ABSTRACT
The African-American novelist, Zora Neale Hurston (1901?-1960), grew up in an all-black town in Florida where she was familiar with African-American folk religious beliefs. Her formal education culminated in graduate work in folklore at Columbia University during which she did the field work reported in this paper. Her work confirmed her view of the distinctiveness and vitality of popular religious beliefs and practices as elements in constituting the culture of black communities. What she found here owed little to mainstream Christianity.
