Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos

By Edward M Erdelac

ZORA!
 

"The oaths of secrecy she [Zora Neale Hurston] swore, and the terrifying physical and emotional ordeals she endured…left their mark on her, and there were certain parts of her material which she never dared to reveal, even in scientific publications." – Alan Lomax

ZORA! She traveled the 1930's south alone with a loaded forty four and an unmatched desire to see and to know. She was at home in the supper clubs of New York City, back road juke joints, under ropes of Spanish moss, and dancing around the Vodoun peristyle. Her experiences brought us Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mules And Men, Tell My Horse, and Jonah's Gourd Vine. But between the lines she wrote lie the words unwritten, truths too fantastic to divulge….until now.

LEAVES FLOATING IN THE WAKE OF A DREAM, BEYOND THE BLACK ARCADE. EKWENSU'S LULLABY. KING YELLER. GODS OF THE GRIM NATION. THE SHADOW IN THE CHAPEL OF EASE. BLACK WOMAN, WHITE CITY. THE DEATHLESS SNAKE. Eight weird and fantastic stories spanning the breadth of her amazing life. Eight times when she faced the nameless alien denizens of the outer darkness and didn't blink.

ZORA! Celebrated writer, groundbreaking anthropologist, Hoodoo initiate, footloose queen of the Harlem Renaissance, Mythos detective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward M. Erdelac
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798215091807

Edward M Erdelac

Edward M. Erdelac is the author of ten novels including Andersonville, Monstrumfuhrer, and The Merkabah Rider series. His short fiction has appeared in over twenty anthologies and periodicals. He's also written everything you need to know about boxing in the Star Wars Galaxy. Born in Indiana, educated in Chicago, he lives in the Los Angeles area with his family.  

Book preview

Beyond The Black Arcade originally first in Heroes Of Red Hook, Golden Goblin Press, 2016.

Ekwensu’s Lullaby first appeared in Beyond Red Hook, Golden Goblin Press, 2016.

Gods Of The Grim Nation first appeared in Dread Shadows In Paradise, Golden Goblin Press, 2016.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or fictitious recreations of actual historical persons. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors unless otherwise specified. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Cover Illustration: Jabari Weathers Worldwide Rights Created in the United States of America

RAINBRINGER

Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos

By Edward M. Erdelac

For Sandra:

I love myself when I am laughing....then again when I am looking mean and impressive.

Table of Contents

Zora: A Brief, Inadequate, and Likely Inaccurate Summation of A Life

1925: Leaves Floating In A Dream’s Wake

1928: Beyond The Black Arcade

1935: Ekwensu’s Lullaby

1936: King Yeller

1937: Gods of The Grim Nation

1940: The Shadow In The Chapel of Ease

1948: Black Woman, White City

1960-1975: The Deathless Snake

Afterword

ZORA: A Brief, Inadequate, and Likely Inaccurate Summation of A Life

The Zora Neale Hurston depicted in this book is not the real person, of course.

The real Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida on January 15th, in (according to her, at various times in her life) either 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1910.

Except she wasn’t.

She was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891.

Her birth year changed as it suited her purposes. She needed to apply for school, wanted to impress a younger man, whatever. She was somehow always vivacious and gregarious enough to sell her claims.

As to her hometown, you can’t blame Zora for claiming Eatonville. It was among the first all-black incorporated towns in the United States, and her father was once elected its mayor, helped write its laws, and was pastor of its largest Baptist church. Combined, these elements surely instilled in her a fierce sense of independence and pride that caught a number of her contemporaries later in life, black and white, by complete surprise.

According to her notoriously unreliable autobiography, Dust Tracks On A Road, she spent much of her idyllic and, it may be inferred, precocious childhood sitting on a fence post engaging strangers of every color as they passed by her house, and looking toward the horizon. As a child, like a young dreaming Joseph, she imagined that the moon followed her wherever she walked at night. Raised in a cradle of black achievement and black self-reliance, she claims she never even encountered racial animosity until she moved to a boarding school in Jacksonville. That became necessary following the devastating death of her beloved mother and untimely remarriage of her father to a woman she despised and purportedly nearly killed in a knock down drag out fight. When racism did rear its ugly head in her life, she was more bemused by it than blindsided.

