Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

2 - The Myth and Ritual of Ezili Freda in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

49 2 The Myth and Ritual of Ezili Freda in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Derek Collins The subtext of this paper asks the difficult question of how best to treat the literary output of an American author like Zora Neale Hurston who consciously employed ethnography and folklore in her work. Literary criticism that is insensitive to folklore research will not succeed, because it tends to prioritize Hurston’s novels, short stories, and dramatic work over her ethnographic studies of southern American and Caribbean cultures . Yet this important author is easily misunderstood when her folklore is not included in a consideration of her fiction. Even more significantly , Hurston’s complex blending of black American and Caribbean lore is overlooked when her novels are read on the surface as novels of merely black American experience. Her sophistication as an artist is misjudged, in fact, when we cannot see that many of her fictional characters are layered cultural entities who can simultaneously be southern black American, West Indian, and West African. This paper explores one of these characters, Janie Crawford, the central figure in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in an effort to demonstrate the complexities of Hurston’s art. This essay was originally published in Western Folklore 55, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 137–54. My wife Kate Evanchuk Collins deserves more gratitude than I can express for her help on this paper. Tossach sodchaid dagben. I wish also to thank Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University and Professor Donald Cosentino of the University of California, Los Angeles, for their unstinting encouragement and advice. 50 Derek Collins Before we come to this particular novel, however, we need briefly to highlight Hurston’s background and interest, especially her formal interest , in folklore studies. Her exposure to folklore can be traced back to her childhood, as she tells us in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, when she read Greek and Roman myths, Norse tales, fairy tales, and the Bible (61–63). From 1925 to 1927, Hurston attended Barnard College and studied anthropology with the great German-born, American anthropologist Franz Boas. In 1926 she began her fieldwork under Boas’s supervision in Harlem. Nine years later, in 1935, she made an attempt to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University working again with Boas, but was unable to complete her coursework.1 Hurston would subsequently collect folklore in various southern American states, including Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama, as well as in Jamaica, British Honduras, the Bahamas, and Haiti, the last of which she visited twice. Although the nature and goals of Hurston’s anthropological and folkloristic work would change over time, the force behind her original interests can best be summed up by Hurston herself: “The major problem in my field as I see it is, the collection of Negro folk material in as thorough a manner as possible, as soon as possible.”2 Needless to say that for Hurston, the term “Negro” was not limited to America but embraced all black peoples descended from the West African diaspora. Much of Hurston’s early collecting passion (between 1927 and 1932) culminated in essays, articles, and eventually a book of southern black American folktales, Mules and Men (1935). The results of her research on hoodoo in the southern United States, with special attention given to New Orleans (where she began research in August 1928), were published in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) late in 1931, and this remains the first scholarly treatment of hoodoo by a black American folklorist (Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 77). Her article is a massive compilation of spells, charms, rituals, beliefs, reports of conjurers, and definitions of magical terms taken from the various practitioners whom she interviewed. The relevance of this early research cannot be underestimated for the whole of Hurston’s ethnographic and literary work, since one of the threads that runs through her entire oeuvre is her fascination with Negro magic and religion. As she states confidently near the beginning of her JAF article: “Shreds of hoodoo beliefs and practices are found wherever any number of Negroes are found in America” (“Hoodoo in America,” 318). This folkloristic appraisal of American Negroes must, in my judgment , cast the background against which Hurston’s novels are read. Two brief examples will suffice to illustrate the point. In Hurston’s first novel, The Myth and Ritual of Ezili...