Tell My Horse.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, (1938).
8vo.; frontispiece; photographs throughout; red and blue striped cloth, stamped in white; pictorial dust-jacket decorated with Haitian village scene; jacket lightly torn, mended with tape. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Hurston’s landmark study of Caribbean “voodoo” practices. Published October 1938, number of copies unknown: Blockson 4129. The First English edition was published the following year with the title Voodoo Gods: An Inquiry into Native Myths in Jamaica and Haiti.
Tell My Horse was based on Hurston’s travels in Haiti, Jamaica, and the British West Indies, where the indigenous culture and rituals of the negro people, she said, had inundated her like molasses in the summertime. In Tell My Horse Hurston produced one of the 20th-century’s first non-sensationalist reports about the African-derived religious practice of obeah, as well as one of the few pre-1970s Western anthropological texts composed with a genuine respect for the people and practices being observed. Hurston’s book broke new ground in other ways—she was one of the first women (and certainly one of the first African-American university-educated women) to record her experiences traveling alone through largely male-dominated territories.
Hurston was well aware of the inherent danger in her work, but her reverence for her material was strong. She wrote in her memoirs:
Research is a formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and dwell therein.
...My search for knowledge of things took me into many strange places and adventures. My life was in danger several times. If I had not known how to take care of myself in these circumstances, I could have been maimed or killed on most any day of the several years of research work. (Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942)
One of the most riveting sections of Tell My Horse describes Hurston’s participation in a traditionally male Jamaican pre-nuptial feast:
They [the members of St. Mary’s parish, Jamaica] did something for me that has never been done for a woman. They gave me a curry goat feed. That is something utterly masculine in every detail. Even a man takes the part of a woman in the “shay shay” singing and dancing that goes on after the feed....
The affair was lavish...Just around a bend in the road we came to an arch woven of palm fronds before a gate...Men were seated in the yard braiding more palm fronds...Three women with elaborate cakes upon their heads were dancing under an arch at the gate. The cakes were of many layers and one of the cakes was decorated with a veil.. The cake-bearers danced and turned under the arch, and turned and danced and sang with the others something about “Let the stranger in.” This kept up until an elderly woman touched one of the dancers. Then the one who was touched whirled around gently, went inside the yard and on to the house. Another was touched and turned and she went in and then the third....
We went inside the house and saw the cakes arranged to keep their vigil for the night....There were about thirty guests in all including some very pretty half-Chinese girls. The cooks announced and we went inside to eat. Before that everybody had found congenial companions and had wandered the grounds warming themselves by the moonlight...
It appeared that there must be a presiding officer at a curry goat...He sat at the head of the table and directed the fun. There was a story-telling contest, bits of song, reminiscences that were side-splitting and humourous pokes and jibes at each other. All of this came with the cock soup. This feast is so masculine that chicken soup would not be allowed. It must be soup from roosters. After the cock soup comes ram goat and spice. No nanny goat in this meal either. It is ram goat or nothing...By that time the place was o
Print Inquire