MOJO

WORKIN’
THE OLD AFRICAN AMERICAN
HOODOO SYSTEM
KATRINA HAZZARD-DONALD

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
 © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
12345CP54321
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hazzard-Donald, Katrina, 1948–
Mojo workin’ : the old African American Hoodoo system /
Katrina Hazzard-Donald.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03729-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-07876-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-09446-0 (e-book)
1. Hoodoo (Cult) 2. Voodooism—United States.
3. African American magic. 4. Medicine, Magic, mystic, and spagiric—
United States. 5. African Americans—Religion. 6. African Americans—Folklore.
I. Title.
BL2490.H39 2013
133.4308996073—dc23 2012020649
To my late husband, Lathan Lee Donald, tried in battle; and to my daughter,
Jameka, who is on her way to becoming a skilled Hoodoo. To daddy, Stonewall
Hazzard, child of freedmen, who regaled me and my childhood friends with
Hoodoo tales of ghost horses, High John roots, haints, lodestone, and powerful
Hoodoos from Alabama. To mamma, Susie Isaac Hazzard, who treated our
“chest colds” with coal oil and white sugar, who dropped keys down our backs
to stop nose bleeds, who wrapped minor cuts in cobwebs, who treated our
swellings with mullein leaves, who dug the roots, healed the sick, transformed
negative energies into positive using sardine oil and “greasy fat meat.” To
those who treated the crack epidemic of the 1990s with Hoodoo medicine, who
still scold and praise the children, who chew the root for all those unjustly
incarcerated in Ronald Reagan's attack on the African American community
disguised as the “War on Drugs.”
To all those born of black women who came walking in the spirit of our African
ancestors. And for those African American “race men and race women”yet to be
born.
 Contents

Acknowledgments

Prescript
1. Traditional Religion in West Africa and in the New World: A
Thematic Overview
2. Disruptive Intersection: Slavery and the African
Background in the Making of Hoodoo
3. The Search for High John the Conquer
4. Crisis at the Crossroads: Sustaining and Transforming
Hoodoo's Black Belt Tradition from Emancipation to World
War II
5. The Demise of Dr. Buzzard: Black Belt Hoodoo between
the Two World Wars
6. Healin’ da Sick, Raisin’ da Daid: Hoodoo as Health Care,
Root Doctors, Midwives, Treaters
7. Black Belt Hoodoo in the Post–World War II Cultural
Environment
Postscript

Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

All work, whether monumental or modest, is never the result

of a solitary effort. I owe thanks to people too numerous to
name who supported and assisted me in the production of
this work. I thank the American Council of Learned Societies
who supplied me with a fellowship that allowed me to take a
year from teaching in order to travel to various locations to
examine resources and interview informants; without the
support of the ACLS fellowship program, this work might
never have been undertaken. I thank Robert Farris
Thompson, who agreed to read an early draft of this work. I
am indebted to Marquetta Goodwine, known to the
residents of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, as Queen
Quet, Queen of the Gullah people. I thank my generous
informants Ms. Mary; Arthur Flowers; Brother Gregory; Papa
Ce; Dancingtree Moonwater; Hougan Vincent, known to
some as Papa Cosmos; Phoenix Savage; and Djenra
Windwalker, who fight to maintain the old tradition, to keep
African American Hoodoo alive, and who serve the African
American community in the names of our ancestors. I give
special thanks and honor to Mama Zogbe, chief Hounon-
Amengansie of West African Mami Wata Vodoun. Thank you
for keeping the faith. I thank Professor James Turner of the
Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University,
who told me the story of his aunt's potential arm
amputation by white medical doctors and her healing
encounter with Hoodoo medicine. I thank all the African
Americans who told Hoodoo stories and renewed the
moribund faith in us even as the tradition was facing
transformation by marketeers and confronting impending
death.
I owe special thanks to all the reference librarians and
archivists, from Mr. Willie Maryland of the Montgomery state
archives in Montgomery, Alabama, to Catherine C. Khan, the
archivist at the old Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, who
allowed me to examine the original admission logbooks and
records from 1855 to 1861 in search of information on
Hoodoo and slave health care. I owe thanks to both Grace
Cordial in special collections at the Beaufort, South Carolina,
public library, who was helpful in directing me to vertical file
materials on local Hoodoo, and the librarian in the
Cleveland, Ohio, public library, who allowed me to examine
several uncataloged boxes of Newbell Niles Puckett
materials. The librarians at the Tallahassee, Florida, state
archives pointed me to several boxes of interview materials
from both Zora Neale Hurston and the Works Progress
Administration writers. I offer a special thank-you to the
library staff at the Amistad collection in pre-Katrina New
Orleans, who directed me to copies of missionary records as
well as public health interviews from the 1930s conducted
with informants on the street about their healing practices
and beliefs in “Hoodoo medicine.” And a special thank-you
to the border control agent in Laredo, Texas, William Graves,
who sent me a dozen High John roots. To Professor Mark
Leone of the University of Maryland, College Park, who
allowed me to examine and to photograph the artifacts from
an antebellum slave conjurer's cache, circa the 1820s,
uncovered in an archaeological dig in southern Virginia:
Thank you for the afternoon.
Last but not least, I thank my family and my dear late
husband, Lathan Donald, who supported me when I became
ill and had to stop working on the manuscript. He nursed
me, fed me in bed, and encouraged me to return to work
whenever I became discouraged. Above all, I thank God,
known to me as Olodumare, but who is called by many
names. I thank my ancestors, who always “had my back,”
and my personal orisha father, Ogun, and mother, Oshun,
for the will to keep fighting and for the wisdom to know
when to change tack in the battle. Finally, I thank all those
African American believers and practitioners of the Old
Black Belt Hoodoo tradition for holding on until we could
arrive.
 African Traditional Religions

African traditional religion chart.

The Old Tradition “Black Belt” Hoodoo Complex

 Old tradition Hoodoo.

Modern/Contemporary Hoodoo Complex

Modern marketeered Hoodoo.

 PRESCRIPT

On October 7, 1994, then nationally known talk show host

Phil Donahue featured a segment highlighting a terrifying
and bizarre incident that occurred in Dallas, Texas. The
incident involved a young African American woman, a school
teacher named Myra Obasi, who allegedly had been taken to
a “hoodooist”1 who had confirmed that she was possessed
by an evil spirit. Obasi, two of her sisters, and five of their
children had fled Arcadia, Louisiana, and ended up in Dallas
at the church and home of Mattie Bradfield; there Obasi had
been allegedly blinded by the removal of her eyeballs. She
appeared on Donahue in the company of two of her sisters,
two attorneys, and a psychotherapist. Though Obasi and her
family members repeatedly confirmed their belief in and
adherence to Christian doctrine, they also asserted their
belief in demonic possession, malevolent magic, and
spiritual realities beyond everyday comprehension.
Throughout the televised segment, the terms hoodoo and
voodoo were used interchangeably to plumb the mysteries
of such an incident; in the process, the observer was left
with a reinforced feeling of dread, confusion, and fear
already associated with those two terms. Professor David
Otto, also a guest on the show and by no means an expert
on African-derived religion or African traditional religions
(ATRs), when asked whether such an incident was possible
inside Hoodoo practice, replied that he had never heard of
such a thing in Hoodoo, but that in Voodoo it could have
occurred. He further defined Hoodoo as largely a rural, folk,
herbal-based, health care system used primarily by blacks
who have little access to mainstream medical care. Otto's
incomplete definition revealed that his understanding of
Hoodoo was more closely related to the now invisible folk
religion of the old black belt Hoodoo tradition.
The occurrence of this bizarre event and its media
association with the terms Voodoo and Hoodoo signaled and
confirmed for this writer the distance between African
American cultural reality and mainstream America's
unsympathetic misunderstanding of that reality. The
apparent invisibility of Hoodoo practice to much of the
American mainstream might lead one to conclude that if
Hoodoo exists and functions at all, it has little relevance for
younger African Americans and is only an insignificant
remnant of useless superstition still clung to by older,
uneducated blacks. Certainly the context of Hoodoo practice
has evolved and been modified by a range of factors;
nevertheless, certain seminal or core Hoodoo practices,
informing principles, paradigms, and values have persisted
with extraordinary sociocultural tenacity.
Asking “what is Hoodoo?” invites a range of interesting
responses, not excluding a straightforward working
definition that Hoodoo is the folk, spiritual controlling, and
healing tradition originating among and practiced primarily,
but not exclusively, by captive African Americans and their
descendants primarily in the southern United States. If one
were to ask a randomly selected group of African Americans
that same question, a variety of answers would be
forthcoming, ranging from “I don't know,” to emotional
testimonials whispered through secretive tones. Some
respondents would openly dismiss Hoodoo as a remnant of
African primitivism and superstition; others would attest to
its efficacy. The answers would all be influenced by
demographic variables and possibilities, such as the age of
the respondents and the region of the country in which they
grew up and currently reside as well as their socioeconomic
status. Hoodoo, like other aspects of African American
culture, is class sensitive, though not always class specific.
Hoodoo has endured numerous definitions. More than
twenty-five years ago, Ralph R. Kuna defined Hoodoo as the
indigenous medicine and psychiatry of the black American.2
Like its predecessors, the traditional African religions
transported to America, Hoodoo made no separation of its
medicinal and spiritual function. Because of its evolving
nature as well as its invisible and frequently secretive
presence, it is difficult to pin down a satisfactory definition
of Hoodoo that conveys its totality. Such an elusive topic and
task can even be somewhat challenging to a well-focused
examination of how Hoodoo functions and what difficulties
or problems it addresses. Hoodoo is no longer a religion; it is
the view here that Hoodoo is the reorganized remnants of
what must have been, albeit short-lived, a full-blown
syncretized African-based religion among African American
bondsmen. The syncretic quality was unlike that found
occurring under Roman Catholicism; it was far less apparent
and achieved a less direct as well as a lesser degree of
syncretic penetration. Only a few religious figures would
achieve something resembling syncretic transfer. The case
of High John the Conquer and its correlation with John the
prophet was the best known. But other syncretic
possibilities existed in the quasi-religious folktales, religious
stories, and jokes. And like many West and Central West
African traditional religions, the Hoodoo religion involved
spirit possession, ancestor reverence, water immersion,
herbal medicine, sacred music, circle dancing, and shaman
priests who functioned in a variety of roles, including that of
leader in religious activity such as role model in the sacred
ritual of the Ring Shout.3
The assertion that Hoodoo could possibly have been a
religion to bondsmen may surprise and even offend some
readers. It is generally agreed in both scholarly and public
discourse that African American slaves could not possibly
have had a real religion, especially since their African
predecessors were viewed as idol worshipers by both
Christians and Muslims alike. The contention that early
Hoodoo could not have assumed the status of a religion is in
part informed by prejudicial notions that Africans, in their
“primitive” state, did not have “true” or “real” religion but
something less; or that slavery destroyed all vestiges of
African religions and spiritual activity. Thus they needed
Christian missionaries or Muslim proselytizers to “save”
them and teach them “the way.” Definitions are fraught with
both political content and intention. Defining African
religious and spiritual and supernatural practices as outside
of “religion” in part justified the invasion, oppression,
exploitation, and conversion of Africans to Christianity.
In the transitional loss of the old gods, Africans in the
United States, in their own process of interethnic
assimilation separate from whites, initially maintained
characteristics and practices common to many West and
Central West African religious traditions. Belief in a single
god and its ability to intercede on mankind's behalf was a
tenet in that belief system. For the purposes of this study,
religion is defined as a coherent personal or institutionalized
system of spiritual belief and practice. The old Hoodoo
religion contained those African elements that would later
give birth to numerous religious practices that would be
labeled “superstition” because they were outside of
acceptable mainstream Christian practice. It would also give
birth to numerous practices that would become secularized
and move into African American popular culture, particularly
in music and dance, but into other areas and into the black
church as well.
The function of any belief system is to make sense of
experience and reality. A historic view of Hoodoo as a system
of spiritual belief and explanation reveals that it appears to
address every problem that African Americans have
confronted, past or present. Those problems include
obtaining freedom and protection while resisting or running
away from slavery; harming the master, his family, or his
property; protecting a loved one about to be sold;
preventing beatings and other forms of harsh punishment;
returning a loved one; healing a malady; addressing issues
of mental, sexual, and public health; and protecting against
curses or witchcraft. Issues of family uncertainty,
employment and financial difficulties, legal issues involving
current or future possible incarceration, as well as health
problems would dominate later Hoodoo. In addition to
specific individual problems, Hoodoo specialists have
treated, and continue to treat, the general condition of
“luck” or lack thereof. This treatment of “bad luck,” though
apparently unfocused, is particularly significant in that it
addresses a general spiritual condition believed to influence
overall aspects of an individual's existence. This is often
expressed in contemporary Hoodoo belief as “jinx
removing,” though the term probably has its origin outside
of African American culture. Today one can purchase a range
of products aimed at jinx removing; these products include
jinx-removing oil, jinx-removing air freshener, house
blessing spray, jinx-removing bath powders and soaps, jinx-
removing floor wash, jinx-removing incense, and jinx-
removing candles, to mention only a few. This range of
products is sometimes marketed under the label “good
luck” candles or “luck-drawing oil,” “personal blessing oil,”
or other similar names.
For the purposes of this study, Hoodoo is the indigenous,
herbal, healing, and supernatural-controlling spiritual folk
tradition of the African American in the United States.
Hoodoo has endured numerous labels, among them black
magic, witchcraft, devil's work, and superstition, though
other less pejorative names include spirit work, root work,
conjure, spiritualism, psychic work, or simply “the work.”
Similar to some missionary treatment of African traditional
religion as evil, the conceptualization of Hoodoo as the
devil's work is not new; this long-standing conceptualization
of conjure as evil sometimes leads contemporary informants
to refer to conjure as witchcraft and to view it as a force
opposing Christianity.
Essentially, Hoodoo, for African Americans, is embodied
historical memory linking them back through time to
previous generations and ultimately to their African past. It
is also a paradigm for approaching both the world and all
areas of social life. Among contemporary African Americans,
certain retained aspects of Hoodoo were learned from
parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who passed
tales, information, beliefs, practices, and paradigms to their
descendants, sometime inadvertently.4 And more recently,
marketeered hoodoo supplies and paraphernalia have made
their appearance in Internet catalogs and Web sites,
supermarkets, botanicas, spiritual supply houses,
drugstores, as well as revitalized curio shops, the place
turned to most often by the uninformed for Hoodoo supplies
and sometimes services. Because certain practices found in
early Hoodoo successfully found their way into a new life in
the African American church, postemancipation Hoodoo
tradition is not completely separate from black Christian
church tradition, but rather it is entwined with it, either as a
complement or a challenge to church power. This is
especially true for the Spiritualist, Sanctified, and Baptist
churches where old tradition black belt Hoodoo ritual is
often a complement to sacred church activity.
While significant effort has been made since the 1970s in
rethinking African American historical and cultural
development, until recently little effort has been given to
rethinking African American Hoodoo. Other aspects of
African American cultural and religious life, especially music
and literature, receive more enlightened attention. Like
African American music, dance, and literature, Hoodoo is
ever changing, evolving, and responding to the sociocultural
environment as well as undergoing modification by its
practitioners. Until recently, especially in public discourse,
Hoodoo was neither discussed nor understood in terms of
religion or legitimate spiritual practice. Nor was African
American spirituality understood or much discussed outside
of the discourse on American Protestantism.5 An underlying
intent of this work, then, is to reinforce the study of African
American Hoodoo within the dialogue on African religion in
the New World as well as to reveal certain hidden and
previously unconsidered aspects of this tradition; this has
not always been the direction of previous Hoodoo studies.
Hoodoo has been conceptualized and explained by some as
a derivative of a syncretized Spanish or French Catholic
expression, such as in Haitian Vodun or Santeria, rather than
having its own independent developmental path. It
continues to be viewed today by some African Americans as
merely a collection of foolish superstitions with little
meaning, little if any cultural history, and no redeeming
social significance; few perspectives could be less accurate.
Framing some of this reaction is a fear as well as a failure to
separate the practices and outline of the old plantation
Hoodoo from contemporary commercially marketeered and
“snake oil” Hoodoo.
Growing up in a community of first-and second-generation
southern African American migrants from the Montgomery,
Alabama, black belt into the urban, industrial Midwest, this
writer had been exposed to some aspects of Hoodoo but
took it for granted and never gave it serious thought until I
began studying traditional West African dance. I became
interested in Hoodoo as a result of my involvement with
African and African-derived dancing. Moving from dance to
Hoodoo may appear a rather circuitous path; it was not. As
scholar John S. Mbiti states “African religion is found in
music and dance.”6 So as I studied more of the African-
derived dance forms of the New World, I was introduced to
the African religions that had given rise to a majority of the
dances. In the process of becoming more involved in both
practicing and investigating West African religion, I observed
subtle but apparent similarities between it and both black
church ritual and the Hoodoo I had seen and heard of in my
childhood and teen years; this stimulated my further
interest in Hoodoo.
When considering the relationship between Hoodoo and
the Ring Shout, my work as a dance researcher informs my
perspective. Researching this work has encouraged me to
reexamine the African American sacred dance ritual known
as the Ring Shout and its function in the African American
community, slave and free, in light of historical old tradition
black belt Hoodoo practice. As I raised questions about the
nature of the Ring Shout ritual, I could only conclude that a
religion other than Christianity was the context for its
emergence and continued existence. Searching for that
religion, I could only conclude that Hoodoo had to have been
that religion, albeit briefly, and the Ring Shout was its
sacred dance.
As someone whose past work has involved the search for
continuities and preexisting African influences as a way to
understand contemporary African American core culture
dancing,7 understanding the sociocultural movement of
Hoodoo in terms of its continuities with African religion
seemed reasonable to me as I searched for ways to
approach the topic. The notion of continuities is certainly
not novel and is part of a well-established tradition. Like
African American dancing and music making, African
American folk spirituality, as Hoodoo, demonstrates strong
continuities with African spirituality elsewhere both in the
New World and in Africa; yet Hoodoo is its own unique
cultural manifestation. And in that posture it has been
affected by a range of demographic, ethnic, marketing, and
technological influences that have impacted African
Americans.
Throughout my investigation of conjure, another name for
Hoodoo, I have tried to remain sensitive to possible
comparisons with other New World, African-derived religious
systems as a way to possibly shed light on the origin,
development, and function of African American Hoodoo;
preceding writers have done this. I found this approach most
useful when I noted similarities with the cultural continuities
with preexisting or “parent” traditions as well as with the
developmental uniqueness of Hoodoo. Where similarities are
noted, there are two possible explanations, either that
Hoodoo practice is similar because it is influenced by a
collateral practice from another system such as Santería,
New Orleans Voodoo, or Haitian Vodun, the most common
position, or that the similarity exists because Hoodoo and
the other systems have common religiocultural ancestors
and great-grandparentage and stand as third cousins with
separate lines of development. Although I acknowledge
possible influences from other systems in the early
movement of Hoodoo, I tend to favor the latter perspective
on Hoodoo development. I limit the discussion of cross-
cultural similarities primarily to those New World African and
traditional African religious practices and themes that are
noted most frequently in the U.S. literature and are most
familiar.
The earliest transformation of African religion into Hoodoo
likely involved significant components of cultural exchange
with other groups, Europeans or white American settlers and
especially the Native Americans. Though the full
complement of contributions by Native Americans to old
tradition Hoodoo may never be recounted, the herbal
healing aspect of Hoodoo is probably heavily influenced by
Native American custom, knowledge, and tradition. The
belief that Native American practice contributed directly to
Hoodoo development is widespread, but little evidence is
offered to support that assertion. I offer a small amount of
evidence and several possibilities. Mixing with traditional
African, European, and Native American herbal knowledge,
African American Hoodoo could very well have analogues in
Native American and European practices. Certainly Native
Americans were the most familiar with the continent's flora
and fauna, and they had established centuries-long
knowledge of local plants and their properties. Black Indians
or African Native Americans, who often stood in both Native
American and African American communities, could have
accessed both traditions and may have been influential in
the transfer of information, knowledge, customs, and
practices into Hoodoo. Native Americans also encountered
African Americans at historically black colleges and
universities such as Hampton in Virginia.
In this work, Hoodoo's development is more precisely
conceptualized as a series of overlapping progressions and
regressions of intertwined strands for which accurate
description ranges far beyond one approach. Nevertheless,
here the movement of Hoodoo through time is
conceptualized in three broad stages with overlapping
demarcations and subsets. Because Hoodoo movement
cannot be neatly packaged in three clean-cut linear
historical packages, I have partially demarcated the stages
based on changes in Hoodoo and located them in time,
temporally correlating them with a changing historical
backdrop of major mainstream influences on black life and
culture.
As a sociocultural phenomenon, Hoodoo's movement is
governed by unique cycles of stimuli that have varied in
duration and social location. Much of what we today
conceptualize as African American culture may have entered
African American cultural space as sacred reenactments; for
example, practices such as the eating of animal intestines
may have begun on southern plantations as a clandestine
sacred observance reminiscent of practices performed in
traditional African ritual. This practice would gradually
secularize and become known simply as eating chitterlings.
These types of ritual reenactments supported the shape and
social formulation of the early though short-lived Hoodoo
religion.
Though much of the data for this study is not new and is
used by other researchers, this study intends to present a
new look at Hoodoo development and a reinterpretative
glimpse at contemporary as well as preexisting Hoodoo
practice. Much of this work is speculative, particularly the
discussion of the most sacred root in Hoodoo practice, High
John the Conquer root. Hoodoo has been of interest to a
wide diversity of observers, from law enforcement officials to
marketeers. Researchers from anthropological to medical
and psychiatric have expressed scholarly interest in the
subject for at least the past century. Few have discussed the
topic in such a way as to reveal the meaning, fluctuating
legitimacy, and place of Hoodoo to those who believe in and
utilize it. Hopefully I will avoid the same pitfalls and will
both contribute to and complement the research that has
preceded my own small effort.
As with all investigative manuscripts, this one has its
weaknesses; since no one has offered data indicating that
Hoodoo was unknown to a significant number of African
Americans, I operate on the assumption that Hoodoo was
known to all members of core culture black communities. I
have never asked an African American about “roots” or
“Hoodoo” who had not heard of it. I have chosen for a
number of reasons not to emphasize “race,” as one critic has
suggested. That is the subject of another study. Though
“race” is of bedrock significance in both U.S. history and
African American life, it is not the only dimension that lends
understanding to interpretations of black life and culture
and need not be included as a dominant theme in all
research on African Americans. There is a rapidly emerging
new body of scholarship, such as that of psychiatrist Frances
Cress Welsing and labor historian David R. Roediger, that
challenges previous scholarship on “race” in the United
States and is too vast and ideologically challenging to be
included here without obscuring the subject of this study. I
have chosen not to utilize postdeconstructionist language or
paradigms as a way to approach Hoodoo's movement. The
two seemed incompatible, and their use risks giving the
subject an academic faddish overlay that would either
obscure or possibly skew many of the points that I wished to
make.
This is not to say that Hoodoo is uncontested. Indeed it is
by those who see Hoodoo as a national African American
cultural product and those who are outsiders to the African
American community and who claim their right to sell it for
income. Cultural contestation is not new and can be found
in places throughout the Western Hemisphere wherever
African derived culture is manifest on a national level, as in
Cuba or Brazil.
In a number of places, I make explicit an idea that
underpins and informs the approach and to some degree
the conclusions here. The idea that African Americans have
formed a “nation within a nation” with their own territory,
common ancestry, unique aesthetic in music, dance,
literature, food, clothing, and religion, and not simply a
segregated group in American life, is an old idea with a
history of vigorous debate on both the left and the right.
Some of the cultural practices discussed here have been
the focus of earlier examinations, but these examinations
rarely have contextualized the practice in a wider religious
framework. Studies of African American folklore, folk
medicine, folk magic, dance, and music have all been
approached as separate entities with no common
overarching umbrella under which they all at one time fit.
Most previous studies have not connected the elements of
music, dance, medicine, midwifery, spirit possession, and
water immersion. This study both asserts and assumes that
the old Hoodoo religion was the African American “sacred
canopy” and that certain aspects of black culture were once
part of the old African American Hoodoo system, a system of
folk religion that precedes both the black Christian church
and the process of secularization of aspects of the culture,
such as music and dance. But other aspects of African
American culture such as traditional proverbs, “sacred
voice” and “sacred signs” were also part of the old Hoodoo
tradition. This work sees many of those practices related to
one another in a “Hoodoo complex” that either has been
previously overlooked or presumed to be nonexistent.
The earliest examinations of conjure, as Hoodoo was also
known, was in periodicals, particularly the Southern
Workman and the Journal of American Folklore, which
published Leonora Herron and Alice M. Bacon's 1878 work
for the Hampton Virginia Folklore Society, with other articles
occasionally appearing in journals such as Century Magazine
or American Mercury. Since the 1960s, a range of specialists
has used interdisciplinary approaches to the study of
Hoodoo. Physicians such as Roland Steiner, psychologists,
medical anthropologists, and social workers have generated
a body of literature that examines the role of belief in
supernatural healing and harming among African
Americans. Regional studies and specialized vertical file
materials have provided the Hoodoo researcher with a
source of materials and have contributed significantly to the
literature on Hoodoo during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.
Beginning with Melville Herskovits, a number of scholars
have addressed some of the implicit cultural issues leading
to the misunderstanding that surrounds the reception and
interpretation of African American culture in the United
States. Certainly Harry Middleton Hyatt's five-volume work
Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork ,8 which completed
publication in 1978, is a landmark collection. Hyatt has
provided those interested in Hoodoo with an extensive body
of texts, dates, locations, and interview data gathered over
several decades. Traveling extensively, he interviewed self-
identified Hoodoo practitioners and believers from
Baltimore, Maryland, to Jacksonville, Florida, from
Brunswick, Georgia, to Little Rock, Arkansas. He collected
the words and practices of his informants and made few
attempts to interpret his vastly fertile material. Though
some of his data may be questionable and problematic,
Hyatt nevertheless created the single most impressive
repository of Hoodoo interviews and observations. Hyatt's
two primary flaws are, first, that he began collecting his
data after the “golden age” of Hoodoo had passed. The
Hoodoo that he collected was different from that of the old
black belt system. By the time Hyatt began collecting his
data, Hoodoo marketeering had altered the old system in
favor of fabrications that permeated Hoodoo nationally and
had transformed it. Hyatt's data collection could have one
other significant flaw, that known as “interviewer effect.”
Working with tape recording technology, and as a “white
man” outsider and representative of the American
mainstream, Hyatt's professional presentation of self may
have influenced the answers he received from his primarily
black informant pool.
Probably the second most extensive examination of
Hoodoo and perhaps the first full-scale examination is
Newbell Niles Puckett's work that culminated in the
publication of Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negpo.9 His
examination raised significant questions and opened an
important view of the scope of Hoodoo practice. Including
both the medicinal and spiritual components of Hoodoo in
his examination, Puckett demonstrates the richness, scope,
and tenacity of the Hoodoo tradition as it was practiced by
Hoodoo contemporaries of his day. He also highlights
numerous similarities between African American Hoodoo
practices in healing, burial, and conjuring and various West
African traditional practices.
One cannot think of Hoodoo studies without the work of
Zora Neale Hurston coming to mind. Several of her works
give insight into the Hoodoo tradition, including her works
“High John De Conquer,” Mules and Men, and “Hoodoo in
America.”10 Unlike earlier researchers on the subject,
Hurston is said to have undergone several Hoodoo initiations
to become a practitioner and insider. Some writers have
challenged this claim. Her participant observation would
have given her access to Hoodoo on a level that was closed
to most scholars interested in the topic. This author's
personal experience as a participant observer verifies this.
I found that searching out data and writing about Hoodoo
required me to become sensitized to Hoodoo's hiding places
and secret locations. One place that Hoodoo data hides is in
the literature on help-seeking behaviors, particularly
medical concerns. The works of Loudell F. Snow, Faith
Mitchell, Wanda Fontenot, and most recently Phoenix
Savage focus their investigations here.11 Gilbert Cooley, who
also writes under the name Elon Kulii, focused his work on
Hoodoo in Indiana in the mid-1970s and provides important
ethnographic data in the form of conversations and
collected Hoodoo tales.12 I later concluded that Cooley did
not interview any old tradition Hoodoo workers. I examined
two studies of black healing and conjure that focused on the
period preceding emancipation, namely Jean Robinson's and
Yvonne Chireau's dissertations completed in 1979 and
1994, respectively; they provide useful historical
information.13 In addition, Chireau extends her work by
examining the relationship between Hoodoo and the African
American church.14 But Chireau stops short of
distinguishing between the old African American Hoodoo
system, the folk form, and the marketeered version found at
Web sites like Luckymojo.com. Because she had no contact
with old tradition Hoodoo workers, Chireau's subsequent
work, Black Magic, demonstrates a fundamental
shortcoming in that she turns to Santeria to explain Hoodoo
and that she appears not to know that the old system even
exists.
Cassandra Wimbs's master's thesis on candle shops
examines the intersection of several alternative spiritual
traditions, notably Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Santeria, as they
present themselves in her primary research site, the candle
shop. Her work allows us to further chart the movement and
influence of Hoodoo in its metamorphic balance between
sustaining old traditions and intersecting with previously
unencountered ones.
The work of Michael Edward Bell in its analysis and
interpretation of Harry Middleton Hyatt's data brings an
organized legitimating analysis to the vast uninterpreted
collection of Hoodoo informants’ interviews in Hyatt's five
volumes. Bell outlines structure and function in Hoodoo
practice and makes one of the great contributions to a fuller
understanding of Hoodoo.15
I examined a master's thesis on what the author called
“the Gullah church,” and this work came closest to my own
observation on the uniqueness of the Ring Shout context.
This same author also touches on the relationship between
the Gullah church and root work but falls short of calling the
early expressions of this church what it was, the Hoodoo
church. This refusal directly reflects the fear and negativity
associated with that term.
Finally, Jeffery Anderson's work Conjure in African
American Society16 was published just as I was completing
a first draft of this work. Anderson attempts to construct a
theory of Hoodoo development using a cultural dichotomy
dividing Africans enslaved by “Latins” versus Africans
enslaved by English speakers. This sociocultural dichotomy,
which uses the culture of the “slave master” to chart the
development of Hoodoo, is, by itself, thin and neglects an
important element considered by this text. Certainly, the
dominant European ethnicity in the area would exert
influence on slave cultural development, but how deeply
influential would it be? And could there be any other equally
influential presence impacting upon macrocultural
development as well as microsocial elements of slave life
and culture? I contend that there were at least two; one was
the slaves’ ethnicity, and the other was the slaves’ labor.
Anderson envisions two primary cultural areas as he
constructs a model to explain certain aspects of Hoodoo
practice, but he completely neglects the contribution by the
regional and labor determinants of the material culture of
the various slave regions. He also neglects the influence of
the various African ethnic groups on Hoodoo's development.
Unlike Anderson, this author uses a “tricotomy” based on
region of the country, primary crop, and material culture as
well as the culture of both the slave master and the
ethnicity of Africans in considering Hoodoo's origin and
development. I also contend, but do not explore, that some
of the European-based outsider contributions to Hoodoo
were imposed on Hoodoo by the later marketeers and were
not the sociocultural heritage of the plantation.
The model of culture, whether it was in cotton culture, or
in tobacco of the upper South, or in sugarcane of the Gulf
Coast, or in rice and indigo of the Gullah Coast, was
supported by labor and a derivative material culture, all of
which impacted Hoodoo. Although I personally believe that
Native American spiritual tradition and healing influenced
early Hoodoo development, I found little evidence to support
this, so I did not pursue that trajectory of investigation.
As I was beginning to formulate my first ideas about
Hoodoo, I was initiated into one of the traditional New World
African religious systems. I did not choose Orisha reverence
through the Yoruba/Lukumi tradition; it chose me. One
evening in August 1995 in Sewanee County, Florida, I was
bathed in the hot waters of the Sewanee River and taken to
a railroad track where part of my initiation to Ogun, Lord of
Iron, warrior Orisha, would take place. The initiation into the
mysteries of Orisha have provided me with an additional
backdrop against which I can view Hoodoo practice. By
familiarizing me from the inside out with a West African
religious system and its syncretic New World variant, the
Orisha tradition broadened my basis for comparison,
suggested alternative avenues of interpretation, and gave
me an additional set of spiritual grips with which to handle
Hoodoo.
In July 1993, two years prior to my initiation as an
Olorisha, I had received my Egungun cloth and ancestral pot
and sacred protective necklace known as eleke. Next came
Esu/Elegba and the accompanying warriors, Ogun and
Ochosi, as well as the red and black eleke for Esu, principle
of uncertainty, often and popularly known as the trickster
deity. Next came the full set of elekes or collares, including
Oshun, Yemoja, Shango, and Obatala. I now had a full set of
elekes, including one for Ogun, received with my Orisha,
and one for Agaju, the Volcano, which I received in Havana,
Cuba, in the summer of 1990. In addition, after my initiation
I received my Ede de Ogun, a green and black bracelet
indicating my status as an initiated Olorisha of Ogun. One
year later, I would receive the “first hand of Ifa” (mano de
ifa), including the sixteen Ikin nuts, a green and reddish
orange ede (bracelet), and a green and reddish orange eleke
for Orumila, divinatory Orisha. I found that entry into one of
the African, syncretic, New World traditions, whether it was
Vodun, Candomble, Regla de Orisha (also known as Lukumi,
Santeria, and Yoruba), Palo Monte/Mayombe, or Akan, gave
me a certain degree of access to all African traditional
religions that was extended as a courtesy to initiates of
other systems. I found this fluidity of acceptance helpful in
conversing with devotees of African religious traditions
different than my own, but more important it sensitized me
to possible sites of exchange and to invisible cultural
process. Through the initiation process and Orisha practice, I
broadened my basis for comparison when viewing Hoodoo.
Initiation into the worship system of a major West African
religion has suggested additional avenues of interpretation
to me and hopefully has provided me with an additional
vantage point from which to view early Hoodoo practice as
described in the existing literature.
Penetrating and understanding the world of Hoodoo has
never been, and is not today, an unchallenging task; Hoodoo
has undergone numerous changes since its birth under
American slavery. After about a year of attempting to discuss
Hoodoo with a range of informants with diverse vested
interest in it, I found it necessary to adopt multiple
personas, fashioned to meet the expectations of my widely
ranging informant pool. Except for two stores that I visited in
New Orleans in April 2003, some owners of curio shops that
sell Hoodoo paraphernalia were often the least cooperative,
some responded with controlled hostility when questioned
and appeared to be annoyed and sometime threatened by
my inquiries. This was especially true of three Internet
sources I contacted.17 Contrary to my assumptions that my
insider status would make them more cooperative, my
insider status seemed to increase their defensiveness,
particularly of one merchant in Philadelphia. I could only
conclude that my insider status was threatening because I
could potentially challenge the authenticity of their services
and “spells.”
An unanticipated response to discussing my research has
been convincing members of my potential audience that I
was not mispronouncing the term Voodoo. The exchange
usually went something like this: “What did you say you
were researching, Voodoo?” “No, Hoodoo.” “Did you say
Voodoo? You mean Voodoo, don't you?” “No, I mean Hoodoo
with an H, I'm not mispronouncing Voodoo.” Usually after
several minutes they realized that Hoodoo and Voodoo are
not exactly the same phenomenon and that I was not simply
mispronouncing Vodun. I usually went on to explain that the
two traditions were linked as distant cousins.
Although it is not as overwhelmingly significant and
visible today as it once was for African Americans, Hoodoo in
the not-too-distant past has been as significant as music
and dance in shaping and revealing African American
psychology and ethnic identity as well as outsider portrayals
of blacks. African American deep spirituality, extending
beyond accepted Christian practice, has been part of many
comic portrayals, and these portrayals have been part of a
wider campaign of “public dishonor” heaped upon African
Americans. In the past, belief in Hoodoo was viewed by
white Americans as part of African American national
character and identity. African American celebrities no less
than Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry, Mantan Moreland, Willie
Bess, and more recently Whoopi Goldberg have all given
widely viewed comic portrayals whose effectiveness is
underpinned by a marginalized, subtly ridiculing, and
negatively stereotyped understanding and misinterpretation
of African American deep spirituality.18 This deep spirituality
extends beyond Christian practice acknowledging a world of
spirits, haints, witches, and malevolent as well as beneficial
forces that can be accessed and harnessed by humans with
either the gift or the training to do so.
 How has Hoodoo practice been able to survive and persist?
How has it changed over the years? Unlike African American
music, which has been highly visible, Hoodoo has not proved
to be universally marketable, so we must exclude
marketability and cultural appeal as the only significant
factors in its longevity. Unlike food, it is not consumed daily,
resulting in conditioned tastes, thus explaining its
persistence and longevity. Hoodoo had achieved a high level
of functionality and must have served, and for some
continues to serve, a community of believers and
practitioners whose needs are somehow met by it. The
adherence to Hoodoo represents a hopeful refusal by African
American bondsmen and their descendants to completely
relinquish either African-style deep spirituality or their own
spiritual agency in daily slave life, thus preserving elements
of their African identity. Enslaved Africans and their
descendants held on and believed in themselves.
In the process of this research, I discovered the existence
of two Hoodoos. One that I designated as “old tradition black
belt Hoodoo” includes the original short-lived Hoodoo folk
religion and, later, when Hoodoo as a religion became
unsustainable, the Hoodoo spiritual tradition that continued
to be developed by African and African American captives on
southern U.S. plantations. The second I labeled
“marketeered” or “snake-oil Hoodoo.” None of the authors
writing on the topic have drawn this significant distinction,
pointing out that dichotomy is a unique feature of this small
effort. There are distinctive, though not always apparent,
differences between the two Hoodoos. In my examination, I
tried to stand as far back as possible in an attempt to view
Hoodoo in both its broadest expression and movement. And
the broad brush strokes with which I paint this portrayal can
be considered an additional weakness of this manuscript.
The broad strokes are made at watershed points in African
American cultural development and reveal a view that
microexamination overlooks.
Old tradition black belt Hoodoo is a long-standing
indigenous folk spiritual belief, medicinal, and controlling
system created by African slave descendants, originating on
American slave plantations in the black belt South, with a
significant number of primary practices that resemble
traditional West and Central West African spiritual practices.
As Hoodoo developed, it was known to all in the slave
community and was a part of the psychic structure of every
individual enslaved there. It was a glue that held the slave
community together. It included folk wisdom and advice. It
addressed the needs of the slave community and, later, the
free African American community; it integrated
psychological support, spiritual direction, physical strength,
and medicinal treatment. It helped to define the cultural
uniqueness of the old black belt nation, its members, and
their descendants. Characteristically, old tradition Hoodoo
was frequently passed down in families, often through the
ritual of “being called”19; it was often associated with an
African American church in which spirit possession could be
experienced; it used freshly obtained ingredients,
circumventing the interference of “spiritual marketeers” and
their supply line whenever possible; and it addressed the
medicinal, psychological, physical, and spiritual needs of the
slave community and, later, the community of free African
Americans.
As with numerous other native traditions and customs,
there was resistance by purists, arbiters, cultural
gatekeepers, established authorities, and traditionalists.
Others resisted, not because they wanted to preserve
traditionality or resist hybridization, but rather because they
saw the incursion of outsiders who would sell them their
own traditions as further demonstration of their own
powerlessness in a world dominated by both wealth and a
“whiteness” hierarchy. The existence of the old system
stands as a testament to a number of potential conclusions,
not the least of which is the staying power of culture under
the harshest conditions and the ability of an oppressed and
economically exploited people to sustain their cultural
identity and uniqueness. The existence of the old system
contradicts much of the negative assessment of African
American culture and demonstrates the positive attributes
of institution building and the passing on of positive
community values, all while developing strategies that resist
commercialization and standardization. The work of both
Yvonne Chireau and Jeffery Anderson neglect this important
aspect in much the same way that some music and social
dance research neglects the role of the folk form, the “core
culture,”20 within its own sociocultural context in the
production of mainstream music and dance.
Created by outsiders, marketeered Hoodoo exhibits none
of the aforementioned characteristics exhibited by the old
tradition. Marketeered Hoodoo was created around the turn
of the twentieth century but does not achieve peak
penetration in northern urban black communities until the,
1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, concomitant with black migration
northward and black displacement from old, rural, black belt
community traditions. Marketeers distorted old tradition
Hoodoo into a profitable business for themselves. Some
marketeers purchased Hoodoo information from blacks who
frequently were not conjurers and who often distorted
information and gave incomplete or incorrect recipes. Other
marketeers simply created their own “spells,” packets, and
baths with no basis in old tradition Hoodoo. They renamed
ritual practices and supplies, distorting what was apparently
fragments of old tradition Hoodoo into a poorly designed
caricature of its authentic self. It inundated the Hoodoo
market with unauthentic supplies and spells that they often
created to financially exploit African Americans and the old
black belt Hoodoo belief system.
It is important that the southern, black belt, African
American origins of Hoodoo not be obscured in
contemporary descriptive phrasing. Terms such as southern
origins or southern style evade the mention of the
socioethnic impact of African slave laborers on the
development of their own traditions. It is not enough to
merely say that Hoodoo is southern; African captives did
indeed engage in the process of creating both culture and
community, and the black belt Hoodoo tradition is evidence
of that. The Hoodoo marketeers are totally disconnected
from the communities they exploit or loosely connected
through their commercial supply line. They do not perform
the all-important “community sanction” function of
conjurers; they treat no physical, psychological, or
behavioral maladies; they do little traditional Hoodoo work;
and they issue the disclaimer “sold as a curio only” on many,
perhaps most, products that they sell.
Chapter 1 briefly discusses the major manifestations of
African traditional religion in the New World. It examines
and outlines significant general principles and practices
carried to the Western Hemisphere by captive Africans from
two regions, which inform West and Central West African
religious practices as well as the major New World African
religious manifestations establishing where Hoodoo fits in
vis-à-vis the other New World syncretic religious forms.
Chapter 2 considers the movement and recoalescing of
eight essential elements into the African Religion Complex,
or ARC, thus enabling the Hoodoo religion to emerge briefly.
Here the manuscript discusses the “mechanism” that lays
the groundwork for Hoodoo's birth. This mechanism consists
of eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the
African ethnic groups landed in the American South. This
idea has not been explored in any other work on Hoodoo and
is entirely new. This is the first manuscript to identify and
conceptualize the movement of Hoodoo against a series of
watershed changes in the American cultural landscape.
Chapter 3 discusses the most powerful and best-known
root in Hoodoo practice, High John the Conquer root and
addresses the intriguing question of “how did a root that is
native only to Xalapa, Mexico, become so significant to
African American Hoodoo practice, particularly in places like
Virginia or other locales thousands of miles away?” With the
exception of Zora Neale Hurston, all previous authors,
including Anderson and Chireau, have totally overlooked the
possible sociocultural origins and movement of this long-
standing and empowering spiritual myth and its
representative plant. The chapter explores these issues.
Chapter 4 charts the transformation of Hoodoo as it moves
from the plantation environment and encounters both
“snake oil” Hoodoo and the spiritual marketplace of the
urban environment.
Chapter 5 extends chapter 4 and introduces an
overlapping discourse on the merging of Hoodoo, dream
interpretation, sign interpretation, the relationship between
Hoodoo and the numbers, the rise of candle shops, and the
domination of the Hoodoo marketplace by commercial sites
and supply houses. This chapter also discusses Hoodoo's
best-known conjurer, Stephaney Robinson, known as Dr.
Buzzard.
Chapter 6 examines Hoodoo as health care and includes
an aspect totally overlooked in the research literature on
Hoodoo practice: the role of the African American midwife in
the old tradition black belt Hoodoo complex.
Chapter 7 looks at Hoodoo's movement during the post–
World War II years and draws a portrait of several
contemporary root practitioners working in the old tradition.
The book concludes with a postscript.
 I have chosen to capitalize Hoodoo wherever I have used
it, even though I would like to have used the lowercased
hoodoo when designating marketeered Hoodoo practice;
that task became time-consuming and cumbersome. It is
my hope that this reinterpretive glance will make a small
contribution to a greater understanding of African American
culture and tradition and ultimately American life and
culture.
 TRADITIONAL RELIGION IN WEST
AFRICA AND IN THE NEW WORLD
A Thematic Overview

