Overview

Recall that the idea of the apocalypse—the end of the world as we know it followed by unimaginable catastrophe, Armageddon, and the final judgment of the living and the dead—is ancient and emerged out of the Zoroastrian faith, in Persia. Subsequently the apocalypse became central in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, making it one of the most captivating beliefs in religious history. It was first eternalized in scripture (the Gathas), revealed to the prophet Zoroaster sometime between 1500 and 1000 C.E. Then, of course, it found its way into the Bible and the Quran. But before discussing how this idea merged with the zombie, we explore how this pitiful, fearsome creature wound up in America in the first place. This story takes us to Haiti in the early twentieth century, a nation militarily occupied by the United States from 1915 to 1934. We will analyze the experiences of Haitian Vodou of three American writers, William Seabrook, Zora Neale Hurston, and Faustin Wirkus. They were the most influential and articulate initial transporters of the zombie to America.

Is the Zombie that Old?

Technically, the idea of the zombie is not nearly as old as that of the apocalypse. Much more ancient notions of the resurrected dead have been recorded. Some even ate human flesh (the Epic of Gilgamesh [2100–1400 C.E.], for example), but they are more like ravenous ghosts than fleshy entities. There are also zombic-sounding beings in the Bible, like in the book of Ezekiel (14:12): “And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.”¹ In one sense, the resurrection itself, the raising of the dead to life, has a zombic ring to it, although the saved, the redeemed, those brought to eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven, are to find themselves in glorified bodies. They are to be free from suffering or sadness, blissful, entirely different from the zombie that emerged in Haiti. But because of his resurrection, Jesus, though “admired,” is not very important in Haitian Vodou—although the cross certainly is—because, as Elizabeth McAlister explains:

Jesus is admired by Vodouists I have spoken with, but not so much that he paid for the sins of humanity and redeemed all believers. Given their own struggles with poverty and human wrongdoing, they are not impressed with Christ’s effects in the world. Rather, Jesus is admired because he is the first zonbi, a person who is killed and then brought back from the dead.²

Fascinatingly, a bòkò (sorcerer) in Haiti described to McAlister how God’s password to enable Jesus’s resurrection was stolen and handed down across generations, and this is what enables him to make zombies!³ This is what makes Jesus the first zombie, at least in the minds of some Vodouists.

Furthermore, although there were earlier notions of zombie-like beings in parts of France and in West Africa—both taproots of Haitian culture—the word itself (rendered in gallicized spelling as zombi) did not appear in print until the late seventeenth century. It was written in Guadeloupe by a French indentured servant and occultist, as we saw in some detail in Chapter Five.⁴ The word was subsequently associated mostly with Haiti, where it first appeared in print in the late eighteenth century, in a book published in French in Philadelphia.⁵ In Haitian Creole the word is zonbi, and there is no direct or definitive etymological cognate in any West African or Central African language, in the Native American Taino language, or in French or Spanish.

Most historians and literary critics would agree that the question of the zombie’s origin really has to be answered in Haiti, the launchpad for the monster’s arrival in Hollywood. Earlier zombie-like creatures are the stuff of “protozombie myths” and devoid of “the crucial element of the resurrected’s enslavement to a master.”⁶ Understanding the emergence of real zombies thus necessitates a tour of Haiti and a primer in neocolonialism, especially the United States’ military occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. During that period and shortly thereafter, novelists, marines, journalists, and anthropologists lived in Haiti and took keen interest in Vodou, and their writings would go far in priming the American public for the exotic and the zombie.

A Brief History of U.S. Imperialism and America’s Relationship to Haiti

During the colonial era, the thirteen English colonies that would, following the American Revolution, become the United States of America were deeply connected to the French Caribbean slave plantation colony of Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti). In fact, during the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue would become America’s most important trading partner, and a number of prominent French families who benefited from the colony lived in the newly independent United States. This included one of the wealthiest people in the country, Stephen Girard (1750–1831). “Prior to the [Haitian] revolution, the United States was a large trading partner to Haiti, second only to its colonial power, France,” Ann Crawford Roberts explains.⁷ Scholars debate whether the newly independent United States shipped arms to insurgents during the Haitian Revolution.⁸ Be that as it may, even though upon Haiti’s achievement of independence in 1804 the United States refused to recognize the Caribbean republic as a sovereign nation, “by the mid-nineteenth century, the United States exported more goods to Haiti than any other country in Latin America.”⁹

The United States also took legal action to protect its political and economic interests in Latin America in the form of a decree. Promulgated in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine stipulated that “further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North and South America would be viewed as an act of aggression,” as Mary Renda explains. This laid the groundwork for President Woodrow Wilson, early in the following century, “to carry out the United States’ self-appointed international police power.”¹⁰ Ironically, this foreign policy doctrine, aimed at combating any recursion of European colonialism in the Americas, enabled America’s neocolonial forays throughout the region, nowhere more so than in Haiti.

Even though by 1910 the United States controlled Haiti’s national bank,¹¹ the Banque Nationale de la République d’Haïti, the Wilson administration became increasingly alarmed by continued French and growing German business in Haiti. Also, the Panama Canal, owned by the United States, had been completed just over ten years prior. World trade was thus being transformed, and the United States saw the Caribbean as a key corridor for dominating twentieth-century global economics.