She wrote, in How It Feels To Be Colored Me;

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

She got a job as a maid for the lead singer of a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe and wound up in Baltimore, enrolling in Morgan State University. In 1918 she attended Howard, and in 1921, joined The Stylus, a literary club founded by the first African American Rhodes scholar, Alain Locke. She spent Saturday evenings in a literary salon on S Street in Washington DC, in the company of W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson.

In 1925 she moved to Harlem and transferred to Barnard College in New York City, doing her first ethnographic work with Melville Herskovits, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead. She was Barnard’s first (and at the time, only) black student, and graduated with a degree in anthropology in 1928.

It was also in 1925 that Zora made her legendary big splash on the Harlem literary scene. Her short story Sweat and her stage play, Color Struck, a look at the taboo subject of colorism in the African American community, were published in Opportunity Magazine, and placed second in their respective categories in the magazine’s annual literary contest, Sweat losing to John F. Matheus’ Fog (and, to illustrate the impression Zora made that night, that took some digging to figure out).

Arriving at the posh awards dinner on May 1st, Zora flourished her vibrantly colored scarf, struck a pose in the doorway, and yelled Colorrrrrrrrrr Struuuuuuuuck! instantly cementing her place as the star of the evening, whatever her placing.

She forged a longtime friendship with the influential white socialite Fannie Hurst (author of Imitation of Life), and convinced the maître de of an upscale Vermont restaurant that she was an African princess so they could dine together. She also made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes, there with his prize winning poem, The Weary Blues.

It was Hughes (or possibly Locke) who introduced her to wealthy white philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, who sponsored (and, to Zora’s growing annoyance, directed, down to the most minute detail) her anthropological research trips through the south from 1927-1932.

In New Orleans, gathering material on Hoodoo for a book, she was inducted into the mysteries of the magical folk practice by Luke Turner following a grueling three day ritual.

She wrote Langston Hughes;

I am getting in with the top of the profession. I know 18 tasks, including how to crown the spirit of death, and kill.

After a falling out with Hughes regarding the ownership of their stage collaboration Mule Bone, Zora also broke her ties with Mason. She spent 1936-1937 studying religious practices in Jamaica and Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and famously met and interviewed Felicia Felix-Mentor, the first photographed zombie.

In was during this period she produced the main body of her best-regarded long form work; her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), the ethnographic books, Mules And Men (1935), and Tell My Horse (1938), her novel Moses, Man Of The Mountain (1939) and her oft-cited romantic masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

After a series of failed ventures both financial and literary, a falsified charge of child molestation (she was out of the country and living in Honduras at the time the crime was supposed to have occurred), and her own outspoken and decidedly bootstrap conservative politics (she opposed school integration on the basis that the policy would hinder Afrocentric education, and that she saw no tragedy in being too dark to be invited to a white school social affair.) put her out of fashion and out of step with the growing Civil Rights movement, she gradually faded into obscurity, working as a teacher and again as a house maid on Rivo Alto Island in Miami Beach.

She suffered a stroke and died in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pearce, Florida, unable to find a publisher for a novel on Herod The Great. Her personal papers were saved from an inglorious end in a trash barrel fire by a passing acquaintance.

She was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pearce, her grave unmarked until it was rediscovered by the writer Alice Walker in 1973.

Zora was many things in the course of her life; anthropologist, author, teacher...she was probably never a Mythos detective.

As far as we know, anyway....

