Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and former student of Franz Boas who traveled to Haiti during the occupation and post-occupation period and produced Tell My Horse (1938) — at the time, Ramsey notes, 'perhaps the only reliable monograph on the vodoun society' in English.
Davis cites her as the explicit predecessor to his own zombi investigation; Ramsey places her within the 1930s foreign research surge around Haiti alongside Katherine Dunham and Melville Herskovits, and notes her use of the notorious occupation-era intermediary Stanley 'Doc' Reser. She provides the vault with an earlier Black American route into Haiti that is neither identical to white exotic travel writing nor free from the problems of mediation and sensational reception: a Harlem Renaissance figure trained in scientific ethnography who encountered the same ritual landscape that later sparked both academic and popular debate about zombi pharmacology. Barthélémy cites her observation that 'the Haitian people has a tremendous talent for getting themselves loved' — then uses it to argue that this is not natural good-naturedness but a genuine strategy of dissuasion, capturing and reflecting external discourse back at its sender.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow opens by naming Hurston as the predecessor whose Tell My Horse established the baseline zombi ethnography Davis was setting out to explain scientifically. He positions her work as containing the unresolved mystery — a reported zombi case — that pharmacological investigation could answer. Davis treats Hurston as a serious field observer whose account of a specific case was credible enough to anchor his own investigation, while his methodology (biochemistry, botany, pharmacology) implicitly positions itself as more rigorous than her folklorist approach. The result is a complex intellectual debt: Hurston gave Davis his problem but Davis's framework eclipses hers.
Davis explicitly positioned his investigation as the scientific answer to the mystery Hurston first encountered — naming her as the acknowledged predecessor whose Tell My Horse established the zombi question.
Ramsey's The Spirits and the Law places Hurston within a 1930s wave of foreign researchers who arrived in Haiti in the post-occupation period with varying degrees of access to Haitian religious practice. Ramsey emphasizes that Hurston worked through Stanley 'Doc' Reser, a controversial occupation-era intermediary who shaped what she saw and how she saw it — complicating the apparent directness of her fieldwork. Ramsey treats Hurston as neither naive nor fully compromised but as a figure whose work is mediated by the specific networks and power relations of the occupation's cultural aftermath, and whose export of Vodou and zombi discourse to English-language audiences had lasting interpretive consequences.
Hurston's Haiti fieldwork was mediated through occupation-era intermediary Stanley 'Doc' Reser, making her direct ethnographic access less transparent than Tell My Horse presents it.
TimelineAcross the historical record.
- 1935
Novelist, Folklorist, and Haiti Ethnographer
Trained under Franz Boas and traveled to Haiti in the 1930s; produced Tell My Horse (1938), the first major English-language ethnographic account of Vodou practice — influencing subsequent researchers including Wade Davis, who explicitly positioned his own work in relation to hers.
RelationshipsPeople connected to this life.
- Related toJacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
- Related toLangston Hughes
Langston Hughes
- Related toArna Bontemps
Arna Bontemps
- Related toKatherine Dunham
Katherine Dunham