The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston

Abstract

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