Though some scholarship of the past four decades on African religion

and culture has been fairer, broader, more objective, and more accurate
in its examination and presentation than many earlier works, overall
much traditional African and African-derived life and culture continue to
be misinterpreted and misunderstood. Nowhere is the
mischaracterization of West and Central West African tradition more
discordant with reality than in numerous early portrayals and
interpretations of African traditional religion. As both the product of and
the producer of pejorative misrepresentations of African traditional
cultural life, some of the materials that degrade and misinterpret the
religious core of traditional African society can be found in the private
journals and other accounts by missionaries, traders, explorers, settlers,
and agents of the Crown used as primary sources. Though this
scholarship has often been racist and pejorative, it is still possible,
however, to glean comparative factual information concerning
traditional African religious practices that would carry over into the New
World.
With the apparent exception of Kongo, where early conversion of the
Kongolese nobility to Catholicism appears to have been voluntary, or at
least without colonial pressure,1 the dual notions of Christianizing and
civilizing “African savages” complemented each other; in some
instances, the two processes, generally accompanied by colonialism,
were one and the same, as a quote from a prayer by Rev. T. Muller,
chaplain to the 1841 expedition up the Niger, illustrates:
Our help is in thee, O God! Who hast made heaven and earth. Undertake Thou for us, and
bless Thou the work of our hands. Give success to our endeavours to introduce civilization
 and Christianity into this benighted country. Thou hast promised, Ethiopia shall soon stretch
out her hands unto God: make us, we pray thee, instrumental in fulfilling this Thy promise.2

Similar attitudes would confront traditional African religious practice in

the Americas and Hoodoo in the United States.
Of all the harmful labels attached to traditional West African religion,
the labels idol worship and superstition and their association with evil or
“dark” forces have been long-standing. The notions that the Christian
god was the one “true God” and that West African spiritual practice was
founded solely on ignorance and fear accompanied the numerous and
influential outsiders entering Africa. African scholar John S. Mbiti, an
astute observer on the attitude of both early and contemporary
scholarship toward traditional African life and culture, speaking in 1990
of the early scholarship on African traditional religion, had this
comment:
One of the dominating attitudes in this early period was the assumption that African beliefs,
cultural characteristics and even foods, were all borrowed from the outside world. German
scholars pushed this assumption to the extreme, and have not all abandoned it completely to
this day. All kinds of theories and explanations were put forward on how the different religious
traits had reached African societies from the Middle East or Europe…. These earlier
descriptions and studies of African religions left us with terms which are inadequate,
derogatory and prejudicial.3

Even in the twenty-first century, unfounded prejudice,

misrepresentation, and misunderstanding of traditional African religion,
though challenged and somewhat abated, still continue. Unfortunately,
contemporary popular images, with unlimited power to capture the
psyche and imagination of the youthful observer through special effects
and fantastic animation, have continued to be one of the most powerful
tools in reinforcing the older misrepresentations. Where these images
would be contested and challenged, the African as the human element
is simply excluded from the portrayal, as with Disney's 1999 animated
version of Tarzan. This full-length cartoon fantasy, which continues the
insidious legacy of pejorative portrayals, may be even more harmful
than earlier misrepresentations because it completely eliminates the
African from his homeland and, through exclusion, silences and renders
him invisible and inferior in his own environment. Because these types
of misportrayals encourage a denial and erasure of African culture, the
ideological implications of this vicious manipulation are potentially far
reaching for those of African heritage as they further contribute to the
already existing self-loathing.
The African slave trade to the New World would not only be an
enterprise that extended nearly four centuries but would also deposit
large populations of Africans in North America, the Caribbean, Mexico,
and Central and South America. One result of this massive involuntary
population transfer would be the reestablishment of traditional African
religion in the new environments. Beginning in the late sixteenth
century and continuing until the late nineteenth, Spain, England,
Portugal, Holland, and France would establish slavery as the dominant
labor relationship producing the New World crops of sugarcane,
pineapple, tobacco, indigo, rice, and cotton. In addition, slave labor
would be used in mining gold, silver, coal, and saltpeter and would be
used in quarries, lumber camps, and later in industries such as the
production of liquor and iron. Nearly all forms of work, skilled and
unskilled, domestic and professional, were performed by slave labor.4
Of the African ethnic groups transported to the Americas, all believed
in a supreme being. Traditional West and Central West African religion
encompassed the totality of African existence; it was the medium
through which explanation for all events was sought and given. It
framed and gave meaning to daily occurrence as well as to events
across the life cycle; it was the bonding agent that held the universe
together, and it assured universal balance, the ultimate governing
principle. Birth, puberty, marriage and family, death, illness and health,
planting and harvest, herd size, and interpersonal relationship were all
framed by, underpinned by, influenced by, and integrated into religious
practice. Whenever illness plagued the individual or misfortune
overwhelmed the community, an explanation and a solution was sought
in sacred ritual, which restored both spiritual and physical balance. For
the traditional African, there was no clear separation between sacred
and secular as one finds in contemporary European and American
society. This would also be true for the early practitioners of Hoodoo
religion.
In addition to containing a socially penetrating and well-integrated
religious philosophy, traditional life in West Africa was ordered around a
rigid status hierarchy based on, among other allotment principles, age
or seniority, exceptional personal accomplishments, and possession of
needed skills. Many of the Africans brought to the North American
mainland, like the Bambara, Akhan, Temne, Bakongo, Igbo, and Yoruba,
came from highly organized, well-developed, and widely spread empires
and kingdoms; they knew, firsthand, the power, durability, and
importance of religious and ancestral tradition such as the secret
societies. New World African captives came from these highly ordered
societies that were structured to include a variety of both institutions
and organizational principles.5 In traditional West African societies,
status could be inherited, ascribed, or achieved, but however it was
attained, the status hierarchy was expressed and reinforced in
numerous symbolic forms, including clothing, body adornment, gesture,
dance, as well as other indicators of status such as birthmarks.6 Life in
West Africa was so governed by symbolic representation that the
smallest feather, seemingly insignificant scarification, special hairdo,7 or
simple bead might be the indicator of power or status in the social
structure. West African social life was negotiated and ordered through a
complex system of multilayered symbols that linked members to the
society and formed the basis of ethnic consciousness. “Each color, each
band of cloth, each design and pattern of textile, each article of
clothing, each ornament, each number has religious significance. There
is thus, no separation between artisanship, artistic creation and
religious observance.”8
Significant numbers of traditional West African religions contained
their own divination system or system of direct communication between
humans and spiritual forces such as deity and ancestral spirits.9
Recognized as the only vehicle through which one can obtain
information about one's destiny, divination governed all important
decisions. Such a communication system is seen in the example of Ifa
divination. Practiced by the Yoruba of Nigeria as well as others in the
region, Ifa is seen as the superior form of communication with God and
destiny. With this system, the diviner uses sacred Ikin nuts, kola nuts
(specifically Obi abata), or cowry shells, known as the Meridillogun.10
Among traditional Yoruba, and among traditional West Africans
generally, no serious decisions such as marriage or major financial
dealings are undertaken without consulting a diviner to read the oracle.
The inner workings of traditional West and Central West African cultures
were negotiated within a sacred and highly symbolic universe imbued
with spiritual significance; there was no secular realm and no atheism.
Like village society, the universe was seen as ordered in a status
hierarchy that arranged humans, ancestors, spirits, aspects of God, and
intermediary forces according to a position between God and
humankind. The use of such conceptualization enabled the adherents to
move through life meaningfully while addressing challenges to universal
order, balance, and survival while engaging God's direct intervention.
The traditional African religious world is populated by a variety of
manipulable spiritual forces and spiritual beings capable of beneficial as
well as malevolent actions that can be directed at any earthly entity,
including plants, minerals, animals, or humans. Within the realm of
spirits, there are different categories of supernatural existence. One
such category of intermediary forces, what John Mbiti refers to as
divinities, is a hallmark of many of the traditional African religions:
 Divinities are on the whole thought to have been created by God, in the ontological category
of the spirits. They are associated with Him, and often stand for His activities or
manifestations either as personification or as the spiritual beings in charge of these major
objects or phenomena of nature. Some of them are national heroes who have been elevated
and deified, but this is rare, and when it does happen the heroes become associated with
some function or form of nature.11

Known by different appellations, these divinities are regarded as

vehicles for or manifestations of God itself. Among the Ashanti, some
are referred to as Abosom; among the Fon, Vodu; among the Yoruba,
they are called Orisha. Divinities govern, guard, reward, and protect
humans in their endeavors; they are similar in some respect to angels or
saints. Among the areas of existence relegated to control by divinities
are war, harvest, fertility and motherhood, smallpox, health, love
relationships, wealth, rivers, oceans, volcanoes, farming, thunderstorms,
and lightening; the proliferation may be elaborate, as in this observation
made among the Fantee of Cape-Coast town: “[A]ll the fetishes of the
place are mentioned by name, which, as in the case of Cape-Coast town,
where there are seventy-seven guardian-deities, is sometimes a tedious
enumeration.”12 The traditional African divinities are petitioned for
protection, healing, and favors; they are also propitiated or “fed” their
favorite offerings. Speaking of the area now known as Ghana, one 1830s
observer had this comment:
These deities are identified with many of the most striking objects of nature. They are
suppose to inhabit rivers. The river Tando is a favorite fetish among the Ashantees.…Lakes as
well as rivers, have a share of the public veneration.…Remarkable mountains and rocks are
also regarded with religious veneration.…The animate creation, moreover, furnishes other
objects of superstitious veneration. Some animals (as leopards, panthers, and wolves) and
dangerous reptiles (as serpents) are believed to be the messengers of the gods; and others
are worshiped as the living incarnations of certain deities.13

Similar practices would find their way into Hoodoo.

The spirit world of the various African traditional religions has the
commonality of being both multilayered and varied. Everything in
nature, including plants, animals, and inanimate objects, is believed to
have a spirit or soul or governing principle and a function in addition to
a certain level of spiritual power. Some plants, because of their
particular level within the hierarchical order in the universe, are
believed to contain spirits, spiritual power, or governing principles that
can influence, harm, or heal. The Bambara, for example, believe that
plants as well as animals have souls and that herbal medicine derives its
power from the soul force of the plant.14 The Yoruba of Nigeria refer to
this soul force as ashe and, like the Bambara, believe it can be found in
plants as well as animals. The people of the Kongo believe in the power
and soul force of certain plants, such as the root of the munkwiza plant,
which was ritually chewed to release power and the juice spit all around
for protection from enemies. Centuries later, African Americans would
witness a startlingly similar ritual practice in what would become a
major part of Hoodoo's courtroom ritual. This notion of governing spirit
or governing principle is often extended to inanimate objects as well.
The use of designated plants, animals, and inanimate objects as
flashpoints for harnessing supernatural power would continue in the
Americas as part of the syncretic religious traditions of the African
diaspora. These spirits or flashpoints are entities that enable the
individual and the group to focus on, tap into, and use God's power,
which can be found in individual personal effects as well as in hair, dead
skin, saliva, bodily secretions, fingernail clippings, and clothing. Among
some traditional practitioners, items such as hair or fingernail clippings
are carefully guarded and disposed of lest they be obtained by an
enemy and used against the owner, causing misfortune, sickness, or
death, a tradition that would carry over into the twenty-first century
among African Americans. Rev. Robert Hamill Nassau leaves this account
from the nineteenth century:
If it be desired to obtain power over some one else, the oganga must be given by the
applicant, to be mixed in the sacred compound, either crumbs from the food, or clippings of
finger nails or hair or (most powerful) even a drop of blood of the person over whom
influence is sought. These represent the life or body of that person. So fearful are natives of
power being thus obtained over them, that they have their hair cut only by a friend; and even
then they carefully burn it or cast in into a river. If one accidently cuts himself, he stamps out
what blood has dropped on the ground, or cuts out from wood the part saturated with
blood.15

Speaking in the nineteenth century of the Mpongwe of the Gabon,

Robert H. Milligan made this observation:
Sickness and death, they believe, may be caused by fetish medicine, which need not be
administered to the victim, but is usually laid beside the path where he is about to pass.
Others may pass and it will do them no harm. The pairing of finger-nails, the hair of the victim
and such things are powerful ingredients in these “medicines.” An Mpongwe, after having his
hair cut, gathers up every hair most carefully and burns it lest an enemy should secure it and
use it to his injury.16

The same observer had this comment concerning the uses and power
of hair, fingernails, and saliva among the Fang people of the Gabon: “A
man who possesses a fetish-skull usually invokes its aid to prevent
secret unfaithfulness on the part of his wife. He compounds a certain
fetish the ingredients of which include a lock of his wife's hair, cuttings
of her nails, or her saliva.…It seems to be a fact that this fetish
frequently proves effective without the aid of poison; that is to say, the
woman dies.”17 Among the Bambara, hair is believed to contain an
important aspect of the soul.18 Saliva is believed to be spiritually potent
and is used in making both talismans and amulets.19 Interestingly, we
now know that both hair and fingernail clippings as well as bodily
secretions contain the individual's DNA, the unique genetic key or “life
code.”
The spirits of the departed or the ancestors are universally honored
among West and Central West African religious traditionalists.
Performed in a variety of ways involving both the individual and the
community, reverence toward the departed is a continuation of the
relationship between family members. Conceptualized as having a full
range of human motives and desires, including misdeeds, anger, and
revenge, ancestors are remembered, honored, and spoken of so that the
familial continuity is strengthened. Ancestral spiritual power is
consulted and invoked as it was when the elders were in their earthly
existence. This passage from the 1841 journals of Rev. James Frederick
Schon and Samuel Crowther illustrates several points:
The first thing which the Natives usually ask for, is their favourite rum;…But before he put it
to his lips, he took care to pour out a few drops on deck, showing his attention to the
superstitious notions of his heart…this custom prevails among many of the tribes of Africa,
and is observed with religious punctuality. Its origin or intention is uncertain; but I am inclined
to think that the Sherbro People have given me the most satisfactory solution of it. In
observing this ceremony, they generally say “Koo bana!” (“To the old people!”) meaning their
ancestors, now in another world.…They are in the habit of carrying rice and other eatables to
the graves of their departed friends; and frequently, in cold or wet nights, they will light a fire
on them.20

Though ceremonies for the ancestors are held in which the community
participates, individuals can personalize their gestures toward the
departed by leaving food or drink on ancestor shrines or at grave sites.
This, as well as a range of significant gestures, often outlines and
exhibits the relationship with the ancestor. John Beecham, who lived
from 1787 to 1856, made this observation of the Ashanti and Fantee
people while he was living on the Gold Coast of what is now Ghana:
“The people believe that the spirits of their departed relatives exercise a
guardian care over them; and they will frequently stand over the graves
of their deceased friends and invoke their spirits to protect them and
their children from harm.…Elderly women are often heard to offer a kind
of prayer to the spirit of a departed parent, begging it either to go to its
rest, or, at least, to protect the family, by keeping off evil spirits, instead
of injuring the children or other members of the family by its touch.”21
Through ancestor reverence, the individual is able to seize the power
and memory of his ancestors for support, direction, and protection.
Speaking of the Fang and other interior ethnic groups of the Gabon, an
observer had this to say: “In most tribes offerings of food and drink are
placed beside the grave. As the drink evaporates and the food wastes
they say the spirit is consuming it. Fire-wood is left on the grave that the
body may be kept warm.”22
The previously cited passage from the journal of Schon and Crowther
gives a subjective snapshot of ancestor reverence, presenting a single
gesture in a richly endowed, deeply imbedded, and highly significant
aspect of the traditional African spiritual universe. The practice of
honoring one's ancestors, seizing the power of the departed, is universal
in West and Central West Africa and would carry over into the Americas
in a variety of forms, including grave site decoration and the magical
use of internment soil, known in Hoodoo as graveyard dirt. When
Africans honor and commune with their progenitors, they are framing
their own existence and substantiating who they are while both
focusing ancestral energies and directing them toward a positive end,
not simply engaging in “worshiping the dead,” as it has often been
mischaracterized. Traditional Africans reaffirm their familial privilege to
request spiritual assistance as well as their familial responsibility for
other family members. Powerful ancestors like the founders of the
nation or significant political or cultural heroes are sometimes deified
and moved into the realm of divinities.
Regarded as a sacred occurrence, spirit possession by a deity, spirit, or
ancestor is universal among West and Central West African religious
traditionalists and is an incredibly powerful experience even for the
observer. Its occurrence announces the arrival of beings from the spirit
realm while demonstrating the possibilities for human communion with
the direct representatives of God. During the journey through
possession, the devotee loses full consciousness and slips into a
semiconscious state in which the physical appearance is transformed,
the individual becomes oblivious to the world around him, and he is
believed to become the temporary vessel for the spiritual entity.
Sometimes the possessed both experiences and demonstrates fantastic
effects of personality, physical strength, endurance, and pain tolerance.
John Beecham leaves us this description: “The order of fetishmen is
further augmented by persons who declare, that the fetish has suddenly
seized, or come upon, them. A series of convulsive and unnatural bodily
distortions establishes their claims.”23 This practice of spirit possession,
like other traditional African practices, would be observed in sacred
contexts among African Americans in the United States in the twenty-
first century.
 Within the context of African traditional religion, herbal and
naturopathic healing were dependent upon spiritual forces for efficacy.
The medicoreligious process from diagnosis to treatment was carried
out in the spiritual realm. The traditional practice of medicine was
intertwined with both the practice of religion and spiritual power.
Indeed the ongoing use of shaman, medicine men, and later African
American conjurers as well as other traditional practitioners was tied to
religious belief in their ability to harness and utilize spiritual power to
treat physical and mental malady.
In both traditional African society as well as in old plantation Hoodoo,
diagnosis of physical or mental illness was often through divination
alone or in combination with other diagnostic methods. In divination, a
range of objects served as the oracle: stones, bones, shells, pods, seeds,
sand, animals, animal entrails, and sticks were all used.24 In addition,
the traditional healer would use his or her senses or the responses of
natural creatures such as insects to help with the diagnosis.25 Ants, for
example, have been used as a diagnostic tool in traditional African
medicine in testing for diabetes. The patient is instructed to urinate on
the ground; if within an hour the spot is infested with ants, then the
patient probably has sugar in his urine.26
In cases such as broken bones, burns, cuts, or obvious physical injury,
divination was not necessary to discover the source of the discomfort.
Treatment could proceed using the traditional herbal/spiritual procedure
or remedy. In some cases, specialists, such as bonesetters, who often
used birds as parasympathetic healing models, were consulted to
facilitate the healing. Since the spoken word was believed to embody
spiritual potency, sacred remarks in the form of incantations and
prayers were a significant component in African traditional medicine
and would later perform a similar function in Hoodoo. The healing
specialists used these spiritual methods in combination with physical
methods such as applying splints and herbal supports in the form of
herbal packs and medicinal juices to stimulate circulation, aid healing,
reduce swelling, and prevent infection. Prayers accompanied the mixing
of medicines as well as the tying of sacred string for healing and
strength. Imbedded within the religion was a code associated with
speaking that extended beyond medicine to daily life; words were
power. According to Mbiti:
There is a mystical power in words, especially those of a senior person to a junior one, in
terms of age, social status or office position. The words of parents for example, carry
“power” when spoken to children: they “cause” good fortune, curse, success, peace,
sorrows or blessings, especially when spoken in moments of crisis. The words of the
medicine-man work through the medicine he gives, and it is this, perhaps more than the
actual herb, which is thought to cause the cure or prevent misfortunes. Therefore, formal
 “curses” and “blessings” are extremely potent; and people may travel long distances to
receive formal blessings, and all are extra careful to avoid formal curses.27

This would also be true in old plantation Hoodoo religion. Phrases such
as “put the bad mouth on” or “burn bread on” attest to the power and
longevity of words in the Hoodoo belief system.
The use of string and knot tying in the traditional healing process is
found throughout West and Central West Africa as well as throughout
the African diaspora; it would appear throughout the black belt South as
well as in northern urban black communities until the mid-twentieth
century. In earlier times in Africa, the strings were made from either
leather, special plants, or the vines of sacred climbing plants. Strings
were tied on various body parts, including the neck, wrist, ankle, and
groin-waist area for spiritual-physical health and strength. String was
used in the old Kongo kingdom to hold in spiritual power28 and was
used throughout the Gabon tied around the waist for health.29 In
Ghana, among the Ashanti people, strings rubbed with vegetable
dressings were used.30 Finally, concerning the use of string for sacred
healing, Robert Hamill Nassau, forty years a missionary in the Gabon
district of Kongo-Français had this to say: “Some kinds, worn on a
bracelet or necklace, are to ward off sickness. The new born infant has a
health-knot tied about its neck, wrist, or loins. Down to the day of oldest
age, every one keeps on multiplying or renewing or altering these life
talismans.”31
In addition to noninvasive healing techniques, traditional medicine
encompassed surgery, including circumcision, cesarean delivery and the
cutting of the umbilical cord, uvulectomy, scarification, piercing of ears
and other body parts, as well as complicated and delicate procedures
such as drilling into the skull to repair fractured bone or to relieve severe
and persistent headaches.32
Among some traditionalists, herbal knowledge was secretly guarded
and was passed on only through long apprenticeships, often, but not
exclusively, limited to family or clan members. The traditional priest,
healer, or shaman often entered into an extensive study period and
training process that began in childhood and lasted for many years.
Beecham made the following observation in nineteenth-century Ghana:
“The fetishmen apply themselves, moreover, to the study of medicine;
and the knowledge which they acquire of the properties of herbs and
plants it will be seen hereafter, powerfully contributes to strengthen
their influence with the people.”33
A division of labor, which was sometimes diversified according to
specialty, often informed the acquisition of herbal knowledge;
midwives, for example, would know best which plants to use for
treatment of childbirth-associated problems and concerns. Other
practitioners had a general knowledge of herbal and naturopathic
medicines. The most mystical and feared aspect of naturopathic and
herbal healing was the knowledge of poisonous and otherwise harmful
plants and substances. In Africa, possession of herbal knowledge gave
an individual both power and unique status within his social group and
oftentimes resulted in the acquisition of material gain. In the United
States, the conjurer with knowledge of poisons was feared. Both the
knowledge and the fear associated with herbal acumen would attend
Hoodoo practice.
Traditional African ethnopsychologists used narcotic, stimulant, and
hallucinogenic plants to treat mental and emotional problems. Herbal
and naturopathic practitioners mixed and administered herbal
medications that calmed, aided sleep, stimulated the nervous system,
dulled pain, and produced antibacterial and antifungal action.
Numerous African ethnic groups had complete medicinal systems
integrated thoroughly into the religious complex. Within the Yoruba
religion, for example, each Orisha or divinity force not only governs a
part of the human body but also has a list of medicinal herbs and
naturopathic substances assigned to it and over which it has dominion.
The herbs of a particular Orisha are said to treat ailments of the part of
the body governed by that aspect of God. The Orisha Oshun, for
example, is said to govern the bloodstream; various disorders connected
to the blood such as diabetes and anemia are said to be governed by
her and can be treated by her sacred herbs.
Water immersion in the form of either baptism or ritual bath for
medicinal or initiatory purposes, the practices of guarding discarded
hair and fingernail clippings as well as other personal effects, the
“feeding” of spirits, pouring libations, as well as belief in spiritual
causation for malady were part of traditional West African religious
practice. Spirit possession, divination, belief in sacred words and words
of power, use of string in healing, herbal and naturopathic medicine, as
well as the basic philosophical principles on which these practices were
constructed and sustained would come to the New World with each
shipload of captive Africans.
Cuba, after centuries of importing Africans as slave laborers, would
abolish slavery in 1886. Brazil would begin importing Africans as slave
labor in the mid-sixteenth century and continue its use until the
abolition of slavery more than three centuries later in 1888. Haiti was
somewhat different than either Cuba or Brazil because the Haitian
revolution in the last decade of the eighteenth century preceded the
abolition of slavery elsewhere in the New World by nearly a century. The
Republic of Haiti was the second independent republic in the New World
and the first to outlaw chattel slavery. During the history of all three
nations, Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, the traditional African religious beliefs
and practices would mix with aspects of Native American religion and
Catholicism. The syncretic strategy of identifying African divinities with
Catholic saints would both protect, stabilize, and expand African religion
while allowing it to sustain its own existence under enslavement.
The major pockets of African religious expression, in Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad, Jamaica, and
the United States black belt South, were drawn both directly and
indirectly from numerous and diverse African cultures, including but not
limited to Igbo, Mandingo, Bambara, Kongo, Yoruba, Fon, and Ashanti
sources and would yield syncretized religious expressions such as
Vodun, Santeria, Lucumi, Candomble, GaGa, Shango Baptist, Palo
Mayombe (Palo Monte), Obeah, and Hoodoo. In some instances,
particular practices can be readily identified as with either Bakongo,
Yoruba, or Fon in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti; in other instances, a particular
practice may have existed in all or a majority of the parent African
cultures as well as among the settling Europeans and the native
populations, making the process of identifying a point of origin tenuous.
An example of this can be seen in beliefs and practices involving saliva
or “spit.” The Yoruba believe that spit contains ashe, or God's power to
create action. Spit also contains special spiritual status for the Bakongo,
Bambara, Igbo, and numerous other African ethnic groups transplanted
to America. Spit also has magical significance in both European folk
magic or witchcraft and for Native Americans.
The most widely known, sustained, and practiced New World African
religious traditions appear to be from the Yoruba of Nigeria, with Kongo
traditions second. Yoruba influences can be observed in Haitian Vodun;
in Cuba, where the religion is known as Lucumi and Regla de Ocha; in
Brazil as Candomble; in Puerto Rico as Santeria; and in Trinidad as
Shango Baptist. This tradition draws directly from the Yoruba and Fon
and celebrates traditional African divinities known as Orishas. The
priests and priestesses are known as Babalorisha and Iyalorisha,
respectively, with higher-order priests and priestesses known as
Babalawo and Iyanfa, respectively. A commonly used term for the
Yoruba/Lucumi clergy is santero for a man and santera for a woman. The
liturgical language of prayer and praise song is Yoruba, and the sacred
Bata drum trio from Nigeria is used in worship.
In Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, as well as other places, African religion mixed
with both Native American beliefs and Catholicism while reestablishing
elaborate and complex levels of orthodoxy, including initiation rites,
systems of divination, types of worship, and religious mythology. The
Yoruba Orisha tradition would come to not only peacefully co-exist with,
but also complement other African religious fragments, particularly the
dominant New World Kongo religious expression known as Palo as well
as Obeah, which resembles African American Hoodoo perhaps more
than any other syncretized religious tradition in the New World.
Palo, Palo Monte, or Palo Mayombe as it is known is directly related to
Kongo religious tradition, and its influences can be observed in Cuba,
Haiti, Brazil, and the southern United States. Known as Paleros, the
mostly male priesthood works with old Kongo spirits and with spirits of
the deceased. Utilizing internment soil (graveyard dirt), magical sticks
from sacred spiritual trees, plants and roots, stones, and animal parts,
Palo harnesses the power of potentially dangerous explosive spirits.
Kongo religious philosophy conceptualizes the world as expressed in the
Kongo cosmogram, emphasizing the continuity between the land of the
living and the spirit realms where the dead reside. And today in
contemporary Cuba, though the traditions are separate, Palo and
Lucumi are often engaged simultaneously, particularly when the
concern for which they are being sought involves serious problem
solving.
Obeah, another African-derived religious tradition, is more closely
associated and identified with Jamaica but exists in other places in the
Caribbean as well as in Central and South America. Believed by some
scholars to be of Ashanti derivation, Jamaican Obeah, perhaps more
than any African-derived syncretic New World spiritual tradition,
resembles African American Hoodoo.34 The resemblance is twofold, both
in content and in structure. Like Hoodoo, Obeah is not openly connected
with a church or regularly meeting ritual and ceremony, and like Hoodoo
it is often identified as “evil.” Further, like Hoodoo, Obeah's syncretic
development occurred under English Protestant slave masters. Both
traditions once probably were connected to an African deity but
experienced the loss of the African gods similar to that described by
Albert Raboteau in his landmark work, Slave Religion.35
Obeah and Hoodoo are similar in other respects, and they have evoked
strikingly similar descriptions by both white observers and slave
masters. As in Ghana where Anansi is revered and his stories are used
as a teaching device, both Obeah and Hoodoo traditions hold spiders
sacred, and Anancy in Jamaica is held in high regard in a fashion
strikingly similar to “Aunt Nancy” the spider in the sea islands off the
Georgia and South Carolina coasts. Traditionally, spiders are used for
divination in the West African country of what is now Cameroon as well
as other places in West Africa.36
In addition to Orisha worship, the Cuban Lucumi engage in ancestor
reverence, as do the Brazilians. Known as the Egun, ancestors are
revered and petitioned by believers whenever spiritual assistance of a
particular type is needed. The widely circulated adage that “the Orisha
walk in front of you, but the Egun have your back” demonstrates the
surrounding bulwark of protection provided through the dual forces of
Orisha and Egun. Though obscured in Christian practices, Egun worship
as ancestor reverence would be sustained in the Mother's Day
ceremonies and rituals still found in many modern-day African American
churches. These rituals include the wearing of a red or white flower to
signify whether one's mother is living or dead; saluting or honoring the
church's elder mothers in which the youth of the church file past,
embracing or shaking the hands of the deacon board mothers and other
church mothers; trips to the local burial site of the ancestor mothers;
special baptismal ceremonies as well as special dinners and special
foods prepared for the ancestor; and the placing of that food on the
grave; all reflect African American ancestor reverence.
The survival of African religious tradition in the United States would
take a noticeably different path than it did in the large plantation
societies of the Caribbean and Latin America. Known by several names,
including Hoodoo, conjure, Juju, and root work, African traditional
religion in the United States would have a shorter life span as a
completely sustainable religious system than those African religious
forms in Cuba, Haiti, or Brazil. In the United States, partly because of
demographic differences in African, white, and Amerindian population
ratios and density and partly because of cultural factors such as
religious differences, especially those differences attributable to
Catholicism in Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil and Protestantism in mainland
North America, its origins would be nearly completely lost. Under
Protestantism, there were few syncretic possibilities, so Hoodoo
development would follow a unique path different from its Caribbean
and Latin American counterparts. With similar cultural material, Africans
in the North American colonies and in the United States would face
different circumstances and would produce an alternative belief system
of spiritual and medicinal knowledge that could serve and sustain them.
Highly organized, Hoodoo would evolve a flexible system, logic, and
structure and maintain practices observed in West and Central West
Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America while replacing its sacred
African backdrop with nature deity, Protestant prayers and imagery, as
well as newly created mythology.
 DISRUPTIVE INTERSECTION
Slavery and the African Background in the Making of
Hoodoo

The improbability of precisely locating when and where Hoodoo emerged has not precluded
this author from including this as a subtextual concern. Throughout this inquiry, this author
questions the common and popular understanding that, like jazz, “Hoodoo came from New
Orleans.” Although New Orleans has its significance, wherever there was a sizable African
population, African naturalistic religious practices that would contribute to Hoodoo were
there also. Something resembling Hoodoo undoubtedly developed among the first
generation of culturally diverse Africans born in the North American colonies. Enslaved
Africans undoubtedly manifest a range of responses to contact with both enslavement and
Christian worship. Some bondsmen eagerly accepted Christianity and modified it to their
needs, others flatly refused to participate, still others participated both in worship
organized on behalf of the masters as well as in clandestinely organized slave worship
services. But whenever they worshipped, these children of Africa expressed spiritual
emotion in bodily patterns inherited from African traditional religion.
The primary African components from which Hoodoo would be constituted were drawn
from a range of different African ethnic cultures that stretched from the area now known as
Senegal down the West African coast to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Because it
concerned the transformation of a variety of traditional African religions into one spiritual
tradition, Hoodoo must have involved a major confrontation of spiritual forces. The early
disintegration process included a great reduction in ability not only to ritualize across the
life cycle, but also to engage openly in significant events, which would help to stabilize and
enrich the psychocultural continuity in the slave community. Though enslavement was a
powerful deterrent to African cultural survival and maintenance, its power was not enough
to force enslaved Africans to completely relinquish all their traditional spiritual and worship
practices, thus significant traditional practices persisted through the conflict and tension
necessary for Hoodoo's emergence as a dynamic spiritual form functioning at the
boundaries of slavery's power; there are numerous examples of African traditional practices
retained by Africans and their descendants in North America. In order for African religious
traditions to contest or be combined with Christianity, they had to remain alive and viable
on their own, outside of the supports of Christian practice; and they did. Further supporting
that process were the numerous aspects of Christianity that resonated with certain African
cultural traditions. The most sacred of Christian symbols, the cross, resonated both with
African notions of the crossroads as a supernatural site and with the sacred cross of the
Kongo Yowa cosmogram. The Old Testament reference to animal sacrifice and the use of
ritual water immersion would certainly have been familiar to many traditional Africans,
including those enslaved in North America.
Kongo cosmogram. The symbol represents the Bakongo people's view of the universe and the place of humankind in that
universe. Among other qualities, it symbolizes the movement from the otherworld of the ancestors as they travel in a
dynamic cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Enslaved Africans in the United States and early colonies apparently retained aspects of
traditional African religious practice with ferocity and created a place for its safe existence.
In that safe space, Hoodoo was born and maintained. Neither uniformly located nor uniform
in their parameters, those safe spaces sustained a regrouping of regional fragments that
would later come together and contribute to a new whole. In addition to both a variety of
African religious fragments and Protestantism, Native American belief undoubtedly
impacted on the formation of African American New World spiritual belief. Africans and
Native Americans were often in close contact with one another as slaves, held by either
white American or European settlers. Additional cultural contact occurred when Native
Americans both held African slaves themselves and hid runaway slaves from patrollers.
Native Americans and Africans have a long history of intermarriage, tribal adoption, and
shifting identities that make it difficult in some instances to locate where one community
ends and the other begins.1 With this in mind, it is safe to say that Native American
spiritual belief remained comparatively intact when encountering fragmented African
spiritual belief disrupted by insufficiently concentrated numbers in the enslaved African
ethnic groups as well as by removal from the African homeland. There existed certain
cultural elective affinities between Africans and Native Americans in their spiritual
reverence for nature, the wind, the moon, the rivers, the ocean, the forest, as well as living
creatures. These cultural affinities would ease the use of substitutions and facilitate any
possible exchange between African and Native American spiritual beliefs. For a period of
time, intact Native American spiritual belief systems could have been a somewhat secure
backdrop that contributed to and supported the retention of African spiritual belief.
In spite of conditions under enslavement that inhibited and circumscribed Hoodoo's
growth toward institutionalization, by either the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth
century three firmly established southern regional Hoodoo traditions existed that, after the
coming of cotton, would cross-fertilize one another against a backdrop process of regional
and cultural homogenization. The African spiritual and cultural influences were especially
significant in the formation of early African American culture, particularly Hoodoo.2
This tricotomy of regional Hoodoo clusters, the location of their major cities and financial
centers, to some extent reflects the regional organization of slave labor around such crops
as rice, indigo, tobacco, pineapple, sugarcane, and later cotton and around nationally
known slave markets and financial centers, including New Orleans, Richmond, and
Charleston/ Savannah. This tricotomy also roughly parallels certain African ethnic
concentrations and influences as well as European ethnic settlement patterns and regional
Native American ethnic populations. Certain Hoodoo practices would be retained and
disbursed from Virginia tobacco culture, other practices would be known to Gulf Coast
bondsmen, while other regional traditions would center in the Florida, Georgia, and South
Carolina Sea Island Gullah culture of the Atlantic coast.
In no particular order, area one, the Southwest Hoodoo region, was centered in the Gulf
Coast/New Orleans/Mobile area; this area would include the western Florida panhandle,
Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi and extend westward into eastern Texas and northward
to Missouri and Tennessee. The ethnic mix and cultural influences from the various
enslaved and imported African ethnic groups ebbed and flowed over time, its profile
modified with each major importation. In this region, the Senegambian, Mande speakers,
particularly the Bambara in Louisiana, would leave a fortified cultural legacy that
recognizably contributed directly to Hoodoo development. The Bambara in particular were
concentrated in such numbers there, that a Bambara interpreter was installed in the New
Orleans court system. Their best-known and documented contribution to Hoodoo may be in
the fabrication of protective amulets known by a variety of Mande labels, including
gerregery (gris-gris), wanga, and zinzin.3 Other groups in area one include those from the
Yoruba, Fon, and Ewe cultural complex as well as from Central West Africa or the Kongo-
Angola-Zaire area.
Area number two, the Southeast region, included the Sea Island/central and coastal
Georgia/Florida area centered in and around Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South
Carolina, extending northward to North Carolina and southward into Florida. Several African
ethnic groups would exercise a formative influence on Hoodoo's development in area two.
Captives from Sierra Leone, enslaved Igbo, and those from Central West Africa or Kongo-
Angola would achieve cultural influence in this area's development during different
historical periods.4 In ritual context in the African homeland, the counterclockwise circle
would be familiar to them all, further supporting chances for continuity, retention, and
survival. It appears that the Central West African contributions from Kongo culture would be
both long-standing and spread far and wide. The counterclockwise sacred dance circle is
believed by some scholars to represent a full cycle of life through the phases of birth,
childhood, adulthood, death, and rebirth5 as represented by the Kongo cosmogram and
that the Ring Shout traced the circle of the Kongo cosmogram on the ground. Indeed,
information that the Ring Shout traced this cosmogram could possibly answer why
bondsmen in America convened the sacred circle during death rituals.6
Area number three, the Northeast Hoodoo region included Maryland-Chesapeake,
Virginia, eastern Tennessee/North Carolina and was centered around Richmond and
extended westward. In this area, the Akan and Gold Coast slaves as well as those from the
Bight of Biafra were particularly significant.
When cotton enveloped the South after 1807, cultural leveling and homogenization
would exert itself as a continual backdrop process to the developing national consciousness
as well as to African American cultural formation. Prior to that time, regional and African
ethnic differences would reveal themselves more recognizably in the daily life of the
enslaved. The tobacco-centered culture of the Virginia Hoodoo cluster was different from
the culture of either South Carolina low-country rice and indigo of area two or Gulf Coast
basin sugarcane and pineapple of area one. The contours of life, including African ethnic
population, population density, landscape, diet, type and organization of labor, and level of
technology, were all somewhat varied in the different regions. Commenting on the
differences between rice and tobacco culture, Philip D. Morgan gives us this analysis:
Apart from the availability of the soils required for tobacco and rice, the type of supervision required of the two crops
also dictated differing unit sizes. Because tobacco cultivation required close attention from planting through processing,
it was most efficiently grown on a small scale.…In short, a tobacco plantation could be set up with no slaves at all, or
with one or two, and certainly with no more than ten, whereas a rice plantation required at least thirty workers.7

Though not always obvious, the differences in climate, dress patterns, and slave quarter
organization had an impact on Hoodoo development and practice as they did other aspects
of slave life. An example can be observed in the prevalence of shoes—or items functioning
as shoes—among captives in the colder northern regions of slave territory, which certainly
impacted on the Hoodoo practice of “track gathering”8 in that region. Once again Morgan
comments: “Foot and head coverings showed little uniformity. Shoes were either
imported…or locally made.…In spite of this varied footwear, many slaves, particularly field
hands, went barefoot—a practice that might well have been more common in the Low
country than in the Chesapeake.”9 The difference in climate meant also that local plants
that composed the local Hoodoo pharmacopeia, as well as the landscape, were different.
Certain plants that could possibly grow or be transplanted to the tropical or semitropical
climate of the coastal Deep South regions would be unavailable except through import in
places like Virginia, Tennessee, or Delaware.
Influenced by myriad factors, including the demand for slave labor, African ethnicity,
black population density in a particular locale, and work patterns, neither the content, the
rate, nor the process of Hoodoo's development was necessarily the same in all three
regional clusters. Hoodoo's proliferation ebbed and flowed as the regional and national
contexts for its development changed. Certainly the Senegambian influence from the
1720s as well as an influx of Haitian and Cuban blacks after 1795 would impact upon the
profile and durability of Hoodoo in the New Orleans, Louisiana, and Gulf Coast basins where
Hoodoo and New Orleans Voodoo would come to be viewed as indistinguishable in many
respects by outsiders and believers alike.10 Similarly, the isolation of Africans in the South
Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands and Atlantic coastal regions supported the unique Kongo-
influenced profile of that region's Hoodoo after 1720.
Hoodoo's emergence and early development under enslavement covered an extended
period of time and involved a multilayered process. The fragmentation and breakdown of
the West African religious systems, “the death of the Gods” to use Albert Raboteau's
phrase,11 were first in that process. What W. E. B. DuBois described as a “terrific social
revolution,”12 the religious disintegration-transformation process, was sometimes subtle
and gradual, sometimes directly overt and immediate; and for the slave, the process
involved sorting out which African religious and cultural fragments could be salvaged. The
creation and perpetuation of Hoodoo among bondsmen depended on their ability to sustain
and transfer historic memory, memory of life as seen in the traditional African village.
African captives in a seeming condition of cultural abandonment not only would certainly
look for the familiar in the new environment but also would consciously strive to re-create
as high a degree of familiarity as possible via perception. The enslaved Africans' encounters
with new plants and animals, as well as new cultural patterns and work practices, would
result in comparison and search for analogous forms that captives had known in the African
homeland and were now carried in their living memories. In this process, Africans
undoubtedly depended, to some degree, on information from Native Americans whose
familiarity with the plants and animals of the North American environment could verify the
sacred and spiritual uses of plants and animals unfamiliar to them. It is indeed possible
that a picture of life in Africa carried in the memory of first-generation captives began to
acquire a new quasi-mythic quality in subsequent generations as Hoodoo emerged to
sustain the enslaved psyche. Stories of very real occurrences in Africa, now impossible or
unlikely in America, entered the newly forming Hoodoo religion as part of its belief system
and sacred enactments.
The period between 1740 and 1780 may be especially significant in contemplating when
Hoodoo was likely to have emerged. Numerous sources agree that nearly half of all Africans
arriving in America did so during this period. Slavery in all three regional Hoodoo clusters
had existed for at least a century prior to the intensive influx of Africans during this period.
Something of an indigenous and regionally distinct African American culture developed
among early slave descendants. The captives that had been in North American colonies for
two generations had, at varying times, lost their traditional gods, a process supported by
ethnic heterogeneity in the slave population. The process of loss was neither rapid nor
abrupt, but it involved transference and investment directly into aspects of nature
associated with African higher spiritual reality. This included the river, the ocean, certain
trees, bushes, plants, animals, rain, and wind. These all became intermediary forms in the
transference process, thus sustaining, salvaging, and transferring essential aspects of old
belief into new, yet familiar, and intermediary African naturalistic spirituality.
In the same process, eight common and essential components of traditional African
religion, which I have labeled the African Religion Complex (ARC), were so potent in each of
the culturally varied regions that, after the coming of cotton, they would partially coalesce
across regions and remain a supporting foundation for further magical, spiritual, and
religious development. The eight components in all probability were shared by all the
African ethnic groups in the American slave population. Linking the New World to the Old,
the African Religion Complex included:

1. counterclockwise sacred circle dancing,13

2. spirit possession,
3. the principle of sacrifice,
4. ritual water immersion,
5. divination,
6. ancestor reverence,
7. belief in spiritual cause of malady, and
8. herbal and naturopathic medicine.

