Tell My Horse

What the title sentence means

The title comes from a chapter in Part Three called Parlay Cheval Ou, which the book translates as Tell My Horse. In Haitian Vodou the spirit Guédé is understood to mount a person the way a rider mounts a horse. While mounted, the person says things nobody in the room could otherwise say — accusations, obscenities, the truth about a neighbour — and prefaces them by telling the listeners that the horse is speaking.

Hurston is interested in that arrangement as a social device and says so. A person with no standing gets a hearing, and nobody can be held responsible for what was said, because the speaker was not the speaker. She had already written a book about competitive lying in Florida. Here the framing is stronger: the speech is attributed to a god so that it can be uttered at all.

Naming the whole book after that chapter is a choice about the whole book. Hurston is telling a reader that the subject is not a set of beliefs but a way of getting things said. The British publisher missed it and retitled the London edition Voodoo Gods, which moves the attention from the speaking to the deities.

Three books in one binding

Part One is Jamaica and reads like a traveller's notebook: a curry goat feast, a wild hog hunt, a nine-night wake for the dead. Part Two is Haitian political history and reads like a magazine correspondent's file, running from the 1804 founding through the 1912 explosion that killed President Cincinnatus Leconte to the American occupation. Part Three is Vodou and reads like the field anthropology of Mules and Men.

No transition smooths the joins. A reader goes from a hog hunt to the mechanics of a coup to a possession ceremony with only a part title in between. Hurston never explains the arrangement. What the arrangement produces is a picture of two countries in which religion, government and dinner are all one subject, which is nearer to how the people in the book live than three separate volumes would have been.

The Jamaica chapter called Women in the Caribbean is the one that has aged into the book's sharpest section. Hurston writes about what a woman is for in the societies she is visiting, and she is not diplomatic. She had made the same argument in fiction the year before, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, where Janie Crawford is married off at sixteen for sixty acres. Here she makes it as reporting.

Part Two is also where a modern reader will argue with her hardest. Hurston writes about Haitian politics as an American, and her verdicts on Haitian self-government are those of a woman whose own country had troops in the country until 1934. The chapter titles are her own framing: Rebirth of a Nation, The Next Hundred Years. Reading the book means reading her position as well as her evidence.

The zombie chapter

Part Three has a chapter called Zombies, and it is the reason most people have heard of this book. Hurston does not treat the subject as a story people tell. She reports a case as something she was taken to see, in a hospital, and she describes a woman said to have been dead and buried and then walking. A photograph of that woman is among the plates in the first edition.

The chapter is where Hurston's method reaches its limit and she keeps going anyway. A researcher who is inside a practice can describe what participants believe with unusual accuracy. A researcher who is inside a practice has no vantage point from which to test whether a particular claim is true. Hurston reports what she was shown and what she was told, and she does not always mark the difference.

Later scholars have pulled the account apart, and it is fair to read the chapter as evidence about 1936 Haiti rather than as evidence about the dead. The rest of Part Three is steadier. Chapters like Isle de la Gonave, Secte Rouge, Graveyard Dirt and Other Poisons, Doctor Reser and God and the Pintards work at the level of practice — who does what, with what, and for whom.

The songs at the back, and why they are there

Pages 279 to 301 of the first edition print songs of worship to Vodou gods, words and music together. The Library of Congress catalogue record notes them as a separate item, which is how a cataloguer registers that a book of prose has suddenly become a book of scores. A second group of miscellaneous songs follows in the later Harper edition's appendix.

Printing the music is a claim about what the material is. A song transcribed with its melody can be sung again by someone who was never there. Hurston had done the same thing in the appendixes of Mules and Men, and she was making the same point: the songs are compositions with correct forms, not noise around a ceremony.

Hurston was also recording sound in this period. The Library of Congress holds the Florida folklife recordings she made with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, and the Haitian and Jamaican work sits alongside them in her career. A reader who wants to hear what she was writing down can start there, because the printed scores are the closest the 1938 book could get to a recording.