In July of 1915 the United States found its pretext to take over Haiti militarily, “when an enraged mob killed President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam” in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital city, and tore his body to pieces. “Within a week,” Kate Ramsey explains, “1,100 U.S. marines and sailors had landed in Haiti.”¹² Thousands more would follow, and they stayed until 1934. Renda summarizes the results of the Occupation over the next nineteen years:

While in Haiti, marines installed a puppet president, dissolved the legislature at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, and forced a new constitution on the Caribbean nation – one more favorable to foreign investment. With the help of the marines, U.S. officials seized the customshouses, took control of Haitian finances, and imposed their own standards of efficiency on Haitian debt.

Some Haitians fiercely resisted the Occupation, as their ancestors had resisted slavery, though without any glorious success like the Haitian Revolution. As many as 11,500 resisters to the Occupation (cacos), considered to be “insurgents,” were killed by U.S. Marines and allied Haitian gendarmes, while forced labor (corvée), was implemented to “develop” the country and control the population.¹³

This was in effect the reinstitution of slavery in Haiti, as reflected in the comments that one victim shared with Roger Gaillard during his extensive research into the Occupation:

First, the work isn’t paid.

Second, you work under the sun, with but a scrap of pants on.

Third, they don’t send you home if you are sick.

Fourth, you don’t eat enough, just corn and congo peas.

Fifth, you sleep in a prison or at the construction site.

Sixth, when you try to escape, they kill you.

So, isn’t that slavery?¹⁴

Americans did this to Haitians. And in Haiti, the zombie, in the form of the zonbi kò kadav, is in effect a slave. The U.S. Occupation of Haiti thus not only reinstituted slavery in the Caribbean nation but also provided the springboard for the zombie to eventually be brought to America.

American servicemen also actively took part and often played a leading role in Haitian efforts to eradicate Vodou from the nation, in part because there were laws prohibiting certain elements of the religion, and in part because such “superstition” was keeping Haiti from truly becoming “civilized” or “modern.” Consider the following patently racist argument made by U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing on the eve of the U.S. Occupation of Haiti:

The experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African races are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization. . . . It is that which makes the Negro problem practically unsolvable.¹⁵

But in addition to protecting American economic and political interests, an “antisuperstitious” effort to solve this “practically unsolvable problem” was elemental to the Occupation, and that chiefly took the form of combating Vodou. It was the faith of the vast majority of Haitians at a time when Roman Catholicism was the only formally recognized religion in the nation. As one marine general testified before the U.S. Senate in 1921, the Occupation was necessary because, among other things, “Voudauxism was rampant.”¹⁶ Thus, from the official American perspective, Haiti was “a country in desperate need of a neocolonial civilizing mission that would rid the nation of the scourges of African tribalism, prevent its descent into wholesale barbarism and bring it back up to speed with Anglo-American modernism.”¹⁷

The marines took their anti-Vodou campaign to the far reaches of the country, breaking up communal rituals and confiscating ritual objects, especially drums, which are of fundamental importance to the religion.¹⁸ At least one young marine, evidently new to such raids, thought that he had received “orders to shoot all the Cacos and Voodoes.”¹⁹ Another reported “that the result of Voodoo worship is plainly on the faces of those who participate in it, making them look like devils.”²⁰ In the words of General Littleton Walker, “We broke up all their meetings, seized all their drums, etc., and wherever a voodoo drum was heard we immediately got on the trail and captured it, and broke it up as far as we could.”²¹ Marines who took part in these many raids thus encountered a good deal of Vodou, though without ever considering it to be a religion and without understanding its beliefs and practices or the meaning that it brings to the lives of its adherents, to say nothing of its rich and often effective healing modalities. Some of these marines would return to the United States and write about “voodoo” in rather sensationalist ways, so rumors of ritual cannibalism, human sacrifice, and the risen dead in Haiti began to captivate the American public.

The U.S. Occupation thus opened the doors for American adventurers, merchants, journalists, and anthropologists to come to Haiti to seek fame, fortune, and fascination. Among such adventurers, William Seabrook’s writings would be the most widely read in the United States and beyond. It was also the chief source for the first zombie movie ever made, White Zombie (1932). Among the anthropologists, none is more important than Zora Neale Hurston. Seabrook and Hurston would both become initiated into Vodou while in Haiti, giving them something of an insider’s perspective into the religion, though it is not clear if either became fluent in Haitian Creole. Faustin Wirkus, a marine, would gain an especially unique perspective, having been crowned a “voodoo king” in Haiti, and he would become quite fluent in Creole.

The work of these three writers was preceded by that of Spenser St. John, whose Hayti: or The Black Republic had been published in 1884 and sold well in America and abroad.²² It primed an American readership for the works of Hurston, Seabrook, and Wirkus. St. John was a British diplomat who in 1863 was appointed chargé d’affaires in Haiti. The book was widely read throughout the anglophone world, was eventually translated into French, and “left a pernicious legacy,” in the words of Alex Goodall. St. John relied primarily on “rumours spread by white planters and European expatriates” to promote “negative stereotypes about Haiti’s people, government, culture and religion, and claimed that Vodou ceremonies commonly involved child sacrifices and cannibalism.”²³

