The Zombie in/as the text: Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse.

Zora Neale Hurston struggled to achieve a personal voice against prevailing attitudes about race, and in her writing there is a clear connection between voice and self-empowerment that has been explored extensively in Hurston criticism. (1) Her voice was constrained in part by the expectation of white readers, including her (in)famously condescending patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, that she would confirm their sense of the black person's naturally primitive essence. The voyeuristic primitivism of whites vied with the competing exhortation of black leaders to their contemporaries to avoid precisely such portrayals of blacks in the primitivistic mode, which they perceived as harmful to their cause of intellectual equality. As a student of anthropology, Hurston was also expected to employ a certain rhetoric of anthropological authority in her ethnographic writing along the lines established by Franz Boas for the 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 a 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 the story being told that undermines or competes with its primary intention (Writing Culture 98-99). The Other story told in Hurston's Tell My Horse (1938) is that of the 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 a travelogue, a piece of journalism and political analysis, a 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 a coherent recognizable genre--is in fact characteristic of Hurston's narrative style, and for her experimental bent she has been seen as a precursor to contemporary experimental ethnography. (3)

In Mules and Men, her "one recognized ethnography" (Gordon 149), Hurston presented black folklore of the South as a language system used to empower the black self in a cultural milieu where blacks were subordinate. The folktales she collected and celebrated featured folk heroes from the time of slavery who dramatized slaves' uncanny ability to get the upper hand through verbal banter in exchanges with white masters. The white master, unable to detect the duplicity of slaves' language, became its victim. The lesson of this folklore is that language has the power to be aggressively subversive, to give voice to those on the 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 the "patterns of behavior recognizable in Hurston's 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 a 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. The first chapter includes a list of Jamaican proverbs that Hurston characterizes as "rich in philosophy, irony and humor" (9). A proverb works by indirection, its surface meaning encoding a latent meaning. For example, Hurston translates "Rockatone at ribber bottom no know sun hot" as "The person in easy circumstances cannot appreciate the sufferings of the poor" (9). The list of proverbs and translations she provides serves as both an example of the sophisticated wit of black folk culture and as a self-reflexive comment on her own narrative sensibility in Tell My Horse.

The title itself invites readers to recognize the double-voiced nature of the text, as it refers to a voodoo rite of possession during which a loa, or spirit, "mounts" a "horse" (a worshipper in a trance-like state) and conveys messages through this person to the participants. The person "mounted" is not held responsible for what he or she says in this context, but is seen as an instrument of the loa, who speaks through him or her. The "horse" is being used to mouth the words of another. At the same time, Hurston sees that the horse is in a position to say indirectly what he or she cannot otherwise say without negative consequences: "Under the whip and guidance of the spirit-rider, the 'horse' does and says many things that he or she would never have uttered unridden.... That phrase 'Parlay cheval ou' [tell my horse] is in daily, hourly use in Haiti and no doubt it is used as a blind for self-expression" (221). Exploiting the ambiguity about the source of the utterance, the "horse's" vulnerability becomes strength in the same way that the strategies of black folklore empower the powerless to say by indirection what they cannot say directly without consequences.

In foregrounding the ambiguity about the provenance of utterances made by the "horse," Hurston points to the double-voiced nature of her own narrative strategy. Just as for the "horse," for Hurston there is both freedom and constraint in language, the possibility for self-expression coexists with the risk of vulnerability, of having one's voice taken over by more powerful others. The horse/loa dynamic may have suggested to Hurston as well her potential complicity in the parasitic ventriloquism that anthropologists perform with unwitting subjects, speaking through them and effectively rendering them voiceless. Hurston's sense of her own vulnerability is mirrored in that of the folk from whom she collected folktales; throughout her career, she searched for a style in which to convey the richness of black folklore as performance in writing without draining it of its dynamic, creative spirit, of its living voice.

