweptclean means Oya” (44). And we are instructed that “Who knows how to calm me down / Knows how to prosper” (43). In offering a sacrifice to Oya, one learns to encounter the storm “first by calming the eye of the beholder” and then by wooing the storm to come, while remaining open to the restorative balancing it may bring (39). In Hurston’s final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, Jim Meserve takes the place of the diviner who pacifies the eye-I of the female storm. Having developed the habit of having fits and fainting spells as a means of avoiding repressed desires and knowledge, Arvay responds to Jim’s courting like “a hurricane [that] struck the over-crowded parlor. Arvay gave a yell from the very bottom of her lungs” (Seraph, 627). Jim pacifies Hurricane Arvay with a drop of turpentine in her eye, to which she responds: “That varmint! Ooooooooh! He poured teppentime right in my eye!” Her father adds: “Quickest cure for the spasm-fits I ever did see” (628). Arvay’s yell, like Oya’s guttural cry of arrival (“heyi!”) or a Polk County blues cry,

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announces a turbulence that refuses supplication but that may find it in the act of vocalization (Gleason, Oya, 248). The primary female warriororisha (Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, 71), Oya brings sublimated rage and release to her storming fields of action. She may destroy those in her way, including the vulnerable and hubristic who do not read or respect her signs, but she may also transform open-eyed devotees such as Janie at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God: “The wind through the open windows had broomed out all the fetid feeling of absence and nothingness” (333). One tale from Mules and Men, “Why the Waves Have Whitecaps,” insists “de wind is a woman, and de water is a woman too” (127). Here the women brag on their children, with Mrs. Water finally drowning Wind’s young seabirds. As their white feathers float, Mrs. Wind lets loose her raging Oya-storm of retribution on the waters (128). Oya’s dance often communicates a whirlwind energy and finds conclusion in an akimbo warrior posture (Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, 54). Such kinetic remembering figures prominently in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and carries something too of Oya’s erotic charge, particularly in the appearance of Lucy, who “put herself akimbo” and, after flirtatious signifying, “was gone up the hill in a blue whirlwind” (34). Without such rain-bringing, embodied expression, we face drought conditions of the sublimated, the successfully subalternized (or globally warmed?) terrain spoken by the Oya-associated Ifa sign Irete Ogunda: Rain never falls again Penis has withered into whips all over town Vaginas have dried up like leather bags All the little rivers are dying of thirst And all the streamlets have put on garments of dried leaves. (Gleason, Oya, 247)

Hurston combated such drought conditions (the drying up of life’s mystery itself) in her blues immersions. In Mules and Men, when Ella Wall, for example, was toasted by Florida-flip players who sang: “Oh, go to Ella Wall / If you want good boody” (146), Wall eluded objectification to shout: “Tell ’em ’bout me!” and “snapped her fingers and revolved her hips with her hands” (146). Challenging her sworn rival, Big Sweet, Ella “stood up akimbo” (147), unnerving Hurston with the prospect of “dying in a violent manner in a sordid saw-mill camp” until things were quieted by the patrolling “Quarters Boss,” whose gaze and pistol would becalm without bringing release, keeping a turpentine and sawmill jook economy steaming, its bloodletting inwardly directed.10 But as in Their Eyes Were

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Watching God, the boss’s profiteering authority cannot control the gathering storm, no matter how much he would segregate (or deny the costs of ignoring or blocking) basic, increasingly heated, cosmic and human flows. If folk blindly follow the boss in disregarding storm signs and trust to the boss’s arrangements of security, the folk (especially folk of the global South) will stay caught in the trap Hurston describes in Their Eyes Were Watching God in the face of hurricane warnings: “The folks let the people do the thinking. If the castles thought themselves secure, the cabins needn’t worry. Their decision was already made as always” (303). Clearly “folks” let “the people do the thinking” at folks’ tremendous peril. We must all attend to this element of Hurston’s recuperative project. Through ritually engaged thinking of the folk, Hurston found powerful mythopoetic performance. Oya rites dispersed and creolized throughout the circum-Caribbean convey the importance of owning one’s own violence, the need in facing a storm to becalm the eye of the beholder—even to woo the storm (as natural event or raging subaltern) so as to seek reparation of the torn fabric of natural, social, or household domains. Oya’s praise songs remind us: “Who knows how to calm me down / Knows how to prosper.”11

“We All Bloody Bones Now in de Drift Together” While our world may thirst because of an absent Rain-Bringer or be buried in a deluge of her rage, even the dead thirst and trouble the living, whose neglect ruptures the continuity of lineage and decenters every subject. This too is a realm of Oya and a signature concern of Hurston’s; here too, folk narrative and religion find recuperative convergence in Hurston’s body of work. Helping us remember Oya-authority, an Ifa oracle under the sign Irosun Osa tells how Oya founded the egungun (ancestor) masquerade. To give birth, Oya is called to carry nine whips in her right hand and nine in her left, to offer nine cocks in the market, and to cover her head in red cloth (Bascom, Ifa Divination, 78). Blessed afterward with nine children who later fall ill, she goes to two diviners, named “Itis-a-great-occurrence-when-rat-is-found-in-a-hole-of-water” and “It-is-agreat-occurrence-when-fish-is-found-in-grassland” (78), both of whom direct Oya’s children to continue the egungun masquerade that enabled their births. The orisha mediating at funerals and the “owner” of cemeteries in much of the Caribbean, Oya works, as Gleason writes, to mend “the broken connection between ourselves and those who have gone before” (Oya, 247, 250).

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As mother of the nine egungun, Oya made her presence felt in Hurston’s crowning related in Mules and Men: from the nine days of ritual preparation (189) to the final blood sacrifice of a sheep into whose bleeding throat were inserted nine sheets of paper with Rain-Bringer’s name written nine times on each (192–93). Befitting Oya, a broom was “dipped in the blood . . . and the ground swept vigorously” for “as long as the blood gushed” (193). Oya’s ritual number nine is the most used number in Hurston’s collected “formulae of hoodoo doctors” (258–59). And in the Caribbeanist text, Tell My Horse, Hurston observes that “the most universal ceremony in Jamaica is an African survival called ‘The Nine Night,’ ” (309), an extended wake releasing the spirit on the ninth night after death, directed under the authority of women. Jonah’s Gourd Vine serves as fictional wake for Hurston’s parents (Lucy and John), as well as an attempt to mend broken connections and promises. On her deathbed, Lucy instructs nine-year-old Isie (Zora) to resist community death rites of pulling the pillow from the head and covering the clock and mirror. The child proves unsuccessful and the adulterous John soon dreads Lucy’s freed spirit in Oya’s winds: That night a wind rose about the house and blew from the kitchen wall to a clump of oleanders that screened the chicken house, from the oleanders to the fence palings and back again to the house wall, and the pack of dogs followed it, rearing against the wall, leaping and pawing the fence, howling, barking and whining until the break of day. (112–14)

John’s life gets funeralized at the novel’s end (and eulogized throughout) with an insistence on African American congregational rites. The text invokes “O-go-doe, the ancient drum” and “voice of Death,” swinging the Baptist service: “With the drumming of the feet, and the mournful dance of the heads, in rhythm, it was ended” (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 168). While Jonah’s Gourd Vine opens to Oya’s storming, Their Eyes Were Watching God commences with invocations of the Oya-swept dead: “The beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead, . . . the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead” (175). The novel’s windswept breath of life moves through death-traps set everywhere. Janie’s first husband, Logan Killicks, to whom her grandmother marries her for his land, is already an ancestor: “He look like some ole skullhead in de grave yard” (185). To her second husband, Janie announces: “You ain’t de Jody ah run off down de road wid. You’se whut’s left after he died” (244). Following the end of these two marriages to spiritual

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and physical death, Janie meets life in the muck with Vergible Tea Cake Woods. Eventually she must bury that life as well. Finally, “combing the road-dust out of her hair” and “thinking” (333), she honors the “roads” of an initiate life. Rain-Bringer’s attentiveness to Oya’s death rites finds expression in a unified body of space-clearing texts that recuperates the dust of ancestors as empowering sources. One of the tales from Mules and Men that finds precedent in the Ifa divination corpus and speaks to domains of Oya-agency is “High Walker and the Bloody Bones” (169–70). Here, High Walker, who “had power” to get cemetery bones to rise and shake and do an egungun dance, encounters a skull that speaks back to him: “My mouf brought me here and if you don’t mind, your’n will bring you here” (170). After reporting this oracular experience to white folk, Walker adds: “If it don’t speak, you kin chop mah head off right where it at” (170). It is no surprise that when the skull refuses to speak, the white man lops off Walker’s head, after which the “skull head” remarks to his new neighbor: “Ah told you dat mouf brought me here and if you didn’t mind out it’d bring you here” (170). The bones then rise and shake, terrifying the white murderer and speaking collectively: “De bloody bones say, ‘We got High Walker and we all bloody bones now in de drift together’ ” (170). This story conveys unusually powerful warning and instruction from the African ancestral dead. We find versions of this tale in canons of Ifa divination in Cuba and Nigeria. Under the figure Otura Obara, Earth seeks divination to bear a child. Told that “the child would wear a crown but that she should sacrifice so that he would be able to do so while she was still alive to see it” (Bascom, Ifa Divination, 429), Earth neglects the sacrifice and dies while her son is just a boy. After the son becomes king, a farmer cultivating yams on Earth’s forgotten grave hears her cry: “Ha! Did you chop my head with your hoe?” (431). When the farmer runs to tell the king of this talking skull, vowing upon his own head to the veracity of the tale, he precipitates a cycle of violence. Officials are sent to verify the tale, and the skull’s silence leaves the farmer decapitated, whereupon the hitherto silent skull asks accusingly: “Ha! Did you kill someone?” (431). The scene is repeated with the official witnesses being executed by other government officials, until divination-prescribed sacrifices for the skull bring reparation. True to its prescriptive function, the tale ends with a plan of action for its client, announcing that a neglected ancestor demands proper burial or graveside attention: “Ifa says that there is a dead person who has not been buried. Ifa says we should hurry and bury this dead person in fine style, so that it will not draw many people to their death after it” (433). Amidst cycles of violence, a forgotten ancestor, Mother

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Earth herself, insists upon ritual respect and reparations to be carried out by the son for “sins” of the parent. Hurston’s respect for ancestors and their landscapes of residence shows clearly in her work. A recuperative vision drives Mules and Men to marry subalternized bodies of knowledge (especially via female repertoires such as Oya’s) to new openings in “diasporic modernism” for women’s agency.12 Yet Hurston herself was to lie forgotten—her grave site unmarked, her body of work out of circulation—until Alice Walker took it upon herself to honor this most indispensable of American culturebearers. When Hurston wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois in 1945 with a plan to establish a national “cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead,” she asserted: “Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness” (Hurston, “To W. E. B. Du Bois,” 518). She further insisted: “We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored” (519). Hurston knew the spiritual and political costs of such neglect since “the lack of such a tangible thing allows our people to forget, and their spirits evaporate” (520). She proposed a hundred acres in Florida’s subtropical lake country, starting, she suggested, with reburial of the dust of the bones of Nat Turner. As her first two books insisted with “High Walker and the Bloody Bones” and with the novelized mourning of her own parents, and as Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to rich detail in its elaborate funeralizings and its constant facings of death, attentiveness to the dead and to death rites conserves the spirit of the living. After the grooves of brass bands and funeral narration comes entry into sacral groves and the planting of memory gardens: “The seeds [that] reminded Janie of Tea Cake more than anything else” and that “she meant to plant . . . for remembrance” (331–32). In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and long years of voodoo economics, there are certainly substantial rites of reparation and remembrance to be made to incorporate Rain-Bringer’s Oya-energies more fully so that our spirits—facing so many various gulfs and a forgotten Earth—may not evaporate in patterns of drought and violence.

“The Wonders of the Forest” As rain-bringing manifestation of Atlantic storms, mother of the nine egungun mediating ancestral passages, and finally as shape-shifting buffalowoman of the bush, Oya’s fields of agency are grounded in areas familiar to Hurston’s readers. In Mules and Men, for example, the narrative of Marie Leveau’s storm-walking power finds ruminative shape-shifting

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figuration as Leveau calls lightning to flash over Lake Pontchartrain and then “the lake heaved like a mighty herd of cattle rolling in the pasture” (185). The buffalo (and in the Americas, the bison and the cow) are the animal doubles of Oya. Having once crossed paths with a water buffalo near the headwaters of the Gambia River, watching it whirl round in rapid decision of fight or flight, I can attest to the dread charge felt in contact with one of the most dangerous animals of the West African bush. Like “the monster [that] began to roll in his bed” in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “old Okeechobee” (303), Oya’s embodiments move with a fateful wonder. It is finally into Florida and circum-Caribbean mucks that we must go in an act of seeking akin to the formalized curiosity of the hunt. Here Oya’s shape-shifting takes forms that Hurston also incorporated. These forms are most visible in an Ifa tale for the sign Osa Ogunda, in which a hunter spies a buffalo cow from his stand. When the buffalo shucks her hide to become a beautiful market woman, the hunter steals the hide, follows the woman to market, and wins her submission to marriage. After Buffalo woman’s “bush” fertility arouses the jealousy of the hunter’s co-wives, her husband drunkenly reveals the secret of her origin. Repentant, he comes to his wild wife’s defense against the mockeries of her human co-wives, demanding: “What do you skinny women know / Of the wonders of the forest?” (Gleason, Oya, 187). Buffalo-woman then slips into her rehydrated skin for revenge against her hounding tormentors before returning to the wilderness, but not before she breaks off one of her horns to give to her now-orphaned children and abandoned husband as a means of communication with her bush powers. They must now take great care in seeking dialogue with her otherly mothering and spousal powers.13 Hurston as Rain-Bringer certainly felt drawn to both buffalo-woman and hunterly roles. Hurston’s frontier-savvy, elastic consciousness, as with Gleason’s description here of Oya’s pull upon hunters, “enters into a curious relationship imposed by the Other,” born of hunting’s “preservative ethos, which goes back as far as the mind can imagine a distinction ever having been made between ourselves and the other species” (159, 160). Hurston’s crowning as Rain-Bringer revealed the skin-shedding other of herself to be the snake, yet Oya’s horned buffalo moves familiarly through her work. With the opening storm of Jonah’s Gourd Vine comes Oya’s emblematic presence: the mother “took the cow-horn that hung on the wall and placed it to her lips” to call her sons (3). Out-of-control libidinal energy leads the novel’s protagonist, John, to troubles divined in the Ifa tale. John “was really searching for a lost self and crying like the old witch with her shed skin shrunken by red pepper and salt” (153). More

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pervasively, economies of white supremacy make their “occupations” felt, even in the idealized Eatonville of Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human” (175). Shape-shifting here preserves access to lost or “occupied” selves, but its morphings can abandon humanity altogether, as in Jody Starks’s climb to be boss: “It was like seeing your sister turn into a ’gator. A familiar strangeness” (212–13). The hunt in Their Eyes Were Watching God centers on Janie’s initiation as Mrs. Woods, who “got to be a better shot than Tea Cake” (281). Her transformation into rabbit-hunting Janie Woods marks a changed “Alphabet” (Janie’s earliest name), one who later—after being saved by a swimming cow (a salvific Oya within her own storming rage?)—kills her rabid husband with one shot after he has morphed into something other. The story of Janie’s gender marooning, her refusal to be the hunter’s game, her insistence on being a gun-toting player, found initiation of its own just months before the writing of Their Eyes Were Watching God, in Jamaica where Hurston accompanied maroons on a five-day wild boar hunt that ended in flavorful jerk pork.14 Hurston’s commitment to Florida as writerly location shows awareness of its ties to New World beginnings and its position as peninsular tropical bridge to endangered (dismembered and difficultly re-membered) bodies of knowledge. In Jonah’s Gourd Vine, when Lucy moves from Alabama to Florida, a sense of ecological homecoming is conveyed, from which her prior life had been orphaned: Lucy sniffed sweet air laden with night-blooming jasmine and wished that she had been born in this climate. She seemed to herself to be coming home. This was where she was meant to be. The warmth, the foliage, the fruits all seemed right and as God meant her to be surrounded. The smell of ripe guavas was new and alluring but somehow did not feel strange. (93)

As with the rich muck of Their Eyes Were Watching God, or the “creaming” blossom of the pear tree that brought Janie a “singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears” (183), or the Mambo’s revelation of truth in Tell My Horse that “there is no mystery beyond the mysterious source of life” (376), this is a libidinal landscape in which nature is neither exterior to humanity nor a mirror of the self but immanent: a “familiar strangeness.” Rain-Bringer achieves what Christopher Hitt calls for in recognizing nature as an “astonishing event” wherein the sublime

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(or dread) encounter with its mysteries is “fundamentally religious” (“Toward an Ecological Sublime,” 613).

Winds of Orisha: A Between-Beat Attenuated Response Hurston’s identification as Rain-Bringer and her invocation of the Yoruba orisha in Their Eyes Were Watching God and her other fictional works have rarely been taken seriously and could be dismissed as the whimsical self-fashioning of an artist who built a career inventorying exotic and potentially remunerative Afro-creole folk traditions. In Dust Tracks on a Road she insists that “people need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences,” adding: “I do not pray” because “I accept the means at my disposal for working out my destiny” (763). Still, it is hard to see the spirited rites of Afro-creole practice as the avoidance of life that Hurston recognized in scriptural religions that have repressed both the body and female power itself. Perhaps she did not pray to the “Man-God” addressed in Mules and Men (187), but her body of writing suggests other means at her disposal. I would argue, along with Pavlic´ and especially Washington, that Hurston’s Oya initiation as Rain-Bringer and her visionary intuition (crowned on an Afro-Baptist base) presented her with more substantial authorial and personal grounding than has been recognized. But I also agree with John Lowe that her religion was protean, moving between idiosyncratic “syncretic beliefs” and the “skepticism that kept them in a shape-shifting boil” (“Seeing Beyond Seeing,” 85). Hurston consistently gave herself to what Karen McCarthy Brown calls the “inseparably mind-and-body” rites of Afro-Atlantic religion (“Serving the Spirits,” 217) to reach her own between-beat attenuating response. As Hurston explained in a letter to Franz Boas, “I mean by attenuation, the listener to the drum will feel the space between beats and will think up devices to fill those spaces. The between-beat becomes more and more complicated untill [sic] the music is all between-beat and the consciousness of the dependence upon the drum id [sic] lost” (Hurston, “To Franz Boas,” 138). Moving to the between-beat, Hurston is the model of the insider/outsider described by Trinh T. Minh-ha: “She stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out. . . . the Inappropriate Other/Same who moves about with always at least two/four gestures” (When the Moon Waxes Red, 218). Pitched “headfirst into the Baptist Church when I was born,” Hurston acknowledged in Dust Tracks that Afro-Baptist rites “were a part of me” (713). Although she contended with the theology and patriarchal heft

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of scripture, she remained a child of Baptist performance traditions. She calls the Sanctified Church “a revitalizing element in Negro music and religion” (Hurston, “The Sanctified Church,” 903). From her work on Baptist and Pentecostal churches to her New Orleans study in Mother Catherine’s Spiritualist Temple, as well as her studies of rootwork, Jamaican balmyards, Kumina, Voodoo, Voudoun, and elements of Afro-Cuban tradition, Hurston sought to revitalize circulation of an Afro-Atlantic Gulf Stream of spirituality. Moved by Mother Catherine’s teachings [“It is right that a woman should lead” since “a womb was what God made in the beginning” (Hurston, “Mother Catherine,” 857)], Rain-Bringer’s “sanctified” attenuation of scriptural authority was simultaneously culturally conservative (of Afro-creole roots) and modern—as exemplified in the jazz-backed preaching of Mother Catherine: “Don’t teach what the apostles and the prophets say. Go to the tree and get the pure sap and find out whether they were right” (“Mother Catherine,” 857). In Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston went to the tree, to the truth and its mystery, and transformed Mother Catherine’s injunction for her own novel ministry: “You got to go there to know there” (332). But what if there is no there there . . . or if it seems the wrong there to go? Among Hurston’s most challenging critics, Hazel Carby insists that she displaces an increasingly urban, northward-bound culture of the black masses by nostalgically keeping black folk culture in its place: the plantation South. Carby points to a reactionary displacement in which “the geographical boundaries of Hurston’s black folk are rural, but their Southernness is not defined through a difference to Northernness as much as it is related to cultural practices and beliefs of the Caribbean” (“Politics of Fiction,” 131). Hurston’s spatial and spiritual positions do differ from the norms of popular and academic culture, which is why her call has gone so long unanswered. Her earliest scholarly publication, a 1927 Journal of Negro History piece on “Fort Moosa” (Ft. Mose), an outpost of black maroons defending Spanish Florida, points to Florida’s foundational colonial difference. Given Hurston’s knowledge of Florida’s historical Hispano-creole difference, her representation of the Okeechobee muck as fertile site of ongoing circum-Caribbean migrations, and the degree to which Florida remains shaped by Cuban and Afro-Atlantic agency, her ability to articulate decentering and recentering creolizations of Florida’s diasporic cross-currents may be seen as pioneering and prophetic. Going beyond an aesthetic mining of folklore, Rain-Bringer’s immersion in Afro-creole repertoires locates its authority in hermeneutic circles that have navigated New World (and new World) contact and wrought much that made the modern ethos possible. Finding ensoulment in Oya

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repertoires, Hurston created new openings for transnational congregation, catching wind of hurricane forces that are no respecters of frontiers, of ancestors to whom we are all variously indebted, and of shape-shifting zones that call us to the gaps between beats in attenuation of forces that would own and consume our lives.

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Notes

1. My use of the word “Voodoo” refers to Louisiana practice rather than to Haitian Voudoun, but I also use the Hollywood-freighted “Voodoo” (with something of the attitude of Aimé Césaire’s coinage of “Negritude”) to refer to a wider family of Afro-Atlantic spirit houses that continues to be dismissed and maligned regardless of the nomenclature. 2. Oya is one of many cosmic-natural-psychic forces creolized throughout the Americas. The orishas find their strongest historical centers of New World service in Cuba, Brazil, and Trinidad (and in Haiti as Voudoun loa or “mysteries”). New Orleans Voodoo was also shaped by a Yoruba “Spanish tinge” that the nearly 9,000 Saint Domingue refugees who arrived in Louisiana in 1809 brought with them from their prior six-year stay in Cuba (Cartwright, “Re-Creolizing Swing” 104). For more on Oya, see Gleason, Oya, as well as D’Ogum, Iansa do Balé. 3. Washington’s strong Yoruba-centric reading of Oya’s manifestation in Hurston’s writing found book publication in 2005, the same year in which my first discussion of Hurston as Rain-Bringer—titled “To Walk with the Storm”— was submitted for publication just as Katrina made landfall. See Turner (“The Haiti-New Orleans Vodou Connection”) and Toland-Dix (“This Is the Horse”) for two additional recent readings of Hurston’s Afro-Atlantic spirit work. 4. See Washington, Our Mothers. Many of the recent responses to AfroAtlantic spirituality in Hurston’s writing do not seem to seek in the usual metaphorically “groundbreaking” manner. Rather, we may find a “baffling” tendency (as in the salt marsh baffles of spartina grass in estuary systems) whereby new ground is conserved, grasped in alluvial and tidal flow, and built from new living extensions of apprehension of old (often erosion-threatened) grounds of assembly. 5. See National Severe Storms Laboratory, “Questions and Answers About Lightning.” www.nssl.noaa.gov/edu/ltg. 6. For an account of Reverend Lovelace as a sermonic model for Hurston’s first novel, see Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 258–59. 7. Robert E. Hemenway exposed Hurston’s plagiarism in Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, 96–99. 8. See Cartwright, “Re-Creolizing Swing”; and also Turner, “The Haiti-New Orleans Vodou Connection.” 9. I borrow Gleason’s idea of a “unified field theory” of Oya’s cross-cultural manifestations, Oya, 231. 10. I am indebted to prior readings of this jook scene offered by Pavlic, ´ Crossroads Modernism, 189; and by Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 233–71. 11. Gleason, Oya, 43. See also Drewal and Drewal, Gelede, on Yoruba

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“cooling” or propitiatory rites (etutu), especially as used in sacrificial cooling spectacle for the mothers, 14. 12. I borrow the term “diasporic modernism” from Pavlic, ´ Crossroads Modernism. 13. For examples of this Ifa tale, see Gleason, Oya, 185–89; and Bascom, Ifa Divination, 375–85. 14. See Hurston, Tell My Horse, 301–8.

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Works Cited

Bascom, William. Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa. 1969. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Brown, David. Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an AfroCuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Brown, Karen McCarthy. “Serving the Spirits: The Ritual Economy of Haitian Vodou.” In Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald Cosentino, 205–23. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995. Carby, Hazel. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” In Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 117–36. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cartwright, Keith. “Reading Africa into American Literature: Senegambian Roots, Creole Routes, Garrulous Ghosts.” Ph.D. diss, Indiana University, 1997. ———. “Re-Creolizing Swing: St. Domingue Refugees in the Govi of New Orleans.” In Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, ed. Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, 102–22. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006. ———. “ ‘To Walk with the Storm’: Oya as the Transformative ‘I’ of Zora Neale Hurston’s Afro-Atlantic Callings.” American Literature 78, no. 4 (2006): 741–67. D’Ogum, Guilherme. Iansa do Balé: Senhora dos Eguns (Oya Igbale). Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 2002. Drewal, John Henry, and Margaret Thompson Drewal. Gelede: Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Gleason, Judith. Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992. Gussow, Adam. Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hagedorn, Catherine. Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hitt, Christopher. “Toward an Ecological Sublime.” New Literary History: Ecocriticism 30, no. 3 (1999): 603–23. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Communication.” Journal of Negro History 12 (October 1927): 664–67. ———. Dust Tracks on a Road. In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 557–808. New York: Library of America, 1995.

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———. “Folklore and Music.” In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 875–94. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. “Hoodoo in America.” Journal of American Folklore 44 (OctoberDecember 1931): 317–418. ———. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 826–29. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. In Hurston: Novels and Stories, 1–171. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Moses, Man of the Mountain. In Hurston: Novels and Stories, 335– 595. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. “Mother Catherine.” In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 854–60. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Mules and Men. In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 1–267. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Seraph on the Suwanee. In Hurston: Novels and Stories, 597–920. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Tell My Horse. In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 269–555. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. “The Sanctified Church.” In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 901–5. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. In Hurston: Novels and Stories, 173– 333. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. “To Franz Boas.” In Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan, 137–38. New York: Doubleday, 2002. ———. “To W. E. B. Du Bois.” In Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan, 518–20. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Hyatt, Harry M. Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork: Beliefs Accepted by Many Negroes and White Persons. Hannibal, Mo.: Western, 1970. Lamothe, Daphne. “Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 165–87. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lowe, John. “Seeing Beyond Seeing: Zora Neale Hurston’s Religion(s).” Southern Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1998): 77–87. Mason, Michael. Living Santeria: Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2002. Minh-ha, Trinh T. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pavlic, ´ Edward A. Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. “Questions and Answers About Lightning.” National Severe Storms Laboratory. www.nssl.noaa.gov/edu/ltg. Ramos, Miguel “Willie.” “Afro-Cuban Orisha Worship.” In Santeria Aesthetics in Latin American Art, ed. Arturo Lindsay, 51–76. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996.

