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6 - “Come and Gaze on a Mystery”: Oya as Rain-Bringing “I” of Zora Neale Hurston’s Atlantic Storm Walkings
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153 6 “Come and Gaze on a Mystery” Oya as Rain-Bringing “I” of Zora Neale Hurston’s Atlantic Storm Walkings Keith Cartwright . . . ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. —Janie beneath the blossoming pear tree, in Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God I was to walk with the storm and hold my power, and get my answers to life and things in storms. The symbol of lightning was painted on my back. This was to be mine forever. —Hurston on her New Orleans initiation as Rain-Bringer, in Dust Tracks on a Road Oya who causes the leaves to flutter Oya, strong wind who gave birth to fire while traversing the mountain Oya, please don’t fell the tree in my backyard Oya, we have seen fire covering your body like cloth. —Praises of Oya collected by Fela Sowande and Fagbemi Ajanaku, reprinted in Judith Gleason’s Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess “What is the truth?” Zora Neale Hurston was asked while undertaking her service to the spirits of Haitian Voudoun that would find publication in 1938 as Tell My Horse. The answer she received—the ritually unveiled vagina of the Mambo—gave unforgettably authoritative witness: “There is no mystery beyond the mysterious source of life” (Tell My Horse, 376). 154 Keith Cartwright This flash of revealed truth would soon inform the language and blooming pear of erotic vision in Hurston’s best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written as she was doing her fieldwork and initiatory seeking in Haiti in 1936. This authorizing encounter with truth and the sublime, however, also finds significant precedent and preparation in Hurston’s earlier ritual seeking. In the winter of 1928, she underwent a series of Voodoo initiations in New Orleans, including one that culminated in her being crowned storm-walking “Rain-Bringer.”1 Later, while writing Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti—and after having witnessed the 1929 hurricane that wrought havoc in the Bahamas—Hurston would script her novel’s concluding action around the destruction caused by the second deadliest hurricane in American history, the 1928 Florida storm that killed over 2,500 people, most of them migrant agricultural workers drowned when the levees holding Lake Okeechobee gave way. The re-presentation of that storm in Their Eyes Were Watching God— with its attentiveness to hubristic dismissals of storm warnings, economically driven decisions to stay in place rather than seek a ride out, control of the high ground commandeered by whites, and a racially charged aftermath of segregationist burial crews—will be read with new poignancy following Hurricane Katrina’s exposure of many of our nation’s old racial wounds and gulfs. Clearly, Their Eyes Were Watching God calls for revitalizing readings, responses that connect Hurston’s dynamic womanism with a spiritual and political vision born of her long circum-Caribbean seeking after sacral truths. But whoever would bow and kiss the mysterious source of the life of Their Eyes Were Watching God would do well to consider what the author as Rain-Bringer brought from her earlier initiation in New Orleans and reconsider then its storm-walking manifestation in her subsequent body of work. My rereadings of Hurston while teaching a University of North Florida seminar on her work following the perspective-changing 2004 hurricane season (when Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne struck Florida)—and again while attempting to respond to Hurricane Katrina in the following year—have convinced me that the coastal South’s most celebrated author found signature authority in her New Orleans initiation into Afro-Atlantic repertoires of the orisha Oya, a female Yoruba divinity of hurricanes, death rites, and shape-shifting wilderness transformations.2 Of the New Orleans initiations represented in Mules and Men (1935), Hurston seems to have been most affected by “the crown of power” she received from Luke Turner (188), who lay claim to being “crowned” by a famous aunt, Marie Leveau, in a storm-dominated narrative of his ritual descent. After accepting entry into this ritual family and undergoing three [34.239.185.22] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:15 GMT) “Come and Gaze on a Mystery” 155 days of intensifying visions in ritual isolation, Hurston emerged to receive Turner’s spirit-divined renaming:“I see her conquering and accomplishing with the lightning and making her road with thunder. She shall be called the Rain-Bringer” (191). She describes how Turner...