The Zombie in/as the text: Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Amy Fass Emery

Zora Neale Hurston struggled to achieve a personal voice against prevailing attitudes about race, and in her writing there is a clear connection between voice and self-empowerment that has been explored extensively in Hurston criticism. (1) Her voice was constrained in part by the expectation of white readers, including her (in)famously condescending patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, that she would confirm their sense of the black person's naturally primitive essence. The voyeuristic primitivism of whites vied with the competing exhortation of black leaders to their contemporaries to avoid precisely such portrayals of blacks in the primitivistic mode, which they perceived as harmful to their cause of intellectual equality. As a student of anthropology, Hurston was also expected to employ a certain rhetoric of anthropological authority in her ethnographic writing along the lines established by Franz Boas for the professional folklorist. Faced with conflicting versions of how "the Negro" should be presented, Hurston felt acutely her vulnerability to criticism from all sides.

In his influential essay "On Ethnographic Allegory," James Clifford suggests that ethnographic writing is by definition allegorical, allegory being "a practice in which a narrative ... continuously refers to another pattern of ideas or events." A narrative can be said to be allegorical in meaning when an Other story is inscribed alongside the story being told that undermines or competes with its primary intention (Writing Culture 98-99). The Other story told in Hurston's Tell My Horse (1938) is that of the author's struggle against being rendered voiceless, of having her self-affirming voice silenced. A travel book about Jamaica and Haiti with ethnographic material on voodoo, Tell My Horse is considered an embarrassing text for its author, and book-length studies of Hurston tend to marginalize it or ignore it completely. (2) Her biographer Robert Hemenway considers it "Hurston's poorest book, chiefly because of its form" (248). Deborah Gordon describes it as more innovative pastiche than traditional ethnography, as "[s]imultaneously a travelogue, a piece of journalism and political analysis, a conventional ethnography, part legend and folklore with art criticism and commentary thrown in ..." (154). The generic instability of Tell My Horse--the refusal to fix material in a coherent recognizable genre--is in fact characteristic of Hurston's narrative style, and for her experimental bent she has been seen as a precursor to contemporary experimental ethnography. (3)

In Mules and Men, her "one recognized ethnography" (Gordon 149), Hurston presented black folklore of the South as a language system used to empower the black self in a cultural milieu where blacks were subordinate. The folktales she collected and celebrated featured folk heroes from the time of slavery who dramatized slaves' uncanny ability to get the upper hand through verbal banter in exchanges with white masters. The white master, unable to detect the duplicity of slaves' language, became its victim. The lesson of this folklore is that language has the power to be aggressively subversive, to give voice to those on the margins who seek to challenge their oppressors. Hurston adapted these strategies in her own writing to channel aggression indirectly through verbal play; Deborah Plant notes that the "patterns of behavior recognizable in Hurston's life and work--silence, shamming, tomming, signifying, masking, and posturing--are all patterns of behavior exhibited in archetypal African American trickster figures like John, High John de Conquer, and Jack" (45).

The master trickster trope generally associated with Hurston is signifying. (4) Critics have identified self-reflexive strategies of ironic distancing--of signifying--in works by Hurston such as Mules and Men and Dust Tracks on a Road, but readers of Tell My Horse have been strangely literal-minded. Much of what is said in Tell My Horse, however, is said indirectly through allegory and irony. The first chapter includes a list of Jamaican proverbs that Hurston characterizes as "rich in philosophy, irony and humor" (9). A proverb works by indirection, its surface meaning encoding a latent meaning. For example, Hurston translates "Rockatone at ribber bottom no know sun hot" as "The person in easy circumstances cannot appreciate the sufferings of the poor" (9). The list of proverbs and translations she provides serves as both an example of the sophisticated wit of black folk culture and as a self-reflexive comment on her own narrative sensibility in Tell My Horse.

The title itself invites readers to recognize the double-voiced nature of the text, as it refers to a voodoo rite of possession during which a loa, or spirit, "mounts" a "horse" (a worshipper in a trance-like state) and conveys messages through this person to the participants. The person "mounted" is not held responsible for what he or she says in this context, but is seen as an instrument of the loa, who speaks through him or her. The "horse" is being used to mouth the words of another. At the same time, Hurston sees that the horse is in a position to say indirectly what he or she cannot otherwise say without negative consequences: "Under the whip and guidance of the spirit-rider, the 'horse' does and says many things that he or she would never have uttered unridden.... That phrase 'Parlay cheval ou' [tell my horse] is in daily, hourly use in Haiti and no doubt it is used as a blind for self-expression" (221). Exploiting the ambiguity about the source of the utterance, the "horse's" vulnerability becomes strength in the same way that the strategies of black folklore empower the powerless to say by indirection what they cannot say directly without consequences.