Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition,and Cultural Transformation in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract Zora nealf hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 while in Haiti collecting folklore on Vodou.1 A year later, she published Tell My Horse, which documents the findings from that expedition. While the history of these publications suggests that, for Hurston, folklore and fiction converge in Haiti, few critics have adequately explored that juncture. Most acknowledge Hurston’s interest in Haitian Vodou, but their analyses of the impact of this belief system on her work frequently do not extend beyond perfunctory glosses. A notable exception is Ellease Southerland’s essay “The Influence of Voodoo on the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in the 1979 collection Sturdy Black Bridges.  2