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Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
RACHEL STEIN
Siena Coiiege
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 materi-
als 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 ar-
ticulate 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,' Tell My Horse de-
serves recognition as a pioneering ethnographic study of Afro-Caribbean
society and religion,^ 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
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 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 dis-
play at the tellingly named Musee de L'homme in Paris; European scien-
tists literally reduced Sarah Bartman to a sexual curiosity (85-90). In this
defining racist image of black women as sexual beasts, both race and gen-
der were naturalized simultaneously and were based on the belief in fixed-
ly ranked categories: man was defined over and against woman, white
over and against black, human over and against nature, with the "animal-
ity" 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 entitled "Women in the Caribbean," Hurston describes the
conjunction of racism, sexism, and classism in the utter social powerless-
ness of poor black women who are considered the dregs of Caribbean soci-
ety. 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 de-
scribes 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. Mu-
lattoes with adequate white blood, status, and money may have themselves
declared legally white upon the official census records, thus literally eras-
ing their black forebearers—usually the black mothers who bore children
to lighter skinned fathers: "Black skin is so utterly condemned that the
black mother is not going to be mentioned nor exhibited" (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 incar-
nate—as "donkeys" created for nothing more than brute labors and sexu-
al service. Hurston emphasizes that black women's social disempower-
ment 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
468 RACHEL STEIN
going to interfere with providence. . . . It is just considered down here that God made two
kinds of donkeys, one kind that can talk. (58)
Hurston describes in painful detail the crippling effects of the back-
breaking 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 de-
scriptions, 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. (59)
cally 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" (62). As this anecdote demonstrates, in colonial cul-
ture 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 practic-
es that Hurston describes directly challenge the colonial denigration of
black women.* 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.^
Hurston argues against previous researchers who had interpreted Voo-
doo as an aberrant form of Catholicism, or dismissed it as barbaric sup-
erstition. 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 up-
per class believers, who attempt to hide their faith from Western eyes.
Voodoo is a retention of African culture, more widely preserved within the
least Westernized black underclass than among the English-aspiring mu-
latto upper-crust. A syncretic religion, constantly evolving in response to
changing cultural and social conditions. Voodoo encourages a view of hu-
man transformative possibilities, rather than of externally fixed, eternally
static identities.^ Crucially, Voodoo spirituality contests the binaristic hier-
archies within colonial structures that prove so damaging to black women.
In contrast to prevailing colonial stratifications in which one term is de-
nned as over and against the other—such as male over and against female,
white over and against black, spiritual over and against sexual, and cul-
ture over and against nature—Voodoo practices and beliefs emphasize a
border-crossing intermingling of polarities, paradigmatic of feminist the-
orist Donna Haraway's "cyborg myth" of "transgressed boundaries, po-
tent fusions and dangerous possibilities" (154). Haraway imagines her
"cyborg"—a creature part human, part animal, part machine—as symbol-
izing a vital alternative to the increasingly deadly Western divisions be-
tween those deemed fully human and those who are seen as less-than-
human resources for profit and consumption. She argues that in breach-
ing assumed boundaries, the cyborg has the potential to disrupt stratified
colonial orders that depend upon binaristic differentiation. I suggest that
470 RACHEL STEIN
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 interpénétration that disturbs racial and sexual hier-
archy. Voodoo is thus a powerful means of indigenous Afro-Caribbean re-
sistance to colonial strictures.
Voodoo refigures the very representation of black women as sexual
beasts exemplified by the "Hottentot Venus." While Christianity, the pre-
vailing 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 cere-
monies are held at sacred trees, stones, and in particular at springs, grot-
tos and waterfalls inhabited by loa, or spirits. While in Western theological
tradition worshippers must forswear the natural world and carnal exis-
tence in order to gain the transcendent realm, in Voodoo bodily proximity
to nature is a means to the divine.
Voodoo adherents, many of them black women, make a yearly pilgrim-
age 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 cele-
bratory 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 froni sordid
things once each year to go into an ecstasy of worship of the beautiful in water forms. (232)
The bodily, ecstatic immersion into the sacred waters ceremonially frees
the black worshippers from their "sordid" existence within the colonial or-
der and transforms them into a beautiful tableau rivalling even Dore's
classic portrait of sacred transport.' 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. Litde 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 vir-
BLACK WOMEN, NATURE AND VOODOO 471
gin." 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 vari-
ous 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 in-
censed 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 ma-
chete 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 tree, but it is reported that several churches have burned on that site. One was de-
stroyed by lightning. (230-31)
The people's worship of the miraculous tree poses a clear threat to Catho-
lic 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.* 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 sacraliza-
tion of nature and also indicates the powers of Voodoo spirituality to un-
settle Western dominance.^
The tree, like the waterfall, heals and re-afRrms the black bodies so de-
spised 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"
(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, l" Hurston comments
that the women are remarkably unself-conscious about their nakedness
and about publicly touching sexual areas of their bodies. Unlike standard
Christian asceticism which adhors women's sexual pleasure, the ritual of
the tree embraces female sexuality as a natural manifestation of spirit.'^
The tree, as Hurston would have know, is a central Voodoo symbol and
often signifies the sexual and spiritual union of the primary male and fe-
472 RACHEL STEIN
male deities. Robert Thompson notes that the tree is central to many Voo-
doo 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 sacremental sexual embrace
of the primary deity, Damballah, and his wife Ayida Hwedo, joined in an
"ecstatic union" of male and female principles (187).12 The sacred tree,
then, as an image of spiritual and sexual ecstasy, counters the Judeo-
Christian images of the tree-of-knowledge and the crucifix-tree that rep-
resent 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 reposito-
ries of sexuality, in the image of the serpent-twined sacred tree, the sexual
embrace manifests divine union. This tree-and-serpent emblem symbol-
izes 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, dis-
embodied ranks of being. Voodoo refuses such distinctions between spiri-
tual and carnal, and views sexuality as sacred, to be worshipped as the
divine source and ultimate mystery of life. Whereas Western views de-
spised black women as the repository of bestial sexual desire, and
even—as in the case of Sarah Bartman—regarded their genitals as scien-
tific evidence of their kinship with apes. Voodoo ceremonially worships
black women's sexuality as the female aspect of the deity. Hurston de-
scribes 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 tbe 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. (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.
