Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica Illustrated Edition, Kindle Edition
Zora Neale Hurston (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |


Learn more

Use the Amazon App to scan ISBNs and compare prices.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

“Strikingly dramatic, yet simple and unrestrained . . . an unusual and intensely interesting book richly packed with strange information.”
—New York Times Book Review
Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer of voodoo practices during her visits in the 1930s, this travelogue into a dark world paints a vividly authentic picture of the ceremonies, customs, and superstitions of voodoo.
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Based on acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston's personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica—where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer during her visits in the 1930s—Tell My Horse is a fascinating firsthand account of the mysteries of Voodoo. An invaluable resource and remarkable guide to Voodoo practices, rituals, and beliefs, it is a travelogue into a dark, mystical world that offers a vividly authentic picture of ceremonies, customs, and superstitions.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.About the Author
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include Dust Tracks on a Road; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Jonah's Gourd Vine; Moses, Man of the Mountain; Mules and Men; and Every Tongue Got to Confess.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Product details
- ASIN : B0013L2BN4
- Publisher : Amistad; Illustrated edition (October 13, 2009)
- Publication date : October 13, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 2068 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 254 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #522,001 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #72 in Haiti Travel Guides
- #88 in Caribbean Travel
- #132 in Poetry Anthologies (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Zora Neale Hurston was born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. Her writings reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings. For Hurston, Eatonville was always home.
Growing up in Eatonville, in an eight-room house on five acres of land, Zora had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father. Her mother, on the other hand, urged young Zora and her seven siblings to "jump at de sun."
Hurston's idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end, though, when her mother died in 1904. Zora was only 13 years old.
After Lucy Hurston's death, Zora's father remarried quickly and seemed to have little time or money for his children. Zora worked a series of menial jobs over the ensuing years, struggled to finish her schooling, and eventually joined a Gilbert & Sullivan traveling troupe as a maid to the lead singer. In 1917, she turned up in Baltimore; by then, she was 26 years old and still hadn't finished high school. Needing to present herself as a teenager to qualify for free public schooling, she lopped 10 years off her life--giving her age as 16 and the year of her birth as 1901. Once gone, those years were never restored: From that moment forward, Hurston would always present herself as at least 10 years younger than she actually was.
Zora also had a fiery intellect, and an infectious sense of humor. Zora used these talents--and dozens more--to elbow her way into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, befriending such luminaries as poet Langston Hughes and popular singer/actress Ethel Waters.
By 1935, Hurston--who'd graduated from Barnard College in 1928--had published several short stories and articles, as well as a novel (Jonah's Gourd Vine) and a well-received collection of black Southern folklore (Mules and Men). But the late 1930s and early '40s marked the real zenith of her career. She published her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937; Tell My Horse, her study of Caribbean Voodoo practices, in 1938; and another masterful novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. When her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942, Hurston finally received the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. That year, she was profiled in Who's Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors. She went on to publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948.
Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. So when she died on Jan. 28, 1960--at age 69, after suffering a stroke--her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her funeral. The collection didn't yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973.
That summer, a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work.
Walker entered the snake-infested cemetery where Hurston's remains had been laid to rest. Wading through waist-high weeds, she soon stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she determined to be Hurston's grave. Walker chose a plain gray headstone. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South."
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
"Tell My Horse" isn't really a coherent book. It's a collection of free-standing chapters/narratives, with no general introduction, no transitions, and no summing-up or conclusions; it just starts and ends. There is no glossary. It's as if Hurston expects the reader to be familiar already with the vocabulary of voodoo, to know what a houngan or a hounci or a canzo is, or for that matter what a loa is and how loas and orishas are related. Occasionally a word that has been used many times before is suddenly defined in parentheses, again underscoring the independence of the various chapters. The names of Haitian historical figures, some quite obscure, are flung around as if everyone knows their histories. Herbal medicines and plants used in magic are named, but not identified botanically. Songs, chants and prayers are reproduced in full in the original Creole--and almost never translated. It gets very frustrating.
And yet--no one can deny that it is a mesmerizing "read." The detailed descriptions of voodoo practices are both fascinating and horrifying, often entailing bloody animal sacrifice. (Such stuff is going on today right here in the United States; there was recent evidence of it in Sacramento, California, a seemingly unlikely venue.) There are numerous photographs, mostly too murkily reproduced, at least in this edition, to be very informative.
The big question about this book is how to read it. Is it descriptive anthropology? Hurston seems swept into the milieu she describes. Does she believe in what she writes about? Does she believe in the power of voodoo ritual? Most of all, does she believe in zombies? She claims to have tried to interview one, and provides the only known photograph of one. But how does she know this is a zombie? She allows for the possibility that zombies are not and never have been dead--that their masters, the bocors, have a secret drug that puts the victim in a death-like state such that he or she is buried, only to be surreptitiously exhumed and put to work as a zombie. The existence of such a secret "zombie powder" has been much discussed by people interested in such stuff, but never proven or disproven. The topic of voodoo zombies (as against the contemporary pop-culture version) refuses to die. Yes, a very strange book.
Hurston, who did not often (if ever) say why she was there, was truly a part of the daily lives of the people with whom she stayed, and she withheld information about why she was there because she knew that if she told the people, she would see a performance of people’s lives, rather than actual lives, staged dances rather than real dances. Hurston also brings us a superb example of participant observation, and she makes no pretense that she can somehow get data that is completely uninformed by her presence. Neither does she accept stated perceptions at face value, but rather, challenges them when she feels it is appropriate. Consequently, her grasp of what is going in around her is much stronger.
One critique I do have is that Hurston makes sweeping, reductionist statements that betray her positionality (an educated black woman from the United States) in some aspects. I am not saying she wasn’t reflective, as there are many comments throughout the book that lead me to believe she was, but rather, that reflectiveness isn’t ever explicitly stated.
For those who enjoy political intrigue, reading about the death of Leconte (chapter 9) might prove quite enjoyable. Leconte isn’t the only memorable character in the book, even if, historically speaking, he may be the best known. Or perhaps that nod goes to Vilbrun Sam. In any case, there is also the buffoon president, his Voodoo priestess daughter, and her husband the goat. Oh, and zombies. The layout of Hurston’s book sets the reader up for the world in which voodoo is at work at that period of time in history, in all places, at all levels of society, leading up to the title chapter, “Go Tell My Horse,” which refers to the “mounting” (or possession) of a person by a loa.
Whether for enjoyment or assignment (although I do hope those aren’t mutually exclusive), Go Tell My Horse is an enjoyable, fascinating observation of Haiti in the first half of the 20th century, and I highly recommend you give it a read.
"Tell My Horse" didn't flow well or make sense to me. Years ago, I read "Their Eyes Were Watching God," and could recall most of it vividly. As I read this book, I was unable to retain any information.
Maybe other people would enjoy Zora Neale Hurston's "Tell My Horse," but this was actually the first book of Hurston's I disliked.
Top reviews from other countries