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Southerland, Ellease. “The Influences of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.” In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 172–83. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1979. Toland-Dix, Shirley. “ ‘This Is the Horse. Will You Ride?’: Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, and Rituals of Spirit Possession.” In Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, ed. Jessica Adams, Michael P. Bibler, and Cecile Accilien, 191–210. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Turner, Richard Brent. “The Haiti-New Orleans Vodou Connection: Zora Neale Hurston as Initiate-Observer.” In Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, ed. Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, 117– 34. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Wall, A. Cheryl. “Mules and Men and Women: Zora Neale Hurston’s Strategies of Narration and Visions of Female Empowerment.” In Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Gloria L. Cronin, 53–70. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Washington, Teresa. Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Ájé in Africana Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

7

“Legba in the House” African Cosmology in Their Eyes Were Watching God Mawuena Logan

The Fon know him [Legba] as a powerful and many-faced agent of transformation, who mediates among the gods, between the gods and mankind, among humans, and even among the many forces that bring humans into being. —Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa

New Orleans is now and has ever been the hoodoo capital of America . . . [but] . . . New Orleans has a law against fortune tellers, hoodoo doctors and the like. —Hurston, Mules and Men

African spirituality in Euro-American discourse is often relegated to the realm of superstition, fetishism, and primitivism in spite of its worldwide and diasporic manifestations in countries such as the United States, Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, and Cuba. The above epigraph from Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935) attests to the general biased perception and attitude attached to African and African-based spirituality. Anthropologist and historian Aylward Shorter, among others, has gone as far as to indicate that that spirituality is Christian in origin (African Christian Spirituality, 4). While the focus of this chapter is not on this myopic and jaundiced view of African-based spirituality, it is nevertheless true that the beliefs of Africa and its diaspora have been, and still are, the cosmological and philosophical “punching bag” of the world. It is this fact that compels me to turn to these areas of African thought to provide a context for my Africanist reading of Their Eyes

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Were Watching God (1937). It is a reading that unearths the epistemological and metaphysical underpinnings of Hurston’s work through a “black frame of reference” which, according to Mary Helen Washington, Hurston achieves by grounding her novel and characters in a West African aesthetics (“Zora Neale Hurston,” 68). My reading highlights the prominent and various manifestations in the novel of Legba or Eshu/ Esu-Elegbara, the Fon and Yoruba divinity of the crossroads—the god of indeterminacy, the linguist par excellence, and the critical thinker. It is a reading that undertakes to stress the power, as well as enhance the understanding, of myths and gods in our ever-changing world in an effort to unveil, among other things, a structuralist interpretation of Hurston’s text, since myths are universal phenomena that inform our perceptions of reality. The grounding of her work in folkloric myth allows Hurston to stimulate, I would argue, our desire for and interest in cultural preservation and in the African “traditional” values that modern Africa and Europe seem to threaten. The universality or ubiquity of gods and myths does not exonerate African belief systems. Robert Pelton, in The Trickster in West Africa, underscores Western/European obtuseness regarding African spirituality when he reminds us that Christian missionaries equated the crossroads divinity Legba with Satan “because of his seeming lawlessness and unbridled sexuality . . . [but] the Fon . . . were neither lawless nor sexually profligate, and . . . have insisted, rather, that Legba is the divine linguist” (88). In Olodumare, God of Yoruba Beliefs, E. B. Idowu contends that Esu1 (also known as Esu-Elegbara) is not incarnated evil of the biblical persuasion: [He is neither Satan nor] the Devil of our New Testament acquaintance who is an out and out evil power in opposition to God’s salvation of man. . . . On the whole, it would be near the truth to parallel him with Satan in the book of Job, where Satan is one of the ministers of God and has the office of trying men’s sincerity and putting their religion to the proof. (80)

Legba/Esu-Elegbara, in an analogous manner, is at the service of the divine creator, because he “tries men’s sincerity” and thus urges them to be exemplary human beings (Idowu, 9). God, goddesses, and gods belong to the domain of spirituality and metaphysics, and are the active beings and the principal players in stories we label as myths. Myths are culturally specific sacred stories of origins. According to Roland Barthes, they are a mode of communication subject to interpretation;

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Claude Lévi-Strauss asserts that they provide ontological structure in order to make sense of the world; in psychoanalytic terms, vis-à-vis Sigmund Freud, they are manifestations of repressed impulses; and as Carl Jung notes, they are the expressions of the collective unconscious. The gods we encounter in myths from around the world are an attempt to tackle fundamental ontological and existential questions that philosophically and spiritually still boggle the human mind amidst a plethora of scientific knowledge and progress. Hence, contrary to the early anthropologists’ view that myths belong to the world of superstition and therefore reflect a culture’s scientific deficiency, it is apparent that no amount of modern scientific astuteness or degree of sophistication can obliterate their power and resilience. As literary critic Simon Gikandi argues in Reading the African Novel, myths can be a “source of insight . . . a manifestation of a keen understanding of social and natural phenomena” (150). Published in 1937 in the declining years of the Harlem Renaissance, Their Eyes Were Watching God generated controversy at the time of its publication and attracted much scholarship at its reclamation in the early 1970s. The novel, in the main, tells of Janie Mae Crawford and her quest for love and identity. After two failed marriages, the first to Logan Killicks and the second to Joe Starks, Janie finally finds love with Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods. Unfortunately, safeguarding her own life forces her to kill an infected and crazed Tea Cake in self-defense after a rabid dog bites him during a hurricane in the Florida Everglades. Janie returns to her hometown, Eatonville, amidst the town’s gossips, and decides to tell her story to her friend Pheoby Watson, who declares after listening to Janie: “Lawd! . . . Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus’ listenin’ to you” (192). By deploying African knowledge systems and spirituality as a backdrop for her novel, Hurston may have unwittingly played into the hands of critics who had accused the writers of the Harlem Renaissance of “white primitivism.”2 Hurston’s biographer, Robert Hemenway, underscores the paradoxical role of Africa in the works of the Harlem Renaissance writers in the following terms: Tom-tom beats were almost a cliché in Harlem Renaissance writing, and both blacks and whites became enmeshed in the cult of exotic primitivism. For the whites . . . they went to Harlem to see the natural rhythm . . . of America’s link with the heart of darkness. For the black artists it was a much more serious concern, an attempt to establish a working relationship with what [Alain] Locke called in The New Negro the ancestral past. (Zora Neale Hurston, 75)

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While I concur with Hemenway, and even though the Harlem Renaissance itself may have begun as a “somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and constrained by the leaders of the civil rights establishment,” Hurston was uneasy with this “arts-cum-civil-rights initiative”—which she describes as “an alliance of ‘Niggerati’ and ‘Negrotarians’ ” (Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, xvi)—and drew rather on a West African divinity pantheon to articulate the ways in which blackness via Legba/Esu-Elegbara, a trickster divinity, frames both her narrative and the lives of the characters in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Of course, as mentioned earlier, bias against Africanderived religions and practices is not new and was arguably worse in Hurston’s time, but she, in her unique and pioneering way, validates African epistemology and cosmology in her writings. She wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road (1942), that she “did not find [voodoo ceremonies] any more invalid than any other religion. Rather, I hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for that person. It does satisfy millions, so it is true for its believers” (205). What or who, then, is Legba, and what are its or his provenance, function, and usefulness among the Fon, the Yoruba, and the Ewe of West Africa, and for Hurston? The myth of creation among the Fon depicts Legba as the youngest of the seven children of Mawu-Lisa, the androgynous Supreme God. Legba is Mawu-Lisa’s linguist and serves as an intercessor for Mawu-Lisa and his brothers on the one hand and for Mawu-Lisa and the world of humans on the other. Legba is the only speaker of the language of MawuLisa and consequently is at every entrance and gate as messenger, mediator, and interpreter of Mawu-Lisa’s message and language, Fa (Pelton, Trickster in West Africa, 72–73). Legba is not the exact equivalent of Esu/Eshu-Legbara of the Yoruba. “Eshu,” according to the cultural critic Erik Davis, “can be a nastier, more malevolent being, though he still delights in contradiction, and, to a lesser extent, sex” (“Who Is Eleggua?” 7). The similarities between Legba and Esu are understandable, given the historical and cultural affinities among the Fon, Yoruba, and Ewe peoples, but these similarities should not blind one to the fact that his serviteurs associate Esu with vengeance as opposed to Legba’s mercy. In the African diaspora, especially in Haiti where Hurston conducted research in African spirituality for Tell My Horse (1938) and where she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, the Rada (derived from Arada, a kingdom in Dahomey) and Petro (derived from Dom Pedro, who allegedly led a slave rebellion in the eighteenth century) illustrate this fundamental divine dichotomy of Legba. Haitians and other members of

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the African diaspora associate the Rada phalanx with “tranquility and generosity,” while they connect the Petro phalanx with “impatience and anger.” Legba as a trickster god is both a Rada and a Petro divinity— both a “guardian of destiny . . . a positive force, representing fecundity,” as well as a spirit of vindictiveness who works in sorcery and unleashes havoc on people. As a Rada spirit/divinity, Legba exemplifies the notion that human life is preordained at birth (Appiah and Gates, Africana, 1607). Legba, like Esu, is a trickster god who establishes balance in the universe. Legba is the god of crossroads, of gates and entrances,3 and at crucial and decision-making moments, a god that tempts human beings to “do the right thing.” Pelton reminds us that as a “two-sided figure, Eshu [or Legba] simultaneously dissolves and reshapes the world, but always with the goal of reestablishing the cosmic order” (Trickster in West Africa, 149). Legba is the “master of sexuality, the juggler of language and experience, for he finds in all biological, social, and metaphysical walls doorways into a larger universe” (119). He is “at all life’s crossings, not only at thresholds, crossroads, and market places, but at every moment of meeting and commerce . . . [and he] has a prime responsibility for the passage of a new life from the invisible world to the world of men” (125). Hence, “if life is ruled by a dialectic of exchange, the trick is not just to keep it moving, but to keep it moving at the right speed. Balance is all. The secret of liminality lies in maintaining the rhythms of passage—in and out, dissolving and reordering, closing and opening” (126). Pelton’s interpretation above, regarding the function of Legba, reinforces my earlier statement that Legba is about cosmic balance. As a trickster, Legba is complex: he is the underdog, the cultural hero, the mischievous, and the witty. Literary critic Jeanne Rosier Smith writes in Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature that “tricksters serve to combat racial and sexual oppression and to affirm and create personal and cultural identity. Tricksters are not only engrossing characters, they are also rhetorical agents. They infuse narrative structure with energy, humor, and polyvalence, producing a politically radical subtext in the narrative form itself” (6). As we shall see, Legba “infuses” not only the characters but also the narrative design of the novel with a “subtext” that speaks to survival, renewal, and change because Legba is at the crossroads to usher in new configurations, new ways of apprehending “reality.” How, then, does our understanding or deployment of Legba aid in our critique and appreciation of Their Eyes Were Watching God? How do we apply the functions and characteristics of Legba to Hurston’s Harlem Renaissance novel?

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Legba: The God of Crossroads Our first encounter with Legba as the god of crossroads who is present at “life’s every crossing” in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God occurs when Janie, at the age of sixteen, lets “Johnny Taylor kiss her over the gatepost”; indeed, Janie admits that her “conscious life had commenced at Nanny’s gate” (Their Eyes, 10). The narrative’s direct mention of “gate” and “gatepost” signals Legba’s presence at this decision-making moment in Janie’s life. At sixteen Janie’s life is about to enter into a new phase, and Legba is invoked to mark that transition. Janie’s transition into a new phase constitutes a rite of passage “marked by separation, margin (limen) [liminality], and aggregation” (Mahdi, Betwixt and Between, 5–7). According to anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, this three-part paradigm accompanies “every change of place, state, social position and age” (qtd. in Mahdi, 7). It is applicable and equivalent to Janie’s passage from a sixteen-year-old adolescent to a capable woman whose story is edifying at least to her friend Pheoby. During the “liminal period the state of the ritual subject is ambiguous,” but it is also a “realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (7). Hurston’s narrative underscores Janie’s liminality articulated by Nanny, her grandmother, in the following terms: “Janie, youse uh ’oman, now, so—” “Naw, Nanny, naw Ah ain’t no real ’oman yet” . . .  “Yeah, Janie, youse got yo’ womanhood on yuh. So Ah mout ez well tell yuh whut Ah been savin’ up for uh spell. Ah wants to see you married right away.” (Their Eyes, 12)

Janie might not be a woman yet, but she is no longer, according to her grandmother, a little girl because what Nanny has “seen just now [at the gatepost] is plenty for [her]” (13) to marry her off to Logan Killicks, a much older but financially stable man. The “gate” where Janie’s conscious life begins and the “gatepost” where she kisses Johnny Taylor symbolize the transitional threshold that Nanny proposes. It is noteworthy that the figurative and physical gates where Legba dwells and where he controls all entrances and passages herald the conjugal transitions that the protagonist later undergoes in the narrative. When Janie becomes dissatisfied with her marriage to Killicks, she leaves. Again an allusion to the limen (gate/barrier) signals her departure

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from the marital home: “A feeling of sudden newness and change came over her. Janie hurried out of the front gate and turned south. Even if Joe was not there waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good” (32). Legba, who leads the protagonist into a “realm of pure possibility” and “novel configurations,” occasions and marks the end of the first marriage. These new configurations do not guarantee a successful future or posterity, but they provide Janie with the possibility of renewal; for our purposes, it is Legba who sees to it that Janie changes her approach to life by putting an end to an unfulfilling marriage: Legba disrupts but also builds; the end of one situation is the beginning of another. As Robert Pelton argues, “Legba is intimately involved in the beginning and the end of each life” and passage (Trickster in West Africa, 125). While we might want to interpret Janie’s failed marriages as misfortunes, let us recall that in African cosmology failure functions as a “wake-up call”; after all Legba is about balance: he disrupts in order to reconstruct, to set the record straight; he puts the ritual subject in a liminal situation to force him or her to decide on the right path of action, because “the secret of liminality lies in maintaining the rhythms of passage . . . dissolving and reordering, closing and opening” (126). Hence, Janie’s journey does not end with Joe’s death either. Joe’s death represents the most definite transition, the ultimate rite of passage in the novel. It marks his passage from the world of the living into that of the “living-dead,”4 life’s proverbial crossing—a crossing that will again change Janie’s approach to life. Here, Legba’s intervention in assisting Janie in charting a new course of life after Joe’s death is an example of Legba’s search for balance and new beginnings. Joe spends his life in all-black Eatonville serving as mayor and neglecting his familial duties. As a consequence “the spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor,” and he ends up having “tuh die tuh find out dat you got tuh pacify somebody besides yo’self if you want any love and any sympathy in dis world” (Their Eyes, 71, 86–87). The narrator illustrates Joe’s passing/transition in the following terms: “The Little Emperor of the crossroads [reference to Legba] was leaving Orange County as he had come—with the out-stretched hand of power” (88). As a trickster divinity, Legba creates new meanings out of chaos, destruction, and death. Joe’s death allows the reader to understand the challenges, benefits, and social responsibilities that come with being the first black mayor of an allblack town, and above all, the necessity of balance that Legba embodies. Legba is not only about balance but also known for risk-taking as he creates novelty every time he intervenes in an individual’s life. Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake is initially risky: he does not have a penny to

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his name and he is a stranger to her and the Eatonville community. The first day of their meeting, Janie wonders if “this strange man was up to something! But it was no place to show her fear there in the darkness between the house and the store” (99). So when he walks her home that first night, he stops at the entrance, a sign of transition (liminality) into a new life that both are about to commence. Like Legba at the crossroads, “he tipped his hat at the door and was off with the briefest good night” (99; my emphasis). Like “gate” and “gatepost,” “door” indicates transition. But Legba also takes risks with language, because he is Mawu-Lisa’s linguist par excellence.

Legba: The Linguist Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his seminal work, The Signifying Monkey, outlines what has now become a well-established theoretical framework for analyzing and critiquing African American literature. The “signifying monkey” is the diasporic equivalent of Legba/Esu, and “signifying” itself refers to a black rhetorical strategy that has its roots in African mythologies/traditions of Legba and Esu/Eshu. Gates does not, however, essentialize black literary experience/culture, for “signifying” alludes to Western contemporary critical theory, which has its origins in Saussurean linguistic theories. Postmodernism’s skepticism toward master narratives and deconstructionism’s attentiveness to the “indeterminacy of meaning” are neither new nor lost to these African mythologies because Legba epitomizes the deconstruction of metanarratives. Legba, the linguist-messenger whose dwelling place at crossroads speaks to the chasm between the “truth of the text” and its interpretation (Gates, Signifying Monkey, 25), has to interpret and decode Fa, the language/writing of Mawu-Lisa. This function of Legba is synonymous with Roland Barthes’s formulation of the “death of the author” and the ultimate “birth of the reader” (“Death of the Author,” 189). Here, Legba is the reader and interpreter of MawuLisa’s text and governs the “indeterminacy of meaning” (Gates, Signifying Monkey, 25). The correlation between Barthes’s theory that every text is “eternally written here and now” with each reading and reader because its meaning lies exclusively in “language itself” and Legba’s role as reader and interpreter of Mawu-Lisa’s text is quite informative and expedient cross-culturally, for in most African cultures and societies no one owns the story or has a monopoly on its telling and interpretation. Likewise, in the words of Barthes, “to give a text an author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that

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text” (“Death of the Author,” 187–88). Legba exemplifies this “indeterminacy of the interpretation of writing” (Gates, Signifying Monkey, 25) because he stands between Mawu-Lisa (the world of spirits and gods) and humans, between the “truth” and understanding—the meaning of a text and its interpretation. Their Eyes Were Watching God, as critics of all theoretical persuasions have shown, is multivocal, polyphonic, and polyglot. Gates’s approach to the novel as a “speakerly text” epitomizes the ways in which Hurston’s language intersects between African American literary theory and modern contemporary literary textual practices. Hurston’s second novel is also a liminal text because of the very fact that it employs a rhetorical strategy “designed to represent an oral literary tradition, designed to ‘emulate the phonetic, grammatical and lexical patterns of actual speech and produce the illusion of oral narration’ ” (181). It resides, like Legba, at the crossroads of speech and writing, and consequently its interpretation must refer to more than one literary/cultural tradition. In the novel there are quite a number of subtexts. One of them comes into play when Nanny gives Janie the following speech after seeing her kiss Johnny Taylor over the gate: Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high. But there wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me with a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through the wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in the world. So whilst Ah was tendin’ you of nights Ah said Ah’d save the text for you. (Their Eyes, 16)

Nanny’s experience and the history of slavery—which Janie, like Legba, has to interpret—inform the text she saves for Janie. Janie’s grandmother hands down this text (Fa) and thus can be easily related to Mawu-Lisa, but we may also equate her with Legba whose “major symbol [is] the tree,” or the gateway, the “intersection [between] the horizontal plane, which is this mortal world, [and] the vertical plane, the metaphysical axis [or world of the spirit]” (Deren, Divine Horsemen, 146, 35). Hurston signals this intersection in her description of Nanny when she wakes up from a nap (in which she “dreamed of voices . . . far-off but persistent”) to find Janie receiving Johnny Taylor’s kiss. Her “head and face looked like the standing roots of some old tree that had been torn away by storm. Foundation of ancient power that no longer mattered” (Their Eyes, 12).

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In processing Nanny’s text, Janie remains in limbo, in the liminal period, after which she decides to leave Killicks and revisit/revise the text Nanny has saved for her. Obviously, this text is incongruent with her experience and dreams. Houston Baker maintains that Nanny’s conflation of “securing . . . property with effective expression” (not having a “pulpit” or voice but wanting to preach a “great sermon”) indicates her keen “understanding of the economics of slavery,” and “having been denied a say in her own fate because she was property, she assumes that only property enables expression” (Blues, Ideology, 57). This text does not resonate with Janie because throughout the novel she attempts to find a voice to express or preach her own sermon. Nanny is probably right—when she equates finding a pulpit/voice with owning property—since Janie’s ability to tell her story to Pheoby is contingent upon her position emanating from the “petit bourgeois enterprises she had shared with her deceased husband,” Joe Starks (59). Consequently, the narrative is deceptive, since “the pear tree metaphor,” as Baker argues, “leads away from the more significant economic dimension of the novel” to emphasize the crucial necessity for African Americans “to observe property relationships and to negotiate the restrictions sanctioned by the economics of slavery” (57–59). Baker’s interpretation intersects with our ongoing discussion of the trickster as master of “signifying”: saying one thing but meaning another, for behind Janie’s story, which ostensibly is a romance, is another bearing an African American history and text with an economic dimension that needs to be remembered and articulated. The romance narrative also conceals the significance of the pear tree to Janie’s story. According to filmmaker and anthropologist Maya Deren, “invisible forces come by way of . . . trees” (Divine Horsemen, 148), and because trees are Legba’s major symbol, Janie’s love story obscures an African belief system embedded in the novel. Hurston exemplifies the ultimate trickster, for Their Eyes Were Watching God is duplicitous in text and context. Not only do contrasting language registers compete in Their Eyes Were Watching God (the “speakerly text is an example of these competing forms of language”), but contrasting discourses compete as well. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as a discourse or a site where high and low forms of language compete and clash is useful to our discussion. Nanny’s “text” does clash and compete with Janie’s own discourse or worldview that the pollen-bearing bee reveals to her: “She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees . . . she saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom . . . So this was a marriage” (Their Eyes, 11). Competing discourses and decision-making moments, embodied in the sign of the cross and in the tree metaphor,

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covertly allude to signifying and to the trickster Legba. It is noteworthy that the pear tree symbolically represents the latter since the tree is the emblem of the crossroads divinity, and it, like Tea Cake’s surname, Woods, calls the reader’s attention to the union/marriage between Janie and Tea Cake, the union of flesh and spirit associated with Legba. As Deren writes, “the sign of the crossroads is always the juncture of the horizontal with the vertical, where communication between worlds is established and the traffic of energies and forces between them is set up . . . Particularly are trees the great natural highway of such traffic” (Divine Horsemen, 36). In trickster fashion Janie accepts, if only for a while, Nanny’s discourse and text, and marries Killicks even though she does not think he personifies the revelation of marriage that she divines under the pear tree. And just as trickster-gods plant seeds of disappointment along life’s journey—which is why many believe Legba is a troublemaker—for pedagogical reasons Janie’s liberation also begins in this “round-about” fashion until she locates her “dust-bearing” bee in Tea Cake. Legba tests/tempts the individual to guide him/her on the right path: after all, it was Janie’s response to the pollination of the pear tree that leads her to Johnny Taylor and sets in motion, albeit unconsciously, her search for love and self-identity. Janie’s life journey may be seen as preordained. Fa, Mawu-Lisa’s text, or the book of fate, which is individualized by the Creator, is also a system of divination, only readable to Legba. Janie’s entrance into a new life mirroring adolescence thus becomes clear and to some extent predestined.5

Legba: The Critical Thinker The sayings “Knowledge is like a goatskin bag, everyone carries his or her own” and “Knowledge is like a baobab tree, you can’t put your arms around or contain it” are arguably equivalent to what Western modern critical theorists refer to as multiplicity or plurality of meanings. As a linguist, Legba is a critical thinker as he “confuses communication, reveals ambiguity of knowledge, and plays with perspective” (Davis, “Who Is Eleggua?” (5). When Shango, the god of thunder, asks Legba/Esu why he does not speak “straightforwardly,” he responds: “I never do . . . I like to make people think” (5). Evidently Legba/Esu governs interpretation and encourages individuals to be critical thinkers. There is a well-known story that reveals Legba/Esu as a critical thinker. In this story, two men vow to be loyal to and considerate of one another but do not say anything to Legba about their vow. One day Legba, wearing a hat that is red on one side and black on the other, goes to visit the two friends in their

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fields where they work on adjacent farms. After he leaves, the two men discuss Legba’s visit. One farmer says Legba’s hat is red; the other says it is black. Their disagreement culminates in insults hurled at each other until Legba reappears to tell them that they are both right and wrong. Some may say Legba foments trouble, but the point here is that at the core of a Fon/Yoruba knowledge system is the importance of multiple viewpoints/“truths.” Multiple viewpoints, according to this epistemology, enhance life, because truth and knowledge are multifaceted/multicolored and relative as seen in the Legba hat tale. Janie’s life story is food for thought; it provides the reader/listener with new perspectives to ponder. Her audience, Pheoby, admits that she has grown ten feet taller “from jus’ listening’ ” to Janie and “ain’t satisfied wid [herself] no mo’.” In the future she will insist that Sam Watson, her husband, take her fishing and will not allow anyone to criticize Janie (Their Eyes, 192). Legba bears responsibility for the growth Pheoby experiences listening to Janie because Legba is discourse and orchestrates Janie’s life, since he is at each crossing that Janie undergoes. He is the gatekeeper at each entrance.

Conclusion Notwithstanding the fact that Their Eyes Were Watching God is not Hurston’s most substantive work in folklore and spirituality, the author’s deployment of Legba in this novel underscores her commitment to and respect for African and African-derived knowledge systems. The centrality of Voodoo in Hurston’s works, for instance, is also “political, for in the figuration of ‘possession’ we find the connection between the material and spiritual history of trans-Caribbean cultures . . . shared by West African, Caribbean, and Black Southern communities” (Trefzer, “Possessing the Self,” 299). The various manifestations of Legba in Their Eyes Were Watching God attest to the diasporic and cross-cultural dimensions of Hurston’s oeuvre. The diverse and sometimes divergent readings and interpretations of Their Eyes Were Watching God attest to the richness of the text, and while my thesis has antecedents, it also challenges them and furthers the discussion of this complex work. Signifying on the stereotypical Eurocentric assumptions that Africa is the antithesis of Europe and therefore retrograde, this essay, besides debunking such myths, presses the reader to recognize the “African” and diasporic elements in—as well as their interconnectedness with—modern literary practices and theoretical formulations such as poststructuralism and deconstructionism. It speaks to the ways in which certain modes of thought dubbed “Western”

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are neither antithetical to nor lost on African epistemologies: Legba, as the embodiment of liminality and indeterminacy (of language), not only mirrors but predates Barthes’s “death of the author,” as well as JeanFrançois Lyotard’s “incredulity towards metanarratives.” But it is also routine that ideas emanating from the “Other” are neither given due consideration nor aired, and that nothing is of value until the West puts its stamp of approval on it. In addition, my reading demonstrates that misreading or assumptions (as in the Legba two-sided hat story) could be fatal or detrimental to a harmonious existence (“minority” groups have been on the receiving end of cultural misunderstandings). Consequently my approach to “disentangling” Hurston’s text is embedded in the trope and context of duality, liminality, plurality, and uncertainty (confusion, where Legba resides, in most cases) that undergird the novel and, by extension, the lives of the major characters. Far from collapsing Western and African epistemes, I believe that “wherever something stands, something else stands beside it,”6 hence the “Other” is at times the “Self” and ancestor, the diviner, the linguist, the master-trickster: Legba. Whether we consider Legba as the trickster-god of the crossroads, the Creator’s linguist, the critical thinker, or simply as the troublemaker full of mischief, he resides in and mirrors the human race. Robert Pelton identifies the similarities between Western and African cosmologies when he writes that “Freud has restored to us, after centuries of Cartesian mechanicalism, a sense of the person as a bundle of interpersonal forces. Thus once we pass beyond the surface strangeness of the Fon vision, it can help us understand the importance of the entrance of a “partial fa” and a personal Legba into the dynamic network that is a human being” (Trickster in West Africa, 115). Their Eyes Were Watching God is perhaps Hurston’s way of reminding us that tricksters, gods, and goddesses found in folkloric myths are as relevant today as they were in the preindustrial world in the preservation of cultural values that are vital to humanity, for myth is a “voyage of exploration in [a] metaphysical space” as well as a meditation “upon the common human experience which is the origin of the human effort to comprehend the human condition” (Deren, Divine Horsemen, 24).

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Notes

1. I use Esu interchangeably with Legba even though there are slight differences between the two, which I will try to clarify later in my discussion. Fa or Ifa—the god of divination among the Yoruba of the southwestern part of Nigeria and parts of the Republic of Benin who is called Afa by the Fon of the Republic of Benin, and the Ewe of Ghana and Togo—is also the language or text of the Almighty God (Mawu-Lisa or Olodumare) that has to be read and interpreted by Legba, the divine linguist. 2. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), a French Renaissance writer, first suggested the nobility of the “primitive man” in his essay “On Cannibals” (1580). Throughout the Enlightenment and later in the nineteenth century many prominent thinkers deplored the “decadence” and ills of modern society by extolling the virtues of so-called primitive people (Beckson and Gaz, Literary Terms, 215). Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1920–1940) have been accused of employing “primitivism” in their works in an attempt to showcase the nobility of African cultures against white racism. The historical, ideological, and thematic connections between writers of the Harlem Renaissance and those of Négritude cannot be overlooked. The latter is often considered an extension and a francophone version of the former. 3. Growing up as an Ewe in West Africa, I remember the shrine for Legba at the gate of my great uncle’s house. Even though I was told he was a guardian and protector of the house, the full implication of Legba’s role did not occur to me until I became an adult. 4. John S. Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy argues that “the livingdead is a person who is physically dead but alive in the memory of those who knew him in his life as well as being alive in the world of the spirits” (32). 5. Predestination in many African religious belief systems (Orí in Yoruba culture, and Kpoli among the Fon/Ewe), however, does not exclude personal struggle and self-help (Ese). The Yoruba believe in predestination but the principle of “Ese” compels humans to strive for excellence. Wande Abimbola asserts that “in spite of the importance of Orí, however, a place is still reserved for free will in Yoruba thought: a good Orí is a potential for success. Hard work and good character, among other things, are still required to make the potential bear fruit” (qtd. in Blakely et al., Religion in Africa, 111–12). 6. The Igbo of eastern Nigeria express duality and multiplicity in nature via the double-sided hat story. Chinua Achebe argues in Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975) that among the Igbo, “nothing is absolute. I am the truth, the way and the life would be called blasphemous or simply absurd” (94).

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Works Cited

Abimbola, Wande. “Ifa: A West African Cosmological System.” In Religion in Africa, ed. Thomas D. Blakely et al., 101–16. Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann, 1994. Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London & Ibadan: Heinemann, 1975. Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic, 1999. Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular

Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Modern Literary Theory, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, 185–89. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Beckson, Karl, and Arthur Ganz. Literary Terms: A Dictionary. New York: Noonday, 1989. Blakely, Thomas D., et al., eds. Religion in Africa. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994. Davis, Erik. “Who Is Eleggua? Trickster at the Crossroads.” http://www. eleggua.com/Legba.html. de Montaigne, Michel. “On Cannibals.” http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/ modsbook. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. London: Thames and Hudson, 1953. Freud, Sigmund. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. New York: Touchstone, 1997. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gikandi, Simon. Reading the African Novel. London: Heinemann, 1987. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. London: Virago, 1986. ———. Mules and Men. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Idowu, E. B. Olodumare, God of Yoruba Beliefs. London: Longman, 1962. Jung, Carl. Psychology of the Unconscious. New York: Moffat, 1916. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic, 1963. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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Mahdi, Louise, et al., eds. Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation. London: Open Court, 1987. Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. New York: Anchor, 1970. Pelton, Robert. The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Shorter, Aylward. African Christian Spirituality. New York: Orbis, 1978. Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Trefzer, Annette. “Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse.” African American Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 299–312. Washington, Mary Helen. “Zora Neale Hurston: The Black Woman’s Search for Identity.” Black World 21, no. 10 (August 1974): 68–75.

