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Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo

Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo · Chapter III: Hoodoo & Rootwork

Zora Neale Hurston and Hoodoo: Mules and Men and Her Fieldwork

Zora Neale Hurston's study of hoodoo: her New Orleans initiations, Hoodoo in America (1931), Mules and Men, Tell My Horse and her influence on conjure.

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Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), the novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, was also a trained anthropologist and the first major Black scholar to study hoodoo, the African American tradition of conjure, from the inside. Between 1928 and 1930 she apprenticed herself to conjure doctors in New Orleans and published the results in the long article "Hoodoo in America" (1931) and the book Mules and Men (1935), works that still shape how hoodoo is understood.

From Eatonville to Barnard and Franz Boas§

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891, though she often gave a later year, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States. Her father was a Baptist preacher who served as the town's mayor. The porch of the village store, where people traded stories, songs and jokes, gave her the folklore she later collected; she described growing up among it as wearing it "like a tight chemise", too close to see until anthropology gave her distance.

After studying at Howard University she moved to New York in 1925, joined the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance and enrolled at Barnard College, where she studied with the anthropologist Franz Boas and graduated in 1928. Boas trained her in the methods of cultural anthropology and encouraged her to collect Black Southern folklore. From late 1927 her fieldwork was funded by a wealthy patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, under a contract that gave Mason control over the material, an arrangement that both supported and constrained Hurston's work for several years.

Collecting Conjure in New Orleans, 1928–1930§

Hurston knew that collecting conjure required more than interviews. Hoodoo, as she wrote, was a secret practice, hidden from outsiders and from the respectable, and its workers would teach only those who became their students. She therefore went to New Orleans, the city with the strongest reputation for Voodoo, and over several stays between 1928 and 1930 apprenticed herself to a series of conjure doctors, paying fees and undergoing their initiations.

Her accounts describe workers with distinct styles. One, presented in Mules and Men as Luke Turner, claimed to be a nephew of Marie Laveau and to continue her tradition. Hurston describes lying face down on a couch, naked, beside a snakeskin, for about three days without food, after which she was given a symbolic crown, painted with a lightning sign and named the Rain-Bringer. Other teachers, including a man known as Father Watson or "the Frizzly Rooster", conducted other rites; some were more Spiritualist, some more strongly African in style. The variety itself is one of her findings: there was no single hoodoo, but many independent practitioners, each with a personal repertoire.

She also recorded the commercial and everyday side of conjure: candles, oils, powders, roots, lodestones and the "hands" or charm bags carried for luck and protection (see the history of hoodoo and rootwork). Her informants used conjure for love, money, court cases and revenge, and as healing and protection against the work of others. Hurston reported all of this without condescension, as the religion of people she knew.

"Hoodoo in America" and Mules and Men§

The first, more technical result was "Hoodoo in America", published in 1931 in the Journal of American Folklore. Running to about a hundred pages, it presents the origins of hoodoo as she understood them, accounts of her apprenticeships, legends of Marie Laveau, and long lists of what she called conjure "paraphernalia" and formulas, collected from her teachers. It was the first extended scholarly description of hoodoo by an African American author and remains a key primary source.

Mules and Men (1935), with a preface by Boas and illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, reached a wider public. Its first part gathers Florida folktales told in Eatonville and in the labour camps of Polk County; its second, shorter part retells the hoodoo material in a lively first-person narrative. Hurston opens that section by describing hoodoo as a suppressed religion with its own priesthood and theology, and by tracing its power back to Moses and the rod of God, a theme rooted in the Black reading of the Bible as a book of power (see Moses as Magician). That approach anticipated later scholarship, such as Theophus Smith's study of "conjuring culture", which treats biblical figures as sources of conjure in African American religion.

Initiation, Names and the Question of Reliability§

Scholars value Hurston's hoodoo writings but also read them critically. She changed names, sometimes combined episodes, and gave the Mules and Men chapters a dramatic shape that differs in details from the 1931 article; the names and order of teachers do not always match between the two versions. Luke Turner's claim to be Laveau's nephew cannot be confirmed and is doubted by historians of Laveau such as Carolyn Morrow Long. Hurston's biographer Robert Hemenway, while admiring the work, noted that she wrote as a storyteller as well as a social scientist, and that her own presence is always at the centre.