At a time when there was no television or internet, magazines and public speeches, along with radio broadcasts, were so much more influential than one can imagine in our present world of social media and thousands of cable TV stations. St. John’s book whetted the public appetite, and with the U.S. Occupation a flood of texts on Haiti reached American shores, besides those of Hurston, Seabrook, and Wirkus. Most notable among them is a book by a former marine named John Houston Craige, who published in 1933 Black Bagdad. Craige exploited the collaboration of a bòkò in his persecutive work against Vodou and absconded with a host of Vodouist ritual items. A few of them were donated to the University of Pennsylvania, while the rest cluttered his house in Philadelphia. Black Bagdad was a success, and Craige went on a lecture tour and followed up with another book, published in 1934, Cannibal Cousins.²⁴

Just as earlier reports, before and during the Occupation, had helped cement popular American support for taking over Haiti, popular publications like these have contributed to justifying U.S. neocolonialism toward Haiti to this day. As John Cussans puts it, such texts, wittingly or unwittingly, “were part of an overarching ideological strategy that helped to manufacture consent at home for U.S. intervention in the Black Republic of the American Mediterranean.”²⁵ Whether or not Hurston, Seabrook, and Wirkus understood their work to be part of such a strategy, they were the most significant authors of such texts because of their closeness to and initiation into Vodou.²⁶

William Seabrook

William Seabrook (1884–1945) introduced the Haitian zonbi to American readers in his 1929 book The Magic Island, which sold widely and brought him some measure of wealth and fame. He was born in Maryland, but his family moved to rural Kansas when he was nine. Seabrook, though white, would claim “deep black roots” by virtue of his recollection that “his White grandmother had been wet-nursed by a Black Obeah slave girl from Cuba.”²⁷ His fascination with Black cultures might thus have begun at a fairly young age and would continue as he went on to be a journalist, first reporting on African American crime for a newspaper in Georgia.²⁸ Possessed by an insatiable wanderlust, Seabrook traveled about Europe, eventually winding up as a philosophy student at the University of Geneva and living for a time in Paris. Once back in the United States, he befriended the famous and influential English occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), with whom he dabbled in occult rituals. He also traveled extensively in Arabia and West Africa, along the way immersing himself in local religious cultures—even engaging in cannibalism, becoming a Sufi, and apprenticing as a witch doctor. Through it all, Seabrook became “a lay anthropologist, sadist, cannibal, paranormal researcher, dabbler in black magic, raging alcoholic, sensational journalist, and suicide.”²⁹

He would also go to Haiti to study Vodou, being especially fascinated with the religion’s cult of the dead. This is of great importance in the religion, in the form of ancestor veneration or ancestral spirituality. Seabrook was ever captivated by the macabre and the sensational and, unsurprisingly, the chapter in The Magic Island prior to the chapter on zombies focuses on the cult of the dead and carries the poetic and haunting title “The Altar of Skulls.” Seabrook also wrote “‘…Dead Men Working in the Cane Field,’” his landmark discussion of zombies. I say “landmark” not because it contains the first mention in English of the zombie but,³⁰ as Sarah Juliet Lauro observes, this chapter “marked the decisive union of the word zombie with the walking corpse – a coupling that would captivate American audiences from the first films in the 1930s to the present day.”³¹

Seabrook’s experience of zombies in Haiti was not entirely firsthand. He befriended a Haitian farmer named Polynice, on the island of La Gonâve, who “was familiar with every superstition of the mountains and the plain . . . [and] was very interested in helping me toward an understanding of the tangled Haitian folklore.”³² After he told Seabrook about “fire-hags,” “the vampire, a woman sometimes living, sometimes dead who sucked the blood of children,” and “the werewolf,”³³ their discussion turned to something that “sounded exclusively local – the zombie”:

a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life – it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or a slave.³⁴

In response to Seabrook’s doubts about the existence of such beings, Polynice raised one rhetorical question: “Why do you suppose that even the poorest peasants, when they can, bury their dead beneath solid tombs of masonry?” He then offered to take the American writer to see “dead men working in the cane fields.” ³⁵

But before taking Seabrook to see these “dead men” at work, Polynice told the American writer about the zonbi who labored for the Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO), a large enterprise that milled sugar and made rum in Port-au-Prince, connected by its own rail lines to a network of cane fields and staffed by low-wage laborers. Some of these laborers were alleged to be zonbi, whose owners would pocket their wages and feed them just enough to keep them somewhat alive and working, ever careful not to let them taste salt, lest they become aware of their condition and return to their graves. Polynice described how one of these zombie masters, in 1918, at one of the putatively implicated cane fields, “appeared leading a band of ragged creatures who shuffled along behind him, staring dumbly, like people walking in a daze.” The master brought them to work, where “they stared, vacant-eyed like cattle, and made no reply when asked to give their names.” They explained to the HASCO foreman that they came from a remote part of Haiti where Creole was not spoken but promised that “under his direction they would work hard in the fields.”³⁶

Seabrook never got to see any HASCO zombies, but before he bid Polynice farewell and left La Gonâve, his friend delivered on his promise to bring him to see other walking dead in person. “Polynice reined in his horse and pointed to a rough, stony, terraced slop – on which four laborers, three men and a woman, were chopping the earth with machetes, among straggling cotton stalks, a hundred yards distant from the trail.” Once they got close to the zombies, Seabrook noted “that there was something about them unnatural and strange. They were plodding like brutes, like automatons.” When Seabrook saw one of their faces it “came as a rather sickening shock”:

The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable of expression.