1925

Leaves Floating In A Dream’s Wake

January 19th, 1925

Dearest Herbert,

Thank you kindly for your sincere well wishes on the occasion of my latest and what I hope will be my greatest run around the sun. I am well as can be and hope most ardently that you are the same. I was reluctant to write you. I wanted to give you your space after all. I guess the distance between Chicago and New York City should probably be all the space anybody would ever want, but of course, I meant time. I think of you more often than I like, if I am being honest, which, with you, I always am.

Tell me how your courses are going at Rush. I know Chi is the Windy City, so I can’t even imagine the level of gales that blow through your clothes. Here in Harlem it is cold, cold cold! And you know how my teeth used to chatter walking home from S Street! My Florida blood is too thin for these northern winds. I wish you were here to warm me.

Yet, I am not so lonely that I will be throwing myself from my window. No, not even over you, my doctor to be. Harlem is a dream, and calls to mind old Eatonville, but dressed up in grown folks’ clothes. My people here don’t slouch when they walk, and standing on the corner of Seventh and 135th is like people watching in front of my family’s house again.

Negroes flow by like a great muddy river, in every lovely shade of beautiful black, and it is tempting to jump on the running boards of the shiny cars or slip my arms through stranger’s elbows, just to lose myself in the current and float down whatever eddy is moving swiftest.

Oh, and I am. I am dancing with poets, singers, jazz men and other liars. Every tongue and every spine is loose. I saw none other than Duke Ellington play at a rent party last Saturday night. The next time you are in town I will take you to a buffet flat, but don’t ask what that is – I want to see the look on your face. I imagine it will be much like my own was the first time I went with Angelina Grimke.

Yes, I have reconnected with a few of the old Saturday Nighters here. James Johnson is only a few blocks down from me. Of course I am in contact with Dr. Locke, and have been over to Dr. Johnson’s home for dinner a few times. His wife is a lovely person and a tremendous cook. Whenever I dine with them and I at last push away in surrender from their bounteous table, I expect to see a bill waiting to be paid, but so far so good, which is good, because brother, I am broke and it is no joke.

I’ve been working as a manicurist again to make ends meet, wearing down my own nails at night on the typewriter. I’m working on a story, Spunk, which I hope Dr. Johnson will go for, and kicking around the idea of a play. Dr. Locke is guest editing an all-Negro issue of Survey Graphic in March and will be showcasing a number of Negro writers, so I hope to have something in that.

I’m not at the Nicholas Avenue address anymore. Use this one instead.

Devotedly,

Zora Neale Hurston

February 27th, 1925

Dear Herbert,

I am glad that school is going well.

I wanted to write you sooner, but I have been busy with keeping a roof over my head. Lost my manicurist job. Waiting tables now. Still trying to find a way to continue my schooling. I am circling Barnard, but they’ve never had a Negro student. I don’t know if I want that ‘privilege.’

Locke sent word that there will be no place for Spunk in the Survey Graphic issue. It’s perhaps no surprise that he’s found only three spots for women in the whole damned magazine, an essay by Elise Johnson McDougald (on the struggle of the Negro woman of all things, published without a hint of irony on his part!) and two poems. One is Angelina’s. I am happy for her of course, but am also jealous enough to chew through my own fist.

The other night I saw this entourage of well-dressed white people passing through Harlem with this blonde giant in the lead like some kind of carved Viking ship’s figurehead, pointing quaint things out to them as they went into Small’s Paradise, as though they were on safari. I don’t mind it in the way you might think. I don’t need to rhapsodize to you on the arrogance of white people.

I feel as though our people are on the cusp of something which is going to kick off like a barrel of black powder here in Harlem. Locke calls it The New Negro Movement. I know that I can be a part of it, maybe even the queen of the whole damn show, if that mincing old woman-hating gatekeeper will just let me stick my foot in the door.

Have not been in the mood to write since getting the bad news. Dr Johnson says there will be a big contest in Opportunity in June with cash prizes and a fancy award dinner, but how am I to make it till then? New York is cold and I have one good coat and one nice dress. I am putting on a mask for the other Harlemites now, telling stories as if I’m on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store, making them all laugh....but are they laughing with me, or at me? Am I a quaint country buffoon to them all? Some rural minstrel with newspapers in the soles of my shoes?