BLACK WOMEN, NATURE AND VOODOO 473
Women dressed like men and men like women. Often the men, in addition to wearing fe-
male clothes, thrust a calabash up under their skirts to simulate pregnancy. Women put on
men's coats and prance ahout with a stick between their legs to imitate the male sex organs.
(Tell My Horse m)
Race and color divisions are also crossed as the loa of one racial back-
ground may possess believers of a different racial composition. For exam-
ple, because the primary female loa Erzuhe 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" (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 posses-
sion, Guede 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 Guede permits
the despised lower class blacks to talk back to their otherwise invulnerable
474 RACHEL STEIN
social superiors. In fact, Hurston suspects that peasants at times feign pos-
session 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. (221)
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 ahle to find o u t . . . 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 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" (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, Janie's pear
tree image radically revises the binary oppositions informing the defini-
tion 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 sing-
ing 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 hranch 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. (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 "revela-
tion." 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 confiâtes 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 revelatory. Like the Voodoo
ceremony described above, during which the priestess's vagina is revealed
476 RACHEL STEIN
rization by notmg that "We'se ah mingled people and all us got black kin-
folks as well as yaller kinfolks" (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 ofJanie and his semi-comic but destructive revenge against
the Turners. The beneficent pear-tree vision of harmonious and mingled
relations 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 stand 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 Bahamanians, the storm eventually forces them to look to
God,^* 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 question-
ing God" (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." Colonial ideology is driven awry by the
hurricane.
The power of the wind and lake soon overthrow the normal order, caus-
ing all sorts of frightful reversals and transgressions much like the disrup-
tive border-crossings of Voodoo spirit possession, in which boundaries
between classes, races, sexes, human and nature, living and dead, no long-
er hold. Nature rages out of control, ferociously destroying the compla-
cencies 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" (236). The separation of humans and animals, too,
disappears before the storm: "They passed a dead man in a sitting posi-
tion 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 indistinguish-
able to the men forced to attempt to sort them into segregated mass
graves.'^ The city of Palm Beach, symbol of progressive human dominion
over nature, as well as a site of extreme racial segregation, is decimated by
478 RACHEL STEIN
the hurricane, while the more adaptable and fluid community of the
muck survives the ravages more or less intact.^"
Throughout her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie has acknowledged
the interpénétration of polar extremes, professing her willingness to risk
pain in order to approach bliss. As she told him at the onset of the hurri-
cane: "If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at
dusk" (236). Venturing with Tea Cake into the rough and rich life of the
muck, surviving the horrendous trials of the storm, and enduring the fi-
nal trauma of Tea Cake's death, Janie has, as she tells Phoebe, 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
fishnet. 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 inter-
mingled and one may roam "all over," free of imprisoning demarcations.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, as in Tell My Horse, the Voodoo-in-
formed vision of nature as site were 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 non-polarized social-natural relations that might refi-
gure 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 Afri-
can-derived belief
Notes
1. See, for example, the lukewarm critical reception that Robert Hemenway notes in
Zora Neale Hurston, and more recent critical dismissals of this text, such as Lillie Ho-
ward's Zora Neale Hurston and Hazel Carhy'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 dis-
missed because of her authorial "double vision," through which she eschews anthro-
pological objectivity for historical analysis of social inequities and insider accounts of
B U C K WOMEN, NATURE AND VOODOO 479
rehgious 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 cere-
monies which Hurston presents from an internal perspective. Mikell views Hurston
as a forerunner of contemporary ethnography, rather than a failure.
Similarly, Ishmael Reed's forward to the 1990 Harper and Row edition ol Tell
acknowledges Hurston as a major, pioneering Voodoo scholar and proto-postmod-
ernist. Reed terms her authorship of Tell "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 re-
sponsible 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, rep-
resentations 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 concep-
tion 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 bestial-
ity, which it was not.
In Black Feminist Theory, Patricia Hill Collins argues that this conception 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 of 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 Hoo-
doo. 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 hoo-
doo, women were the spiritual equals of men. They had like authority to speak and
to act." (21)
Houston Baker has a chapter on Hurston and Hoodoo in his book on Afro-American
women writers. The Workings of the Spirit. He argues that Hoodoo heals the violent rifts
among blacks that Hurston describes in the early sections oí 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 forward to the 1990 edition oiTell, Ishmael Reed notes that Voodoo was driven
underground in Haiti shortly afterward, by the time Hurston's study was first pub-
lished in 1938 (xi).
6. Robert 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 chang-
ing the colonial "readings" of the images.
480 RACHEL STEIN
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
de Plessis 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"
(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 non-resistance of the muck dwellers.
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