Zora Neale Hurston in Context: Researching Real Undead Zombies in Haiti, Jamaica, and Florida

In Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1990 [1938]), anthropologist, storyteller, and novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) writes of encounters with the real and active undead, the zombies she sees and as far as is possible interacts with during her Guggenheim funded study visit to Haiti. As folkorist, author, observer, initiate, and adept server of Voodoo/vodou in practice, her testifying about first encountering in the road a dead wife turned zombie, Felicia Felix-Mentor, then learning and practicing voodoo, lends a researcher’s authenticity to what might seem only superstition in practice. Although she does not overtly make the argument, through her focus on the objectification and forced labor of enslaved zombies, Hurston’s work engages racism and capitalism, exposing links between exploitation and inhumane treatment of the minds and bodies of the weak and poor, particularly of African origins, a focus developed in the zombie-themed fiction and films which follow Tell My Horse.