8

Voodoo and the Black Vernacular as Weapons of Resistance Liberation Strategies in Their Eyes Were Watching God Babacar M’Baye

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), hereafter referred to as Their Eyes, reflects the significance of Voodoo and the black vernacular as covert means of resistance against gender, race, and class oppression. The second novel of Zora Neale Hurston subtly depicts Voodoo and other West and Central African traditional survivals in the New World as cultural and social rituals that empower Janie Mae Crawford, its protagonist, to develop circumspect resistance strategies. These strategies help her to survive a turbulent marital relationship with Joe “Jody” Starks and to reclaim her right to personal and social autonomy and humane treatment. Their Eyes is a work of sociopolitical consciousness that illustrates the use of West and Central African traditional religious practices that transcended the Middle Passage as liberating weapons of resistance against European patriarchal oppression in the Americas. Among these practices, Voudoun, the creolized adaptation of Africa’s Vodun that flourishes in the Caribbean, played an important role in the Haitian Revolution during which enslaved Africans used the amalgamated religion as a tool for liberating themselves from their European masters. Voodoo plays a similar role in Their Eyes where Hurston employs it as a means of giving Janie and other members of her Eatonville, Florida, community the power to resist Joe Starks’s perpetuation of intraracial slavery and European/white patriarchal oppression. Structured as a frame narrative—the plot starts in Eatonville, the first incorporated all-black town in America, moves to the Florida Everglades, then returns to Eatonville—Their Eyes is the heart-wrenching love story of

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a black woman in search of an egalitarian identity. Janie Mae Crawford’s successive marriages to three men of African ancestry—Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods—either fail or end in her husband’s death. After experiencing sterile cohabitations with Logan and Joe, both older men who fail to acknowledge her autonomy as a woman, Janie follows Tea Cake, ten years her junior, who helps her become an independent and self-affirming agent. With Tea Cake, Janie’s independence blossoms as she realizes unrestricted access to words, nature, and selfactualization. Janie’s romantic relation with Tea Cake, however, is not perfect since the latter occasionally treats her recklessly. He irresponsibly takes her money and gambles with it without her consent and beats her to bolster his masculine need for communal respect and female possession. Hurston’s ethnography defied social and gender binaries and the deprivation of voice and personal agency that the power elite imposed on African Americans, particularly those of the underclass in the first half of the twentieth century. In “ ‘Sis Cat’ as Ethnographer: Self-Representation and Self-Inscription in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men,” D. A. Boxwell argues that Hurston’s ethnography overcomes “ ‘the pernicious distinctions’ that separate ‘academy vs. vernacular,’ ‘the scholar vs. the folk,’ and the ‘ivory tower vs. the real world’ ” (606). Moreover, Hurston’s ethnography recognized the power of the folklore of African American plain folk to effect social change and liberation amidst racial and economic oppression. Hurston perceived folklore as an agent of conquest filled with customs that assisted the common black man and woman in transcending painful moments in African American history and that provided a vehicle for liberation from racial and economic inequalities. Despite Zora Neale Hurston’s implementation in her work of ethnographic folklore as a liberation strategy, few critics have devoted attention to the covert expression or agency of Voodoo in Their Eyes that found overt expression in the novel that Hurston published before it, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), and after it, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). A pioneering essay on the treatment of Voodoo in Their Eyes is Ellease Southerland’s “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston” (1979). Southerland uncovers and connects natural elements with recurring Voodoo signages that Hurston embeds in the novel, such as her linking the image of the tree with the sign of Legba, the loa or lwa (divinity) “who provides a way” (“Influence of Voodoo,” 179), and connecting the image of the snake with “the signature of the supreme god, Damballa[h]” (180). Both Legba and Damballah are divinities derived from West African retentions of Vodun that survived the Middle Passage of the European transatlantic slave trade. Almost two decades passed before Derek Collins’s “The Myth

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and Ritual of Ezili Freda in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1996) asserted that the Haitian loa of love, Ezili Freda, “unmistakably parallels Janie with regard to her physical beauty, her barrenness, her focus on erotic love, and the lack of permanence in her relationships with men” (140). Drawing from the resistance theory of James C. Scott and the black vernacular theory of Henry Louis Gates Jr., I assert that Hurston uses Voodoo in Their Eyes as the principal source of Africanisms that are tucked invisibly in the cultural apparatus of the narrative and as subtle resistance against the black male’s reformulation of European or white patriarchal oppression. Janie deploys elements associated with Voodoo as tools of liberation and self-actualization in the same ways peoples of African descent from Dahomey, Yorubaland, Kongo, and other West and Central African empires utilized traditional beliefs during the Haitian Revolution that they initiated in 1791 and that resulted in their independence from France in 1804. In doing so, Hurston affirms the twentieth-century political relevance and agency of Voodoo. The history of the conflicting relationships between enslaved Haitians and their French enslavers before and during the Haitian Revolution provides a precedent for the use of Voodoo as a weapon of resistance and liberation in the Americas against white patriarchal domination. Focusing on the influence of the Haitian Revolution on Hurston’s denunciation of European racial and economic oppression, my essay contributes to a growing body of scholarship that includes Michael Largey’s Vodou Nation: Haitian Art, Music and Cultural Nationalism (2006), Hyppolite Pierre’s Haiti, Rising Flames from Burning Ashes (2006), and Madison Smartt Bell’s Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (2007), which also examines Haiti’s contribution to the PanAfrican agitation for equality and self-determination.

Theorizing Vernacular and Behavioral Resistance In her own life, Hurston perceived Voodoo as a means of attaining equality between women and men and between African Americans and European Americans. As Wendy Dutton points out, Hurston saw Voodoo not only as a religion of creation and life but also as a belief system equally committed to “female power” (“Problem of Invisibility,” 133, 136). In her letter to Alain Locke written on October 15, 1928, Hurston represents the “conjure material” she collected from New Orleans as “a lead that promises something good out of the past” (“To Alain Locke,” 128), suggesting her recognition of a twentieth-century power emanating

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from ancient, African-derived traditions of Voodoo or Hoodoo. Commenting on the African folklore that she collected in Haiti, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and other parts of the African diaspora in a letter to Melville J. Herskovits dated July 30, 1936, Hurston describes this “lead” from the past as the remnant in the African diaspora of “a strong primitive survival deeply buried from the sight of prying official eyes” (“To Melville J. Herskovits,” 384). Her assertion reflects the concealed and resistive nature of Voodoo in the African American diaspora that she also discusses in her analysis of her research on Haitian Voudoun in Tell My Horse, which she published in 1938. She establishes the covert and rebellious roles of Voudoun that enslaved Africans employed during the Haitian Revolution in order to resist the exploitive tyranny of their French masters. Voudoun’s concealed and insurrectionary functions during the Haitian Revolution and in contemporary Haitian society at large served as precedents for Hurston’s invocations of Voodoo in Their Eyes. Voudoun’s influence on the novel is also apparent in Largey’s argument that Hurston wrote the narrative while she “was conducting ethnographic research in Haiti” (Vodou Nation, 58). According to Largey, Hurston was a Harlem Renaissance writer who, along with Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, “turned to the folk cultures of [both] African Americans and Haitians in search of artistic subjects that could express a ‘racial Geist’ through literature and music” (58).1 Hurston’s revolutionary concept of Voodoo is also evident in Houston Baker’s argument that she uses it to create “an emergent nation of Africans in America” and “to change things around” (Workings of the Spirit, 94–95, 101). As evident in the Eatonville townspeople’s belief in Janie’s employment of Voodoo to level the gender playing field with Joe, Hurston’s utilization of the African traditional religion also aims to create a balance between the sexes by liberating women and men from an absolute masculine hegemony. Here is the twentieth- and twentieth-firstcentury power of Voudoun that La Vinia Delois Jennings describes as an “African usable past” or as a model of unity that dissolves any dichotomies between genders, races, sexual orientations, nationalities, and other subjective identities.2 Hurston’s subliminal representation of Janie and the townspeople of Eatonville using Voodoo as a weapon of resistance against patriarchal oppression parallels James C. Scott’s conception in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance of a South Asian peasantry’s subversive retaliation against an elite’s power through the use of “hidden transcripts” and “appropriation.” The reliance on “hidden transcripts” identifies an instance when a subordinate group enacts neutrality, passive

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accommodation of the elite’s society, or adaptation to the customs of the intruder as an outward means of maintaining a semblance of order while covertly resisting oppression (Scott, Weapons, xviii, 317). The concept of “appropriation” describes the oppressed group’s sharing of a collective memory of the past from which it borrows to overcome the hardship of the present.3 Scott summarizes the concepts of “hidden transcript” and “appropriation” as forwarded through verbal deference and false behavior arising from suppressed anger. An exploited individual recognizes that she or he has been ill-treated and, protecting her or his effort and achievement, swallows that anger lest it endangers her or his livelihood (278–79). Although Scott works with South Asian culture, his concept of “hidden transcript” has influenced studies of African American and Haitian cultures. Robin D. G. Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class credits him with enumerating the ways “oppressed groups challenge those in power by constructing a ‘hidden transcript,’ a dissident political culture that manifests itself in daily conversations, folklore, jokes, songs, and other cultural practices” (8). According to Kelley, these “hidden transcripts” that Scott also calls “infrapolitics” assist in describing “the daily confrontations, evasive actions, and stifled thoughts that often inform organized political movements” (8). In a similar vein, Michael Largey credits Scott, in Vodou Nation, for providing Gage Averill, whose scholarship intersects popular music and power in Haiti, with a theory of “hidden transcripts” that outlines the various subversive ways subordinate classes challenge the elite’s ideologies and “public transcripts” of hegemony (8–9). Like Kelley and Averill, I draw on Scott’s concept of “hidden transcript” as a viable transracial theory that extends to the African diaspora in order to uncover the elusive and covert vernacular and behavioral strategies that an African-descended, subjugated group deploys to resist European and European-descended, master-class oppression. A few examples of the subversive strategies that powerless groups utilize as subtle resistance to the domination of the state and landowners that may go unnoticed due to their passive and nonviolent nature are “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, [and] sabotage” (Scott, Weapons, 29). While hidden transcripts such as dissimulation, false compliance, and feigned ignorance are both verbal and behavioral forms of rebellion, foot dragging is emblematic of deportment resistance, and slander is exclusively a mode of vernacular resistance. These “weapons of the weak” help the peasant and landless classes to confront clandestinely the exploitation that they face

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daily (29–30). Averill states that the hidden transcript tactics that Scott also calls “politics of disguise and anonymity” resonate with “a family of ‘masked’ practices of subordinated peoples all over the world, but in particular form of the African diaspora saturated with African cultural specificities and retentions” (Day for the Hunter, 17). These strategies, which Averill calls “masked” tactics, were pertinent to the Haitian Revolution. Enslaved Africans in Haiti, like the British American colonists in North America, gained their independence in the Western Hemisphere by driving out a controlling European power. Voudoun helped oppressed Africans in the Americas defeat the French who had colonized the island of Hispaniola in 1697 when, as Charles Arthur and Michael Dash state, “Spain ceded the western third of the island to France, known thereafter as Saint Domingue” (Libète, 17). Many enslaved persons joined the revolution because their religious beliefs, creolized under the banner of Voudoun—the Haitian-French adoption/adaptation of West African Vodun— empowered them.4 A similar appropriation of African tradition in the Americas is the subversive and creolized language that enslaved Africans developed in the United States. The dissident and hybrid nature of this language is clarified in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s discussion of black vernacular theory in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, in which he identifies “signifying” as a set of black rhetorical tropes that include verbal indirection, “marking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out (of one’s name), sounding, rapping, [and] playing the dozens” (52). He defines signifying as “what we might think of as the writing implicit in an oral literature” (88). Gates’s theory of signifying comes out of West African oral traditions in which the trickster figure Esu-Elegbara of the Yoruba or Legba of the Fon represents meaning that is “hidden” in two sides of identities and words (30). Gates states that “Esu is a figure of double duality, of unreconciled opposites” who can however achieve a “hidden wholeness” (30). Yet one might also theorize signifying as a parallel of the African concept of “indirection,” which is analogous to African satire and irony. According to the literary and art critic Gena Dagel Caponi, enslaved Africans improvised satirical songs about private grievances and personal gossip “marked by social and political criticism” (“Case for an African American Aesthetic,” 27). As Caponi shows, these satirical songs “were part of many rites, but were also sung during formal evening entertainments and during group work. Such songs reduced stress by airing frustrations publicly, in a socially acceptable way” (27). Similar examples of signifying of the Esu-Elegbara type occur subversively in the African

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American vernacular as subtle resistance. For instance, Geneva Smitherman states that in the Old Testament Negro spirituals, “slaves moaned ‘steal away to Jesus’ to mean stealing away FROM the plantation and TO freedom” (Talking and Testifying, 48). As Smitherman points out, the enslaved “sang triumphantly ‘this train is bound to Glory,’ but the train they were really talking about was the ‘freedom train’ that ran on the Underground Railroad” (48). The linguistic practice of saying one thing to mean something else is an effective vernacular tool of resistance that Hurston gives to Janie to protect her against a European-descended and -stylized patriarchy. Known as Voodoo, Hoodoo, and conjure in the United States, Voudoun in Haiti, Shango in Trinidad, Candomblé and Macumba in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, and Cumina or Obeah in Jamaica, Vodun is the West African traditional belief in a “Supreme God” who is too “high” to be concerned with earthly affairs (Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 10–11). Thus its practitioners invoke a pantheon of lesser divinities—spirits or saints—to assist them in exercising control over their lives (11). The Vodun belief in a “Supreme God” resonates with the Christian faith in the one and true God, allowing Africans in the diaspora to juxtapose the Europeans’ high divinity into their own ancestral religion (10). The juxtaposition of African and European religious traditions in Vodun is visible in Hurston’s theory of Voodoo. In Tell My Horse, Hurston defines Voodoo as “a[n African] religion of creation and life” that regards the Judeo-Christian prophet Moses as “the great father of magic” (113, 116). Hurston’s representation of Moses as what literary critic Will Brantley calls “a biblical Voodoo priest” (“Zora Neale Hurston,” 477) shows her conception of Voodoo as a syncretic traditional African religion in which elements of Judeo-Christian faith play a major role. Clarifying the African American usage of the word Hoodoo to describe Voodoo, Hurston writes the following in The Journal of American Folklore: The American Negro’s own name for his practices is hoodoo, both terms being related to the West African term juju. “Conjure” is also freely used by the American Negro for these practices. In the Bahamas as on the West Coast of Africa the term is obeah. “Roots” is the Southern Negro’s term for folk-doctoring by herbs and prescriptions, and by extension, and because all hoodoo doctors cure by roots, it may be used as a synonym for hoodoo. (“Hoodoo in America,” 317)

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As a religion that permeates the African diaspora, Voodoo, according to African cultural historian Robert Farris Thompson, is generally defined as a North American synthesis of the traditional religious beliefs of Dahomey, Yorubaland, and Kongo with an infusion of Roman Catholicism (Flash of the Spirit, 163).5 The West African traditions of Vodun amalgamated in Haiti where, according to Maya Deren, the FrenchHaitian creole term “Voudoun (which is the Fons [Dahomean] word for god) includes the loa (the Congo word for the spirits) of many nations.” Dahomean culture integrated the religious beliefs of all Africans into the Rada rites and divinities who are “essentially benevolent, paternal and passive” and the Petro rites performed for Haitian divinities that “are the patrons of aggressive action” (Divine Horsemen, 60, 61). The Petro rites and divinities that developed in Haiti are more aggressive than the Rada rituals and divinities.6 The concept of Petro derived from the Haitian resistance against French enslavement and imperialism had wide political significance for the African diaspora. As Selden Rodman and Carole Cleaver maintain in Spirits of the Night: The Vaudun Gods of Haiti, Boukman, a Voudoun priest, employed Petro rites to summon the enslaved in Haiti to revolt in 1791 (12). And Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert write that “the links between religion and the uprising were established early through the slaves’ belief in the powers of their legendary leader [François] Makandal to predict the future and transform himself into various animals, attributes that served him well in his clandestine war against the French colonists” (Creole Religions, 16). According to Kwame Anthony Appiah and Gates, the roots of the Haitian Revolution go back to 1789 when 30,000 freedmen and 450,000 enslaved Africans utilized the radical rhetoric of the French revolutionaries against the nobility to demand the political rights that Saint Domingue’s 40,000 whites living in luxury had (Dictionary of Global Culture, 270). As Appiah and Gates show, the Haitian Revolution was a long process that involved the work of many black revolutionaries such as Boukman, Jean Biassou, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, Moyse Bréda, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (270–71). C. L. R. James maintains that the Saint Domingue revolution started in early October 1789 in Fort Dauphin, Haiti, where a group of Africans “were stirring and holding mass meetings in the forests at night” in the South Province to strategize the overthrow of slavery during an imminent revolution (Black Jacobins, 81–82). According to James, the enslaved Africans “had shown signs of unrest” while they were “watching the fight between their masters for and against revolution” (82). As James also points out, “in isolated plantations there were movements. All were

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bloodily repressed” (82). Africans soon retaliated against their masters’ brutal reactions to their “unrest” by directly attacking them. They began their reprisal against their owners on August 21, 1791, when twenty of them “awakened” the manager of La Gossette estate in the northern plain of Haiti and “attacked him” (Dubois, Avengers, 94). The slave rebellion spread rapidly to other plantations under the leadership of Boukman, who had worked the Petro rites (94). While scholars credit the success of the Haitian Revolution to Boukman, Makandal, Biassou, Bréda, Dessalines, and other enslaved men who resisted the French, they tend to regard Toussaint Louverture as the major architect of the uprising. As Laurent Dubois argues, Toussaint Louverture was the “master of the crossroads” of the Haitian Revolution (Avengers, 176–77). His pivotal role in the uprising was apparent in his use of subversive verbal and behavioral resistance tactics inherent in Voodoo. An example of Toussaint Louverture’s hidden transcript is apparent in his covert and duplicitous resistance to Napoleon Bonaparte’s colonialism. Toussaint Louverture publicly stated that he was willing to give Saint Domingue to Napoleon, yet he privately defied him (Ros and Ford, Night of Fire, 119). When Napoleon attempted to prevent him from being Haiti’s leader, Toussaint Louverture said, “If he [Napoleon] does [block my way], he will have to face a buck rather than a sheep” (115). Toussaint Louverture’s public statement demonstrates his use of duplicity as a means of resisting Napoleon’s tyranny. As Mercer Cook maintains, Toussaint Louverture mastered the art of duplicity, since he knew that “it would have been foolhardy” for him “to expose all of his [military] aims to adversaries as treacherous as Napoleon” (Review, 465). Duplicity is also the transcriptive form of resistance that Ralph Korn­ gold calls a “verbal misleading,” which was one of the “weapons of the weak” that Africans used to circumvent their enslavement in Saint Domingue (Citizen Toussaint, xiv). Toussaint Louverture used duplicity or verbal misleading when he explained his sudden switch from French to Spanish allegiance in 1793. According to Dubois, “When the French rejected his ‘avenues of reconciliation’ in mid-1793, Toussaint Louverture said, ‘The Spanish offered me their protection and liberty for all those who would fight for the cause of kings; I accepted their offer, seeing myself abandoned by the French’ ” (Avengers, 179). Yet, on May 6, 1794, Toussaint Louverture massacred Spanish soldiers “and led his four thousand negro troops into Republican territory. . . . This astounding defection completely disorganized the Spanish forces, which rapidly evacuated most of their conquests in the North” (Stoddard, French Revolution, 248). The incongruity between Toussaint Louverture’s words of allegiance and

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act of treachery demonstrates his reliance on duplicity as a legitimate means of resistance against Europeans he could not trust. The Africans in Saint Domingue had similar “weapons” of resistance, since they used vernacular and behavioral practices inherent to Voudoun as transcripts that concealed their rebellion against their masters. According to Kevin J. Wetmore, African priests were especially instrumental in organizing gatherings that were disguised as religious ceremonies to plot the overthrow of European domination: The African priests whose religion would become voodoo were the first leaders of slave revolts in the Caribbean and the United States. They could conduct meetings under the guise of ceremony; they already had a leadership role in the African community, and thus were respected and obeyed, and they could assure supernatural support and inspiration for the revolts. (Black Dionysus, 168)

A fine example of the use of traditional religion as a hidden transcript of resistance was Boukman’s couching in a Voudoun ceremony that required the slaughter of an animal, a ritual that resisted the tyranny that European planters imposed on enslaved men and women: “Boukman plunged the knife once more into the pig’s entrails and pronounced that a pact of blood had been sealed between the initiated and the great gods (loas) of Africa” (Pezzullo, Plunging into Haiti, 36–37). Boukman’s immolation of the pig was also an indirect means of urging enslaved African and African-descended peoples to shed the blood of the Europeans who had enslaved them. Like Boukman, Toussaint Louverture was not a stranger to Voudoun, since he was a revered participant in the African religious rituals that those in bondage had performed before their insurrection. According to James Ferguson, “Legend has it that Toussaint was present at the voodoo ceremony which began the slaves’ uprising in the north of the colony in August 1791” (Makers of the Caribbean, 8). Before the revolt the rebels had “transmuted” Toussaint Louverture “[t]o a sort of divinity in the [Voudoun] cult” (Bailey, Ritual Theater, 141), adopting their leader as an icon of Voudoun whose name “Louverture” was probably attributed to him “on the basis of passages in voodoo which refer to the ‘Opener’ of the way” to freedom (Davis, Latin American Leaders, 27). The enslaved Africans also viewed Toussaint Louverture as a Voudoun saint who symbolized the path to wisdom and resilience. They called him “Papa Toussaint and associated him with Papa Legba, one of the principal loas of voodoo and of the Haitian Revolution as well, since he took charge of selecting the right course

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[of action]” and following it through (Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 162). In this sense, Toussaint Louverture and those that he led armed themselves with important hidden transcripts, since they had appropriated a collective, intelligent, and spiritual resistance strategy that they brought to the Americas by way of the Middle Passage. Their mastery of verbal/vernacular resistance and their intelligent, military organizational structure were instrumental in the defeat of the European colonialists in Haiti. The overthrow of the French in the Haitian Revolution, which culminated in the establishment of the first black independent republic in the Caribbean on January 1, 1804, was primarily the outcome of Voudoun since the African-descended rebels rallied under a single banner of belief (Dubois, Avengers, 270–71).7 The creolized religious rites and spirits provided the courage and beliefs that allowed bondsmen and freedmen to topple their oppressors. Hurston ascribes similar power to African traditional religion by subversively representing vernacular and behavioral strategies practiced in Their Eyes as key elements that Janie uses or allegedly uses in her resistance to Joe’s suppression of her voice, to his sexism, and to his perpetuation of European or white patriarchy.

Voodoo and Vernacular Resistance: Deference, Duplicity, Silence, and Compliance Throughout Their Eyes, Janie resists, through hidden transcripts of false deference, duplicity, silence, and routine compliance that are inherent in Voodoo tactics, Joe’s perpetuation of a European patriarchal oppressive ideology. His perpetuation of white patriarchy is apparent in his commission of the same form of controlling and paternalistic relations with the lower-class blacks of Eatonville that his white bosses in Atlanta practiced with him. Haiti and Eatonville are similar, because individuals of African ancestry in both the island nation and the central Florida town liberate themselves from whites to become all-black independent spaces. The parallel between Haiti and Eatonville is also apparent in the ways in which Joe’s attitudes toward blacks of Eatonville mirror those of the French slave-owners’ toward the Africans in Saint Domingue before their liberation and the country’s renaming. As Paul Gordon Lauren points out, the French perceived Africans in Saint Domingue paternalistically as chattel laborers that they could control permanently in an attempt to prevent them from being “independent” (Power and Prejudice, 19, 25). Joe acts in similar ways since he wants to be “a big voice” in Eatonville just like the white folks were that he worked for in Georgia, and he intends to invest

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his money in the town while it is still a “baby” (Their Eyes, 27). Joe’s perception of Eatonville as a “baby” reveals his white-appropriated condescension and paternalistic interpretation of the inhabitants of the town, anticipating his intent to be a master of them just as his white bosses were masters of blacks in Atlanta and the French mastered the Africandescended population in Haiti. He emulates the domineering posture of the white master: No sooner was he all set as the Mayor—post master—landlord— storekeeper, than he bought a desk like Mr. Hill or Mr. Galloway over in Maitland with one of those swing-around chairs to it. What with him biting down on cigars and saving his breath on talk and swinging round in that chair, it weakened people. (44)

The narrator’s emphasis on Joe’s patriarchal ability to weaken people suggests a parallel between Joe’s governance of black people and Europeans’ enslavement of peoples of African descent on plantations in the New World. The connection is evident in Janie’s realization that the townspeople have begun to see her as an extension of Joe’s white authority: She slept with authority and so she was part of it in the town [sic] mind. She couldn’t get but so close to most of them in spirit. It was especially noticeable after Joe had forced through a town ditch to drain the street in front of the store. They had murmured hotly about slavery being over, but every man filled his assignment. (44)

In the latter extended passage one notices the townspeople’s false deference toward Joe, since they murmur their frustration about his dominance while they continue to do his bidding. The example also shows Joe’s power to re-create a master/mastered dichotomy to exploit for personal gain his fellow blacks and perpetuate the class divisions and inequalities of the peculiar institution of servitude in Eatonville. Yet Janie is not completely alienated from the townspeople of Eatonville with whom she shares similar experiences of mastering and humiliation by Joe’s plantation slavery and enactments of white patriarchy. Although the townspeople view her as a person who shares Joe’s authority, Janie is the person that Joe’s white patriarchal domination affects the most because she lives with him and, therefore, experiences it on a daily basis. Growing very jealous of the admiring looks men give Janie, Joe demands that she cover her hair in his store since she is there “for him to look at, not those others” (52). Joe’s requirement that Janie wear a head rag denotes her

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servant-class status and opens her to public humiliation. Claire Crabtree states that the head rag “provides an ironic counterpoint to the portrayal of Starks as a progressive entrepreneur, for his insistence on her covering her hair suggests his need to belittle Janie, despite his protestations of her high stature as a lady” (“Confluences of Folklore,” 62). Joe’s humiliation of Janie parallels his “weakening” of the black townsfolk of Eatonville, allowing the community to create with his wife a secret social space in which they develop subversive hidden transcripts of false deference, duplicity, silence, and compliance that mirror the duality, duplicity, and double voice that are reminiscent of the character traits of the African divinity Esu. They do so in order to resist Joe’s intolerable aping of white patriarchy. Their false deference is apparent when porch sitters Lige Moss, Sam Watson, and Walter pretend to commiserate with Joe about the defiant way Janie talks to him when they secretly admire her courage and find her dozens “comical” (Their Eyes, 74). The concealed solidarity between the other blacks of Eatonville and Janie is an invisible compact of resistance on par with the hidden transcript that the black lower classes develop against racial or social elites that trample their dignity and deny them justice and equality. In Race Rebels Kelley points out that the effect of an “accumulation of indignities,” “anger,” and “rage” by poor blacks in white power structures may lead to “a powerful declaration of . . . usually veiled dissident [black] political culture” (89). Thus hidden transcripts may become visible, leading to the oppressed group outwardly resisting the injustices of the dominant group. The suspension of hidden transcripts transpires in Their Eyes when Janie becomes publicly resistant to Joe. A pivotal moment in Janie’s hidden transcriptive resistance against oppression occurs when the thirdperson narrator states that Janie learns incrementally to remain silent while she waits for the day that her troubling relationship with Joe will end. The narrator comments that “gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor” (67). Janie’s silence reveals a near-death experience in her relationship with Joe that begins when she complains about the stifling impact his busy mayoral duties have on their marriage. Janie is aware of the “strain” his public office puts on them, making her feel as if “in some way we ain’t natural wid one ’other” (43). By the word “strain,” Janie means more than the discomfort of being on public display daily; she implies that their private interactions with each other tax them to the brink of collapse. Joe misunderstands her comment even when Janie gives him an indirect warning couched in a delicate observation and wistful optimism: “You’se always off talkin’ and fixin’ things, and

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Ah feels lak Ah’m jus’ markin’ time. Hope it soon gits over” (43). Janie’s comment of indirection that Joe is “always off talkin’ and fixin’ things” is an implicit invective against the ways he neglects her personal desires. She bides her time, hoping to see the unnaturalness that they endure end. Janie employs a resistance strategy that is identical to the one that Scott classifies as clandestine and anonymous. The poor and oppressed engage this strategy by sending one or two warnings before destroying the property of the elite who disturb their peace (Weapons, 271). According to Scott, members of these communities will publicly “remain mute about their intentions,” because “their safety will depend on silence and anonymity; the kind of resistance itself may depend for its effectiveness on the appearance of conformity” (301). Yet, in a private setting, the poor and the oppressed will break their silence by verbally denouncing the tyranny of their exploiters, thereby revealing their false deference toward the dominant class. Scott writes that “what we have here is a difference between ‘onstage’ and ‘offstage’ behavior; to the extent that the deference expressed in public, power-laden situations is negated in the comparative safety of offstage privacy, we can speak unambiguously of false deference” (25). Janie’s indirection as a means of resisting Joe’s white patriarchy is a resistance that draws upon the black traditional communal culture of Eatonville, Esu’s duplicity, and the fluid tradition of “an African usable past” that I referenced earlier. Janie’s statement to Joe charging that he “bigbellies round” Eatonville and “put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but” his “big voice” (75) is vernacular resistance that resonates with the townspeople’s description of Joe as an egocentric man who spends all his time flaunting his “big-belly round and tell[ing] other folks what tuh do” (46). The men of the town and Janie use Esu-ian indirection as an implicit means of criticizing Joe’s white patriarchal behavior toward them. Their indirection draws from Esu’s duplicity expressed in his ambiguous language that Gates describes as “our [black] metaphor for the uncertainties of explication, for the open-endedness of every literary text” (Signifying Monkey, 21). Esu is the source of indirection and duplicity in the black vernacular tradition since, as Gates argues, he represents both “the duality” and “multiplicity” of meanings in this tradition (21). The influence of Esu’s duplicity in Their Eyes is apparent in the duality that the black townspeople of Eatonville express toward Joe. While these men admire Joe’s “bow-down command” and his ability to do “tangible things” such as buy more land for the Eatonville community, they frown on his perception of himself as akin to a white, patriarchal ruling class and of them as an insignificant underclass that he can chastise, order, and

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punish at will (44). These men despise his transformation into a tyrant the moment that they elect him as mayor. He behaves like a white planter who lives in the “big house” surrounded by “servants’ quarters” (44) and spits in a gold-looking vase and swings to and fro like his “used-to-be bossman” in Atlanta (44). Joe’s patriarchal demeanor justifies the public’s use of verbal indirection and bad-mouthing as vernacular forms of resistance to his subjugation. The men of Eatonville are the public voice of the silent Janie, since they are the ones who outwardly criticize Joe’s authoritarianism when he is absent. As the narrator states, “When the mail came from Maitland and he went inside to sort it out everybody had their say” (45). Their protestations behind Joe’s back reveal the men’s concealment of their disapprobation and resentment of his domination until they gain substantial power that allows them to upturn the unequal power relations which separate them from him. The ambivalence of the Eatonville men toward Joe mirrors Janie’s dualistic attitudes toward the latter. After marrying Joe, Janie realizes that her romantic feelings abate since her husband devotes most of his attention to his position as mayor, postmaster, and property owner, not to his status as the husband “of a woman who is petal open and wants to experience the fullness of marriage, not the institution, but the unity of the sexes in nature as she observes in the vertical axis of the spiritual world of the pear tree while she lies horizontal underneath it in the mortal, physical realm.”8 Janie’s awareness of her marital unhappiness with Joe grows and she consciously resists his neglect of her humanity by way of a discreet silence that he imposes on her and she ruptures, faulting him for mistrusting her during their marital life and expressing no fear of his imminent death. She tells him, “Yeah, Jody, don’t keer whut dat multiplied cockroach [“two-headed” doctor of Voodoo] told yuh tuh git yo’ money, you got tuh die, and yuh can’t live” (Their Eyes, 81). Janie reverses the unequal power relations that exist between Joe and herself. Consequently, Their Eyes, as Susan Meisenhelder points out, becomes the most daring exposé of female resistance in African American literature (Hitting a Straight Lick, 62). Janie’s rupture of silence is also evident when she expresses her dissatisfaction with the demands patriarchy places on her in Joe’s store. As the narrator observes, “The store itself kept her with a sick headache,” which came from the confusion Janie experiences when she has to do mathematical calculations to determine the value of a “dime’s worth” of bacon, lard, or cheese (Their Eyes, 51). According to the narrator, “The whole thing changed from a little walking and stretching to a mathematical dilemma . . . She [Janie] went through many silent rebellions over things