Once Seabrook was over the “mental panic” that this sight caused him, he mustered the courage to reach out and touch one of the zonbi. “I reached out and grasped one of the dangling hands. It was calloused, solid, human.” Then Seabrook had “seen enough,” enough to convince him that this was all real.³⁷

Shortly after seeing zombies up close and (im)personal and actually touching one, Seabrook returned to the United States and quickly got to work on The Magic Island. It was published in 1929 and was a sensation, and thereby “the Haitian zombie was formally introduced to the American imagination,” notes Lauro. The book also “is the entry point through which the walking dead zombie passes into American cinema.”³⁸ Seabrook would publish several other books over the next dozen years, but his alcoholism became so serious that, in 1933, he found himself institutionalized. His book recounting that experience, Asylum, was another bestseller, published in 1935. Ten years later he committed suicide.

Zora Neale Hurston

Born in Alabama in 1891 and having spent much of her childhood in Florida, Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) would become one of the literary giants of twentieth-century America, especially for her novels. She also wrote poetry and short stories and for a time was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. These were extraordinary accomplishments for an African American woman who grew up in the Jim Crow South, to say the least. Hurston studied at Howard University and went on to Barnard College, the first Black student ever to gain admission into the elite women’s school. There she worked under the mentorship of Franz Boas of Columbia University (the two schools are closely related). He was the Ivy League university’s first professor of anthropology and one of the most influential in the history of the discipline. He is also widely considered to be the founder of the field in the United States. Previously, while at Howard, Hurston had worked with another of the most influential figures in the early history of American anthropology, Melville J. Herskovits, who had done a good deal of fieldwork in Haiti. Her second book, Mules and Men (1935), which is a rich account of Black folk culture in the South, carries an endorsement by Herskovits on the back cover and a preface written by Boas. As an anthropologist, Hurston’s training was thus stellar.

Hurston did more than study and write, of course. She immersed herself, as a veritable spiritual seeker, in Africana cultures in the rural South, New Orleans, Haiti, and Jamaica. She was initiated twice, once in Louisiana into Hoodoo and later into Vodou in Haiti. Much of that is recounted in Mules and Men, based on research done in the late 1920s.

Leaving the United States in 1936, Hurston arrived in the Caribbean in April of that year. First, she did fieldwork in Jamaica for six months and then she made her way to Haiti. Her findings from these visits are written up in her following ethnographic book, Tell My Horse (1938).³⁹ All of this was funded by a lucrative and prestigious grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Hurston arrived in Jamaica just two years after the end of the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, while Jamaica remained under the yoke of colonialism, still being a British colony.

In Jamaica, Hurston lived in a maroon community and took part in Nine Night communal funerary ceremonies (also called “Dead Yard”). Nine Night involves both song and food “to placate the spirit of the deceased, which roams for forty days and nights before finally resting,” according to Benard Burrell. It is also quite festive, driven in part by strong Jamaican rum, “the one thing guaranteed to establish contact links with the spirit of the dead.”⁴⁰ This ritual reflects Haitian Vodou in its music, food for the dead, and belief in the soul’s floating about nearby after death. It is also evocative of Vodouist notions about ancestor veneration and the zombie because it is designed to keep the dead in their graves, lest they harm the living. Valerie Boyd, one of Hurston’s biographers, explains:

At these rituals, usually held at night on the ninth day after death, men and women warmly welcomed the spirit of the dead – the duppy – and sang to it, danced for it, and then bade it farewell forever. At one ceremony, the dancing was so rapturous, Hurston noted, it felt as if the drums had become people, and the people had become drums.⁴¹

A few months later Hurston found herself in Haiti, an experience that would forever change her life. There she learned about Vodou and zombies, actually meeting one that she believed to be real. One might suspect that Hurston’s experiences with the Nine Nights ceremony and the duppy in Jamaica were not far from her mind as she visited cemeteries and learned about zonbi in Haiti. Not so: “As thrilling as her Jamaican studies were, Hurston found the complex voodoo beliefs of Haiti almost overwhelming.”⁴² She arrived in September of 1936 and began to learn Haitian Creole and make contacts with Vodou priests and priestesses for the purposes of her fieldwork, first in Port-au-Prince, then on the island of La Gonâve and the central coastal town of Arcahaie. Over time she came to realize how intricate and rich Vodou was and, in her correspondence, said that explaining this religion would be “like explaining the planetary theory on a postage stamp.”⁴³

To more deeply understand Vodou, and to bring to fruition a personal spiritual quest, Hurston became initiated into the religion. Not once, but twice, even though her closest Haitian friends warned her not to undergo the second initiation (kanzo) or delve too deeply into certain secrets of the religion. Closest to her was her maid and confidante, a Haitian woman named Lucille, who lived with Hurston in Port-au-Prince and expressed such concerns: “I am well content, mademoiselle, if you don’t run to every drum you hear.”⁴⁴ Undeterred and increasingly fascinated by Vodou, Hurston “went Canzo,” an experience that she found “both beautiful and terrifying.”⁴⁵ Such an initiation is indeed quite a serious ritual, under the direction of a priest or priestess, that “involves isolation and is a path to knowledge about Vodou and the lwa,” as Benjamin Hebblethwaite explains. The isolation lasts for seven days and requires fasting, after which the initiates’ “‘corpses,’ still wrapped in burial cloth, are resurrected by the vodun (lwa) Sakpata in a dramatic public ceremony.”⁴⁶

