Folklore is a spontaneous product of vitality and imagination. It needs a careful interpreter whose reports have these same two qualities. Seldom has there been a happier combination than that of the vivid, fantastic folklore of the West Indies and interpreter Zora Neale Hurston…. [She is] one of the most delightfully alive personalities of our day. She knows what she is talking about and she talks with a zest and a humor and a genuineness that make her work the best that I know in the field of contemporary folklore.

The first part of "Tell My Horse" is a sort of practice walk-around in Jamaica…. Stopping off at that British island to hunt the wild hog, collect proverbs, observe marriage customs, hear the "Night Song After Death" served to let her get her hand in for the big job ahead.

It is when Zora Hurston begins writing about her life and observations among the denizens of the misty mountains of Haiti that she becomes incomparable. A few works on Haitian lore have been too dully sensational, a few have been dully academic. Miss Hurston's book is so filled with the spirit of her subject that the whole feeling of its spine-chilling supernatural grotesquerie encompasses the reader and he has a hard time convincing himself that he is reading the authentic work of an honest, painstaking scholar.

Perhaps because she is herself a Negro, Miss Hurston makes her readers conscious of the deep current of racial poetry that runs beneath the rituals of Haitian life. Her sympathies are so strong that she seems to identify herself with her subject. She is but another folk teller of the tales she has uncovered, even a better teller than those who have preceded her….

Zora Hurston has come back from her visit to the two near islands with a harvest unbelievably rich. Her book is full of keen social comment relieved with constant humor, it is packed with good stories, accounts of folk religions, songs with both music and words as all songs should be reported. There are few more beautiful tellings of a folk tale than "God and the Pintards," the last story in the volume.