Although some critics have felt that Hurston's position on voodoo is celebratory, its potential for malevolent activity seems to have impressed itself deeply on her consciousness. (5) Voodoo's menace lies in its ability to exploit the vulnerability of its victims through sorcery. Hurston's awareness of her vulnerability is everywhere expressed in her writing, as she often dramatizes putting the self at risk. Her autobiography has been read as evasive and incoherent, more concealing than revealing--a stance that suggests a need to protect the self from malicious readers. In Mules and Men she dramatizes her vulnerability by involving her character Zora in a knife fight in a seedy jook [that is, a bar] that she barely escapes unscathed. In the hoodoo section of Mules and Men she finds herself in New Orleans in the exceedingly vulnerable position of being stretched out naked on a mat for three days during her initiation into the mysteries. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the novel's protagonist Janie is wounded in a fight to the death with her lover Tea Cake who, maddened by rabies, bites her arm and draws blood. This wound marks at once Janie's vulnerability and Hurston's sensitivity to the vulnerable position; as James Clifford notes, the etymology of the word "vulnerable" relates it to rending or wounding (Predicament 43). (6)

Robert Hemenway reports that Hurston became deathly ill in Haiti and, fearing that her illness was caused by voodoo poisons as a warning to end her quest to uncover voodoo mysteries, she in fact was frightened enough to keep her distance (248-49). The fear of physical harm that intervenes in Hurston's research causes an "epistemological failure" that can be sensed in the distance that she creates rhetorically in the text with respect to voodoo. (7) One way that Hurston distances herself from the voodoo material is through a liberal use of unattributed, generalized statements such as, "All over Haiti it is well established that Damballah is identified as Moses" (116); "The rod of Moses is said to have been a subtle serpent" (116); "They say that many witch doctors in Africa can so hypnotize a snake that it can be made rigid and seemingly lifeless and carried as a cane and brought to life again at the will of the witch doctor" (118); "The average houngan says that he is given the white cock and hen because he guards domestic happiness" (119); and "It is said that no girl will gain a husband if an altar to Erzulie is in the house" (122). (8)

Another distancing device that Hurston uses is to set the terms of voodoo ceremony in quotation: "The 'baptism' or initiation into the cult of Erzulie is perhaps the most simple of the voodoo rites. All gods and goddesses must be fed, of course, and so the first thing that the supplicant must do is to 'give food' to Erzulie ... food is needed at the ceremony, during which the applicant's head is 'washed'" (124). The stance of the distanced social scientist manifested in these rhetorical structures is one that Hurston scrupulously avoided in Mules and Men, but adopted in Tell My Horse even in describing ceremonies she personally observed. She distances herself from a ceremony in which a dead houngan is made to sit up and then lie back down by suggesting it was a staged rather than a genuine event: "The body of the dead man sat up with its staring eyes, bowed its head and fell back again and then a stone fell at the feet of Dieu Donnez, and it was so unexpected that I could not discover how it was done" (142). Hurston further casts doubt on the reality of voodoo by qualifying its beliefs with such statements as, "if you want to look at it like that" (142). Another kind of distancing is accomplished by making plain her distaste for the animal sacrifices performed at every ceremonial event:

      Dieu Donnez broke the wings of
   one of the chickens, then its legs, holding
   the throat of the fowl in such a way
   that it did not cry out as the sickening
   sound of cracking bones broke through
   the singing. Then he wrung its neck. In
   every other ceremony the throat is cut.
   The supposedly dead bird was placed
   upon the signature, but after what
   seemed like a full minute, even with its
   broken thighs, it leaped in its death
   agony and crashed into me. My heart
   flinched and my flesh drew up like
   tripe (153).