Another drum to which Hurston could not resist running was that of the zonbi. The thirteenth chapter of Tell My Horse is titled “Zombies” and opens as follows: “What is the whole truth and nothing but the truth about zombies? I do not know, but I know that I saw the broken relic, remnant, refuse of Felicia Felix-Mentor in a hospital yard.”⁴⁷ Throughout Haiti, Hurston had heard that zonbi “are the bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called back to life again.”⁴⁸ She had also learned that they could be put to various forms of work, like doing evil, stealing, and mindlessly laboring in the fields, “like a beast.” Even some “little girl Zombies” could be dispatched by their masters at dawn out into the world “to sell little packs of roasted coffee.”⁴⁹

Reasons behind zombification intrigued Hurston, as well as how zonbi are made in the first place, so she sought insight into these questions by interviewing several bòkò, or sorcerers. As they explained to her, for instance,one zonbi was made because someone required a laborer (and presumably paid a bòkò to arrange this), another was zombified out of “revenge” and then sent to work, while a third “was given as a sacrifice to a spirit to pay off a debt for benefits received.” How do bòkò succeed in doing such things?

I asked how the victims were chosen and many told me that any corpse not too old to work would do. The Bocor watched the cemetery and went back and took suitable bodies. Others said no, that the Bocor knew exactly who was going to be resurrected even before they died. They knew this because they themselves brought about the “death.”⁵⁰

Hurston was further told that after the burial, around midnight, the bòkò and his assistants go to the cemetery to open the tomb, minimally revive the corpse, take it away, and close the grave in such a way as to give the appearance that nothing had happened. They shuffle the victim past its former house and to the temple to be “given a drop of liquid, the formula for which is most secret. And after that the victim is a zombie.”⁵¹

Effectively discouraged from trying to gain knowledge of the mysteries of how zombies are made,⁵² of what might have been in that “drop of liquid,” the intrepid anthropologist set out to find a zonbi instead. And she was convinced that she did, in the person of Felix-Mentor, though her personhood seemed so effaced to Hurston that she writes of her as “it.” However, later in the chapter, the author does recall Felix-Mentor as a “her.” Hurston’s encounter with Felix-Mentor happened in the city of Gonaïves, about 140 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince. Having learned of a zombie there “that had been found along the road” and hospitalized, Hurston left the capital to go investigate and, when she arrived, “found the Zombie in the hospital yard. . . . She was hovering against the fence in a sort of defensive position,” refusing to eat a dinner that had been set there for her. As the anthropologist approached Felix-Mentor, accompanied by two doctors, the supposed zombie grabbed a tree limb and pretended to be sweeping the floor with it, evidently fearful of “abuse and violence.” Felix-Mentor kept her head and face covered the entire time.⁵³

Hurston’s photograph of Felix-Mentor has been criticized by some,⁵⁴ and not without reason. Consider the anthropologist’s own account of this moment, taking pictures of someone who was “cringing” and pinning herself against the wall, her head covered:

Finally the doctor forcibly uncovered her and held her so that I could take her face. And the sight was dreadful. That blank face with the dead eyes. The eyelids around the eye were white all around the eyes as if they had been burned with acid. It was pronounced enough to come out in the picture. There was nothing you could say to her or get from her except by looking at her, and the sight of this wreckage was too much to endure for long.⁵⁵

Quite disturbing, to be sure, so Hurston tries to understand how Felix-Mentor came to be this way. Felix-Mentor had supposedly died in 1907, only to turn up one day in 1936 on the farm where she grew up. Family members confirmed that this was indeed she; however, Felix-Mentor “was in such wretched condition that authorities were called in and she was sent to the hospital,” the very hospital where Hurston photographed her.

Most historians and anthropologists who work on Haitian Vodou believe that Felix-Mentor was really not a zombie at all. As Wade Davis explains:

Hurston became the object of scathing remarks. Alfred Métraux dismissed her as being “very superstitious.” Louis Mars noted: “The American writer came to Haiti with no doubt in regard to the belief in the zombie pseudo-science. Miss Hurston did not go beyond the mass hysteria to verify her information.” These scholars were correct in exposing the Mentor [sic] case as fraudulent.⁵⁶

Davis adds, though, that such critics missed “the central tenet of Hurston’s argument,” that “zombies were created, but not by magic”⁵⁷ Métraux acknowledged that in Haiti belief in potions that can zombify was widespread when he did his fieldwork there the following decade.⁵⁸ Furthermore, it is likely that Felix-Mentor suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness.⁵⁹ But the Haitian doctors treating her also believed that she was a zombie. At the same time, there are very few resources in Haiti for people struggling with mental illness, who are often either cared for by friends or loved ones at home or become homeless and wander about urban streets or rural mountain paths. More than once I heard Haitians refer to them as zonbi. They might have been speaking either metaphorically or literally.

Although Hurston heeded warnings not to seek knowledge of the potion that supposedly zombifies people in Haiti, her research got her close enough to zombic esoterica that, she believes, revenge on her was exacted by a bòkò. She became dreadfully ill with acute gastric disease and was bedridden for two weeks. At one point she was brought to convalesce at the residence of the U.S. consul in Port-au-Prince. Hurston was fully aware that poisonings are not uncommon in Haiti and that many Haitians scrutinize their food and drink and who prepares it before they consume it. But evidently she did not. She was also “convinced that her illness and her research were directly related.”⁶⁰ Fearful that remaining any longer in Haiti might cost the anthropologist/novelist her life, she returned to New York to recuperate, only to bounce back to Haiti in August of 1937, for about a month, to find additional material for Tell My Horse. By her September return to New York, her most celebrated book, which Hurston had written while in Haiti (in pencil!), had been released: Their Eyes Were Watching God.⁶¹

Faustin Wirkus

Faustin Edmond Wirkus (1896–1945) would be king. A Vodou king, in fact. Far cry from his humble origins as a child coal miner in Pennsylvania.

