Hurston’s focus in “Mules and Men” on the life and work of Marie Leveau, is a biographical example that is emblematic of the literary expression of her folkloristic study of Hoodoo in New Orleans. While Hurston’s work is profoundly influenced by the standards and objectives of academic research, her academic heterodoxy is both deliberate and resourceful. Her unique accomplishment is to serve her own creative and professional convictions while invoking curiosity and admiration in her readership, thereby achieving a high degree of authenticity in conveying the many subtleties of New Orleans’ Hoodoo culture. As with the contemporary “post-verite” cinematic style of conveying anthropological research through documentary films, Hurston’s personal participation in the work of her subjects, to the point of ritualistic, magical convergence, softens the clear delineations between fact and fiction, between personal biography and folklore, and between history and folk belief. In the same way that fiction draws the reader into a perfectly blended world of their own and the writer’s imaginations, Hurston makes the world of Hoodoo as real to the reader as it had become to herself, and discovers in the personalities with whom she engages, the same deep truths and complexities that appear in the mythic personalities and melodramas of the gods. To put this idea into the terminology of academic linguistics, we learn from Karla Holloway’s insightful and beautiful linguistic analysis of Hurston’s texts, that “the development of character is critically linked to voice. Voice, as the African word nommo, indicates creative potential. Hurston’s construction of character blends the magic of this African word with the poetry of nature and bodies forth women and men fully invested with the power that union would imply.”
What is fascinating about Zora Neale Hurston, especially after making a preliminary study of Caribbean religion, is her intimate sense of emic perspective with respect to her topics. This essay addresses Hurston’s study of New Orleans Hoodoo culture and practice. In particular I will explore the ways in which Hurston 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. However this essay will focus specifically on the ways that 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 techniques on the basis of the obvious difficulties that an emic approach (by a researcher) presents for the practice of folkloristic study, I am interested in discussing the ways in which such techniques empower the literary and ethnographic work of 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 Hurston’s 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 her 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”. In fact, remarks Walker,
“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 to which 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 Hurston’s work on Haitian Vodun, “Tell My Horse”. 1 However by comparison, what we find is that “Mules and Men” is scanty, a meager collection, at least in terms of a statistical sampling. 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 merely of one Hoodoo doctor of conjuror, but of a number of them. One thing that makes this fascinating is that, from what I have learned of Vodou culture as it originates in the Caribbean, it is nothing like standard practice for a student to move from family to family in the tradition or from teacher to teacher. That may be the expected behavior of an ethnographer, but actual initiation into the Vodun religion or its offshoots 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 larger community. This is where Hurston breaks rules not only from an 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. An ironic case-in-point is the lamentation she expresses when she finds herself unable to comply with Turner (the Hoodoo adept that initiates her into the lineage and practice of Marie Leveau) in his offer to work with her as an equal partner. This may be attributed to “academic necessity” but she does not make her reasoning clear.
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 nourishes those realizations that she conveys in her own work of folklore collection and literary creativity. By responding personally and artistically to real people who for her represent varied expressions of the ideal (ritually realized and expressed) forms of men and women, Hurston invokes for her readers a sense of her own immersion in the mythic experience that is an esoteric object of the practice of Hoodoo adepts, and grapples with the problems revealed by the mythic and the personal embodiments of these ideals. 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”. Meisenhelder observes that 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 in contrast to the Jamaican sense of racial ambiguity, where some of mixed heritage found that it behooved them to be “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 (beyond the obvious influence of personal history) 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, among 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”. Indeed, Zora Neale Hurston was decidedly not “tragically colored.” 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 Luke 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 300 years!
Hoodoo in French New Orleans may doubtlessly be traced to the Vodou culture of French Haiti. It is appropriate to Hurston’s knowledge and assessment of Vodou culture, that she begins her chapter in “Mules and Men” on Hoodoo, from a biblical perspective, as she does her description of Voodoo in “Tell My Horse”. After all, in both places she makes it known that Voodoo begins with the creative act of God. The days of God’s creating activity are depicted in terms of magic spells or words of making. When Hurston says “the way we tell it” she associates herself with an ancient Biblical heritage that perceives the Divinity as the first in a lineage of great sorcerers or makers.