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like that. Such a waste of time and life” (51). The narrator’s description of Janie’s work in Joe’s store as “a waste of time and life” underscores Janie’s need for “silent rebellions,” and reflects Hurston’s sympathy with Janie’s use of subversive hidden transcripts of duplicity, silence, and duality akin to those of Esu by publicly deferring to Joe when she secretly denounces the inhumane and slavish ways that he treats her. Hurston forwards this reading by having Janie cut Joe’s tobacco plug unevenly, thereby showing Janie’s frustration with her husband indirectly by destroying one of his capitalistic holdings that has phallic, patriarchal symbolism. When she realizes that the only way for her to resist Joe’s sexism and dominance and survive his white patriarchal oppression is to ignore his verbal and emotional abuse even if she keeps his house and shares his bed, Janie effects false deference and silence. The third-person narrator explains Janie’s strategic vernacular responses: No matter what Jody said, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. . . . She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn’t value. (72)

Janie’s calculated attitudes toward Joe are covert actions that allow her to plot her escape from Joe without causing damage to herself. By “talk[ing] some and leav[ing] some” and being “a rut in the road,” Janie utilizes silence and slow, routine steps and procedures as incremental tools of liberation. Through seemingly silent compliance, she is progressively victorious over Joe since she succeeds at outlasting his overbearing chauvinism by literally outliving and defeating his relegation of her to domesticity and servant-class status. Janie achieves resistive success by keeping her “girl self” intact (83) and appropriating a communal transcriptive mechanism beyond Joe’s boundaries where she is able to be a spiritual vessel floating toward new horizons. Janie’s false compliance is apparent from the moment that she implements vernacular resistance against Joe. She becomes less tolerant of his patriarchal domination. When Joe chides her in public for badly cutting a customer’s plug of tobacco, Janie finally lashes out by verbally ridiculing him, in the dozens fashion, in front of the male porch sitters who congregate in his store. Replying to Joe’s description of her as an “old” woman that nobody would want to marry (75), she states, “Humph! Talkin’ ’bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life” (75). Janie’s confrontational language exposes her earlier

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false compliance. The poor and the oppressed use this resistance strategy when they change their verbal communication toward the exploiter by discontinuing the deference they once expressed. Hurston gives Janie a witty response to Joe’s belittling sexism while sanctioning a vernacular form of empowerment. Janie’s humorous language toward her domineering husband shows Hurston’s attempt to restore the suppressed voice of the past generations of black women who gave her life. Janet Carter-Sigglow argues that in Their Eyes, “Hurston is recreating a community that is already history. . . . As a sixteen-year-old girl Janie has no voice to express her feelings and no focused vision of the life she wants for herself. However, Hurston had already shown that a woman need not be speechless and that even . . . a girl can know her own mind” (Making Her Way, 69). Hurston saves Janie from voicelessness by allowing her to make a self-affirming remark about herself—“Ah’ m uh woman every inch of me”—and a satirical comment about Joe—“When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life”—as tools of vernacular resistance against his patriarchy. In this sense, “language,” as Tiffany Patterson posits, “is central to resistance in the narrative of Janie’s marriage to Jody” (Zora Neale Hurston, 120). Janie’s subversive language against Joe’s patriarchy suggests the influence of Esu-modeled indirection in the resistive voice that Hurston gives to her heroine. Hurston enables Janie’s resistive voice by letting it lampoon Joe’s white patriarchy indirectly. By representing Joe as a man who “big-bellies” in his store when he has nothing to offer her other than a “big voice” (Their Eyes, 75), Janie employs the hidden transcript that Scott theorizes as the aggressive language a subordinate utilizes against the public humiliation that he or she receives from an employer or superior. Scott exposes that “[a] subordinate who has just received a public dressing down from his superior during which he behaved deferentially [. . . later] among his peers may curse his superior, make physical gestures of aggression, and talk about what he would like to say next time” (Domination, 115). Janie deploys this hidden transcript beyond the private sphere by using its covert aggressive language as a subtle means of publicly ridiculing the domineering voice that Joe assumes in his store when he fails to demonstrate humility, sensitivity, and respect for her. On the other hand, Janie uses false compliance to defeat Joe’s white patriarchy. The reader infers the potency of Voodoo when the townspeople of Eatonville rumor that she has used the mystical power of a “two-headed” doctor to “fix” Joe (Their Eyes, 78). While the rumor may be a fabrication of the townspeople, it does, however, strengthen Janie in her quest for personal and social autonomy. Refuting the charge that she

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has poisoned her husband, Janie states that it is a lie of the “two-headed doctor” who sold “gophers” to Joe to capitalize on his illness (79). The “gopher” here is the noun form of the verb “goofer” meaning to conjure, to cast a spell, or to bewitch (Major, Juba to Jive, 208). The word “goofer” itself comes from the Ki-Kongo word kufwa, which means to die (208). The idea of dying suggests the fear of being a fatal victim of somebody’s goofer through eating his or her food, which is apparent in Joe’s refusal to eat Janie’s cooking (Their Eyes, 78). His dread of a goofer mistakenly leads Joe to alienate Janie physically and emotionally by refusing to let her nurse him in bed when he is on the verge of dying (81–82). Joe’s fear of Janie exemplifies Hurston’s successful invocation here of the respectful fear in African American culture of Voodoo. Fear of Voodoo is apparent in Joe’s decision to have “old lady Davis” cook for him when he suspects that Janie has “fixed” him (78). According to Andrew Warnes, Joe’s suspicion of Janie signifies that he “suspects that he has been a victim of conjure and is cognizant of the cultural wisdom, articulated in Mules and Men, that only conjure doctors can cure conjure” (Hunger Overcome?, 63). As Warnes points out, this cultural wisdom is evident in Hurston’s representation of Janie as “the unwitting agency of the imminent physical disaster” ( 63). Recognizing Hurston’s representation of Janie as a symbol of danger, Warnes, however, admits that the “crime” that Janie has supposedly committed against Joe may be involuntary as is apparent in her wish for her husband to see a qualified “doctor, and a good one” (63). The folk belief implied in Their Eyes in Janie’s alleged usage of Voodoo power counters Joe’s perception of her as a wife who “don’t know nothin’ ’bout no speech-making” and whose “place is in de home” (Their Eyes, 40–41). By spreading the rumor of Janie’s enlisting African traditional power, the townspeople oppose Joe’s subordination of her and, thereby, empower her as his equal. The people’s rumor that Janie has fixed Joe reveals their collective perception of Voodoo as an effective, legitimate, and modern reformulation of political agency and resistance to white patriarchy and oppression. Through their invocation of a traditional method of resistance to Joe’s domination, the townspeople affirm a similar “nobility of human resolve” that Hyppolite Pierre identifies in the solidarity of Africans against their French oppressors during the Haitian Revolution (Haiti, 151). Pierre represents these Africans as “an Army of hungry, ill-prepared, unsophisticated and dehumanized slaves [who] managed to defeat their masters of the sea, the military geniuses of General Rochambeau, Leclerc, and other officers of the Napoleon army” (151). Eatonville’s townspeople resemble these Africans since they eventually thwart

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Joe’s intraracial, patriarchal oppression with a collective, culturally based traditional mode of resistance. Hurston’s invocation of Janie using African traditional practice to quash Joe’s white-informed patriarchy posits the subversive role Voodoo played in black resistance against oppression in the Americas. The subversive use of Voodoo in black liberation was evident during the Haitian Revolution when the enslaved and freedmen organized their liberation inconspicuously in order to escape the scrutiny of their white masters. According to Maya Deren, the revolutionaries met in the hills where they secretly performed the Petro rites that later inspired them to swoop down on the plantations, liberating both enslaved and freed Africans from French oppression (Divine Horsemen, 62). As is evident in Hurston’s modeling of Janie’s implementation of traditional African vernacular and behavioral liberation tools in Eatonville, the revolt of the Haitians at the end of the eighteenth century has strong parallels to twentieth-century African American resistance. The residents of all-black Eatonville are collective allies of Janie in her resistance to Joe’s patriarchal power, in the same way that the enslaved Africans who rebelled against the French sugar cane planters in Haiti were united in their opposition to French patriarchal dominance. Concealed unity among blacks against white patriarchy is a subversive element that Hurston drew from Haitian Voudoun. As Daphne Lamothe argues, when “she looked to a belief that addressed black people’s capacity for self-determination,” Hurston “found in Haitian Vodou a syncretic cultural production that spoke to both of those interests and more. Her anthropological research revealed that the ways in which Haitian people worked out their political, social, and psychic conditions in the spiritual plane resonated with the concerns and experiences of African Americans in the United States” (“Vodou Imagery,” 158).

African Survivals as Weapons of Resistance In Their Eyes Janie’s deployment of various hidden transcripts from Voodoo incrementally allows her to develop spiritual, symbolic, and material forms of resistance against Joe’s white patriarchy, sexism, and class bias. Janie draws upon hidden transcripts of false deference, silence, and routine compliance to subvert the domination of her oppressors while keeping in the forefront of her consciousness the necessity to end her subjugation. Hurston’s implementation of African spiritual and cultural practices as a covert tool of liberation resonates with the resistance strategies of Africa’s enslaved and free peoples against the European master class during

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the Haitian Revolution. Haitians utilized their creolized West and Central African cultural heritage as a resource for communal empowerment and subversive resistance against bondage and imperialism. West and Central African traditional beliefs play similar roles in Janie’s liberation since they assist in resisting patriarchy and achieving self-actualization. The interpretation of Voodoo forwarded above is a symbolic call for what Jennings calls “an Africanist usable past.”9 An “experiential communality,” which Wade W. Nobles defines as “the sharing of a particular experience [and a common past] by a group of people” that determines “what ethos, or set of guiding beliefs, a people will follow,” fuels the alliance that Janie and the Eatonville townspeople form against Joe’s patriarchal domination. “These guiding beliefs, in turn,” states Nobles, “dictate the creation and adoption of the values and customs, which in the final analysis determine what social behavior a people will express in common—their cultural configuration” (Seeking the Sakhu, 15). Therefore, experiential communality is visible in the solidarity that a group of people shares from common experiences such as racial or physical isolation in the midst of a dominant host culture. A parallel concept is the idea of an “extended self” evident in the dictum “I am because we are” that African peoples cite to insure the survival of their community (Seeking the Sakhu, 20). A Pan-Africanist concept of solidarity is evident in Their Eyes through the ways in which Janie and the townspeople of Eatonville covertly resist Joe’s perpetuation of European/white patriarchal domination in order to create a free black community in America. Hurston’s fictionalized black community is able to mount a Pan-African collective resistance against tyranny by strategically deploying hidden transcripts in which Voodoo and a West and Central African traditional ethos play crucial roles.

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Notes

1. Langston Hughes (1902–1967) traveled to Haiti on several occasions and made the country the focus of his play Emperor of Haiti (1936); his libretto for the opera Troubled Island (1936/1949); and his children’s book Popo and Fifina (1932), which he wrote with Arna Bontemps. Claude McKay (1889–1948) in the novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which won the Harmon Gold Award for literature, features American and Haitian protagonists. 2. Jennings, notes to the author, March 19, 2008. 3. Scott writes in Weapons of the Weak, “They [the villagers] have collectively created a remembered village and a remembered economy that serve as an effective ideological backdrop against which to deplore the present” (178). See also Weapons of the Weak, xvii, 33, 35, 42, 66, 269, 296, 297, 301, and 303. 4. See Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert’s Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo, 3, 4–7, 36, 195; and Arthur and Dash’s Libète: A Haitian Anthology, 114, 142, 144, 148, 258–60, 271–72. 5. Karen McCarthy Brown argues that a West African water goddess named Mammy Water (spelled as Mami Wata in Senegambia) survived in Haiti in the persona of the mermaid Lasyrenn (Mama Lola, 223–24). Yet Maya Deren shows that although Voodoo was a collective creation of all the Africans that Europeans transported to the New World, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Bakongo people of the Kongo, Central Africa, and the Yoruba of Yorubaland (now primarily Nigeria) had stronger influences in its development than other groups. See Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (224) and Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (58–60). 6. See Deren, Divine Horsemen, 61; and Rodman and Cleaver, Spirits of the Night, 12. 7. See also Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions, 16–17. 8. Jennings, notes to the author, March 19, 2008. 9. Jennings, notes to the author, March 19, 2008.

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Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Dictionary of Global Culture. New York: Knopf, 1997. Arthur, Charles, and Michael Dash. Libète: A Haitian Anthology. London: Ian Randle, 1999. Averill, Gage. A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Bailey, Marianne Wichmann. The Ritual Theater of Aimé Césaire: Mythic Structures of the Dramatic Imagination. Turbingen: Narr, 1992. Baker, Houston. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Bell, Madison Smartt. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography. New York: Pantheon, 2007. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Boxwell, D. A. “  ‘Sis Cat’ as Ethnographer: Self-Representation and SelfInscription in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men.” African American Review 26, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 605–17. Brantley, Will. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South, ed. Richard J. Gray and Owen Robinson, 472–85. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Caponi, Gena Dagel, ed. “The Case for an African American Aesthetic.” In Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’ & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture, 1–41. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Carter-Sigglow, Janet. Making Her Way With Thunder: A Reappraisal of Zora Neale Hurston’s Narrative Art. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Collins, Derek. “The Myth and Ritual of Ezili Freda in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Western Folklore 55, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 137–54. Cook, Mercer. Review of Le Napoleon Noir, by Raphael Tardon. Journal of Negro History 37, no. 4 (October 1952): 464–66. Crabtree, Claire. “The Confluences of Folklore, Feminism and Black SelfDetermination in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Southern Literary Journal 17, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 54–66. Davis, Harold Eugene. Latin American Leaders. New York: Rowman, 1968. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. 1953. New York: McPherson, 2004. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

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Dutton, Wendy. “The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 13, no. 2 (1993): 131–52. Ferguson, James. Makers of the Caribbean. Guadeloupe: Institut de Cooperation Franco Caraïbe, 2005. Frey, Sylvia R., and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Hoodoo in America.” Journal of American Folklore 44 (October–December 1931): 317–417. ———. Tell My Horse. 1938. New York: Harper, 1990. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. ———. “To Alain Locke.” In Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan, 128–29. New York: Doubleday, 2002. ———. “To Melville J. Herskovits.” In Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan, 384. New York: Doubleday, 2002. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 1943. New York: Vintage, 1963. Jennings, La Vinia Delois. Notes to the author. March 19, 2008. Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free, 1994. Korngold, Ralph. Citizen Toussaint. Boston: Brown, 1944. Lamothe, Daphne. “Vodou Imagery, African-American Tradition and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Callaloo 22, no. 1 (1999): 157–75. Largey, Michael. Vodou Nation: Haitian Art, Music and Cultural Nationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Lauren, Paul Gordon. Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. Major, Clarence ed. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. New York: Penguin, 1994. Meisenhelder, Susan Edward. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Nobles, Wade W. Seeking the Sakhu: Foundational Writings for an African Psychology. Chicago: Third World, 2006. Olmos, Margarite Fernández, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo. New York: New York University Press, 2003. Patterson, Tiffany Ruby. Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. Pezzullo, Ralph. Plunging into Haiti: Clinton, Aristide, and the Defeat of Diplomacy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Pierre, Hyppolite. Haiti, Rising Flames from Burning Ashes. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2006.

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Rodman, Selden, and Carole Cleaver. Spirits of the Night: The Vaudun Gods of Haiti. Dallas: Spring, 1992. Ros, Martin, and Karin H. Ford. Night of Fire: The Black Napoleon and the Battle for Haiti. New York: Sarpedon, 1994. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. ———. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. Smitherman, Geneva. Talking and Testifying: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977. Southerland, Ellease. “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.” In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 172–83. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1979. Stoddard, Lothrop. The French Revolution in San Domingo. Boston: Houghton, 1914. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage, 1984. Warnes, Andrew. Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in TwentiethCentury African American Literature. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Wetmore, Kevin J. Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003.

9

“All Those Signs of Possession” Love and Death in Their Eyes Were Watching God Cynthia Ward

Gods always behave like the people who make them. —Hurston, Tell My Horse

As Zora Neale Hurston’s biographer, Robert Hemenway, plainly states, “Their Eyes Were Watching God is a love story” (Zora Neale Hurston, 231). Perhaps more accurately, Hurston’s most frequently read and most deeply loved novel is a quest-for-love story. But what kind of love? Sexual love? Platonic love? Communal love? Self love? The narrative tells us that Janie Mae Crawford’s “conscious life had commenced” with what amounts to a sexual experience under a pear tree in bloom that led her in search of “a personal answer” for “a bee for her bloom” (Their Eyes, 10, 11, 32). Carla Kaplan claims that the novel, “reduced to its basic narrative components[,] . . . is the story of a young woman in search of an orgasm” (“Erotics of Talk,” 137); the “pain remorseless sweet that left [Janie] limp and languid” while watching a “dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom” suggests that the novel’s protagonist had already experienced physical orgasm; it is that experience which triggers her search. In longing for “kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world,” Janie is, above all, “waiting for the world to be made” (Their Eyes, 11). Initially, in observing the sexual activity of the bees and the “flies tumbling and singing, marrying and giving in marriage,” Janie thinks that her “personal answer” would inevitably be found in marital sex. “So this was a marriage!” her indirect discourse declares immediately prior to her orgasm (11). After a year of marriage to Logan Killicks, an older man her grandmother Nanny forces her to marry for his property and protection, Janie learns “that marriage did not make love” (25). Even though she initially suspects that Joe Starks, the “citified, stylish dressed” stranger who

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comes down the road, “did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees,” she nevertheless runs away with and marries him, blindly— and, it turns out, mistakenly—trusting that “from now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom” (27, 29, 32). Whether or not her third husband, Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods, represents her bee, the object of her quest, has been much debated. While some critics, such as Hemenway, see Tea Cake as instrumental to Janie’s self-fulfillment, others, such as Kaplan, see Tea Cake’s violent and controlling behavior toward Janie as troubling. The narrative ends with Janie admonishing her interlocutor, Pheoby, to tell the people that “love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes is shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (191). And so it seems to be with Hurston’s readers, who discern a wide variety of interpretive shorelines in the novel. There is no mistake, however, about the note of triumph and contentment Janie experiences at the end of the novel. She obviously finds what she was seeking; the question is what does she find? While Janie’s quest begins with her passively “waiting for the world to be made,” what she discovers on her “great journey to the horizon” is the importance of her participation in actively making the world (11, 89). This imperative, which propels both the narrative and the thematic elements of the novel, is also at the heart of West African and African diasporic belief systems, which honor above all the generative forces put into play by living humans, who are responsible for creating and maintaining both this world and the “otherworld”: the world that the ancestors and spirits inhabit. Just as much as Their Eyes Were Watching God is a story about love and the affirmation of life, it is equally a story about death. While Janie’s “conscious life” begins with a sexual experience and the desire for love, the narrative frame and setting begin—and end—with death: “So in the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead” (1). Janie relates her story to Pheoby at the end of the day, as “the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing,” and in the fall of the year (7).1 But death is not the end. Just as Janie returns from her journey to the horizon with a transforming narrative to share, Zora Neale Hurston brought to her readers the transforming narrative of Their Eyes Were Watching God after making her own inspiriting journey to Haiti where death, physically manifested in a spirit known as Guedé, “is the beginning” as well as the end (Deren, Divine Horsemen, 38). Guedé, like the novel’s frame, generates a cycle that returns to the beginning, bringing life and death together across a permeable boundary that acts of possession may bridge.

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“All Those Signs of Possession”: Hurston in Love and Haiti In “Love,” a chapter in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Hurston declares that the generating impulse for Their Eyes Were Watching God was her obsessive and possessive love for a Columbia graduate student twenty-one years her junior, whom she identifies as “A. W. P.” She states, “The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ [sic]” (Dust Tracks, 260).2 Perhaps not as far from the plot of the novel as she claims, the circumstance of their romantic relationship, as Hurston describes it, displayed “all those signs of possession” that Janie and Tea Cake most notably exhibit twice in the novel; once when “Janie learned what it felt like to be jealous” of the flirtatious Nunkie, a young woman working on the muck, and initiates a wrestling match with Tea Cake and again when Tea Cake slaps Janie after Mrs. Turner’s brother comes to town because “being able to whip her reassured him in possession” (110, 136, 147). These eruptions of violence between Janie and Tea Cake, which end with passionate and tender reconciliations, parallel a physical altercation that took place between Hurston and “A.W.P.” that she describes in her autobiography. Jealous of her career and of her contact with other men, he provoked reciprocal jealousy in Hurston: “Just let him smile too broad at any woman and . . . the war was on! One night (I didn’t decide this) something primitive inside me tore past the barriers and before I knew it I had slapped his face” (Dust Tracks, 257). Harboring his own possessive resentment from an earlier incident, “he paid [her] off then and there with interest.” They affectionately reconcile, but Hurston, who had never before tolerated “a blow to [her] body,” realized at that moment that she “was too deeply in love to be [her] old self.” She accepted a Guggenheim Fellowship that would take her to Jamaica and Haiti, writing in her autobiography, “This was my chance to release him, and fight myself free from my obsession” (257, 260). “But I freely admit,” she goes on, “that everywhere I set my feet down, there were tracks of blood. Blood from the very middle of my heart . . . So I pitched in to work hard on my research to smother my feelings. But the thing would not down” (260). As a response to her obsession, she obsessively wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in November and December of 1936 in a burst of creativity that she also characterizes as an act of possession: “I wrote ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote

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it under internal pressure in seven weeks . . . The force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded” (Dust Tracks, 212–13). While Hurston’s description may accurately reflect the passion she felt for a man that had effectively displaced her “old self,” it equally applies to the acts of possession Huston had been witnessing in the numerous ceremonies she had attended since her arrival in Haiti less than two months prior to commencing work on the novel. In these ceremonies, which Hurston would later describe in Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), Haitian gods and goddesses—the loa—manifest themselves by “ ‘mounting’ a subject as a rider mounts a horse” (220). The loa “speak and act” through their mounts: “The person mounted does nothing of his own accord” (220–21). Indeed, Hemenway attributes Hurston’s inspiration for writing Their Eyes not to Hurston’s obsession with the Columbia student or to a vague “force somewhere in Space” but to Haiti itself. He claims her initial encounter with Haitian beliefs and practices was so overwhelming it prevented her from writing directly about those experiences, while at the same time opening the floodgates of creative fiction: After Hurston left Jamaica for Haiti, she discovered an entire system of belief that made [Jamaican] rituals look like child’s play. She arrived in Port-au-Prince in late September. . . . She was immediately confronted with such a wealth of material that she found it impossible to write up her research. In little less than three months she perfected her Creole, acquired a working knowledge of voodoo gods, attended a number of ceremonies presided over by a voodoo priest, or “houngan,” and photographed an apparent zombie. . . .  Haiti released a flood of language and emotion that Zora finally admitted to herself had been “dammed up” inside her ever since her departure from New York. (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 230)

Hemenway does not elaborate on what ways, if any, the novel reflects Hurston’s impressions of Haitian culture; indeed, it may be difficult for many readers who would have little trouble in seeing the influence Hurston’s love affair with a younger man might have had on the novel to see any signs of “an entire system of belief” evident in its plot or themes. On the surface, very little of the novel makes any direct references to Haitian beliefs or to any of the systems of belief and practice derived from West Africa with which Hurston was familiar from her previous research, particularly in comparison to the two novels that preceded and followed

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Their Eyes: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Perhaps the most direct allusion to African traditional practices and beliefs in Their Eyes occurs during Joe Starks’s terminal illness when Janie’s friend Pheoby Watson conveys to Janie the Eatonville townsfolk’s suspicion that his illness was the result of a curse that Janie had put on him: “it’s been singing round here ever since de big fuss in de store dat Joe was ‘fixed’ and you wuz de one dat did it” (82). In the same scene Pheoby also informs Janie that Joe has been consulting a “two-headed doctor,” who “was round heah tryin’ tuh sell gophers,” or charms, to which Janie replies, “Pheoby, Ah don’t even b’lieve Jody b’lieve dat lie. He ain’t never took no stock in de mess. He just make out he b’lieve it tuh hurt me” (83). Even if Janie calls it “mess,” Hurston did evince great respect for beliefs originating in Africa, and, of course, would eventually “write up her research” as Tell My Horse, which was published the year after Their Eyes Were Watching God. Just as Voodoo—an esoteric and, at the time Hurston was conducting research in Haiti, an illicit and clandestine system of belief—subtly yet profoundly pervades Haitian life in ways invisible to outsiders,3 many of the tenets of Voodoo belief subtly yet profoundly pervade Their Eyes Were Watching God. In particular, attention to the reciprocal dynamic between love and death and humans and gods in the ongoing project of creation—of making the world—productively addresses yet does not fully resolve debates regarding seemingly unnecessary and inexplicable instances of hostility and violence in the novel.

“Janie Erzulie Freida,” Loa of Love In her influential article, “Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Daphne Lamothe calls important attention to Hurston’s “use of a Vodou subtext,” focusing in particular on what she regards as the “primary Vodou element”: “Ezili, a figure from Caribbean folklore and ritual, a central, yet nearly invisible, aspect in Janie’s struggle for survival” (167, 170, 169). Lamothe delineates numerous parallels between Janie and the Haitian goddess of love, drawing primarily on Alfred Métraux’s description of Ezili Freda, the spirit’s Rada aspect, and on Karen McCarthy Brown’s description of Ezili Danto, the Petro aspect. Physically, Janie resembles Ezili, who, as Métraux writes, “has all the characteristics of a pretty mulatto” (qtd. in Lamothe, “Vodou Imagery,” 171), yet unlike Ezili, Janie “rejects the aristocratic ideal Freda embodies (represented by her love of jewelry, brushes and combs, the valorization of her light skin

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and long hair and her preference for French over Creole, the language of the lower classes of Haiti)” (Lamothe, “Vodou Imagery,” 172–73). Lamothe resolves the conflicting traits by claiming that Janie “embraces the working-class folk identity of Ezili Danto” (173–74), whom Brown describes as having “dark black skin” and is “not too proud to work” (qtd. in Lamothe, “Vodou Imagery,” 174) and whom Hurston calls “the terrible Erzulie, ge-rouge (Erzulie, the red-eyed)” (Tell My Horse, 123). In the latter guise, Janie/Ezili Danto fulfills the perception of an agent of violent and vengeful destruction: the hurricane wreaks havoc, Lamothe argues, “in order to convey Danto’s displeasure” with “African Americans’ deference to white cultural, racial, and economic supremacy at the expense of their own autonomy” (“Vodou Imagery,” 174). Janie as a manifestation of Erzulie is a productive starting point for examining the novel in terms of the tenets of Haitian belief, but one must keep in mind Hurston’s own declaration in Tell My Horse that “Gods always behave like the people who make them” (219). As Hurston points out, Haitian gods are many and vary from place to place, according to the particular needs of their creators: “No one knows the name of every loa because every major section of Haiti has its own local variation” (114). Like love, which takes its shape from the shore it meets, the loa take their shape from the people who made them. In fact, two demands emerge from Hurston’s observation about the genesis of gods: we must first look at Hurston’s construction of them in her study of Voodoo and then we must look at her characters’ construction of them to suit their social and spiritual needs. To read Their Eyes Were Watching God as the product of Hurston’s “possession” by an epiphanous insight into Haitian beliefs one must attend to Hurston’s own account of Haitian Voodoo that emerged from the same experience that produced Their Eyes. Lamothe relies primarily on works written after Their Eyes to identify the characteristics of the Haitian goddess of love, but Hurston herself had a lot to say about the divinity. Of the three loa Hurston discusses at length in the chapter “Voodoo and Voodoo Gods,” Erzulie Freida receives the most lavish attention. While Lamothe’s description of Ezili presents the goddess’s characteristics as fixed and subject to specific verification (including the spelling of her name), Hurston begins by stressing that the loa’s characteristics are difficult to pin down: “so far, no one in Haiti has formulated her,” she writes, “but they told me what she was like and what she did” (Tell My Horse, 121). Just as the description of “ships at a distance” that opens Their Eyes turns out to present two opposing gendered perspectives, Hurston’s description of what “they” told her about Erzulie gives readers two similarly gendered accounts:

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Erzulie is said to be a beautiful young woman of lush appearance. She is a mulatto and so when she is impersonated by the blacks, they powder their faces with talcum. She is represented as having firm, full breasts and other perfect female attributes. She is a rich young woman and wears a gold ring on her finger with a stone in it . . . To men she is gorgeous, gracious and beneficent. . . .  Toward womankind Erzulie is implacable. It is said that no girl will gain a husband if an altar to Erzulie is in the house. Her jealousy delights in frustrating all the plans and hopes of young women in love. Women do not “give her food”. . . . To women and their desires, she is all but maliciously cruel. (Tell My Horse, 122)

The first description Hurston gives the reader of Janie is similarly narrated from a collective yet oppositionally gendered viewpoint of the Eatonville community, with the men attending to Janie’s “perfect female attributes”—strikingly evocative of Hurston’s description of Erzulie—and the women, in contrast, jealously looking for chinks in her armor: The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets, the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume; then her pugnacious breasts trying to bore holes in her shirt. They, the men, were saving with the mind what they lost with the eye. The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if it turned out of no significance, still it was a hope that she might fall to their level some day. (Their Eyes, 2)

Janie’s physical attributes, her material wealth, and her search for love are traits she shares with Erzulie, yet the divergences are equally crucial; as Lamothe observes, Janie “does not actively seek male attention,” and, more importantly, she “rejects the elitist trappings that characterize” the loa (“Vodou Imagery,” 174). Unimpressed by Logan Killicks’s sixty acres and oppressed by Jody Starks’s “class[ing her] off” from the working-class Eatonville community, Janie follows a trajectory of desire that culminates with her going down on the muck with a dark-skinned, penniless gambler (112). Janie’s choices are crucial deviations from this aspect of the divinity, particularly in terms of Hurston’s formulation of Erzulie, for, if “Gods always behave like the people who made them,” this goddess is entirely the product of the elite: “More upper class Haitians ‘make food’ for Erzulie Freida than for any other loa in Haiti” (Tell

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My Horse, 127). Lamothe’s explanation for the deviations—the claim that Janie embodies the dual aspects of Ezili: the upper-class Ezili Freda and the working-class Ezili Danto—overlooks the fact that Hurston devotes only a few sentences to the Petro aspect, “Erzulie, ge-rouge,” and consistently and unequivocally vilifies the Petro sect to which she belongs as “terrible and wicked,” going so far as to say “her name has been mentioned in connection with . . . demon worship” (164, 124). A more productive route to exploring the ways that Hurston’s perception of the Haitian belief system imbues the novel is to consider another loa upon which Hurston also lavishes particular attention: Guedé, the loa of death. Hurston devotes much of the chapter that gives Tell My Horse its name—“Parlay Cheval Ou”—to a vivid description of “the one loa which is entirely Haitian,” who “belongs to the blacks, and the uneducated blacks at that,” and who is “the deificiation of the common people of Haiti,” using terminology that not only places him in direct opposition to Erzulie as the mulatto goddess of the elite, but also echoes her description of Tea Cake (Tell My Horse, 219). If readers can productively interpret Janie as Erzulie, the loa of love and privilege, then they might also interpret Tea Cake as Guedé, the loa of death and poverty. Again, just as much as it is a love story, Their Eyes Were Watching God is also a story about death.

