Abstract
This chapter will analyze Hurston’s journey as an initiate-observer of Vodou and her “introspection into the mystery” of the religion as a Vodou adept serving the spirits. This is an extraordinary religious narrative of an initiate and an observer, interpreting the key themes of Vodou, tapping the magical-spiritual wisdom of her elders and ancestors and recording what Haitian adepts call the “konesans”—the simple and complex esoteric spiritual knowledge of ordinary Black folk who create transformative healing rituals in African-diasporic communities.
The Negro has not been Christianized as extensively as is generally believed. The great masses are still standing before their pagan altars and calling old gods by new names.
—Hurston, Sanctified Church
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Notes
Katie C. Canon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988), 15 and back cover.
Donald H. Matthews, Honoring the Ancestors: An African Cultural Interpretation of Black Religion and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), front flap.
Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 ), 6.
Anthony B. Pinn, Varieties ofAfrican -American Religious Experience ( Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998 ), 1.
David C. Estes, “The Neo-African Vatican: Zora Neale Hurston’s New Orleans,” in Literary New Orleans in the Modern World, ed. Richard Kennedy (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 67–68; Brown, Mama Lola, 384.
Milo Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo ( San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1985 ), 8.
André Pierre, “A World Created by Magic: Extracts from a Conversation with André Pierre,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Consentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), xxii.
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica ( New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1990 ), 120.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum -Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 56–58, 63–64.
Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966 ), 11.
Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 93, 94.
Bobby C. Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change ( Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991 ), 1.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969), viii.
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© 2006 Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith
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Turner, R.B. (2006). The Haiti-New Orleans Vodou Connection: Zora Neale Hurston as Initiate-Observer. In: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312376208_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312376208_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53305-3
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