Though it is certain that Faustin Wirkus was born in 1896, there is some debate whether he was born in Dupont or Pittston, in Pennsylvania, or in Poland. That debate should now be settled, as I have found definitive proof that he was born in his parents’ native town of Czyzewo, Poland, and brought by his mother to Pittston, while a baby, in 1899.⁶² His father had previously immigrated there, one of thousands of mostly Eastern Europeans who flocked to the region in search of work in the burgeoning coal mining industry. It was a harsh life, one that the young Polish Pennsylvanian wanted to escape, rebelling “against the drudgery of the Pittston collieries.”⁶³ So he joined the U.S. Marine Corps. Wirkus was willing and eager to go anywhere, and, in 1915, he wound up in Haiti, soon believing that he had been delivered to “a land of evil enchantment.”⁶⁴

Wirkus soon fell ill in Haiti and had to return to the United States for two years, but he returned to the occupied Caribbean nation in 1919. Then and there, he learned that the crown of the nineteenth-century Haitian emperor Faustin I (1782–1867) had been discovered. The young recruit was tasked with guarding the crown for a few weeks. He could not have known that one day he would wear his own crown in Haiti, though not quite as ornate as this one: “as large as a half-bushel basket, fabricated of gold wire and plates . . . with jewels from India, Africa, and Asia.”⁶⁵

Upon first entering the Bay of Port-au-Prince on a naval vessel, Wirkus asked one of the other grunts about a large island that they were passing on their way into port. The reply: “No white man has stepped foot on that island since the days of the buccaneers, until this here occupation. . . . That place is full of Voodoos and God knows what else.” The young coal miner- cum-soldier was intrigued but went on with his duties, unaware that one day he would rule that very “misted, menacing, and mysterious” island, La Gonâve.⁶⁶ His eventual subjects on La Gonâve probably never saw the splendorous crown that Emperor Faustin I had once worn, but they would be “perfectly content with the splendiferous headpiece of silk, feathers, and seashells with which they had invested me.”⁶⁷ In retrospect:

I never dreamed that I was to be adopted as the play-king of the people and that they would make my military and temporary authority that of a reincarnation of a past emperor, or that I was to be the regent for their sometimes amiable, always efficient black Queen.⁶⁸

How could this happen? How could a young U.S. Marine from Pennsylvania mining country wind up being the Vodou king of La Gonâve? The Haitian people living on the island clearly did not think of Wirkus as a “play-king” at all, and he was correct in understanding that they saw him as the reincarnation of Faustin I, in large part because of his first name, but there is much more to the story than that. Let’s trace Wirkus’s earlier steps in Haiti before considering some of his discussions of Haitian Vodou and his life after his return to the United States, when he became a major contributor to America’s fascination with Haiti in all its “evil enchantment” and with all its zombies (something Wirkus never wrote about, incidentally, though surely he knew about them and would speak of them on the lecture circuit).

Part of the answer to the question of how this could have happened: An elderly prophet who lived in a seaside cave had a vision that one day a white king would rule La Gonâve. He had reported an earlier vision, while on the mainland: “emperor Faustin ride off to war on a white horse.”⁶⁹ The prophecy captivated the most powerful Vodou priestess on the island, Ti Memenne, queen of La Gonâve’s Kongo society. The prophecy is also seemingly based on the book of Revelation, 6:2: “And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer” (King James Version).⁷⁰

During his military service in Haiti, Wirkus so impressed his superiors with his dedication that he quickly rose to the rank of sergeant. In January of 1920, he was appointed sub-district commander at Archahaie and, therefore, nominally in charge of La Gonâve, “a God-forsaken hole inhabited by savages and infested by mosquitos and all sorts of poisonous insects.” Though previous marines posted on La Gonâve could not wait to leave and returned to the mainland with stories of horror, Wirkus “was filled with curiosity. . . . The fact that nobody seemed to know much about this mysterious island made it all the more worth knowing about to me.”⁷¹ He would soon have the chance not only to know La Gonâve, but to rule it.

This has everything to do with prophecy on the island and with a prisoner who came to Wirkus while he was at Archahaie on the mainland, “a massive person, short in stature and compactly built . . . all hard flesh and muscles and had eyes like a tied-up hawk.” She wore “a clean white dress, a brilliant and also clean kerchief around her shoulders, and a bright red bandana on her head.”⁷² She also wore gold earrings and shoes, hardly the typical prisoner in the custody of the U.S. Marines during the Occupation. When Sergeant Wirkus told her his first name, she lit up: “Faustin! . . . That is not the name of a blanc. Where did you get it?” Wirkus released her, then unaware that the prisoner was Ti Memenne, Vodou queen of La Gonâve, and she gratefully said, “If the good God pleases, we shall meet again.”