I am sorry to unload all this on you.

Burn this letter.

Faithfully,

Zora Neale Hurston

––––––––

March 2nd, 1925

Herbert,

The strangest thing happened. It was on Saturday night Sunday night.

I have told you before of the dreams I had as a child, and how many of them came to pass. I told you how I dreamed that my family circle would be broken, and of the train, and of that terrible shotgun house, and how all that came true.

You will remember I think, how, as a little girl, I also dreamed of a rich room and an old woman with strange flowers, and of standing knee deep in my own despair beside a dark pool with a huge fish moving slowly away.

I dreamed of that dark pool again, and while, in the moment, I thought that the fish was the opportunities I have seen slipping out of reach as of late, I do not think that it was so, for this time the vision was different.

The fish moved just below the surface, a great black shape, like a whale or some leviathan. Out in the center of the lake, whose far banks I could not see, something strange breached the surface; jagged, bizarrely shaped towers of blank stone slathered in green slime, arranged crazily atop some unseen, rising hump of land.

The still waters shook and churned, splashing titanic waves of cold water over me, and I trembled as the immense thing making for the newborn city rose to beach itself on that black granite shore. Its huge, cleaving wake split the water like an ocean liner. It reached out for those stone edifices with things like massive hands, and it pulled its tremendous, slick bulk into the midst of the necropolis, pushing itself between the canted obelisks. I could only see the back of its bulbous head between two bat wings that unfolded and cast the waters and the city in frigid shadows.

I heard as if in my inner ear, an awful, guttural repetition I can’t even begin to recall. It didn’t conform to any syntax or language system I have ever studied, or even ever heard of.

But when I awoke sweating in my bed, I felt sure that this thing I had seen, as terrible and fantastic as it was, was most surely, somehow, going to come to pass; that out beyond the harbor somewhere far out at sea, this scene was transpiring, and that the Brobdingnagian form I had seen need only turn its head to set its unknowable face against this city, against this country, against all of humanity, to destroy us all on a mere whim.

It was night, about 9:20, and the whole of the building was swaying, so I thought I was still dreaming. But I heard tires squeal outside my window, and a pair of coupes collided, and people screamed in the street below.

I managed to get out of bed and get to the window, and saw people grabbing light posts and crouching in place. I saw advertising shingles on the storefronts swinging on their chains.

Herbert, it was no dream!

Every face was painted with confusion, but I felt mad, as though I alone had been granted a vision of what was actually happening. Down on 135th Street I could see those who were not screaming were smiling nervously at the strangeness of the happening.

I tell you truthfully, Herbert, and you will know it is true for with all I have been through in my life so far, I have never once given even a passing through to self-destruction. I wanted to pitch something heavy through the pane and then follow it headfirst into the street below. I was convinced it would be a mercy to die that way, rather than to keep on in the face of what was coming. I wanted no part of this; to be neither its herald nor its witness. I wanted to be packed and gone wherever we are all bound well before its arrival.

I managed to pull myself away from the window though, and I pulled on my one coat and hat and went out of my place. The halls were crowded with crying children and people all talking at once. It felt like the end of the world.

I went downstairs and out into the cold night. I wandered the street like a crazy woman, no thought of where to go, only thinking that I needed to feel the night air on my face, to breathe it in, to not be already shut in a box like a gift for death when it came.

It’s silly now, to think of my reaction to something as simple as an earthquake, but well, we don’t get those down in Florida, and I had never thought I would experience one in New York City, particularly one whose epicenter was way up in Quebec.

I found myself at The Tree of Hope.

That tree is an elm on the corner of 131st Avenue and Seventh over by the Lafayette and Connie’s Inn. People come there, you see, artists and buskers and the like, to rub the bark for good luck.

