It’s Shrove Tuesday – or Mardi Gras! Preparing for the season of Lent, this is the day when Christians scour their kitchens for eggs, fat, milk, and butter, using up all the yummy ingredients that might be turned into something delicious and non-penitential. Pancakes, for instance! Thinking about Mardi Gras puts me in mind of Zora Neale Hurston’s time in New Orleans and the amazing anthropological research she did there. In Zora’s biography, Robert E. Hemenway describes “the unique context of Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork… the pressures were both racial and sexual. She was a pioneering role model as a woman who rejected sexual roles, traveling with only a handgun, a two-dollar dress, a suitcase full of courage through some of the roughest and remotest parts of the rural south”. Imagine being a single, black, educated woman in the late 1920’s exploring Vodou (or “Hoodoo”) in the Deep South! Zora published two works on New Orleans Vodou: Mules and Men and Hoodoo in America. Zora’s field work was significant to African American religious history; she explored the deep knowledge of the ancestors, transformative healing rituals and the ancient wisdom of her people.
As for me, I will make a King Cake (traditional today in New Orleans) and eat Pancakes.
LAISSEZ LES BON TEMPS ROULER!
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