Tell-My-Horse -Voodoo-And-Life
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TELL MY HORSE VOODOO AND LIFE IN HAITI AND JAMAICA ZORA NEALE HURSTON WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY ISHMAEL REED SERIES EDITOR: HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. To Carl Van Vechten God’s image of a friend Contents Foreword v Part I Jamaica 1 1 The Rooster’s Nest 3 2 Curry Goat 11 3 Hunting the Wild Hog 21 4 Night Song After Death 39 5 Women in the Caribbean 57 Part II Politics and Personalities of Haiti 63 6 Rebirth of a Nation 65 7 The Next Hundred Years 73 8 The Black Joan of Arc 93 9 Death of Leconte 103 Part III Voodoo In Haiti 111 10 Voodoo and Voodoo Gods 113 11 Isle de la Gonave 133 12 Archahaie and What It Means 139 13 Zombies 179 14 Secte Rouge 199 15 Parlay Cheval Ou (Tell My Horse) 219 16 Graveyard Dirt and Other Poisons 237 17 Doctor Reser 245 18 God and the Pintards 259 Appendix 263 I Songs of Worship to Voodoo Gods 265 II Miscellaneous Songs 279 Afterword 289 Selected Bibliography 301 Chronology 305 About the Author Cover Copyright About the Publisher FOREWORD line from Countee Cullen’s famous poem “Heritage” typifies A the attitudes of many “educated” white and black Americans for whom African and Neo-African religions are exotic faiths whose gods, “quaint…outlandish…,” and “heathen,” are “naught” to them. It took the restless intellect of Zora Neale Hurston to make Neo-Af- rican religion, and its gods, more than “naught.” The result was Tell My Horse, a major work of the Voodoo bibliography, which includes books written in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Creole as well as English. The majority of these works have yet to be translated, which makes Hurston’s work a treasure for the English reader who is curious about the subject. Though Voodoo had been driven under- ground by the time Tell My Horse was published, there has been a resurgence recently, due to the arrival in the United States of many of its followers from South and Central America and the Caribbean. Since white American readers are suspicious of the scholarship of those they deem to be aliens—they seem to need one of their own to translate—the efforts of such scholars as Robert Thompson, Robert Gover, and Michael Ventura and musicians like Kip Hanrahan and David Byrne have been invaluable in defusing some of the hysteria with which Neo-African religion has been regarded in the United States, a Protestant v country. The contemporary misunderstanding of Voodoo was re- cently shown by the harsh criticism that African priests and Amer- icans like Rev. George A. Stallings, Jr., received from the Catholic hierarchy as a result of their incorporation of the African style into western Catholic rites—even though such blending of styles has been long established in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Haiti, where it is said that the people are ninety-five per cent Catholic and one hundred per cent Voodoo. It is against this back- ground that Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneer work can be appreciated, though one can understand why a writer tackling such a taboo subject would have appeared odd to the intellectually slothful of her time. But Tell My Horse, the result of Hurston’s travels to Jamaica and Haiti, is more than a Voodoo work. She writes intelligently about the botany, sociology, anthropology, geology, and politics of these nations in a style that is devoid of pompous jargon and accessible to the general reader. It is an entertaining book. Hurston’s gift for storytelling is immense, whether writing about the hunting of a wild boar by the Maroons at Accompong (“Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their…courage and in- genuity”), or an account of the extraordinary steps that Jamaicans take to appease a “duppy,” lest it return from the grave and do harm to the living. In one of the book’s very good interviews an informant tells Hurston that “the duppy…is the most powerful part of any man. Everybody has evil in them, and when a man is alive, the heart and the brain controls him and he will not abandon himself to many evil things. But when the duppy leaves the body, it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man ever dreamed of. It is not good for a duppy to stay among living folk.” Part travelogue, Tell My Horse invokes the beauty of Jamaica and Haiti and the sacred zones where African gods continue to dwell—the “good” ones, the Rada group, and the “bad” ones, the Petros. The enemies of Voodoo have exploited rumors associating the Secte Rouge, a Petro sect, with human vi sacrifice in order to defame Voodoo, less a religion than the common language of slaves from different African tribes, thrown together in the Americas for commercial reasons. This common language was