Hurston's desire to distance herself from voodoo suggests her sense of vulnerability with respect to its powers. (9) An alleged victim of the malevolent powers of voodoo was the zombie whom she encountered in a Haitian mental hospital. A zombie is created when the body of someone who has seemingly and inexplicably died is raised from death to serve the interests of a controlling bocor, or sorcerer. A zombie resembles the person it once was, but its voice and will have been taken away through sorcery (Fig. 1). Hurston suggests that a drug is administered to simulate death. The victim is buried and then later uncovered and revived, but the drug has fulfilled its function: to destroy "that part of the brain which governs speech and will power" (196). She describes how a zombie functions as a sacrificial offering, a soul that is taken in order to be "given as a sacrifice to pay off a debt to a spirit for benefits received" (182). She notes the practice's resemblance to "the old European belief in selling one's self to the devil but with Haitian variations" (184).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Hurston goes to the mental hospital to photograph the woman alleged to be a zombie, and confronts an abject figure who in her complete submission embodies the ultimate consequences of the self's vulnerability to others, "the broken remnant, relic, or refuse of Felicia Felix-Mentor" (179). The zombie represents the uncanny return in the text of fears that Hurston tries to repress--of the dispossession of voice and the loss of the self's autonomy through submission to the will of others, the death-in-life of the tragically vulnerable silenced black woman. (10) Hurston ponders the motives that might lead someone to traffic in souls: "Why do men allegedly make such bargains with the spirits who have such terrible power to reward and punish? When a man is ambitious and sees no way to get there, he becomes desperate. When he has nothing and wants prosperity he goes to a houngan and says, 'I have nothing and I am disposed to do anything to have money'" (185). It is tempting to see underlying this bit of ethnography a veiled allusion to Hurston's own uncomfortable bargain with her wealthy patron Charlotte Mason, who was known to wield a "terrible power to reward and punish."

But if Hurston sees in the zombie a portrait of the self whom she struggles to deny--a virtual slave to the malevolent machinations of manipulative others--at the same time, in the act of photographing the woman, she takes on a different role entirely: participating in the woman's subjection, exploiting her vulnerability, colluding in a sense with the bocor/zombist to serve the interests of anthropology while performing her own submission to authority figures like Boas and her patron: "I listened to the broken noises in its throat, and then, I did what no one else had ever done, I photographed it" (182). Hurston clearly sees this act as a violation; she notes that the woman/zombie "kept on trying to hide herself" and that ultimately "the doctor uncovered her and held her so that I could take her face" (195).

The hospital doctor assists Hurston in her quest to capture the zombie's wretched image, despite her instinctive resistance. Similarly, Hurston's mentor Dr. Boas aids, abets, and legitimates her intrusions into the private space of others in the name of scientific knowledge. Anthropology, in this light, may be seen as a parasitic practice bent on turning subjects into horses/zombies. Clifford suggests that ethnographies enact "allegories of salvage" in a pastoral mode; that is, they attempt to preserve in writing--to salvage--practices that are transient and would be lost forever if not recorded. But "Since antiquity," he notes, "the story of a passage from the oral/aural into writing has been a complex and charged one. Every ethnography enacts such a movement, and this is one source of the peculiar authority that finds both rescue and irretrievable loss--a kind of death in life--in the making of texts from events and dialogues.... The text embalms the event as it extends its 'meaning'" (115-16). In this sense, the zombification of vulnerable human beings as embodied in the silenced, abject woman photographed by Hurston is suggestive of what the process of textualization of oral speech at the heart of Boas and his colleagues' salvage operations threatens to become: something parasitic and aggressive that sucks the life/soul out of its subjects.

There are many suggestions in Hurston's work that her desire to capture the spirit of living black folklore traditions is in conflict with her sense that consigning a real-life performance to its textual double is sacrificial in nature. The "giving" of others--that is, the deaths exchanged in order for a narrative to be produced--can be seen, for example, in the deaths of Starks and Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God as well as the deaths of short story protagonists like John Redding ("John Redding Goes to Sea"), Spunk ("Spunk"), and Sykes ("Sweat"), among others. In Dust Tracks on a Road Hurston speaks of her great but conflictive love for a man she identifies as P. M. P. She confesses that she "tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God" (211). Writing for Hurston involves "embalming" passion (the real) in a text. Tea Cake must die for Janie to tell her tale (and she herself is wounded in the process). Writing traitorously feeds on these corpses, exploits them, as the parasitic bocor does the worker zombie. (11)