There were several other wide-eyed men and women about the tree, some in evening wear, some in pajamas, all milling around, all jabbering like the people in the hallway, demanding to know each from the other what was going on, as if anyone could say.

I don’t know why, but I pushed through them all and went to the tree. I reached out and put the palm of my hand on the lined bark, on a spot that looked like a snake stretched out and standing on its tail, and I just shut my eyes tight. I can’t say I prayed, but perhaps I came close to it. I could feel the tree shaking beneath my hand, but in a couple of moments it stopped, along with the noise of the people gathered.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that everyone around the tree had done what I had done. All of them had outstretched an arm and taken hold of the tree, as if together we could stop it shaking, and maybe we did, in some way I can’t explain.

I saw several faces I recognized. Angelina was there, and Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and Arna Bontemps. There were some who I knew of, but had never met. Countee Cullen was there, and Langston Hughes, the poet I’d been hearing about and seen around.

It was Langston who said to me the thing that rocked me down deep in my bones;

Did you all have a dream about a city rising up?

Yes! And something else, I said excitedly. Something in the water.

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh," someone said. "Cthu-

Several of us hushed him. I don’t know why, but Langston said;

I don’t think we should say that. I don’t think anybody should.

We all agreed to retire to the Log Cabin and talk about it over drinks and low key piano music.

The counter man put the radio on then, and that was when we heard that it had been an earthquake – what they’re calling the Charlevoix-Kamouraska earthquake now, as I said, up in Quebec along the St. Lawrence River. They had felt it all the way down in Virginia, someone on the news said.

But some of us got another shock when we realized it had struck at 9:19 on March 1st.

You see, I had come home from a party Saturday night, on February 28th.

I had somehow slept all through Sunday into the evening, as had several others at the Log Cabin, about half of the dozen that had been drawn to the tree, all artists of some sort.

Now, you know, Herbert, that even as a minister’s daughter, I am no great believer in God, not in the bearded man on the throne at any rate. I only go to church now and again for the old comfort of the stomp and shout.

But how can what happened to us collectively be explained?

One hollow-eyed, gator-faced, cokey musician whose name I never did learn, had a terrible theory, which he muttered down into his coffee cup;

Maybe that Astorperious motherfucker we seen, maybe we ain’t the ones dreamt it. Maybe it dreamt us, and it’s finna wake up. Where you think we go when it do?

Ah, you’re beatin’ your gums, said another. What we dreamed, it was a message from our ancestors.

What message? Langston asked.

Something’s coming, and we as a people need to get ready. That’s the beast Leviathan we saw....

There were groans.

And there were other theories.

And there were more groans.

Well, I’m no oneirocritic, no Sibyl, but based on what personally happened to me next, I can surmise what happened.

You will remember I spoke in my last letter or perhaps the one before, about our people being on the edge of some explosive greatness, centered here in Harlem?

I think this shared, secret dream (for all of us at the Log Cabin that night swore not to speak of it outright, lest we wind up slung howling into Bellevue) is a call; a call from the collective Negro unconsciousness, our ancestors gone and our descendants to be, to awaken, rise up from the depths and embrace our greatness in unity. It was terrifying yes, because it was a threat.

Do not let this moment in time pass, or we will pull you down to the dead to make room for others who will not hesitate to live!

And why did this call come only to us dream-singers (that’s one of Langston’s words)? Because, like the holy men and women of old, like the deacons in the sanctified churches today, we must take this sacred vision and distill it, impart it to the rest of the people, inspire them to boldness and greatness.

This has been our call to action.

I do believe Locke has started something, and just as I have known all along that I will one day meet the old woman with the strange flowers, I know I will be a part of this thing. I will give myself up to it; cease to be a thing striving against the current and allow the waves to raise me to my natural born place.

The Survey Graphic issue has met with much acclaim. So much, that Locke has asked me to contribute something to an all-Negro anthology he intends to build upon his expanded essay on the New Negro Movement.