Following the creation, the emphasis is immediately upon the personalities of empowered beings, “Great names in rites that vie with those of Haiti in deeds, that keep alive the powers of Africa.” The objective of these magic makers is to ferret out the secrets of God, or “how to accomplish and do”, or to emulate the activity of God’s voice and hands. While Moses is not the first magus, he is certainly the first great one, who enters into the mountain of God’s certainty and speaks His “rumbling judgement”. Moses learns, by virtue of his connections with various feminine beings, including a mystical serpent, “God’s power-compelling words”. The various symbols of Moses’s power, (especially his staff,) the symbolism of his deeds, (such as invisibility, visioning the form of the Lord, and prevailing in the presence of the divine fire,) and the power-dynamic of his dependent association with feminine initiatory power, beginning with the daughter of Jethro and extending to the snake that bestows the words of power upon him, all set the stage for the mythical cosmology of Hoodoo magic. However Hurston gives us a fully bicameral ontology of divinity through the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Queen of Sheba establishes Africa (Moses is an Ethiopian in a sense, but always a Hebrew first), and the divine Mother or Enchantress as the fulcrum of magical power from which African religion, and by extension Hoodoo emerge. In her text on Hoodoo, she carries this idea to the next level by associating the power of Marie Leveau with the symbolism introduced earlier in the snake imagery and the Queen of Sheba. In an example of what her biographer Hemenway refers to as “unprincipled selectivity”, Hurston informs us in a manner that is more that of a storyteller than of an ethnographer, that the words of power used in Hoodoo are taken from the words Solomon wrote in his book of secrets, words he received from the “talking ring” gifted to him by the Queen of Sheba.
What follows in this tour-de-force explication of the folklore of New Orleans Hoodoo are a couple of examples of what Hurston herself refers to in her analysis of Negro linguistics as the “will to adorn” in metaphor and simile. It is difficult to determine however the meaning or even the sense of placement, in this odd paragraph on “Raw-Head-And-Bloody-Bones”, whom I presume to be the analogous to Baron Samedi’s African protégé , and “High Walker” who may perhaps be associated with Damballah . It is perhaps Hurston’s effort to lend importance in context to neglected symbols, or to associate them with the ancientness of Hoodoo, but she speaks of the “old folks” that tell the origins of things and says, “we speak it again”. What she speaks is that of these two primal forces, it was the dark one (Raw-Head…) that “had reached down and laid hold of the taproot that points to the center of the world.” From this point, she begins the introduction of New Orleans Hoodoo, then moves immediately to her narrative conveyance of the living lore, in a conversation with “Mrs. Rachel Silas of Sanford, Florida” that reveals the paradoxical juxtaposition of secrecy and revelation that characterizes the “thousands in America. . .warmed by the fire of Hoodoo.” For American Hoodoo, secrecy is an even greater concern than it is in the Caribbean cultures. Hurston notes the absence of ceremonial drums (aside from the “great drum” which is mentioned in the work of Turner). Dancing is described as a distraction to keep tourists in the dark and possession is both described and manifested in terms so sedate by comparison with the characteristic expressions of Haitian Vodou, that one hardly gets a sense of the extraordinary from it at all!
