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Zora Neale Hurston, American Author

I first discovered Zora Neale Hurston in my undergrad days. I had to take one more humanities class to fulfill my graduation requirements so I took Anthropology of Religion. One of our asignments was to write a paper. I was studying biology. My main interest was in pharmacology and toxicology. I read the journals in the science library including one called Journal of Ethnopharmacology. This journal published reports on the pharmacology of pharmaceutical use of plants and animals by different cultures. One of the articles was about Zombies in Haiti. It was written by Wade Davis of Harvard's botany department.

He went to Haiti and was given the recipe to make a Zombie by a Bokor, a Haitian Voodoo "witch doctor". The recipe included puffer fish which has a poison called tetrodotoxin which is a potent ion channel blocker. Tetrodotoxin poisoning can kill but at other times it leads to a near death state with such a lowered metabolism that the poisoned person is thought to be dead. Somehow along the line Haitian's discovered this property and may at times have used it nefariously. Poisoning someone with the Zombie recipe caused their seeming death. After they were buried the poisoner would unearth the not quite dead victim. The next step was also one of the slick aspects of this scheme in that the unburied and now ressucitated poison victim would be fed a paste made from a plant that contained atropine and scopalomine. These toxins are potent dissociative hallucinogens. The victim was first "killed", buried, and brought back to life. Then given a heavy duty hallicinogenic drug. The dead had come back to life and was walking the earth. Just like in a movie. These guys were then sold to labor camps to work in the fields. Davis later wrote about this in a book called theSerpent and the Rainbow. The book was made into a movie, but don't go see it, it's worthless.

So this intrigued me as being an interesting phyicial explanation for what, previous to this report, was thought to be simply a myth. So for my paper I chose this topic, Zombie Belief in Haitian Voodoo and the Biological Basis for the Myth. In researching the topic I checked out other books from the library on the subject. One was called Tell My Horse, published in 1937, written by Zora Neale Hurston. The name Tell My Horse came from a phrase used in Voodoo ceremonies where the person becomes possessed by a spirit and is ridden like a horse by the spirit. The spirit might speak through the person, the horse being ridden, and say "Tell my horse..."

Hurston also wrote about the Zombie beliefs and included in this discussion the idea that there was a posion that certain Bokors knew about that could create the zombies. She was right. In her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road she also wrote about her Zombie findings:

What is more, if science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unkown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony.
Almost 50 years later her observation was confirmed by Davis.

I don't remember how I found out about her other books. Around this time though, there was beginning to be an awakening about Zora Neale Hurston. I remember seeing a flier on the wall in a humanities building about a conference on her. This may be when I found out she was more than just someone who wrote an anthropological book about Haitian Voodoo beliefs and practices.

Thanks for looking at this Zora Neale Hurston page. Please let me know what you think, if you like her writing, if you heard of something new, got a bone to pick, anything... I always appreciate feedback.