In Picturing Ourselves, Linda Rugg draws an analogy between "the loss of control over the body's image inherent in photographic portraits" and "the loss of control inherent in writing" (4). She further notes that "The photographic situation ... offers the autobiographer a representational image for the autobiographical act of looking at oneself, as well as a metaphor for the intrusive act of reading and interpreting that takes place after the publication ..." (5). Hurston's fear of losing control of the self in her writing is projected outside of the self onto the zombie, who is vulnerable to the photographer and the photograph's viewers in the same way that Hurston was vulnerable to malicious, "intrusive" readers. Hurston's confrontation with the black woman zombie--her uncanny double--thus presents an allegory about the nature of anthropology: about the shared vulnerability of the self and the other, and about the parasitic speaking of the anthropologist through the abject body of the other that produces the zombie-text. By capturing the zombie in the text (for a photograph is fixed, static, not alive), Hurston bears witness to the "epistemological failure" of a science that "kills" its object/victims as it consigns them to a static textual death in life. (12)

Voodoo, which also involves 'killing' object/victims, is a belief system that develops strategies of indirection for overcoming powerful adversaries while avoiding direct confrontation, a system for leveling or disempowering powerful individuals who have inspired the envy of others. An ouanga (or charm), like the infamous voodoo doll, works by affecting the well being of its victim indirectly, through sympathetic magic. Similarly, the black vernacular art of signifying is characterized by its aggressive use of strategic indirection to bring the mighty down. Like irony and parody, signifying is a trope that allows its users to insinuate, to state something without seeming to state it. Hurston's mastery of the signifying art is evident in a chapter near the end of Tell My Horse entitled "Doctor Reser."

Doctor Reeser was an actual former Marine who stayed in Haiti after the US occupation and was given charge of an insane asylum. He was known for being a white man who participated in voodoo ceremonies and for regularly being possessed by the loa, generally while in a drunken state. Hurston meets and spends time with Dr. Reeser and praises him as a great man. She pretends to be a disciple of his ways and professes to find him admirable. Yet Hurston changes the spelling of the man's name "Reeser" to "Reser," creating a palindrome that suggests that the reverse of what she is saying is also true. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., comments on the rhetorical tropes that involve repetition with difference, like agnominatio--the change of one letter--noting that such tropes "luxuriate in the chaos of ambiguity that repetition and difference ... yield in either an aural or a visual pun" (45). Hurston's change of the man's name indicates that she is "signifying," that her use of repetition with difference is "motivated," in Gates's sense, and her intentions ambiguous. (13) She reveals her traitorous intent when she confesses: "I am breaking a promise by writing this" (245).

The asylum dwellers whom Hurston portrays are like "horses"; their words emerge as if from alien sources, an incomprehensible gibberish, a primitive babble that Re(e)ser appears to speak like a native:

      One Syrian, formerly a merchant in
   Port-au-Prince, kept standing with his
   face against the porch wishing Dr.
   Reser well.

      "Doctor Reser! Doctor Reser!" he
   kept calling, "I like for you to eat a
   very good eating. The very best eating
   in the United States."

      "Thank you very much," Dr. Reser
   answered each time.

      "Dr. Reser, I was driving very fast
   to Port-au-Prince--about sixty meters
   an hour--and I make three times
   around a pork [pig]. I tell the man,
   'You pay five dollars duty to American
   government every time you leave pork
   in the street'."