feared because it not only united the Africans but also made it easier for them to forge alliances with those Native Americans whose customs were similar. Voodoo has been the inspiration for the major slave revolts in this hemisphere, including the one that ousted the French from Haiti, but just as Christianity has been used by tyrants as a means for persecuting their opponents, Voodoo has been simil- arly abused. Hurston’s account of the Neo-African religion practiced in Haiti is fascinating. She gives a thorough description of the main loas (gods), their needs, their desires, and their powers. The details about art and dance are informative, though she describes the dance as “barbaric.” But the most interesting discussion in Tell My Horse concerns possession, that strange phenomenon during which a mortal is taken over by a god. (One wonders what would happen if “possession,” this amazing phenomenon, were as available to the millions of anxiety-ridden Americans as are the billions of toxic stress-reducing pills that are shoveled across drugstore counters and the illegal substances consumed by Americans that make ours a nation of junkies.) It is interesting to note that a growing number of psychiatrists and physicians are beginning to trace the mental and physical health problems of many blacks—in particular the lack of self-esteem—to the symbolic annihilation to which their culture is subjected by the white-pride school curricula and media. Perhaps another cause of this depression is the severance of any link to the images of their ancient religion. One wonders how the millions of Catholics and Protestants who came to these shores or the followers of Buddhism and Confucianism would have fared had their faiths been driven underground, depriving them of spiritual nourishment, or if their religions had been exposed to the kind of pillorying that Neo-African religion receives in the media and from the mo- vii tion picture industry. Typical of the treatment accorded Voodoo was NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw’s sensational announcement that the drug murders occurring in Mexico in 1988 were the result of Voodoo rites; it was revealed later that the so-called drug cult had been inspired by a Hollywood “Voodoo” film entitled The Believers. Contemporary myths about black literature proliferate, but the fate of the average black writer, male or female, is the same: the nonavailability of their books; reviews that are often influenced by racist ideology or that exhibit a double standard; the difficulty in getting their views aired—these are just some of the problems that hamper their careers. Most would agree with Countee Cullen’s as- sessment that a black writer in a country in which they are treated as aliens is “a curious thing.” For Hurston, though, the human family has room for a President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, a “greedy detestable criminal,” as well as his son, known by the peasants of his time as “fine” and “intelli- gent.” In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, despite their flaws, the men are productive and talented. In Tell My Horse, Hurston de- scribes, without sermonizing, the Jamaican practice of cultivating geishas for the delight of prospective grooms and comments in passing on the practice of polygamy. When commenting about the status of women in the United States, she sounds more like Phyllis Schlafly than Bell Hooks or Michelle Wallace: “The majority of men in all the states are pretty much agreed that just for being born a girl-baby you ought to have laws and privileges and pay and per- quisites. And so far as being allowed to voice opinions is concerned, why, they consider that you are born with the law in your mouth, and that is not a bad arrangement either. The majority of the solid citizens strain their ears trying to find out what it is that their wo- menfolk want so they can strain around and try to get it for them, and that is a very good idea and the right way to look at things.” Ironically, many of today’s feminists would consider such thinking to be “retrograde.” Zora Neale Hurston has also gained the reputa- tion of viii a racial chauvinist. She reserves some of her harshest opinions for black nationalists (Race Men), whom she dismisses as “windbags” and “demagogues.” The Zora Neale Hurston of Tell My Horse is skeptical, cynical, funny, ironic, brilliant, and innovative. With its mixture of techniques and genres, this book, originally published in 1938, is bound to be the postmodernist book of the nineties. But her greatest accomplish- ment is in revealing the profound beauty and appeal of a faith older than Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, a faith that has survived in spite of its horrendously bad reputation and the persecution of its followers.