“Tea Cake Guedé,” Loa of Death As a god of death, as well as “the deification of the common people of Haiti,” Guedé is far removed from the cold, impersonal death that Janie imagines as Joe’s illness worsens: Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West. The great one who . . . stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come. Been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then. (84)

Rather than being a dour, abiding presence, the Haitian god of death “cavorts about, making coarse gestures, executing steps like the prancing of a horse, drinking and talking” (Tell My Horse, 220). He has no “high house”—“the god of the common people has no hounfort”; one of his manifestations, Baron Cimetière, “has his abode in an elm tree, lives

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always in the forest, and may be worshipped anywhere in the woods” (220, 223). He is a grave-digger who “loves to smoke a cigar” (220). These are all traits shared by Tea Cake, whose given name is Vergible Woods, who first comes to Janie after Jody’s death asking for “smokin’ tobacco,” “who ain’t got doodly-squat,” whom whites conscript to bury the dead after the muck’s hurricane and flood, and whom Janie visualizes in his absence as “bucking around the room in the upper air” and “prancing around her” (95, 103, 107, 193). Already dead at the novel’s beginning, with Janie coming back from “burying the dead,” Tea Cake haunts, indeed possesses, Janie’s narrative. Even more crucial, however, is the function of the loa in relation to Tea Cake’s role in the novel. Guedé is a “hilarious divinity,” who, like Tea Cake, loves fun, laughter, jokes, and play. The purpose of Guedé’s play, however, is very specific and gravely serious: to mount a social critique of the Haitian upper-class mulattoes by the lower-class blacks. In an ironic twist, the god himself seems almost possessed by the people who made him. The first two paragraphs of “Parlay Cheval Ou” express the ironical inversion well and warrant citation in full: Gods always behave like the people who make them. One can see the hand of the Haitian peasant in that boisterous god, Guedé, because he does and says the things that the peasants would like to do and say. You can see him in the market women, in the domestic servant who now and then appears before her employer “mounted” by this god who takes occasion to say many stinging things to the boss. You can see him in the field hand, and certainly in the group of women about a public well or spring, chattering, gossiping and dragging out the shortcomings of their employers and the people like him. Nothing in Haiti is quite so obvious as that this loa is the deification of the common people of Haiti. The mulattoes give this spirit no food and pay it no attention at all. He belongs to the blacks and the uneducated blacks at that. He is a hilarious divinity and full of the stuff of burlesque. This manifestation comes as near a social criticism of the classes by the masses as anything in all Haiti. Guedé has another distinction. It is the one loa which is entirely Haitian. There is neither European nor African background for it. It sprang up or was called up by some local need and now is firmly established among the blacks. (Tell My Horse, 219–20)

Rather than engage in directly confrontational challenges to hegemonic power structures, which lends credence to the values of that structure,

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Guedé’s burlesque inverts the structure’s frame and “bites with sarcasm and slashes with ridicule the class that despises him,” turning the powerful into an object of derision, powerless to make any response that would not simply exacerbate the humiliation (220). Thus, Tea Cake, hurt and angered by the color-struck Mrs. Turner who had belittled him to Janie for his dark skin, eschews the direct action advocated by Sop-de-Bottom to “knock her teeth down her throat,” saying “Dat would look like she had some influence when she ain’t. Ah just let her see dat Ah got control” (Their Eyes, 148). He does that through play that transforms the situation. When a fight breaks out in Mrs. Turner’s eating house, he pretends to come to her aid, saying “she’s more nicer than anybody else on de muck” (151). His insistence on punishing the brawlers only increases the destruction of her property, to Mrs. Turner’s dismay, and Tea Cake continues to act the gallant, despite her pleas to leave the brawlers alone. Although the brawlers are in on the joke and keep up the fight for that reason, Mrs. Turner never apprehends their complicity and is helpless to defend herself or her property.

Guedé’s African and American Kinfolk Although Hurston observes that Guedé is unique to Haiti, where the distinction between the light-skinned, French-speaking elite and the darkskinned, Creole-speaking working class has been inscribed into the social and political fabric for centuries, the social tension she describes between the rich mulatta loa of love and the impoverished black loa of death also reflects an ongoing theme in her writing concerning tensions between upperclass and lower-class African Americans. In several essays she examines the relationship between the “well-educated” and “well-mannered” and their “bookless,” “loud-talking” brothers and sisters. In particular, the chapter in Dust Tracks on a Road entitled “My People! My People,” also written while she was in Haiti, delineates both the tension and her own ambiguous attitude, herself a college-educated scholar of the working class. She begins the chapter with a declaration of exasperation that becomes a refrain: “ ‘My people! My people!’ From the earliest rockings of my cradle days, I have heard this cry go up from Negro lips . . . It is called forth by the observations of one class of Negro on the doings of another branch of the brother in black” (Dust Tracks, 215). The dynamic she describes—of the “educated Negro” being horrified and embarrassed by the “trashy Negro,” who, in turn, transforms “the ‘dicty’ Negro [into] the butt of all the quips”—reflects the role that Guedé plays in using biting humor as social critique:

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The educated Negro may know all about differential calculus and the theory of evolution, but he is fighting entirely out of his class when he tries to quip with the underprivileged. The bookless may have difficulty in reading a paragraph in a newspaper, but when they get down to “playing the dozens” they have no equal in America, and I’d risk a sizable bet, in the whole world. Starting off in the first by calling you a seven-sided son-of-a-bitch, and pausing to name the sides, they proceed to “specify” until the tip-top branch of your family tree has been “given a reading.” No profit in that to the upper-class Negro, so he minds his own business and groans, “My people! My people!” (Dust Tracks, 217)

Furthermore, though Hurston claims “there is neither European nor African background” for Guedé, the kind of humor both he and his African American kin engage in may in fact be traced back, as indeed can Voodoo, to West Africa, where such “play” is a powerful philosophical concept. Distinguishing from the Western “capitalistic notion” of play as non-productive, “unserious, frivolous, and unimportant,” Margaret Thompson Drewel argues that, for the Yoruba, play (ere [noun] or sere [verb]) is a central element in ritual and performance, and considered indispensable to the proper creation of social relations among humans, gods, and ancestors (Yoruba Ritual, 15). Referring to “a whole gamut of spontaneous individual moves: ruses, parodies, transpositions, recontextualizations, elaborations, condensations, interruptions, interventions, and more,” play is “an engaging participatory, transformational process that is often, but not always, competitive. . . . What is significant is that to play a situation is to intervene in it—to transform it,” often with the specific moral goal of encouraging participation with others and revealing others’ strengths and weaknesses (Yoruba Ritual, 20, 15, 17). While, at least in Hurston’s view, Guedé and his African American kin engage in play primarily as a social critique of the upper classes, it is important to note that, while in the context of West African beliefs play may similarly operate as social critique, it also has a much larger function. At the heart of the Yoruba notion of play lies the Yoruba notion of asé: “the power to bring things into existence, to make things happen” (Yoruba Ritual, 27). Not only does this power entail the responsibility for generating the world in which we live, but the responsibility for generating, manipulating, and bringing into existence the other world as well: the world of spirits, ancestors, and the unborn. A fundamental concept shared by West Africans and West African diasporic belief systems is the permeability of the boundary between the two worlds. Drewel states, “The life

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cycle of an individual constitutes only a segment in a larger ontological journey—a continuous, unending movement of the human spirit from the world to the otherworld and back again” (26). Above all, play is the function of the “unpredictable trickster stationed at the crossroads” Esu/ Elegba who, like Guedé, poised between the world of the living and the world of the dead, “is a symbol of the efficacy of play, and narratives that focus on him are models of and for its practice” (17). It is Hurston’s play with the characters of Janie and Tea Cake that is a model for the practice of transformative play, a restructuring of the roles of Erzulie and Guedé. Hurston makes it very clear in Tell My Horse that Erzulie and Guedé are stark opposites, with the loa of love representing the desires of the mulatto upper classes and the loa of death speaking for the dark-skinned lower classes, and would have nothing to do with each other in the Haitian social environment. Métraux, indeed, claims that Guedé courts the goddess of love, “but in vain, for being a beautiful half-caste, Ezili has a certain colour prejudice, and cannot forgive him his black skin” (Voodoo in Haiti, 112). Bringing Erzulie/Janie into the crossroads, into the world of Guedé/Tea Cake, Hurston puts these normative opposites into play in the liminal space between the two worlds. What is generated by their resultant interplay?

Erzulie and Guedé at Play Janie’s original quest—for the world to be made—quickly detours into others making her that bears parallels to Erzulie. Various characters ply her with the material goods that Erzulie craves. Nanny offers Logan Killicks’s parlor organ and sixty acres; Joe Starks endows her with wealth and status; and almost all the narrative’s characters worship the physical traits that she shares with Erzulie and which they believe “class her off” from their own vernacular world. Mrs. Turner most blatantly pays “homage to Janie’s Caucasian characteristics,” and does so in a manner that Hurston describes precisely and extensively in terms evoking the worship of a loa (Their Eyes, 145). In explaining that Mrs. Turner puts up with Janie’s snubs because Janie “looked more white folkish than herself,” the narrative expounds: Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are

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cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. . . .  Mrs. Turner, like all other believers[,] had built an altar to the unattainable—Caucasian characteristics for all. . . . Behind her crude words was a belief that somehow she and others through worship could attain her paradise—a heaven of straight-haired, thin-lipped, high-nose boned white seraphs. (145)

And, like the upper-class Haitian mulattoes, she scorns the “hilarious divinity” of the common people, “these black desecrators howling with laughter before the [temple] door” (Their Eyes, 145). She especially despises Tea Cake, whom “she hated . . . first for his defilement of divinity and next for his telling mockery of her” (145). Mrs. Turner’s attitude, although extreme, reiterates the socioracialized dynamic behind the ways that Janie is involuntarily “classed off” by the townsfolk of Eatonville and, briefly, by the folks on the muck. Although not exactly worshipped by her second husband, Mayor Joe Starks, she is materially possessed by him as another one of the material objects that gives him power: as Tony Taylor puts it in his speech: “Brother Starks, we welcomes you and all dat you have seen fit tuh bring amongst us—yo’ beloved wife, yo’ store, yo’ land—” (42). Similar to the way Mrs. Turner worships Janie, the town deifies Joe: “The town had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe’s positions and possessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down” (50). The type of god he represents is not, however, akin to one of the many loa who understand the reciprocal relationship they have with their devotees, upon whom they depend for food and for their material manifestations through spirit possession, but more like the Christian God—or like “Le Bon Dieu” or “Le Gran Maît” of Haitian belief, who is “too distant and impersonal to pay attention to the needs of ordinary Haitians” (Dash, Culture and Customs, 67). Joe Starks is “uh man dat changes everything, but nothin’ don’t change him” (Their Eyes, 49). He inspires as much resentment as admiration, so that the phrase “Our beloved Mayor” becomes “one of those statements that everybody says but nobody actually believes, like ‘God is everywhere’ ” (48). His signature swear-oath is “I god” (44, 46, passim). Hurston associates Janie, as Joe’s possession, with the “impact of awe and envy” he inspires: “She slept with authority and so she was part of it in the town [sic] mind” (46). While Joe is alive, he actively inhibits Janie from engaging in the verbal play that she surreptitiously

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enjoys on the porch of his store; he forces her to hide her hair and prevents her from making speeches or attending the mythic funeral of Matt Bonner’s mule. But even after his death, the town perceives her as “classing herself off” from them. It is with the advent of Tea Cake that she begins to participate in the reciprocal banter, to play: “Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it was natural for her to play” (96). Even before Hurston constructs Guedé’s physical manifestation as Tea Cake, however, she has Janie conjure his spirit when fatally “playin’ de dozens” with Joe. Like Guedé, Janie articulates what the “common people” think about their social superiors but are afraid to say. When Joe makes a cruel insult regarding her age, Janie responds in a way that is both uncharacteristic for her and for the townspeople: “Janie took the middle of the floor to talk right into Jody’s face and that was something that hadn’t been done before” (78). Joe, shocked by her response, declares “You must be out yo’ head . . . Talkin’ any such language as dat,” and tries to justify his insult with straight talk about her age until Janie, possessed with a Guedé-boldness, delivers the fatal blow to his manhood, his God-like image, and ultimately, his life (79). Saying what the townspeople think but don’t say—“You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but ’tain’t nothin’ to it but yo’ big voice. Humph!”— she makes an observation only a wife could know that exposes him to the porch sitters: “When you pull down yo’ britches you look lak de change uh life” (79). Figuratively pulling down Joe’s pants for the world to see, Janie’s comment graphically illustrates Hurston’s observation about the role of Guedé: When a “mount” of [Guedé] is making devastating revelations the common comment is “Guedé pas drah” (Guedé is not a sheet), that is, Guedé covers up nothing. It seems to be his mission to expose and reveal. At any rate, Guedé is a whimsical deity, and his revelations are often most startlingly accurate and very cruel. (Tell My Horse, 223)

Devastated not only by Janie’s retort but by the laughter it evokes, Joe experiences the power of derision that Guedé wields: “she had cast down his empty armor before men and they had laughed, would keep on laughing. When he paraded his possessions hereafter, they would not consider the two together. They’d look with envy at the things and pity the man who owned them” (79–80).

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Inviting the loa of death into her world, Janie not only initiates the physical death of Joe, who deprived of his godly image wastes away and dies in a matter of weeks, but also frees herself from the world of things that he, and Janie’s grandmother before him, represents. “Digging around inside of herself” after his funeral, Janie muses, “She had been getting ready for her great journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her. But she had been whipped like a cur dog, and run off down a back road after things” (89). With the arrival of the prancing Tea Cake, Guedé incarnate, Janie sheds the identity of Erzulie and cavorts with the playful god of death. He teaches her to play. As in the “Yoruba context,” Janie learns that “playing involves spending time with people for its own sake (indulging in time), engaging them in a competition of wits verbally and/or physically, and playing it out tactically to disorient and be disoriented, to surprise and be surprised, to shock and be shocked, and to laugh together, to enjoy” (Drewel, Yoruba Ritual, 17). Like the “eternal arguments” that Sam Watson and Lige Moss perform in front of the village on the store porch, such play “is a contest in hyperbole and carried on for no other reason” (Yoruba Ritual, 63). Throughout the novel, other characters continue to cast her in the role of Erzulie: her friend Pheoby, who attempts to discourage her relationship with Tea Cake in favor of the “endurable” undertaker from Sanford; the color-struck Mrs. Turner; and, initially, the people that she meets on the muck, who assume “that she thought herself too good to work like the rest of the women” (133). Even Tea Cake does so, excluding her from the party he throws with her money because, as he tells her, “Dem wuzn’t no high mucky mucks. Dem wuz railroad hands and dey womenfolks. You ain’t usetuh folks lak dat and Ah was skeered you might git all mad and quit me for takin’ you ’mongst ’em” (124). It is at this point that Janie insists on full participation with Tea Cake: “Looka heah, Tea Cake, if you ever go off from me and have a good time lak dat and then come back heah tellin’ me how nice Ah is, Ah specks tuh kill yuh dead. You heah me?” “So you aims tuh partake wid everything, hunh?” “Yeah, Tea Cake, don’t keer what it is.” (124)

When she dons overalls and joins Tea Cake to work in the fields because they cannot stand to be parted all day, “the romping and playing they carried on behind the boss’s back made her popular right away. It got

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the whole field to playing off and on” (133). Tea Cake and Janie’s house becomes a magnet for their neighbors—much like Joe Starks’s storefront porch in Eatonville, but here Janie participates: The men held big arguments like they used to do on the store porch. Only here, she could listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to. She got so she could tell big stories herself from listening to the rest. Because she loved to hear it, and the men loved to hear themselves, they would “woof” and “booger-boo” around the games to the limit. No matter how rough it was, people seldom got mad, because everything was done for a laugh. (134)

At this moment in the narrative, Janie seems to have fulfilled her lifelong quest: she has found love and she has found people. And at this point, Hurston abruptly transforms the situation, plunging the idyllic resolution into a series of scenes of death and judgment. Suddenly, a timeless romance becomes immutably grounded in the Okeechobee hurricane and flood of September 1928: the second-deadliest hurricane in American history and a humanitarian disaster that surpasses Hurricane Katrina’s battering of the Gulf Coast in August 2005 in terms of the loss of African American lives due directly to racist public policy.4 Hurston, who herself experienced a hurricane in the Bahamas a year after the Lake Okeechobee hurricane, may have chosen the Okeechobee flood as the setting for the thematic transition from love to death as subtle social criticism: accurately depicting, via Tea Cake’s experience, the forced conscription of African American men to collect and bury the dead in segregated mass graves, with coffins furnished only for whites. Hurston foreshadows the scene with her invocation of “the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment” in the very beginning of the novel, as Janie returns to Eatonville as an emissary from the place of the “sodden and bloated” dead (1). The scene also evokes a powerful image in Voodoo belief: the waters of the abyss (also called Guinea)—the place below the earth where the ancestors and the loa reside, from where we come and return, where all life begins and ends and begins again. The watery realm is not just the world of the dead, but a permeable space in which human intervention is not only possible but necessary to maintain the connections between the living, the gods, the ancestors, and the yet-to-be-born. These connections are reciprocal, with the living “reclaiming” recently dead relatives from the waters of Guinea and “giving food” to the gods and ancestors in ceremonies in which the loa are called upon to manifest

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themselves physically in order to grant favors and give advice to the supplicants. In Haitian belief, according to Maya Deren, filmmaker and Voudoun initiate, life and death are reciprocal, interdependent: “Death . . . delineates a first boundary of being. Thus ending is, for man, the beginning: the condition of his first consciousness of self as living. Death is life’s first and final definition” (Divine Horsemen, 23). Seemingly echoing Janie’s simile of love being like the sea and “taking its shape from de shore it meets,” Deren writes that “as the land and the sea define each other at the shore, so life and death define each other” (24). The notion of an intimate, mutually dependent relation between love and death stands in direct opposition to the traditional Western belief characterized by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s distinction between Eros and Thanatos, which are ineluctably opposed as the life instinct— entailing procreation, and by extension, love, good, peace, creation, unity, and God—and the death instinct, which signifies hate, evil, war, destruction, chaos, and Satan. The Western association of spirit possession with fear, evil, and loss of self also reflects this binarism. In West Africa and West African diasporic belief, to host a spirit is a welcomed honor. In Haiti devotees particularly celebrate possession by one of the gods of death, Guedé—who stands at the crossroads between the living and the dead. To get this point across in the strongest terms, it is not enough that Hurston brings Love/Janie/Erzulie and Death/Tea Cake/Guedé together in love; they must also be brought together in death. After experiencing the sudden and sodden dead, Janie faces, with the death of Tea Cake at her own hands, the death that is the ultimate source of the creation of Voodoo. As Deren explains, it is not death as an abstract, cosmic entity to which Voodoo responds, but the loss of the source and means of [a person’s] singular identity. We mourn not man, but a man. . . . His death is as a closing of a door upon that singular, particular self which, projected through his flesh, nourished the world of substances which we shared. We mourn this man because to us his spirit was not like any other. (Divine Horsemen, 25; emphasis added)

In Haitian belief, this spirit, called the gros-bon-ange, is “the metaphysical double of the physical being, and since it does not exist in the world of matter, it is the immortal twin who survives in the mortal man” (Divine Horsemen, 25). In this regard, it is significant that

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Hurston chooses rabies as the means of Tea Cake’s death. Rabies is a disease that, perhaps more than any other, mimics an act of spirit possession, when a “loa may temporarily displace the gros-bon-ange of a living person and become the animating force of that physical body” (Divine Horsemen, 29). Janie speculates to Tea Cake early in his illness that “Maybe it wuz a witch ridin’ yuh, honey” (Their Eyes, 175); and on his final night, when he has two bad attacks, Janie “saw a changing look come in his face. Tea Cake was gone. Something else was looking out of his face” (181). Although the scene may evoke for many readers the Western notion of possession as evil rather than as a benevolent possession by a spirit host, what is crucial here is the evocation of the belief that the gros-bon-ange can be separated from a body when another entity takes it over, but also can be preserved and eventually, under certain conditions, may be “transfigured into a god” (Divine Horsemen, 29). During Janie’s trial to ascertain her criminal responsibility in the death of Tea Cake, she recognizes that Tea Cake “couldn’t come back to himself until he had got rid of that mad dog that was in him and he couldn’t get rid of that dog and live” (Their Eyes, 187). By taking on the responsibility of being the effective cause of Tea Cake’s physical death as well as ensuring the continuity of his spirit, Janie is not passively looking on as an impersonal death approaches, as she does while Joe lies dying, but becomes one with death. If one fully accepts that death is a necessary complement to love (and to life), one can see Janie as an emissary returning from the “otherworld,” transferring the memory of Tea Cake to Pheoby’s—and subsequently to the reader’s care. After Pheoby’s departure, Janie reclaims Tea Cake’s gros-bon-ange from the waters of the abyss: “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes. She called in her soul to come and see” (193). As she does, she articulates a fundamental principal of Voodoo: “Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking” (193). As Deren explains, “Death had deprived the gros-bonange of its living form; the memory of the living had reclaimed it and given it voice” (Divine Horsemen, 29). Death is not the ending, but the beginning: The entire chain of interlocking links—life, death, deification, transfiguration, resurrection—churns without rest through the hands of the devout. None of it is ever forgotten that the god was once human, that he was made god by humans, that he is sustained by humans. (Divine Horsemen, 33)

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Janie begins her conscious life “waiting for the world to be made” and ends it knowing that it is her responsibility—and the reciprocal responsibility of each of us—to make both this world and the “otherworld.”

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Notes

1. The text does not specify the time of year, but one can deduce it from the historical events related in the narrative that coincide with the Okeechobee hurricane and flooding which occurred on September 17, 1928. A month after the dog bites Tea Cake during the hurricane he develops symptoms of rabies (Their Eyes, 173), and a “few weeks” after Janie’s trial she returns to Eatonville (191), which situates the narrative around the beginning of November. Haitians celebrate All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, or the Day of the Dead on November 2. They also refer to November 2 as the Day of Guedé. 2. While some critics state that Hurston alludes to Albert Price, Valerie Boyd asserts that here she refers to Percival McGuire Punter (Wrapped in Rainbows, 271–75). 3. Although the majority of Haitians believe in the tenets of Voodoo, since its introduction to Haiti by enslaved Africans from Dahomey, present-day Benin, and Nigeria, practitioners of Voodoo have been subject to persecution by authorities, whether French colonists, the Catholic Church, or even, after the Haitian Revolution (in which Voodoo was a powerful, unifying factor), by black leaders who were themselves known to be practitioners. The first constitution of the Republic of Haiti declared Catholicism the official religion of Haiti. In 1935, after the end of the American occupation of Haiti and a year before Hurston would arrive in Haiti for the first time, the government of Sténio Joseph Vincent issued a decree that prohibited “superstitious beliefs.” It was not until April 2003 that the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide officially recognized Voodoo as “a religion in its own right” with the same legal status as other religions (“Haiti Recognises Voodoo Religion”). 4. Until 2003, the official death count for the Okeechobee hurricane and flood stood at 1,836, but as early as October 1928, the director of vital statistics admitted that since “most of the deaths were among the Negro laborers,” many from the Caribbean, the “exact number of deaths will never be known” (qtd. in Kleinberg, Black Cloud, 213). In 2003, the National Hurricane Center increased the death count to 2,500, though some estimates put it as high as 4,000. A storm surge when a dike broke on the wide, shallow Lake Okeechobee caused the majority of the deaths. Agricultural interests, with the support of the state of Florida, had dammed the lake to drain more land for growing crops but had inadequately built the dike to protect the lives of those in the surrounding area—the majority of whom were migrant workers. The state legislature had not approved funds to erect a flood-control dike, and landowners refused to pay more drainage taxes (Kleinberg, Black Cloud, 15). Despite the fact that the hurricane had already struck the Leeward Islands (killing as many as 1,200 Guadeloupeans), Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas over the course of the previous week, Florida authorities did not evacuate the migrant workers living on the lake.

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Works Cited

Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 Dash, J. Michael. Culture and Customs of Haiti. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti. London: Thames and Hudson, 1953. Drewel, Margaret Thompson. Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. “Haiti Recognises Voodoo Religion.” Agence France-Presse (English). May 2, 2003. http://www.afp.com/afpcom/en/. Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. ———. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. 1938. New York: Perennial Classics, 1990. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. Kaplan, Carla. “The Erotics of Talk: ‘That Oldest Human Longing’ in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”: A Casebook, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 137–63. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kleinberg, Eliot. Black Cloud: The Great Florida Hurricane of 1928. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003. Lamothe, Daphne. “Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”: A Casebook, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 165–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Métraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti. 1959. Trans. Hugo Charteris. New York: Schocken, 1972.

10 Zora Neale Hurston’s VodunChristianity Juxtaposition Theological Pluralism in Their Eyes Were Watching God Nancy Ann Watanabe

Zora Neale Hurston’s subscription of West African Vodun in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) falls within an African American literary practice traceable from Charles Chesnutt’s conjure tales published at the turn of the twentieth century to Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, A Mercy, published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Relegating Vodun material to a subtextual level in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston succeeds in imbuing her second novel with West African traditional beliefs and practices—old and new—as pervasive natural forces emanating from a cosmic doxology that harmonizes with, reconciles, and even reinforces the beliefs of Christianity. Hurston’s narrative artistry penetrates to the heart of black consciousness by combining the spiritualism of ancient African theology with the Christian religious culture of African Americans. She initially delineates in Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), her first novel, a mutually reinforcing religious interaction that juxtaposes native West African Vodun1 with Judeo-Christian theology in her representation of the African-derived Haitian divinity Damballah Ouedo, the most important Voudoun loa (spirit or god) and father of creation.2 In Their Eyes Were Watching God, she again parallels African and Western religions in her representation of the Haitian Voudoun storm god Shango, the Yoruba divinity who was originally the third king of ancient Oya. Derek Collins and Daphne Lamothe discuss parallels between Janie Mae Crawford and the Haitian Voudoun goddess of love, Ezili Freda (Erzulie Freida), and Edward M. Pavlic´ discusses the Yoruba orisha (spirit or god) Esu-Elegbara’s influence in the novel. I widen the scope of African traditional findings

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initiated in these pioneering studies by challenging the widespread supposition that Jonah’s Gourd Vine was “impressive” as a first novel and “well received by both the critics and the public,” but “prepared few readers for the book that was to follow” (Gates and McKay, “Zora Neale Hurston,” 998). Jonah’s Gourd Vine is a Vodun-Christianity-American novel that is a prelude to Their Eyes Were Watching God, which on its surface appears to be simply an exuberant novel about female maturation set in exclusively African American, American Indian, and black diaspora spaces. But it is also a brilliant testimony to the Vodun ideal of spiritual integrity that Hurston labors to achieve throughout her literary art. When Janie tells the story of her life to her best friend, Pheoby Watson, who in addition to being a confidante is a symbolic representative of Southern Baptist Eatonville, Florida, she recounts experiences from her infancy, childhood, and adulthood. She also covertly and subliminally celebrates elemental values about life that have provenance in the theology of West African Vodun. Examination of Hurston’s ambitious attempt to incorporate the symbology of Vodun cosmology in Jonah’s Gourd Vine reinforces elucidation of Their Eyes Were Watching God as an outgrowth of Hurston’s anthropological investigations. Hurston constructs a unique form of theological resonance through nature divinities that yokes the two novels. Jonah’s Gourd Vine establishes the snake divinity Damballah’s influence on its protagonist John Buddy Pearson, and Their Eyes Were Watching God shows the thunder god Shango’s impact on the spiritual lives of its main characters, Janie Mae Crawford and Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods. The protagonists in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston’s West African Vodun male novel, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston’s Haitian Voudoun female novel, engage in individual quests to discover spiritual meaning in their lives within the social context of their respective African American Christian communities. Hurston includes in their pilgrimages provocative expressions of their twin Christian and Vodun cultural influences and beliefs. Their Vodun journey begins with outwardly seeking movements of escape from the confinement of their Southern Baptist homes. Existential desires identified with their deepest emotional urges motivate Hurston’s protagonists to seek unknown horizons. Hurston’s novels featuring cultural elements retained from the transatlantic Middle Passage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries conflate the Christian tradition into which her protagonists are born with conscious and unconscious religious survivals traceable to Hurston’s perpetuating the theological rhythm and design of West African Vodun. Hurston is arguably the first twentieth-century American novelist to make sociopolitical use of West African Vodun theology in depicting

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African American culture, which is steeped in the beliefs and practices of Southern Baptist and Methodist Christianity, New Orleans black Catholicism, and Pentecostal Holiness. Her fusion of Vodun and Christianity has eluded notice by literati whose critical insights, along with Ellease Southerland’s 1979 article, have given rise to my exploratory investigation. Perceptively, Langston Hughes, in The Big Sea (1940), extols the innate artistic capacity Hurston demonstrates in writing her “tragic comic stories,” which accommodate radically different, even polar opposite modes of thinking and feeling: “She could make you laugh one minute and cry the next” (31). Alice Walker praises Hurston’s artistic accomplishment in exalting “a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature” (“Zora Neale Hurston,” 85). Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes that Hurston is the first African American novelist to combine “various modes of Afro-American rhetorical play” with the “diction of standard English” and to succeed in reconciling these two strands to form a “collective” discourse that is revelatory of the “dignity and strength of the black voice” (Signifying Monkey, 191, 215). Gwendolyn Mikell, in African-American Pioneers in Anthropology, stresses that Hurston “wished to emphasize the legitimacy and wholeness of black cultural institutions”; moreover, her unwavering belief in “black cultural integrity” motivated her anthropological investigations (66). While Hurston made “scathing indictments of the black middle class and black politics and of the eagerness with which blacks accepted desegregation and integration” (66), her dogmatic ideology adamantly supported black Christian churches. Joseph E. Holloway, in Africanisms in American Culture, observes that in post-Civil War America “black churches” played a “strong role” in “helping blacks reorganize their culture after slavery ended” (x). Hurston’s sympathetic portrayals of Judeo-Christianity testify to her recognition of the crucial role of religious pluralism in allblack African American communities where West African influences are more pronounced. Although Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, a racially integrated town, she identified so strongly with the ethnological values inherent in the concept of an all-black township that Eatonville, Florida, has gained widespread recognition as her legendary birthplace. It may be argued in purely literary and cultural terms that Hurston considered Eatonville to be her symbolic birthplace because the concept of an all-black communal space provided historically fertile ground to build the foundation for her artistic portrayals of an African-steeped African American culture that has roots deeply embedded in West African traditional religious beliefs and practices.

