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From: catherine yronwodeNewsgroups: alt.lucky.w,alt.magick.folk,alt.magick.tyagi,alt.religion.orisha Subject: Re: Zora Neale Hurston: Opinions? Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 12:44:37 GMT Reave Socratic (socratic@rocketmail.com) wrote: > > Just picked up a copy of _Folklore, Memories & Other Writings_ which > includes Hurston's investigations as a folklorist into Voudoun and > Hoodoo (which I'm not sure she keeps separated very well, but that's > on first blush and a light skim; the jury's still out). > > Do any of the experienced root doctors (Cat? Jo?) out there have an > opinion about Hurston? Reliability? Comparison with Hyatt? > > Reave Well, "the jury is still out" is a pretty fair assessment of Hurston's collection of hoodoo material. Her tales of Vodoun-like initiations in New Orleans were far-fetched enough at the time that her contemporary, the folklore-collector Harry M. Hyatt, twice visited New Orleans and asked specifically about the things she mentioned, only to be told by all his informants that they wre unaware of such events. Pro-Hurstonites have in the past marked this discrepency up to Hyatt's being white and Hurston black. They claim that local black informants were freer in giving her information than they were with him. Anti-Hurstonites note that Hyatt had no trouble eliciting the most intimate details about hoodoo and spiritualism from his informants all over the South and that if there were any Vodoun-like goings-on in New Orleans in the 1930s, he would not have been excluded from the knowledge. One particular mark against the "they wouldn't tell the truth to a white man" argument is that Hyatt collected information from a man who seems to have witnessed a Vodoun-like ceremony in New Orleans during his youth (circa the 1880s) -- and he stated that such events were no longer carried on in New Orleans by the 1930s because the old people had passed away. He did not claim that common everyday hoodoo no longer existed, merely that what we now identify as a Haitian-influenced Afro-Caribbean priest-or-priestess-led ceremonial religious meeting -- which hit New Orleans in the early 1800s and was carried through the 19th century in increasingly debased forms by the likes of Marie Laveau and her kin -- had, by the 1930s, run its course and died out for lack of pracitioners. Hyatt's other New Orleans informants seemed not at all Vodoun-influenced, and, in fact, when it came to describing old folk-magical charms and remedies, the New Orleans residents were typical of urban people everywhere -- ignorant of the names or sources of herbs and minerals and content to purchase pre-mixed formula oils rather than make them up from wildcrafted herbs. This makes Hurston's tales of participation in Vodoun-like ceremonies seem highly unlikely. As Hyatt saw it, the major contribution to hoodoo made by the New Orleans root workers and two headed doctors during the 20th century was not Vodoun -- which had passed away completely by that time -- but the syncretic use of Catholic candle-burning rites. These Hyatt noted at length in a special section devoted just to candle-magic. This New Orleans candle-burning phenomenon was also commented upon by one of Hyatt's informants, an African-American minister named Reverend Young, who explained how the the northward movement of New Orleans candle-magic had by then reached up the Mississippi River to Memphis, Tennessee. (Since that time it has spread throughout most urbanized African-American communities and is heavily practiced among hoodooists in New York, Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, and Baltimore, in large part due to the popularity of Henri Gamache's 1942 volume "The Master Book of Candle Burning." ) Leaving aside Hurston's possibly fictionalized account of Vodoun initiations in New Orleans, what can be said about the rest of her fieldwork? Most of it -- especially the material she collected in Florida among her own relatives -- is congruent with Hyatt's contemporary 1930s collections throughout the South and with his 1970s fieldwork in Florida. Thus one can give it more credence, because it was confirmed by another investigator's field notes. Why did Hurston possibly fictionalize her accounts of Vodoun-like initiatory ceremonies in New Orleans? Well, as we all know, she was primarily a novelist, and she was also working on the material with an eye to selling articles and thus earning a living. Perhaps she thought people would be more interested in her writing if it was spiced up like that. Perhaps she thought that Negro life was so obscure to the white world that no one would ever cover the same ground and interview the same cultural base of informants a mere two years later and find out that she was fabricating material. It's impossible to say, but speculations such as these have been aired in print for a while and have, sadly, cast a bit of a pall over some of what she wrote. For my part, i give credence to everything Hurston published that accords with Hyatt's more lengthy and extensive field work, and, when the rest is discarded, the result is that her material bolsters and amplifies his and vice versa. The image of Zora Neale Hurston undergoing a Voodoo initiation rite in New Orleans i can just chalk up to a novelist's quaint fancy and leave at that. Eoghan, if you are reading this, i'd like to know what your opinion is, and what your colleagues in the world of folklore think of Hurston as a folklorist these days. And Jo, what do you think? cat yronwode Lucky W Amulet Archive --------- http://www.luckymojo.com/luckyw.html Lucky Mojo Curio Co. http://www.luckymojo.com/luckymojocatalogue.html Send e-mail with your street address to catalogue@luckymojo.com and receive our free 32 page catalogue of hoodoo supplies and amulets
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