They believed, in short, that the woman who was walking through their town was the same dead woman who had been buried, returned to life through supernatural means.

This detail is startling to modern readers who are likely to encounter the word “zombie” primarily through Hollywood horror films, where the term refers to flesh-eating, brain-hungry reanimated corpses.

But the zombie of Haitian and African American folk tradition — the tradition within which the Blackville community’s fears would have been embedded — is something different.

The zombie of this tradition is not primarily a horror monster.

It is something closer to a theological and social concept: a person who has died and been raised by supernatural power to serve the purposes of whoever raised them.