Within each of the eight components, the elective compatibilities and transethnic
similarities further supported the social construction of a new and essentially Pan-African
spiritual tradition that would become the basis for the African contribution to Hoodoo. An
example of such similarities can be seen in the structural fabrication as well as the contents
of amulets from different African ethnic groups. Most West and Central West African
traditionalists use and prescribe charms that are strikingly similar in their construction,
content, and function. Similar charms and amulets appear across cultures in the African
diaspora. Whether the charm is constructed from leather, from a tiny gourd encased in
raffia, from an animal skin, or from a piece of cloth, the similarities of bags, from the African
American mojo bag to the Kongo nkisi, are undeniable.14
The half century preceding 1740 is the period of Hoodoo's germination and dormancy.
Though the “death of the Gods” had occurred, slave worship retained enough familiar
elements that newly arriving African captives would certainly be familiar with similar
practices in the homeland and possibly recognize them. By 1740 some bondsmen had
been in the American colonies for three generations or more. Both the 1740–80 influx and
the increase from 1790 to 1799 deepened the cultural complexity of the slave community
by adding a significant number of newly imported Africans to the already developing
African American culture. Bondsmen in regions with a significant-size homogeneous ethnic
group, such as the Bambara in Louisiana, could possibly sustain more African traditional
practices for a longer period. According to author Michael Gomez,15 simply because of their
longevity, longer-standing practices bore an increased chance either of being disbursed or
of cross-fertilizing other practices. The simmering Hoodoo pot was constantly being stirred.
Though occurring across a span of time and through different social, economic, and
political eras, legal importation of African slaves served to shore up, and to strengthen,
many of the surviving African cultural elements, particularly those eight from the ARC. The
continuing illegal importation and smuggling of continental Africans, though dwindling
after 1807,16 further supported the establishment of a new, unique, and transferable
African-based culture among American-born slaves.17 A product of the ARC, the
religiophilosophical cornerstone for that new culture would be the emerging Hoodoo
religion.
Certain African religious and cultural practices were doomed to extinction under
enslavement. Major religious and psychic adjustments affected every facet of the captive's
daily existence. Africans, in making this adjustment, availed themselves of every limited
option to respond to enslavement's cultural disruption, but they would soon realize that
they could neither recreate nor save everything they had known in the homeland. For
example, essential elements in family life were irretrievably transformed for some African
captives once the religious aspects of traditional African ancestor reverence were
destroyed, and neither the ancestor institution nor other institutions were fully sustainable
if, at the slave owner's will, one could be sold away from one's family and community at
any time, including infancy. Nor could traditional social institutions be permanently and
openly sustained where legal, social, and economic structures and practices successfully
limited or barred their existence as they did under American slavery.
 Continual interethnic assimilation and cross-fertilization between Africans from different
ethnic groups further informed the complex, multilayered process of cultural
transformation and salvaging. Though the Africans in a particular region or locale might
sometimes exhibit a culturally dominant and identifiable ethnic strain, like the Bambara in
Louisiana, African bondsmen were brought into the American colonies and the United
States, from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, from numerous
African as well as West Indian sources.18 The “death of the Gods” and disruption of
traditional spiritual continuity was concurrent with interethnic assimilation among the
captive Africans themselves. The dual social processes of cultural disintegration and
interethnic assimilation were neither straight-line19 nor separate, but occurred under
widespread overarching cultural commonalities shared by a significant percentage of the
enslaved Africans. Indeed for some of them, the interethnic assimilation process had begun
in Africa and would continue in the New World.20 The two processes interplayed with each
other, both limiting and expanding possibilities for cultural retention as they occurred.
Yet an additional process would begin to intercede after 1807—further homogenization—
resulting from the coming of cotton. King Cotton would blanket the South while modifying
the material culture of crop production. As a result, slave labor in some regions was totally
reorganized and the lives of those who had previously been involved in the production of
sugarcane, rice, indigo, pineapple, and tobacco were changed by cotton culture. With a
now widespread and somewhat common material culture across the black belt South, the
lives of slaves in different regions became more similar and uniform with respect to tools,
vocabulary, planting and harvesting techniques, and schedules. Though ethnic and cultural
differences remained and overlapped, the nearly universal movement to cotton culture
further homogenized the three regional differences and further stirred the Hoodoo melting
pot.
Given the necessity for expedience, in all probability the modifications forced on African
religious practice, mandated by adjustment to enslavement, involved, in part, conscious
decisions by religious specialists and elders. This possibility existed for all the New World
manifestations of African religious tradition. Through the prism of enslavement, the
traditional priests and religious leaders consciously moved to preserve, modify, and extend
the possibilities for African religious survival. Cuba demonstrates the classic expression of
this type of agency and conscious decision making among slaves. In order to preserve
African religious tradition, slaves in Cuba learned the mysteries of many divinities known as
Orisha rather than of only one Orisha, as had been done in the African homeland, thus
enabling the Orisha tradition to increase its chances for survival under the system of
slavery. Though the demographics in North America were different than in Cuba, there is no
evidence to indicate that a similar or analogous process of conscious decision making did
not begin to take place and influence the emergence of Hoodoo in what would become the
United States.
Early on in the American slave experience, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans probably experienced a more visible exchange
of cultural folkways. The exchanges could and did occur in areas where plantations were
both large and small, as well as in urban centers. For Africans, the Americanization process
was no mere straightforward discarding of African religious traditions and embracing of
European folk superstitions or Christianity. In the slave quarter, there were certain practices
that slaves would have been at liberty to openly discuss, retain, and pass on. Child rearing
practices, certain religious beliefs, healing, and burial practices were all areas of slave life
in which bondsmen could and did exercise some limited agency. The cultural exchange
between the three groups would encourage and support a greater diversity in the
developing Hoodoo practice across regions and with respect to treatment of individual
problems and maladies. This diversity would remain the case and would be modified with
the coming of cotton, which expanded national cultural boundaries and promoted an
intensified cultural homogenization across regions among Americans both slave and free
and again when Hoodoo becomes commercially viable, as it does after Reconstruction.
Without implying a reductionist model to either the variety of cultures included here or to
the interethnic assimilation process, one more important feature, shared by a significant
number of the enslaved ethnic groups, allowed and supported a unified new spiritual
tradition to emerge from a variety of West and Central West African religions. This feature,
though not directly derived from religious content as were the components of ARC, along
with interethnic assimilation, enabled enslaved Africans to find a commonly shared basis
on which to salvage religiocultural essentials while constructing a new tradition. Openness
or the inclusive-integrative principle,21 which also marks West African religion generally, is
the other characteristic. This feature allows Africans to integrate aspects of external beliefs
and practices into their religion as well as to make substitutions of required ritual items
while maintaining religious vitality, validity, and integrity.
The eight components of the ARC would become the foundation elements in the new
Hoodoo religion; the inclusiveness principle would imprint on the process. Retaining many
of the particular practices of African traditional religion, Hoodoo, like Vodun, Lucumi, and
Candoble, would have its sacred dance as well as its herbal medicinal practice. At its most
fully developed point, the Hoodoo religion would contain not only African supernaturalism
but a corpus of orally transferred religious wisdom that contained advice on issues from
selecting an acceptable spouse to community relations, from advice on treating illness to
relationships with slave owners and other whites. These vessels of traditional religiocultural
components sometimes took the form of stories, riddles, folk tales, proverbs, or dance
plays. It is likely that some of them were even linked with dance plays similar to the
“Buzzard Lope,” which Lydia Parrish observed still in existence in the Georgia Sea Islands in
the 1930s.22 The dance known as the Ring Shout certainly imitated actions from the work
routine that extended meaning into daily life. The gesture known as “picking up or
harvesting leaves” made visible the work ethic and advised one to harvest while the season
is ripe lest you do without during winter. Some traditional African dance acted out
miniature pantomimes of deity in their daily activities. And much African-derived African
American social dance includes mimetic gestures that comment on life's daily issues. In
addition to rendering advice and intervening on life cycle issues, personal concerns, and
issues of public and private conduct, Hoodoo would celebrate its divinities, such as High
John the Conquer. It would protect against feared as well as negative supernatural forces
such as Plat-eye, Robination Horse, haints, hags, and curses, and it would revere and use
the elements of nature such as lightening, rain, the river, and other natural phenomena.
Early Hoodoo religion would have its sacred locations and power sites such as the
crossroads, the cemetery, the threshold, railroad tracks, and special clearings in the woods.
Initially it would contend with Christianity for control of the souls of black folks and for
religious hegemony in the slave community. Bondsmen would resolve the contestation by
integrating their version of Christianity into conjure and vice versa.
The size of the plantation community as well as black, white, and Native American
population ratios, population density, whether the slavery existed in an urban or rural
setting, and fluidity of the slave population resulting from mortality, sale, or transportation
to another region23 were all additional factors promoting or inhibiting either the breakdown
or the retention of African religious traditions. Add to the cultural development process the
intensity of interactive exchange of folk religious and cultural influences from Native
Americans and at least several European ethnic groups, and you have quite a complex
cultural context. Under these influences, bondsmen engaged in the process of
reconstructing and maintaining an African-based culture, including religion, for themselves.
Though enslaved, they appear to have freely substituted intellectual frameworks as well as
external customs from Native Americans and whites while modifying and inventing new
ones wherever necessary and possible.
 With its pantheon of saints, Catholicism would easily serve as a vehicle for syncretic
transfer between African deity and Catholic saints, as it did in relevant parts of the West
Indies and Latin America. But the stringent minimalism of North American Protestantism
provided few points for syncretic transfer of African deity. North American Protestantism
had few if any syncretizable saints, so that any transfer, syncretism, or combining of African
religion with Protestantism had to either occur within a unique paradigm or achieve the
impossible and remain totally autonomous. On the level of content and practice more so
than structure, the cultural transformation process necessary for Hoodoo's emergence
occurred gradually, taking place over several generations, during which time cultural
practices were continually adjusted and adapted. Though there was limited consistency,
and no long-term, unmodified, sustainable traditional African institutional structures,
certain practices survived long enough to take hold and become a breeding ground for
new, transferable elements. Throughout this process, community physical and spiritual
necessity called forth, influenced, and fulfilled corresponding and developing roles within
the slave community.
An especially important component in the old Hoodoo religion was the sacred circle
dance that would come to be known as the Ring Shout. This group religious dance was
performed in a circle that moved counterclockwise. Scholars have not speculated about the
relatedness of Hoodoo and the Ring Shout, but there is certainly enough evidence to
associate both Hoodoo and conjure, in its broadest aspect, with the sacred dance circle.
Early in Hoodoo's development, there had to have been the association with surviving
African religious dance. It is not unreasonable to assert that conjure and the Ring Shout
were components of a quickly evolving, uniquely African American adaptation of West and
Central West African traditional religion to the Protestant environment of North American
enslavement. And just as the syncretic religions of the Caribbean were danced, the Ring
Shout was the sacred dance of the Hoodoo religion.
Sterling Stuckey asserts that the Ring Shout may have been the most important
sociocultural occurrence in the slave community. “The Shout,” as it would eventually come
to be called, sometimes had white observers, though it was largely a private, often secret,
occurrence among blacks. On such occasions, African religious values were reinforced as
well as modified to respond to enslavement. And when outside observers, especially whites,
were present, they rarely understood what they were seeing. Slaves privileged the Shout
ritual over forms of dance so much that they refused to label “shoutin'” as a type of
dancing. It is against the backdrop of the Shout that we see the primary cleavage between
sacred and secular, not typical of African traditional religion and culture, drawn first on
dancing. On sacred celebratory occasions, bondsmen were basically free from the dance
performance expectations of both blacks and whites, which frequently influenced African
American secular dancing. Unlike secular dancing, the sacred Ring Shout involved no
personal competition, as was often found in plantation breakdowns. In the Shout, dance
was neither for entertainment of the master, as in the contra dances, nor for rewards, as in
the plantation cakewalks or jig contests.24 The expectations in the Shout were those of the
enslaved spiritual community.
Dance vocabularies and the motor muscle memory retention patterns of the various
African ethnic groups could be quite different. The range and uses of movement were often
dissimilar, though the general characteristics of West African and Central West African
dance distinguish sub-Saharan African dancing generally and mark its uniqueness when
compared with European or Asian dance forms. Dance scholars generally agree that
delineation, articulation, and segmentation of body parts; angularity; asymmetry;
polyrhythm; and mimicry are among those overarching, distinguishing qualities of
traditional African dance.
Because the sacred counterclockwise circle was familiar to all the enslaved African ethnic
groups in North America, each group could potentially participate in the sacred ring ritual.
Each ethnic group would potentially bring a unique signatory contribution to the Ring
Shout. Thus the Shout originally allowed a wide range of ethnic expression and dance
vocabularies to prevail. These varied contributions seen as expressions of individual identity
were encouraged as long as the circle was maintained.
As often as possible, the Shout itself, its location, was away from the eyes of outsiders,
especially the slave master, who had the power to mete out punishment. The sacredness of
the circle imparted a protection to participants that allowed them wide boundaries of
personal and community expression—something unknown to them in their daily labors. The
abandonment permitted in the movement of the Ring Shout submerged the individual
shouter in a mother lode of sacred African values expressed as dance innovations. Shaped
by labor and their African heritage, their bodies created and stabilized the early African
American dance vocabulary in the Shout ritual. The most intense levels of movement
innovations were in the threshold movements, those rhythmic gestures that immediately
preceded spirit possession. These gestures would ultimately have a developmental effect
on African American dance itself. Fundamental to the support of African American culture,
especially dance, the Ring Shout, more than any other dance form, developed and
sustained elements that would influence the development, vocabulary, movement quality,
and organization principles of future sacred dance, secular social dance, and theatrical
dance forms, including modern, jazz, and tap. In the circle, all Africans could contribute
from their particular dance vocabulary and cultural motor muscle memory.
Dance supported the construction and coalescing of wider spiritual values. It allowed
bondsmen to establish a spiritual continuity with their former homeland in West and
Central West Africa. As dance was the oarsman of spirituality in the African religious ocean,
the distant shore to which the Ring Shout boat was rowed was spirit possession, and the
wider sea in which it traveled was the Hoodoo religion. Hoodoo was simultaneously both
the context for the dances in the circle and the result of it. The relationship was gestational
and mutually nourishing. At the new religion's birth, the incipient dances were influenced
by and reflected the forces of nature, as do significant West African deity. The traditional
African names of the gods would be lost, but the forces of nature that deity often
represented were clearly recognizable to all. From the captive Africans' common
consciousness of the sacred counterclockwise circle, the forces of nature, including
lightening, rain, certain stones, rivers, oceans, and forests, were all reflected in the
construction of the early Ring Shout. Without Hoodoo and its sacred dance that preserved
much of the traditional African dance vocabulary, the African American dances would not
have survived. In the assault that was American enslavement, a variety of African
traditional religions, initially clustered by region, combined with other ethnic and religious
influences, merged, and gradually metamorphosed into Hoodoo. The Hoodoo religion was
born.
As the sacred dance of the old Hoodoo religion, the Ring Shout contained all the
antecedent dramatic, mimetic, and stylistic elements of future African American sacred as
well as secular dancing. The perspective of the Ring Shout as text inside the context of the
old Hoodoo religion allows us to speculate on the dance's origins in Kongo cosmology. This
view also allows us a vision of how one aspect of the old Hoodoo religion moved into African
American Christian church practice and eventually into secular popular dance. The sacred
circle was an essential vehicle in early black Christian conversion for both slaves and
freedmen. Several scholars have commented on the possible cosmological significance of
the use of circularity in this sacred dance, Sterling Stuckey among them. Seen as a possible
tracing of the Kongo cosmogram, the sacred circle was the gateway to a broader spiritual
experience, that of spirit possession.25
Dance was an important central repository for African values, including the distribution
and allotment of intragroup status. In the context of the Ring Shout, slaves could and did
assert a limited independence from slavery's pain as well as agency in forging their
community, personality, and place. As worshippers circled, some of them fell into the
spiritual vortex of the circle's center, where they were embraced by both the community
and the supernatural spiritual forces. A hallmark of African spiritual values in worship, the
Ring Shout emerged early on in the slave community and included both sacred dancing
and spirit possession while being a vessel for the retention of foundation African spiritual
values that informed individual and community relations.
In the process of spirit possession, the devotee was embracing the spirit, abandoning
earthly control, and entrusting all to the spiritual community. The values of caring, secrecy,
community obligation in work, and spiritual help were all conveyed in the sacred Shout
ritual. The Shout was the central occasion in which community roles, statuses, values, and
sanctions were played out, and it was a time to express spiritual individuality.
As a result of frequent participation in the sacred circle, a shouter could often be
identified with a particular style of shouting or a special nuance or dance step. One can
surmise that once Hoodoo emerged, its foundation values were sustained in the Ring Shout
as the participants drew on the spiritual power of the circular Shout ritual to sustain
themselves. And there were those who had spiritual power in the Shout.26 The African
priest, who would evolve into the plantation conjurer, and later the plantation's black
preacher possessed spiritual power in the Shout. In addition, he was a likely individual who
could seek out Native American spiritual knowledge to augment his and his community's
own.
Additional similarities in role structuring and status attribution were shared by a
significant number of the enslaved African ethnic groups. These similarities supported the
interethnic assimilation process and eased the appearance and development of newly
created and ever-changing roles, further supporting the possibility for this ethnically
diverse group of slaves to develop limited but effective responses to immediate as well as
long-term needs among the bondsmen and later among freed blacks. For example, in the
African homelands, roles such as blacksmith, diviner, or herbalist were universally special
status positions, even among the ethnically diverse. In the maelstrom of slavery and New
World cultural re-creation, certain components of social structure were compatible enough
for there to be an achievable interethnic syncretic settling among the ethnically diverse
enslaved Africans when the actual process of restructuring the spiritual community began.
Roles would quickly become institutionalized within Hoodoo practice. Among those roles
were religiomagical practitioners such as conjurers and religiomedical specialists such as
treaters, midwives, healers, and slave “doctors.”
In the African homeland, certain special status individuals were sometimes insulated
from enslavement and sale abroad; that notwithstanding, it is near certain that tens of
thousands of African priests and other spiritual specialists such as diviners, musicians,
herbalists, bonesetters, bronze casters, and blacksmiths from different ethnic groups were
transported to the New World during the slave trade. They carried their religions with them,
and their spiritual work would not cease with their enslavement and displacement to
American shores.27 Upon arrival in the new environment, slave priests, shamans, and other
religious specialists were confronted with major cultural trauma. If African religion were to
survive at all in North America, it would have to make major adaptations; many of those
adaptations were forced, but other adaptations were arrived at through rational decision by
using age-old principles to modify the religious conventions. The nature of the “peculiar
institution” and its attendant restrictions and instabilities required it.
Enslaved Africans carried with them to the New World traditional African modes of
understanding and responding that were both informed by and developed in conjunction
with other elements of African village social structure and economy. These included norms,
values, and beliefs functional in and tailored to their respective cultural environments. Well
suited to and formed in cultures bound together by tradition and ritual that were
responsive to societal needs, the remaining elements of African social structure would
continue developing through centuries of practical experience.
The African American Hoodoo priest and other religiomedical functionaries were focal
points in which the difficulties of sociocultural restructuring under the harsh conditions of
bondage were partly resolved. More than a mere spiritual representative, the Hoodoo priest
was embodied hope. Like his African counterpart, he was a regulator of community; in West
and Central West Africa, the priest's regulatory influence sometimes extended to state
affairs. He was essential to community harmony and survival, political stability, as well as
personal prosperity. He was a major player in the slave community and was perhaps the
most serious potential challenge, by an individual slave, to the slaveocracy's power; within
the circumscribed context of enslavement, plantation conjurers were powerful and
influential. An observer notes: “On every large plantation of Negroes there is one among
them who holds great sway over the minds and opinions of the rest; to him they look as the
oracle—and this same oracle is, in ninety-nine cases the most consummate villain and
hypocrite on the premise.…The influence of such a negro is incalculable.”28
Concerning the conjure priest as African American shaman, folklorist Julien A. Hall, made
this observation: “They firmly believe that certain ones amongst them are able to conjure or
trick those they have a grudge against, and when one is supposed to be possessed of this
ability he is called a ‘conjure doctor,' and is looked up to by the others with the profoundest
awe and dread. The conjure doctor's word is law, and he can generally live without
working, as he frightens his companions into contributing freely to his support.”29
Though Hoodoo's scope and content would be modified and tailored after emancipation,
Hoodoo's functions in the slave community included supernatural controlling and
community regulation, protecting individuals from harm, and stimulating or drawing good
fortune; but its most widely accepted and least threatening function was herbal healing
and medicine. Members of both the slave and free population relied heavily on homemade
herbal medicinal treatments. The atmosphere of mutual codependence encountered in
frontier, colonial, and plantation communities encouraged exchanges of traditional
information, approaches, prescriptions, remedies, formulas, herbal, magical, and curative
knowledge. The African healing tradition via Hoodoo was so widely accepted among African
American slaves that those who practiced it effectively enjoyed enviable reputations and
high status among bondsmen, among free blacks, and often among whites.30 One such
slave was named Cesar, who was given state emancipation by the South Carolina General
Assembly and 100 pounds per year for the remainder of his life. His ability to cure
rattlesnake envenomation as well as poisoning from ingestion of mercury earned him great
acclaim as well as his freedom.31 Cesar's snakebite cure could possibly have been derived
from information and knowledge mutually shared by African and American indigenous
communities. Certainly with the large number of venomous snakes in Africa, Africans were
familiar with natural treatments for snakebite in their homeland.
The West and Central West African ancestors of African Americans had a highly diversified
and centuries-long tradition of healing and healing specialists. John Beecham, born in
1787, leaves us this account of Ashantee: “The fetishmen apply themselves, moreover, to
the study of medicine; and the knowledge which they acquire of the properties of herbs
and plants, it will be seen hereafter, powerfully contributes to strengthen their influence
with the people.”32 Beecham continues:
In case of bodily affliction, a medical preparation is ordered for the patient. It has already been noticed, that the fetish
men and women apply themselves assiduously to the study of the healing art, and acquire such a knowledge of the
properties of herbs and plants as enables them to effect the cure of many complaints.…It is backed, moreover, during
the healing process, by occasional fetish practices; such as the binding of strings round the knees and other joints of the
patient, the ends of the strings which hang down after the knots are tied being covered with red vegetable
application.33

E. J. Glave leaves us another glimpse of the Hoodoo conjure man's highly skilled spiritual
ancestor, the Nganga or Congo traditional priest:
To his religious functions the Nganga unites those of surgeon and the physician, and however his pretensions in the one
calling may be, his skill in the other is more than considerable…In skirmishes of intertribal warfare natives are often
badly wounded:…The slugs used are rough pieces of copper, brass wire.…In the extractions of these rude bullets the
 fetish-man displays great surgical skill…several of my men received wounds from enemy's overcharged flintlocks. I
called in a native charm doctor who was renowned for surgical skill.34

These statements indicate that among American bondsmen's West African progenitors,
healing and spiritual beliefs were thoroughly comingled; and because success at healing
was tied to religious belief, the most proficient healers were frequently spiritual leaders as
well. In addition to surgical skill, Africans possessed a highly developed knowledge of
herbal medicines and other naturopathic treatments. Cotton Mather, for example, learned
of smallpox inoculation from his West African servant, Onesimus: “I was first instructed in it
by a Guaramantee servant of my own long before I knew that any Europeans or Asiatics had
the least acquaintance with it.”35
Using government money, Lieutenant Governor William Gooch, during his first year as
lieutenant governor of Virginia, purchased a slave's freedom. This slave had provided him
with information on plants, roots, and herbs that would cure venereal distempers. Gooch's
explanation for expending government funds was that the information the slave provided
was valuable to mankind.36
It was from the healing facet of the Hoodoo tradition that African Americans derive the
term most frequently used for a conjurer: root doctor. There is some distinction between
the concepts of conjurer and root doctor; although in some of the literature on Hoodoo as
well as in common usage, that distinction is often confusing and unclear.37 The
interchangeable use of both terms indicates a time when there was an indistinguishable
division of labor between the two; nevertheless, it is from this facet of the Hoodoo tradition
that U.S. blacks derive the use of herbs and roots to affect supernatural occurrences as well
as natural cures.
Partly from necessity, the herb and root tradition was strong on the southern plantation.
White medical doctors were costly and often inaccessible, so circumstances encouraged
the use of home remedies by both slave and free persons.38 Evidence indicates that
Africans and Native Americans exchanged knowledge and beliefs. John P. Reynolds, a black
healer, gained much of his knowledge of medicine and treatment of patients from a Native
American physician.39 Bondsmen often acknowledged the use of herbal remedies that they
learned from Native Americans.40 Native Americans and Africans were more familiar with
the subtropical and tropical flora and fauna of the Deep South than were European settlers,
so it is not surprising that early white settlers made extensive use of the root and herbal
traditions of both Native Americans and Africans.41 Considering this, it is not surprising to
find that novels depicting nineteenth-century life included descriptions of root doctors or
that slave doctors treated whites as well as blacks. This began to change after legislation
passed in Virginia in 1748.42
The constant appearance of slave doctors, treaters, and conjurers was seen by certain
segments of the white population as such a problem that some municipalities enacted
legislation against the transmission of the very information these practitioners needed to
continue their work.43 This reaction against slave expertise in both healing and herbalism
was at least in part from fear of the slaves' knowledge of poison plants, but also from fear of
the power that root doctors, conjurers, and healers could wield over some bondsmen. Each
success in physical healing or spiritual controlling potentially served to strengthen and
validate not only the reputation and power of the slave priest-healer, but also the complete
storehouse of slave community folk knowledge. Each visible success confirmed for the slave
that his tradition-bound view of the world was both functional and correct in the face of
what threatened to become all-encompassing enslavement and oppression.
Early in American history, there was tension between the practice of prohibiting slaves
from acquiring medicinal herbal knowledge and the medical needs of the frontier and
colonial communities. There was inconsistency in both the legal and the social treatment of
slaves with herbal knowledge and healing skills. On one hand, they were needed and
utilized; on the other hand, they were feared and regarded with suspicion, and rightfully so
because slave owners in many parts of the New World lived in fear of being poisoned by
their slaves.44 Though a slave would have to pay dearly for attempting a poisoning, there is
ample evidence to justify the fears that whites held of being poisoned by a captive laborer.
In their homeland, many of the Africans had mastered the knowledge of poisonous plants
and substances for both medicinal purposes and dealing with enemies. Once in the
Americas, they continued the practice throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century,
enabling the lore as well as the practice of poisoning to remain fairly well developed among
bondsmen. Consider the following statement published in November 1749: “The horrid
practice of poisoning white people by the Negroes, has lately become so common, that
within a few days past, several executions have taken place in different parts of the country,
by burning, gibbeting, hanging, &.”45 A newspaper account from Charleston, South
Carolina, dated October 30, 1749, and found in the Pennsylvania Gazette leaves the
following:
Wednesday last, a Negro Wench, about sixteen Years old, Slave to an Apothecary in this Town, was committed to Goal
for poisoning a Child of her Master, about 11 Months old, by putting Arsenick, or Ratsbane, several times into what it
drank. The Child continued in great Misery till Thursday Morning, and then died. The Wretch has not only acknowledged
the poisoning of this Child, but also another of the same Family, about 15 Months old, some Time before.46

From Maryland, two similar reports:

On Friday last, William Stratton, Negro Toney the Poison Doctor, and Negro Jemmy, were all executed at Port Tobacco, in
Charles County, pursuant to their Sentence, for the poisoning the late Mr. Chase, and the Bodies were all hung in Chains
the same Day, in different Parts of the County.
At the same Time and on the same Gallows, Were executed, Negro Jack, for attempting to poison Mr. Francis
Clements, His Master.47

As emancipation ended slavery and dispelled the fears of such poisoning, the public
discourse on—and the white concern with—its practice diminished in magnitude and
eventually vanished. Poisoning as a method of dealing with an enemy, or exacting revenge,
would continue in the African American community, its greatest adherents being
emancipated slaves, their children, and their grandchildren. The root doctor, conjurer, or
two-head remained the link with the past; an element in his African legacy included his
mastery of poisonous substances as part of his command of a complete medicinal system.
In support of this, esteemed African American author Charles W. Chesnutt leaves us his
observations in 1901: “Some of the more gruesome phases of the belief in conjuration
suggest possible poisoning, a knowledge of which baleful art was once suppose to be
widespread among the imported Negroes of the olden time. The blood or venom of snakes,
spiders, and lizards is supposed to be employed for this purpose.”48 In many locales, the
cultural environment in the postemancipation, pre–World War I black community was
scarcely different than it had been under enslavement, so even after emancipation,
poisonings among blacks continued to take their toll. One of the most famous examples
was the poisoning of bluesman Robert Johnson. Johnson was allegedly poisoned by a rival
over a woman. He died not long after he had drunk from an open bottle of liquor given to
him at a southern jook.49
The strength of the herb and root aspect of Hoodoo not only resulted from its clearly
defined functionality, but also was due, in part, to the African slaves' cultural tenacity and
familiarity with their own healing, controlling, and spiritual paradigms and traditions. That
Hoodoo could be sustained through slavery speaks to the effective tenacity of the paradigm
of silence, a highly valued and well-understood posture in the slave community and one
necessary for Hoodoo's existence and development. Couched in a Hoodoo presentation of
self, the paradigm of silence served blacks in their relationships with whites, while being
the primary vehicle in which secrecy was expressed, modified, and further defined. The
silence paradigm was made visible in a variety of ways; for example, in the African secret
societies, in the pursed lips of the elders demonstrating an intentional closing of the
mouth, as well as in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar's “We Wear the Mask.”
 At least one other factor promoted Hoodoo's development and survival during slavery: its
high level of adaptability. This previously mentioned quality is expressed in more than a few
West and Central West African religions. Inclusive adaptability enabled the required
substitutions of both specific plants and conventions of preparation to be successfully made
and applied as nondisruptively as possible. This quality would serve Hoodoo development
well as Hoodoo struggled to stabilize and sustain itself.
From an examination of Hoodoo artifacts uncovered in an archaeological dig in southern
Virginia and dated circa 1820–30, it is clear that by the late eighteenth or early nineteenth
century Hoodoo was fully functioning in the slave community, completely self-sufficient
with its own supply lines, networks, and ritual procedures as well as substitutions. The
“Hoodoo clergy,” conjurers, root workers, and Hoodoo priests had developed acceptable
substitutions that could be obtained and sanctified. An early nineteenth-century Hoodoo
priest's storehouse of supplies would contain his divination devices, such as a set of rib
bones or the walking boy made from a tiny blue bottle suspended from a cord, or he kept a
“frizzly chicken” as a divination device. Later Hoodoo workers would use a deck of regular
playing cards, dominoes, or even dice to read a situation and diagnose the concern. He
would also have a supply of dried peach pits that, used for spiritual work only, he could
substitute for the more difficult to obtain High John the Conquer root. He would also have
broken pieces of ceramic pottery or china, four hole buttons, nails, pins, metal buttons,
beads, small wooden sticks (some from spent matches), small ceramic doll's head, arms
and legs, crab claws, various types of seeds, pods, shells, crystals, dried herbs, pieces of
leather and cloth scraps, and lodestone.50 Some of these items were similar to those given
to this author as part of the divinatory implements following my first-level initiation as an
olorisha of Ogun. The doll's head, piece of broken white ceramic pottery, large seed, and
black stone found in the dig were remarkably like those same items given to this author at
initiation.

Conjurer's cache. Items uncovered in an archaeological dig in Virginia. Items pictured here include rib bones and a small blue-
green bottle. This bottle was probably the conjurer's “walking boy” divination device.