They would indeed meet again five years later, in 1925, on La Gonâve, where Wirkus had been transferred to assume the post of marine commander, the only white person on the island. The sergeant later reflected: “Just how it came about that I fulfilled the prophecy of Queen Ti Memenne. . . is the sort of stuff that dreams are made of.”⁷³ Once he assumed his post, the queen came to greet him, regally arriving on a donkey and flanked by two members of her court. One of them was La Reine Julie, Queen Julie, a person who “mystified” the sergeant, who thought she was more Native American than African in appearance.⁷⁴ Evidently, Memenne was the supreme, but there were sub-queens like Julie on La Gonâve. Declared Memenne, “There has never been on La Gonave a king.”⁷⁵ As of 1925, there was though. At least for a few years. And he was white. Faustin Wirkus was the reincarnation of Emperor Faustin I, the second coming of the king. The cave sage’s prophecy was evidently so widely known around the island that its inhabitants often referred to him as “he who was to come.”⁷⁶

Once he had come, the people had to coronate Wirkus. “The time has come now, to-night,” reported Queen Julie. “We are going to make you the king of La Gonave.”⁷⁷ Then, surrounded by about two hundred people, Wirkus was hoisted up in his chair and thus “escorted into the initiation chamber.” Torches abounded, and “people were leaping up into the air, hugging themselves and one another, and shouting ‘Le Roi, le Roi, le Roi!’ and then my name, ‘Faustin’!”⁷⁸ Drums began to play in the crowded sanctuary, while hundreds of people outside joyfully danced. Once flags were brought to the coronation party, Ti Memenne declared that “‘The king will now be crowned’ . . . . ‘Bring me the crown.’” The crown was brought “on a platter covered with a red silk cloth.” Here is the sergeant/king’s description:

It was made of cream-colored silk with the brim turned up all around. Across the crown and around the outer edge of the brim were seven seashells, in a double row. They had been colored with juices of red and yellow and blue berries or herbs. All over the surface of the satin were stitched tiny bits of mirrors and between them ribbons and paper flowers. Humming-bird feathers and the flame-colored wing and tail feathers of larger birds were tucked in wherever there was space for them.⁷⁹

None of the gold that the crown Faustin I wore at his own coronation was part of this, but Ti Memenne, the queen, placed it on the sergeant’s head and here was a newly anointed Vodou king of La Gonâve.

As king, Wirkus was privy to a range of Vodou ceremonies on the island, and he writes about them extensively in The White King of La Gonave, evidently with an effort to be respectful, though frequently he resorts to racist and exoticist language. The book also includes reflections on Vodou elsewhere in Haiti and on the raids of temples and Vodouist communities in which the soldier had previously participated. But he was deeply interested in the very religion that he had been ordered and paid to suppress:

As an enforcer of the law it was for me to learn all I could about these rites which I was sworn to suppress. In honesty I must admit that it fitted very well with my urgent curiosity about these secretive people that such was my duty. To satisfy my personal curiosity I preferred gaining friendly admission into voodoo ceremonies, but by raiding them I found out a great deal that would otherwise have taken many months and infinite patience.⁸⁰

Being the only marine commander on an island that is larger than Barbados and Martinique combined, then home to some 13,000 people, and especially being king afforded Wirkus not only friendly admission to Vodou ceremonies but literally royal admission. He was also initiated into a Kongo society, a Vodou congregation of Central African origins. There is not time, space, or need to summarize Wirkus’s rich and sometimes misinformed discussions of Vodou in any detail. So instead we turn our attention to what the sergeant did with his knowledge of this remarkable religion: he wrote his memoirs. They appeared, in a two-part series, in one of America’s most widely read publications, Harper’s, carrying the alluring title “The Black Pope of Voodoo.”⁸¹

Upon returning to the United States, Wirkus went on a lecture tour and eventually became something of an international celebrity, even being “invited to speak before the National Geographic Society.”⁸² This would be a tough act to follow, but follow it the king did, returning to Haiti to shoot a film on Vodou. Wirkus did this in 1930/1931, producing the first film on the religion, Voodoo (1933), which premiered in New York City at the Cameo Theater in April 1933 and was reviewed in the New York Times to be an “authentic, if technically unskilled travelogue” about “a weird reality.”⁸³ Sadly, though, the film has been lost to history. Ramsey has carefully considered the reviews and traces of this film:

Voodoo seems to have been fashioned as a kind of documentary travelogue showing, as one reviewer noted, “in some detail the surviving rituals of voodoo as practiced by the natives of this island.”. . . fragmentary evidence gleaned from both reports on the “raw” footage and from reviews of the complete film suggests that one or more of the sosyete kongo into which Wirkus was inducted organized their members to stage decontextualized ritual performances, including the sacrificial offering of fowl and a goat, as the camera rolled.⁸⁴

It would seem that when the king returns to your island with a camera crew and asks you to act out your religion, you do it. The film’s final scene was “universally lambasted” by reviewers though. It featured a person who had been taken off to the jungle only to be rescued by the intrepid white savior.⁸⁵ It’s almost a prelude to the film World War Z, the most expensive zombie film ever made, in which Brad Pitt plays that white savior at another point in history, a savior of humanity against hordes of globalizing zombies. As Wirkus’s film made the rounds across the United States in the 1930s, it was hailed for being the “First Authentic Film Record of the Forbidden Ritual of Voodoo Held by Primitives of Haiti.” Ramsey adds that the poster promoting the film “featured a diaphanously clad woman, apparently white, with one arm halfway tucked into the maw of an amorphous, wile-eyed monster, and a masked figure who seems to direct the scene from below with ritual gestures.”⁸⁶

