was originally conceived as a tribute to black
preachers, documents the psychological wounds
she and her mother sustained from John Hurston’s
constant infidelities and abandonment of the fam-
ily. A gifted black man, John Pearson (based on
John Hurston), married to Lucy Pearson (read
Lucy Hurston), becomes a renowned preacher who
loses all when his repeated adulteries finally kill
his wife, alienate his children, outrage his parish-
ioners, and end in his own violent death. Its folk
religious practices reveal the linguistic richness of
the black church and the pain of women and chil-
dren held hostage by flawed preacher-poets. MULES
AND MEN (1935) is a collection of 70 tales arranged
in two parts, “Folk Tales” and “Voodoo.” A narrator
unifies the collection. Her contextualizing, largely
absent from the modern “scientific” ethnography,
transformed the discipline. Their Eyes Were Watch-
ing God (1937) Hurston’s Künstlerroman and most
beloved novel, stages the spiritual and artistic com-
ing of age of an African-American woman griot.
A classic “speakerly” text with its free and indirect
African-American rhetorical strategies, this novel
features signifying, front porch storytelling, bait-
ing, boasting, and lying. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and
Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), Hurston’s three-
part account of the voodoo cults of Jamaica and
Haiti, contains sections on Haitian culture, poli-
tics, personalities, and voodoo practices.
Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) is a creative
black vernacular telling of the purported back
story of the biblical Moses, whom Hurston blames
for Judeo-Christianity’s racism, sexism, anti-Semi-
tism, fascism, and nationalism. It is never speci-
fied whether Moses is Egyptian or Jewish, black
or white. Moses is a fascinating minor work that
reveals a black female perspective on Western ra-
cial and gender injustices. DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD:
An Autobiography (1942), written under severe fi-
nancial pressure, was seriously distorted when her
white editors removed many of the 12 prophetic
dream visions that structured the book. The most
problematic of all Hurston’s works, Dust Tracks
is now finally available in the form she intended.
In it Hurston styles herself as folk character, per-
former, narrator, and trickster. Critics black and
white have dismissed the book as “lying,” make-
believe, or a propagandistic act of appeasement to
the white readership. Hurston’s problem was her
own racial anguish, her audience, her white edi-
tors, and her times. The Seraph on the Suwanee: A
Novel (1948) also deals with femininity, marriage,
and religion, this time within the sphere of poor
white Southern womanhood. Reviewers were pro-
voked by Hurston’s departure from her usual col-
orful “Negro subjects.”
The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of
Zora Neale Hurston (1984) written 60 years before
its publication, contains some material recently
shown not to be Hurston’s. It contains innovative
essays on the folklore, legend, popular mythology,
and spiritual configurations of the Black South-
ern Baptist Church. Section I, “Herbs and Herb
Doctors,” contains pieces on cures and beliefs and
figures like Mother Catherine and Uncle Mon-
day. Mother Catherine and Uncle Monday taken
together suggest the intersection of Afrocentric
voodoo culture and Christianity. Section II, “Char-
acteristics of Negro Expression,” contains pieces on
the tricksters, shamans or conjurers, High John the
Conqueror, and Daddy Mention. Section III, “The
Sanctified Church,” is rich in contextualized folk
material about the spirituals, neospirituals, con-
versions, visions, shouting, sermons, and the sanc-
tified church service itself. It is a valuable source of
information about the Holiness-Pentecostal move-
ments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and
about how religious forms from Africa were sub-
sequently grafted onto Christianity.
Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (1991) was
discovered in 1991, 60 years after Hurston and
LANGSTON HUGHES wrote it. A black dialect folk
comedy, it was thought by some Harlem Renais-
sance writers to reflect poorly on the black com-
munity. If this play had appeared in the 1930s it
might have influenced the development of black
vernacular theater. In 1991, when the Lincoln
Center Theater staged Mule Bone, many wondered
if the producer had tried to resuscitate a hokey,
lost, unfinished work. The Complete Stories (1995)
containing 19 previously published and seven
previously unpublished stories, reflects modern-
ist themes of love, betrayal, and death. A newly
discovered short story entitled “Under the Bridge”260 Hurston, Zora Neale