Contained within traditional West and Central West African religion was an approach to
health and healing as well as approaches to addressing all of humankind's major problems.
Included were rituals, detailed procedures, and avenues to invoke protection from
malicious intent such as poisoning51 as well as protective objects that repelled harmful
forces. There were also commonly known and engaged in protective behaviors, which
included avoidance procedures.52 Learned in both the family and the community, these
avoidance behaviors were designed to limit one's vulnerability and might include
something as simple as not eating or drinking in potentially unfriendly or unfamiliar
circumstances or environments or not allowing intimate personal objects such as clothing
to fall into the hands of potential enemies. Half a century after the end of slavery, bluesman
Robert Johnson knew the warnings against drinking from an opened bottle, a bottle of
liquor that had the seal already broken; he ignored the traditional folk wisdom, and it cost
him his life.53
Traditional African religions view the human state as part of a continuum in which life on
earth is a duty-bound stop, as is time in the realm of the ancestors. Though time on earth is
predestined within certain boundaries, mankind can affect change within those limits. In
traditional West African religions, physical malady and illness, even misfortunes, are seen
as spiritual in origin. Maladies are believed to be caused by a dissatisfied ancestor or a
malcontent's wandering spirit that was captured and redirected. In other instances, the
soul, essence, or ashe of an individual could be affected by supernatural means. These
concepts varied somewhat in their overt and detail manifestations, but the principle was
significantly similar among the people of the slave-plundered regions of West and Central
West Africa.54 This general tenet, that physical malady, illness, and misfortune can have a
spiritual origin, was carried over into the syncretized spiritual traditions of the New World,
where, encountering similar or compatible principles held by Native American
traditionalists and in European folk belief, it became widespread and fused with vibrant
longevity.
In a significant number of traditional West African religions, the religious leader was, and
remains today, also a diviner, healer, and manipulator of worldly and spiritual events. The
roles he or she fills are multifaceted.55 With this fact in mind, it is not surprising to find that
in the slave communities of the United States, the traditional social roles of healer, diviner,
and conjurer were often occupied by one person, as they had been in West Africa. W. E. B.
DuBois attests to the multifunctionality of the slave conjurer's role. According to him, the
loss of traditional West African religion among American bondsmen was a:
…terrific social revolution, and yet some traces were retained of the former group life, and the chief remaining
institution was the Priest or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation and found his function as the healer of
the sick, the interpreter of the Unknown, the comforter of the sorrowing, the supernatural avenger of wrong, and the
one who rudely but picturesquely expressed the longing, disappointment, and resentment of a stolen and oppressed
people. Thus as bard, physician, judge, and priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system rose the Negro
preacher, and under him the first Afro-American institution, the Negro church.56

This “terrific social revolution” occurred under the influence of internal cultural tension
resulting partly from the heterogeneity of bondsmen. Consciously or otherwise, these
ethnically diverse groups contended somewhat with one another over which traditional
elements could and would be preserved. The cultural-religious tensions thus generated
would resolve themselves in a range of patterns, but always under the direct pressure and
limitations imposed by slavery. Certainly elements familiar to nearly all enslaved Africans,
such as spirit possession, ancestor reverence, animal sacrifice, and certain dance elements,
would be more likely candidates for survival in the new environment of slavery, which
mandated a protracted reconfiguring of traditional African religious beliefs.
Hoodoo religion did not emerge simultaneously and uniformly in every locale, but in
certain concentrated plantation environments that exhibited the necessary and sufficient
conditions that would nourish Hoodoo's germination and materialization. These core
plantations were large by American standards, exhibiting high African population density,
inadvertently allowing enslaved Africans some degree of autonomy or unhampered religio
cultural space. At least one of these core culture plantations existed within proximity to
nearly every major urban locale and exercised influence on the model of culture that
emerged in that region. At gatherings such as corn shuckings, plantation dances, Shout
worship services, and at clandestine, illegal public gatherings bondsmen from the core
plantations exchanged cultural and spiritual information with Native Americans as well as
with slaves from other plantations. An account from the South Carolina Gazette describes
what appears to be such an exchange. “They also had their private committees; whole
deliberations were carried on in too low voice, and with much caution, as not to be
overheard by the others.…The members of this secret council had much the appearance of
Doctors in deep and solemn consultation upon life or death which indeed might have been
the scope of their meditations at the time.”57 The dismal act of slave trading was
inadvertently culturally significant in that it provided both regional and national reshuffling
and exchange of African cultural and spiritual practices. The trader's infamous slave pens of
New Orleans are noteworthy here. Slaves from every region of the country as well as some
from Africa, the West Indies, and Mexico could spend as much as one to three months there
waiting to be sold. During that time, slaves were exposed to cultural and spiritual
knowledge from a variety of regions.58
The slave community's cultural leaders, conjurers, blacksmiths, priests and priestesses,
proficient singers, musicians, and excellent dancers initially came from a variety of different
African ethnic traditions. But familiarity with, or commonly shared knowledge about, a
particular transethnic practice like the counterclockwise dance circle may have been the
most significant in a series of culturally leveling selection principles, used by enslaved
Africans, in holding onto elements of traditional African culture. Much of what becomes
Hoodoo exhibits continuities with a range of West African and Central West African religious
traditions. Consider the similarity in the following two passages for example:
[I]t was thought by many that he would not be able to find the buried poison, but as they were about to give up their
pursuit,…Then the doctor ordered the man to dig quickly, for the “trickbag” was there. On the order being obeyed, the
poison was found. It was rusty nails, finger and toe nails, hair and pins sewed up in a piece of red flannel. The “doctor”
carried this to the patient, and convinced him that he had found the cause of his illness, and that he would surely get
well. Not many days elapsed before he was walking as well as ever.59
______

“Bring me a hoe,” said Okagbue. When Ekwefi brought the hoe, he had already put aside his goatskin bag and his big
cloth and was in his underwear.…He immediately set to work digging a pit where Ezinma had indicated.…Suddenly
Okagbue sprang to the surface with the agility of a leopard. “It is very near now,” he said. “I have felt it.”…“Call your
wife and child,” he said to Okonkwo. After a few more hoe-fuls of earth he struck the iyi-uwa. He raised it carefully with
the hoe and threw it to the surface…he went into his goatskin bag, took out two leaves and began to chew them.
When he had swallowed them, he took up the rag with left hand and began to untie it. And then the smooth, shiny
pebble fell out.…All this had happened more than a year ago and Ezinma had not been ill since.60

The first passage is from the Hampton Institute's Southern Workman from 1899. The
second passage, written more than half a century later, is from Chinua Achebe's 1959 novel
of traditional Igbo life in Nigeria, Things Fall Apart. Both the Ibo iyi-uwa and the African
American trickbag contained items that were wrapped in cloth, buried in the ground, and
believed to be the cause of illness. Both the iyi-uwa and the trickbag required unearthing
and neutralization by a spiritual specialist. The apparent similarities in preparation,
appearance, and handling indicate the use of similar operational conventions and
principles and suggest a common cultural ancestry or religious paradigm for both practices.
The roles of Hoodoo doctor, conjurer, and plantation preacher were directly inherited
from the traditional African priest, but the role of conjurer had been more long-standing
than any social role to emerge from slavery and existed well before the appearance of the
Negro preacher. Like the African priest, both the Hoodoo priest and the early slave preacher
employed a complex system of symbols to raise client expectations of a successful
outcome, thus to achieve success in their practices.61 Slaves viewed conjurers as embodied
spiritual power; these enslaved men of power apparently provided a rewarding and hopeful
counterbalance to the powerlessness experienced by blacks because of enslavement. As
part of a wider community response to social expectations for problem solving, the conjurer
himself was a living symbol signifying deep levels of hope as well as access to alternative
sources of support and assistance beyond the slave master's control. The slave community
inherited and passed on to freedmen the availability of the Hoodoo priest's particular
services.
It is likely that when and where Hoodoo functioned as a complete religion, it was a
momentarily stable cultural plateau in the decline of an interethnic yet traditional African
religious formation. As it existed under slavery, the Hoodoo religion was a short-lived,
transitional, and shrinking religious form that stabilized briefly, fragmented and declined,
evolved, and then expanded after emancipation. As with the African American jook and
other African-based cultural forms, Hoodoo made adaptations necessary for its own
survival.
In its early years, Hoodoo had its secret signs and gestures associated with the spiritual
forces of nature, with power over individuals and situations as well as over the darker forces
such as haints or witches. These signs were likely to have been composites of signs and
gestures from traditional African secret societies modified through great cultural loss and
the experience of slave labor; many of them became the short-lived secret sign system of
conjurers and Hoodoo priests. These signs and gestures would eventually die within
Hoodoo, but not before a few of them would move into the vocabulary of gestures and signs
used by the fundamentalist African American preacher. The sign would form a link between
the believer and the world of supernatural power. In a scene from the film The Color Purple
adapted from the Alice Walker novel of the same name, as Celie, the protagonist, is leaving
Mister, her abusive husband, he raises his hand to strike her and she rapidly extends her
right arm with her first two fingers outstretched pointing into a Hoodoo-influenced
horizontal V as if throwing a fix on him. With a sense of protected bravery, she prophetically
utters, “All that you do to me already done to you.” Mister stops as if frozen in place; Celie
then confidently rides away.
Momentarily, though perhaps not in all regions, Hoodoo religion had its own deity and
religiocultural heroes, its sacred dance (the Ring Shout), its healing practices, and its
religious specialists. But the Hoodoo religion could not sustain itself. So the aspect known
as conjure, later called Hoodoo, quickly and concurrently appeared independently even as
the Hoodoo religion was dying. Conjure required no worship services, no formalized
doctrine, and could be embodied in a single individual, the conjurer. Like the system of
signs, certain other elements of the Hoodoo religion would yoke themselves to and be
sustained within Africanized plantation Christianity. Other elements, because of their
functionality, would be sustained independently and later become an integral part of
conjure/Hoodoo practice.
While asserting influence in the creation of all subsequent secular dance among blacks,
the Ring Shout maintained a sacred identity during slavery and, though its circularity
would eventually be destroyed by the linear organization of church pews,62 its spiritual
essence successfully moved from clandestine Hoodoo ritual into the Africanized Christian
sacred dance ritual known as shoutin'. Aspects of shoutin' would secularize and move into
at least two African American popular social dances: the Big Apple, appearing in the 1920s,
and the Shout, which would appear in the late 1950s. In the transformative process that
propelled the Ring Shout into African American Christian worship, certain aspects of
Hoodoo as a component of black Christian worship would eventually be relegated to a
separately existing sphere, at least in surface appearance. But on a deeper level, some
aspects of Hoodoo were taken into the black church while certain aspects of the conjurer's
role were merged into some Christian ministers' functional capacity. This occurred while
other clergy condemned and abandoned Hoodoo practice. DuBois had this comment
concerning the movement of African religious practice, repeated here from the epigraph to
this chapter: “This church was not at first by any means Christian nor definitely organized:
rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each
plantation, and roughly designated as Voodooism.”63
 African captives and their descendants in America were often left alone by their masters
to worship as they saw fit in unhampered social space. The Hoodoo religion could develop
in this isolated space. It also enabled the slave religious leadership to consciously retain,
merge, or discard elements from African traditional religion. The older traditions would
transform into a transgenerational form, in which conjure and the sacred dancing of the
Ring Shout both played a significant and unified role as part of the Hoodoo religious
tradition. Both the Ring Shout and aspects of Hoodoo were eventually taken over into black
Christian ritual, with aspects of conjure gradually being discarded from black Christian
practice in most churches.64 Plantation conjurers were instrumental in this process because
they undoubtedly functioned in several closely associated roles, like that of Ring Shout
leader or perhaps as arbiter guiding the direction of worship. It is not unreasonable to
assume that plantation conjurers achieved special status in both clandestine and openly
visible Ring Shouts as well as in other activities, such as death rituals, where the sacred
circle was convened. Attending these ceremonies and rituals in a variety of capacities,
conjurers, in their general role as comforter, spiritual leader, protector, and earthly contact
with the supernatural, were entrenched in the overall life of the slave community and were
thoroughly familiar with its African-derived rituals, including its sacred dance. Similarly,
both religious leaders and chiefs in parts of Africa are often expected to be competent
dancers. The plantation preachers who merged Hoodoo practice with their Christianity were
competent if not outstanding shouters and more sympathetic to the Ring Shout, allowing,
encouraging, even participating in it.
The services provided by the Hoodoo priest, two-head, or conjurer were in perfect
alignment with the traditional African religious worldview. In practice, this spiritual and
healing specialist was a generalist whose religioscience enabled him to approach the world
as a seamless entity with little demarcation between sacred and secular, physical and
spiritual, natural and supernatural. He was a religioscientific practitioner operating inside a
paradigm that he inherited primarily from his African cultural past and that was continually
evolving and modifying itself to meet the needs of his clients in the environment of North
American enslavement.
Hoodoo was no static phenomenon; it had to have been a complex social process
influencing multiple levels of plantation and slave society. As a primary requirement for
successfully sustaining itself, Hoodoo had to be thoroughly enmeshed in the social
interaction of the slave community. Supernatural solutions were not embraced by
bondsmen simply because other forms of controlling and other centers of power were
closed to them. From the very beginning, Hoodoo both was embedded within an immediate
network of sanctions and supports and was able to engage in coercion and behavior
shaping representing a source of power within the fragile and uncertain normative
structure of the slave community. Hoodoo, more than any other aspect of slave cultural
tradition, promised power beyond the brittle normative structure of the community of
bondsmen. This promise could not always be fulfilled; but when it was, it strengthened
Hoodoo belief and practice.
The conjurer, as a symbol of both resistance and defiance as well as a model of secrecy,
was a cultural signpost, a living semiotic indicator of a functioning worldview held by
African American bondsmen. He was an important arbiter sanctioning the transformations
in Hoodoo procedures, paraphernalia, ritual objects, ceremonial content, and decorum
necessitated by American slave life. In the slave community, the conjurer was both
thoroughly integrated and aligned in every way; he was a significant source of tradition,
meaning, community definition, and cohesion. Not until emancipation and the destruction
of the slave quarter community did the unusual appearance, demeanor, and qualities
associated with conjurers in the post-Reconstruction environment become more apparent
and particularly significant. In some traditional African contexts, traditional priests are
marked by some unusual physical characteristic, such as a deformity, birthmark, or unusual
birth circumstances; when this occurs, it is seen as a sign or indicator of supernatural
verification of priestly status. This belief, like numerous others, would continue among both
enslaved and free blacks on the North American mainland.
Under slavery, the conjurer or root doctor was not able to disconnect his specialized
spiritual labor from that of other slaves, and this affected him. As slaves, conjure doctors
were still accountable to their owners for their labor output. Their physical labor in the
fields embedded them in the fabric of slave social structure and provided the social
conditions for them to be similar to other bondsmen in appearance, language, sentiments,
and expectations. But following emancipation, the destruction of the slave quarter
community and the reorganization of slave labor into the individualized rural labor form
known as sharecropping, the conjurer could be and often was disconnected from the labor
routines of the field, factory, or urban environment. This freedom of movement as
individual and spiritual laborer, accompanied by isolation from the routine of sharecropped
labor, allowed the conjurer freedom to behave in ways that sharecroppers, who answered
to their white landlords, could not. Because the emancipated conjurer made his living
serving primarily an African American clientele, he was not immediately answerable to
whites or anyone for his livelihood and labor. Within certain limits imposed by American
white supremacy racism, he had the latitude and mandate to look and behave in an
unorthodox fashion. Strange appearance or behavior is one of the hallmarks of the post-
Reconstruction conjure doctors.65
African traditional rituals and beliefs were and are today part of a complex philosophy of
universal existence and order designating a place and procedure for all of humankind's
concerns and problems. Included here, for example, are all rituals, procedures, and acts
aimed at maintaining balance.66 The principle of universal balance, and the need to
maintain it, gave rise and development to a complex of practices. These practices were
modified by varying degrees in the New World, depending on the aforementioned specific
conditions of enslavement such as plantation size and intensity and frequency of contact
with whites and Native Americans.
African slaves in America were surrounded by a complex spiritual universe defying simple
categorization. The conjurer, treater, Hoodoo, or two-head, as root doctors were also known,
was the mediator between the slave community and that wider spiritual reality. Even after
the acceptance of Christianity, African-style spirituality continued to inform the slave
community's supernatural belief system.67 But African religion could not survive intact
under slavery in the United States or in the less fragmented forms, as one finds elsewhere
in the New World. According to scholar W. E. B. DuBois, in the United States: “African
religion…was transformed. Fetish survived in certain rites and even here and there in blood
sacrifice, carried out secretly and at night; but more often in open celebration which
gradually became transmuted into Catholic and Protestant Christian rites.”68
Success at re-creating the familiar was essential in the religious transformation process.
Thus, as in the Ring Shout, the sacred circle was invoked at early Christian worship and
conversion services, even against the wishes of the presiding Christian reverend.69 Even
within the boundaries set by enslavement, familiar cultural practices that imparted a sense
of comfort and security were carried wherever possible into the ever-changing religious and
cultural life of slaves. The older familiar practices acted as an ever-moving anchor in
stabilizing and giving acceptable form to the emergence of Hoodoo and establishing
Hoodoo's marginal acceptability in some black Christian churches.
The varied uses of Hoodoo religion or conjure in the slave community ranged from
healing to injuring, from attracting a spouse to protecting oneself or loved ones. The
development and maintenance of Hoodoo rituals and practices were influenced by the total
spiritual backdrop of slavery. Some slaves approached Hoodoo with an attitude that was
both desperate and reaffirming. The white man's religion was often seen as inaccessible
and unresponsive, particularly when Christianization efforts aimed at slaves were
minimum. So the harshness of the American system of enslavement coupled with
Christianity's limited responsiveness intensified the slave's need for additional supernatural
African assistance.
Hoodoo exhibited numerous contradictions under slavery. On one hand, certain aspects of
the tradition, such as herbal work, appeared efficacious and thus achieved some degree of
validity and legitimation among whites, particularly in early America, and imparted a
positive reputation to black Native American “doctors.”70 On the other hand, the spiritual
controlling aspect of the tradition was severely maligned, denigrated, misunderstood, and
sometimes feared by outsiders. Because of the apparent power it held over bondsmen to
incite as well as to strengthen the spirit of rebellion and individual resistance, Hoodoo was
approached cautiously by some whites. There is ample evidence that conjurers played an
important role in slave rebellion and individual slave resistance.71 Frederick Douglass was
one of the better-known bondsmen who spoke of their encounters with conjure. In his book
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, he tells the story of being given a packet of
magical roots by an older African-born slave named Sandy. Though Douglass doubted the
root pack's efficacy, its purpose was apparently fulfilled and Douglass was never whipped
by any man ever again.72
The protective amulet or charm known as the mojo bag, mojo hand, Hoodoo bag, Hoodoo
hand, juju bag, root bag, conjure pack, gopher bag, jack, toby, lucky hand, or package,
mentioned by a considerable number of freedmen as significant in their life experience,
was universally carried and understood in the slave community. Similarly, Louis Hughes, a
slave in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Virginia, carried one type of protection, a small leather
bag, to ward off whippings. The charm's “magic” or power was usually encased in several
layers of either cloth or leather and wrapped with either leather cord, hemp string, or twine
so as not to be exposed. Given to him by an older slave, Hughes's bag was probably similar
to a thousand others carried by slaves throughout the South; we are left with this account:

Kongo nkisi. This medicine bag from the Congo resembles one type of African American mojo bag. (Drawing courtesy of the
Laman Collection; Wyatt MacGaffey, trans. and ed., Art and Healing of the Bakongo, Commented by Themselves: Minkisi
from the Laman Collection , Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.)
Mojo bags. African American package wrapped with thread and enclosed in a red silk bag and two Nigerian Yoruba medicine
bags encased in leather.

It was the custom in those days for slaves to carry voo-doo bags. It was handed from generation to generation; and,
though it was one of the superstitions of a barbarous ancestry, it was still very generally tenaciously held to by all
classes. I carried a little bag, which I got from an old slaver who claimed that it had power to prevent any one who
carried it from being whipped. It was made of leather, and contained roots, nuts, pins and some other things.…Many of
the servants were thorough believers in it,…and carried these bags all the time.73

In traditional West and Central West African religion, the amulet, in addition to leather,
could be housed in sacred cloth, seeds, insect pods, seashells, snail shells, woven raffia,
animal horns, as well as small and large calabash gourds. In addition, the mojo might be a
double or triple bag, that is two or three bags tied together and with other attachments
such as bones, whistles, bells, thorns, or plant parts. Other types of protective fabrications,
such as the type requiring the tying of knots directly on the body, would later retreat into
isolated pockets and nearly disappear. The tying of knots and the making of protective
packets were widespread religious practices in traditional West and Central West African
religion and would become staples in African American black belt Hoodoo practice that
would continue into the twenty-first century. Mary Alicia Owens in 1891 records a former
slave conjure doctor's use of string and knots in making a “tricken bag” and “luck ball.”
Owens leaves us this observation:
He broke off four lengths of yarn, each length measuring about forty-eight inches. These were doubled and re-doubled
into skeins of four strands each and spread in a row before him. To each skein was added forty-eight inches of sewing-
silk folded as the yarn was.
“Dar now!” he said, “De silk am ter tie yo' frens unter yo' de yahn am ter tie down all the debbils. Des watch me tie
de knots. Hole on dough!—dis fust!”
The “fust” proceeding was to fill his mouth with whiskey. Then ensued a most surprising gurgling and mumbling, as
he tied a knot near the end of the skein nearest him. As it was tightened, he spat about a teaspoonful of tobacco-
perfumed saliva and whiskey upon it. “Dar now!” he said, “dat's er mighty good knot. Dey ain't no debbil kin git thu
dat.”74

Most authentic old tradition mojoes were baptized in liquid spirits and tailored to the
client's specific needs; no two were exactly alike—there were no generic mojo bags as one
would later find dominating the spiritual marketplace. In the construction of a protective
mojo bag, for example, the conjurer-root doctor would consult with the client to understand
his daily schedule, where he was likely to be, where he was likely to need protection, and
from whom or what. Then the specifics of location, schedule, and personality would be
fabricated into the amulet using the principles of physical power, speed, and territoriality.
Specific instructions for the care, maintenance, and spiritual interaction with the mojo
accompanied the amulet and were given to the client. And in latter-day Hoodoo-conjure,
sometimes the client would be given something sacred to say, such as a Psalm.75
Emancipation would transform every aspect of African American life; Hoodoo in all its
aspects was no exception. After emancipation, certain Hoodoo practices would find new
life, others would die, still others would be engaged in selective adaptation that
transformed them from their former state into something functionally new. In the area of
folklore and myth, some beliefs would rapidly disappear, others would achieve prominence
and functionality, as others faded, leaving the survivors in a stronger, more entrenched
position within Hoodoo practice. The belief in High John the Conquer was one such myth
that would be grounded in both a medicinal and magical reality; we now turn our attention
to it.
 THE SEARCH FOR HIGH JOHN THE CONQUER
Early in the North American slave experience, the conditions of bondage circumscribed
African slave life and transformed the remotest aspects of slave psyche, mythology, and
behavior. In response to this, resistance behaviors appeared in the slave population;
rebellions, mutinies, and poisonings, along with subtler dissembling, creating a legacy of
hope and support while providing models for further resistance. Since New World
enslavement exacted a high price from both the slave's physical body and his spiritual
apparatus, “hope” was indeed the tool that enabled the enslaved to salvage his own
humanity. That vision of hope, resistance, rebellion, and triumph had no stronger
expression in Hoodoo than in the sacred High John the Conquer myth.1 The single most
important root in contemporary Hoodoo practice, High John the Conquer root, a member of
the morning glory family, has long been invested with magical and spiritual potency.
Contemporary scholars of Hoodoo exhibit some confusion about what this root is and the
source of its power. In her landmark research, scholar Yvonne Chireau incorrectly identifies
High John as St. John's wart.”2 Others have stated that High John derives its power from the
fact that it resembles a black man's testicle. The latter explanation reveals white
supremacy's fear of, and fixation on, black sexuality, especially as it reflects black male
sexual potency; neither is true.3 Its power is derived from its relationship with enslavement
and the spirit of rebellion and resistance.
Known also as bindweed and as jalap root, its botanical name Ipomea jalapa or Ipomoea
purga indicates its kinship with the sweet potato, Ipomoea patata. It is sometimes classed
as convulvolacea jalapa. Its most commonly known name, jalap, is derived from the region
in Mexico—Xalapa, Veracruz—where this native plant grows in abundance and from where
most of the stock used in Hoodoo has been imported. Jalap's other names include
bindweed, jalapa hembra, jalapa de Orizaba, brionia de las Indias, rubarbo de las Indias,
and jalapa official;4 but the name Mechoacan de guerrero or Michoacan de guerrero
indicates the Hispanicizing of a Nahuatl Indian name indicating a region with an
abundance of fish. The Spanish term guerrero means “warrior.” This linguistic combination
points to a coastal area where warriors made a reputation, such as the coastal area of
Veracruz, Mexico, where Xalapa is the capital city and jalap is said to be native to the area
and can grow in abundance there. In fact, this region of Mexico is jalap's only native
habitat.
The Xalapa region was inhabited by Teochichimecs, Totonocs, and Nahua-speaking
peoples prior to an Aztec or Mexica conquest during the latter half of the fifteenth century.
According to Patrick J. Carroll, the Aztecs modified the local economy, demanding greater
production of “certain items such as purga de Jalapa, a medicinal herb that grew naturally
in the area.”5 When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico in the fifteenth century, they
discovered the plant in its native abundance. The roots exported to Europe by the
Spaniards in the middle 1500s were collected from the extensive natural populations then
growing in the region of Xalapa-Xico in the state of Veracruz. 6 The increased European
demand eventually led to commercial cultivation. Between the mid-sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, the plant was introduced into various European botanical gardens in
France and England to attempt its cultivation. The British eventually introduced the species
to Jamaica and India where it was cultivated. The demand for the root continued to
increase, and between 1761 and 1851 the Xalapa-Xico region of Veracruz exported more
than one and a half million tons of the root to Europe, where it was used in treatment of
several maladies. Its most frequent use was as a purgative, laxative, and treatment for
kidney disorders.7
Though it is only partly documented, there is evidence that a powerful culture of slave
resistance developed in the American colonies and later in the United States. Examples of
resistance culture included the use of song to facilitate escape, the use of quilts carrying
messages aiding escapees, the use of conjure for protection in violating slaves codes and
confounding patrollers, and folktales and myths that specifically nourished the seeds of
resistance and hope. The story of High John the Conquer was one such myth.
Albeit enslavement demanded both mental isolation and some degree of individual
loyalty, bondsmen created a community of resistance and support that constantly
reminded them that both challenges to enslavement and triumph were indeed possible
even when apparently unfavorable circumstances prevailed. Successful adjustment to
enslavement stretched the limits of a slave's humanity and imprinted itself on every aspect
of the person, marking the members of the slave community, predisposing them to a range
of vulnerabilities, including early death. Hope was often all that bondsmen had.
Zora Neale Hurston describes High John the Conquer as “our hope bringer.”8 The picture
she draws of him appears at first both ambiguous and contradictory yet all-encompassing.
“There is no established picture of what sort of looking-man this John de Conquer was. To
some, he was a big, physical-looking man like John Henry. To others, he was a little,
hammered-down, low-built man like the Devil's doll baby. Some said that they never heard
what he looked like. Nobody told them, but he lived on the plantation where their old folks
were slaves.”9 Her examination and description in 1943 draws from history, literature,
sociology, and folklore in presenting the scope of High John's domain. For Hurston, High
John de Conquer is a cultural trope. He is the mythologized spirit of hope, resistance, and
safekeeping. But equally important, he is a conveyor of significant values, particularly the
values of justice and universal reciprocity. High John seems to take on the qualities of a
savior, a personal protector for the enslaved, informing them that freedom was on its way,
so they must persevere. “My mama told me, and I know that she wouldn't mislead me, how
High John de Conquer helped us out. He had done teached the black folks so they knowed a
hundred years ahead of time that freedom was coming. Long before the white folks knowed
anything about it at all.”10 North American bondsmen clung to the belief that High John
had preordained, predestined emancipation and freedom. They testified that it was the
power of High John and not the American Civil War nor whites who brought them liberation
from chattel slavery. The notion of High John as a liberating force as well as a “hope
bringer” was intimately intertwined in the black popular imagination. “These young
Negroes…talk about the war freeing the Negroes…‘course the war was a lot of help but how
come the war took place?…John de Conquer had done put it into the white folks to give us
our freedom, that's what.…Freedom just had to come. The time set aside for it was there.
The war was just a sign and a symbol of the thing.”11
The notion of High John also conveyed the spirit of kindness, humor, and morality while
wrapping the embattled slave psyche in a protective package of functional values.
Embedded in the concept of High John were many of the values extolled and esteemed in
black popular folk discourse. The compilation of values posited a normative outline by
which members of the slave community could sustain their sense of themselves. High John
spread and remained viable because of the holistic model it represented. To African slaves
encountering the Americanized story, there might be familiarity; to Americanized slaves,
there would be identification and a source of esteem. Cassandra Wimbs asserts that High
John, Jesus, and Shango are collateral or analogous spiritual forces.12 High John was not
merely a hope bringer, he also was an intermediary between man and God, a warrior
martyr, dying for “us,” a soul saver, a sustainer, and a virtual saint of the old Hoodoo
religion. “Way over there where the sun rises a day ahead of time they say that Heaven
arms with love and laughter those it does not wish to see destroyed. He who carries his
heart in his sword must perish. So says the ultimate law.…John knew that it is written
where it cannot be erased, that nothing shall live on human flesh and prosper.”13 Known
among Santeria/Lukumi adherents as Juan el Conquistador, the idea of High John the
Conquer is perhaps the most widely known non-Abrahamic folk spiritual figure in the black
Atlantic New World.
Best and most potent if dug before September 21, the last day of summer,14 High John is
used in numerous types of Hoodoo work and has been the most utilized Hoodoo root. That
was probably not always the case. Within the old black belt plantation tradition, High John's
uses were probably more specific than in more recent usage. Across time, High John's uses
appear to move from the specific to the general. Once used for only a few and very specific
needs, High John eventually would be used as a substitute for increasing numbers of
Hoodoo roots and plants. The specificity of High John's earlier uses was first tailored to the
gender of the work to be done. Was the work predominantly male or female? Once
determined, the High John root was selected based on its gender. The distinction between
male and female High John was lost in the turn-of-the-century spiritual marketplace, as was
the distinction between male and female mojoes.
With respect to its importance in the Hoodoo pharmacopeia, there are two perplexing
questions: How did this legendary root, native only to the region around Xalapa, Mexico,
become so significant to Hoodoo practice thousands of miles away in Tennessee, Virginia,
Alabama, and the Carolinas where it does not grow? And how would bondsmen and later
freedmen access this highly valued root?
In the 1950s, when someone asked “who was High John?” an elder would reply, “High
John was an African prince, the son of an African king, who was kidnapped and sold into
slavery. He was never to be a slave. He could not be broken by the slave breaker and he
disobeyed the slave master at every opportunity. He was a troublemaker for the white man.
He ran away, stole food, destroyed property, and led a band of rebels in many slave
rebellions. Finally he was captured and publicly executed for all the slaves to witness. But
before he died, he told the crowd of slaves looking on that before his spirit flew back to
Africa he would leave a bit of it in the root of a certain plant. That whenever they needed
hope or whenever they wanted to rebel and needed the spirit of protection to help them, to
get that root and they would have a bit of his spirit.” That root was known to nearly all
black Americans as High John the Conquer root. A very similar version of that story was
recited to this author by her Yoruba religion godfather, a Nigerian-initiated American
Babalawo from Georgia, where, as a child growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, he heard the
same story retold.15
Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s and early 1960s, this author heard the High
John story from the elders, those over sixty years old, most of whom were from central
Alabama. These often lofty monologues of the elders were complemented by the “Niggah
John” jokes and tales told mostly by the younger adults, those well below the age of sixty. I
would later come to realize that by the time I encountered these “Niggah John” jokes, they
were a thinly connected backwater tributary of the High John the Conquer theme. Scholars
have largely viewed the John stories as a natural response to enslavement. In the character
John, many have seen the trickster character familiar in the animal stories in which an
underdog triumphs over a stronger, larger adversary. In these expanded, often bawdy, and
humorous continuations of the High John the Conquer legacy, Niggah John always got the
best of the white folks. Among African Americans, he was almost always called “Niggah
John,” rarely called just “John.” When he was referred to as simply “John,” it was often done
with a twinkle in the eye so that informed listeners knew that the term niggah was implied
in the omission. The effectiveness of the John stories lies in the juxtaposition of black and
white under racial oppression. Though John is reduced to servitude, he still manages—
through some quality of his personality or behavior—to debunk the myth of white racial
superiority and get the best of the white man. Though he is ostensibly a mere “niggah,” he
is capable of outwitting members of the master race, thus challenging and undermining
white superiority and challenging the white right to authority and control over black lives,
thus restoring the significant principle of balance.16
Like the blues and the African American dances, the John tales developed and grew by
incremental repetition.17 As they grew, the very concept of John began to convey a certain
generic anonymity and familiar distance; but it also galvanized a community and became
part of the commonly understood mythology and folklore of African American culture. Once
this happened, John was free to move in the common consciousness as a stock character
representing multiple options. The very mention of John among some older blacks invoked
a secret code of hope and resistance. High John the Conquer may have been the first
deified ancestor of the Hoodoo religion who gradually became a secularized spiritual
alternative.
The most effective teller of John stories I have ever encountered was a man called Mr. Jim,
originally of Sarasota, Florida. Whenever he told one of these stories, his entire being would
take on a new countenance. He would tell the story as if talking in a secret code that whites
couldn't understand. His style of delivery to an all-black group of listeners implied the
presence of powerful and controlling whites even when they weren't present. Mr. Jim would
establish the white presence with his body language, stooping his shoulders, shuffling his
feet, feigning the “stupid Negro” of white folks' expectations. As Mr. Jim wove the story and
John eventually triumphed, Mr. Jim's countenance would transform into one of cunning and
triumph, which spoke of real intellectual and practical superiority, defiance, and power.
During the telling of the story, Mr. Jim would punctuate significant moments with a half
smile and winking eye, which signaled that John knew something that the white folks did
not.

MR. JIM'S BAWDY JOHN TALE

John was so defiant that he promised himself that he would never respond to a question from whites with the proper
answer of “yes'm” or “yes, sir.” And he never did. There was nothing that the white folks could do to make John say
“yes, ma'am” or “yes, sir,” he just wouldn't do it. Whenever John was asked a question by white folks that would
normally solicit a “yes'm” or “yass'r” answer, John would answer affirmatively like this. If the white folks asked John,
“John, did you chop the wood?” John would reply, “Stacked it, too.” “John, did you water the horses?” “Groomed ‘em,
too.” “John, did you weed the garden?” “Watered it, too.” John always avoided the deferential answer that the white
folks wanted to hear. Well, the white folks decided that they had had enough of John's impudence and they devised a
plan to force John to answer appropriately. The twenty-year-old unmarried daughter, Lisa Belle, was to hide in the
shower naked and surprise John with a question that would force him to reply “yes'm.” So, Lisa Bell went upstairs and
hid behind the shower curtain, naked in the shower. She called out to John as he cleaned the bathroom, “John, did you
wash the dishes?” John replied, “Dried ‘em, too.” “John, did you cut the hay?” “Baled it, too.” Finally in total frustration,
Lisa Belle threw back the curtain, revealing her naked white body to John. As she stroked her breasts, she demanded
that John look at her as she asked him the final question, “John, have you ever sucked a white woman's tittie?” John
replied, “Pussy, too.” And with that reply he left the bathroom.18

Through these and other stories, as well as in jokes, proverbs, and folktales in African
Americans' daily conversations, John the generic Negro resisted, outsmarted, and exacted
justice on whites. In his fullest manifestation, John was an actor in more than John tales and
jokes. He could become an example of esteemed behavior in almost any context. The
notion of John celebrated African American ingenuity under adverse circumstances and
could be applied to the daily encounters of the average black man. John represented all
African American men. When Mr. Jim was confronted with a challenge, he would often ask,
with a smile, “Now, what would John do ‘bout dat?”
The significance of High John the Conquer root in Hoodoo cannot be overstated. In the old
conjure tradition, High John roots were often tied around either the waist or other body
parts; it was embedded into walking canes and constructed into necklaces. Capable of
being used in nearly every traditional Hoodoo ritual, High John has at least three
namesakes, running John, cut from pieces of the High John vine and carried for good luck;19
middle John, whose uses are most obscure of the three; and low John, the galanga root
used in courtroom ritual. Galanga root, a relative of the ginger plant, is the famous chewing
John. In his book Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor, J. E. McTeer describes Dr.
Buzzard's root-chewing presence in a 1930s Beaufort, South Carolina, courtroom: “At a
term of the general sessions court, the Doctor was very much in evidence, sitting among
the spectators. He was busy ‘chewing the root' on the judge, the solicitor, the jury and me,
so that his clients would either be let loose or would receive a light sentence.”20 Another
descriptively informative account of Dr. Buzzard's root chewin' states: “One of Robinson's
best paying clients was the one who employed him to ‘chew the root' on the judge, sheriff
and solicitors during criminal court. Many times I've looked back into the courtroom and
seen the purple sunglasses glaring at me as Stepheney ‘chewed the root' on me. The basic
goal of ‘root chewing' was to render the evidence harmless and provide the best outcome
for the accused. Dr. Buzzard couldn't lose, no matter what the verdict read.”21
Root chewing, once quite common, has all but vanished or been replaced by something
else. In 1980 in Robson County, North Carolina, professor Frank Schmalliger interviewed ten
conjurers concerning their courtroom and legal casework. Though they mentioned rituals,
powders, spells, roots, even track gathering, there is no mention of chewing the root to aid
a courtroom defendant. Had root chewing disappeared in North Carolina by 1980?22 Or was
it nonexistent there for some other reason? It was known among conjurers and root workers
that if a court case promised to be a difficult one, then root chewing was combined with
other rituals such as dressing the courtroom with a spiritually potent substance such as
lightening dust. According to conjure man Jim Vaugn of Menola, North Carolina: “Lightening
dust is the red dust coming from insects boring into the exposed wood of a lightening
struck pine tree. It becomes a powerful control agent when mixed with other things by a
skilled conjure doctor.”23
High John, as the ipomoea jalapa or ipomoea purga root is called by Hoodoo patrons and
practitioners, could once be purchased from apothecaries as a type of laxative, from curio
shops, candle shops, spiritual supply stores, and botanicas as well as from mail-order
catalogs and Internet businesses. In the community of bondsmen, the root was obtained
through the slave pharmacy assistants and doctors' assistants who had access to it where
they worked. It was a medicinal root used to treat fevers and constipation and for its
purgative qualities. If one can obtain it today, it can be rather expensive and is becoming
more prized as ipomoea plant parts are illegal coming into the United States from any
country except Canada.24 Much to this author's surprise, when I tried to purchase jalap root
I learned that most merchants advertising High John root would not sell the whole root, but
would cut it into pieces and sell those instead or soak the root in oil and sell the oil for the
same uses as the root.
This author's quest to purchase whole Mexican jalap root led to an Internet search of the
area around Xalapa, Mexico, and this further led to yet another, and more astounding,
discovery, the story of Afro-Mexican slave rebel Gaspar Yanga. As I read the story of Yanga, I
could see immediately the startling parallels and detailed similarities between the story of
Yanga and his kidnapping and the story of High John. How could this be? According to all
available sources, Gaspar Yanga was a kidnapped member of one of the royal families of
the African country of Gabon. Early on, he became the Spanish authorities' most feared and
dreaded rebel and Maroon leader. He lived nearly four decades in the mountains between
Xalapa and Puebla, where he eventually established a successful Maroon community in the
hills of Veracruz, similar to the Quilombo del Palmaires in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Brazil as well as numerous other Maroon communities.
In 1612, a mass public execution of thirty-three blacks, four of them women accused of
plotting an uprising, quieted the spirit of rebellion for a while and forced the Maroon rebel
spirit into silence only temporarily. In the mountains of Veracruz, the only native habitat of
jalap root, the Yanganista Maroons continued to raid plantations and Indian settlements.
The best known of all Afro-Mexican Maroon settlements, Yanga's Maroon community was
founded after a bloody rebellion in the sugar fields in 1570; Yanga was its leader. Hostile
relations between the Spanish authorities and slave rebels continued for the next sixty
years, and finally the Maroons were officially settled near the slopes of Mount Totutla in
1630. The town was moved again to better farmland and survived, known as the city of San
Lorenzo de los Negros. At the time of Mexican independence in 1821, the small town had
719 people. Today it is a city of over twenty thousand.

Gaspar Yanga. The enslaved Afro-Mexican Maroon rebel leader Gaspar Yanga, possibly the model for High John the Conquer.