      "Yes, yes," Dr. Reser answered
   with feigned interest. "Perhaps you
   want to go and look after the chickens
   for me." (248)

In this exchange, Hurston parodies the authoritative anthropologist at work in the field pretending to have mastered the other's inscrutable ways. That Hurston intends a parodic portrait of the benevolent asylum caretaker and his roguish charges is suggested by the juxtaposition of two similar episodes. At the start of her account of voodoo, Hurston witnesses a ceremony in which, in answer to the question of what is truth, a voodoo priestess responds by lifting her skirts and unveiling the female sexual organs. The ultimate truth is that of the cycle of birth and death as revealed in the priestess's gesture, a gesture to be followed by a ritual dance and the male participants bowing "to kiss her organ of creation" (113-14). In the chapter on Doctor Re(e)ser, Hurston offers the following episode as a repetition with difference:

      He received the signal that supper
   was being served so he abruptly left
   us. In a short while we saw a file of
   men being conducted through the
   grounds to their sleeping quarters.
   Several women stood about within
   their enclosure, which was fenced in
   by heavy chicken wire. As the line of
   men came abreast of the space where
   the women were standing, one of the
   women walked up to the fence, suddenly
   lifted her skirts up around her
   waist and presented herself. Instantly
   one of the men broke from the line and
   ran to her. It was all unplanned, simple
   and instinctive. Presently the guard
   who was marching in front heard the
   commotion and looked around. He
   rushed back and dragged the man
   away with the help of two others. The
   woman stumbled back to a stool and
   drooped down in a sort of apathy. The
   man was forced to his cell and could
   be heard cursing and howling all night
   long. (255-56)

In her presentation of this man's "instinctual" carnivalesque version of a voodoo ritual, Hurston insinuates that her portrait of the Re(e)ser universe is inflected with parody.

As a former Marine, Re(e)ser implicitly stands for the US forces and their occupation of Haiti, while the inmates of the asylum become the Haitian people infantilized by white America's controlling regime. Hurston's perception of the infantilized state of Haitian blacks with respect to the white man is suggested in the following anecdote:

   Some say that he [Reser] belongs to the
   Societe de Couleve (Snake Society) that
   is supposed to be headed by Dr.
   Arthur Holly. Its object is said to be the
   extermination of the Secte Rouge and
   the devil worshippers in Haiti. One
   young man assured me that they all
   wore a snake tattooed on their forearms.
   He had seen the snake on Dr.
   Reser's arm. It had life. He had seen
   Dr. Reser feed it eggs. After I met
   Reser I asked to see this symbol. It
   turned out to be a dragon which he
   had had tattooed on his arm when he
   was in the navy. But to many Haitians
   it is a sacred snake that eats eggs and
   performs miracles of magic. (245-46)

Doctor Re[e]ser thus becomes the symbol of black capitulation to white authority--a theme that echoes in Hurston's teasing the Doctor about his resemblance to the "white king" of La Gonave Faustin Wirkus, whose story is told in William Seabrook's Magic Island. Hurston refers to Seabrook and admits that he "had fired my imagination with his account of the White King of La Gonave. I wanted to see the Kingdom of Faustin Wirkus" (134). According to Seabrook, Wirkus was a farm boy from Pennsylvania who became a sergeant in the Marine Corps and requested to be sent to the island of La Gonave off Haiti. He remained there for years, "the benevolent despot of an island inhabited by ten thousand blacks" (173) who apparently crowned him king imagining the miraculous return of Faustin I, a black who had been proclaimed Emperor of Haiti in 1848.

Hurston often critiqued black submission to white authority, and the theme runs through Tell My Horse. In the first chapter on Jamaica, she laments that "it takes many generations for the slave derivatives to get over their awe for the master-kind" (6) and suggests facetiously that Jamaica is a "rooster's nest":

   When a Jamaican is born of a black
   woman and some English or
   Scotsman, the black mother is literally
   and figuratively kept out of sight as far
   as possible, but no one is allowed to
   forget that white father, however questionable
   the circumstances of birth....
   Black skin is so utterly condemned that
   the black mother is not going to be
   mentioned nor exhibited. You get the
   impression that these virile
   Englishmen do not require women to
   reproduce. They just come out to
   Jamaica, scratch out a nest and lay
   eggs that hatch out into "pink"
   Jamaicans. (8-9)

Although Hurston has been criticized for praising the modernizing results of the American occupation of Haiti in Tell My Horse, her parodic representation of Dr. Re(e)ser undermines her explicit stance with its revelation of the carnivalesque, dubious nature of white control over black others. At the same time, the zombie in the text suggests that Hurston is "signifying" or commenting indirectly on Haiti's historical subjugation; as Paravisini-Gebert notes, "the myth of the zombie is that of the Haitian experience of slavery, of the disassociation of people from their will, their reduction to beasts of burden subject to a master" (39).