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Their Eyes Were Watching God refines Zora Neale Hurston’s exploratory art of religious counterpoint in Jonah’s Gourd Vine. The 1934 novel contains scenes that opened it to critical allegations that the verisimilitude of the descriptions of Vodun ritual dancing to the accompaniment of African drumbeats do not interface favorably with Christianity. Critics also claimed that Hurston had inadequately integrated the anthropological material into the narrative. Josephine Pinckney’s review attributes the overarching theological tenor of the novel to its Christian settings: the novel is “full of humor and folk notions; [it is] poetic, whether on the secular side or transposed into the biblical phraseology required by the many church scenes” (“Pungent, Poetic Novel,” 7). Andrew Burris’s review misconstrues Hurston’s literary objective as being to write “a novel about a backward Negro people” and to create “situations” for “them as mere pegs upon which to hang their dialect and their folkways.” He admits, however, that the book is “a rich store of folklore,” and that Hurston captures “the lusciousness and beauty of the Negro dialect as have few others” (“Browsing Reader,” 166). These contemporary reviewers catch only a glimpse of the novel’s Vodun design since for them Jonah’s Gourd Vine limns African belief only as local color. The Christian theological perspective in Their Eyes Were Watching God coincides with the African traditional association of feminine spirituality with love. Similar in complexity to the Christian conversion of John Buddy after he slays a river snake on his way to experiencing love and spiritual growth in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Janie Mae Crawford discovers an exhilarating but stormy path that paradoxically fills her heart with lofty insight into spiritual love. Hurston depicts John Buddy as a Christian whose torturous pilgrimage releases his soul from hubris, pangs of guilt, and inexplicable suffering after he confronts a symbolic Damballah. She slowly reveals to readers in his turbulent, agitated life a direct link between his salvific epiphany and the river snake. Likewise, Hurston portrays Janie as confronting Shango, depicting the oscillating rise to respectability of a young woman who yearns to find her soulmate, a man with whom to escape “bourgeoisification” (Hurston quoted in Mikell, African-American Pioneers, 51). Janie anticipates the spiritual journey that she will make during the course of her life as she reposes “horizontally” contemplating the horizon under “a vertical axis” in the form of a pear tree in bloom that the reader may interpret as the Genesaic tree of life or as the Voudoun tree of the cross, whose intersection is the crossroads, the “point of contact, where flesh and spirit meet” (Jennings, Toni Morrison, 3). In fulfillment of the promise of salvific grace for John Buddy, whose patronymic extends to Pearson after he crosses the river

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and does battle with a symbolic Damballah in the form of a snake, Hurston has Janie’s understanding of life’s ultimate truth crystallize at the moment she witnesses under the pear tree the consummation of male (bee) and female (flower) in “marriage” (Their Eyes, 13). The symbolism of the tree, however, may also be read as the cross on which Christ suffered and died. By means of her visionary art, Hurston evokes West African cosmology’s fusion of the living and the sanctified spirits of the dead, the loa, through mystical unions made possible through the medium of nature divinities. Hurston’s coupling of religions demonstrates that Their Eyes Were Watching God is a fulfillment of Jonah’s Gourd Vine and suggests that Janie’s quests for truth in love and for self are commensurate with the messianic quest of the Vodun diaspora.

Zora Neale Hurston and West African Vodun The cosmic Vodun consciousness embraces a vast supernatural dualism that harnesses opposites, asserts the mutual reciprocity between realms of the living and the consecrated spirits of the dead, and attributes to supernatural divinities—the loa and the orishas—the power to affect the destiny of the living. West African Vodun envisions the universe as a multilateral unending interrelationship between the cool and lithe elusiveness of feminine forces and the hot drive of masculine forces. The drum duet “Ibo,” which is native to Dahomey and appears in the form of musical notation in Hurston’s painstakingly gathered “Songs of Worship” to major Vodun gods, illustrates this essential Vodun pattern in the alternating beats of sixteenth notes and rests that a first drummer plays and the mirroring pulses with which a second drummer responds (554). In ways that complement her nonfiction writings and lend greater profundity to her research work as a cultural anthropologist, Hurston informs her earliest book-length fictional writings with the aesthetically fructifying principle of contradictory yet mutually interrelated forces at the heart of West African Vodun. Hurston’s novels are particularly illuminating when each novel is read as an imaginative literary artifact amenable to critical exploration of the tandem coupling of West African Vodun spirituality with the traditional Christian religious beliefs and practices of African Americans in Southern Baptist, Methodist, Louisiana French Catholic, and Pentecostal Holiness churches. Paradoxically, this West African Vodun concept of oscillating complementarity and pluralistic perspective constitutes a unifying force that instills psychological complexity, poetic nuances, and spiritual intensity in Hurston’s American novels.

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Although Vodun originated in West Africa, this ancient religion reached North America by way of the Caribbean and principally Haiti in the eighteenth century. Literary critic La Vinia Delois Jennings observes that the “alliances” of “dissimilar cultural regions of Africa’s western seaboard and hinterland [from Senegambia to Kongo-Angola]” and Caribbean Indians “spawned syncretized transcultural beliefs and practices that enslaved Africans forwarded in the New World” (Toni Morrison, 17). Alfred Métraux affirms that “a conglomeration of beliefs and rites of African origin,” which, “having been closely mixed with Catholic practice,” produced Voudoun, the creolized version of Dahomey’s Vodun in the Americas. Voudoun has come to be “the religion of the greater part of the peasants and the urban proletariat of the black republic of Haiti” (Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 15). Anthropologist Lilith Dorsey recounts the Fon’s mythic explanation for the Dahomean-derived religion’s presence in Haiti: Damballah and Ayida Ouedo are the Lwa [loa] responsible for bringing the religion of Vodun across the sea and sky from Africa to the Americas. These divinities are envisioned as snakes. In serpent form, Damballah and Ayida Ouedo left Africa with ancient knowledge of Vodun. Damballah took the route under the ocean, while Ayida Ouedo arched her serpent body across the sky to make the crown of the rainbow. They met on the island of Haiti, intertwining in an embrace of love that gave birth to the Voudoun religion. (Voodoo, 55)

Dorsey states that there is “no official record” of when enslaved Africans began the widespread practice of Voudoun in North America, but “most scholars agree it happened in New Orleans in the late 1700s” (Voodoo, 58).3 Phil Pastras observes in his scrupulously researched 2001 monograph on American jazz that while “a few scholars have denied that Roman Catholicism had any significant influence” on Voudoun, by far “the majority” view Voudoun as “a syncretic religion” that “developed in Haiti,” and “fused West African religions with Catholicism,” along with “perhaps some Native American forms and imagery” (Dead Man Blues, 61). During travels in the American South and the Caribbean, Hurston wrote more than 920,000 words in documenting her investigations of Negro folklore, religious practices, and spiritual beliefs. These meticulously prepared materials were made more readily available in 1995 in the compilation of her writings, Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Hurston’s fieldwork memoirs help to lay the groundwork for

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analytical interpretation of Janie’s mythic Vodun love quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God. As we shall see, Hurston infused the American novel with these creolized beliefs as a result of her systematic yet thoroughly artistic representation of morally inflected West African Vodun theological principles. The benchmark novels that she wrote are much more than merely fictionalized accounts of the lives of African American denizens. Their ideological foundation in Vodun theology confers mythic overtones upon John Buddy Pearson and Janie Mae Crawford as fictional characters that illuminate the religiously liberated imagination of Hurston and shed new light on her self-proclaimed birthplace, Eatonville, the all-black incorporated municipality located six miles north of Orlando, Florida. Hurston went to New Orleans to study Hoodoo (Voodoo), which is the local Louisiana variant of Haitian Voudoun, after she graduated with a B.A. at Barnard College and sojourned in Florida and Alabama collecting folklore. Her research on New Orleans Hoodoo dominated her daily investigations from August 1928 to April 1929 and from October to December 1929. She began writing Jonah’s Gourd Vine in August 1933, and finished it on October 3, 1933. While working very briefly on her Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University in 1935, she accepted a Guggenheim grant to Haiti, where her fieldwork provided evidence of theologically significant cultural similarities among black communities in the American South, the West Indies, and Haiti that share common Yoruba, Ibo, Fon, and Kongo heritages traceable to West and Central Africa. Her anthropological studies during the 1930s appeared in shortpress-run publications of Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1938), and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and have served as anthropological blueprints for later researchers to follow. Her anthropological research, which she had pursued for nearly a decade, empowered her with high levels of intellectual understanding and cultural awareness that jelled and skyrocketed to an artistic zenith when she wrote her critically acclaimed second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. During the period between September 22, 1936, and December 19, 1936, Hurston completed Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti. She observes in Tell My Horse that West African Vodun is “a religion of creation and life. It is the worship of the sun, the water and other natural forces, but the symbolism is no better understood than that of other religions and consequently is taken too literally” (376). As a gifted novelist, Hurston explores the hidden dimensions of meaning in West African Vodun theology by embedding in her artful representations of mundane reality theologically resonant layers of meaning residing beneath the surface of monotheist Vodun hierarchic cosmology.4

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The interdisciplinary anthropological concept of syncretism, which refers broadly to the combining of different philosophical or religious beliefs and practices, is central to understanding Hurston’s aesthetic approach to the genre of the theological novel. In historical and contemporary terms, Vodun represents a belief system linked to myriad indigenous native cultures and sects. Vodun coexists in North America with the predominant Judeo-Christian Protestant and Catholic religious denominations and in the Caribbean with Roman Catholicism, which gained legions of African converts starting in the fifteenth century during successive colonization by the empires of Spain, France, and England. Hurston’s colleague at Columbia University, Melville J. Herskovits, whom she met when they were studying with the German-American anthropology professor Franz Boas, argues in Cultural Dynamics for the permanence and enduring strength in the Americas of West African culture despite its mingling with Protestantism and Catholicism: “West African cultures and their New World derivatives afford an instance of retention of an original focus under forced acculturation” (188–89). Herskovits asserts that these West African societies . . . are among the largest in the nonliterate world. Their technological equipment is advanced, their economies complex, their political systems sophisticated and their social structures well organized and administered. Their . . . folklore is noted for its subtlety. . . . The focus of these cultures . . . is on religion in all its manifestations—belief-systems, world-view, and ritual. (Cultural Dynamics, 189)

Herskovits emphasizes that West African Vodun accommodates Christianity, and not the reverse: “In West Africa, tribal gods had been freely borrowed, and there was no reason why the Christian concept of the universe and the powers that rule it, which the Negroes encountered, could not equally well be incorporated into their system of belief” (Cultural Dynamics, 189). He stresses the symbiotic relationship between Vodun and Christianity, observing that “syncretism . . . is most strikingly exemplified” in the way “New World Negroes . . . in Catholic countries of the New World” identify “African deities with the saints of the Church” (190). Herskovits observes that Haitians identify the crossroads or tree of the cross “Legba, the trickster of the West African Dahomeans and Yorubans,” with Saint Anthony, “the patron of the poor,” and they conceived Legba as “an old man who wanders about, clad in tatters.” They identify Damballah, “the Dahomean rainbow-serpent,” with Saint Patrick because pictorial representations of the Irish saint, which Irish lore

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credits with driving the snakes out of Ireland, usually contain serpents (190). Leslie G. Desmangles traces the “cultural and religious juxtaposition of Catholicism and Vodou in Haiti today” to the “Haitian colonial period,” when “Catholic missionaries” used “lithographs showing the various symbols associated with the lives of the saints in Christian hagiology,” and black slaves “learned to associate these symbols with those related to the African gods” (Faces of the Gods, 11). Instead of Vodun’s “close association” with Catholicism creating “theological fusion,” observes Desmangles, “the two religious systems represented in the minds of their adherents two separate ‘objects’ juxtaposed to one another” (11). Hurston notes the retention of the “older forms of Negro religious expression asserting themselves against the new,” commenting that the “Negro has not been Christianized as extensively as is generally believed.” Many blacks in the diaspora call “old gods by a new name” (Hurston, “The Sanctified Church,” 901). Hurston’s novels use elemental nature imagery—the feminine earth and water and the masculine air and fire—to portray ways in which West African Vodun theology permeates the collective unconscious and, hence, the culture of African Americans, even those who have been taught to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob under the auspices of Christian religious beliefs. Their Eyes Were Watching God elevates to a macrocosmic domain Jonah’s Gourd Vine’s metaphorically muted evocations of similarities between the Christian sacrament of baptism by immersion in water, established when John the Baptist immersed Jesus in the Jordan River, and the Vodun reverence of Legba as “the opener of gates” leading to “opportunities” (Hurston, Tell My Horse, 382). Hurston reserves the epithet “Papa” for the opener of the gate to the spiritual life: Legba Attibon is the god of the gate. He rules the gate of the hounfort [sequestered site for observance of Vodun rituals], the entrance to the cemetery and he is also Baron Carrefour, Lord of the crossroads. The way to all things is in his hands. . . . The picture of John the Baptist is used to represent Papa Legba. (Tell My Horse, 393)

Key episodes in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God show that Hurston, by dint of her intellectual imagination and ability to evoke theological resonances, melds together the resilience of Southern Baptist, Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Pentecostal Holiness religious observances and West African Vodun spiritual consciousness.

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John Buddy Pearson and the Snake God at the Crossroads Hurston’s juxtaposing of Vodun and Christianity in Their Eyes Were Watching God reprises and reinforces the simultaneous pairing begun in Hurston’s first novel. She intentionally uses ambiguous tree, snake, and cross imagery to evoke the influence and presence of earth and watery underworld nature divinities, the loa, and of sky nature divinities, the orishas. Introducing them in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and refining their pairing in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston commingles Vodun snake imagery in her depiction of John Buddy as he undergoes, at an early crossroads in life, the rite of passage into autonomous personhood and Judeo-Christian symbology. Portraying the hybridity of Vodun and Christianity, Hurston has John Buddy celebrate leaving home with the West African practice of responding percussively with the body to drums and as a drum: “John plunged on down to the Creek, singing a new song and stomping the beats” (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 12; Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, 219; emphasis added). John sits “on the foot-log” and makes “some words to go with the drums of the Creek” (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 12). Later, his prayers to the Christian “Lawd” for “mercy” (25) are answered when the schoolmaster, Lucy Potts’s uncle, changes his name to John Pearson, legitimizing his birthright as Judge Alf Pearson’s son but also aligning him with metaphorical tree imagery in much the same way Tea Cake Woods will be aligned with tree symbolism in the later narrative. Although John Buddy’s love attraction to thirteen-year-old Lucy Potts culminates in a formal wedding at the Macedonia Baptist Church, a snake encounter underscores their early courtship. Lucy fears a snake that seemingly guards a branch crossing made possible by a section of a tree that she must walk along in order to go home. Her confession to John at their first crossing of the branch together that “everytime Ah go ’cross dat foot-log Ah think maybe Ah might fall in and den he’ll bite me” (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 34; emphasis added) inspires him to show heroic bravery by battling the cottonmouth moccasin at the log crossing: He . . . stepped cautiously down into the water. The snake went on guard, slowly, insolently. Lucy was terrified. Suddenly, he snatched the foot-log from its place and, leaning far back to give it purchase, he rammed it home upon the big snake and held it there. The snake bit at the log again and again in its agony, but finally the biting

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and the thrashing ceased. John fished the snake out and stretched it upon the grass. (34)

The second chapter of Jonah’s Gourd Vine culminates in John’s portentous snake wrangling, but starts with his observations of a train in Notasulga after he leaves home that coincides with Damballah imagery. Upon his arrival in the town, John, who has never seen a train before, is suddenly “conscious of a great rumbling” as “the train schickalacked up to the station and stopped” (15). John cuts a comic figure as he stares at “the panting monster,” while “that great eye beneath the cloud-breathing smoke-stack glared and threatened,” and “the engine’s very sides seemed to expand and contract like a fiery-lunged monster.” He nonetheless sees beauty in its form and pronounces the train “uh pretty thing too” (16). At the novel’s end, years after Lucy’s death, John falls asleep at the wheel of his car as he approaches a train crossing. His sudden death when the train runs into his automobile mirrors his violent fight with the snake. Conflating the snake and train imagery in the two earlier scenes, Hurston reprises John’s snake battle in variant form. The snake’s killer suffers the same fate at the railroad crossing that he dealt the serpent at the water crossing. Deep in thought about the “return” of the dead Lucy, John fails to hear the train’s whistle: He had prayed for Lucy’s return and God had answered with Sally [Lovelace]. He drove on but half-seeing the railroad from looking inward. The engine struck the car squarely and hurled it about like a toy. John was thrown out and lay perfectly still. Only his foot twitched a little. (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 200)

Hurston, whose father, John Hurston, was killed when a train struck his car at a railroad crossing on August 10, 1917, in Memphis, Tennessee (Plant, Zora Neale Hurston, 31), associated trains with snakes and later in her visit to Haiti observed that altars devoted to worship displayed “iron representation[s] of the snake” (Tell My Horse, 381). In addition, in Voudoun doctrine, crossings and crossroads are sites where flesh and spirit, the living and the living spirit of an ancestor or of a relative, meet and part; it is also the moment when a loa mounts a devotee. In both the water crossing and the railroad crossing, death parts the material and the metaphysical. Significantly, John is “looking inward” when his own spirit is parted from his flesh. John’s contemplation of Lucy’s reincarnation in the form of Sister Sally Lovelace of Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church is a veiled allusion to spiritual return or rebirth, a tenet of both Christianity and

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Vodun. The belief that individuals are divinely returned in successive generations and that the loa divinely operate in the personal lives of devotees has West African provenance (Jennings, Toni Morrison, 64–65). Hurston highlights a remarkable conflation of Vodun theological imagery with Hebraic Old Testament and Christianity’s New Testament symbology when she observes that Damballah’s “signature is the ascending snakes on a rod or a crucifix” (Tell My Horse, 382). Her incorporation of loa imagery with John Pearson sets the stage for future development of theological pluralism in her narratives. Hurston observes that Damballah Ouedo is the supreme Mystere and his signature is the serpent. . . . All over Haiti it is well established that Damballah is identified as Moses. . . . The rod of Moses is said to have been a subtle serpent. . . . All over the Southern United States, the British West Indies and Haiti there are reverent tales of Moses and his magic. It is hardly possible that all of them sprang up spontaneously in these widely separated areas on the blacks coming in contact with Christianity after coming to the Americas. It is more probable that there is a tradition of Moses as the great father of magic scattered over Africa and Asia. (378)

The title of Jonah’s Gourd Vine alludes directly to the story of the wilting vine in the biblical book of Jonah 4:7; it may also be interpreted as the coiling Vodun divinity Damballah. Subsequently, John’s encounter when he leaves home with Big Creek’s thunder and whirl invoking the authority of Shango resurfaces in his courtship of Lucy, a ritual that takes place under the auspices of a veiled ceremonial Vodun worship. The liturgical cadences of West African drumbeats are analogous to the sounding of church bells. They are also comparable to Shango, who is the divinity of thunder and lightning and the lord of the drum and fire, and with images that coincide with the wrath of the Christian God. Devotees of Shango, the owner of the Bata, three doubleheaded drums, consider him the ruler of music and the art of dance. The drumbeats are his thunder. The kidskin-covered “dance drums of Africa,” sounding the rhythmical invocation to African American dancers, is as prayerful as a Christian minister’s “Let us pray” call to worship. Kata-Kumba, the great drum, displays the divine handiwork of “priests and sits in majesty in the juju house,” honoring the born-again heartbeat of a new day, for Kata-Kumba is “the drum with the man skin dressed with human

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blood, . . . beaten with a human shin-bone” that “speaks to gods as a man and to men as a God. Then they beat upon the drum and danced” (Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 29). Hurston’s omniscient narrator notes the “hollow hand clapping for the bass notes. Heel and toe stomping for the little one. Ibo tune corrupted with Nango. Congo gods talking in Alabama” (30).5 At John Pearson’s funeral, the officiating minister delivers “a barbaric requiem poem” (201) in which only God knows the deceased: And the hearers wailed with a feeling of terrible loss. They beat upon the O-go-doe, the ancient drum. . . . Their hearts turned to fire and their shinbones leaped unknowing to the drum. Not KataKumba, the drum of triumph, that speaks of great ancestors and glorious wars. Not the little drum of kid-skin, for that is to dance with joy and to call to mind birth and creation, but O-go-doe, the voice of Death. (202)

At the pinnacle of the Harlem Renaissance era, when almost all Americans remained as yet unaware of the depths of the African Americans’ retention of various aspects of West African traditional beliefs and practices, Hurston blazes a path that restores the theological heritage of the African American. As a minister of the Christian Gospel, John Pearson has a willful sermonic approach of juxtaposing Christianity and Vodun that is defiant. He invokes some new . . . praise-giving name for God, every time he knelt in church. He rolled his African drum up to the altar, and called his Congo Gods by Christian names. One night at the altar-call he cried out his barbaric poetry to his “Wonder-workin” God so effectively that three converts came through religion under the sound of his voice. (89)

John Pearson prays irreverently, suggesting a fluid identity for God that he understands only as fixed: You are de same God, Ah / Dat heard de sinner man cry. / Same God dat sent de zigzag lightning tuh / Join de mutterin’ thunder. / Same God dat holds de elements / In uh unbroken chain of controllment. / Same God dat hung on Calvary and died. / Dat we might have a right tuh de tree of life—.(89)

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Janie Mae Crawford and the Thunder and Wind Gods Similarly to the way that the West African Vodun snake god Damballah influences the life of John Buddy, the Vodun thunder and lightning god Shango and his wind and rainstorm wife Oya intervene decisively in the spiritual love quest of Janie and Tea Cake. At the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston uses metaphors of violence in nature to depict Shango and Oya as divine forces that engender a hurricane with the divine power to take or spare one’s life. Hurston recasts in the magnifying lens of nature the dual religious symbolism that she first invokes in Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Janie and Tea Cake grow in stature in the cataclysmic Vodun-Christian metaphor of an immense storm that evokes the Judeo-Christian God’s omnipotence on the one hand, and Shango’s lightning-swift passion and Oya’s deluge of tears on the other. The climax in Their Eyes Were Watching God is a tumultuous uproar that clandestinely yet unmistakably invokes Shango and Oya as natural forces that must be properly revered or one risks placing his or her life in peril. After the visitation of Shango and Oya, Janie achieves personal growth of a profoundly physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual nature. Anna Lillios asserts that “the hurricane is the most powerful symbol in the book” (“Monstropolous Beast,” 89). When viewed comprehensively, the novel lives up to its title: The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They [Janie and Tea Cake] sat in company with the others in other [muck] shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God. (Their Eyes, 160)

While Western readers interpret the “God” invoked here as the JudeoChristian God, Janie, Tea Cake, and their muck companions gathered together to wait out the storm can as easily be watching the thunder god Shango and hurricane wind-spirit Oya. Marking the storm’s approach with drumbeats, Shango’s signature sound, Janie and Tea Cake’s companions follow Vodun rituals. For example, the rhythmical drum playing of Stew Beef and Gabriel invoke Shango and Oya taking possession of Lake Okeechobee. In the earlier novel, John Buddy’s “stomping the beats” in Jonah’s Gourd Vine is reminiscent of the West African ritual of sitting still and “singing,” “swaying,” or “clapping” to drumbeats; of imitating

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onomatopoeically the electrical hissing of lightning bolts and boom of thunder claps (Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, 219). Hurston’s depiction of Janie’s companions engaged in drumming illustrates their subliminal awareness that the thunder god Shango reveals himself to them as he mounts in their consciousness: Sometime that night the winds came back. Everything in the world had a strong rattle, sharp and short like Stew Beef vibrating the drum head near the edge with his fingers. By morning . . . Gabriel was playing the deep tones in the center of the drum. So when Janie looked out of her door she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west—that cloud field of the sky—to arm themselves with thunders and march forth against the world. Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting. (Their Eyes, 158)

Herskovits explains that during Shango cult rituals “drums and rattles and songs bring on the violent possession of the classical type, accompanied by the same magnificent dancing that marks the worship of African gods wherever they ‘mount’ their devotees” (The Myth of the Negro Past, 221). Gabriel’s drumming is a Vodun annunciation, heralding the coming of Shango. Vodun drums imitate Shango’s thunder—“A big burst of thunder and lightning that trampled over the roof of the house.” To the novel’s African American characters, Shango displays the cruelty of a slavemaster and of an angry Christian God: “Motor looked up in his angel-looking way6 and said, ‘Big Massa draw him chair upstairs’ ” (Their Eyes, 159). Contrapuntally, personification of “old Okeechobee” as a “monster” that “began to roll in his bed” poetically indicates Oya’s rising waves of wind and rain. The African American Christians are impervious to the storm’s heightened danger and do not give the appropriate respect by evacuating the area because New World conditioning prompts them to follow the master race and to “wait on the mercy of [his] Lord.” They see Okeechobee as a monstrous lake that “the bossman” will “have . . . stopped before morning.” Janie reveals unconscious knowledge of Shango when she rebukes Motor Boat, who invokes the Christian God: “Big Massa draw him chair upstairs.” Reverently, Janie announces, “Ole Massa is doin’ His work now. Us oughta keep quiet” (Their Eyes, 158). In striking contrast to Motor Boat’s high regard for the Christian God— “Big Massa”—Janie respects the “work” of “Ole Massa,” the ancient Vodun thunder divinity Shango. Her veneration for the mounting power

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of Shango to make the lake into a “senseless monster” (159) foreshadows the rabid displacement of Tea Cake’s psyche, a symbolic possession. Commensurate with the storm’s chaos and cacophony, Hurston pays homage to Shango and Oya whom she invokes as a piece of “tin roof” hanging from “the branches by electric wires” with “the wind” swinging it “back and forth like a mighty ax” (164–65). Devotees symbolize Shango’s power “on the altar of a house by a double-bladed ax or a ram’s antlers” (Owusu, Voodoo Rituals, 26). The oshe or double-headed axe represents swift and balanced justice for the disobedient and the wayward. His “sacred animal,” the ram, “pound[s] the earth with hooves of fire” (Herskovits, Dahomean Narrative, 64–65). Hurston obliterates divisional boundaries that define Africa and America as religious binaries. Oya’s and Shango’s destructive power to move sand-wind-thunder-rainstorms from the Sahara Desert to the Americas parallels the story of Damballah and his wife Ayida’s transatlantic transport of Vodun from Africa to the Caribbean. In scientific terms, hurricanes originate in Africa when hot air rising above the Sahara Desert clashes with high winds carrying moisture inland from the African coast, spawning storms. The transatlantic jet stream flowing at high velocity transports the storms from Africa to Florida. Historically, the westward trajectory of West African slave ships and of the culture of the African captives parallels the path of the weather system that brings storms from Africa to America. Hurston uses natural references to depict the hurricane as a transatlantic phenomenon that may be comprehended in terms of an African and American collaboration that turns on divinely activated forces. Working forward from subtly etched details that hark back to African traditional cosmology initialized in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston creates a dynamic dialectical interplay that culminates in Vodun and Christianity paralleling in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston makes and governs the textual universe of these two novels, opening them to critical explorations of their subtextual meaning. Her fiction amplifies the anthropology in her nonfiction writings, because she expands the multidimensionality and commodiousness of the conventional novel. Their Eyes Were Watching God gives insights into the theological pluralism and ideologies of African Americans. Through her depiction of character and her use of imagery and symbolism, Hurston invisibly aligns Vodun and Christianity elements in the same way that Vodun and Christianity mirror one another in African American life.