Like High John, Yanga was a kidnapped African prince who could not be broken. He made
trouble for slave masters and managed to get the better of them. Yet the Yanganistas' quest
for freedom and the vision of hope they provided those still enslaved were tempered by
public executions in the area where jalap root grows most abundantly. Could Gaspar Yanga
or executed members of his rebel party be the original model for the African American High
John the Conquer? Or could one of the many Maroon leaders in Spanish America be the
model? There were certainly a significant number of them. And Spain could have traded
slaves from other Spanish territories, as well as from Mexico, into the mainland of North
America. Certainly there were other possible models, like Benkos Bioho in Cartegena,
Columbia, in 1603. Maroon rebels were responsible for beginning the revolution in Haiti.
The Maroons of Accompong, Jamaica, were regarded as fierce fighters. Maroon communities
existed from Virginia to the southernmost slave societies of South America. And each of
them had their rebel leader. In many instances, the leaders were captured, executed, or
killed by bounty hunters. Since indigenous people were native to the habitat, they were
often used to hunt down Maroons. But in some instances, native peoples joined with
Maroons to fight off European settlers and enslavers, as in the case of Florida's famous
Negro Fort.25
Pointing to a potential Afro-Mexican or Afro-Hispanic origin, the name Juan el
Conquistador contains a reference to the Spanish conquerors. No such equivalent term for
the British settlers was ever used by North American Indians or enslaved Africans; this
further points to potential Afro-Mexican or Afro-Hispanic origins of the story. But if High John
was Afro-Mexican originally, how could such a story achieve such a high degree of
penetration into the black communities of North America? The answer may lie in several
possibilities, not the least of which is the infamous slave pens of old New Orleans under the
Spanish occupation.
 The formation of community in the slave trade—the creation of networks of support and sometimes resistance among
individuals previously unknown to one another—began as something quite different: passing the time, engaging in
conversation, offering isolated acts of friendship or succor.…[O]ut of these contingent interactions could be fashioned
connections that could sustain slaves emotionally and help them circulate important knowledge about the trade. The
revolts and runaways, of course, are the most obvious examples of the subversive connections that took root in the
interstices of the slave trade.…[T]he community of slaves in the trade provided information and support that slaves
could use to their advantage.26

Just as Spain traded slaves from Mexico into its new center of commerce, New Orleans, it
easily traded slaves from other Spanish colonies where there were Maroons and stories of
their triumphs. Slave traders had well-established slave-trading networks and followed the
same routes that had proved successful year after year. Slaves who were traded also
learned these routes and networks and had knowledge of the major southern slave trading
centers like Lexington, Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Savannah, and New Orleans, among
others. The stories, tales of hope and triumph, spread along these networks. Each slave
state had its slave sales and brokers. Slavery as a stable institution with social networks
was important to the forging of social identity, and white men's social selves were known
and respected according to a code deeply dependent upon slavery for its existence. In the
major slave-trading centers, particularly the slave pens of New Orleans, tales of triumph
spread, slaves received and sent messages thousands of miles to distant relatives, to stolen
and sold children, to other family members and friends. According to Walter Johnson:
“Some of those whose friends or relatives were carried away by the traders had the comfort
of information that came across the filaments of connection which spanned the enslaved
South. Ann Garrison, who had been a slave in Maryland, told an interviewer in 1841 that
her son, sold to a southbound trader, was able to send a farewell from Baltimore via a
friend who lived there.”27 Some routes were so well traveled that slaves might encounter
other slaves they had known elsewhere. These routes and their social connectedness
supported a fragile underground slave communication network essential in sustaining
hope. William Wells Brown leaves us such an account in his narrative. Brown encountered
at least two slaves, one in New Orleans and one in Natchez, Mississippi, that he had known
previously in St. Louis, Missouri.28
According to Walter Johnson, “More than anything, the community of slaves in the trade
seems to have been forged out of conversation.”29 Conversations and other forms of
communication were of supreme importance to slaves in the pens: “[T]he once anonymous
slaves built a network of mutual recognition through a communal remembering and
retelling of the past.”30 These slave communications networks reached out, obtained, and
disseminated information and tales of hope from around the nation as well as
internationally.31 Noteworthy in this respect is the role of slave stewards, hired-out slaves,
and errand boys working in the pens.
Slave stewards were responsible for escorting other slaves in the pens; they carried the
slaves' baggage as well as clothing, and they were in and out of the slave pens regularly.
They carried messages to and from slaves from different regions belonging to different
traders. They performed favors for slaves such as obtaining food or tobacco. Hired-out
slaves brought in news from the outside and disseminated it inside the pens and vice versa
and so did the errand boys. These slaves who circulated in and out of the slave pens
accelerated the movement of all types of information, including folktales of resistance,
articles, letters, seeds, messages, conjure bags, medicinal roots, and reminders of a former
life in Africa or elsewhere. Because these stewards and errand boys were sometimes owned
by the owner of the slave pen, they were traded less frequently and represented a linkage,
a site for continuity, limited stability, and consistency across time as well as region. This
increased the reliability rate for sociocultural transfers of all types.
The story of Yanga as well as other Maroons or rebels could easily have moved into the
slave pens of New Orleans when Louisiana was under Spanish control in the mid to latter
eighteenth century. There was significant trading of slaves between Mexico and New
Orleans during and after Spanish occupation. In her database, historian Gwendolyn Midlo
Hall lists, mainly from records of slave sales, enough slaves in the area around New Orleans
whose birthplaces were recorded as Mexico to indicate a trade in slaves between Mexico
and New Orleans.32 One such male slave, Jose, age eighteen, was sold by Sr. Jose Briones
for 788 pesos in April 1783. He was probably born around 1765, and his birthplace was
listed as Veracruz, Mexico. Another male slave, also age eighteen, named Pedro, trained as
a ship caulker, was born in Mexico and was sold in Louisiana from the estate of Sr. Pedro
Biraso in 1795. Still another male slave listed as a mulatto and “criole” of Mexico, age
twenty-seven, sold for 400 pesos in 1801. The seller is listed as “Presbitero Capellan del
2nd. Batallon of the Infantry Regiment of Mexico.” The buyer was “the Archbiship [sic] elect
of the Holy Cathedral and Diocese of Guatemala.” Still another slave, Aniceto, age thirteen,
apparently was purchased by a slave dealer for 550 pesos on October 23, 1801, from Maria
Josefa De Echagary y Lazaga in Mexico City. Another male slave, Bernard, a fifteen-year-old
domestic servant, sold for 650 pesos on May 13, 1809, was listed as a native of Mexico. And
finally, a female mulatto slave, Petra Catalina, purchased for 700 pesos on May 28, 1800, by
Jose Carballo, is listed as born in Puguano, Mexico. Not only slaves but also buyers and
sellers themselves came from Mexico or they authorized others to sell or purchase slaves for
them in New Orleans, potentially to be sold into other places in Spanish America. In Hall's
database, this author found at least one transaction listed as follows: “Slave is sold with
power of attorney of Jose Goma of Campeche, Mexico.”
Certainly the slave population was, because of its condition of forced servitude,
predisposed to embracing a hope bringer. Though the resemblance of Yanga to High John is
remarkable, the Afro-Mexican Yanga was not the only famous slave rebel, nor was his the
only Maroon community; there were others who could have provided a model of resistance
like that found in the tale of High John the Conquer.
Throughout the New World, particularly in Latin America, from Mexico to Peru and
throughout the Caribbean, over a three century time frame, Maroon communities and
encampments, with their rebel leaders, sprang up. They are too numerous to list here.
Examples include a slave rebel settlement that was destroyed on Hispaniola in 1522.33 In
1545, two hundred Maroons living in the swamps and marshes north of Lima, Peru,
engaged in a bloody fight in which all the rebels were killed.34 More than two hundred fifty
years later in 1795, thousands of Venezuelan slaves rebelled and established a Maroon
settlement retreat that was eventually destroyed by the Spanish.35 In Columbia in 1603,
Maroon rebel leader Benkos Bioho founded Palenque San Basilio in the area of Cartagena,
Columbia.36 In Mobile, Alabama, a Maroon stronghold was destroyed by local vigilante
planters in 1827.37 The Afro-Mexican Maroon community known as Palacios de Mandinga,
one of six Maroon settlements established around 1735 after a series of costly revolts,
persisted until 1827 with some Maroons remaining in hiding until the legal abolition of
slavery in Mexico in 1829.38 The most famous of all Maroon settlements is the Quilombo
dos Palmares in Pernambuco, Brazil; it is estimated to have contained upward of ten
thousand runaways.39 The numerous Maroon communities in Spanish America would
certainly strengthen the myth as it entered and passed through the Spanish-controlled
slave pens of old New Orleans.
There are several possibilities that could be drawn from the widespread activities of
Maroons and rebels within the present limits of the United States. One notable possible
model for High John is the Louisiana Maroon rebel known as St. Malo. According to historian
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, runaway slaves in lower Louisiana adapted to the conditions of the
cypress swamp and established Maroon camps throughout the region. “The maroon
communities that developed during the last half of the eighteenth century consisted almost
entirely of creole slaves, though large numbers of Africans were brought in under Spanish
rule.…Runaway slaves hid out for weeks, months, and even years on or behind their
masters' estates without being detected or apprehended.”40
During the Spanish period in Louisiana, St. Malo and his party of runaways were the most
troublesome of several Maroon rebel bands in the area south of New Orleans between the
Mississippi River and Lake Borgne. “The syndic of the Cabildo of New Orleans described St.
Malo as ‘audacious, daring, and active' (atrevido, osado, y activo), which was fair enough,
but he also portrayed him as ruthless and bloodthirsty.”41 Like most Maroons forced to live
as fugitives, St. Malo's band both raided nearby plantations carrying off needed supplies,
food, and munitions and fought fiercely to preserve their freedom from bondage. A number
of the Maroon groups occupying the area below New Orleans established working
relationships both with plantation slaves and, on occasion, with white slave masters.42
St. Malo and most of his band were finally captured, tried, and publicly executed on June
19, 1784. We know that before his death he made a final statement proclaiming the
innocence of two of his fellow Maroons.43 What else did he say before his life was publicly
taken? How often was this or a similar scenario repeated under the various slave regimes of
the New World? The story of St. Malo opens many speculative possibilities concerning the
myth of High John the Conquer, particularly when one considers the high concentration of
African slaves, especially Bambara, in the area of New Orleans.
The Bambara as well as other African ethnic groups believed that special amulets could
be created that preserved the souls of individuals especially those who died in warfare or
through the administration of justice.44 Similar beliefs persisted among other groups
including some native Europeans. The European belief in the power of the “glory hand,” the
left hand of a convicted murderer is similar in some respects. Among the Bambara, amulets
were created to be carried into battle that were believed to contain the soul of the warrior
ancestors. These amulets were created to support both physical and spiritual struggles. In
speculating, this author suggests that if St. Malo's body were left hanging to rot publicly, as
stated in the Creole slave song about his capture and execution, then it is not beyond the
realm of possibility that amulets and protective charms could have been made from his
body parts such as bones, hair, nails even clothing. Amulet making certainly was
traditionally African. Perhaps clothing, hair, or other items were ritually confiscated from
the bodies of publicly executed rebels by slaves who knew of or witnessed the executions.
Certainly the stories of the numerous slave rebels circulated among the slave populations
of the New World.

QUARRA ST. MALO.

Aie! Zeinzens, vinifeouarra
Pou' pov' St. Malodansl'embas!
Ye c'asse li avec ye chien,
Ye tire li ein coup d'fizi,
Ye hale li la cyprier,
So bras ye ‘tasse par derrier,
Ye ‘tasse so la main divant;
Ye ‘marre li ape queue choual,
Ye trainein li zouqu'a la ville.
Divantmiches la dans Cabil'e
Ye quise li life complot
Pou'coupecou a tout ye blancs.
Ye ‘mande li qui so comperes;
Pov‘ St. Malo pas di‘ a-rein!
Zize la li lir so la sentence,
Et pis li fedressepotence.
Ye hale choual—c'aretteparti—
Pov St. Malorestependi!
Eine her solieldeza levee
Quand ye pend li si la levee.
Ye laisse so corps balance
Pou'carancrogagneinmanze.

THE DIRGE OF ST. MALO

Alas! Young men, come, make lament

For poor St. Malo in distress!
 They chased, they hunted him with dogs,
They fired at him with a gun,
They hauled him from the cypress swamp
His arms they tied behind his back,
they tied his hands in front of him;
They tied him to a horse's tail,
They dragged him up into the town.
Before those grand Cabildo men
They charged that he had made a plot
To cut the throats of all the whites.
They asked him who his comrades were;
Poor St. Malo said not a word!
The judge his sentence read to him,
And then they raised the gallows-tree.
They drew the horse—the cart moved off—
And left St. Malo hanging there.
The sun was up an hour high
When on the Levee he was hung;
They left his body swinging there,
For carrion crows to feed upon.45
Could St. Malo be the model for High John the Conquer? Could his spirit or a part of his
soul have been placed in the root that could have grown in the area of Louisiana below New
Orleans possibly imported there by the Spanish? Or could the life of St. Malo simply have
acted to strengthen the already existing story of the kidnapped, unbreakable Maroon prince
who was publicly executed, and whose soul flew back to Africa after leaving a bit of his
warrior essence in the root of a certain plant?
The Maroon rebel story was acted out in many places in the New World; including the
area now the United States of America. Maroons established communities and camps from
Virginia to Florida, from South Carolina and eastern coastal areas to Louisiana.46 The
possibilities are numerous, but I am inclined to think that St. Malo's and other slave rebel
and Maroon stories further strengthened the already existing archetype of the unbreakable
warrior prince developed through centuries of rebellions and maroonage. And that the
traditional African belief in a plant or bush possessing a “spirit” was enlivened and infused
within the framework of the “spirit plant” model common in African traditional religion.
And that wherever Africans were enslaved in the New World in significantly concentrated
numbers, the circumstances of enslavement predisposed and readied them for the
appearance of a “hope bringer.” Once again Hurston speaks to us:
Maybe he was in Texas when the lash fell on a slave in Alabama, but before the blood was dried on the back he was
there.47 …There are many tales and variants of each, of how the Negro got his freedom through High John de Conquer.
The best one deals with a plantation where the work was hard, and Old Massa mean. Even Old Miss used to pull her
maids ears with hot firetongs when they got her riled. So naturally, Old John de Conquer was around that plantation a
lot.48

The legacy of High John de Conquer, though transformed, is continued today in African
American Hoodoo practice and by those that keep the remaining fragments of the Hoodoo
faith.
The thousands of humble people who still believe in him…do John reverence by getting the root of the plant in which he
has taken up his secret dwelling, and “dress” it with perfume, and keeping it on their person or in their houses in a
secret place. It is there to help them overcome things they feel that they could not beat otherwise…You will know then,
that no matter how bad things look now, it will be worse for those who seek to oppress us.49
 CRISIS AT THE CROSSROADS
Sustaining and Transforming Hoodoo's Black Belt
Tradition from Emancipation to World War II

The period following emancipation was transformative in every sense for African Americans.
Both the physical and social boundaries of their cultural lives would be expanded and
would develop a more prominent national profile. It was a period of fragmenting and
recoalescing values and practices as the nation shifted gears between the Civil War and
World War I. Black belt traditional Hoodoo would find itself approaching a critical crossroads
in its identity and existence. Though emancipation would prefigure the forthcoming loss of
certain traditions, freedom of movement would simultaneously provide the social backdrop
from which regional cultural variations would cross-fertilize one another. The crisis that was
approaching would challenge Hoodoo's adaptability and would confront black America's
desire and ability to reinvest in a tradition that clung to the sociohistoric bones of an ever-
evolving African American culture. The old tradition, the Hoodoo of the old black belt region
plantation, would be modified and transformed under the influence of both internal and
external factors as an interregional cross-fertilization process would disperse locally potent
customs, traditions, and knowledge throughout the newly emancipated African American
nation more rapidly than had been done previously. In some locales, the breakup of the old
slave-quarter community manifests its impact immediately as destruction of the slave
quarter meant that new and different cultural spaces would have to be located or created.
Prior to emancipation, the larger plantation slave communities, as well as areas of high
black concentration, had functioned as culturally potent repositories and cultural
germination sites where, partially due to demographics, the culture-making process was
intensified. The intensification process supported African cultural retention, especially in
slave communities where recently imported African slaves were deposited.
The end of Reconstruction and withdrawal of federal troops from the South after 1877 left
most African Americans at the mercy of local white citizens, many of whom were former
slave owners. With a reign of racial terror raging around them in a violently antiblack
atmosphere, freedmen had few defenses. The increased stress attending the movement
from slavery to freedom, coupled with the terrorism and racist exclusion of the period,
strained every role in the black community, exacerbated both psychological and physical
malady, and made successful assimilation and individual societal adjustment difficult if not
impossible for all but a minority of blacks. Legal marginalization and racial terrorism
unraveled still-developing and stabilizing community traditions and propelled blacks into a
mass exodus, first into southern cities then northward into large urban areas, many lured
there by the promise of “good” employment made by labor recruiters.1 The massive
migration began as a trickle, hardly resembling the great deluge it would soon become. In
this massive flow of humans from the rural countryside into more urban environments,
certain aspects of African American cultural life, including Hoodoo, would become more
visible to the wider society than they previously had been. In the postemancipation
environment, blacks would continue to depend on Hoodoo's support and protection both to
anchor and to provide them with a degree of certainty in an uncertain new world. With the
black community confronting an unfamiliar and less certain future, Hoodoo workers
experienced an increased demand for protective mojoes during this period. There was
certainly an increase in the visibility and number of Hoodoo practitioners in at least one
southern Hoodoo center, New Orleans.2
Hoodoo's new visibility and presence would immediately stimulate mainstream popular
artistic and scholarly interest that would continue into the twenty-first century, as the July
9, 2007, issue of Fortune Magazine demonstrates when it asks on its cover, “Can Harvey
Weinstein get his mojo back?” In the American mainstream, the rapid commercial
secularization of Hoodoo's sacred dance, the Ring Shout, would give America the
foundation for dances such as the Big Apple, a “called” counterclockwise circling dance
with high arm gestures; the Eagle Rock, derived from the traditional African American
dance play, known as the Buzzard Lope; and the Shout, a possession dance ritual3
translated into a secular dance step. But more important, African American sacred
dancing's postures, gestures, and movements would influence all American theatrical
dance and would eventually dominate American urban popular dancing even more
thoroughly than it had dominated some of the older plantation country dancing forms.4
Continuing for more than fourteen decades after the end of Reconstruction, Hoodoo's
impact on American literature, though significant, was less intense than its influence on
popular dance and music. The works of early writers such as Mark Twain, Charles W.
Chesnutt, William Faulkner, DuBose Heyward, as well as more recent ones like John Berendt
and Toni Morrison are noteworthy here. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's
slave character, Jim, lives in a world inhabited by witches, haints, signs, herbal medicine,
and magic. Through Jim we get a glimpse of the governing principles and scope of conjure.
Jim turns to the conjure tradition to interpret signs, cure rattlesnake bite, keep off the
witches, ward off loss, and deflect negative occurrences and bad luck. He lives by the
conjure code, and it informs much of his behavior and impacts upon those he encounters.
Young and impressionable, Huck Finn has absorbed many Hoodoo beliefs and practices
from Jim in the same manner that many whites, through close association with African
Americans, had learned certain Hoodoo practices. One such belief interpreted the presence
of spiders as a good-luck sign and clearly states that harming or killing one is destined to
bring the worse kind of bad luck to whomever committed the offense. Huck informs us:
Pretty soon a spider went crawling up my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit in the candle; and before I could budge it
was all shriveled up. I didn't need anybody to tell me that that was an awful bad sign and would fetch me some bad
luck, so I was scared and most shook the clothes off of me. I got up and turned around in my tracks three times and
crossed my breast every time; and then I tied up a little lock of my hair with a thread to keep witches away. But I hadn't
no confidence. You do that when you've lost a horse-shoe that you've found, instead of nailing it up over the door, but I
hadn't ever heard anybody say it was any way to keep off bad luck when you'd killed a spider.5

A thousand miles away and more than a century later, a very similar and culturally
tenacious belief would be echoed in the daily lives of Sapelo Island, Georgia, residents,
where sightings of “Aunt Nancy” the spider, were interpreted as an especially fortunate
occurrence portending good things to come—but killing Aunt Nancy made you highly
vulnerable to bad luck and could doom you to unfortunate, even deadly retribution. A
Sapelo Island resident reveals: “For good luck, there was that black cat, of course, and we
also had Aunt Nancy the spider. We called the spider An' Nancy. An' Nancy was quite wise.
You could play with that spider all day long but they would not let you harm An' Nancy. We
did not harm it, we did not kill it, we did not do anything to it. That spider brings you good
luck.”6 A retention from the Ghanaian Ashanti of the Akan nation, stories of the trickster,
Anansi, who comes in the form of a spider, was the subject of children's game plays in both
the American black belt South and the Caribbean where Anansi tales and stories shaped
the content of folk wisdom in the form of riddles, stories, and proverbs.
A focal point in much of Chesnutt's work, conjure, as Hoodoo is called there, acts as a
bedrock principle in the lives of his black characters. Hoodoo, or conjure, is the great
equalizer in the face of white supremacy's terrorizing power; when events take an
uncontrollable turn for the worse and circumstances seem insurmountable, conjure is the
next resort. Through Chesnutt's characters, we can see the post-Reconstruction world of
blacks and the deep intertwining of conjure in their daily lives. Through conjure, Chesnutt's
characters can become invisible to “patterollers” (slave patrollers), they can administer
medical treatments, ward off beatings, and guarantee justice. Born before the Civil War to
free Negro parents, Chesnutt was intimately exposed to the daily uses of conjure as an
alternative spiritual reality. His conjure tales reflect a well-organized spiritual philosophy
achieving centrality as a life-organizing, problem-solving, and meaning-attribution
principle. Through conjure, lives are made whole, loved ones are kept in one place and not
subjected to the master's will. In Chesnutt's work, conjure continually challenges the
assumptions of the dominant white world while Chesnutt's portrayals of conjure give us
additional information about its capricious nature. Functioning on the principles of balance,
reciprocity, and compensation, conjure can backfire and have unintended consequences, as
it does in Chesnutt's short story “Hot-Foot Hannibal.”
In this conjure tale, which demonstrates a traditional Hoodoo principle, the root pack or
goopher to make Hannibal, a slave well ingratiated to his master, “light headed” and “hot-
footed” is fashioned in the form of a doll with a cornstalk body, splinters for arms and legs,
elderberry pith for a head, and two little red peppers for feet.7 The goopher comes with
strict instructions for use, and the conjure woman explicitly states that when the work is
complete, the doll must be retrieved and returned to her: “Fer it's monst'us powerful
goopher, en is liable ter make mo' trouble ef you leabe it layin' roun.'”8 Through Chesnutt's
conjure tales, we learn something of conjure's boundaries expressed as time constraints,
location restrictions, constraints on duration, and periods of maximum and minimum
efficiency and effectiveness.
In another respect, Chesnutt's Hoodoo themes are particularly interesting when
compared with contemporary and traditional African religious belief. Noteworthy here is the
theme of a spirit embodied in a tree or bush. In one of Chesnutt's stories entitled “Po
Sandy,” Sandy, a hardworking, obedient slave, is turned into a tree so that he can stay in
one place and not continue to be hired out by his master. The hiring-out process took Sandy
away from his wife so often that she tired of the situation and she and Sandy agreed to
have the local conjure woman turn Sandy into a tree in the forest. Once he was turned into
a tree, Sandy could stay in one place. Eventually, through great difficulty and effort, Sandy
the tree is chopped down and sent to the sawmill where, because he is conjured, he breaks
the saws used in the milling process as workers attempt to cut him into planks. The sound
of the saw blade on Sandy's wood is said to sound like the wail of a human voice.9
According to author James H. Neal, he encountered a similar spirit bush while he was
stationed in Ghana working on a building project. During the course of building, a large
bush needed to be unearthed and removed. This feat would prove to be impossible. Try as
they might with the latest equipment, the workers could not unearth and remove the bush.
Finally a traditional priest was called and with alcohol and offerings persuaded the spirit of
the bush to go elsewhere. The bush was then removed by hand using no heavy
equipment.10
Faulkner's work references components from the old Hoodoo belief system. Statements
about “blue-gummed” Negroes, for example, though viewed as pejorative, reflect old
tradition Hoodoo belief in markings, particularly the belief in birthmarks. It was believed
that if a pregnant woman looked a blue-gummed Negro in the eye during the full moon, her
unborn child would be marked in some way, often by being born as a blue-gummed child.11
Best known for the 1925 novel Porgy and the 1935 Broadway folk opera Porgy and Bess,
author DuBose Heyward makes compelling use of Hoodoo traditional belief to more
completely and accurately portray southern African American life in his work. His short
story “The Half Pint Flask” uses Hoodoo burial tradition as a core element in the unfolding
of the story. In this tale, a visitor to the area removes a rare half-pint flask from a Negro
grave. This action proves to be a regretful faux pas for the visitor.12 Little did he know of the
old Hoodoo method of decorating a grave with beautiful items or items of significance in
the life of the deceased. Given to the dead, these items both honor them as ancestors and
appease the spirit of the departed. In the initial internment, the sacred counterclockwise
dance circle is convened as items are deposited on the grave; other items are added later.
The ritual surrounding the continuing decoration of grave sites often resembles ancestor
reverence practices in West and Central West Africa and proves to be an African American
remnant form of the ancestor institution.
John Berendt, in his best-selling novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
introduces the reader to a character named Minerva, a Hoodoo woman, alleged in the novel
to have been Dr. Buzzard's mistress. Minerva's Hoodoo work on behalf of the novel's
protagonist brings him to meet her in Beaufort, South Carolina, over Dr. Buzzard's grave.
Minerva's work results in a not guilty verdict in the protagonist's murder trial. Through
Minerva, the protagonist can access Dr. Buzzard's legendary power in the courtroom. Her
use in the novel is a pivotal point in this story filled with local color.13 For these five authors
—Chesnutt, Faulkner, Twain, Heyward, and Berendt—as well as numerous others such as
Ismael Reed, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Hoodoo as an important element in their
portrayals deepens and enriches their characters, setting, and tone and reveals a deeply
informative and essential cultural element rarely seen today by outsiders to working-class
black life.
Hoodoo references would also be used in monologues by performing comics. Richard
Pryor's monologue involving Miss Rudolph the conjure woman is one of his most widely
known and most entertaining. Pryor reveals a number of interesting observations on old
tradition Hoodoo's use of insects, spiders, and urine as well as the old practitioner's
willingness to accept alternative forms of payment, other than money, such as food items.
In this monologue, Miss Rudolph requests a “goose or a turkey” at Thanksgiving time as
payment for her services. This was typically true of old tradition plantation Hoodoos. The
significance and referencing of conjure would not end with an increasing number of literary
references or an abundance of blues lyrics; they would extend themselves into the 1970s as
black consciousness turned toward Africa. An example of Hoodoo's lingering influence is
evidenced in the naming and construction of a university research publication entitled Ju-
Ju. The title is taken from the following quote by black arts movement cofounder Larry Neal:
“We cannot abdicate our culture to those who exist outside of us. We should guard and
protect our culture viciously, and work critical ju-ju on those who screw up.”14 Portending
statements like this raise new possibilities for old tradition Hoodoo's rejuvenation and
fusion with the black consciousness movement. But the embracing of Hoodoo by black
nationalists would not occur in that cycle of the politicocultural movement. Instead, Islam
was seen by many as both a more viable spiritual alternative to “the white man's religion”
of Christianity and a revolutionary alternative to the conservative hold of Negro preachers
on the black spiritual community. Nevertheless, latter-day artists such as Renee Stout would
continue using Hoodoo as a source of creative inspiration.15
Having been freed from constraints imposed by chattel slavery, conjure after
emancipation would continue to figure significantly in black consciousness of self, family,
and community under the new freedom. Just as newly enslaved Africans brought their
historic memory of traditional African life with them into American bondage, the newly
emancipated slave retained and carried part of the enslavement experience into the
environment of freedom as well as into the next century. Since both the conjurer and the
belief in conjure were often maligned, creating and sustaining Hoodoo involved a battle of
spiritual and psychological energies for the ex-slaves as it had for their bondsmen
predecessors. Following Hoodoo's birth under bondage, a new and constantly shifting
battlefront for its existence would reinforce the belief that only through a highly adaptable
profile could Hoodoo sustain itself. Initially, Hoodoo's dynamic and ever-evolving roles were
partly a response to immediate as well as long-term needs among the bondsmen. Included
among those roles were religiomedical practitioners such as treaters, midwives, healers,
and slave “doctors.” These individuals continued to appear in the slave population, and
their overlapping roles as well as the role of conjurer would later broaden among freedmen
and become both stabilized and institutionalized within Hoodoo practice.
Hoodoo's first phase of development occurred under enslavement and ended with the
period surrounding emancipation. Hoodoo's second developmental stage began after
Reconstruction and continued until World War II. This period marked the birth and
development of marketeered Hoodoo, remodeled and controlled primarily by “middlemen
minorities,” in this case European Ashkenazi Jews who were outsiders to the Hoodoo
tradition, even as old tradition black belt Hoodoo was fully functioning among African
Americans. This second phase was roughly a seventy-year period that was distinguished by
the full emergence of both the conjurer/ treater as an independent practitioner and the
intensified homogenization of the three regional variations into one Hoodoo practice with a
newly emerging national African American profile; this second phase of development
occurred in two stages.
The second developmental period, particularly the last two-and-a-half decades preceding
World War II, was marked by Hoodoo's full entry into the mainstream commercial
marketplace, with full commoditization of many of its most publicly visible implements,
tools, and supplies as well as a proliferation of exploiters of various types. Early on during
this second developmental period, there is diversification and specialization by those
offering various types of Hoodoo services both inside of and outside of the African American
community; the conjurer often also functioned as a treater or folk doctor.
Often known as a root doctor, he or she, like their plantation counterparts, had the
knowledge of herbal medicines and could use plants, animals, and other objects to cure or
ward off illness or to attract good fortune. He or she was a master of spells and recipes—the
term preferred by old tradition Hoodoo workers—potions and amulets, and could use plants
and other objects not only to heal but also to cause harm. Supporting the root doctor's use
of Hoodoo herbal remedies, patent medicines were both extensively used and advertised in
early black newspapers in an attempt to reach black clientele. Already well established
among blacks, the herb and root tradition would face competition from medical
professionalization.
The role of conjurer doctor transferred directly and intact from slavery into the
postemancipation environment. In some instances, the role of conjurer would split into two
roles, and the two roles would not always diverge completely. In other instances, the dual
function of root doctor and conjurer would continue to further diversify into completely
separate roles, with the conjurer performing fewer and fewer of the healing functions and
the root doctor performing fewer and fewer of the religiomagical tasks. By relinquishing
more of the religiomagical functions, the root doctor could both function as an herbalist
and divorce himself from the association of Hoodoo with “devil's work,” a troublesome and
pejorative label that would stubbornly persist in more than a few quarters.
Early in this second stage, immediately following Reconstruction, there appears to be a
firm and visible stabilization of the old Hoodoo tradition resulting from the establishment of
new internal norms and conventions as well as the strengthening of existing ones. Couched
in a widely occurring transformative process, these modifications in the older plantation
Hoodoo tradition were in part the result of the unprecedented movement of hundreds of
thousands of newly freed slaves immediately following Emancipation. This massive
migratory movement of people rapidly transported regional Hoodoo customs and traditions
to new areas where they were quickly integrated into existing practice, contributing to a
newly emerging national rather than regional profile. The national identity of Hoodoo
parallels the redefinition of African American identity following Reconstruction. A new
African American national profile sparked by migration and movement toward urbanization
was influenced by forces similarly impacting upon Hoodoo. There was also further
diversification in roles related to Hoodoo as well as in the division of labor within Hoodoo
tradition, particularly between midwives-treaters and conjure men and the respective
traditions they represented.
It is in the early years of this second stage that Hoodoo established a durable national
profile as an African American spiritual-medicinal tradition while maintaining some
regional uniqueness. In this stage Hoodoo rapidly transformed into a self-contained national
African American institution complete with several divination systems, including the
walking boy, the dancing dime, bones, playing cards, dice, dominoes, as well as animal
signs such as low-flying birds and “frizzlie chickens” used as divination devises.
Incantations in the form of Christian prayer, particularly the Psalms, would eventually
totally replace the traditional West and Central West Africa chants and prayers. An example
can be seen in slaves' traditional use of Psalm 10 when requiring protection during travel,
especially when running away, Psalm 53 for God's divine protection, and Psalm 109 to
curse and damn those who are wrongdoers.16 Regional Hoodoo beliefs like the belief in
witches, haints, and demon spirits like Plat-eye, Robination Horse, Jingo's Horse, or
Hampshire's Horse spread. These spiritual entities were believed to be capable of changing
form and luring away or chasing its victim into danger, confusing the mind and leaving the
victim to die.17
There were sacred days in Hoodoo, particularly Friday, about which it was believed that
no new project or piece of work should ever begin. Established procedures for recruitment
and training of Hoodoo successors existed. They included training in the magical and
medicinal uses of plants and other substances as well as training in reading signs in nature,
such as in cloud formations and in the behavior of certain animals like barking dogs and
low-flying birds. During this period, there were also socially strengthened Hoodoo myths
and legends, some in the form of personal testimonials or syncretized African and perhaps
Native American and European folk beliefs and tales. These were often delivered as stories
like those of High John the Conquer, the fabled Dr. John of New Orleans, Marie Laveau, the
Seven Sisters of Algiers, famous East Coast Hoodoo legends Dr. Bug and Black Herman,18
and the most famous of them all, Dr. Buzzard of St. Helena Island, South Carolina.
Hoodoo truly had entered its golden age, and it had not yet fallen under the exploitative
and controlling influences of occult marketeers; it was largely an African American
dominated and controlled institution. Root doctors, midwives, conjurers, treaters, and those
doing “the work” gained increased access to other occult traditions and supply paths, and
all interfaced more freely than they had under slavery's inhuman confinement. Most locales
with significant black populations had someone who provided the community with Hoodoo
services. So a Hoodoo ritualist was available whenever the need arose. Some of them
became very well known both inside and outside of their regions. Their clientele usually
learned of them by word-of-mouth testimonials and referrals.
Early in this second stage, Hoodoo had its ritual practices and had achieved some degree
of consistency with respect to philosophy and material culture. Though limited, ritual
animal sacrifice, sometime performed at the crossroads, persisted. One observer leaves us
this account from 1891:
One terribly hot Sunday afternoon as I was sitting on the piazza, I happened to see at some distance through the pine
grove Uncle Robert and his two little grandchildren, and at first could not determine what they were doing. I soon saw
that the children were picking up leaves and small sticks and putting them on a pile under Uncle Robert's direction, and
presently I noticed a little smoke rising from it. Wondering what it could mean, I walked out towards them and saw a pile
of leaves and twigs around a small stake, the whole burning by that time quite briskly. “Isn't it hot enough to-day, Uncle
Robert, without building a fire? What are you doing?” “I'se offering a sacrifice.” “A sacrifice. What do you mean?”
“Why, you see, Mister Gus, the distemper has got among my chickens, and they are dying off fast. Now when that
happens, if you take a well one and burn it alive in the fork of a path it will cure the rest, and no more will die.”
I then noticed that he had built the fire in the fork of a footpath through the grove.”19

Though some regional variation still existed, implements, materials, formulas, incantations,
and initiation rites20 all attained a degree of widespread consistency across regions during
this phase. While some remaining African elements such as animal sacrifice were
eventually lost or discarded, other practices such as amulet making and knot tying
stabilized and remained part of the old black belt Hoodoo tradition. Black worship during
this period was already highly African, and there was a continual movement of both African
spiritual practices and approaches to worship into African American Christian worship. This
simultaneously resulted in the formation of both a new Hoodooized Christianity and a
nonchurch spiritual and controlling tradition.21
In the Hoodoo church, Hoodooized Christianity would become infused with African
American Hoodoo sensibility and practices from the African Religion Complex (ARC),
including water immersion, sacred dance, head shaving, spirit possession, faith or spiritual
healing, amulet making, and rites of passage. But other Hoodoo practices were also
dragged kicking and screaming into the black Christian experience, where they were
frequently contested and denounced yet precariously balanced between toleration and
condemnation. Hoodoo belief was so strong in some Afro-Christian churches that ministers
resigned their posts in acquiescence to the strength of Hoodoo belief in their
congregations. Consider the following passage from Newbell Niles Puckett written in 1922:
In a rural Negro church near Columbus, Miss., there was a constant change of ministers because of the reliance of the
congregation upon “jacks” (charms wrapped up in red flannel). A new minister was more quick-witted. He wrapped a
large hunk of coal in red flannel, planked it on the pulpit one night and said: “Folks, dis yere de daddy-jack I'se got. Bring
yo' baby-jacks on up.” The members of the congregation were afraid not to do this. Thus the minister found out who
had “jacks,” destroyed their charms, and was able to hold his position without further trouble.”22

One can speak of a Hoodoo-informed lifestyle developing and lasting in certain local and
black communities. In some of these communities, such as that found on Sapelo Island,
Georgia, everything was done under the canopy of luck and protection and laid upon a
foundation of sign interpretation, including dreams as signs.23 Though Hoodoo's early
religious components could not coalesce into a recognizably sustainable religion, as
traditional African religion did in the Caribbean and parts of Latin America, they heavily
influenced the foundation beliefs and life approaches of a majority of African Americans.
For most American blacks, the spiritual world in which they lived was one that included
both Christian practice and Hoodoo belief in a noncontradictory coexistence. Hoodoo belief
functioned as an epiphilosophical canopy and commonsense guide to life.
The early years of Hoodoo's second stage following emancipation was the period of
classical Hoodoo practice and refinement when it fully flourished in the postemancipation
era and achieved a national profile. It was this first phase of Hoodoo's second stage, the
years from emancipation up to the few years surrounding World War I, that both Zora Neale
Hurston and Harry Middleton Hyatt longed for but felt that they missed.24 During this time,
Hoodoo was freed from the legal bonds of plantation slavery and rural confinement as
independent Hoodoo practitioners emerged and began to strengthen the tradition while
developing Hoodoo as an African American community-owned commercial enterprise. The
tradition blossomed in response to the black community's tremendous psychoreligious
need during this postemancipation period of displacement, turmoil, upheaval, and change.
Some locations experienced such phenomenal growth in the number of Hoodoo
practitioners as to generate a concern for public safety. Speaking of the post-Reconstruction
proliferation of spiritual practitioners in New Orleans, Louis Pendleton had this comment:
“It has been stated that the number of Voodoo professionals among the negroes of New
Orleans was found to be so great in 1886 as to compel the Board of Health to interfere, with
a view to their suppression.”25
Following Reconstruction, the descendants of African slaves in America had a new
independence thrust into their lives as they became responsible for administering to their
own needs. A reign of racial terrorism gripped the black communities of the South
following emancipation and subjected the nation's newest citizens to the most brutal forms
of murder, public beatings, torture, lynching, and starvation; nevertheless, this period was
filled with both new fear and new hope. Harsh forms of repression touched all areas of
black life, coupled with public pogroms in which racists openly dragged thousands of
African American citizens from their homes and burned or otherwise destroyed their
property and murdered them and their families. The wider American society felt little
obligation toward its former chattel and outright denied people of African heritage refuge
from terror as well as life-sustaining materials and services, frequently thrusting them back
into the terror and to their own socially circumscribed, marginalized, and limited resources.
There were new contingencies to their existence, and the conjurer/treater was one sure
resource for dealing with instability, insecurity, poverty, and anxieties that invaded the lives
of African Americans of the period. Intensified community anxieties and concerns centered
on issues of securing a livelihood, family and marriage, health care, housing, police
harassment, legal issues, vigilante terrorism, and the numerous dangers of the new
freedom. All this was coupled with an onslaught of both public and private psychological
intimidation and economic crippling that constantly circumscribed and limited black
advancement while both state and federal governments turned a blind eye to the terror.
During this second stage of Hoodoo development, the divergence of roles between the
conjurer and the former plantation preacher gained higher visibility. Again, W. E. B. DuBois
leaves us this observation:
[T]he chief remaining institution was the Priest or Medicine-man. He early appeared on the plantation…. Thus, as bard
physician, judge, and, priest, within the narrow limits allowed by the slave system, rose the Negro preacher, and under
him the first Afro-American institution, the Negro church. The church was not at first by any means Christian nor
definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation,
and roughly designated as Voodooism. Association with the masters, missionary effort and motives of expediency gave
these rites an early veneer of Christianity, and after the lapse of many generations the Negro church became
Christian.26

