Is Doechii a daughter of Zora Neale Hurston?
The phenom enchants the music industry with Black magic, the focus of Hurston’s work
When Doechii accepted her Grammy award for Best Rap Album, she thanked her fans, The Swamp. She explained to the viewers who haven’t yet been inducted, “I call myself the Swamp Princess because I’m from Tampa, Florida!” In interviews, Doechii often boasts being from the swamp and being a dark-skinned woman. She told little Black girls watching at home,
“Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you, to tell you that you can’t be here, that you’re too dark, or that you’re not smart enough, or that you’re too dramatic, or you’re too loud.”
Doechii’s love for Black people infuses all of her art. Earlier that night as she shut down the stage delivering a medley from her Grammy-winning mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heals, she chose to be surrounded by gorgeous dark-skinned dancers in gray Thom Browne schoolgirl attire. Explosive energy, precise lines, cornrowed box braids, contortions, breath control, Doechii clones, and a punched-up musical arrangement with Hollywood jazz—this performance had it all. It was a breakout moment that brought industry elites to their feet and put the public on notice: Doechii is here to stay.
Doechii chooses an unquestionably Black aesthetic because she knows just how rare and remarkable it is to be a dark-skinned girl on top of pop. Colorism has stifled the careers of many talented artists before her. But Doechii isn’t willing to shrink who she is for a better shot at fame. Her choices so far say, “if I’m going to be one who makes it, I’m going to make it Whole.”
It’s a question of when Doechii will make it to the upper echelons of artists, not if. She’s in capable hands with her team at Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), who also manage Kendrick Lamar and SZA. The team executed a jaw-dropping promo run that included performances at NPR’s Tiny Desk, Stephen Colbert, long-form interviews with the Breakfast Club, Zane Lowe, and Dissect,1 and fun moments for social media like rapping with Issa Rae and paying homage to Black sitcoms in the “Denial is a River” music video. Oh, and Nike recruited her to narrate its 2025 Super Bowl commercial. It could be that my algorithm is warping my view, but my corroborating evidence is that Doechii’s moves keep making it into my group chats. Every time she steps outside she makes a moment.
One reason Doechii is thrilling is because she’s clearly a student of the craft. Musicianship, visual storytelling, and live performance. I’m reminded of my favorite artist, Beyoncé, whose greatness is fueled by her commitment to visiting the archives, and being a music historian. If you took Lauryn Hill, DOOM, Missy Elliot, SugarHill Gang, Slick Rick, Outkast, Nicki Minaj, and Kendrick Lamar, tossed them into a mixing bowl, stirred well, and baked at 350 for 35 minutes, you’d get something close to Doechii. But the thing you baked wouldn’t be nearly as delicious, because, well, you’d be missing all the ingredients that make the Swamp Princess something we haven’t tasted before.
In addition her biological mother who joined her on the Grammys stage, Doechii just may be the artistic daughter of another Florida woman, Zora Neale Hurston. Ms. Hurston hailed from Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black town in the US established after the end of chattel slavery. Most of Ms. Hurston’s stories take place in Eatonville, a departure from other Harlem Renaissance writers who recorded Black life from big Northern cities. Think of her writing as an early version of Outkast’s iconic line: “the South has something to say.” Although Ms. Hurston and her book Their Eyes Were Watching God are now firmly in the American literary canon, she was extremely poor in the final years of her life. She died in obscurity, buried with no headstone to mark her grave until decades later.2
Ms. Hurston obsessively chronicled everyday Black life. Music, food, rituals, traditions, and cultures that others ignored, she saw as worthy of serious scholarship. Readers came to know Ms. Hurston’s fascination with language, as she tried out many techniques for capturing dialects over the years. The characters in her catalog are common Southern workers, farmers, homemakers, preachers, and strivers, portrayed with all the beauty and complexity that humans carry.
Doechii is up to something similar in her latest body of work. The song titles alone build a world that is distinctly Southern and unmistakably Floridian. Stanka Pooh, Boiled Peanuts, Catfish, Fireflies, Nissan Altima, and Alligator Bites Never Heal are cultural references that hit deep when you smile at childhood memories of running through wet grass at night, catching fireflies (we called them lightning bugs) in mason jars. In the title track ABNH, there’s a Black love story in an unglamorous but real setting “Bare-feet in the parking lot / Dancing with the car light on / Gas tank running on and on / (Are you hurt? Are you hurt? Won't you dance for me?)” The lyrics conjure a couple of Black teenagers swaying in a parking lot after Friday night football game. “I Wanna Be Your Man” by Zapp and Rogers plays through the car speakers. A forbidden love, sweating in the Southern summer humidity.