Hurston went to Jamaica and Haiti as a mixture of things: an anthropologist, a journalist, a creative writer, a first worlder, a US citizen, an African-America, a woman….and that mixture influenced how she looked at the people she met and their customs, and how she wrote about them. The result is an account of customs and beliefs that is detached yet sympathetic with no trace of condescension (at least I couldn’t detect any). Some of it seemed familiar as I’ve lived in Jamaica and I know many people of Jamaican heritage in the UK. I thought I knew something about Haiti as well, but I learned a lot more from this book.
However, you can see why Hurston was marginalised, not just by the white publishers and reviewers but also by mainstream Black literati. Her independent thinking meant she was frequently off-message. The chapter on women in the Caribbean is a good example of that. I suppose one thing that would have made a conscious African-American in the 30s/40s or later cringe is the way Hurston focuses on conflict and strife within Black communities rather between white and Black. Also she doesn’t present that conflict and strife in a context of slavery and continued oppression. She is more comfortable with folk lore than with political analysis. There’s a suggestion that slavery and oppression mixed with African heritage gives Black people an enhanced and spiritual/esoteric outlook on life compared to whites. In that context it is perfectly reasonable for Jamaicans to believe in duppies, a belief that the white colonial masters would dismiss as ignorant superstition. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance were very uncomfortable with this approach and Hurston, sadly, ended her life in poverty and obscurity.
Kudos to Alice Walker for rediscovering her.
This edition has a very illuminating afterword by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
I’ve since read Hurston’s Complete Stories in the Harper Perennial edition. These editions of Hurston’s works are great value as they include additional material about Hurston’s life and work. The Complete Stories has an account by Alice Walker about how she tracked down Hurston’s tomb in an overgrown cemetery in Florida.

Where the book falls down is the pictures- terribly reprinted, you can barely see anything, and the side rambling into Haitian local politics (in the present day then) that really means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps if there'd been a footnote by a scholar to say how that local bit of political history impacted on Haiti today, I'd have been happy, but as it is, it took me out of the story. Overall, a good read if you read it in the day. It's spooky reading it at night!