Hoodoo's second phase was additionally marked by role diversification, specialization,

and increasing Christianization. Though neither the plantation preacher's work nor the
ordained reverend's calling was totally separate from many of the tasks and functions of
the conjurer, the African American preacher, as a separate role, firmly emerged during this
second phase of Hoodoo and presented itself as a full-blown alternative to the old-style
plantation conjurer. Further diversification and specialization were evident in the widening
split between medicinal herbalist, Hoodoo workers, lay midwives, and conjure women.
The diversification process, which early on marked this phase, temporarily expanded role
definition and the structure within which the conjurer operated; but a quick-following
period of specialization and disassociation limited conjure's purview and function.27 The
roles of preacher and conjurer diverged in a process, influenced initially by the same
regional variations that influenced the character both of early Hoodoo and of early black
Christian belief and worship. Significant numbers of early African American preachers
allowed, even maintained, traditional African spiritual practices, and many of them had and
today have a thorough knowledge of both Hoodoo and early African American Christian
practice. Under the protective canopy of the church, Hoodoo could maintain a connection
to a theological backdrop; in this context, one Hoodoo divinity, High John the Conquer, in
some instances became associated with and partially merged with John the Prophet. While
helping to define what Hoodoo was not, the early black folk preacher was essential in
forging a new Christianity, an African-influenced Christianity, a Hoodooized Christianity that
was socially flexible and fluid and would eventually find a future and permanent home in
both the Spiritual churches and the Sanctified Church that would develop in numerous
African American communities.28
Divergence in the roles of conjurer and preacher had begun during the enslavement
period with efforts aimed at Christianizing bondsmen. Christianization notwithstanding,
both bondsmen and freedmen insisted on adhering to both traditional African religious
patterns and their newly accepted Christian expression of faith; convening the sacred
circle, one of numerous African religious practices, was just one means of doing this. Born
in 1811, in Charleston, South Carolina, of free colored parents, Bishop Daniel Payne, sixth
bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal church and founder and first president of
Wilberforce University, leaves us this observation on African American response to
Christianization: “This young man insisted that ‘Sinners won't get converted unless there is
a ring…at camp meeting there must be a ring here, a ring there, a ring over yonder, or
sinners will not get converted.'”29
Shaving the head upon conversion, a practice known among traditional West and Central
West Africans, was another African religious pattern observed among American bondsmen.
Henry Brown, a fugitive slave, leaves this account of his sister's conversion experience:
“[S]he shaved the hair from her head, as many of the slaves thought they could not be
converted without doing this.”30 What did this head shaving mean? Were the converts
reenacting what remained of a traditional African ceremonial rite of passage transformed
into standard ARC practice and transferred into the early black Christian church, the
Hoodoo church? Probably so; because head shaving marks a number of African rituals and
rites, we can speculate with reasonable certainty about its African religious origins among
bondsmen in the United States.
Hoodoo practice was broadened and enriched as a result of the regional migration taking
place following the end of the Civil War. It took on a new profile as it repositioned itself to
address new needs and confront new environments and new expectations. Traditions and
practices that had been confined to isolated regions now became more available as freed
slaves migrated intra- and interregionally. Hoodoo practices and standardized conventions,
which prior to emancipation had been fairly isolated in Virginia or Mississippi were now—
more rapidly than ever before—encountering one another with increasing frequency in
cities such as Atlanta, Richmond, Montgomery, and Memphis and mixing with local Hoodoo
practice there. It was indeed the coming of the golden age of Hoodoo practice.
Gradual and protracted, Hoodoo's transformation into its urban counterpart was, as with
many institutions, uneven, so, too, with Hoodoo's movement into postemancipation black
cultural and religious arenas. Born of the rural environment, Hoodoo's existence and
survival in the city verified its adaptability and functionality. Prior to World War I, Hoodoo's
urban practice was barely distinguishable from the rural tradition that gave rise to it. The
site for the most potent African American cultural creation was still in the rural South, with
its high concentration of African Americans, but the mass migration process would create
similarly functioning sites in the urban North.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the increase in Hoodoo in the urban
environment, particularly in the North, forced certain changes and adaptations in its
practice. Changes such as the increasing use of both commercial advertising and
commercial supply houses and curio shops became more widespread. The older rural
Hoodoo men and women were skilled herbalists who supplied their own needs, rarely using
commercially produced supplies. These traditionalists were the direct carriers of a slowly
disintegrating, moribund African American herbal tradition sustained through a period of
forced enslavement. The urban practitioner, on the other hand, was far more dependent on
suppliers and was exposed to a higher rate of cross-fertilization from other spiritual
traditions than the rural conjurers and the rural Hoodoo tradition. By the 1930s, the old-
profile Hoodoo priest, also known as a swamper, would all but disappear. Zora Neale
Hurston leaves us this account of one of the last of the swampers, Dr. Duke: “Dr. Duke is a
member of a disappearing school of folk magic. He spends days and nights out in the
woods and swamps and is therefore known as a ‘swamper.' A swamper is a root-and-
conjure doctor who goes to the swamps and gathers his or her own herbs and roots. Most of
the doctors buy their materials from regular supply houses.”31 By the publication of this
account in 1935, the latter phase in the second period of Hoodoo's development, marked
by a proliferation of supply houses and urban clientele, conjure's older traditions were
giving way to a more specialized practice, limited and heavily commercial. This would have
indirect psychological impact. Participation in the mainstream marketplace, even if it were
only at a Hoodoo curio drug store or supply house, allowed blacks who had been, and in
most instances were still, marginalized economically and forced to the fringes of the
American mainstream marketplace to minimally validate their economic location and way
of life by buying from a store that targeted black specialty products. This dynamic was
exacerbated by mainstream white merchants who refused to trade with blacks, making the
reception in the Hoodoo shop all the more appealing.
By examining the visible practices of freedmen, their children, and their grandchildren,
one can draw a partial picture of the scope of Hoodoo's domain and reveal something of the
depth of Hoodoo's cultural penetration into black life as well as its level of social tenacity
during the postemancipation period. Some Hoodoo practices have direct African
antecedents, and depending on when they are first recorded, they allow us an extended
view backward into the invisible world of African American folk religion and magic. Other
practices were possibly derived from mingled European or Native American practices. Both
groups certainly had folk magic traditions that likely strengthened the spiritual context in
which Hoodoo could expand and flourish. Accounts from colonial records of European
settlers give vivid evidence of widespread belief in the supernatural, particularly witchcraft.
Witchcraft trials were well known and publicized throughout the colonies. Indeed the
evidence indicates that belief in fairies, hobgoblins, bugbears, willis, enchantment, witches,
and witchmasters was strong enough for there to be the official office of “witchfinder
general.”32 Beliefs in phenomena such as shape-shifting and existence of spirits were found
among the Native Americans. Speaking of the American aboriginal religious practice, Dr.
John Brickell leaves us this account from circa 1737: “These people [the Indian conjurers]…
are great Enchanters, and use many Charms of Witchcraft…. [I]t is reported by several
Planters in those parts, that they raise great Storms of Wind, and that there are many
frightful Apparitions that appear above the Fires during the time of their Conjuration.”33
Whatever the origin, many Hoodoo practices and beliefs with strong African antecedents
would persist into the twenty-first century; others would be lost in the massive dislocation
known as the great migration.
The African American mass migration from rural areas into the urban industrialized North
would transform Hoodoo practice as it would all other aspects of African American life.
Some practices transplanted easily to the new urban environment, others could not.
Practices that in the rural environment addressed both the individual as well as his
relationship with the community and the surrounding environment were often impossible
in the city, which dislocated the individual from nature. One such practice was the act of
erasing one's footprints or tracks.
Hoodoo adherents believed that a conjure fix, or spell, could be put on someone or, to use
the language of Hoodoo, “someone could work you” by either gathering the dirt tracks
where you had left your footprints or by dusting or pouring a mixture onto the footprint.
This magic was potentially more potent if the victim walked barefoot, leaving invisible
traces of perspiration and dead skin. This picking up tracks was easy to achieve in the rural
environment of an African village or rural southern community of unpaved dirt roads and
walkways. But in the urban areas, paved roads and walks as well as the more frequent
wearing of shoes made track gathering nearly impossible. Track gathering was the origin of
the commercially marketeered hot foot powder and would later be subtly and overtly
reflected in African American blues songs long after many blacks had given up the practice.
Chester Arthur Burnett, known to the blues world as Howlin' Wolf, reminds us of the
practice in one of his biggest hits, the Willie Dixon blues hit “Tail Dragger”:
I'm a tail dragger
I wipe out my tracks
I'm a tail dragger
I wipe out my tracks
When I get what I wont (want)
Lord I don't come sneakin' back34
Adherence to the Hoodoo belief system represented more than operationalized faith; it
provided an alternative reality paradigm. Throughout the black belt South, African
Americans could be observed at sunset sweeping or raking the dust yards and walkways
leading to their abodes; this activity was more than mere yard maintenance. Many
sweepers were ritually removing any tracks or family members' footprints before they
retired for the night, lest an evildoer pick them up while the family slept.
Track gathering was practiced throughout West and Central West Africa as an integrated
part of many of the traditional religions of the area. It should therefore not be surprising to
observe it in African American communities of the black belt South. The following account
tells us:
“Pickin' up tracks” is a common practice among the extremely superstitious, not only among negroes, but “po' white
trash” as well, who have presumably adopted it from the former by intimate association.
Not long ago great excitement prevailed in a country district in Mississippi, caused by a young negro woman who had
“picked up tracks.” It broke up families; everybody was afraid. Nobody knew whose track might be picked up next.
It seems that the young woman had a grudge of some kind against a man and a woman. She had followed them
and had “picked up their tracks.” Then she had gone off and buried the tracks she had picked up. She had put dog's hair
with the tracks of the man, and cat hair with the tracks of the woman. After that the man and the woman could not
live together anymore than a cat and dog could. They separated and the whole community was in an uproar. The
belligerents finally becoming awestruck at their own lawlessness, caused by fright, superinduced by superstition, agreed
to send for an old negro preacher who lived in an adjoining county, and who was popularly supposed to “have power
over evil spirits.” He came at their request, remained several days and finally succeeded, by some method known only
to himself in pouring oil on the troubled waters and in patching up affairs. The female originator of the trouble was
publicly rebuked as well as privately taken to task by the preacher; he visited among scattered members of families, and
by exhortation, public open-air service, and private lectures, restored peace once more. The most important of his
injunctions, and one that was strictly carried out under penalty of “a spell,” of undefined character, was that the girl dig
up the tracks and hair and burn the latter. The spell of “picked up tracks” can be destroyed only by fire.35

The incredible power of the gathered track was such that many African Americans deeply
feared being conjured by someone using their footprints. Again, Tom Peete Cross writing
about folk belief in North Carolina leaves us this account:
The same principle explains the terror with which the negroes and poor whites in some sections of the South regard
the action of “picking up tracks.” Because of their accessibility and their close association with the person, especially in
country districts where there is much traveling on foot and many people go barefooted, foot-prints are especially liable
to be used by witches in working their will upon the maker.36

Knowing the power of the gathered track, it is not surprising to find the deepest Hoodoo
believers among the elders, who sometimes carried old twig brooms with them to sweep
away their tracks if they traveled any distance by foot. One such individual, Aunt Memory,
was observed in Tallahassee, Florida. From the Florida State Archives we are left with this
account:
Aunt Memory was a negro slave in Tallahassee…. She walked with a drove of slaves from Virginia and was sold for
$800 at the age of 4 in Tallahassee…. [S]he acquired the habit of always carrying a satchel,…broom and a watering pot
wherever she went. The satchel was for gifts given her by the people for whom she did house work, but the broom and
watering pot were used to efface witch tracks. Small boys frequently placed suspicious marks at street corners and
watched her dispose of them. She had a well dug inside her house “so no niggers can witch my water.” She was a
Methodist and was allowed to sit in a special part of white church and take communion after others finished.37

Aunt Memory carried a broom with her to wipe out her tracks, thus assuring her immunity
from footprint conjure. She may well have been a conjure woman herself. She was observed
washing away and neutralizing suspicious marks at street corners, the site of the
crossroads, a sacred location in Hoodoo.
What was it about track gathering that people feared? It was common knowledge among
many older African Americans that the soul rested in the palms of the hands and soles of
the feet. Rubbing the palms together could activate or stir up the soul's special power.38
The belief in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet as conductors of the soul's unique
power was further manifested in the variety of Hoodoo signs associated with those body
parts.
 One of the most dreaded uses of the gathered track other than causing death was the
walkin' foot, a charm made in combination with ants, ant hill dust, or a red ants' nest.
Another greatly feared use of the gathered track was in combination with running or
flowing water, as in a stream or river. Both ritual charms were designed to compel the
target to leave and go elsewhere. But certain manipulations of the footprint could cause a
restlessness in which the victim was compelled to walk backward or in other strange
patterns at unusual and dangerous times, such as out in a rainstorm at midnight. As late as
the 1970s, according to some who knew him, one walkin' foot victim in the small East
Texas town of Leesburg was seen walking the same route daily against his will, no matter
what the weather. When the appointed time came, he appeared to be compelled by some
unknown force to walk the same pattern during several months as he gradually slipped into
insanity.39 The local two-head, Mr. L. J., was known to have one of the most powerful walkin'
foot charms available, but community members believed that someone other than Mr. L. J.
“worked” this victim.40
His methodological shortcomings notwithstanding, Harry Middleton Hyatt interviewed
Hoodoo adherents and practitioners from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Norfolk, Virginia, from
Brunswick, Georgia, to Memphis, Tennessee, and he collected and recorded various uses
and types of actions associated with the gathered track. Depending on the ritual and the
intention, gathered tracks could be used in a variety of ways, including to attract a new
lover, prevent a mate from straying, return a straying mate, drive off a rival, break up a
romantic union, gain power or control over someone, force someone to leave or stay away
from you, cause itching or unbearably hot feet, inhibit one's ability to walk, cause one to
travel constantly and wander aimlessly from one destination to another, induce insanity,
induce bodily weakness and wasting, and induce a general state of bad luck.41
Though track gathering has all but vanished or forcibly degenerated into the use of
commercial hot foot powder, Hoodoo practices such as the safeguarding of discarded hair,
menstrual flow, fingernails, and personal items such as underwear are still alive in the
second decade of the twenty-first century in African American communities. In earlier
times, hair trimmings that fell to the floor were gathered up and secured from conjure and
root work through various disposal techniques. Burning the hair was the easiest and most
often used method of secure disposal. Similar to the beliefs of their African ancestors, the
belief that one's hair could be used to harm, control, and manipulate the owner is deep-
seated and long standing even among many young African Americans. The practice is most
visible today in institutional contexts in which people are forced into close proximity with
one another, such as army barracks, prisons, or dormitories. In these contexts, African
American believers are more vigilant about hair disposal and often burn their hair in
discarded cans or in ashtrays. When questioned as to why they burn their hair, all revealed
that if an enemy obtained your hair they could “work you” or “put roots on you.” The hair
was not flushed down the toilet because it was and still is believed that sewer rats will get
it and use it to build a nest, resulting in the owner of the hair experiencing unexplained and
sudden headaches, blindness, insanity, or death. The same logic is applied to discarding
hair in the trash. It is believed that certain birds will use the hair in nest building, with
similar tragic results for the hair's owner. These practices are both in evidence today and
previously observed and recorded in various types of literature.
The increased mobility of freedmen after Reconstruction would certainly allow for
increased exposure and contact with other religions and spiritual practices as well as occult
traditions. One such source was certainly present in the many traveling tent shows, gillies,
or carnivals. In addition to featuring magicians, these traveling shows sometimes featured
occult artists such as Gypsies, palm readers, crystal ball gazers, fortune-tellers, Indian
medicine men, or even African witch doctors. On special nights designated for “Colored,”
African American consciousness of supernatural possibilities would encounter commercial
occultists at work who would expose blacks to new and often fabricated models of exotic
and spiritual presentation. This exposure would awaken the new marketing possibilities for
Hoodoo on the urban landscape. Internationally, the Western world's interest in the exotic
as a theme in theater, dance, music, literature, and painting during the period surrounding
World War I led to a proliferation of exotic stereotypes and images. The postemancipation
African American community was not unaware of these commercial themes, stock images,
and stereotypes, but they would run head on into them as the rapidly developing snake-oil
Hoodoo industry's exploitation of old plantation Hoodoo accelerated. Hoodoo was still
largely a black-controlled rural phenomenon during the first five decades following
emancipation; significant numbers of root work practitioners collected fresh roots and dried
them for storage. Frequently an older family member, often a female, had some knowledge
of roots and herbs and administered various treatments. Swampers still collected their own
roots, herbs, and other supplies themselves. A well-connected conjure doctor, root worker,
or two-head had access to a black-controlled underground supply network that included,
but was not limited to, midwives, apothecary workers, root diggers, gravediggers, and
undertakers. The supply network was an economic asset among poor blacks, providing
much needed economic resources in the highly charged racist atmosphere that outright
denied and limited African American life chances. Each type of Hoodoo traditional specialist
could and frequently did supply the conjurer with items that they had unique access to.
Midwives supplied cauls, afterbirths, and umbilical cords. Consider the following quote:
To “blin” a child, that is to ghosts, the caul should be kept; but were it lost, another caul might be secured, bought from
“de docter shop.” The doctor has a supply, because “dese midwife steal de chillun caul an' kyarry an' sell ‘em to de
doctor.”42

Even this marginalized pipeline to economic hope and access was attacked and
destroyed by marketeers who were well aware of the powerlessness of the recently
emancipated community. Enslaved African Americans and later free blacks working in
apothecaries had access to numerous supplies, including Hoodoo's most sacred root, the
legendary High John, also known as jalap. High John root was kept on hand in most
apothecaries for use in making laxatives. Gravediggers and morticians had access to
graveyard dirt, human remains, and personal articles belonging to the dead, all of which
were used in certain types of conjure work. Consider this article in an 1883 African
American newspaper: “James King and George Gaddis, negroes, were arrested Tuesday,
charged with robbing the grave of Mrs. Hattie Howell. They confessed the crime, informing
the officers that they stole the body for the purpose of securing the bones of the arm, which
they used in their profession of conjurers.”43
In addition to an underground network of suppliers, a well-connected, reputable conjurer,
Hoodoo, or two-head man or woman inherited the conjurer's “oral textbook” and practical
experience through apprenticeship, oftentimes in families. The secrets of Hoodoo were
guarded by the true old tradition practitioners, as access to spiritual power had been
carefully protected in traditional West and Central West African societies. Hoodoo priests
knew the guarded secrets and proper procedures for harvesting, processing, and working
certain roots, and they also knew the scope and specifics of each plant's power, were
knowledgeable of harvesting times and techniques, and knew which roots could be
harvested by human hands and which ones should be harvested by animals only. They
knew when to harvest for maximum effectiveness and knew the particulars accompanying
each plant, animal, rock, and twig. Roots that required harvesting by animals often were
extracted from the ground using an aged or ill dog or mule. A cord was tied to the animal
and attached to the plant, then the animal pulled the plant from the ground. Plants that
required this harvesting technique were believed to have the power to drain life force
energy from any living creature attempting to unearth them. So an animal near death from
ill health or old age, rather than a healthy one, was put at risk. Harvested thusly, these
roots were used only in the most serious life-and-death matters. Other plants were believed
to emit a scream or to cry tears when harvested. Still other plants like “wonder of the world
root” required that it be spoken to and ceremonially addressed before it could be harvested
successfully, lest it release forces that will harm whoever handles it.44 Like their traditional
African predecessors and their Native American counterparts, an African American conjurer,
well trained in the old tradition, believed in the life force potentiality in each sacred plant,
sacred animal, and sacred inanimate object.
Conjure and root work during the postemancipation pre–World War I period achieved and
maintained some degree of public legitimacy and visibility among blacks, enough for some
African Americans to feel no need either to conceal or to secret their belief in and use of
conjuring. This is made clear even in urban areas like late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia.
In W. E. B. DuBois's landmark study The Philadelphia Negro, at least two of his informants
openly list their occupation as root doctor.45 Though the rituals and practices of conjuring
and root doctoring were largely secretive and invisible, their quasi-public legitimacy among
blacks contributed to Hoodoo's vulnerability to middlemen minority exploitation and
detrimental mainstream market influence. It was well known among whites that significant
numbers of African Americans believed in supernatural phenomena such as spirits, root
work, Hoodoo, and conjure. With a large pool of believers and no formalized power to
regulate either Hoodoo development or its uses and practitioners, this struggling tradition
was especially vulnerable to pitchmen and other types of appropriative exploitation. And no
exploiters were more skilled than the immigrating middlemen minority European
marketeers.
Prior to emancipation, the black community had very much been a part of the plantation
and frontier health care tradition, heavily contributing its traditional healing principles and
techniques while developing new ones. But the first two decades following emancipation
witnessed the birth of two divergent and competing lines of Hoodoo development: one, the
old tradition of African root doctor/conjurer from the plantation, the other, an exploitative
quasi rendering of the tradition from primarily middlemen minority marketeers, the
traveling medicine shows, and other similar related venues that reached a peak in
popularity during this period.
Following emancipation, Hoodoo was essentially an internally contained “race product,”
and neither its magical practices nor its naturopathic medicine aspect was yet fully
exploited by hucksters, dream merchants, snake-oil salesmen, spiritual merchants, or con
artists, and the practice of healing was not yet regulated by a medical establishment. The
result was that in the rural segregated community, one could find either a reputable two-
head doctor or a local root worker through personal referral. The American medicine show,
its imitators, and its spin-offs would, in some areas, challenge those traditional networks.
But no challenge was as great as that posed by the middle minority manipulators and
exploiters of Hoodoo.
To attract potential customers, the American medicine show took on elements of the Wild
West show, the carnival, the circus, and the healing center. It was not beyond exploiting
any and all cultural themes or traditions to make money. Indians, both Native American and
Hindu, were frequently portrayed on advertising handbills distributed prior to the show's
arrival in town. Often a medicine show featured someone dressed as and impersonating a
Native American medicine man. Native Americans, like African Americans, certainly had
acquired a widespread reputation and acceptance as adept healers, so their presence at
medicine shows and their appearance on advertising handbills served to legitimate the
snake-oil sales pitch.
Both African Americans and African witch doctors, like other exotics, Arabs, Hindus, and
Native Americans, were often portrayed by white minstrels in blackface. White people in
the United States had enjoyed blackface portrayals of African Americans since Lewis Hallam
“performed a ‘drunken darky' act on the American stage in 1769.”46 But it would not be
until 1829, nearly sixty years later, before the blackface minstrel prototype known as “Jim
Crow” would be portrayed by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, a white man. Instantly popular, Jim
Crow was copied, imitated, and embellished. With his immense popularity, he was a fine fit
in the medicine show or among other types of pitchmen and ballyhooers. According to
medicine show historian Ann Anderson:
Minstrelsy was easily incorporated into medicine shows. Blackface comedy dominated most medicine shows even after
minstrel companies per se were in decline. The bright, upbeat shows were the sort of simple, nontechnical fare that
Main Street loved, and the producer could insert a medicine pitch at any point…. A typical medicine-minstrel show might
have begun with the tried-and-true fake stabbing to draw the crowd. Then a banjo solo and a big musical number with
the whole cast might follow…. After that, there were the specialty bits like magic, mind reading, or ventriloquism.”47

Though the pitchmen, hucksters, and snake-oil industry had no access to Hoodoo's deep
ceremonial nature, herbal treatments, myths, beliefs, procedures, and practices, their
misportrayals and exploitation of aspects of the Hoodoo tradition ultimately exercised
influence on public discourse, opinion, and expectations. By selling amulets, mojoes, and
“luck bags,” which they had neither authority, traditional training, community grounding,
nor experience in making, they helped both to transform the Hoodoo tradition and to
contribute to an atmosphere of distrust, denigration, and opposition to Hoodoo while
fostering a misshapened portrayal of Hoodoo in the imagination of a significant percentage
of their displaced and well-fleeced audience. Traditionally, only the conjurer, root doctor, or
two-head could make effective mojoes because only the conjurer knew the incantations,
prayers, herbs, and rituals necessary to empower the charm. Only a called, trained, and
anointed Hoodoo priest or priestess could prepare an authentic, traditional, and effective
mojo bag and instruct the client in its care and uses. Blacks were especially vulnerable to
marketeers who had both racial and economic power over them.
Before the takeover of Hoodoo by marketeers, there were different types of mojoes,
tobies, jacks or luck bags, depending on the purpose for which it was constructed. One
type, a luck ball, was carried for general protection. To empower the mojo, the owner was
instructed in how to enliven, sustain, and strengthen the charm. A close, personal
relationship was established between the charm and owner; the charm was protected,
cared for, and fed in fashions similar to those performed in many parts of West and Central
West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Originally encased in either leather, shells,
seeds, or raffialike grass, African American mojoes eventually turned to cloth as the outer
containment bag. Charms to attract, repel, or control another were often named for their
target, while charms constructed for personal protection were often named for the owner or
a revered protective ancestor. Mary Alicia Owens leaves us this account of old Aunt Mymee
and her luck ball, which she named for herself and fed once a week:
…of which was the loss of her most powerful fetich, the luck-ball she had talked to and called by her own name as if it
were her double…. “What are you doing, Aunt Mymee?” “Gwine to gib Lil Mymeeer drink….” “Shall I bring you a gourd
of water?” “No, honey. Lil Mymee, she don' sup watteh,” said Aunt Mymee, lifting a dirty little yarn ball out of the dirty
little linen bag. “She sup wut Big Angy name eau-de-vie, an' datsholy am de wattehob life foh huh, kaseef she don' git
un she die.” Aunt Mymee produced a black bottle of Little Mymee's elixir of life, better known to the general public as
whiskey, and proceeded to moisten, first the ball, then herself therewith; after which ceremony she restored the ball to
its proper receptacle, mended the broken string,…and made it an ornament to her person by slinging the string over
her right armpit. She had, beforehand, be it understood, slipped out of her various waists of her raiment, so that the
ball should lie against her naked body, with no intervening fold of calico or flannel to absorb its “strenk.”48

After emancipation, African Americans had worked often in all-black medicine shows,
tent shows, and gillies that played to segregated audiences. There was one outstanding
exception, Jim Ferdon of Litchfield, Illinois, who impersonated a Quaker to sell his cures.
Described as “the most blatant of the religious medicine show cons,”
Ferdon's show was much more lively than a real Quaker meeting, but audiences didn't seem to mind the discrepancy.
After years of Indian shows, they were charmed by the novelty. He toured the midwest with an African American
quartet dressed in the latest fashion: bulldog yellow shoes, three-inch collars, and wide-brimmed fedoras for the men,
leg o' mutton sleeves, wasp waists, and peek-a-boo hats for the women. Ferdon was one of the few medicine
showmen who had a mixed-race troupe. They were quite a spectacle in a region that didn't see many African
Americans—or Quakers, for that matter. They carried their own stage, which consisted of a large platform surrounded
by high canvas walls.49
Contact with pitchmen, hucksters, and the exotic themes they employed was one conduit
through which the Hoodoo folk tradition would be turned into a field of exploitation, dream
salesmanship, and in many instances outright thievery of tradition as well as money. J. C.
Julian, an oil field worker near Seminole, Oklahoma, took the nickname “High-John-the-
Conquer” and sold mojoes and toby charms as a sideline; he used the following snake-oil
sales pitch:
Put up and built by the Seven Sisters at the Crackerjack Drug Store at New Orleans, Louisiana. My Toby will bring you
Honor, Riches, and Happiness. It will help you Win in all Games. It will bring you Health and Wealth. It will Protect you
against Evil Spirits and Witchcraft. Thieves nor Enemies cannot bother you. Now listen, everything you turn your hand to
Prospers you and makes you Money. You succeed in your Trade, Job, or Business. You got Seven Wishes to make with
each Lucky Bag. Hold the Bag in your Left hand, blow your hot breath on it Three times, and Make your Wish, and see if
it don't come to Pass before the Seventh day is gone.
To hold your True Loved one. To get anyone you love. To Protect yourself against all Law. To Kill all Voodoo and
Witchcraft. Buy a toby. Just One Dollar. And if you ain't satisfied with my Toby, I give you your Money Back. Don't be
Foolhardy. Don't run no Risk. Keep a Toby on your person all the Time. Just One Dollar. But it's worth Fifty.50

While the true keepers and practitioners of Hoodoo's old tradition fought for its survival,
they were overwhelmed in the deluge of oppositional and undermining forces, including
attacks from certain Christian fronts, bastardization of its practices, and an association with
trickery and con artistry. Prior to the appropriation of traditional Hoodoo charms by the con
industry beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo had little, if any,
identification with con artistry, with superstition perhaps, but not with outright deception
and financial trickery, at least not yet.
As the racial terror of the black belt continued to escalate, the great migration
intensified; urbanization and movement northward would displace some of the migrants
from their traditional web of tried and trusted old tradition Hoodoo contacts, leaving them
potentially vulnerable to con artists and market forces beyond their control. With at least a
temporary loss of network, migrating blacks had to reconstruct a partial web of contacts in
the new environment. How was this to be done? Hoodoo believers and practitioners had no
formal advocates, no formal institutional structures, and no nationally organized hierarchy
and regulatory body. Hoodoo's presence was visible to some and invisible to others. An
example of its most visible public presence is described by Clyde Vernon Kiser in his
landmark study of early-twentieth-century migrants from St. Helena Island, South Carolina,
to Harlem, New York. Virtually indistinguishable from each other in some contexts, the old
plantation Hoodoo tradition and the turn-of-the-century snake-oil Hoodoo competed for the
potential market represented by both newly freed and migrating blacks. Both traditions
brought their appeal directly to the potential consumer, as demonstrated by this
statement:
It is almost impossible to go through Harlem, especially on Saturday afternoon when the streets are filled, without
encountering several quack doctors surrounded by the curious and gullible. Some display well-worn charts of the human
anatomy and by help of a pointer, indicate to the on-lookers the supposed nature of certain diseases and the reasons
why potions, herbs, and salves can eradicate the ailments. Others seek to draw a crowd by exhibiting snakes wrapped
around their necks, and by performing sleight of hand. Some venders are white, some black, but apparently the most
successful are the light West Indians who pose as East Indians. Nor is quackery confined to medicine for the cure of
physical ailments. At 162 West 129th Street, the following sign was displayed in an apartment window: “Prof. Ed.
Barritt, School of Metaphysics, Spiritual Messenger, and Divine Healing Meetings.” A few steps beyond and across the
street was another placard in an apartment window, “Zandros Good Luck Incense Sold Here. 25c a can.”51

In the urban North, the problem of locating an independent conjurer or root worker was
partially solved as it had been in the rural South, by word-of-mouth reputation. But the
urban environment offered the exploiters, imitators, and con artists a new entrée into the
black community through print media advertising, especially magazines and newspapers.
Competing with the old tradition, the snake-oil Hoodoo industry was the first to use
commercial supply houses and would come to heavily exploit the increasingly present print
media. Appealing primarily to both an illiterate and a semiliterate clientele, snake-oil
Hoodoo and its peddlers would benefit from and take advantage of the push toward
increasing literacy that occurred in the black community during this period. They did so by
advertising in African American newspapers.
Not long after 1877, the year marking the end of Reconstruction, there was a noticeable
increase in ads for spiritual services in African American newspapers. Like the beginnings of
the great migration, the earliest ads were few and of limited use or influence. The old
plantation Hoodoo tradition was still intact, self-contained, virtually self-supporting, and
nearly independent of mainstream market forces. The earliest print media targeting black
potential spiritual clientele that this author found was in the New York journal The Rights of
All on Friday August 7, 1829 (vol. 1 no. 4). The advertisement for “Sarah Green Indian
Doctress” informs her friends and clients of her new location. Undoubtedly a root doctor,
she claims through her ad that she can cure a range of maladies, including piles, smallpox,
and “Bite of mad dog.” Perhaps she was a black Indian; nevertheless, her claim of Native
American identity is intended to legitimate her claims at doctoring.
Prior to World War I, the African American population in the North was small compared to
the numbers of blacks who were still in the South, but those less numerous, northern
blacks were significant enough to support black newspapers in cities like New York,
Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. The number and types of ads would increase
by leaps and bounds as the southern black population in the urban North increased.
Newspapers and other print media would bring snake-oil Hoodoo's appeal and hook directly
into previously inaccessible areas like black-owned businesses and households.
The pre–World War I ads were few and less elaborate than the later ads, but their snake-
oil veneer clearly established a pattern that would influence future spiritual advertising
aimed at blacks. The postemancipation pre–World War I ads would chart the course, set the
style, and establish the conventions of future Hoodoo ads. The growing southern and
northern black urban presence would find itself in a mutually reciprocal relationship with
spiritual and occult traditions other than Hoodoo and Christianity. Unable to sustain
autonomy from market influences, Hoodoo found itself mixing with and having an impact
on other traditions as well as popular trends; astrology was one such influence.
Unknown in plantation Hoodoo, astrology or “planet reading” began soon after the end of
Reconstruction to openly influence the newly developing urban variant of old tradition
Hoodoo. As early as 1879, ads for a practitioner who combined psychic mediumship with
root doctoring and astrology appeared in a Baltimore newspaper that served the black
community, thus potentially expanding his clientele and establishing the framework to lay
claims of increased power and effectiveness. Both the patent medicine ads and snake-oil
handbills had established an easy path on which outside traditions and influences would
enter Hoodoo and enable it to gradually replace aspects of the declining rural old tradition.
A natural decline in the rural-based Hoodoo, resulting from increasing urbanization and
transplantation northward would leave sociocultural crevices, holes that would be partially
filled by the integration of external traditions and outsider influences and information. The
opportunity for a commercial supply industry, supplying both traditional and snake-oil
Hoodoo workers and their clients, would be seized and exploited. There were several books
openly advertised in pre–World War I black newspapers that would become considerably
influential among some urbanized Hoodoo practitioners. These texts would support the
newly developing urban snake-oil Hoodoo to further disconnect from the old tradition while
allowing certain practices to strengthen their relationship within the black church as a
result of their alleged Old Testament legitimacy. Salesmen of The Sixth and Seventh Books
of Moses, Albertus Magnus, and Long Lost Friend vigorously sought the African American
market, and these texts were actively advertised in black newspapers and promoted. The
following ad was in the local news section of a 1912, pre–World War I issue of the
Pittsburgh Courier: “Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses,” “Albertus Magnus,” “Long Lost
Friend” At Mount's Old Book Shoppe, 626 Penn Avenue.52
As the more earth-based aspects of old tradition Hoodoo proved unsustainable in the
northern urban environment, Hoodoo transplanted northward as well as to southern urban
areas and would become more dependent on outsiders and outsider traditions and
influences for procedures, incantations, prayers, paraphernalia, and supplies. The transition
from the old tradition to the new marketeered urban Hoodoo was partly facilitated by the
patent medicine industry that legitimized root doctoring and homemade medicine
treatments. Like the ads for patent medicines, many of the ads for Hoodoo specialists
emphasized their adeptness at treating both physical and spiritual concerns; these ads,
their frequency, variations, and intensity would increase as the twentieth century dawned
and unfolded. Influenced by its proximity to the rural community, southern urban Hoodoo,
capable of stronger resistance to marketeering, faired better and sustained its connection
to its rural parent longer and more intensely than the rapidly transforming northern urban
form. But it also would eventually be altered by the forces of both the cultural marketplace
and the great migration as urbanized Hoodoo, black Christian practice, snake oil, and the
old tradition cross-fertilized and competed with one another for both “the souls of black
folks” and their pocketbooks. The migration into both southern and northern urban areas
provided a ready-made and potentially exploitable economic community. Coping with new
pressures and driven by the desire to improve their lot in life, black migrants wrestled with
whether to retain or discard Hoodoo as a relic of their former lives, lives filled with racial
oppression in its most hopelessly barbaric form.
Some Hoodoo believers and practitioners viewed Hoodoo and Christian practices as
complementary parts of a whole. Hoodoo's presence was justified then as it is today by the
tenet that root work and spirit work are complements to God's power through the church
but that the totality of God's power is disbursed and not totally located in church ritual,
belief, and practice. Hoodoo philosophy, the oral text that sustained and justified its
existence and that explained its motives and the spiritual foundation for all Hoodoo
procedures, evolved as migration, urbanization, modernization, commercialization, and
fragmentation all pulled to disconnect urban Hoodoo from the old plantation tradition. The
post–World War I social environment would witness an intensification of all these trends.
The confrontation between Hoodoo and its opponents, detractors, and undermining
influences was nowhere more protracted than in the context of the black church. A
previously cited account illustrates the depth of tension and contestation that Hoodoo
believers experienced; they viewed their mojo bags, jacks, or tobies as spiritually essential
to their role in black Christian worship and they carried them to church. I turn again to a
previously quoted passage in which Newbell Niles Puckett reminds us:
In a rural Negro church near Columbus, Miss., there was a constant change of ministers because of the reliance of the
congregation upon “jacks” (charms wrapped up in red flannel). A new minister was more quick witted. He wrapped a
large hunk of coal in red flannel, planked it on the pulpit one night and said: “Folks, dis yere de daddy-jack I'se got. Bring
yo' baby-jacks on up.” The members of the congregation were afraid not to do this.53

The dynamic tension of this passage fades into poignant irony upon closer examination.
Only a technique that acknowledges and uses the power of the Hoodoo jack could rid this
Christian congregation of their traditional African charms, known here as jacks.
In addition to jacks, other practices, characteristics, and aspects of African traditional
religion would move from old tradition Hoodoo ritual and worship into the black church.
The use of at least two types of sacred voice—a voice that was nasalized toward falsetto
and a second gravelly voice—would move from the traditional African priest and other
sacred workers into plantation Hoodoo and finally into the black Christian pulpit. But their
movement would not settle there, like the Ring Shout, sacred voice would move into black
secular song and eventually become a hallmark convention of stylized blues singing, while
falsetto voice, observed in the Yoruba cult of Osayin, as an example, would reach a new
widespread popularity nearly a century later in the doo-wop rhythm-and-blues songs of the
1950s and early to mid-1960s.
Certain modes of speaking and pronunciation would be imprinted on black Christian
worship early on, with the plantation conjurer assuming a leadership role in accepting and
converting to Christianity. In the religious dialogue between the leader and the
participants/congregation, there was the use of elongated vowel emphasis to establish
rhythm in their incantations, invocations, and prayers. These conventions would transfer
from Hoodoo into the black church as part of the style and character of black worship,
particularly black preaching. But as some African Americans slowly and painfully struggled
to publicly legitimize their existence and to become more assimilated, some of them would
relinquish these traditional conventions in their worship styles.
The division between the root doctor and the conjurer would become even more
entrenched reflecting the pressure from the black church and the movement toward
specialization and professionalization that generally marked the period. Some root doctors
would become known as expert herbal healers, like Dr. James Still. Specializing in natural
treatments and naturopathic healing, “Dr. James of the Pine Barrens” empowered his
treatments with a spiritual component, his strong belief in prayer, and the sacred healing
power of nature as created by God.54 Other two-heads made the conscious decision to
relinquish the supernatural work and to pass on only the medicinal healing aspect of their
folk religioscience.

Hoodoo healing symbol. This symbol was traced in the sand by an enslaved woman whenever she experienced a pain in her
side.

