The zombie concept that the accounts attribute to the Blackville community’s response to Essie Dunbar’s alleged return deserves more careful attention than it typically receives in popular treatments of the story.

The zombie of African American and Caribbean folk tradition is not the Hollywood construction.

It draws on West African religious traditions that were preserved and transformed in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath.

The concept of the zombie in Haitian Vodou — the tradition in which it is most extensively documented — involves the belief that a sorcerer (a bokor) can use specific substances to produce a state of apparent death, bury the victim, and then exhume and revive them as a slave, stripped of will and memory.

The cultural and political dimensions of the zombie concept in this tradition are profound.