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

1 - Remembering the Sacred Tree: Black Women, Nature, and Voodoo in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God

29 1 Remembering the Sacred Tree Black Women, Nature, and Voodoo in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God Rachel Stein Artist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, her classic novel of a black woman’s quest for selfhood, while she was in the Caribbean in 1936–37 collecting the ethnographic materials that she would later publish as Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Taken together, Tell My Horse and Their Eyes Were Watching God articulate Hurston’s analysis of the conjunction of colonial conceptions of race, sex, and nature, and demonstrate her conclusion that African-derived spirituality affords black women an alternative paradigm through which to recast oppressive social-natural relations. Long dismissed as a work of uneven anthropology,1 Tell My Horse deserves recognition as a pioneering ethnographic study of Afro-Caribbean society and religion,2 notable in particular for Hurston’s biting analysis of the harsh effects of colonialism upon black women. Hurston suggests that Caribbean racial and sexual inequities are grounded in the representation of black women as animals; because Caribbean black women are viewed as subhuman “donkeys,” their sufferings can be dismissed as inevitable, and the social pyramid which rests upon their backs can be justified as only natural. However, as Hurston describes in Tell My Horse, Voodoo ritual and belief offer black women an alternative spiritual model that counters the colonial hierarchies that operate within the denigration of black women as nature incarnate. Through rituals that locate the sacred within nature and within female sexuality, Voodoo challenges This article was originally published in Women’s Studies 25 (1996): 465–82. 30 Rachel Stein the degradation of black women as “donkeys.” Furthermore, when these “donkeys” become “horses” ridden by the loa during Voodoo spirit possession , colonial class and color lines are called into question. Beyond its import as ethnography, Tell My Horse provides an invaluable context for rereading Their Eyes Were Watching God. I argue that Hurston “embalmed” her growing knowledge of Voodoo spirituality within the nature imagery of this novel. Much as Caribbean black women are formatted by Voodoo ritual, Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes, is inspired to resist society’s conception of black women as “mules of the world” through her Voodoo-informed vision of the blossoming pear tree fertilized by golden bees as a fecund “marriage” of polarities. This vision of nature as the site of fertile possibility and egalitarian exchange inspires Janie to re-create herself as a self-possessed, erotically fulfilled woman. Their Eyes Were Watching God clearly develops the revolutionary potential that Hurston perceived within Afro-Caribbean spiritual belief. The Caribbean conception of black women as donkeys that Hurston analyzes in Tell My Horse is, of course, only one instance of the historic representation of blacks, particularly black women, in terms of animals. Beginning with early European explorations of the African continent, European popular and scientific speculations about the relations between Africans and Europeans generally posed Africans as a questionable form of humanity, ranked along the Great Chain of Being between whites and apes, below fully intelligent life and suspiciously close to lower animals. The simultaneous European contact in Africa with blacks and tailless apes such as orangutans* further spurred the European belief in the close genetic or evolutionary association between blacks and apes, an association that was cemented in the European imagination by the belief that sexually aggressive orangutans sometimes engaged in intercourse with African women. Historian Winthrop Jordan notes that Europeans imagined this transgressive sex-coupling as occurring only between apes and black women: “the sexual union of apes and Negroes was always conceived involving female Negroes and male apes. Apes had intercourse with Negro women” (White Over Black, 238).3 This view of African women as sexual beasts was epitomized in the treatment of Sarah Bartman, a Hottentot woman captured in Africa in *Editor’s Note: While orangutans have been forwarded in the popular imaginary and scholarship as native to Africa, they are exclusively Asian, native to Indonesia and Malaysia. Remembering the Sacred Tree 31 1810 and exhibited in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus.”† Medical scientists were fascinated with Bartman’s “primitive” genitalia, which they compared to those of the female orangutan as a sign of the distinct and debased nature of the black race. Believing that the configuration of Bartman ’s genitalia demonstrated black women’s likeliness...