The Zombie In/as the Text: Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston struggled to achieve personal voice against prevailing attitudes about race, and in her writing there is clear connection between voice and self-empowerment that has been explored extensively in Hurston criticism. (1) Her voice was constrained in part by expectation of white readers, including her (in)famously condescending patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, that she would confirm their sense of black person's naturally primitive essence. The voyeuristic primitivism of whites vied with competing exhortation of black leaders to their contemporaries to avoid precisely such portrayals of blacks in primitivistic mode, which they perceived as harmful to their cause of intellectual equality. As student of anthropology, Hurston was also expected to employ certain rhetoric of anthropological authority in her ethnographic writing along lines established by Franz Boas for professional folklorist. Faced with conflicting versions of how the Negro should be presented, Hurston felt acutely her vulnerability to criticism from all sides. In his influential essay On Ethnographic Allegory, James Clifford suggests that ethnographic writing is by definition allegorical, allegory being a practice in which narrative continuously refers to another pattern of ideas or events. A narrative can be said to be allegorical in meaning when an Other story is inscribed alongside story being told that undermines or competes with its primary intention (Writing Culture 98-99). The Other story told in Tell My Horse (1938) is that of author's struggle against being rendered voiceless, of having her self-affirming voice silenced. A travel book about Jamaica and Haiti with ethnographic material on voodoo, Tell My Horse is considered an embarrassing text for its author, and book-length studies of Hurston tend to marginalize it or ignore it completely. (2) Her biographer Robert Hemenway considers it Hurston's poorest book, chiefly because of its form (248). Deborah Gordon describes it as more innovative pastiche than traditional ethnography, as [s]imultaneously travelogue, piece of journalism and political analysis, conventional ethnography, part legend and folklore with art criticism and commentary thrown in ... (154). The generic instability of Tell My Horse--the refusal to fix material in coherent recognizable genre--is in fact characteristic of narrative style, and for her experimental bent she has been seen as precursor to contemporary experimental ethnography. (3) In Mules and Men, her one recognized ethnography (Gordon 149), Hurston presented black folklore of South as language system used to empower black self in cultural milieu where blacks were subordinate. The folktales she collected and celebrated featured folk heroes from time of slavery who dramatized slaves' uncanny ability to get upper hand through verbal banter in exchanges with white masters. The white master, unable to detect duplicity of slaves' language, became its victim. The lesson of this folklore is that language has power to be aggressively subversive, to give voice to those on margins who seek to challenge their oppressors. Hurston adapted these strategies in her own writing to channel aggression indirectly through verbal play; Deborah Plant notes that of behavior recognizable in life and work--silence, shamming, tomming, signifying, masking, and posturing--are all patterns of behavior exhibited in archetypal African American trickster figures like John, High John de Conquer, and Jack (45). The master trickster trope generally associated with Hurston is signifying. (4) Critics have identified self-reflexive strategies of ironic distancing--of signifying--in works by Hurston such as Mules and Men and Dust Tracks on Road, but readers of Tell My Horse have been strangely literal-minded. Much of what is said in Tell My Horse, however, is said indirectly through allegory and irony. …

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