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Notes

1. Vodun flourished in Dahomey, which was a French colony from 1894 to 1960 before the country’s partition into Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. 2. The loa Damballah Ouedo energizes the material world, hence controls human regeneration, seasonal renewal in nature, and continuity in the universe. Hurston’s description juxtaposes Vodun and Catholicism: “Damballah Ouedo is the supreme Mystere,” and although the “picture that is bought of him is that of St. Patrick, he in no way resembles that Irish saint” (Tell My Horse, 378). 3. The late eighteenth century as the initial period for the concentrated practice of Voudoun to emerge in North America and specifically in New Orleans coincides with the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804. Between these years many French planters, fearing for their lives, fled Saint Domingue to New Orleans, taking with them enslaved peoples of African descent who carried their religious beliefs with them. 4. George Brandon explains that the “kings of Benin, Dahomey, and the Yoruba city-states all trace their origin back to Odua (Oduduwa), creator of the earth” (Santeria, 9). In this hierarchy, the “supreme being” is “Olodumare, the creator and sustainer of the universe, who nonetheless is remote from humans and has neither priesthood nor temples” (14). The “orishas” are “emanations directly from Olodumare”: some “came from heaven,” while “others were once human beings and died remarkable deaths” (14). 5. Herskovits explains that some scholars “group” the West African coastal region “with the Congo” even though the “Congo tribes are all Bantu speaking” (The Myth of the Negro Past, 80–81). 6. The description of Motor Boat’s face looking like “a little black cherubim just from a church tower” (Their Eyes, 157) is an example of Hurston’s use of poetic simile to juxtapose black African Vodun and Protestant Christianity.

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Works Cited

Brandon, George. Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Burris, Andrew. “The Browsing Reader,” review of Jonah’s Gourd Vine, by Zora Neale Hurston. Crisis 41 (June 1934): 166–67. Desmangles, Leslie G. The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Dorsey, Lilith. Voodoo and Afro-Caribbean Paganism. New York: Citadel, 2005. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 996–1065. New York: Norton, 1997. Herskovits, Melville J. Cultural Dynamics. Abridged from Cultural Anthropology. 1947. New York: Knopf, 1964. ———. Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1958. ———. The Myth of the Negro Past. 1941. Boston: Beacon, 1958. Holloway, Joseph E., ed. Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Hughes, Langston. An Autobiography: The Big Sea. In The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. 1940. Ed. Joseph McLaren. Vol. 13. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Hurston, Zora Neale. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. 1934. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990. ———. “The Sanctified Church.” In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 901–5. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. “Songs of Worship to Voodoo Gods.” In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 533–55. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Tell My Horse. In Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 376–97. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Lippincott, 1937; HarperCollins, 1990. Jennings, La Vinia Delois. Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lillios, Anna. “ ‘The Monstropolous Beast’: The Hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Southern Quarterly 36, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 89–93.

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Métraux, Alfred. Voodoo in Haiti. Trans. Hugo Charteris. New York: Schocken, 1972. Mikell, Gwendolyn. “Feminism and Black Culture in the Ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston.” In African-American Pioneers in Anthropology, ed. Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison, 51–69. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Owusu, Heike. Voodoo Rituals: A User’s Guide. New York: Sterling, 2002. Pastras, Phil. Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pinckney, Josephine. “A Pungent, Poetic Novel About Negroes,” review of Jonah’s Gourd Vine, by Zora Neale Hurston. New York Herald Tribune Books, May 6, 1934, 7. Plant, Deborah G. Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. Westport: Praeger, 2007. Walker, Alice. “Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View.” Foreword in Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, by Robert Hemenway, xi–xviii. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Rpt. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 83–92. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983.

CONTRIBUTORS

Keith Cartwright received a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University and is presently an associate professor of English at the University of North Florida. Specializing in African American literature, Caribbean literature, southern literature, African diaspora studies, and West African expressive traditions, he is author of Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales (2002). Cartwright published an earlier essay, “ ‘To Walk with the Storm’: Oya as the Transformative ‘I’ of Zora Neale Hurston’s Afro-Atlantic Callings,” in American Literature (2006). Derek Collins completed a Ph.D. at Harvard University and is a professor of Greek and Latin in the Department of Classics at the University of Michigan and associate dean for Humanities, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. His third book, Magic in the Ancient Greek World (2008), is a synthesis of his expertise in early Greek literature and magical and religious practices in the ancient world. Daphne Lamothe received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and is currently an associate professor of Afro-American studies at Smith College. Her research interests center on the intersection of ethnography and the African American imagination, the construction of cultural memory in contemporary black fiction, and narratives of migration and the diaspora. Her book, Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography (2008), received honorable mention in the 2008 Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition. Mawuena Logan earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is presently a senior lecturer in African and African diaspora literatures at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of Narrating Africa (1999). Babacar M’Baye completed a Ph.D. at Bowling Green University and is currently an associate professor of African American literature, black Atlantic studies, and African literature at Kent State University. M’Baye’s study, The Trickster Comes West: Pan African Influence in Early Black

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Diasporan Narratives (2009), focuses on Africa’s enrichment of narratives that enslaved and free blacks produced in Britain and in the New World. Pamela Glenn Menke received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is vice provost of education at Miami Dade College. She is the coeditor of Southern Local Color: Stories of Region, Race, and Gender (2001). In addition to the essay reprinted in this volume, she published “ ‘The Lips of Books’: Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God as Metalingual Texts” in The Literary Griot (1992). Edward M. Pavlic´ earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University and is a professor of literature at the University of Georgia, Athens. In Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African-American Literary Culture (2002) he provides an in-depth look at the West African cultural legacies that inform the African American modernist creative process and Hurston’s work. Rachel Stein completed a Ph.D. at Rutgers University and is a professor of English and the director of women’s studies at Siena College. A specialist in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American multicultural literature that focuses on issues of gender, race, and sexuality, she is the author of Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers’ Revisions of Nature, Gender, and Race (1997), which includes a longer discussion of Hurston’s incorporation of Haitian ethnographic research in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Cynthia Ward received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and is presently an associate professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. ˉ She specializes in West African literature and culture, postcolonial studies, and oral and performance studies. An earlier article by Ward on Zora Neale Hurston, entitled “From the Suwanee to Egypt: There’s No Place Like Home,” appeared in PMLA (2000). Nancy Ann Watanabe completed a Ph.D. at Indiana University in comparative literature. She is currently conducting research at the University of Washington libraries. EDITOR La Vinia Delois Jennings earned a Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in twentieth-century American literature

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and culture, and is presently Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Jennings’s Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (2008), a study of the West and Central African beliefs and symbols subscripted in Morrison’s fiction, won the 2008 Toni Morrison Society Award for the best single-authored book on the Nobel laureate’s works. Her study on Morrison’s work also received the College Language Association’s Best Scholarship Award in 2009.

Index

Abimbola, Wande, 124, 136, 188n5 Abiodun, Rowland, 124, 136, 140 Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner), 133–34, 143 Achebe, Chinua, 188n6 Adonis, 16, 17, 53 Africa, 87, 96, 157; as the antithesis of Europe, 186; exploration of, 30; myths/divinities of, 15, 17; origins of hurricanes in, 252; perceptions of in the United States, 73. See also Central Africa; West Africa African American culture/tradition, 3, 14, 19–20, 52, 63, 70, 75, 86; African diasporic tradition/culture, 83, 87; black Atlantic culture, 87; Christian religious culture of, 237, 239; and cultural transformation, 83–84; folk culture, 72, 82–83, 88, 96, 168; the jazz impulse in black culture, 132; and minstrel stereotypes, 72, 73, 82; operatic tradition, 18; oral tradition, 81; southern black culture, 51; and West African Vodun theology, 238–39 African American Pioneers in Anthropology (Mikell), 239 African American women, 14; association of with beasts, 44–45n3; backbreaking labor of in the Caribbean, 32; as “chattel,” 44–45n3; effects of colonialism on, 29; and the empowerment provided by Voodoo, 71–72; erotic energy of, 41, 46n17; and hoodoo, 45n4; as innately subhuman, 32; as sexual objects, 33, 71–72; social powerlessness of, 31; as subhuman “donkeys” (mules), 29, 30, 32, 39–40, 41; view of as apes and orangutans, 30, 30n; view of as sexual beasts, 30–31, 44–45n3; Voodoo as an alternative spiritual model for, 29–30;

worship of black women’s sexuality in Voodoo, 37 African American writers/literature, 16, 17–18, 73, 141–42, 237, 239; African American literary theory, 183; and the depiction of the African American lower class, 83; Harlem Renaissance writers and African American culture, 73–74, 188n2; influence of white modernist writers on, 122; influence of Western and Central African religions and Voodoo on, 17–19; theoretical framework for analyzing African American literature, 182; use of African American vernacular by ZNH, 73. See also modernism African Americans: “ancestral” past of, 19, 74, 177; minstrel stereotypes of (“happy darkies”), 72, 73, 85 African diaspora, 15, 19–20, 70, 86, 130, 175, 178, 179, 196, 198, 245; and the concept of the “hidden transcript,” 195; resistive nature of Voodoo in, 194; the West African diaspora, 50, 231 Africanisms in American Culture (J. E. Holloway), 239 Afro-Caribbean cultures, 63 Agwe (lord of the seas), 54 Aida, 11 Ajàálà, 136, 137 Ájé, 157 Alf Pearson (Jonah’s Gourd Vine), 100, 246 All Soul’s Day. See Day of Ghede (Fête Ghede) Altamonte Springs, 10 American Opera and Its Composers (Hipsher), 23n18 Amram, 21n1 Anderson, Sherwood, 122 261

262 Index

Another Country (Baldwin), 123 anthropology, 29, 50, 51, 70, 243, 244, 252 Aphrodite, 16, 17, 53 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 198 Arada, 178 Arawaks (people of the Caribbean), 5 Archelaus, 21n1 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 6, 234n3 Arthur, Charles, 196 asceticism, Christian, 36 asé (sacred energy), 120, 126, 225 Auden, W. H., 122 Averill, Gage, 195, 196 Awkward, Michael, 83 Ayida Hwedo (Ayida Ouedo), 36, 242 Bahamas, 50, 95, 98, 155, 194, 230; 1929 hurricane in, 154, 234n4 Bahamian folks (in Their Eyes), 146–47 Bahamians, 42, 87, 145; Bahamian songs, 111 Baker, Houston, 45n4, 103, 184, 194 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 124, 126; on Their Eyes as a novel of competing discourses, 184–85 Bakongo people, 5; contribution to the signage of Voudoun, 8 Baldwin, James, 123, 125, 130, 132, 137, 144–45 Baptists, 167–68; preaching tradition of, 51; Southern Baptists, 15, 239, 241, 245 Barber, Karin, 124 Barksdale, Richard, 4 Barnard College, 3, 12, 50, 96, 243 Barnicle, Mary Elizabeth, 21n2 Baron Carrefour (“Lord of the Crossroads”), 118, 125, 138 Baron Cimetière, 11, 22n8, 222 Baron Samedi, 22n8, 38 Barr, Tina, 17 Barthes, Roland, 176; on the “death of the author” and the “birth of the reader,” 182–83, 187 Bartman, Sarah (the “Hottentot Venus”), 30–31, 31n, 33, 37 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University), 9

Bell, Madison Smartt, 193 Beloved (Morrison), 46n10 Benin. See Dahomey (now Benin) Bethel, Lorraine, 89n4 Biassou, Jean, 198, 199 Big Sea, The (Hughes), 239 Big Sweet, 157, 159, 160 bigamy, 57 Black Arts Movement, 19 black Atlantic, 17, 74, 75, 84, 87 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy), 83 black consciousness, 80, 237 Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by and About Black Women (M. Washington), 4 Black Feminist Thought (P. Collins), 44–45n3 Black Gods: Orisa Studies in the New World (Edwards), 127 blackness, 19, 85; treatment of in Their Eyes, 78–79 Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Snowden), 22n13 blood sacrifice, 99, 103, 105–6, 162; in Their Eyes, 106–7 blues, the, 141–42, 144, 146, 147, 148, 159, 160 Boas, Franz, 3, 12, 50, 96, 99, 167, 244; scientific objectivity of, 97 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 12, 199 Bontemps, Arna, 211n1 Boukman, 198, 199, 200 Boxwell, D. A., 192 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 5–6 Brandon, George, 253n4 Brantley, Will, 197 Brazil, 170n2, 175, 197 Bréda, Moyse, 198, 199 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 122 Brown, David, 158–59 Brown, Karen McCarthy, 67, 78, 90n8, 167, 211n5, 219, 220 Buddhism, 13 Burris, Andrew, 240 Butler, Octavia, 18 Caponi, Gena Dagel, 196 Carby, Hazel, 85–86, 87, 91n13, 168

Index

Caribbean, the, 13, 63, 88, 157, 161, 168, 191, 244, 252; creolized religion of, 5; poor treatment of black women in (colonial period), 31–33, 39–40 Carrefour, Baron. See Baron Carrefour Carter-Sigglow, Janet, 207 Cartwright, Keith, 14–15 Central Africa, 14, 191, 193, 243; influence of on Greek and Roman culture, 22–23n13; traditional beliefs/religions of, 5 Change Is Gonna Come, A: Race, Music, and the Soul of America (Werner), 132 Character of the Word, The (K. Holloway), 80 “Characteristics of Negro Expression, The” (ZNH), 124, 148 Chesnutt, Charles, 18, 72, 237 Christianity, 13, 15, 16, 80, 237, 240, 246, 249, 252; view of nature and carnal existence, 34 Christophe, Henri, 5 Cilla, 11 Cimetière, Baron. See Baron Cimetière Clarke, Joe, 12 class oppression, 15 classism, 19 Cleaver, Carole, 198 Collins, Derek, 14, 192–93, 237 Collins, Patricia Hill, 44–45n3 colonialism, 35, 42, 45–46n9; effects of on black women, 29; of Napoleon Bonaparte, 35 colonization, 244 Columbus, Christopher, 5 “Come In” (Reeves), 124 “Confluence” (Komunyakaa), 118, 149 Congo, 198, 253n5; gods of called by Christian names, 13, 101, 249 conjure stories, 97 Conjure Woman, The (Chesnutt), 18 conjuring, 95, 101, 103, 107; of dreams, 104 Constantino, Donald, 130 Cook, Mercer, 199 cosmology, African, 181, 252; similarities between Western and African cosmologies, 187. See also Yoruba people

263

Crabtree, Claire, 57, 203 Creole, 196, 220 Crisis of Possession, The (Mars), 46n14 cross-dressing, 38; and the use of the calabash by men, 38 crossroads, 24n20, 75, 119, 124, 127, 176; and consciousness, 128–29; crossroads symbol (Yowa), 14, 15; as the intersection of flesh and spirit, 8 “Crossroads” (Komunyakaa), 123–24 Cuba, 170n2, 175; expulsion of French nationals from, 12; Ifa divination in, 163 Cult of Ifa Among the Yoruba (McClelland), 126–27 “cup of trembling,” 123 “cyborg myth,” 34 Dahomey (now Benin), 5, 99, 178, 234n3, 241, 253n1 Damballah (also Danbala, Damballah Ouedo), 11, 13, 36, 37, 52, 54, 55, 99, 192, 237, 242, 248; control of human regeneration and seasonal renewal of nature by, 253n2; “signature” of (a serpent), 114n1; and St. Patrick of Ireland, 22n10, 244–45 Danielpour, Richard, 18 D’Anna, Andrea, 61, 62 Dash, Julie, 18, 24n20 Dash, Michael, 196 Daughters of the Dust (J. Dash), 18; personalities of West African Yoruba divinities in, 18, 24n20 Davis, Erik, 178 Davis, Wade, 99 Day of Ghede (Fête Ghede), 9 death: in Haitian culture, 231; traditional African philosophy concerning, 11 deconstruction, 186 Deren, Maya, 60–61, 62, 184, 198, 209, 211n5; on death in the Haitian culture, 231 Desmangles, Leslie, 89n1, 245 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 5, 198, 199; declaration of Haiti as a free republic, 6 diasporic epistemologies, 124 diasporic ontologies, 124–25

264 Index

“Diver, The” (Hayden), 122 divination, 185; Yoruba-Ifa system of, 22–23n13, 126, 160, 161, 163–64, 165, 188n1 Divine Horsemen (Deren), 60–61 Doré, Gustave, 35 Dorsainvil, J. C., 15, 22n11 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 122 “Drenched in Light” (ZNH), 13 Drewal, Henry J., 126, 143 Drewel, Margaret Thompson, 124, 225–26 drums, 51, 73–74, 101, 102, 167, 177, 246, 251; and African American identity, 74; Kata-Kumba (the great drum), 248–49 Du Bois, W. E. B., 83, 164 Dubois, Laurent, 199 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 72 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 46n19, 75, 89n4 Dust Tracks on a Road (ZNH), 12, 39, 50, 100, 102, 104, 243; discussion of religion in, 167, 178; “Love” chapter of, 217; “My People! My People!” chapter of, 224–25; original conclusion to, 110, 113; personified trees in, 13–14; Rain-Bringer’s ritual signature in, 155–56; recounting of Hurston’s witnessing the Nassau hurricane (1929), 158 Dutton, Wendy, 125, 193 Duvalier, François (“Papa Doc”), 6 Duvalier, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), 6 Eatonville, Florida (actual), 10, 12, 81, 96, 201, 238; field research conducted in by Alan Lomax, Mary Barnicle, and ZNH, 21n2; high incidence of lightning storms in, 157; as ZNH’s birthplace, 70–71, 239, 243 Eatonville, Florida (fictional), 91n14, 140, 147, 166, 191–92, 207, 209, 219; ambivalence of Eatonville’s male population toward Joe Starks, 205; communal culture of, 204; and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, 133; Janie’s being “classed off” by the townspeople of, 77, 227; Janie’s return to, 10, 56, 75, 76, 128, 177,

230, 234n1; Joe Starks as mayor of, 181; Joe Starks’ vision of, 129–30, 143; resistance by townspeople to Joe Starks’ perpetuation of white patriarchy in, 210; weakening of the black townspeople of, 203; as a workingclass community, 221 Edwards, Gary, 127, 144 “Eeldrop and Appleplex” (Eliot), 135 Elegbara. See Esu (also Eshu-Elegbara, Esu-Elegba, and Esu-Elegbara) Eliot, T. S., 17, 99, 110, 125, 135; on modernist poetics, 121–22; on the “mythical method,” 23n14 Ellison, Ralph, 122, 123, 125, 142 Emperor of Haiti (Hughes), 211n1 Emperor Jones, The (O’Neill), 74 England, 244 entertainment, exotic, racist demands for, 74 Epthelia (Freeman), 23n16 erotic love, 14, 55, 56, 62 Erzulie (loa or divinity of love), 10, 15, 18, 56, 57, 61, 79; as a mulatto, 38, 219–20 Eshu-Elegbara. See Esu (also EshuElegbara, Esu-Elegba, and Esu-Elegbara) Esu (also Eshu-Elegbara, Esu-Elegba, and Esu-Elegbara), 14, 22–23n13, 24n20, 89n3, 118, 125–26, 143, 176, 178, 188n1, 196; African words for (Lecbah, Letbah), 127; character traits of and the development of hidden transcripts, 203, 204; as a crossdresser, 144; diasporic “gates” of, 127–28, 143; invocations of, 127–28, 129; as a modernist force of destruction in Their Eyes, 118, 136–37; and the multicolored hat, 130–32, 137–38; primary duty of, 126; and the symbolic North, 129–38; and the symbolic South, 128–29; and Yoruba cosmology, 126–27 Esu-Elegba. See Esu (also Eshu-Elegbara, Esu-Elegba, and Esu-Elegbara) Esu-Elegbara. See Esu (also Eshu-Elegbara, Esu-Elegba, and Esu-Elegbara) “Esu-Elegbara, the Yoruba God of Chance and Uncertainty” (Ogundipe), 130

Index

ethnography, 49 ethnology, 23n14 Etienne, Mambo, 158 Everglades, Bahamians and African Americans in, 87 evil, possession by, 232 Ezili Danto, 14, 57, 78, 81, 219, 220; association of with motherhood, 74; black skin of, 78–79; power of to destroy, 79; rage of, 80, 90n9; as representative of romantic love and erotic sexuality, 54 Ezili Freda, 14, 52, 54, 59–60, 81, 90n6, 156, 193, 219; entrance of to the peristyle, 76; fate of, 60–61; fertility of, 59; iconography of, 78; idealization of as the sexual woman, 55–56, 59; identification of with the Mater Dolorosa, 60; inability of to find satisfaction in love, 61; initiates of, 58, 76; as a mulatta, 74; offerings to, 55; physical description of, 75–76; as representative of the springtime, 53; ZNH’s admiration of, 53 Fa, 182, 185, 188n1 Faces of the Gods, The (Desmangles), 89n1 Faulkner, William, 133 female agency, and Vodou imagery, 74–82 Ferguson, James, 200 Fernández Olmos, Margarite, 198 fetishism, 175 Fischer, Sibylle, 6–7 Fisk Jubilee Singers, criticism of by ZNH, 84, 85 Florida, 252; shaping of by Cuban and Afro-Atlantic agency, 168 Florida Historical Quarterly, 4 folklore, 4, 49; African American, 73, 89n2, 192, 242; Caribbean, 73; ethnographic, 192; Haitian, 89n2; literary possibilities of, 73 folktales, 72 Fon people, 14, 15, 243; creation myth of, 178; knowledge system of, 186; religion of, 5, 176

265

Fort Pierce, Florida, 3, 4 France, 7, 244 Frazer, James, 16, 23n14, 99 Freeman, H. Lawrence, 18, 23n16 Freud, Sigmund, 22n9, 46n17, 177, 187; on the distinction between Eros and Thanatos, 231 Frizzy Rooster, 12 From Behind the Veil (Stepto), 119 Frost, Robert, 135 Gabriel (Their Eyes), 250, 251 Gaitán, Tata, 158–59 Garber, Marjorie, 90n7 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 41, 89n4, 106, 122, 182, 193, 196, 198, 204; on ZNH’s use of “Afro-American rhetorical play,” 239; on “signifying,” 196 Gede. See Ghede (also spelled Guedé or Gede [Lord of the Dead, Keeper of the Cemetery]) Geffrard, Fabre-Nicolas, 6 gender, 15; gender politics, 63 Ghede (also spelled Guedé or Gede [Lord of the Dead, Keeper of the Cemetery]), 9, 38, 54; and the humbling of other persons, 80–81 Gikandi, Simon, 177 Gilman, Sander L., 31 Gilroy, Paul, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 Gleason, Judith, 156, 159, 161–62 God (Christian God), 7, 13, 46n18, 75, 231, 250; substitutions for in Their Eyes, 75, 89n4 God (non-Christian God), 15 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 16, 23n14, 99 “goofer,” 208 Gosselin, Adrienne, 122 Graham, Shirley, 23n18 gros-bon-ange belief, 231–32 Guedé (loa of death and poverty), 15, 38, 109, 216, 222–23, 228, 229; Baron Cimetière as a manifestation of, 222–23; use of biting humor as social critique, 224–26. See also Ghede Guest of Honor, A (Joplin), 23n17 Guggenheim Foundation, 11

266 Index

Haiti, 9, 19, 23n18, 39, 71, 170n1, 175, 178; culture and history of, 14; as a free republic, 6; and the grosbon-ange belief, 231–32; persecution of Voodoo practitioners in, 234n3; religion in, 15; rise of amalgamated religion in, 7–8; tension between Voudon and Roman Catholicism in, 5; U.S. occupation of, 6; Voodoo driven underground in, 45n5; Voodoo as unofficial national religion of, 33, 242 Haiti, Rising Flames from Burning Ashes (Pierre), 193 Haitian mythology, 53–54 Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), 5, 7, 191, 193; as a liberation strategy, 15; overthrow of the French in, 201; roots of, 198–99; solidarity of Africans against the French during, 208; Voodoo’s functions during, 194, 196, 200–201, 209, 234n3 Hamlisch, Marvin, 23n16 Haraway, Donna, 34 Harlem, 50; cultural uniqueness of, 86–87; potential of, 87–88 Harlem Renaissance, 3, 72, 84, 177–78, 188n2, 194, 249; struggle of Harlem Renaissance writers to define African American culture, 73–74 Harris, Trudier, 89n2 Hattie (Jonah’s Gourd Vine), 101–2 Havana, 12 Hayden, Robert, 121, 122, 125 Hayes, Elizabeth T., 17 H.D., 119 head rag, 202–3 “Hell Hound on My Trail” (R. Johnson), 147 Hemenway, Robert, 4, 177–78, 216; description of Their Eyes as a love story, 215; on the stereotypes of drums, 73–74; on ZNH’s inspiration for writing Their Eyes, 218 Hemingway, Ernest, 122 Henderson, Stephen, 122 Hercules, 12 Herod the Great, 21n1; and the Slaughter of the Innocents, 21n1

Herskovits, Melville J., 194, 251, 253n5 hidden transcripts, 194–96, 200–201, 203–4, 207, 209–10; and the character traits of Esu, 203, 204, 206; Scott’s examples of, 195 High John de Conquer, 101, 102 Hipsher, Edward Ellsworth, 23n18 Hispaniola, 5 Hitt, Christopher, 166–67 Holloway, Joseph E., 239 Holloway, Karla, 80, 84–85, 95 Home to Harlem (C. McKay), 211n1 Hood, Robert E., 22n12 hoodoo, 22n9, 45n4, 50, 70, 96, 100, 114n1, 145, 158; hoodoo doctors, 99, 162; practitioners of, 121; process of, 111 “Hoodoo in America” (ZNH), 197 “Hottentot Venus.” See Bartman, Sarah (the “Hottentot Venus”) hounforts, 7; center post of, 36 houngans. See priests (houngans) “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (ZNH), 74, 158 Hughes, Langston, 18, 122, 194, 211n1, 239 Hurricane Katrina, 154, 230 hurricanes, 154; origin of in Africa, 252. See also Hurricane Katrina; Lake Okeechobee hurricane Hurston, John (father of ZNH), 12, 157, 162 Hurston, Lucy (mother of ZNH), 162 Hurston, Zora Neale (ZNH), 3, 4, 49, 85–86, 117; Afrocentric consciousness of, 113; anthropological research of Voudoun in Haiti, 8–9, 11, 29, 69, 71, 98–99, 125, 243; association of trains with snakes after the death of her father, 247; and becoming an initiate in Voodoo (“going Canzo”), 11–12, 96, 97–98, 100, 158; collecting of and interest in folklore, 50, 186; commitment of to Florida, 166; and the concept of syncretism, 244; criticism of her portrayal of folk characters, 82–83; criticism/reviews of ZNH’s work, 72–73, 82–83, 239, 240; and the “crown of power,” 154–55; death

Index

of, 3; diasporic modernism of, 126, 135, 138–39, 142, 143–44, 150; earliest scholarly publication of, 168; ethnography of, 192; experience of Haitian Voudoun in New Orleans, 12, 95–96, 97, 125, 145, 154–55, 168, 243; familiarity of with conjuring and root work, 95, 97; graduation from Barnard College, 3, 243; grave of, 164; immersion in circumCaribbean ritual communities, 156; knowledge of Voodoo and Voudoun, 8, 95; literary revival of, 4; love and passion for A.W.P., 65n15, 217–19; and the Magic Cat Bone, 98; and modernism, 84–85, 119, 120, 150; mystic home of (water), 110; mythic vision of, 156–57; narrative strategies of, 103; plagiarism of, 158; and the power of invisibility, 98; proposal of for a national Negro cemetery, 164; as “Rain-Bringer,” 154, 155, 158, 159, 165, 167, 168–69, 170n3; reading of Roman and Norse myths and biblical narratives by, 12–13, 50; religion of, 167–68; research of folklore in New Orleans, 12, 96–98; spirit name of, 97; study of anthropology at Barnard College, 50; view of the Sanctified Church, 168; view of Voodoo as a means of attaining equality, 193–94; view of Voodoo as a religion, 178; Voodoo as a site of artistic identity for, 112–13; as a voudienne, 100, 111; and West African Vodun, 241–45; white benefactors of, 72; work of at the time of her death (on Herod the Great), 21n1; zigzag lightning and storm motifs of, 155–56, 158 Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (ZNH), 242–43 Hyatt, Harry M., 111, 158 I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (Walker), 4, 63 Ibo people, 243. See also Igbo people/ nation Idowu, E. B., 176

267

Ifa (god of divination), 126, 160, 161, 163–64, 165, 188n1 “Ifa Art Objects: An Interpretation Based on Oral Traditions” (Abiodun), 136 Igbo people/nation, 188n6, 253n1. See also Ibo people “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (Walker), 4 “Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, The” (Southerland), 4–5, 21n3, 69–70, 192 Institutionist, The (Whitehead), 18 Inventions of the March Hare (Eliot), 135 Invisible Man (Ellison), 122 Irete Ogunda, 160 Ishtar, 16, 17, 53 Isis, 16, 17, 53 Islam, 13 Île de la Gonâve, 104–5 “Iwàpèlé: The Concept of Good Character in Ifa Literary Corpus” (Abimbola), 136 Jamaica, 9, 39, 98, 155, 168, 175; “Nine Night” ceremony in, 162 Jambalaya (Teish), 45n4 James, C. L. R., 198–99 James Weldon Johnson Collection, 9 Janie Mae Crawford (Their Eyes), 3–4, 9–10, 14, 15, 30, 39, 49, 102, 137–39, 144, 177, 238; ability of to read nature’s signs, 79–80; aquatic imagery of, 105; barrenness of, 14, 40, 52, 57, 193; behavior of as a tearful infant, 10; Caucasian features of, 77–78, 226–27; characteristics of the Voudoun deity Erzulie in, 220–21; characteristics of Ezili Freda and Ezili Danto in, 74–75; confrontations with Esu-Elegba, 147– 48; connection of to the Babylonian myth of Ishtar and Tammuz, 53; connection of to the Greek myth of Persephone, 17; desire of for “things sweet,” 76–77; dispossessing of other people’s stories by (finding the authority of her own mouth), 109–10; dissatisfaction with Joe Starks, 64n12; dissatisfaction