If Re(e)ser performs white superiority with his eccentric charges, at the same time the asylum dynamics mimic the machinations of a controlling bocor presiding over a group of worker zombies, or the plantation master overseeing his slaves, or an author imposing authorial control over a text, or, ultimately, an all-powerful God lording it over the submissive multitudes. For Hurston, this kind of controlling authority and the unsubtle literal-mindedness of its regime is vulnerable to subversion from below. Her preference for strategic indirection and a figurative rather than literal use of language as a means to disrupt obtuse power is everywhere apparent in Tell My Horse to readers attuned to the trickster art of signifying.

Hurston ends Mules and Men with a self-reflexive comment on method in the tale of Sis Cat, who has caught a rat and is preparing to have him for supper when the sly rat suggests that eating without washing up first is bad manners. When Sis Cat returns from washing her hands, the rat has disappeared. Subsequently, Sis Cat always washes after eating to avoid losing her prey. Hurston closes the tale and the book with the comment, "I'm sitting here like Sis Cat, washing my face and using my manners" (252). In other words, Hurston is going to do things her own way despite the opinions of others who have their own agendas, agendas that are at odds with hers. (14)

The final chapter of Tell My Horse, which follows immediately after the chapter on Doctor Re(e)ser, is entitled "God and the Pintards." In it Hurston relates a Haitian folktale about God's attempts to eliminate the pintards--that is, the guinea fowl--because they are eating up his rice crop. The pintards escape the mortal consequences of God's wrath by singing and dancing so joyfully and infectiously that the agents of God sent to destroy them are unable to do the deed. Finally, frustrated by the successive failures of his angels Peter, Gabriel, and Michael to get rid of the pintards, God himself decides to do it, only to be diverted from his purpose by the same stratagem. In the end, God decides not to destroy the pintards, but to send them to Guinea, a sad place they will liven up with their incessantly joyful song and dance.

The pintards' cannily strategic performance of primitivism demonstrates once again that the vulnerable and powerless have the ability to transform their vulnerability into strength, to subvert authority from below. The strategic use of one's wits in the struggle for survival that underlies black folklore and saves the pintards characterizes Hurston's signifying strategies of self-expression. The fact that she places the tale of God and the pintards at the end of Tell My Horse compels the reader to compare it to the tale of Sis Cat as a final self-reflexive comment on method, an allusion to the "blind" for self-expression that allows the horse to speak without consequences and underlies Hurston's Guinean narrative art. Hurston had a healthy fear of the malicious havoc that voodoo could wreak, and she distances herself from it rhetorically, as we have seen. Yet ultimately she harnesses the strategic power that she intuits in the workings of voodoo--that subtle magical power of indirection--to counteract the vulnerability of her voice and to escape the fate of the zombie in the text, even as she represents it allegorically. Although often misunderstood as an anomaly in the context of Hurston's work, Tell My Horse should be seen as yet another example of her inventive use of the signifying art to make her voice heard by those who, like Phoebe in Their Eyes Were Watching God, know how to listen. (15)

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Trefzer, Annette. "Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse." African American Review 34 (2000): 299-312.

Visweswaran, Kamala. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Notes

(1.) Wall notes: "In her fiction, [Hurston] honed in on the connection between voice and selfhood, between the power of speech and personal status. Revelatory moments in her novels occur when a character claims his or her own voice" (142). Deborah Plant refers to Hurston's "ardent struggle against being defined by external powers that would narrow her individual power of self-definition and self-determination" (23).