Despite all that raged around them and tore at the fringes of an unraveling tradition, in
some rural areas the older plantation Hoodoo traditions would continue. Some African
Americans would still call their infant's name in the crossroads.55 Others wore the African
healing string tied with sacred healing knots.56 Others engaged in sacred healing symbol
manipulation. Ruby Andrews Moore leaves us this account of a rarely observed and
recorded healing symbol used by bondsmen and their descendants. Entranced and using
an unintelligible incantation, the afflicted woman knelt and drew a symbol in the sand.
One negro woman suffered a pain in her side, which she firmly believed to be the work of a witch. To exorcise the pain,
when it grew severe, she went out into the yard, got on her knees in the sand, and making the following figure of as
large dimensions as she could without moving, muttered words to herself that I could never find intelligible, indeed,
barely audible, and she would never enlighten me when I asked what she said. Below is the figure she made, very
slowly, with her eyes “set,” and an intense expression on her face. When she had made a certain number of lines the
pain ceased, she said. It appeared that the same number was not always requisite.57

Still others considered the water from the forging process sacred, as it had been regarded
by their African ancestors, and they used that water in their church's indoor baptism pool
when the practice of baptizing in the river significantly declined. Elsie Clews Parsons tells
us: Just as they have “cut out” “baptizin in de riber.” They now baptize in a pool in the
church with water from the foundry.58
Though transformation bore down on it, the old tradition sought and found refuge in the
rural community of practitioners who would extend, but would not be able to permanently
sustain, its life in the face of accelerating urbanization and targeted commercialization
occurring between the two world wars in the latter half of Hoodoo's second stage.
 THE DEMISE OF DR. BUZZARD
Black Belt Hoodoo between the Two World Wars

The period between World Wars I and II would play host to diversification in spiritual
merchandising that contributed to an ever-strengthening subversion and undermining of
Hoodoo's traditional old black belt practice. Aspects of the black belt Hoodoo tradition that
the snake-oil industry could not exploit would begin a slow transformative decline into
increasing invisibility while the spiritual merchants would marketeer Hoodoo merchandise
into a lucrative and full-blown industry. The all but complete domination of the Hoodoo
marketplace by spiritual merchants and marketeers produced a transformation in Negro
supernatural folk knowledge. But the marketeers were merely one active and essential
element in the transformation process. Another element was the medical community's
attack on midwifery, Hoodoo's thriving and powerful link with the black folk medicine
tradition. Marketeers could not penetrate and control this aspect of the old black belt
Hoodoo complex. The medical establishment's attack contributed to the destruction of lay
midwifery, an institution that controlled a wealth of sexually specific root and herbal
knowledge as well as tradition. This destruction further disrupted the Hoodoo supply
network and terminated the supply line in items such as cauls, placentas, and umbilical
cords controlled by the midwife-conjure woman.
Old tradition Hoodoo was not an exception to the cultural change and further
homogenization that was in process throughout the United States. American regional
culture across the board would continue to become more homogenized and more national
in its potential scope. As cultural access across regions became increasingly available, deep
ethnic as well as regional uniqueness would become less encompassing while still retaining
some core differences, but within an intensifying national identity. With the coming of
railroads, radios, automobiles, movies, dance halls, company catalogs, print media,
airplanes, standardized public education, and the birth of a free-floating, urban, popular
culture consumer, Americans were becoming more similar; they could engage in similar
experiences across regions. The two great wars that framed the period would further
contribute to an intensification of national identity as they called forth national over
regional loyalty, sentiment, and identification.
The three regional black belt Hoodoo clusters experienced a widening access to one
another's unique Hoodoo expression in both the South and the North. This had a twofold
effect. It enabled Hoodoo to resist and decelerate the limiting commercial standardization
process by increasing regional diversity through exchange, but it also gave a unique
visibility to those elements of Hoodoo that were not regionally specific and were widely
known across regions. In some regions, Hoodoo recipes called for the use of local plants or
other natural substances. These local supplies would not prove to be nationally
recognizable and therefore were less marketable. In all three regions, certain aspects of
Hoodoo would become even more visible in the era of Dr. Buzzard. Though it remained
alive, Hoodoo's old tradition would be further weakened and would continue to slowly
contract and transform as market forces as well as economic and social pressures mounted
on the back of this highly vulnerable and exploitable tradition.
Advertisements in black print media for Hoodoo services, a trend started in the
nineteenth century, increased dramatically during the period following World War I. Ads
that targeted the primary areas addressed in Hoodoo ritual, including love, health,
sexuality, finances, jobs, and legal trouble or court cases appeared in black print media,
particularly newspapers and magazines. The marketeers addressed every area except that
which was a central theme in plantation Hoodoo: protection from whites and their violent,
controlling, and exploitative behavior. Most of the Hoodoo ads appropriated and
emphasized several catchphrases and fictive kinship names frequently used in African
American churches. Fictive kinship titles such as “Mother,” “Brother,” or “Sister” would
serve not only to identify the ad's owner as a Hoodoo practitioner, but also to signify a
connection with a church or sacred tradition, thus legitimizing the practitioner. Phrases
such as “have you lost your nature?” “do you have bad luck?” or “are you in legal trouble?”
served a similar purpose: getting the attention of a believer in need.
Hoping to exploit and benefit from the Hoodoo belief system, the practitioners behind the
ads cast a wide net of appeal by advertising in the black print media of several cities
simultaneously as well as carrying on a brisk mail-order trade. Targeting the dramatically
increasing urban black population, ads appealing to Hoodoo believers appeared in all major
black newspapers. Continuing, reflecting, and expanding the trend begun before World War
I, ads appeared in The Cleveland Gazette, The Chicago Defender, The Baltimore Afro-
American, The Richmond Planet, The New York Age, The Amsterdam News, The Washington,
D.C. Colored American, and numerous other African American newspapers. Exemplifying
this expanding trend in mail-order Hoodoo, The Chicago Defender in the 1930s carried an
ad for “The Real and Original D. Alexander,” whose address was listed as 200 West 135th
Street in New York City, more than a thousand miles away. Another ad was for M. Williams,
whose address was listed as 901 Bergen Ave. in Jersey City, New Jersey. In addition to the
Hoodoo ads, there was an assault of ads for spiritual mediums, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants,
“old Indian herb medicine men,” and astrologers. In addition, ads for horoscopes, occult
books, Hindu occult secrets, Egyptian talismans, Hindu magic mirrors, lucky hands, New
Orleans luck powder, and root and herbal treatments and cures, all appeared in black
newspapers between the world wars. The presence of these ads intensified and diversified
the spiritual atmosphere in which both commercially marketeered Hoodoo and old tradition
Hoodoo would compete to exist. Hoodoo's urban face would find itself submerged in an
ever-changing sea and spiritual marketplace in which both access to supplies and
competition with outsiders and nonbelievers for clients were challenging Hoodoo's once
exclusive and self-sustaining supply market. Urbanized Hoodoo would experience a
dynamic tension between its plantation origins and the contemporary urban marketeer-
controlled marketplace. But the marketplace was limited in what it could offer and would
eventually impact upon the direction of Hoodoo's urban development, severely
circumscribing and transforming it. It was indeed a hostile takeover.
Spiritual merchandising by nonblacks would reach a plateau in the 1930s, 1940s, and
early 1950s as the black urban population continued to increase.1 Once they were carried
to the cities, the old practices, legends, and beliefs did not die immediately. Instead they
changed, metamorphosing into urban forms, as did other core aspects of African American
culture such as music and dance. But unlike music and dance, old tradition Hoodoo could
not hold its own against the negative undermining onslaught of outsider influences and
marketeers. Negro dance and music had few successful imitators and external competitors
during this time, but this was not true for Hoodoo, which faced both pressure and
condemnation from some Christian quarters. Other competing philosophies as well as the
spiritual merchants sought to control the trade in Hoodoo supplies. For many of the new
migrants, the urbanized marketeered Hoodoo, with its almost total use of warehoused and
commercially supplied roots and herbs, was insufficient when compared to the freshly
harvested supplies and personal touch, cultural familiarity, and modes of community
exchange of the old swampers. Though a number of these commercial establishments
attempted to personalize their services by offering readings in a private area of the shop
such as a back room, the down-home personal touch could not be duplicated in the
commercial atmosphere of the white-owned Hoodoo drugstore or the curio shop with its
comings and goings of customers. Even the fresh herbs of the urban root peddlers2 could
not keep pace with the demand and would eventually fade away. In addition, the newly
acquired urban veneer of northern spiritual workers—particularly the snake-oil variety, who
often combined forms of exoticism such as Islamic names, East Indian or Sikh turbans,
contrived accents, Gypsy palm reading, and astrology as well as other spiritual and occult
forms—often lacked appeal to the older southern-born Hoodoo believers. Many of the older
migrants were unimpressed with the slick marketeering that had invaded northern urban
Hoodoo. Consequently, many of them journeyed back to the black belt South where they
believed they could find a purer and more powerful genuine carrier of the old tradition.
Many East Coast residents found themselves journeying to St. Helena Island, South
Carolina, seeking the Hoodoo services of Stepheney Robinson, America's most famous root
and conjure doctor.
Known as Dr. Buzzard, Robinson built a reputation that spread far and wide up and down
the eastern seaboard; he worked the old tradition as his enslaved African grandfather had
taught him to. His conjure was free of exotic influences, he used only noncommercial
products, he was a living link with the old plantation Hoodoo folk religion, and his life
spanned Hoodoo development through several of its rapidly changing stages. Because both
Robinson's father and his son-in-law and great-grandson were all known as Dr. Buzzard,
there is sometimes confusion about the identity of the practitioner under discussion. The
title as it applies to Robinson's progenitors had to have developed and remained well
established in the plantation culture of African American bondsmen. The name Dr. Buzzard
functions here as more of a title than a name. Probably derived from a commingling of
African and Native American religious elements, the notion of the buzzard as spiritually
significant can be found in both traditional West African culture and among southeastern
Native American ethnic groups. Discussing Cherokee animal lore, Gayle Ross reflects: “Each
animal had its place. Buzzard was known as a great doctor, while Turtle knew the secrets of
conjuring. Frog was to marshal at the council house. Rabbit's job was to be the
messenger.”3
The exact date of Stepheney Robinson's birth is unclear. The St. Helena Island Cemetery
Survey of 1999 gives his birth and death dates as 1860–1947.4 But the best-known
accounts of his presence are in two books by J. E. McTeer, High Sheriff of the Low Country
and Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor.5 In both volumes, McTeer underestimates
that Dr. Buzzard is around fifty years old when McTeer becomes sheriff at age twenty-two in
1926. If this is correct, then Robinson would have been born circa 1876. This date
contradicts other reports as well as St. Helena Island folklore, which states that Robinson
was born a slave.6 These two volumes by McTeer give some indication of how deeply
entrenched Hoodoo practice was among the local residents, particularly the African
American ones. Hoodoo was so important in controlling area residents that Sheriff McTeer
found it necessary to imitate at least the appearance as well as minimal aspects of Hoodoo
practice in order to more effectively administer justice in his jurisdiction.7 Robinson was
most famous for his work on legal matters, especially for clients charged with a crime.
When a client contracted his services, he would don his famous blue-purple tinted glasses
and sit in the courtroom chewing the galanga root and spitting whenever and wherever
possible. Known as “chewing John,” “low John” or “little John,” the galanga, a member of
the ginger family, was also used in other situations requiring neutralization and control.
The practice of releasing the magical power in the root of sacred plants by mastication is
common in West and Central West Africa and was passed on to African American Hoodoo
practitioners by their parents. In the more difficult court cases, Robinson would have
dressed the courtroom ahead of time, sometimes paying and sending in the unnoticeable
Negro janitor to deposit the root. Robinson directly and fearlessly confronted the white
man's world represented by the power of the courtroom. This was something that few
African Americans could or would do.
Robinson's reputation is legendary in black communities, especially up and down the
eastern seaboard, but it carries mythological weight on the Gullah Coast, an area stretching
from south of Savannah, Georgia, northward to Georgetown, South Carolina, and dotted
with sea islands and Gullah communities. In an interview, lifelong Awendaw, South
Carolina, resident sixty-four-year-old Frances Nesbitt stated, “I always thought ‘Dr. Buzzard'
was someting made up by de old folks. I always hear folks talk about going to see Dr.
Buzzard ‘bout some root work or to get a licky hand or some such ting ever since I a child I
hear dem talk.”8
Robinson's notoriety increased as the World War II draft trial of one of his fellow root
doctors, Dr. Bug, came to public attention. Peter Murray, also known as Dr. Bug of Laurel
Bay on the Broad River, was arrested in connection with his role in administering a root
designed to produce a cardiac flutter in a man during his draft board medical examination.
This root assured the exemption of his client from service in World War II. Murray's client
was given a small amount of whiskey laced with minute amounts of lead arsenate, which
Murray apparently ordered, purchased, and signed for through a Beaufort drugstore. He
was taken into court, tried, and convicted of aiding a young white man from Georgia to
“evade selective service.” Murray was given a one-year suspended jail sentence and
ordered to pay a $1,000 fine.9
The investigating authorities then turned their attention to other root workers in the area,
particularly Dr. Buzzard. But neither the draft evasion charge nor the mail fraud charge
against him could be made to stick, so federal authorities abandoned the pursuit of the
eighty-three-year-old Dr. Buzzard to South Carolina authorities. The state of South Carolina
arrested and charged Robinson with practicing medicine without a license. Contradicting
his own practice, Robinson did not employ a member of the root brotherhood to chew the
root10 on his behalf at a possible costs of $250 or $300. Instead he hired a top-notch
attorney, State Senator Brantley Harvey, to represent him.11 He entered a guilty plea and
paid a $300 fine in cash. It is believed that shortly after his conviction, Dr. Buzzard
abandoned his root work practice, passing the mantle to his son-in-law, who continued
working roots and being referred to as Dr. Buzzard. Robinson died about four years later in
1947, purportedly from stomach cancer.12
Robinson's burial site continues to be a carefully guarded secret known only to a select
few. It is believed that his final resting place would be continually plundered by those
wanting graveyard dirt, pieces of clothing, and even bones and hair if the burial site were
well known. Robinson's status as a powerful old style conjurer and root worker makes
articles and dirt retrieved from his grave more powerful in Hoodoo work than articles from
the graves of lesser-known and less-powerful conjurers and root workers.13 Both his
reputation and his name are frequently appropriated by marketeers and used to sell their
products.
With his life spanning from the end of U.S. chattel slavery to the end of World War II,
Robinson witnessed stark transformations in American life and culture, particularly in
Hoodoo practice and the targeting of Hoodoo by marketeers and the growth of the spiritual
marketplace. Though Robinson rarely used them in his early years, commercially produced
and mail-order Hoodoo supplies would be used by his descendants and, later, occasionally
by him as these products became more accessible and natural harvest grounds became
less available. Though most root workers during Robinson's earlier years maintained their
own fresh root and herb supply when possible, certain products necessary in old tradition
Hoodoo such as cauls, jalap root, sulfur, mercury, and bluestone were almost always
obtained through purchase, exchange, or barter from African American midwives,
morticians, or pharmacists. Robinson witnessed that change.
 The era between the world wars was one of rapid transformation that cascaded and
rippled throughout African American life as it was witnessing an increase in the number
and quality of streets and highways. Each time a new highway or street was etched into the
countryside, some essential Hoodoo harvest ground was potentially disturbed or destroyed.
And in years to come, suburbanization with its concomitant malls and parking lots would
ruin a significant number of harvest grounds. The destruction of harvest grounds, coupled
with the ever-growing spiritual marketplace, would begin to squeeze old tradition Hoodoo
practitioners out of their place as their own suppliers. In the years to come, some
manufacturers and suppliers would attempt to corner at least their regional markets,
locking out African American access to the traditional supplies and paraphernalia of
Hoodoo practice. According to Lady Dale's Curio Shop, longtime employee Albert Hampton,
he and shop owner Alex Silverberg would drive to Mexico and purchase all the jalap root
available to them, usually enough to fill a large delivery truck, and drive it back to
Philadelphia, thus monopolizing the High John the Conquer root trade in the Philadelphia
area and shrinking the national mail-order supply for the competition.14
The major Hoodoo marketeers and commercial suppliers experienced significant growth
and diversification during this period. Carolyn Morrow Long in her work Spiritual Merchants,
Religion, Magic and Commerce outlines and describes the major manufacturers and
suppliers of Hoodoo-inspired products. According to Long:
Many of the early manufacturers entered the spiritual products business through the publication of books on the occult;
the production of toiletries, patent medicines, and household cleaning products; or the manufacture of candles and
incense. Some got their start in neighborhood Hoodoo drugstores. Family connections have been another means of
entry into the spiritual business. Most spiritual supply companies are family owned; spouses and in-laws are involved,
and the current owners are often the children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, of the “founding father” who
established these companies in the 1920s-1940s.15

The growth of the spiritual marketeers is directly related to both the turn-of-the-
twentieth-century eastern European Jewish immigration and the great migration of
southern African Americans into northern urban communities. These migrants, their
children, and their grandchildren, divorced from the African religious foundations and now
further divorced from the southern Hoodoo folk religion, were especially vulnerable to these
marketeers. How and why the community of Hoodoo believers could not make the
adjustment to remain self-sustaining are questions for future research. The answer requires
an understanding of American race relations and the convergence of several factors,
including community dislocation, assimilationist pressures from significant numbers of
black American churches, the level of poverty and lack of education among blacks, as well
as the timely, shrewd, and exploitative business practices of the marketeers.
According to Long, the manufacturing of Hoodoo supplies was primarily controlled by
whites from either Christian or Jewish backgrounds. A significant number of the Jewish
spiritual merchants selling Hoodoo products were like Philadelphia-born Alex Silverberg,
who was trained as a chemist but because of anti-Jewish sentiments found that getting the
work he wanted was difficult in a white Christian environment. So he, like many of them,
turned his business skills to exploiting the market in Hoodoo supplies and Negro cosmetics.
The Christian merchants came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Whatever the religious
background, none of the manufacturers or marketeers, according to Long, were
practitioners of any African-based religion, nor were any of them participants in the Hoodoo
belief system.16 This situation of nonbelieving outsiders exploiting the African American
market lends itself to a range of possible interpretations not explored here.
The Hoodoo of this period, as compared with both earlier and later Hoodoo, was at its
most diverse, culturally widespread, most complex, best organized, and most interactive
with other occult traditions. Though unstable and facing both continuing contestation and
removal from its old tradition origins, Hoodoo during this period was at its fullest, richest,
and most vibrant social placement. Here every aspect of Hoodoo overlaps into this period.
In the earlier part of the era, black midwifery was still fully functioning. Undertakers,
pharmacy workers, and swampers of the old tradition maintained the older Hoodoo
networks and were fully functioning alongside the spiritual marketeers. Eventually the
marketplace would prevail as the old tradition continued to decline. But during a brief
social moment, the old tradition stared directly into the eyes of its Janus-faced nemesis and
held its own against both the spiritual marketeers and the assimilationists from inside the
African American community who viewed Hoodoo as a shameful relic of barbarism,
ignorance, and forced subservience.
The oldest and longest-standing of the spiritual products manufacturers was the de
Laurence Company of Chicago.17 Chicago, like other northern manufacturing cities during
this period, was a major urban industrial center receiving significant numbers of southern
black migrants. Encouraging and facilitating this mass movement, Chicago industry sent
labor recruiters into the South who offered one-way tickets to workers who would come to
the North to work in the factories. Like the spiritual marketeers, Chicago industry placed
ads in black newspapers inviting potential migrants with the promise of “good jobs” to
journey “up north.”18 The flood of black migrants strategically, though inadvertently,
placed a ready-made market at the disposal of spiritual merchants. When Laurens William
de Laurence actually began his business in publishing occult books on hypnotism, magic,
kabbalah, spiritualism, and Hindu mysticism is undetermined. But he soon expanded his
offerings to include herbal medicines, candles, incense, perfumes, oils, seals, and other
items that served a growing northern urban Hoodoo clientele.19
Founded in 1928 by chemist Morton G. Neumann, the Valmor Company targeted the so-
called race market in Negro products such as hair straighteners, skin lighteners, soaps,
tonics, and laxatives using four subsidiary names: Madam Jones and Sweet Georgia Brown
for women's products and Lucky Brown and Slick Black for the men's. In addition to
cosmetics, medicines, and Hoodoo spiritual supplies, Valmor produced “race records” and
printed dream books.20 The company achieved penetration into black communities
through its sales agents, a technique it adopted in imitation of Madam C. J. Walker's
successful business methods.21 According to Long:
Valmor covered all bases: the company sold wholesale to smaller stores, did a retail mail-order business, and recruited
sales agents from all over the country through advertisements in its retail catalogs and dream books and in the Chicago
Defender. Valmor's spiritual supplies were marketed through subsidiary companies called King Novelty and Famous
Products. The back cover of the Valmor Dream Book advertises Famous Products incense in seven fragrances—John the
Conquer, Aunt Sally's Lucky Dream, Lodestone, Lucky Mo-Jo, Lucky Spirit and Frank-Incense.22

Established in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1925 by Morris Shapiro and chemist Joseph Menke,
the Keystone Chemical Company was later known as Keystone Laboratories.23 Through
advertisements in black newspapers and the use of African American sales agents,
techniques proven by Valmor and other companies, Keystone offered Negro cosmetics and
Hoodoo spiritual supplies directly to the African American community. But Keystone went
one step further by penetrating the black spiritual community directly through maintaining
a sales booth at the Sanctified Church conventions.24
The Sanctified Church, the most African of black American Christian Protestant churches,
according to Zora Neale Hurston, has two branches: the Church of God in Christ and the
Saints of God.25 In these churches, several components of the African Religion Complex
were retained in the old rituals of sacred music and dancing the remnants of the Ring
Shout; baptism by water immersion, preferably outdoors in a lake or river, spirit possession;
speaking in tongues; and naturopathic and supernatural healing. There they had a stable
institutional base for continued existence. There also, just as the label and title “midwife”
could serve to protect the conjure root woman, the two-head man could modify his persona
and find protection as a Sanctified or Spiritualist church official, and many did just that.26
Certain Negro religious behaviors observed in Sanctified churches in the 1960s urban North
had remained relatively unchanged since the early 1800s, St. Clair Drake and Horace
Cayton tell us: “Urban life puts its stamp on this religion, and while the basic features of the
old beliefs and rituals persist in Bronzeville they have been modified by contact with the
complexities of a large northern city.”27
Distinguished from the Spiritual churches in label only, the Sanctified churches and their
yearly conventions were a fertile marketplace where spiritual marketeers could gain access
to potential Hoodoo consumers and further tighten their unchallenged control of the
Hoodoo supply market. Drake and Cayton further reveal the growth and existence of the
Spiritual churches and independent tangential spiritualist in Chicago in a ten-year period.
In 1928 there were seventeen Spiritualist storefronts in Bronzeville; by 1938 there were 51
Spiritualist churches including one congregation of over 2,000 members. In 1928 one
church in twenty was Spiritualist; in 1938 one in ten.28 As African American migrants
became increasingly assimilated and removed from easy access to the old tradition, the
truncated Hoodoo of the spiritual merchants narrowed and transformed the image of
Hoodoo into a shadow of its former powerful and meaningful existence.
Keystone sales agents could purchase kits containing Hoodoo curios and peddle them in
black communities.29 Kits typically contained certain herbs such as life everlasting, a plant
well known in Gullah folk medicine and native to South Carolina, as well as High John the
Conquer root, lodestone, Adam and Eve root, Devil's shoestring, controlling powder, and
lucky candles.30 New products, new names, and new labels were continually introduced.
These new marketing ideas were based partly on older Hoodoo images, beliefs, and
charms, a knowledge of which was gleaned from African Americans themselves through
customer requests and from the black sales agents.31 The job of traveling salesman was
short-lived and would soon disappear, and with it went the door-to-door marketing of these
products. New sales venues would also appear during this period and Hoodoo product sales
would continue in a new modified sales format via catalog and direct sales in curio shops
and Hoodoo stores.
Venues such as the candle shop would emerge as successful Hoodoo enterprises. Candle
shops specialized in selling spiritual work candles. The proliferation and success of these
shops demonstrate one aspect of Hoodoo transformation, adaptation, and functional
change. Cassandra Wimbs calls candle burning “Hoodoo's modern-day incarnation.”32
Closely tied to the spiritual merchants, the production of spiritual candles is controlled by
some of the same companies that produce and market other Hoodoo supplies. The candle
shop focuses Hoodoo ritual on candle burning as a means to affect the desired result. The
process of burning replaces the intervention and old rituals of the plantation conjurer.
Candle burning to affect change exists at the intersection of Hoodoo, New Orleans Voodoo,
and Santeria/ Lucumi. But in the precommercial days of candle burning, a flame was
sustained with a wick in the appropriate oil for that divinity, saint, orisha, or lwa. For
example, a flame for Oshun, Yoruba orisha of female sexuality, was simply a wick in
sunflower oil. Oshun enjoys sunflowers; they and their oil are sacred to her. A flame for
Obatala would use coconut oil, and a flame to Ogun, lord of iron, would include used motor
oil. The flame consumes the oil as a sacrifice to the force that one is petitioning.
As significant as candle burning would become to post–World War I Hoodoo ritual, candle
burning does not appear to have been a major part of the old plantation black belt Hoodoo
tradition. Candles were costly and were rarely seen by slaves except in the “big house.”
Slaves used grease lamps in their cabins to supply them with light. Ex-slave Louis Hughes
leaves us this description: “For light a grease lamp was used, which was made of iron, bowl
shaped, by a blacksmith. The bowl was filled with grease and a rag or wick placed in it, one
end resting on the edge for lighting. These lamps have a good light, and were in general
used among the slaves. Tallow candles were a luxury, never seen except in the ‘great
houses' of the planters.”33 Candle burning could have achieved some inclusion in
plantation Hoodoo, but only on a very limited basis. Southern Louisiana appears to be the
exception to this with the influence of Catholicism, Haitian Vodun, and the emergence of
New Orleans Voodoo, which all used candles.
 Candle burning represents the reduction of Hoodoo ritual to one principle ritual artifact:
the spiritual candle. According to Wimbs, “Candle wax is replacing roots as the most
common ideal holding agent.”34 Candle burning became acceptable partly because
candles avoid some of the stigma attached to Hoodoo holding agents such as mojo bags or
other ritual amulets. Some candles can be displayed and are readily available in candle
shops, in supermarkets, in drugstores and pharmacies, and in some churches.35
Candle burning addresses all the areas addressed in old tradition Hoodoo, including love
and family, employment, legal matters, and mental and physical health concerns. Unlike
the traditional Hoodoo amulet in which external color was far less important than the
materials and rituals used to construct it, candle color is especially significant. Most of the
candle shops surveyed by Wimbs also sold other items used in Hoodoo, including oils, baths
and washes, powders, and incense. Many of the ritual items as well as the candles take
their names from their intended outcome. In both modern Hoodoo candle burning and
classical old tradition Hoodoo, intent is of supreme significance. Names such as “bend
over” candle or oil, “jinx removing” oil, “steady work” oil, “chase away” powder, “love me”
oil, “fast luck” candle, “money drawing” candle, “do as I say” oil, and “controlling” oil and
powder all speak to intent.
Candle shops are primarily an urban phenomenon, and their increasing proliferation and
visibility in urban areas are closely tied to black migration into large urban areas,
particularly in the North. By the time World War II ended and blacks were continuing to
move northward both to escape the rule of racial terrorism and to access postwar
employment and prosperity, Hoodoo was being transformed into something observably
different and severely limited as compared with the old tradition. The spiritual marketplace
was limited in what it could deliver no matter how creative, exploitative, and well
developed it became. Marketeered Hoodoo could not deliver the fresh herbs and roots, nor
could it tailor a ritual or a mojo to the client's specific needs. It could not know the old
incantations, it could not tie the sacred knots or use the walking boy for individual
diagnosis of malady. It could not know the proportions in which High John was mixed with
“rattlesnake master” to empower and strengthen a client. As the old tradition slowly died,
marketeers continued to make inroads in supplying those root workers, conjurers, and
independents who claimed to still practice what was left of the old plantation black belt
tradition.
During this period, there developed a deeply intertwined relationship between Hoodoo
dream interpretation, the illegal lotteries known as “the numbers,” and Hoodoo sign
interpretation. An important component in Hoodoo belief has always been the sign. A sign
is an unusual occurrence that portends or warns of a coming event. A sign may be great or
small, subtle or bodacious. It may be something simple that occurs out of place or it may be
something abrupt and commanding your immediate attention. It may appear to be
perfectly explainable and suddenly become complex and mysterious. Every human
interaction is pregnant with possibilities and has potential to be a sign. Signs may come in
dreams or during waking hours. The stories that illustrate the function of the sign are
numerous and are told frequently in African American culture. Here are two such tales. A
neighbor of mine, Mrs. Austin, an elderly African American woman then in her seventies,
told the story of her brother's passing. She explained that a clock, which was believed to be
broken and incapable of chiming, chimed at one o'clock. This unusual occurrence was
viewed as a sign, a harbinger that something out of the ordinary and unexpected had either
happened unbeknownst to her or was about to happen; that something was her brother's
demise. The chiming of the clock was the related sign forewarning or informing the family
of the impending death.36
Another informant in his early nineties told the story of his sister leaving her wristwatch
on his kitchen table and how this was a sign. Upon discovering the timepiece on his kitchen
table, he insisted, against his family's wishes, upon personally taking the watch to her
rather than mailing it from his home in Cleveland, Ohio, to her home in Montgomery,
Alabama. He packed the watch in his luggage and boarded a bus for Montgomery. Upon
arriving in Montgomery, he went to his sister's house, they ate dinner, enjoyed an evening
together, and retired late. Upon awaking in the morning, he entered his sister's room to
awaken her; instead he found her dead.37
A list of common contemporary signs includes itching palms, usually interpreted as
having to do with either losing or acquiring money. It is most often interpreted as a sign
that you will soon receive some money. Some believers distinguish between the itching
occurring in the left or the right palm. Muscle spasms in the eyelid called “twitching eye”
are seen as a sign, usually a sign that trouble is coming. If your feet are swept by someone
using a broom to sweep a floor, that is seen as a very serious sign that either bad luck is
coming or you may be bound for jail. Dogs barking or howling excessively at night means
death is coming.
Some signs such as sweeping of feet must be neutralized by some immediate gesture in
order to deflect the coming negative consequences and to restore the balance disrupted by
the sign event. Most bad luck signs could be immediately neutralized by gestures that
became standardized, like spitting on the broom after one's feet were swept or biting and
stepping on one's index finger if you had pointed at a cemetery or a recently covered grave.
These latter-day standardized gestures were likely derived from early Hoodoo belief. Other
gestures were displayed at the Hoodoo shout that neutralized negative spiritual energies
for the plantation slave community.
The faith in signs heavily informed African American spiritual belief and could extend into
all areas of black life. As they functioned, signs provided the believer with a rudimentary
form of divination that was accessible to everyone, even youngsters. Signs were always
regarded as spiritual in nature even when they signaled a secular event. The consciousness
of signs extended itself into unexpected areas of African American life, including
participation in the illegal lotteries, known in black communities as the numbers.
Though the relationship between sign interpretation, dream interpretation, and the
numbers would often prove to be exploitative in nature, that triangular relationship formed
a supporting component in the vibrant, alternative, underground economy of many black
communities. The daily and sometime weekly income from the numbers was lucrative
enough so that African American men often were able to support their families with their
weekly take; others supplemented marginal or seasonal employment. Still others prospered
and some amassed small fortunes. Numbers was an equal opportunity employer. Though
men primarily were numbers runners who carried bets to the numbers station, anyone,
regardless of gender, could make a book—as collecting and writing numbers was known—
and women often did. The money derived from such an endeavor supplemented scarce
household income.
Buttressed initially by post–World War I prosperity, then again during the Great
Depression, playing the numbers38 experienced tremendous growth and expansion in
urban black communities. Although the numbers began before World War I, they grew
exponentially as black urban population density increased from northward migration.
Hoping to hit39 on a bet as small as one cent, gamblers often saw numbers as a hoped-for
possibility for financial gain in the face of limited employment access and the “last hired,
first fired” policy. As the growing black urban population began playing numbers, Hoodoo
would influence black participation in numbers betting as it had done for other forms of
gambling.
It was during this period that dream books and their association with the numbers
became familiar to a great many African Americans. A dream book is a book of dream
interpretation that assigns corresponding numbers to the subject of the dream. If one
dreams of a black cat, then the dreamer looks up “black cat” in the dream book index and
finds its corresponding number. Dream books and written numerological interpretations of
dreams are much older than one would imagine. According to Gustav Carlson: “The dream
book is a very old item of culture since there is evidence of its existence as far back as the
time of the ancient Egyptians…. We read of dream books being used as long ago as the
16th century in connection with the Italian lottery.”40
Ancient Greek priestesses of Zeus and Apollo interpreted dreams. Hippocrates, the Greek
father of medicine (460–370 BC), believed that dreams could predict upcoming struggle
and could reveal information about health, including which organ was affected.
Artemidorus, a second-century physician from Roman Asia, wrote what is believed by some
to be the first book of dream interpretation. Entitled Oneirocritica and written in five small
volumes, this book is regarded as the parent of all dream books.41 Subsequent books on
dream interpretation were printed in Greek and translated into Italian and English. Achmed
ibn Sirin (born AD 653 in Basra, Iraq) wrote a work of dream interpretations that was
printed in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1577 and in Paris in 1603. The Universal Dream
Dictionary was published in Philadelphia and in Baltimore in 1797 and in Wilmington,
Delaware, in 1817. In 1835, U. P. James published the Complete Fortune Teller and Dream
Book in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in 1848 he published Sibylline Oracles; or Dreams and Their
Interpretations.42
The earliest known dream book thought to have been written by an African American was
entitled The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book, by Chloe Russel, a woman of color; it
was written in 1824 and published in 1827. It contained no numbers and gave an
alphabetized list of dreams and their interpretations, from “adversity” to “weight.” The text
also included a discussion of palmistry and the reading of moles on the body.43
In 1862 and 1863, publisher Dick and Fitzgerald departed from the previously published
dream books and released The Golden Wheel Dream Book, and Fortune-Teller and Le
Marchand's Fortune Teller and Dreamers' Dictionary. Different from all heretofore printed
dream books, these two included “luck” numbers following each dream interpretation.
From 1862 onward, nearly all dream books published lucky numbers.44 Today dream books
sold in African American communities rarely if ever interpret dreams, they merely give
numbers.
Many dream book publishers were like Ed Kay, owner of Dorene Publishing, and Alex
Silverberg. Both published dream books, and Silverberg manufactured Hoodoo products as
well as supplies and sold them in his store located on South Street in Philadelphia. These
spiritual merchants targeted blacks and exercised a very profitable control over the Hoodoo
marketplace and Hoodoo ritual artifacts. Silverberg, although he was neither a Hoodoo
believer nor a two-head, would make mojo bags for unsuspecting, and oftentimes
unknowledgeable, clients. For those same unknowledgeable and culturally displaced
clients, his wife invented and manufactured “power pouches.”45 None of these products
was properly prepared according to old tradition Hoodoo protocol, the divination was not
performed, the problem was not diagnosed, the proper rituals were not enacted, the
appropriate incantation or prayer was not said by the appropriate number of “prayer
warriors,” and the proper forces were not harnessed. Divorced from their own cultural
traditions by migration and the desire to discard the past, African American clients were at
a loss and could easily be sold the marketeered, snake-oil version of Hoodoo. The
marketeers controlled dream book distribution, they profited from the sale of gambling and
lucky mojoes, they profited from the sale of incense and candles that revealed numbers
when burned, and they controlled the transformation of urbanized Hoodoo artifacts.
Dream books and dream interpretation seem to be a natural outgrowth of the numbers.
Like dream books, lottery-style numbers games are far from new. The numbers was based
on the old Italian lottery, which, according to sources, began circa 1550 when Benedetto
Gentile organized a lottery based on election results. By 1634, the first Genoese Republic
instituted a lottery tax, and by 1644 the state had control of the game. By 1860, the Reggio
Lotto existed in every Italian state except Sardinia46 and has continued as the model for
American lotteries. Numbers lotteries were probably introduced in America from several
independent sources, but by 1720 lotteries actively existed in the colonies and along the
East Coast.47 Believed to have derived from earlier French and Spanish sources, the famous
Louisiana lottery began in 1868. But the modern-day lottery in the United States probably
appeared somewhere around the end of the nineteenth century with the influx of southern
Italian immigrants who controlled the numbers games in several cities.
Other sources state that the numbers game that dominated cities like Tampa and
Jacksonville, Florida, in the late 1920s and early 1930s was imported from Havana, Cuba,
around the turn of the century. The game spread northward and westward to Baltimore,
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, New York, Atlanta, Kansas City, Toledo, and Detroit.48 Some sources
cite Chinese numbers games Gee Fah and Pak Kop Piu, which are based upon symbols
rather than numbers, as the source for some lotteries. The Chinese lottery paid two to one
odds and mostly remained confined to the Chinese American and Chinatown communities.
Along with these three types of lotteries, numbers games of numerous types sprang up
around the country.

Dream books were an important element in Hoodoo's relationship with the numbers racket.

Another widely played type of numbers was based on bets placed on horse races. Known
as both clearinghouse and mutuel race horse policy or simply mutuel policy, this system
used an independent source, rather than an in- house numbers wheel, or bolita bag to
determine the day's winning numbers.49 Still another type of policy gambling was based on
numbers published by the various stock exchanges, including some smaller local
exchanges in Cincinnati and Indianapolis. In areas such as Minneapolis and St. Paul, where
milling was significant, the number was obtained from the totals of the grain exchange. On
the West Coast, the total poundage of the salmon catch was used to determine the number.
And in some southern mining regions, the total number of tons of ore mined was used to
determine the daily number. Even the figures from the Chicago Butter and Egg Market were
used in certain cities. And at one time, the figures of the Weather Bureau Report were used
in Washington, DC.50 But by far the universal favorite was numbers published by the New
York Stock Exchange; the number was based on the total stock and bond sales and could
be obtained by simply consulting the market close edition of local metropolitan
newspapers. Popular all over the country, the stock exchange number was the most widely
bet upon, and Hoodoo was used to forecast a winning possibility.
More often than not, Hoodoo patrons placed bets on a winning number or lucky number
that they played frequently and even became identified with as “their number.” But when
the lucky number did not hit quickly enough, some anxious policy players wrote letters to
the New York Stock Exchange asking for the upcoming winning number and sometimes
proposing types of schemes to win and share the winnings if the stock exchange would
comply. Between 1932 and 1935, the New York Stock Exchange received hundreds of
letters from the numbers playing public from cities large and small around the country,
including Baltimore; Columbus, Ohio; Sharon, Pennsylvania; Sarasota, Florida; Mount
Vernon, Ohio; Pittsburgh; Atlanta; Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit; and Buffalo, New York, to
mention only a few. Here is an example of one such letter written on November 15, 1935:

New York Stock Exchange, November 15th, 1

New York City.

Gentlemen,-

For many, many weeks I have been trying to “catch” the New York bond on No. 375 – and in looking back upon my
records for over a year I note this number has never come out on the Bond – the final three figures of the dollars on the
daily transactions of the Exchange as published in the daily papers.
Is there a reason why 375 has never come out or has it just happened so? Also I note “000” has never dropped –
there must be a stock exchange superstition against throwing this particular number.
If by any chance 375 could come out once it would save my home and something else besides. Please let me know if
I should continue playing 375 or had I better change. And thanking you kindly for your consideration in reading this, my
letter, I am,

Very truly yours

________________
P. O. Box 1334
Tampa, Fla.
Both numbers gambling and the spiritual marketplace experienced tremendous growth
during this period. The spiritual marketeers expanded their product lines to include not
only more dream books, but an entire line of products aimed at numbers gamblers.
Cashing in on the black community's cultural and economic vulnerability, the spiritual
marketeers added products such as lucky candles and lucky incense, which revealed a
lucky number when burned. They retooled existing products to include luck at the numbers
along with other types of luck at gambling. Lucky oil and incense packets, when not
prepared to reveal a number when burned, simply included a list of lucky numbers in the
package, but at a price. Concerning financial and cultural exploitation of the African
American community and the policy player, one researcher had this comment:
Lucky products command fabulous prices. For example an inch-long piece of Adam and Eve Root is sold for $3.00, the
cost of an ounce bottle of holy oil ranges in price from $2 to $20, a snuff of graveyard dust is worth 50 cents, while a
good luck ring will bring anywhere from $20 to $100. It is interesting to note that the cost of the ingredients for an
ounce of holy oil selling for $20 is a fraction of a cent. Lucky products constitute an important place in the stock of every
negro drug-store. They are sold also by salesmen who go from house to house as representatives of such organizations
as Oracle Product's Co., Sovereign Products Co. Valmor Products Co., and Alexander's Psychic Aid, Inc.51

The older African Americans who knew the old tradition and journeyed back down South
to access it were disgusted by, yet powerless against, the urban middlemen minority
spiritual marketeers who were actively exploiting, redefining, and helping to transform a
long-standing black folk tradition. The demise of the old tradition, symbolized in the death
of Dr. Buzzard, signaled the transformation that was taking place in Hoodoo between the
two world wars. African American health care, another area of Hoodoo tradition, would also
undergo transformation. We will now turn our attention to it.
 HEALIN’ DA SICK, RAISIN’ DA DAID
Hoodoo as Health Care, Root Doctors, Midwives, Treaters

The full dimensions of Hoodoo have been overlooked. Even recent scholarship on Hoodoo
has not included a discussion of the medicinal aspect of the tradition. In addition, that
scholarship has totally overlooked a discussion of traditional Hoodoo healers: treaters,
midwives, and root doctors. Even African Americans who know anything of contemporary
Hoodoo will usually not immediately associate it with medicinal herbalism. Hoodoo
marketeers were neither interested in nor had access to this aspect of Hoodoo. While much
of the magical aspect of Hoodoo would be discarded under the strict dictates of
Christianity, science, and commercialism, much of Hoodoo's medicinal herbalism would be
kept alive under another label. Home remedies were passed down in extended families
from an earlier time, thus assuring that the postemancipation African American community
would inherit a well-developed and long-standing folk medicine tradition rich in regional
variation. That community, like African communities elsewhere, would also inherit the deep
belief that physical illness could have a supernatural cause. This belief would persist among
African Americans into the twenty-first century. Hoodoo was believed to be able to cause all
types of illness as well as unusual physical and mental symptoms. Even in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Hoodoo is believed to be capable of causing the
following:
1. Paralysis
2. Weight loss
3. Hair loss
4. Loss of willpower
5. Miscarriage
6. Falling obsessively in love
7. Breathing problems
8. Bodily infestations of lizards, snakes, salamanders, worms, spiders
9. Hating one's own family
10. Prolonged constipation/locked bowels
11. Acting like a dog or cat
12. Eliminating feces through nose or mouth
13. Unexplained bodily pain
14. Fits
15. Insanity
16. Impotence/loss of nature
17. Financial trouble
18. Ugliness
19. Swelling of limbs
20. Blindness
21. Arthritis
22. Death
23. Disfiguration
24. Insomnia
25. Paranoia/intense fear1

In a majority of poor and working-class black neighborhoods, there was someone at least
minimally skilled in administering herbal-based treatments, some of which are used today
in African American communities as well as throughout the African diaspora.2
The slave “doctor” was a common feature on most plantations of substantial size, and on
smaller plantations there was someone at least minimally skilled in naturopathic
treatments for physical, mental, and spiritual malady. Herbal healing recipes were but one
chapter in Hoodoo's oral textbook. Herbal healers and practitioners such as midwives,
treaters, and root doctors mastered treatments and developed their regional
pharmacopoeia. In addition, there was an existing body of common knowledge and
information grounded in well-known treatment traditions that some individuals applied to
themselves. We see an example of this in the slave who wore a buckeye on a string around
his neck as a protective medicine.3 In addition to bringing healing traditions from Africa
with them and acquiring medicinal skill on their own, some slaves were owned by white
physicians and were trained by them.4 One such slave named Primus assisted his master, a
white doctor, at surgery and began his own practice when his master died.5 Another slave
doctor, who practiced in New Orleans, bought his own freedom after having assisted and
apprenticed under three doctors, all of whom owned him at one time or another.6 Other
slaves were owned by pharmacists and assisted in the filling of prescriptions and the
making of medicines.7 And at least one bondsman, Willie Elfe, published his own
prescription book.8 Still others acted as nurses both accompanying their owners and
practicing independently applying their knowledge of herbal healing.9 Midwives were
among those who also had herbal medicinal knowledge.
Like their plantation predecessors, most post-Reconstruction midwives harvested their
own herbs rather than purchase them. A well-stocked midwife's cabinet would contain
“digitalis, golden seal, belladonna, lobelia, sage, henna, rhubarb, May apple, blood root,
wild cherry, and numerous others,” many that she cultivated herself.10 Like the old
conjurers known as swampers, most midwives were skilled herbalists, knowledgeable in
both the identification of and use of plants and other natural substances such as natural
clay dirt and insect nests. In addition to midwifery, she often used the herbs in other types
of “doctorin.'” Sometimes known as a medicine woman, and skilled in herbal treatment,
the doctor-midwife specialized in roots related to matters of romance and of the heart. She
knew which roots, herbs, substances, prayers, and rituals would “get a husband,” restore
“nature,”11 and help the childless to conceive.
The midwife tradition among enslaved plantation women emerged out of necessity and
fulfilled a need in both the slave quarter and in the freedmen communities. These women
would also be called on to deliver white babies. This aspect of the Hoodoo tradition would
be handed down to the next generation through community apprenticeships by practicing
midwives. Researcher Holly F. Mathews reveals:
Most midwives learned their trade through long apprenticeships to older, established midwives, usually their kinswomen.
The apprenticed girl would accompany her mentor on visits to pregnant women, sew and clean for them, and stay with
them after their babies were born. After years of attending births and after having their own first child, the apprentice
could begin to assist at deliveries and eventually answer night calls for the senior midwife. When the senior midwife
decided to retire, she would officially hand over her practice and patients to her chosen successor. In this way, the
traditions of midwifery were passed from generation to generation and continuity in belief and practice were
maintained.12

