Out of her field experience she produced Mules and Men. Rich in folktales, it delved into the Black experience like never before, and revealed previously unknown secret pagan doings. Hurston wrote,
"Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites, is burning with a flame in America, with all the intensity of a suppressed religion. It has thousands of secret adherents...The way we tell it, hoodoo started way back before everything."
(Suddenly, I had a new understanding of the CCR song "Born on the Bayou," wherein hoodoos are chased by hound dogs.)
With a Guggenheim scholarship, Hurston continued here explorations of Black living by trekking to the Caribbean for "a study of magic practices among Negroes of the West Indies," focussing on the ex-slave colonies Jamaica and Haiti. As King describes her experience there, King writes that Hurston saw that
"Culture wasn't just a set of rules or rituals,,,It could also be a set of chains that individuals dragged around with them after the prison wardens more or less fled the scene."
To get a better feel for the living Black spirit in Jamaica, Hurston drove to St. Mary's parish in the Blue Mountains and came across "a country wedding" with music, dancing and cake (think: "Sweet and Dandy"). From there she joined the Maroons in "a boar hunt that stretched over several days, traipsing up and down the mountain slopes, slogging along in her riding boots, the hunters' dogs yelping when they got too close to the boar's razor-sharp tusks." From there she went to another parish where she attended a nine-day "wake" at which the corpse was "nailed tight to the interior of the coffin" so that its "duppy" spirit, "the dark matter inside any person" couldn't "take flight" and f*ck with the community.
From Jamaica, Hurston sailed to Haiti, where she uncovered the Home of Hoodoo-Voodoo and was introduced to a zombie by the name of Felicia Felix-Mentor, a product of local voodoo practices. Dumped by her husband, and suffering 'a total eclipse of the heart', King describes Hurston's situation: "[M]edical records showed that [Felicia] had died in 1907"[Hurston's account] remains the first known depiction of a person whom her Haitian neighbors knew as a zombie.
As Hurston poignantly adds though,
That was the real story of Felicia Felix-Mentor. Put away, disregarded, institutionalized, forgotten, willed by others to be effectively dead-her condition was very much like that of many people Hurston knew, the black women and men she had met from Florida labor camps to whites-only universities. It was just that Haitians had invented a word for it.
(Eventually, we got around to creating a Netflix series, The Walking Dead.) Hurston wrote a whole book on the subject, Tell My Horse. She describes ceremonies involving bocors (dark magicians) and instances where loa inhabit the body of local believers and "ride" them. An enactment of such a ritual involving such horse-riding is depicted in the Papa Legba scene of David Byrnes's film True Stories.
Like Mead, Hurston, too, showed signs of free-lovin'. While she was still at graduate school, and married, she fell in love with a fellow student there by the name of Percival Punter. With him she "sputtered and sizzled" and had to be with him. She said of this affair, writes King, "I did not just fall in love," she recalled. "I made a parachute jump."
One final member of the Boas Circle who King provides details for is Ella Cara Deloria, who grew up on a Sioux reservation on South Dakota. Enrolled at Columbia's Teacher's College, she was "summoned" one day to meet with Franz Boas, who wanted to use her a translator for Native American projects he had going. She was a highly regarded liaison and ethnologist.
In the Preface to her novel, Waterlily, which tried to bring to life in fiction the Dakota people, as Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God had done for Blacks, the publisher writes, "Deloria was an ideal intermediary between the predominant American traditional Dakota cultures, and she took that role seriously." In the Boas tradition, Deloria believed that "To write properly about Indians, you had to stop using the past tense." She lived with her people, while she wrote about them, and made sure her accounts came from authentic voices.
Early in Gods of the Upper Air, King identified its purpose:
"This book is about the women and men who found themselves on the front lines of the greatest moral battle of our time: the struggle to prove that-despite differences of skin color, gender, ability, or custom-humanity is one undivided thing."
They were up against social Darwinists and scientific racism. The Boas Circle, with their studies in Cultural Relativism, celebrated the diversity of multiculturalism and its consequent public policies, which over the years have resulted in a righteous vilification of racism, sexism, and gender-bound roles.
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