What I find fascinating about Zora Neale Hurston, especially after making a preliminary study of Caribbean religion, is her intimate sense of perspective with respect to her topics. In Hurston’s study of New Orleans hoodoo culture and practice, she draws her audience into the details of her topic through the use of local color, especially dialect, and by means of her personal involvement with her expert subjects. She attains a degree of familiarity with her subjects and their work that would not be possible by means of standard academic ethnography. In fact Hurston’s work on hoodoo culture challenges the standards of academic objectivity in many ways. For example, she breaks down the simple delineation between fact and fiction, and between subject and researcher, in her presentation of the mythic personality of Marie Leveau. Rather than challenge her work on the basis of the obvious problems that this sort of approach elicits, I am interested in discussing the ways in which such an approach empowers literary and ethnographic creativity for Zora Neale Hurston.

Hurston was clearly motivated by intense professional curiosity, as well as a deep and innate commitment to her own racial heritage. Unfortunately the realities of economic necessity did at certain points in her career place limits on her capacity to make ideal creative and professional choices. In the dedication to one of her books, Alice Walker writes an essay “On refusing to be humbled”. In it Walker compares Hurston with Bessie Smith, saying that both the author and the singer “knew shit” when they saw it (such as patronizing attitudes from white people), while both depended upon the patronage of whites. Of Hurston, Walker remarks that Hurston’s work, (“writing down the unwritten doings and sayings of a culture nobody else seemed to give a damn about, except to wish it would more speedily conform to white, middle class standards”), unlike Smith’s, did not “pay”.
“Financial dependency is the thread that sewed the cloud over Hurston’s life, from the time she left home to work as a maid at fourteen to the day of her death”, says Walker, pointing out that Hurston was “denied even a steady pittance, free from strings, that would have freed her to do her best work.”

Ironically however, it is precisely to Hurston’s willingness to take risks in the context of pursuing academic responsibilities under the auspices of financial sponsorship that the creative and scholarly success of her New Orleans research may be attributed.

It would be one thing, if with regard to the collection and analysis of various items of folklore relating to Hoodoo conjuration, we found a broad and in-depth survey of the details of a religion such as one finds in her work on Haitian Vodun, “Tell My Horse”. However, by comparison, what we find in Hurston’s “Mules and Men” is scanty, more of a small sampling, at least from the point of view of a statistical significance. Where this work finds its depth is in the description she gives us of her personal exploration of the culture, and her intimate participation as a disciple, not of one Hoodoo doctor of conjuror, but of a number of them. One thing that makes this fascinating is that it is, from what I have studied of Vodou culture as it originates in the Caribbean, nothing like standard practice for a student to move from family to family in the culture and from teacher to teacher. That may be the expected behavior of an ethnographer, but initiation in Vodou culture is not a matter of spending a few months gaining esoteric knowledge and then moving on to gain more from another teacher. It is a lifelong social commitment to a particular family within the overall culture. This is where Hurston breaks rules not only from the academic point of view, but also uses her academic goals as a basis for breaking with the traditions of the culture itself, thereby gaining a broad perspective that might not be attainable even by an adept practitioner. The lamentation she expresses when she finds herself unable to comply with Turner’s (the Hoodoo adept that initiates her into the lineage and practice of Marie Leveau) offer to work with him as an equal partner, due to her “academic necessity” is an ironic case in point.

We have to ask ourselves what the contingencies may be in Hurston’s ethnographic research, and try to discover how the mechanics of intimate involvement with her subjects and their work nourish the realizations that she conveys in her own work of literary creativity. By responding personally and artistically to real people who for her represent varied expressions of the ideal (ritually realized) forms of men and women, Hurston invokes for her readers a sense of her own immersion in the mythic experience that is the esoteric object of the practice of hoodoo adepts. For example Susan Meisenhelder describes contrasting images of the male form in Hurston’s fiction such as her assessment of Moses in “Man of the Mountain”. Hurston’s Moses is first portrayed as a creative and empowering triumph of the black soul, who “Like Tea Cake . . . is also a “bee-man,” emotionally expressive, attuned to nature, and supportive of women.” Later, the same Moses becomes “more like Joe Starks – disdainful of women, alienated from the common people and from his own feelings . . . a dictator as ruthless as the Pharoah he sought to overthrow.” Likewise we find male heroes and female heroines in Hurston’s social research, (including herself in the essay under consideration) and these men and women embody for her the very same noble characteristics and internal contradictions that she recognizes in the god-like Moses and the Queen of Sheba, with whose descriptions she introduces her study of New Orleans hoodoo.
Hurston discovered in her studies impediments of class, race and gender that confounded for both black people and whites what it meant to be black. In “Tell My Horse”, Hurston describes some of the problems slavery created for the self-identification of Jamaicans as black and as African in an English colony.

“To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattoes give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica’s black mass. Under ordinary circumstances the trend would be toward the majority group, of course. But one must remember that Jamaica has slavery in her past and it takes many generations for the slave derivatives to get over their awe for the master-kind. Then there is the colonial attitude. Add to that the Negro’s natural aptitude for imitation and you have Jamaica.”

However, speaking of American blacks, Hurston says that contrasting the Jamaican sense of racial ambiguity, where some of mixed heritage found it behooved them get “declared legally white”, blackness in America means that “any one who has any colored blood at all, no matter how white the appearance, speaks of himself as black.” In the case of both cultures however, it requires a writer with a deep sense of cultural self-respect and honor to find her own optimism reflected in positive trends that the predominant white culture viewed as merely the persistence of primitivism. She says,
“..a new day is in sight for Jamaica. The black people of Jamaica are beginning to respect themselves. They are beginning to love their own things like their songs, their Anansi stories and proverbs and dances. Jamaican proverbs are particularly rich in philosophy, irony and humor.”

It may be this persistence of painful race-memories, the long separation from the African homeland, the humiliation of slavery, rape and racial dilution, and the illusory promise of material advantage implied by whiteness in colonial culture, that influenced Hurston’s decision to depict in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” a township and a work-camp effectively devoid of a single white soul, (except it be in caricature), where “blackness” could unfurl through linguistic and cultural “bodaciousness” the unself-conscious and natural potency, intelligence, rhythm, energy and earthy spirituality of its genuine and ancient heritage. Yet this blackness celebrated in the works of Zora Neale Hurston was discoverable by her precisely because it affirmed the “tall-tale” of her own soul, where she flourished as a child that could not perceive her own blackness as a distinguishing force in an all black township, with other blacks who “deplored any joyful tendencies in me”, and who contrasts her own pride with the “sobbing school of Negroehood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it,” and who is “too busy sharpening [her] oyster knife” to “weep at the world”. Without this empowered sense in her self-identity, it would not have been possible for Hurston to exhibit the kind of indefatigable determination by which she was able to gain the trust of her subjects, especially Turner. It also made it possible for her to “go where no man has gone before” (so to speak…), and furthermore, to take her readers along for a journey into the heart of secret rites and sinister powers, a journey that takes us no farther than the back yard of our own homeland, and into the lives and hearts of a noble people that have remained invisibly, before our very eyes, for over 200 years!