Assemblage and Inheritance

Speak so you can speak again read the placard in Mother Catherine Seals’s Temple of Innocent Blood. When writer, anthropologist, and ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston visited the site in 1928, it occupied an entire city block in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. In her vignette “Mother Catherine,” Hurston describes the compound’s grounds and worshippers, and the ceremonies she observed—and participated in—during her time in the city. A room devoted to the Sa