Two critical concepts are reflected in the narrative structure of Hurston’s depiction of New Orleans Hoodoo culture. One is the circularity of Hoodoo’s cosmological scheme, (“When the eighth day comes around, He’ll start to making new again.” “Mules and Men”, pp. 183-4); the other is her profound association of meaning with personality, rather than abstract knowledge. It is not ideas, not power, and not the individual that predominate the movement of thought and feeling in Hoodoo culture and in Hurston’s work, but rather a deep circularity of the comings and goings and especially the inter-connectedness of beings profoundly identified with form and feeling experienced in relationship. Relationships are embodied in this life and the next, creation repeats itself, and respect goes out to the respectful, while the lesson of retribution falls heavily upon the heads of the contemptuous. Yet in the midst of all this, the adept conceives of the work of healing as an economics of holiness, (a means of keeping the rabble at bay, distinguishing the sincere from the whimsical or vicious, and making a living.) He must set himself and his inner circle of disciples apart for a higher, inward work of transformation. The adept shares the burden of magical practice with others, for the most part, even a great Adept like Leveau. Yet for all that, these “families” develop bonds of intense affection and love that are lifelong. We can see this in the story of Leveau’s melodramatic death ceremony, which elicited the desperate intervention of her followers, and in the spontaneous and complex coordination of initiated groups enacting ceremonial magic.
For Hurston, academic and literary creativity and productivity seem to be the immediate manifestations of her response to the work of initiation, but there can be no doubt that she sported a charisma that was deeply compelling, or that her obvious attraction toward men and women of distinction in spiritual power was something that was often reciprocated. So it is perhaps not so far-fetched to suggest that she identified deeply with the personality of Marie Leveau herself, or that her initiation by Luke Turner had a somewhat “tantric” component to it, expressed in part by his adorning her with the robe of snake-skin that was his own ceremonial garment and in his plaintive desire for her “lifelong” association. All of this generates a compelling atmosphere in her portrayal of the social and mythical dynamics of Leveau’s personality and magical practice and its ubiquitous influence over the entire New Orleans community. By embracing the most profound approach to Leveau that was available to her, (direct initiation in her lineage), she is able to invoke an extraordinary description of Leveau from Turner as he conveys her story in a liminal state of authentic trance to us, the entranced readers. This description comprises the heart of Hurston’s depiction of Marie Leveau. How wonderful, that instead of just spitting back what she read or heard in some interview, she solicited the deep trust and indulgence of Leveau’s intimate nephew and disciple! At the heart of this description is Luke Turner’s “voice”, and upon this vehicle Hurston “bodies forth” first Turner himself, then Marie Leveau, (whom she has derived or expanded from her embodiment of the African “Queen of Conjure”), and finally her own self by the description of an initiation ceremony that emulates the character and intensity of Leveau’s annual “act of power” (the nine day seclusion, splitting of the waters and emergence, etc.). In all of this is exemplified the complex, multilayered and masterful literary conveyance of a true folklore of religion by a talented scholar and authentic priestess of the ancient tradition, Hurston herself.
Hurston continues with her narrative device of mythic embodiment by conveying a dramatic description of her own initiation that is analogous in style and intensity to Turner’s depiction of the ritual exhibitions of Marie Leveau. Before she reaches this stage however, she is compelled to endure the fire of an absolutely outrageous curse, quoted as from the lips of Leveau herself by her new teacher. She is fittingly stunned by the time he is finished and slinks from the room with her figurative tail between her legs. While the chapters on Hoodoo open with a brief reference to her academic responsibilities, after two paragraphs all of this is left behind. The authenticity of her cultural analysis does not rest upon the laurels of her professional certifications, but upon her capacity to draw the reader hook, line and sinker into an immersion experience of the actual culture. Consequently her power to impress us with graphic depictions of the symbolic humiliations, death and resurrection of a Hoodoo initiation is central to the authenticity of her narrative. Hurston leads the reader through a visionary initiation experience by proceeding in the first person to attain the crown of power that authorizes her service to the Altar. She seems to presume that anyone reading her work is steeped in fascination with the mystical, so she uses the kind of syntax we would expect from a bard recounting an ancient saga in the hall of a king. “… for rest assured that no one may approach the Alter without the crown, and none may wear the crown of power without preparation. It must be earned.” This is not the dry recitation of facts in an academic treatise.
