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

7 - “Legba in the House”: African Cosmology in Their Eyes Were Watching God

175 7 “Legba in the House” African Cosmology in Their Eyes Were Watching God Mawuena Logan The Fon know him [Legba] as a powerful and many-faced agent of transformation, who mediates among the gods, between the gods and mankind, among humans, and even among the many forces that bring humans into being. —Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa New Orleans is now and has ever been the hoodoo capital of America . . . [but] . . . New Orleans has a law against fortune tellers, hoodoo doctors and the like. —Hurston, Mules and Men African spirituality in Euro-American discourse is often relegated to the realm of superstition, fetishism, and primitivism in spite of its worldwide and diasporic manifestations in countries such as the United States, Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil, and Cuba. The above epigraph from Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935) attests to the general biased perception and attitude attached to African and African-based spirituality . Anthropologist and historian Aylward Shorter, among others, has gone as far as to indicate that that spirituality is Christian in origin (African Christian Spirituality, 4). While the focus of this chapter is not on this myopic and jaundiced view of African-based spirituality, it is nevertheless true that the beliefs of Africa and its diaspora have been, and still are, the cosmological and philosophical “punching bag” of the world. It is this fact that compels me to turn to these areas of African thought to provide a context for my Africanist reading of Their Eyes 176 Mawuena Logan Were Watching God (1937). It is a reading that unearths the epistemological and metaphysical underpinnings of Hurston’s work through a “black frame of reference” which, according to Mary Helen Washington , Hurston achieves by grounding her novel and characters in a West African aesthetics (“Zora Neale Hurston,” 68). My reading highlights the prominent and various manifestations in the novel of Legba or Eshu/ Esu-Elegbara, the Fon and Yoruba divinity of the crossroads—the god of indeterminacy, the linguist par excellence, and the critical thinker. It is a reading that undertakes to stress the power, as well as enhance the understanding, of myths and gods in our ever-changing world in an effort to unveil, among other things, a structuralist interpretation of Hurston’s text, since myths are universal phenomena that inform our perceptions of reality. The grounding of her work in folkloric myth allows Hurston to stimulate, I would argue, our desire for and interest in cultural preservation and in the African “traditional” values that modern Africa and Europe seem to threaten. The universality or ubiquity of gods and myths does not exonerate African belief systems. Robert Pelton, in The Trickster in West Africa, underscores Western/European obtuseness regarding African spirituality when he reminds us that Christian missionaries equated the crossroads divinity Legba with Satan “because of his seeming lawlessness and unbridled sexuality . . . [but] the Fon . . . were neither lawless nor sexually profligate, and . . . have insisted, rather, that Legba is the divine linguist” (88). In Olodumare, God of Yoruba Beliefs, E. B. Idowu contends that Esu1 (also known as Esu-Elegbara) is not incarnated evil of the biblical persuasion: [He is neither Satan nor] the Devil of our New Testament acquaintance who is an out and out evil power in opposition to God’s salvation of man. . . . On the whole, it would be near the truth to parallel him with Satan in the book of Job, where Satan is one of the ministers of God and has the office of trying men’s sincerity and putting their religion to the proof. (80) Legba/Esu-Elegbara, in an analogous manner, is at the service of the divine creator, because he “tries men’s sincerity” and thus urges them to be exemplary human beings (Idowu, 9). God, goddesses, and gods belong to the domain of spirituality and metaphysics, and are the active beings and the principal players in stories we label as myths. Myths are culturally specific sacred stories of origins. According to Roland Barthes, they are a mode of communication subject to interpretation; “Legba in the House” 177 Claude Lévi-Strauss asserts that they provide ontological structure in order to make sense of the world; in psychoanalytic terms, vis-à-vis Sigmund Freud, they are manifestations of repressed impulses; and as Carl Jung notes, they are the expressions of the collective unconscious. The gods we encounter in myths from around the world are an attempt...