When word filtered back to the United States that a U.S. Marine had been crowned the king of a “voodoo island,” people were fascinated, and, while on La Gonâve, Wirkus began receiving letters from some of them. One came from Seabrook, who was then in Haiti and was so intrigued that he arranged a visit with the sergeant on the mysterious island. He was sure to bring along a box of chocolate for the former Pennsylvania coal miner, who did not drink but enjoyed chocolate, something one could not find on La Gonâve. Once parachuted in with a marine commander, Seabrook was received by Wirkus at his humble abode in the island’s capital of Anse-à-Galets. He spent several weeks on La Gonâve with Wirkus, who was generous with his time, shared stories with him, and took him all around the island, whether on horseback, on foot, or in Sergeant Wirkus’s motorboat. Wirkus’s book includes a picture of the two men relaxing on wooden chairs outside the sergeant’s house in Anse-à-Galets, underscored by the caption “Two great authorities on the magic rites of black races.”⁸⁷

But Might There Already Have Been Zombies in America? A Salty Conclusion

This interesting question demands our attention before we make our journey to Hollywood. One clue might lie in salt! As there have been Africans and peoples of African descent in America since the seventeenth century, and as Voodoo and related African-based spiritual traditions have long histories in the country, especially in Louisiana and the Low Country South (coastal Georgia, South Carolina, the Gullah Islands), it is quite feasible that notions of the living dead were already gripping believers in America before Seabrook, Hurston, and Wirkus published their work on Haiti. After all, as Lauro points out, “Many African religions have beliefs that involve the stealing of souls, both of corpses and live persons.”⁸⁸ In Kongolese traditional religion, for instance, one’s soul can be “removed from its ordinary container,” per Wyatt MacGaffey, “and enclosed in another in such a way that its energy is at the witch’s disposal,”⁸⁹ which sounds a great deal like the Haitian Vodouist notion of the zonbi astral. There were thousands of Kongolese slaves in the United States, so might the notion of the zombie have already been part of African American religious culture prior to the U.S. Occupation of Haiti?

The importation of slaves from West Central Africa, primarily the Kingdom of Kongo, “began in the early eighteenth century and increased during the 1720s and 1730s,”⁹⁰ with nowhere, except for Haiti, receiving more Central Africans than the Low Country South. While steeped in Catholicism, Central African traditional religions, whether in Haiti, Brazil, or South Carolina, featured beliefs in sorcery, kindoki, something that we visited in Chapter Five in the Congo. The ndoki, the sorcerer, is an ancestor of the bòkò in Haiti, the manufacturer of zombies. So, if there were nodki in the United States as early as the eighteenth century, might there also already have been zombies? After all, they were well versed in extracting souls from bodies and envesseling them in other ways to employ their powers for a range of supernatural ends.⁹¹

Historically in the Low Country South, per Jason Young, “many . . . blacks maintained a deep trepidation regarding the presence of witches and hags in the community, for which they often sought the aid of conjurers.”⁹² Witches would shed their skin to embark on such raids, attacks that “reflect the idea of the body as a mere shell for resident spirits,”⁹³ a vessel:

Tales of witches in flight recall the perceptions of both Africans in Kongo and slaves in the Lowcountry who perceived of minkisi, medicine bottles, and conjure bags – and in some cases human beings themselves – as mere vessels housing abiding animating spirits. . . . Like minkisi or other ritual objects . . . the shell is but a container, not unlike other containers. The true nature of the object is revealed in the spirit.⁹⁴

But how to protect one’s spirit from being victimized, contained in such ways as this? Why salt, of course! For, in Kongolese religion, “salt warded off witches and evil doers.”⁹⁵ Furthermore, salt was integral to the sacrament of baptism in precolonial Kongolese Catholicism, and its consumption was widely considered among West Central Africans to be a powerful form of protection: “Catholic baptismal ritual called for the priest to place a small amount of salt on the tongue” of the one being baptized, Young continues. “Though priests proved terribly unsuccessful in the conferring of other rites – marriage, confession, the last rites – they were successful at baptism, or the eating of salt, yadia mungwa, as it was called locally.”⁹⁶

Salt in African American folk traditions in the South is also used in something of an opposite way, at least in Hoodoo, that “inhibits a person’s freedom: throwing salt in someone’s direction, for example, can encourage him to leave town.”⁹⁷ Salt does quite the opposite to zombies in Haiti, liberating them from their slumbers, inciting self-awareness of their wretched state. Lauro has carefully sought answers to the question of whether there were zombies in America before ideas about them came from Haiti in the 1930s, and she turns to Hurston’s analysis. There simply is no better place to turn, for in addition to her pioneering work in Haiti and Jamaica, Hurston wrote extensively on African American folklore, folk beliefs, and folk practices in the rural American South, as well as in New Orleans, which might be called the Vodou, or Voodoo, capital of the United States. Lauro observes, “Although Hurston chronicles the phenomenon of zombification in detail in her study of Haitian Vaudou, Tell My Horse, there are no zombies described in the one-hundred-plus pages devoted to Hoodoo in her Mules and Men, a study of the folk tales and beliefs of southern African American culture.”⁹⁸ There are stories of poisons that render people insane and songs about being among the dead, but “if there is evidence of a properly American zombie,” admits Lauro, “I haven’t found it.”⁹⁹ Neither have I.

Notes