The “crown” of attainment and authority Hurston refers to is akin to the Orishan religion’s “Orisha of the head”, or Gaurdian Angel, emblematic of the divine Self. It is not however a prominent symbol in the Haitian Vodou religion, so its presence in Hoodoo is interesting. It may be taken from the Roman Catholic symbolism that signifies both the suffering (initiation and the crown of thorns) and kingship of Christ (“Christus regnat”). Hurston leaves no doubt concerning the Roman Catholic affiliations of Marie Leveau and of Hoodoo culture in general. Whatever the provenance of the symbol, Hurston’s initiation by Luke Turner is the most intense among all of her initiations, and through it she enters intimately into the identity of woman and self as power-holder. One device that assists her in this matter is her surprisingly banal preliminary reference to Leveau who, in the company of the great mystic Moses who saw the burning bush and of Solomon who “by magic knowed all wisdom”, is presented to us with the simple words “and Marie Leveau was a woman in New Orleans.” This is understatement at its best. Indeed, Zora Neale Hurston as well, was a “woman in New Orleans”, with all that may signify in the company and favor of those who are deemed to be great by a vast and secret magical underground.
In liminal, ceremonial space, what is said is what is. Thereby the overstepping of a bathtub becomes “she has crossed the dangerous stream in search of the spirit”, Zora Neale Hurston the collector of folktales becomes in the imagination of her audience, (and in truth), the fitly named “Rain Bringer”, and her collection and representation of Leveau’s “routines” in the ensuing months becomes far more than a prolific gathering of cultural novelties, such as may be found in the astonishingly prodigious collection of Harry M. Hyatt, “Hoodoo Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork”. Hurston is an insatiable seeker of knowledge with a deep sense that personality and embodiment are respectively the most appropriate modalities of containment and purveyance of that knowledge. That this emphasis on the personal transcends for her even the modalities of tradition and discipleship can be seen in her essay on Father Abraham in “Sanctified Church”. She describes therein a man engaged in “holy work” who learned his trade from nothing more than a yearning felt from his childhood and the spontaneous manifestation of power that he eventually chose to make the source of his livelihood and the essence of his mission. It (the transcendence of tradition and discipleship) is also revealed in Hurston’s freedom from fixation on the practice and discipleship of Luke Turner. When another high priestess, Mother Catherine, asks why she has been approached, she is delighted to hear that Hurston “has come seeking knowledge.” Describing Mother Catherine Hurston states amusingly that “unlike most religious dictators Mother Catherine does not crush the individual.” Indeed Zora Neale Hurston is an individual who will not be crushed, even by the attachment of a man (Turner) that embodies the ideals of African culture and religiosity she so admires and so powerfully expresses in her literature. She fulfills in her life and work this edict of Mother Catherine: “Don’t teach what the apostles and prophets say. Go to the tree and get the pure sap and find out whether they were right.”
Robert Hemenway, often referred to as the biographer of Zora Neale Hurston, makes an interesting distinction between what he considers to be superior and what he thinks is inferior in Hurston’s work. He remarks on the difference “between the scrupulous reportage appropriate to anthropological description and the unprincipled selectivity characterizing esthetic construction. The reporter describes as much as she can of the event. The artist uses the event for her own selfish purposes. When Locke and James Weldon Johnson argued for a conscious art based on folk sources, they were advocating a disciplined irresponsibility to the folk idiom; Hurston had to reconcile licensed irresponsibility with her knowledge of the original source.” Hurston’s study of the Hoodoo culture of New Orleans demonstrates that for the student of literature or of folklore, her work in both fields is mutually complementary, and holds great value in conveying an authentic sense of the actual culture of her time that would not have been achieved had she limited her style to contemporary academic standards of “scrupulous reportage”, whether we are speaking of what was current in her time, or what might be expected from a modern-day scholar of folkloristics. Hurston’s achievement is a blend of fieldwork and fiction that recreates the folkloristic culture it describes and in which her subjects and their deep emblematic significance, to paraphrase Holloway, are “bodied forth” in a critical union of life-force with the fulfillment of creative potential in her construction of character.