Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

Zora Neale Hurston was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement (See: Background), as well as a poet, playwright, and anthropologist. She is best known for her work on African-American folklore and culture, and for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is widely celebrated as one of the greatest examples of 20th-century African-American literature.

Born in Alabama in 1891 (although she would later claim a birth date of 1901), Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida’s first all-Black town. She left home when she was 16 and was married and divorced three times over the course of her life. Living in New York during the latter part of the Harlem Renaissance, she associated and collaborated with many major African-American writers and intellectuals of the era, including Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and Wallace Thurman (1902-1934). Hurston helped to found numerous magazines and journals, and published dozens of short stories, plays, and essays in addition to her major novels and ethnographic studies.

Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University under the famed “Father of American Anthropology” Franz Boas (1858-1942). Boas was revolutionary in his rejection of scientific racism and evolutionary methods of studying culture. His theories of cultural relativism allowed for objective comparative study of different cultures, including the previously neglected or denigrated cultures of the African diaspora. Hurston was inspired and influenced by his teachings; she conducted ethnographic fieldwork of her own in the Black communities of the Southern United States and in the Caribbean. Her ethnographies Tell My Horse and Mules and Men remain seminal works in their fields.

Politically, Hurston was a Republican who opposed Communism and criticized perceived socialist handouts such as Roosevelt’s New Deal. Although she supported the abolition of the oppressive Jim Crow laws, she rejected many of the ideals espoused by early Civil Rights activists. Hurston believed that African Americans could empower themselves and achieve equality while remaining separate from mainstream white American culture and protested that enforced integration was a violation of civil liberties. She valued African American heritage and traditions and feared that decreasing barriers between white and Black Americans would threaten their unique culture. Part of her motivation in writing Tell My Horse and other ethnographic works was the desire to record and preserve Black heritage and culture.

Despite her early literary success, Hurston struggled financially in her later years. Her formerly generous patron, Charlotte Mason (1895-1954), retracted support and banished Hurston from her circle following clashes over the overbearing and controlling conditions of Mason’s patronage. Hurston worked many jobs over the course of her life in addition to writing, but died in relative obscurity, impoverished and in a welfare home at the age of 69. Her work had faded from public consciousness during the later years of her life. This was likely due in part to her unpopularity with many of the younger African-American literati of the era because of her political convictions and controversial use of dialect transcriptions.

Widespread interest in Hurston was rekindled, however, by author Alice Walker’s 1975 article Looking for Zora (Originally titled In Search of Zora Neale Hurston), wherein Walker seeks out and rediscovers the location of Hurston’s unmarked grave. Hurston is now recognized as one of the most significant African-American writers of the 20th century.