I have only stopped writing to tell you of this. Now, looking at it, I may not even send it, for I expect you’ll think I’m crazy.

But the words are leaping out of me now so fast my fingers are a blur just trying to catch them. I’m writing about hoodoo and sex, murder and revenge, passion and mothers and fathers and their children.

I may win every category of that Opportunity prize just by inundating Dr. Johnson with entries.

I am on fire, my dear, and fanning those flames!

Off now, to catch that old fish.

Isis Watts

(Zora Neale Hurston)

1928

Beyond The Black Arcade

Under high arches of twisting, moss garnished cypress and through sucking, chill waters we waded, me feeling the cool, brackish slime on my bare legs and Doc Turner leading the way without any light but what stars could be glimpsed through the tangled boughs overhead. Things moved away from us in the water which I supposed were alligators.

Out of the dark came a high, child’s wail and a shout that made my skin prickle up. There was a commotion of cracking wood, like the sound of falling trees I knew from the lumber camps around Eatonville. I could not imagine who should be way out here in the bayou pitching such a fit, and I wished I had thought to bring the .44 I had toted around the turpentine camps to convince folks I was a bootlegger.

Two shotgun blasts boomed like thunder, and I saw the flashes of the muzzle a ways off.

Against common sense, Doc Turner made for the sound, though in no hurry.

This was to be my test, then; the test of Great Yig.

* * * *

It was at the behest of Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason, wealthy white widow of that pioneer of parapsychology Dr. Rufus Mason, that I had traveled to New Orleans to collect data on the practice of Hoodoo after a year spent rambling across Florida gathering the biggest lies I could tickle out of folks.

Godmother Mason, as she likes her Negro emissaries to call her, had hit on the notion that Indian and Negro peoples were unspoiled by white civilization, and thus, rich sources of primordial spiritual energies necessary to renew the American nation, upset from its natural evolutionary course to mass enlightenment by the spiritual woes that went hand in hand with rampant industrialization and capitalist avarice.

At our first meeting over caviar and capon she had urged me, leaning across the sparkling, mirror-bright silver with her knotty, liver spotted hands the hue of egg shells enveloping my own;

Zora, you must not let your education sever your precious connection to primitive intuition.

I had taken this in stride and resisted laughing in her face. Because she had spent time among the Indians with a musicologist, I got the sense that she thought herself a better Negro than I.

Despite suffering from that acute, arrogant blindness all rich white Negrotarians are stricken with from birth, Mrs. Mason was a gallant soul in her way, charitable toward Harlem artists and New Negro thinkers.

Alain Locke had recommended me to her, and I saw in her a chance to hit a straight lick with a crooked stick. I had brushed up on her history prior to our first meeting. She was a spiritualist like her husband, and I had buttered her generously with talk of a powerful psychic bond I felt with her.

Now, that was not entirely a lie, for as soon as I stepped into her penthouse, I was fairly struck back out the door by the sight of a maid arranging a vase of calla lilies beside the old woman. The very flowers I had dreamed of all those years ago.

Why my vision had led me to this condescending old dowager I can’t begin to guess, but I have learned not to question dreams.

Mrs. Mason had gushed that she felt a connection to me as well (Who knows? Maybe she was following some secret dream of her own), to the tune of a two hundred dollar a month stipend and a tasty old yellow Nash coupe I took to calling Sassy Susie for to bomb around the South in, collecting folklore to be published under her aegis later. I admit I did not care for the guidelines she had set before me. I was not to use dirty words so that the end result might be presentable to the public, and the inference that I was to, in all things, emphasize the noble savagery of my people was implicit in her dictate.

Langston has quoted Rostand at me, told me I am playing the minstrel show for Miss Anne, but I am an artist and an anthropologist, and neither gets too far on their own dime. Anyway, Mr. Hughes is no black Cyrano, too proud to chase money. He dances