Zora Neale Hurston: Author and real life zombie...

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Zora Neale Hurston: Author and real life zombie hunter

Zora Neale Hurston is best known as the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God as well as one of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. But did you know that Hurston’s other love was zombies? Real-fucking-life zombies? I did, but I minored in African American studies in college.

In the 1930s, she visited Haiti to study and witness first hand the brain-dead zombies that had been created by local “witch doctors” to become mindless field hand slaves. The process is secret and complicated, but the voodoo priest essentially “kills” a person with herbs and a toxic potion and then later “revives” them (they were never really dead, they just appeared dead), having essentially given them a chemical lobotomy. And Zora Neale Hurston got to interview one of these zombies.