Both artists revere women’s sexuality. Nearly all of Ms. Hurston’s stories center women, as does her ethnography, a rarity in her lifetime. Janie, the protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God, transforms to own her sexuality through a series of marriages. Her first two husbands treated Janie and her body as property, making the sex unfulfilling and unappealing. By the end of the novel, Janie owns her desire without a husband, experiencing her dream from an early scene. Lying under a pear tree, “she saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.” Ms. Hurston’s other works feature women who trade their bodies to get ahead, women who shame others for promiscuity, and women who know their sexuality is not only alright, it is divine.
Doechii’s recent run of singles are extremely sexy. From the ballroom-influenced Alter-Ego “Pussy poppin', Doechii season/ New persona, new vagina / Push back but I'm still gon' get that.” To Doechii’s Billboard Hot 100 debut “What It Is (Block Boy)” “Bedroom bully in the bando / He gon' make it flip, do it with no handles / Never switchin' sides, only switchin' angles / Ooh, we go crazy like Rambo.” To the breakout bop from her latest project, Nissan Altima:
They like "Doechii, you delulu
You a loose screw
She really givin' cunt and the pussy voodoo
She swapped the old nigga for a bitch named new new
She munchin' on the box while she watchin' Hulu.
Speaking of voodoo, Ms. Hurston studied the West African spiritual practice and observed the practice for some years. She traveled to New Orleans, Haiti, and Jamaica, documenting voodoo rituals in her anthropological work, which made its way into her novels and short stories. Ms. Hurston saw women holding leadership roles in Voodoo traditions. Priestesses led ceremonies, healed people, and spoke with ancestors and spirits like Erzulie Freda, the cherished Vodou spirit of love, femininity, passion, and beauty. Hurston wrote in her book Tell My Horse, “There is no damnation in the loa world for love. Only in the Christian world.”
When I watch Doechii perform, I see her engaged in spiritual practice. Her 2022 performance of “Persuasive” and “Crazy” on the Tonight Show is worth watching. At the top of the clip, the sparkling eye makeup, billowing gray dress, and red hair puffs make Doechii resemble a fairy. The performance gets darker, and by the 2:58 mark, she is holding a seance on stage. My conviction of her supernaturalness continues as I watch Doechii reject genres, shapeshifting into new sounds, visuals, and storylines with ease.
I’ve thought to myself, is she an alien? No. She’s a sorceress. Doechii warns in Boom Bap that she will keep defying industry boxes - “I’m everything!” she roars.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Uncle Monday,” an old man mysteriously appears in the small town of Lake Bell one day. No one knows where he came from and the residents find him strange, terrifying, and riveting. They eventually learn that he, Uncle Monday, is a hoodoo doctor. People start visiting him for spiritual help and practical life advice. The other hoodoo doctor in the town, Ant Judy Bickerstaff, hates Uncle Monday for stepping on her turf. After cursing Uncle Monday behind his back, one day Judy goes fishing at the lake and sees something that stuns her:
“Suddenly a bar of red light fell across the lake from one side to the other. It looked like a fiery sword. Then she saw Uncle Monday walking across the lake to her along this flaming path. On either side of the red road swam thousands of alligators, like an army behind its general.”
Uncle Monday curses Ant Judy and takes away her speaking ability. Then he disappears. In the years to come someone in the town would occasionally see a gator or hear one bellowing from the lake. They’d whisper that Uncle Monday was visiting.
Doechii is Uncle Monday rising from the lake. Surrounded by her gators (fans in the Swamp), she’s arrived to enchant the town. Doechii the Don, Doechii the dean, Doechii supreme, the Swamp Princess’s journey has been fun, literary, and magical. She’s bound me in her spell and I don’t want it to break.
If you haven’t seen the Dissect episode, I highly recommend it. Doechii talks to the host Cole about the process of creating Alligator Bites Never Heal and the meaning behind the tracks. It’s fun to watch and shows her command of music history.