(2.) For example, Plant's Every Tub Must Sit on its Own Bottom contains extensive discussions of Dust Tracks on a Road, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Moses, Man of the Mountain and Mules and Men, but mentions Tell My Horse only in passing. Meisenhelder's excellent Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick has chapters on Dust Tracks, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Mules and Men, Moses, and Seraph on the Sewanee. Gloria Cronin's anthological collection of critical essays on Hurston contains only three brief reviews by Hurston's contemporaries on Tell My Horse. The by now vast body of Hurston criticism focuses mainly on Their Eyes, Mules and Men, and Dust Tracks.

(3.) See, e.g., Visweswaran 33-36; hooks 143; Hernandez 148-51. North calls her pastiche style "anthological" in his suggestive essay on Hurston's modernism in The Dialect of Modernism.

(4.) According to Gates, signifying is characterized by an implied or insinuated difference "between surface and latent meaning." Signifying "presupposes an 'encoded' intention to say one thing but to mean quite another" (82). Tropes of "rhetorical indirection" (Gates 65) that are used to "signify" include allegory, irony and parody. For an excellent discussion of Hurston's use of the signifying art, cf. Plant 83-87.

(5.) Critics who have interpreted Hurston's writing on voodoo as celebratory include Menke, Stein, and Trefzer.

(6.) On vulnerability in anthropology, see Behar.

(7.) Visweswaran discusses what she calls "epistemological failure" as a stance that should be embraced by deconstructive ethnography to undermine or demystify the illusion created by a declarative mode of knowledge that, ignoring the real possibilities for failure in the field, elides instances in which the claim to ethnographic authority breaks down--fails--and must be abandoned (78-79). Meehan makes a compelling argument that Hurston's repeated failures to extract the ethnographic information she desired is inscribed in her text as the triumph of Haitian "resistance" strategies in the face of a colonizing ethnography's determination to exoticize their "primitive" knowledge.

(8.) Clifford identifies this narrative strategy as an indirect style used frequently in ethnographic discourse, the use of which is meant to reinforce the ethnographer's control over others' voices that might threaten his or her monologic authority (Predicament 47).

(9.) Dutton suggests that Hurston's failure to overcome her fear of voodoo results in a failed text. But according to Visweswaran, such failures are productive for anthropology, as they bear witness to the fictional nature of control over others. Hurston's vulnerability in the face of voodoo prefigures Visweswaran's vision of a deconstructive anthropology that would embrace such epistemological short circuits.

(10.) Another tragically vulnerable black woman was Zora's mother, who allegedly pleaded on her deathbed to have her dying wish acknowledged, but was silenced by those around her. The young Zora's frantic attempt to have them comply goes unheeded in a much-commented upon scene in Dust Tracks.

(11.) The idea of the sacrificial nature of language goes back to Hegel's view that language kills what it names, annihilates the real in order to take its place. Language traitorously usurps, betrays the real, and replaces it with signs. Symbolic systems, in this view, are founded on murder.

(12.) According to Sontag, "there is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera" (7); "to photograph someone is a sublimated murder" (14-15); "to take a photograph is to participate in another person's ... mortality, vulnerability, mutability" (15).

(13.) In Gates's view, such "motivated" repetition with difference (66) is "fundamental" to the black art of signifying, a trope he suggests inscribes "the trace of black difference" (46) through a double-voiced sleight of hand. In Island Possessed, Katherine Dunham portrays Doc Reeser, whom she meets in Haiti during the time when Hurston was also there, as a colorful but definitely flawed man. Dunham's nuanced, rather critical view of him puts Hurston's sincerity in doubt.

(14.) For an interpretation of the Sis Cat tale in Mules and Men, see Willis 28-29.

(15.) On Phoebe's extraordinary skills as a listener, see Kaplan.

Amy Fass Emery is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Dickinson College. She is the author of The Anthropological Imagination in Latin American Literature (U of Missouri P, 1996).