Her lists of materials also include many manufactured candles, oils and powders, so they reflect the commercialised hoodoo of the 1920s city as well as older rural practice. Scholars also note that her early career included a lapse in scholarly method, in a 1927 article that borrowed heavily from a published source. None of this makes her hoodoo work fictional. It means that, like most ethnography of her generation, it should be compared with other evidence, such as the thousands of interviews later gathered by Harry Middleton Hyatt.

Read this way, Hurston's work is distinctive less for exact data than for its point of view. She wrote as an insider to Southern Black culture, treated her teachers as religious specialists, and made her own participation part of the record, a method later anthropologists would call participant observation and, in its literary form, reflexive ethnography.

Haiti, Jamaica and Tell My Horse§

With Guggenheim fellowships in 1936 and 1937, Hurston travelled to Jamaica and Haiti to study religion in the Caribbean. In Haiti she attended Vodou ceremonies, interviewed houngan and wrote, in a burst of about seven weeks, her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The fieldwork appeared as Tell My Horse (1938), a mixture of travelogue, political commentary and ethnography of Haitian Vodou. The book describes the lwa, including Danbala, Ezili and the Gede, and the title itself comes from the phrase spoken when a spirit, riding a possessed devotee, gives a message for its "horse".

Tell My Horse also includes Hurston's famous account of meeting and photographing a woman named Felicia Felix-Mentor, held at a hospital in Haiti and said to be a zonbi, a person believed to have died and been raised. Hurston speculated that a drug might be involved, an idea later developed by Wade Davis; modern scholars generally see the case as one of mental illness and mistaken identity, and treat the zombie as a matter of folklore and social fear (see Voodoo Myths and Misconceptions).

In 1939 Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain, a novel retelling the Exodus in African American speech, in which Moses is the greatest of all hoodoo men, the master of the power behind the plagues. The book draws together her fieldwork, her Bible-saturated upbringing and the long association in Black folk tradition between Moses and conjure, the same association that made the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses a favourite text of rootworkers.

Legacy: Hurston's Place in the Study of Hoodoo§

Hurston's later years were difficult. Her books went out of print, and she died in poverty in Fort Pierce, Florida, in January 1960, buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973 the writer Alice Walker placed a headstone there, and her 1975 essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" helped launch a revival that has made Hurston a central figure of American literature.

In the study of conjure, her influence is just as large. "Hoodoo in America" and Mules and Men established hoodoo as a subject for serious study and helped fix the word itself in scholarly use. Later historians of conjure, including Yvonne Chireau, Jeffrey Anderson and Katrina Hazzard-Donald, build on her work while correcting it, and practitioners of hoodoo today often cite her as an ancestor of the tradition's written memory. Her insistence that conjure was a religion with its own logic, rather than a quaint superstition, remains her most lasting contribution.

Frequently asked questions§

Did Zora Neale Hurston practise hoodoo?§

Hurston underwent several hoodoo initiations in New Orleans as part of her fieldwork and described them in the first person. Whether she continued to practise is unclear; she presented herself chiefly as a researcher and writer who had learned the tradition from its practitioners.

What is "Hoodoo in America"?§

It is a long article by Hurston published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1931. It describes her apprenticeships with New Orleans conjure doctors, legends of Marie Laveau, and many conjure materials and formulas, and it is one of the earliest scholarly studies of hoodoo.

Is Mules and Men a reliable source on hoodoo?§

It is valuable but must be read with care. Hurston changed names, shaped episodes for narrative effect and sometimes differed from her own earlier article, so historians compare it with other sources such as Hyatt's interviews.

What is Tell My Horse about?§

Tell My Horse (1938) records Hurston's fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti. It discusses politics and daily life, describes Vodou ceremonies and the lwa, and includes her well-known encounter with a woman said to be a zombie.

Sources and further reading§