268 Index

with Logan Killicks, 180–81; donning of overalls by, 78, 90n7, 229–30; doomed love of, 62; Ezili Freda as a “mythic model” for, 53, 156; envy of, 57; empowerment of, 191; experience of in the muck community, 41–42, 43, 120–21; first kiss of, 180, 183; and the gift of mulatto rice, 10, 109, 128; as the inspiration for self-expression and self-determination, 82; journey of to the horizon, 216; love for Tea Cake, 64n13, 79, 110–11; magic stone power of, 105; marital unhappiness of, 205; openness of to male possession, 108; pear-tree/blossom vision (erotic vision) of, 30, 39, 40–41, 43, 76, 79, 108, 154, 166, 184, 205, 215, 240; perseverance of, 43; physical beauty of, 56–57, 193; play/playfulness of, 229–30; possession of by Joe Starks, 227–28; psychological descent of (the “ninth darkness”), 130, 135, 140; relationship with Tea Cake, 58–59, 64n10, 76, 108, 147, 181–82; resemblance of to the mythical goddess Ezili Freda (Erzulie Freida), 10, 52, 56, 57, 62–63, 70–71, 219–22, 226–33, 237; retrieval of her “girl self,” 110; revelation of, 111–12; reversal of the direction of black migrants, 86; sacredness of, 104, 105; sacrificial rituals of, 105–7; and Shango and Oya, 250–52; spiritual and historical development of, 107–8, 240–41; three marriages of, 10, 16, 58–59, 62, 64n10, 76, 106, 120, 162–63, 185, 192, 215–16; as a “two-headed doctor,” 207–8; vernacular resistance of against Joe’s white-informed patriarchy, 194, 201–9; wearing of a head rag, 202–3 jazz, 132 Jennings, La Vinia Delois, on an “African usable past,” 194, 204, 210 Jesus Christ: baptism of, 245; passion of, 60 Jim Meserve (Seraph on the Suwanee), 156; pacification of Hurricane Arvay by, 159–60 Jochebed, 21n1

Joe (Jody) Starks (Their Eyes), 10, 53, 55, 57, 62, 71, 78, 109, 130, 133, 135–36, 137, 138–39, 145, 162, 166, 177, 191, 192, 206, 215–16, 226; death of, 110, 149, 181; funeral of, 138; Janie’s dissatisfaction with, 64n12, 106–7; as the “Little Emperor (Lord) of the cross-roads,” 10, 117; modern identity of, 118; perception of Eatonville, 202; perpetration of white patriarchy, 201–9; possession of Janie by, 227–28; progressive vision of, 129–30; as self-proclaimed “I god,” 10, 75, 89n4, 106, 129, 135, 227; terminal illness of, 219; white patriarchy of, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 210 John (Jonah’s Gourd Vine), 100–101, 165–66; relationship with Hattie, 101–2; ties of to mastery, 101 John the Baptist, 245 John Buddy Pearson (Jonah’s Gourd Vine), 13, 51, 100, 238, 243, 250; Christian conversion of and fight with the symbolic Damballah, 240–41; funeral of, 249; irreverent prayer of, 249; and the snake god at the crossroads, 246–49 “John Redding Goes to Sea” (ZNH), 12, 149, 155 Johnny Taylor (Their Eyes), 180, 183 Johnson, Barbara, 89n4 Johnson, Robert, 147, 149 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (ZNH), 8, 13, 14, 51, 74, 96, 100, 113, 149, 155, 157, 160, 192, 219, 243, 245, 250; blend of African and Christian religion in (religious counterpoint), 13, 237–38, 240, 252; as a fictional wake for ZNH’s parents, 162; Lucy’s “ecological homecoming” in, 166; presence of Oya in, 165–66; spiritual rebirth in, 247–48; as a West African Vodun male novel, 15 Joplin, Scott, 18, 23nn16–17 Jordan, June, 4 Jordan, Winthrop, 30, 44–45n3 Journal of Negro History, 168 Joyce, James, 17, 23n14

Index

juju house, 51 Jung, Carl, 177 Kaplan, Carla, 215, 216 Kata-Kumba (the great drum), 248–49 Kelley, Robin D. G., 195, 203 Kinnamon, Keneth, 4 knowledge, 185–86 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 118, 123–24, 142, 149 Kongo people, 243 Korngold, Ralph, 199 Kubitschek, Missy Dehn, 124 kufwa (Ki-Kongo: to die), 208 Kumina, 168 Lake Okeechobee hurricane, 230, 234n1; death count from, 234n4 Lamothe, Daphne, 14, 15, 156, 209, 219–20, 221, 222, 237 “Langston Hughes + Poetry = The Blues” (Komunyakaa), 142 Largey, Michael, 193, 194, 195 Lasyrenn, 54 Lauren, Paul Gordon, 201 Laveau (also Leveau), Marie, 97, 99, 154, 158, 159, 164–65 Le Bon Dieu (Le Gran Maît), 7, 227 Legba (also Papa Legba [keeper of the crossroads]), 10, 75, 89n3, 124, 146, 176, 178, 179, 188n1, 192; altar of, 11; as a critical thinker, 185–86; as the embodiment of liminality and indeterminacy, 187; enjoyment of CocaCola and tobacco by, 11; as god of the crossroads, 180–82; identification of with St. Anthony, 244; as linguist, 182–85; as the “opener of gates,” 75, 245; as Satan, 176; as a spirit of the fields and woods, 11l; trees as the symbol of, 184; as the trickster-god, 15, 20n20, 119, 120, 125, 178, 179, 181, 184–85, 187, 196, 226 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 177 Lewis, Cudjo, 158 Lige Moss (Their Eyes), 137, 203, 229 Lillios, Anna, 250 linguistic theory, Saussurean, 182 literary studies, 15–16; and anthropo-

269

logical scholarship, 15; cross-cultural approaches to, 15 “living dead,” 181, 188n4 loa, 7, 10, 16, 34, 38, 81, 105, 192, 200, 237, 241; colors of, 90n5; in Haitian mythology, 53–54; loa imagery in the work of ZNH, 13; of love, 14; speaking and acting of through their devotees (“mounting horses”/mounting serviteurs), 7–8, 30, 37, 54, 76, 218, 247, 248, 251 Locke, Alain, 3, 82, 83, 193; on the cultural uniqueness of Harlem, 86–87; on the potential of Harlem, 87–88 Loco, 11 Logan, Mawuena, 15 Logan Killicks (Their Eyes), 53, 78, 180, 226; African ancestry of, 192; attraction to Janie, 55; failure of his marriage to Janie, 57, 177; Janie’s criticism of, 136; land ownership of, 91n13; marriage of to Janie as a loveless marriage, 76, 215; traditional attitude of, 140 Loko (god of healing), 54 Lomax, Alan, 4, 96; field research of, 21n2 “Looking for Zora” (Walker), 83 Louverture, François-Dominique Toussaint. See Toussaint Louverture, François-Dominique “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot), 122 Lovelace, C. C., 157, 158 Lowe, John, 16, 95, 167 Lucy Potts (Jonah’s Gourd Vine), 100, 101, 246 Lyotard, Jean-François, 187 Macedonia Baptist Church, 101, 246 magic, sympathetic, 5, 12, 99 Maitresse Ezilee, 11 Makandal, François, 198, 199 mambos. See priestesses (mambos) Mammy Water (Mami Wata in Senegambia), 211n5 “Man Who Lived Underground, The” (Wright), 122

270 Index

Margaret Garner (Danielpour), 18; Margaret Garner as a figuration of Erzulie in, 18 Mars, Louis, 46nn13–14 Martyr, The (Freeman), 23n16 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Volosinov and Bakhtin), 126 Mary. See Virgin Mary Mason, Mrs. Rufus Osgood, 72 materialism, Western, 19 Matheus, John F., 23n18 Matrix of Modernism, The (Schwartz), 121 Mawu-Lisa, 178, 183, 188n1; Fa language of, 182, 185 M’Baye, Babacar, 15 McClelland, E. M., 126–27 McDowell, Deborah E., 91n14 McKay, Claude, 194, 211n1 McKay, Nellie, 103 Meisenhelder, Susan, 205 Menke, Pamela Glenn, 14 Meridian (Walker), 45n8 Mercy, A (Morrison), 237 metanarratives, deconstruction of, 182 metaphysics, 176 Methodists, 15, 239, 241, 245 Métraux, Alfred, 7, 54, 57, 75–76, 219, 226 Middle Passage, the, 191, 192, 238 Mikell, Gwendolyn, 44n2, 239 Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 167 minstrelsy, 72, 73, 85 modernism, 20, 85; Afro-modernism, 122–23; “countermodernism,” 118; diasporic modernism, 14, 118, 119, 120, 121–28, 135, 138–39, 142, 143–44, 145–46, 164; and the disruption between objective and subjective realms of experience, 118–19 modernity, 14, 70, 85, 143; black American modernity, 118, 125; Western modernity, 7 Moe, Henry Allen, 11 Montaigne, Michel de, 188n2 Morrison, Toni, 19, 237; images of Western and Central African rituals in her work, 18; on myths, 19 Moses, 13, 17, 21n1, 248; ancestry

of, 22n9; importance of to different traditions and cultures, 52 Moses, Man of the Mountain (ZNH), 13, 16, 17, 95, 155, 192, 219; depiction of Moses in as a “hoodoo man,” 13, 51–52 Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 22n9 Mother Catherine’s Spiritualist Temple, 168 Motor Boat (Their Eyes), 46n20, 144, 251, 253n6 Mrs. Turner (Their Eyes), 144, 145, 227, 229; class and color consciousness of, 41–42, 77–78, 224; faith of in whiteness, 78 Ms. magazine, 4 Muck-Boy (Their Eyes), 144 mulattoes, 31–32, 34; view of black women as sexual objects, 33 Mules and Men (ZNH), 14, 16, 50, 113, 145, 157, 243; High John de Conquer in, 102; “High Walker and the Bloody Bones” section of, 163, 164; “Hoodoo” section of, 96–97, 121; as an immersion narrative, 159; narrative of Marie Leveau’s storm-walking power in, 164–65; Petro ritual in, 138, 139–40; and the presentation of a young “Zora” in, 155; transformation of ZNH in, 159; on the wind as a woman, 160 “Mules and Men and Women” (Wall), 45n4 Mulira, Jessie Gaston, 114n1 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed), 13 Musée de l’Homme (Paris), display of Sarah Bartman in, 31, 31n music, African American, comparison to black English, 85 musicologists, 85 Must God Remain Greek? (Hood), 22n12 mysticism: Haitian, 15–16 myth, 16, 176–77, 187; African American myths, 19; “cyborg myth,” 34; “mythic method,” 17, 23n14, 125 “Myth and Ritual of Ezili Freda in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” (D. Collins), 192–93

Index

mythology, 21n1, 77; Babylonian, 16, 17; disasporic, 118, 125, 135–136; Egyptian, 16, 17, 22–23n13; Ethiopian origin of Greek divinities, 22–23n13; Greco-Roman, 12–13, 16, 17, 22–23n13; Haitian, 53–54; Norse, 13; West African, 130 Nanny (Janie’s grandmother, Their Eyes), 8, 9, 18, 41, 58, 71, 78, 106, 136, 137, 139, 140, 149, 180; insistence that Janie marry Logan Killicks, 107–108; “Nanny’s gate,” 128–29; on the plight of black women, 39–40; speech of after Janie Crawford kisses Johnny Taylor, 183–84 Native Son (Wright), 83 Neal, Larry, 51, 122 “Negro Jazz Grand Opera” (Freeman), 18 negroism, 96 New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (Awkward), 83 New Negro, The (Locke), 74, 86–87; assessment of the contributors to, 90–91n11 New Orleans, 12, 50, 155, 170n2, 253n3; African migration to, 12; vitality of Voodoo in, 158–59, 175 New York City Opera, 18 Newson, Adele S., 4 newspapers, African American, 83 Nigeria, 125, 146, 188n1, 188n6, 211n5, 234n3, 253n1; Ifa divination in, 163 Nobles, Wade W., on “experiential communality,” 210 North, the, 86, 88; the “symbolic North,” 119, 129–38 numerology, 8 Nunkie (Their Eyes), 107, 150n Obatala, 24n20 Ofun Osa, 159 Ogun (also Ogou [god of iron and war]), 24n20, 53 Ogundipe, Ayodele, 130 Olodumare, 253n4 Olodumare, God of Yoruba Beliefs

271

(Idowu), 176 “On Cannibals” (Montaigne), 188n2 “Once by the Pacific” (Frost), 135 O’Neill, Eugene, 74 Opportunity, 82 orí (head), 136, 142 orisa/orisha(s), 143, 144, 145, 150, 241 oshe (double-bladed ax), 252 Osiris, 16, 17, 53 “otherworld,” 216 Ouanga (White), 23n18 Our Mothers (T. Washington), 170n4 Oya/Oya Yansa (god of winds and storms), 15, 24n20, 121, 147, 153, 154, 169, 170n2, 250, 252; agency of, 159, 163, 164–65; animal doubles of (buffalo, cattle), 165; dance of, 160; destruction of horses by, 159; and the founding of the egungun (ancestor), 161–62; as the hermeneutic key to ZNH’s mythic vision, 156–57; in Nigeria, 146; Rain-Bringer as a “road” of Oya, 157; shape-shifting of, 165, 166 Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess (Gleason), 159 Palm Beach (city in Their Eyes), as symbol of human dominion over nature, 42–43 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 198 Pastras, Phil, 242 patriarchy, 191, 193, 197, 208. See also Joe (Jody) Starks (Their Eyes), white patriarchy of patrimony, diasporic, 19 Patterson, Tiffany, 207 Pavlić, Edward, 14, 124, 167 Pelton, Robert D., 175, 176, 179, 181, 187 Pemberton, John, III, 126, 143 Pentecostal Holiness culture, 15, 239, 241, 245 Persephone, 12 Petesch, Donald, 90n10 Pétion, Alexandre, 5 Petry, Ann, 18 Petwo (Petro) spirits, 78, 90n8, 99, 178; the Petro phalanx, 179

272 Index

Pheoby Watson (Their Eyes), 9, 10, 43, 77, 81, 82, 103, 107, 109, 110, 112, 180, 184, 186, 216, 219, 229, 238; unclear visionary powers of, 111 Pierre, Hyppolite, 193, 208 Pinckney, Josephine, 240 plantation romance, 85 play: Western notion of, 225; Yoruba notion of (ere [noun] or sere [verb]), 225; and the Yoruba notion of asé (the power to bring things into existence, to make things happen), 225 pluralism, theological, 248, 252 Pluto, 12 politics: class, 87; gender, 14, 87; racial, 14, 87 “Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk, The: Zora Neale Hurston” (Carby), 85 Pondrom, Cyrena N., 3, 12–13, 16–17 Popo and Fifina (Hughes and Bontemps), 211n1 possession. See spirit possession postenslavement/postcolonial literature, 20 postmodernism, 182 poststructuralism, 186 Pound, Ezra, 119 “Power, Judgment and Narrative in a Work of Zora Neale Hurston” (DuPlessis), 46n19 Pratt, Theodore, 4 predestination, 188n5 priestesses (mambos), 7, 37, 41, 54, 104, 114n3 priests (houngans), 7, 37, 54, 99, 104, 114n3; West African priests, 51 primitive, the (primitivism), 14, 175, 188n2; exotic primitivism, 73, 83, 177; lure of, 72–74 “Problem of Invisibility, The: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston” (Dutton), 125 prophecies, 99 Punter, Percival McGuire, 234 psychology, 23n14 “ ‘Queen of the Niggerati’ and the Nile: The Isis-Osiris Myth in Zora Neale

Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” (Barr), 17 Queen Bee dance, 104 race, 15 Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Kelley), 195, 203 racial uplift, black aesthetic prescriptive of, 3 Rada spirits/energies, 54, 90n8, 99, 140, 178–179, 198, 219; the Rada phalanx, 179 Ramos, Miguel, 157 Rampersad, Arnold, 90–91n11, 122 Reading the African Novel (Gikandi), 177 Reed, Ishmael, 13, 21n4, 44n2, 45n5 Reeves, Dianne, 124 religion, 178; African, 9, 13, 46n15; Afro-Atlantic, 167; language of, 90n10; neo-African religions, 5, 21n4; and theological pluralism, 15, 248, 252 Reser, Dr., 99 “Richard Wright’s Blues” (Ellison), 142 Rigaud, Milo, 114n3 Rodman, Selden, 198 “Role of Myth in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, The” (Pondrom), 16–17 Roman Catholicism, 5–6, 13, 15, 114n3, 234n3, 239, 241, 242, 244; animosity of toward the sacred palm tree, 35–36; Catholic missionaries, 245; Voodoo as an aberrant form of, 33, 245 Roosevelt, Theodore, 23n17 Rosenblatt, Roger, 4 Rukeyser, Muriel, 122 Ryan, Judylyn, 119, 141 Saint Domingue (now Haiti), 5, 12, 196, 198 Sally Lovelace (Jonah’s Gourd Vine), 247 Sam Watson (Their Eyes), 103, 137, 186, 203, 229 Samedi, Baron. See Baron Samedi Santiago de Cuba, 12 Satan, 231 Saut d’Eau waterfall, pilgrimage to, 35 Schwartz, Sanford, 121

Index

Scott, James C., 193, 194–99, 211n3; on appropriation, 195; on hidden transcripts, 194–95, 204, 207 secret societies, 99 Seraph on the Suwanee (ZNH), 13, 156, 159–60; figurative tree circling in, 13 Serpent and the Rainbow, The (W. Davis), 99 serviteurs, 7, 8, 16 sexism, 19 Shango, 102, 104, 146, 155, 185, 237, 238, 240, 248, 250–52; as the owner of “lightning and thunder,” 157 signifying, 182, 184, 185, 186, 196 Signifying Monkey, The: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Gates), 127, 182, 196 Sis Cat, 98 “ ‘Sis Cat’ as Ethnographer: Self-Representation and Self-Inscription in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men” (Boxwell), 192 skepticism, 182 slave revolts, in the Americas, 21–22n6 slave trade: European, 44–45n3; transatlantic, 5 slavery, 52, 74, 183, 184; intraracial slavery, 191 Smith, Bessie, 158 Smith, Jeanne Rosier, 179 Smith, Maria T., 19 Smitherman, Geneva, 197 Snowden, Frank M., Jr., 22–23n13 Song of Solomon (Morrison), 19 “Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin), 123, 132 Sop-de-Bottom (Their Eyes), 224 Soulouque, Faustin, 6 South, the, 88, 168; the mythical South, 85; the rural South, 86; the “symbolic South,” 119, 128–29 Southerland, Ellease, 4–5, 8, 14, 46n15, 69–70, 156, 192, 239 Spain, 12, 244 spirit possession, 37–39, 46n13, 81, 111; and “horses,” 46n14; possession by Guedé, 38; Voodoo spirit possession, 41, 42 Spirits of the Night: The Vaudun Gods of Haiti (Rodman and Cleaver), 198

273

spirituality: African-derived spirituality, 14, 74, 170n4, 175–76; Voodoo spirituality, 39 spirituals: as a form of resistance, 197; operatic performance of, 84; and polyrhythms and blue notes, 85; ZNH’s view of, 84, 85, 91n12 “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals” (ZNH), 85, 91n12 Stepto, Robert, 91n13, 119, 121, 128, 129, 141 Stew Beef (Their Eyes), 250, 251 Still, William Grant, 18, 23n16 Stone, Merlin, 45–46n9 stones, spirit-invested, 105 Street, The (Petry), 18 Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Bell, Parker, and Guy-Sheftall), 4–5, 69 Sundquist, Eric, 85 superstition, 6, 33, 175, 177 Tammuz, 16, 17, 53 “Tea Cake.” See Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods (Their Eyes) Teish, Luisah, 45n4 Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (ZNH), 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 54, 60, 97, 109, 113, 145; account of Baron Carrefour in, 118, 138; account of the god Gede in, 80–81; admiration for Ezili Freda in, 53; animal sacrifice in, 105–6; conclusion of, 102, 155; criticism of, 29, 44n1; definition of Voodoo in, 197; “double vision” of the author in, 44n2; on Haitian gods, 218, 220–21, 226; on Legba Attibon, 75, 125, 127–28, 146; nature in, 43; on people (not gods) as the agents of vision, 103; as a pioneering ethnographic study of Afro-Caribbean society and religion, 29, 44n2; publication date of in relation to Their Eyes, 52, 153, 194, 219; on the social powerlessness of poor black women, 31; Tete L’eau ceremony described in, 99–100, 108–9; uneven tone of, 45n7; and the Voodoo symbol of God, 112; “Voodoo and Voodoo Gods” chapter of, 220–21

274 Index

Tete L’eau ceremony, 108–9 Their Eyes Were Watching God (ZNH), 175–76, 238, 252; absence of Voodoo mysteries in, 100; allusions to Haiti in, 9–10, 63; aquatic images in, 105; and black community, 81; black oral tradition in, 81–82; as a “bold feminist” work, 3–4; Christian theological perspective of, 239–41; classical interpretations of, 16, 62–63; crossroads motif in, 124, 125, 149, 185; cultural identity and Vodou imagery in, 86; diasporic modernism in, 126, 135, 138–39, 142, 143–44, 145–46, 150; the Eatonville townspeople’s PanAfrican collective resistance against Joe’s tyranny in, 201–2, 203, 204–5, 208–9, 210; Esu-Elegba/Legba in, 120, 121, 125, 130, 134–35, 137–38, 144, 148–49, 181; Esu-Elegba and inter-personalization in, 138–41; flower metaphors in, 53; frame narrative of, 191–92; gate motif in, 180; generating impulse for, 217; “god Watchers” in, 111–12; grounding of in West African aesthetics, 176; as a Haitian Voudoun female novel, 15; hellhound image in, 147, 148; holographic manuscript of, 9; hunting in, 166; impetus for the writing of, 65n15, 102–3; influence of Esu’s duplicity in, 204–6; invocations to the Oya-swept dead in, 162–63; meaning of the storm/hurricane in, 42–43, 46n19, 79, 121, 144, 146, 150, 250; misjudgment of by black male critics, 3; the muck as symbolic East in, 141–42; Native Americans in, 79; nature/nature imagery in, 39, 80, 166–67; non-European interpretations of, 16–17; as a novel of transitions, 117–18; parallel between Haiti and Eatonville in, 201–2; porch sitters as “Mouth-Almighty” in, 109; publication of by Lippincott, 11; recurring Voodoo imagery/motifs in, 8–9, 14, 15, 19–20; relevance of to the issues preoccupying black intellectuals, 82; reprinting of, 4; revival of, 4–5; romanticizing of the past in, 87; setting

of, 4; traits of Voudoun divinities in the principal characters of, 10–11; the violence between Janie and Tea Cake in, 217; Vodou imagery and female agency in, 74–82; Vodou symbolism/ imagery in, 70, 74, 75, 194; water ritual in, 108–9; womb images in, 107–8; writing of over a seven-week period, 9, 52, 217–18 Thomas, H. Nigel, 72–73 Thompson, Robert Farris, 8, 36, 45n6, 89n3, 124, 140, 198 Tolson, Melvin B., 122 Tom-Tom (Graham), 23n18 Tony Taylor (Their Eyes), 227 Toomer, Jean, 122 Toussaint Louverture, FrançoisDominique, 198; duplicity of, 199–200; as the major architect of the Haitian Revolution, 199; as Papa Toussaint, 200–201; and Voodoo, 200–201 Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (Bell), 193 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot), 121–22, 125 Treemonisha (Joplin), 18; history and rediscovery of, 23n17 trees, 46n12, 168, 184; as a central Voodoo image signifying sexual and spiritual union of primary male and female deities, 36–37; crucifix tree, 37; figurative tree circling, 13; personification of, 13–14; sacred palm tree, 35–36; sacred trees, 34, 43; tree/ center post symbol, 8, 36; tree of knowledge, 36 Trickster in West Africa, The (Pelton), 132, 176 Trinidad, 170n2 Troubled Island (Hughes), 211n1 Troubled Island (Still), 18 Turner, Luke, 97, 145–46, 154, 155, 158 Turner, Nat, 164 Turner, Victor, 180 Ulysses (Joyce), use of Greek myth in, 17 United States, 7, 99, 175; black communities in, 83–84; occupation of Haiti

Index

by, 6; perceptions of Africa in, 73; representations of Vodou in, 74 Van Gennep, Arnold, 180 Vatican, the, “anti-superstition” campaign of, 6 Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods (Their Eyes), 53, 55, 62, 75, 77, 87, 101, 137, 139, 145, 163, 238; and the blues, 141–42, 146, 147; death of, 11, 60, 80, 107, 120, 121, 177, 232; distrust of Janie, 42; failure to reckon with Esu-Elegba’s interior gates, 147; and gros-bon-ange, 232; house of, 143–44; interpersonal skill of, 148; linkage of with both Legba and Ghede (Guedé), 11, 15, 222–24, 226–33; “possession” of, 79, 252; rabies of, 177, 232, 234n1; rage of, 149–50; relationship with Janie, 41, 59–60, 64n10, 65n13, 140–41, 147, 148–49, 185, 192, 216; sacrifice of by Janie, 106, 107; as “Son of the Evening Sun,” 10–11, 16–17; and tree symbolism, 246 Vested Interests (Garber), 90n7 vever (pattern made by a devotee to honor a loa), 10 Vincent, Sténio Joseph, 6, 234n3 Virgin Mary, 10, 60 Vodou Nation: Haitian Art, Music and Cultural Nationalism (Largey), 193, 195 vodu, 89n1, 95, 114n1 Vodun, 5, 45–46n9, 89n1, 192, 249, 252, 253n1; in the Caribbean, 5, 242, 246; and Catholicism, 242; movement of from West Africa to North America, 242, 252; as a religion of creation and life, 243; and ritual dancing, 240; as a syncretic religion, 242; West African Vodun theology, 238–39, 241–45 Voodoo/Vodou, 5, 16, 44n5, 70, 88, 96, 97, 99, 114n1, 158, 170n1, 234n3; as an aberrant form of Catholicism, 33, 45n6; and African culture, 33–34; African groups with the strongest influence in its development, 211n5; agency of, 192; allusions to in the

275

musical, literary, and performing arts, 23n18; as an ancient faith, 13; basic beliefs and practices of, 7–8; belief of in a “Supreme God,” 197; as a counter to the denigration of Caribbean black women, 33; empowerment afforded by to black women, 71–72; as evil magical practices, 22n9; importance of tree symbolism in, 36–37; interpenetration of nature and the sacred in, 34, 45–46n9; mythic dimension of, 99; as the national religion of Haiti, 33, 242; the Petro rites, 198, 209; phallic imagery of, 112; the Rada rites, 198; reaffirmation of black bodies through, 36; representation of by Hollywood, 7, 89n1; and respectful fear, 208; spirituality of, 39; symbolism of, 83; as a syncretic religion, 34; and the waters of the abyss (Guinea), 230, 232; as a weapon of resistance, 193; worship of black women’s sexuality/vagina as truth in, 37, 41, 104, 112, 153–54. See also trees; Voodoo/Vodou, names for in different countries Voodoo/Vodou, names for in different countries: Candomblé and Macumba (Brazil), 197; Cumina and Obeah (Jamaica), 197; Santeria (Cuba), 197; Shango (Trinidad), 197; Voodoo, Hoodoo, and conjure (United States), 197; Voudoun (Haiti), 197 Voodoo (Freeman), 18, 23n16 “Voudou Imagery, African American Tradition, and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” (Lamothe), 219–20 Voudoun, 5, 16, 17, 170n1, 191, 253n3; allusions to in the work of ZNH, 13–14; circular imagery of (sun, horizon), 13–14; Haitian, 14, 17; imagery of, 14, 17; in New Orleans, 12; official recognition of as a state religion in Haiti, 6; practitioners of, 13; public rejection of, 6; signage of (Yowa), 8; suppression of in postrevolutionary Haiti, 5–6

276 Index

Walker, Alice, 4, 45n8, 83, 142, 239 Wall, Cheryl, 41, 45n4, 46n15, 46n17, 160 Wall, Ella, 160 Walter (Their Eyes), 137, 203 Warnes, Andrew, 208 Washington, Booker T., 23n17 Washington, Mary Helen, 4, 81, 176 Washington, Teresa, 156, 167, 170n3 “Waste Land, The” (Eliot), 99 Watanabe, Nancy Ann, 15 “Water from an Ancient Well: The Recuperation of Double Consciousness” (Ryan), 119–120 waters of the abyss (Guinea), 230, 232 Watson, Joe, 97, 98 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance (Scott), 194–96, 211n3 Werner, Craig, 122, 132 West Africa, 14, 51, 121, 178, 191, 193, 231, 243; cultural traditions of, 118; gods of, 244; influence of on Greek and Roman culture, 22–23n13; traditional beliefs/religions of, 5, 237, 239, 249; West African Diaspora, 50, 231; West African vodu/vodun, 114n1, 192, 243, 244 West Indies, 51 Westernization, 85 Wetmore, Kevin J., 200 When God Was a Woman (Stone), 45–46n9 “When Horses Talk: Reflections of Zora Neale Hurston’s Haitian Anthropology” (Mikell), 44n2 White, Clarence Cameron, 23n18

Whitehead, Colson, 18 whiteness, 78, 79 “Who Is That Fellow in the ManyColored Cap? Transformations of Eshu in Old and New World Mythologies” (Constantino), 130 Williams, Sherley Anne, 4 Willis, Susan, 103 Wilson, Woodrow, 6 women. See African American women; female agency, and Vodou imagery “Words in the Mourning Time” (Hayden), 121, 122 Workings of the Spirit (Baker), 45n4 world religion, 7 Wright, Richard, 3, 122, 125; criticism of Their Eyes, 82–83 Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (J. R. Smith), 179 Yai, Olabiyi, 124 Yoruba people, 5, 170n2, 178, 188n1, 243; belief of in predestination, 188n5; cosmology of and Esu-Elegba, 126–27; divinities of, 14, 15, 20n24, 125–26, 154, 159, 176; importance of orí (head) in Yoruba cosmology, 136; knowledge system of, 186 Yowa (cross-within-a-circle cosmogram), as symbolizing a crossroads, 8 zombies, 99 Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography (Hemenway), 4