African women who were transported to the New World as captives would have been aware
of traditional African birthing practices, and many probably had given birth. Some
undoubtedly were traditional birth attendants in their homeland. The African American
midwife in some instances was also a competent treater of ailments and possessed skill in
aspects of conjure related to love, marriage, and family. As an essential part of a
cooperative Hoodoo network that included conjurers, root doctors, apothecary workers,
hospital workers, gravediggers, morticians, and other midwives, she frequently had contact
with conjurers and other types of root doctors.
 In her close contact with conjurers, the midwife was the only direct supply line through
which conjurers could obtain umbilical cords, cauls, or other supplies associated with birth.
Even midwives who worked with white physicians would secretly steal cauls and sell them
to conjure doctors.13 Frequently the midwife was also a conjurer, and she could use any
cauls, umbilical cords, or placentas that she could obtain. Describing one such midwife-
conjurer, author F. Roy Johnson describes Aunt Joe: “Aunt Jo (Sephine) Minton (1873–1927)
of the Diamond Bridge area on the Nottoway River a short distance in Virginia from Como
began to collaborate with her first cousin Jim Jordan…. She was recognized as a good mid-
wife, herb doctor and conjure woman.”14
Believed by some to have been a midwife, New Orleans Voodoo legend Marie Laveau
appears to have accompanied midwives who attended births. Claiming to have known
Laveau, ex-slave N. H. Hobley had this comment:
Now that it's all over, here are some practices of Marie Laveau. She stood in with midwives and—as there was no law
then requiring birth records—she obtained the bodies of babies soon after they were born. They were then dried out by
being treated in some way, left to hang up a chimney and smoked until they was so black you couldn't tell whether they
were born white or colored, and so shriveled as to be unrecognizable. You would not know they were human. These,
she used in her ceremonies. She had a cabinetmaker make neat little boxes out of cedar, and in each one she put one
of these mummies or skeletons. They were then bought by rich men who put them in their safes to ward off evil
spirits.15

Whether the idea that Marie Laveau was a midwife was mythical or not, the association of
midwifery with conjure was firm. Claiming to be a midwife and using the title imparted a
level of legitimacy to women root workers and female Hoodoos. Numerous conjure women
used the title and probably attended births, but their primary function was not in the area
of delivering babies. In forty-six counties in Alabama in 1925, most of the women claiming
to be midwives attended no more than one delivery in six months and 28 percent of the
known midwives reported attending no births in that year. By comparison, 26 percent of
the known midwives in the forty-six counties attended seventy percent of the births.16 Why
did so many women claim to be midwives when in fact they were not attending births or
delivering babies? The title “midwife” imparted not only legitimacy but also community
status as well as a degree of legal protection under which a conjure woman could safely
operate.
Also known as granny midwives, these women were significant facilitators in both the
spiritual and physical aspects of birth. Through prayer, incantation, potions, amulets,
sacred objects, procedures, and rituals, they treated and safeguarded the birthing woman's
heightened spiritual vulnerability. The midwife's bag contained materials from the old
tradition that she clandestinely used even after state regulation of midwife practices
forbade it. Some midwives even created two bags, one for state inspection and one for
traditional ritual use.17 Where the midwife's conjure skill and spiritual belief were well
developed, she could engage in minimum ritual, something as simple as driving three
brand-new nails into the threshold of the house to distract malevolent spirits that might
interfere with the birth process.18 These nails served also to warn bad spirits of the
midwife's spiritual strength and power. In cases of premature infant death or death shortly
after birth, the bereaved mother was given ritual instructions by the midwife to protect
against death claiming another of her infants. This is reminiscent of certain practices
among traditional West and Central West Africans. The Yoruba provide us with the example
of abiku, a child who is born to die. If the cycle of stillbirth or sudden death is not broken,
then the abiku will return and die innumerable times. In his book Way of the Orisha,
American author Philip John Neimark tells of his ordeal with abiku and how, after losing two
children at birth, he enlisted a Babalawo, high priest of the Yoruba religion, who fastened
his newborn's soul to the earth using a traditional implement, an Ogun chain, in order to
prevent his newborn infant's death.19 African American midwifery was a place where
Hoodoo ritual related to birth and sometimes death was fully functioning, inadvertently
preserving and safeguarding what would otherwise soon become a moribund tradition.
 The midwife, even more so than the conjurer, root doctor, or treater, stood in the doorway
separating life and death, natural and supernatural, spiritual and physical worlds. Her
methods were frequently part conjure ritual, part herbal tradition, and part folk medicine.
Like the conjurer, root doctor, treater, and preacher, the midwife was often called into
service through supernatural occurrence, such as a recurring dream or a vision. Describing
the two-part vision that called her to her work as a midwife, Aunt Quintilla, an African
American Virginia midwife recalls:
Den I had annuder call,…I was washin' de clo'es on de back po'ch, and de suds pile up lak de clouds in de sky. All in a
minnit I seen a bright light an' a han' come right up outen de suds hol'in a fiery sword an' a voice says, “Quintilla, why
aint you obeyed de call?”20

As with the many Hoodoo practitioners and believers, the midwife was usually well
connected and often prominent in several roles in the widespread network of her church
community, which frequently provided her with client referrals. Often she was a church
official such as a deaconess or church mother. And it was there that she was important in
the movement of Hoodoo into black American church ritual that used aspects of the Bible,
especially the Psalms, in replacing lost African prayers and incantations. An example of the
Psalms used for healing and restoring ill health can be found in Psalms 42 and 43. A major
player in the Hoodoo community, she was both a carrier of tradition and a significant elder
with the power to label and sanction behaviors. Within her community, she was sought as a
counselor, advisor, mediator, assistant, and visionary. Her counsel was considered expert in
advising women on cultural knowledge of men. She was keeper of ritual and procedures
that would allow a woman some degree of control over her husband's fidelity, loyalty, and
devoted love. She knew the awesome legacy of the power of menstrual blood, perspiration,
and urine, and she knew how to direct and use them with maximum efficacy. With a good
supply of cauls, umbilical cords, and placentas available to her, she primarily controlled
love charms and rituals related to conception and female sexual potency. She advised,
soothed, counseled, and supported women, particularly in their role as mothers and wives.
And she controlled the tying of the dreaded nature sack.
This old tradition Hoodoo charm has been confused and mislabeled “nation sack” by
those who misunderstood certain African American pronunciation patterns and who
believed that blacks were mispronouncing the word nation instead of nature, which was
pronounced “naitcha.”21 Others confuse this mojo with the donation sacks carried by both
tent revival preachers as well as some prostitutes around Memphis, Tennessee, in the late
1800s and described as existing only in Memphis. As referred to by seminal bluesman
Robert Johnson in his song “Come on in My Kitchen,” it is a purse or sack smaller than but
resembling tent show preachers' donation sacks:
Oh-ah, she's gone
I know she won't come back
I've taken the last nickel
out of her nation sack
You better come on
in my kitchen
babe, it's goin' to be rainin' outdoors

This could possibly have been a true nature sack he was referring to, and the record
company translated and corrected his pronunciation and wrote “nation” instead of
“nature.” Prostitutes who carried purses for their earnings began calling them donation
sacks as a barb at the donation-collecting practices of the self-righteous traveling preachers
who in their sermons often targeted prostitutes as examples of sin. On the other hand, the
true Hoodoo nature sack, a female-controlled mojo, was wrapped from Virginia to Texas, not
in only one city. Marketeers are responsible for asserting the misleading and ridiculous
information.
 Original Hoodoo nature sacks were tied by midwife conjure women all over the black belt
South, not simply in Memphis. The confusion of the donation sack with the Hoodoo nature
sack probably originated with misinterpretations of Harry Middleton Hyatt's work Hoodoo-
Conjuratio-Witch-craf-Rootwork and a misreading of southern black pronunciation patterns.
The misinterpretation has been perpetrated by Hoodoo exploiters and marketeers. Various
readings of Hyatt's work probably further confused the issue.22 Like High John and
midwifery, this and other types of mojoes have not been sufficiently discussed in either the
scholarly or popular literature on Hoodoo; nevertheless, the midwife-conjure woman was
the guardian of the dreaded nature sack. This type of amulet-mojo was believed to be
extremely powerful when tied properly, tailoring and integrating all the necessary elements
of time, location, direction, and ingredients.
The purpose of the nature sack was to enable a woman to control her man's ability to
become sexually aroused and achieve an erection with another woman. To be most
effective, the nature sack had to be tied during coitus, with the final knot tied during the
man's ejaculation. The woman desiring such a mojo was given strict details, instructions,
prohibitions, and warnings. This type of mojo was known to cause trembling in men who
were Hoodoo believers and was feared by women and approached cautiously. If a woman
was caught in the act of tying a nature sack on a man, her life could be in peril. Even the
mere mention of the nature sack could incite extreme reactions in some men, even those
claiming to be nonbelievers. Women as well as men sometimes sought out conjurer-
midwives to restore a man's nature. These lay fertility and sexuality specialists prescribed
herbs, potions, and certain foods to increase male sexual potency and increase a woman's
chances of conceiving.
In addition to “catchin' babies,” midwives were consulted for advice on marital problems.
They acted as lay psychologists and community counselors. In African American
neighborhoods, there was frequently at least one well-respected church community elder
who was sought out for her advice, counseling, and support. These granny midwives
performed any number of birth-related duties, including staying on with the new mother
and infant for an extended time during the postpartum period. Like the contemporary
doula, the midwife would help with housework, cooking, and child care. She would also
instruct the new mother on diet, postpartum bodily care, infant care, household safety, and
spiritual protection. A North Carolina midwife reveals:
You teach them how to take care of themselves, to keep the house clean and proper for a baby, ‘bout good food to eat
so they'll have good milk and how to make the baby's clothes. Then you get ready for the birthin' so they won't be
scared and you be there with them any time of day or night. Lord, I've been called at some strange times. But when
that baby's comin' there ain't nothin' for it but to do it. And stay—stayin' after, that's the thing. That's when they really
need you more than in the catchin' ‘cause after is when the tiredness sets in and they're weak and that's when the
baby prone to sickness. So I'se always been one to stay as long as they needed me; to help clean, cook, and
sometimes show ‘em what to do with that little baby. And I never lost but one baby in all my days of work.23

Revered for their knowledge, ability, skill, and power, midwives were women held in high
social esteem in the rural African American communities of the black belt South.24 This
high esteem could possibly be another reason that so many black women claimed that
title. Because she encountered medical personnel such as physicians and nurses and
because she also attended birthing white women, the black midwife sometimes stood
between two racial worlds, one black, one white, and forged a link by forcing open a door in
mainstream society unknown to many African Americans of the period. Describing one such
midwife-conjure woman, Aunt Molly Kirby, who attended white women and was allowed
into areas off-limits to most African Americans, an informant tells us:
We didn't have a big time herbist. People got their own herbs from the field or the store. There was Aunt Molly Kirby,
they called her, a great big black woman. She made herb medicines and hoodoos. Lots of men went to her when they
had social diseases. She was also a midwife, delivered a world of babies. She's go out on the mountain and deliver
babies. They didn't allow colored people out there much, but they allow her.25
 Usually called in months before the delivery, the midwife supported the overall needs of
the pregnant woman. Using parallel practices found in traditional West African cultures,
including abdominal massage, belief in birthmarks, burial of the placenta, use of sharp
metal objects to ward off a malevolent spirits, and geophagy, if the midwife suspected the
possibility of miscarriage, she took a particular course of action. In an interview, Granny Ya,
an eighty-six-year-old treater and former midwife, explains: “I put a red rag around them if I
think they gon miscarry, and it hold the baby there. When child got asthma, or got attaché
(overgrown liver), I put the cloth back on. (She used red strips of cloth for women of
childbearing age).”26 In her role as midwife and healer, the granny was the guardian of one
aspect of the Hoodoo tradition. Her ceremonies, rituals, and practices involved a holistic
approach to treatment and support. In the absence of twilight sleep and pain-deadening
epidurals, the granny depended on the power of self hypnosis and suggestion framed by
ritual practice as she placed a sharpened axe under the laboring woman's bed in the belief
that the axe would cut the pain.27 To time the birth, she used her own natural timing
devise, a dried fern with tightly curled fronds, known in contemporary botanicas as either
rose of Jericho or resurrection plant. An informant tells us:
When she arrived at the bedside of a labor patient she put the dried plant into a bowl of water, lighted her pipe, sat
down, and watched the fronds unfold. They gave her full information about the child's progress on its journey into this
world. If the leaves caught on one another or opened unevenly she feared trouble and resorted to action. The value of
this charm was far-famed, and because of it she had a large and respectful clientele.28

The Hoodoo-informed birthing ritual was both simple and elaborate and included the
donning of ritual clothing, usually by the birthing mother. The items included ceremonial
necklaces from either herbs, bones, animal teeth, or other items and ritual clothing, usually
one of the husband's scent-laden, well-worn, and unwashed shirts or a hat. The midwife
controlled the “sacred birthing flame” built in the hearth. This flame was used to convert
and mark the fireplace as a temporary sacred altar with ritual care procedures. These
procedures dictated how long the flame should burn as well as when and how the ashes
were used and disposed of.
African American midwives developed and maintained a body of evolving spiritual
knowledge and information about the use of plants and other substances as they
responded to the changing needs of their clientele. They collected and tested numerous
folk remedies and rituals; among them, remedies for diminishing childbirth pain, for
avoiding birthmarks, and for treating abnormal conditions in both the infant and mother.
Their knowledge and experience enabled them to establish and control the psychosocial
atmosphere in the birthing chamber. The midwife engaged in behaviors and practices
expected by the birthing mother. She also was the essential link between the birthing
mother and the wider community. In the cultural context of birthing, she helped reinforce
expectations and fulfilled them by moving the mother through the ritualized stages of
birth.
While performing the necessary tasks such as cutting the umbilical cord, the midwife
would also obtain the placenta; this she used as a divination instrument. The midwife
would “read the knots” in the placenta to predict the number of children a woman would
bear. Describing the procedure as performed by Miss Katie, a local midwife, Cornelia Bailey
tells us:
Now if Elise had been Ada's first child, Miss Katie would have read the knots in the afterbirth, as the midwife always did
after the first child was born. By that, I mean she would have counted the knots when the first child came and
predicted how many more kids you would have. Miss Katie would read those knots, and lots of time she'd say, “Oh
Lord, plenty of knots in this one. You gonna have plenty chirren.”29

The midwife was also directly responsible for ensuring a proper and secure burial for the
placenta.
 As with the conjurers, demeanor was an essential component in the midwife's success.
She needed to move with the quiet authority of supernatural power, conveying confidence
and spiritual support to the birthing mother. Most midwives were regarded as spiritually
well developed as they used prayers and incantations to pull down supernatural power in
supporting the birthing process and the midwife's work.
The midwife was also the essential person involved in postpartum care. As with the birth,
certain postpartum ritual procedures were followed and brought into play. One researcher
tells us:
The midwife was responsible for instructing the mother in the performance of prescribed precautionary measures
during the particularly vulnerable postpartum period and overseeing rites to celebrate and protect the newborn. Since
the acceptance of a range of living spirits, good and evil, is not unusual, the community valued the midwives' role in
providing instruction on how to mitigate such forces during the postpartum period.30

She was directly involved in the related Hoodoo rituals of “taking up the mother” and
“calling the baby's spirit.” Frequently, on the ninth day after birth, the mother was both
helped to her feet by the midwife and slowly walked counterclockwise, the circling
direction of the sacred Ring Shout, around the house. Then she was given a thimble of
water to drink when she returned indoors. The midwife also took up the newborn and
walked the sacred counterclockwise circle around the house, speaking to the infant and
calling its name.31 In some places like central Alabama, the mother took up the infant and
circled the house either three, seven, or nine days after the birth, and she consumed the
thimble of water. A Eutaw, Alabama, resident informs us: “My baby was, I believe, it was
two weeks old when they made me go around the house with the thimble of water. Mama
brought me the thimble of water, and I had to carry it all the way around the house. Mama
made me drink it when I got back. It was just a swallow. It was a little small thimble.”32
During the period between the two world wars, the lay midwife profession among blacks
declined; North Carolina appears typical. In 1917 there were nine thousand midwives in
North Carolina; eight years later, in 1925, North Carolina led the nation with sixty-five
hundred practicing midwives who delivered one-third of all babies born that year.33 By
1931 there were 2,234 fewer practicing midwives delivering 31 percent of all babies born.
By 1940 the percentage of midwife-assisted births declined to 24.6 percent, and by 1950
only 10.9 percent of all births in North Carolina were midwife-assisted. The number of
practicing registered midwives declined concomitantly to only 915 by 1950.34 Similar
patterns of decline can be observed in all the black belt areas, especially Mississippi,
Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.
The rapid decline in black midwifery resulted in part from protracted attacks by the
medical profession and its promotion of the new medical specialty of obstetrics and
gynecology. Describing the process in North Carolina, Holly F. Mathews states: “War was
declared on the granny midwife by the General Assembly of the state in 1912 with the
passage of a law granting any county board of health the power to license and control
midwives.”35 But it was not until 1917 that Rocky Mount, North Carolina, began to enforce
a local law that required that midwives pass an examination.36 The attack further included
berating the midwife and distorting the contrast between midwives and doctors. A massive
propaganda campaign was waged that used racist stereotypes and images to support its
arguments.
Midwives were by no means the only type of Hoodoo health care provider available to the
black community. Other types of Hoodoo health care personnel included treaters. Treaters
were a type of healer, either male or female, who used herbs, roots, prayers, rituals,
amulets, and incantations to effect a positive change in a personal malady. Contemporary
treaters are the direct descendants of the old plantation conjurer doctors, though all of
them, when confronted with the label “Hoodoo,” “conjure,” or even “root work,” denied any
relationship whatsoever.37 Treaters were a diversified group, and the midwife was often also
one type of treater.
 Another type of treater was simply known as “doctor.” Like the conjurer and the midwife,
the doctor stood astride the physical and spiritual worlds in his or her approaches and
techniques as well as in the supplies used. The doctor's work overlapped with both the
midwife's and the conjurer's work. In the slave community, the doctor was often the same
individual but frequently had specialized knowledge, ability, or gifts, such as the ability to
“blow out fire” or ease the pain from burns.38 Slave healers, like their African predecessors,
used insects in addition to plants and other substances to treat malady. Enslaved African
Americans were known to use maggots to treat external infections. The maggots ate away
the dead and infected tissue, leaving clean, healthy tissue in its place, and the larvae
produced a secretion that had additional antiseptic and medical value in healing and
restoring the tissue. A popular novel of the 1960s leaves us this description of Mere
Angelique, a slave conjure doctor, and her use of maggots, incantations, and prayer to heal
and treat infected tissue. After applying a poultice of medicinal herbs and other healing
substances to Drum's badly infected leg, she:
…reached for the red cock, and she laid it on its back on the floor. Taking a long knife from her basket, she held it over
the bird while she mumbled another series of unintelligible words…. With one slash of the knife, she laid the fowl open,
neatly cleaving it from neck to tail. Spreading open its severed body, she laid it over the steaming poultice,…and
bandaged the whole agglomeration tightly to Drum's leg.
“Six days”—she counted them off on her fingers—“six days no touch. Bile this.” She handed a tied bundle of herbs
to Rachele. “Make him drink it. Keep him shittin' all-a time. Make him drink lots water. Keep him pissin' all-a time.” She
pointed to the bulging bandage on Drum's leg. “Pretty soon big stink. Phew! But no take off. One day God de father,
one day, Holy Virgin, one day Jesus Christ, three days conjur' spirits, much betta goddam strong.”…Mere Angelique
arrived again, took a long satisfied look at her patient, and then, with the same knife that had split the cock, she
proceeded to cut off the putrid poultice attached to Drum's leg. It came off in a mass of crawling maggots, but after
Mere Angelique had washed the leg with warm water, there was nothing but a clean, nearly healed wound in the midst
of an expanse of pale lavender-colored flesh.39

One technique used by all three types of Hoodoo health care providers was the method of
using string to tie sacred healing knots. Abayomi Sofowora speaks of this practice in West
Africa, where both healing and preventative medicine used the string tied around the waist
or worn as a necklace.40 Once widespread throughout West Africa, the technique of healing
and rebalancing by using string and sacred knots was carried to the Americas by captive
Africans. The healing string would outlive American slavery and survive in isolated pockets
of African American culture at least until the early twenty-first century.
The string as a healing device was recorded by Newbell Niles Puckett in South Carolina in
the 1920s and 1930s. String or yarn soaked in turpentine and worn around the waist for
nine days was used to cause abortion.41 Tied around the head with a knot in front, the
string was used to treat headaches.42 Tied around the neck or, like the Yoruba/Lucumi “first
hand of Ifa” (primer mano de Ifa), tied around the left wrist using sixteen knots and
traditional prayer, the string was seen as a powerful protective device.43 One of Puckett's
informants, Ms. Hattie Harris of Columbus, Mississippi, prescribed the knotted string for
treating chills.44 The healing string was photographed in active use on St. Helena Island,
South Carolina, in 1934, and its most recent use was recorded in Opaloosas, Louisiana, in
1994 by Wanda Fontenot. Though Puckett's and Fontenot's works were in different states
and were separated by more than seven decades, the similarities that they documented in
the use, approach, and techniques of string healing are undeniable. Tied by various peoples
from Senegal down to the Kongo, the string in West Africa was used for rebalancing as well
as for healing and protection.
Fontenot's work on African American ethnomedicine documented nine types of healing
amulets, five of which use string and knots. The nine types are the single-knot string
amulet, the multiknot amulet, the root necklace, the prayer bead necklace, the prayer
cloth, the biblical scroll, the walking cane, religious lithography, and the silver coin,45 but
the most widely used is the single knot string amulet. According to Fontenot:
Whole nutmeg strung around the neck, red flannel wrap, and a silver dime strung around the ankle as medicine. (Photo
courtesy of Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1968).

Of the nine amulets, the single-knot string amulet is considered the dominant ritual
artifact. It usually is made with cord string and has nine knots tied on it. In most cases it is
a part of the healing rituals of the treaters and is commonly prescribed for children and
adults. The single string amulet can be made to be worn around the waist, across the chest
(the string fits over one shoulder and under the opposite arm), the wrist, the ankle, or the
neck, depending on what area of the body is afflicted. The common colors are white, red,
and black.46

Child in foreground wearing two medicine packets attached to the African healing string. Photo taken in Colombia, South
America, in 2000. (Dr. Thomas. B. Morton © 2000)

The various colors of string further specify its function. Fontenot continues:
The red is used for women of childbearing age who suffer with a history of miscarriages, difficult pregnancies, excessive
bleeding after giving birth, and irregular menses. The red string amulet is a specialty of midwives. The white is used for
any sex, any age, and any disease. The black is used for young children suffering with worms.47
 The multiknot amulet, considered very powerful and worn only around the waist, is often
prescribed for adults suffering from multiple problems. Composed of the single-string
amulet with a macramé-type knot in the center, the multiknot amulet is used less often
than the single-knot type. More difficult to tie and considered very powerful, “the multiple
center knots,” according to one practitioner, “represent every organ and bone in an
individual's body.”48
The silver dime amulet was undoubtedly the most widely used by African Americans.
Sometimes selected for its “man” or “woman” qualities, dimes were either male or female
because the portrait on the coin was either male or female. If the required male dime was
not available, then the charm was reversed so that a female dime could be used for male
work if necessary, but that required additional knowledge and steps in the ritual. Observed
in northern black communities in the early 1950s by this author, the silver dime amulet
was nearly universally known by American blacks until the silver dime was modified with a
copper filling by the United States Mint. The coin's modification coincided with, but
probably had little effect on, the declining status of Hoodoo as an independent alternative
approach and perspective on the world. Sometimes silver dimes and High John roots were
sewn alternately on a narrow cloth belt that was tied around the waist to heal, strengthen,
and protect the wearer.
The string, sometimes constructed either as a belt, an anklet, a bracelet, or a necklace,
served to focus the individual's psychic energies on that part of the body that required
medical attention. It provided the conduit for a uniting of the spiritual and physical
energies, which were constantly being refocused and rebalanced by the string. It turned
the self-healing receptors inward and opened up the individual so that healing could occur.
It also prepared the individual for the healing process. It raised confidence and psychic
strength and tapped into the individual's ability to heal himself through positive thinking. It
focused the psychic healing resources on that part of the individual that required
treatment. Medical personnel, including doctors and nurses, are now recognizing the
healing benefits of spiritual beliefs and supports, and some doctors are even using their
patients' belief systems to support their own treatment of patients.
Though more widely known today for his magical and spiritual manipulations, the
conjurer was also sought as a health care provider. The conjurer, root doctor, health care
tradition extended from West and Central West Africa to the North American plantation,
where conjurers were often the sole health care provider treating both black and white
patients. The tradition that united the magical with the medicinal in a balanced spiritual
framework was the African medicinal legacy inherited by the plantation conjurer. According
to historian Eugene Genovese, “The most important positive application of charms came in
slave medical practice.”49 The slave conjurers, root doctors, and midwives passed on a vast
body of knowledge of naturopathic healing techniques. The old tradition accumulated a
storehouse of knowledge, such as pennyroyal tea used for female complaints, sassafras tea
used for measles, mint tea used for abdominal problems, and Spanish moss used to treat
asthma.50
Not only were herbs and roots, with incantations, ritual procedures, and prayers used, the
earth itself was used as a healing device to restore use of limbs. In seaside communities
such as Sapelo Island, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama, the power of the earth itself was
harnessed to treat both humans and animals stricken with impaired use of lower limbs. At
the shore, a deep hole was dug in the sand and the afflicted individual was buried in a
standing position up to the chest. A shelter was constructed over exposed body parts to
protect them from the elements, insects, and inclement weather. Water would be
continually fed to the patient to prevent dehydration; this treatment was continued for
three days while pressure from the sand combined with the sand's mineral content and the
raw power of the spinning earth straightened out and strengthened the afflicted limbs.
Cornelia Walker Bailey informs us of the procedure described by her Uncle Nero:
 He believed in the power of the earth to heal—just sand, doing its work…said the Creator created us from sand from
the earth, so the earth was special, it had special healing properties…. Uncle Nero said he would dig a hole straight
down and he would put Ophelia in there and he's straighten out Ophelias legs and he's pack sand around them, and
that sand would keep her legs straight. He would keep packing sand around her, just up to a certain point that was high
enough, but not up to her head, so there wasn't gonna be any danger to Ophelia, she wasn't gonna suffocate or
anything. Ophelia would just be in a hole in a standing position for three days and three nights.51

Another example tells us of thirty-five-year-old John Isaac of Montgomery, Alabama, who

was suddenly stricken with an unknown affliction that made him unable to walk without
the use of crutches. In an attempt to find a cure, he was sent to his older sister's house in
Mobile, Alabama, where he was taken to the beach and buried in a standing position in
sand up to his chest. He returned to Montgomery about two weeks later fully restored,
walking without the use of crutches.52
Professor James Turner of the Cornell University Africana Studies and Research Center
shared the following story of his personal encounter with the Hoodoo medical legacy. His
aunt had a serious malady in her arm. Doctors were unable to cure the condition, and as it
worsened, amputation was presented to the family as the only lifesaving solution.
According to Turner, his aunt—as with many African Americans—had little trust of white
doc tors, and when the physician suggested amputation of the arm she refused. She
instead turned to Hoodoo medicine, boarded a bus, and headed for upcountry South
Carolina, where she had been born and had grown up. She embraced and had faith in the
power of old tradition Hoodoo healing procedures. She was taken to community “doctors,”
who treated her from the rituals and herbal medicine of the old tradition and who saved
both her arm and her life. After several weeks of treatment, she returned to New York with
her arm fully healed and restored.
The attempt to eliminate slave medical practice, which began in earnest in 1748 and
probably was made more so from fear of slave poisonings than of concern for competence,
was never wholly successful among either blacks or whites in the antebellum environment.
Though the late nineteenth century saw an increase in the attacks on the black herbal
medicine tradition, that attack, like earlier efforts, was less than successful. Blacks and
some whites continued to seek treatment, advice, and support from African American root
doctors as well as other black health care providers.
Born in 1812 and probably America's most famous nineteenth-century root doctor, Dr.
James Still of southern New Jersey was known to locals as “Dr. James of the Pine Barrens.”
The brother of abolitionist William Still, Dr. James Still was widely sought and consulted by
both blacks and whites with medical concerns. Though he never claimed to be either a
medical doctor or a Hoodoo practitioner, he did invest his herbal potions and remedies with
spiritual potency through prayer. As the child of slaves, he was exposed to and adhered to
disconnected elements of the Hoodoo belief system, such as the belief in luck, as the
following passage indicates:
Leaving Samuels, I started for Philadelphia. I went by by-roads and through woods. After traveling about two hundred
yards in a woods, I spied a large black-snake lying a little to my left. I seized a stick close at hand, and killing the snake,
threw away the stick and was about to gather up my pack and go on, when on the other side of the way, I beheld
another as large as the first. I picked up the stick again and killed it, also. Now, thought I, good luck will attend me, as I
had heard say “Kill the first snake you see in the new year and you shall kill your enemies.”53

Like his contemporaries the swampers, Dr. James Still dug and harvested his own roots
and distilled a wide range of oils, essences, and potions that he sold to Philadelphia
druggists Charles and William Ellis.54 He distilled sassafras roots and peppermint and used
his own healing herbal recipes made from a range of plants and roots, including saffron,
ipecac, pleurisy root, Virginia snakeroot, lobelia, bloodroot, cloves, comfrey, horehound,
elecampane, skunk cabbage, spikenard root, Alexandria senna, mayapple, cream of tartar,
catnip, boneset, and High John root.
Nicknamed “Mr. Buzzard” by other young men he encountered one day while chopping
wood for a living, Dr. Still's nickname may have been an appellation applied to any man
who was skilled in either medicinal or magico-spiritual root work. In African American
culture, the buzzard has appeared in dance, song, folktale, joke, and riddle, attesting to its
now lost significance as part of the Hoodoo worldview and applied not only to Dr. James Still
but also to America's most famous conjurer, Dr. Buzzard, Stepheney Robinson of St. Helena
Island, South Carolina. The reference to the bird may have been handed down either from
African cultural tradition or from a Native American appellation easily adopted by Africans
and their descendants.
By whatever name they were designated, all the late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-
century African American folk health care providers had one common concern relating to
the wider society: being arrested and charged with practicing medicine without a license. It
seems that this charge particularly was used to suppress anyone functioning as a folk
healer, and it was used to suppress and legally threaten the root brotherhood. The control,
containment, and suppression of patent medicines during this period had a further
undermining influence on Hoodoo. The establishment of regulatory efforts at the turn of the
twentieth century modified the public atmosphere in which folk medicine would be
regarded and practiced. Two important regulatory acts overlapped and framed the period:
the 1906 Federal Food and Drugs Act and the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. These
two acts addressed issues of truthful labeling and allowed government officials to assert
some degree of control and regulation over products and substances that might threaten
public safety. Those included nearly everything from drugs such as opium and cocaine to
food additives and adulterants of all types.
Fueled by muckraking journalism, a new public discourse emerged that would favor
government oversight and regulation of foods, drugs, and medicines. African Americans
would be late to follow this trend. But their distrust of white doctors, the medical profession
generally,55 and the oppositional cultural attitudes toward the white mainstream reinforced
the fact that blacks had profound faith in their own medicinal legacy and healing practices.
This all predisposed them to supporting and seeking out a tradition passed down to them
by their elders. The African American belief in the “night doctor” and the “needle doctor”56
reminded and warned blacks that they should not trust the medical profession and that
instead they should seek out midwives, root doctors, conjurers, treaters, and healers of the
old Hoodoo tradition. Of the cultural attitudes contributing to the maintenance of Hoodoo
medicine, the long-standing belief that the medical profession continues to experiment on
blacks is the most potent and influential.
A 2002 questionnaire on Hoodoo belief revealed interesting results. Of the thirty-six
African American women who returned the survey from a field of one hundred distributed,
twenty-seven, or 75 percent, revealed that they have known someone who believes that
doctors may be experimenting on blacks. Twenty-six, or 72 percent of respondents revealed
that they personally believed that doctors may be experimenting on blacks.57
In the hands of either the uninitiated or the exploitative marketeer, Hoodoo medicine
could prove to be anything from less than helpful to fatal, particularly when an ailing
individual encountered a charlatan or when he or she simply asked a friend how to treat an
ailment. In the case of a potentially fatal ailment or public health threat like venereal
disease, the home remedies circulating in public discourse could prove fatal. By the time a
young man asked someone to suggest a home treatment, that particular treatment may
have been modified in the public discourse and assigned to an inapplicable malady, as in
the following case:
I drew them into a conversation, finally asking what I should do for gonorrhea. One of them said that he had had the
“clap” several times and while he knew of others who spent large sums of money to get rid of it, he never spent more
than ten or fifteen cents…. He told me to get ten cents worth of turpentine and take nine drops at a time on a spoonful
of brown sugar.58

Public health studies document what some young men suggest as a treatment for either
syphilis or gonorrhea. A 1931 New Orleans public health survey indicates that black men in
the survey were only about one-third as likely as white men to seek out a physician or clinic
when ill. Seventy percent of black men surveyed said that they would use some form of
home remedy, while only forty-six, less than half, white men said they would use a home
remedy.59 Studies conducted in Chicago and Washington, DC, reveal similar trends.60
Many of the supplies used in self-medication and self-treatment could be purchased at
the local drugstore, sometimes a Hoodoo drugstore. Hoodoo drugstores were commercial
sites where the magical and medicinal aspects of Hoodoo were reunited; those
establishments were common throughout the black belt South. Very different than today's
drugstores, these establishments were sometimes owned by a doctor who filled
prescriptions as well as created treatments for various symptoms. Hoodoo drugstores were
a significant component in urban folk medicine and home remedies in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. According to researcher Carolyn Morrow Long:
[W]hite people were also entering the spiritual business, often through ownership of a neighborhood drugstore with a
predominantly black clientele. The pharmacy was a common source for the “materiamedica” of hoodoo. In the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all pharmacies stocked botanicals, oils, essences, and flavorings for the
formulation of healing preparations, and they sold common household preservatives and cleaners such as alum,
saltpeter, ammonia, laundry bluing, lye, and sulfur…. Certain white druggist were willing to make up hoodoo
“prescriptions” for customers.61

The most famous of all the Hoodoo drugstores was the Cracker Jack Drug Store, located at
435 South Rampart Street in New Orleans. Founded as an ordinary drugstore in 1897 by a
white pharmacist physician, George A. Thomas, the Thomas Drugstore eventually became a
spiritual market and in 1932 was renamed the Cracker Jack Drug Store, a name it retained
until it closed in 1974.62
As a commercial folk health care site, the Hoodoo drugstore was a station at which
numerous spiritual trains stopped. These establishments would eventually bring together a
range of spiritual and occult practitioners and traditions that had previously little if any
access to one another. These were sites for cross-fertilization and change, a place where the
high practitioners and potential patrons met and exchanged information, knowledge, and
tradition. It was also a place where new approaches to Hoodoo would be created and sold
by outsider merchants and always with marketeering and profit as their primary intent.
 BLACK BELT HOODOO IN THE
POST–WORLD WAR II CULTURAL
ENVIRONMENT
The aftermath of World War II, particularly its benefits in the form
of educational supports, jobs, pensions, and housing benefits
from the GI bill to returning African American servicemen, would
provide the black community with both incentives and
opportunities for continuing migration northward. Increased
income, though racially circumscribed in northern black
communities, intensified the movement away from old black belt
traditions. In some cases, the old Hoodoo continuum would
experience internally generated redefinition, particularly through
church-connected Hoodoo workers. But in the northern urban
environment, marketeered Hoodoo would dominate in many
black communities.
Hoodoo's first urban face, which appeared in the smaller cities
and towns of the postemancipation black belt South, was unlike
its latter-day counterpart in large northern metropolises and even
some large southern cities. The style of early, urban, black-
controlled Hoodoo was very much like its rural counterpart,
sharing similar characteristics, and was intertwined in the same
supply networks. Commercial exploitation was less developed
there. This would change as marketeers moved to take over,
control, and profit from the sale of Hoodoo. Post–World War II
urbanized Hoodoo would present itself publicly as a
conglomeration of disconnected products, gestures, and
procedures like candle burning and mojo bag making.
Participation in old black belt traditions would eventually come to
be viewed by some African Americans as incompatible with
notions of “racial uplift.” This view was informed largely by
several factors, including the aggressive diversification and
proliferation of the spiritual marketplace, increasing African
American cultural disengagement from old southern black belt
spiritual traditions and culture, migration to and employment in
the urban North, and the thrust toward “race betterment”
marked by assimilation to the mainstream. Confronting these
factors, post–World War II urbanized Hoodoo would become
nearly unrecognizable as it presented itself publicly as a
conglomeration of disconnected products, gestures, and
procedures.
Workers of old tradition Hoodoo would be outnumbered by and
achieve lower levels of visibility than the marketeering outsiders
interested in the commercial exploitation of Hoodoo. This would
have potentially dangerous consequences for those seeking help
with medical conditions or those preoccupied with a serious
personal concern. Some of the spiritual merchants, who had so
effectively financially exploited the African American Hoodoo
belief system, would pass their businesses to their heirs and
establish a continuing legacy of intergenerational exploitation
and profiting from Hoodoo. They would further modify urban
Hoodoo's face.
As old tradition black belt Hoodoo's influence and reach were
weakening, it was both outflanked by commercial exploiters and
becoming more difficult to locate inside the African American
community. Concurrently, the old sites for locating the vast array
of authentic old tradition Hoodoo ingredients and materials were
becoming increasingly scarce.1 For example, the supply line
through the often elderly black man, who either assisted or
became the local pharmacist, and the old-style drugstore with its
compounding pharmacy selling patent medicines and
ingredients used both in Hoodoo and for other purposes would,
like the old swampers, become relics of the past. Both the
conjurer-root workers and the clients they served would,
increasingly, be forced to turn to the curio shop, the mail-order
marketplace, and Hoodoo mail-order catalogs for supplies.
Though the new sources could deliver only a limited and often
insufficient inventory, the exploiting marketeers aggressively
pushed their products in an increasingly receptive atmosphere,
contributed to by black belt tradition invisibility and racism.
Loudell F. Snow, in her study of “mail-order magic,” clearly
documents the commercial exploitation of the old Hoodoo folk
belief system by marketeers using mail-order catalogs.2
Several other factors would contribute to black belt Hoodoo's
susceptibility to outsider control and further marginalization as
well as loss of black control in the marketplace. The
disappearance of the street-crying root and herb peddlers, the
African American community's own door-to-door Hoodoo supply
salesman, would disappear. The continuing shrinkage of old root
and herb harvest grounds and the disappearance of natural sites
such as forested lands for obtaining other old tradition Hoodoo
ingredients further contributed. The disappearance of the African
American lay midwife disrupted the traditional supply line
needed for most sexually specific Hoodoo work. All left the black
belt Hoodoo believer open to intense financial and spiritual
exploitation by those who were nonbelieving outsiders looking to
make a profit. Mail-order catalog Hoodoo would thrive in this
cultural atmosphere, but it would not go uncontested.
In addition to an increase in the number and diversity of mail-
order catalogs offering Hoodoo supplies, Hoodoo advertising
would move from primarily newspapers to the new “confessions”
magazines that were penetrating African American and white
communities alike. Like the race records of the era, the
confessions magazine initially targeted their racially segregated
potential readership based considerably on race and gender. True
Confessions Magazine, the best-known example on the market,
though it would later expand its readership to include African
Americans, initially targeted primarily, though not exclusively,
working-class white females between ages sixteen and forty
years old. African American consumers could partake of similar
material in at least three comparable publications: Tan, Sepia,
and Bronze Thrills, all published by the same company as True
Confessions, McFadden Publishers. Targeted to working-class
women, the confessions publications of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s
offered stories that centered on themes of love, cheating,
sexuality, secrecy, and betrayal. Confessions publications gave
the reader a look from behind the “chastity curtain.” Their stories
involved home wreckers, premarital sex, out-of-wedlock
pregnancies, infidelity, and young women who violated the moral
code of the day and suffered the consequences. Titles such as “I
Had to Put Out or Lose My Job,” “He Only Wanted One Thing,” “My
Man Left Me for My Neighbor,” and “My Parole Officer Stole My
Woman” attest to the often melodramatic, soap opera quality of
the magazines' contents. It is no coincidence that the characters
in the confessions stories confronted the very same problems
that plagued Hoodoo help seekers, thus reinforcing an instant
identification between the readers and the characters while the
Hoodoo ads promised help for such problems. These magazines
acted as templates both by illustrating familiar thematic
problems and by providing the numerous ads that directed
readers to supernatural solutions.
Hoodoo confessions ads like these flood black confessions magazines.

The late 1960s and early 1970s, the era of heightened black
activism and economic transformation would witness decline in
confession market sales. But beginning in the late 1970s and
early 1980s and by the 1990s, the confessions market would
experience a rebound as well as an expansion from three to six
separate magazines aimed at blacks. Bronze Thrills and Jive are
the oldest at more than forty years old; the other four magazines,
Black Confessions, Black Secrets, True Black Experience, and
Black Romance, are all less than thirty years old and demonstrate
the increase in demand for this material. Since their first
publication, these magazines have become a major vehicle
carrying advertisements for alleged Hoodoo practitioners. The
ads are spread throughout the magazine, with the largest
concentration of ads in the last few pages.
The Hoodoo ads in the confessions magazines were not and
today are not unlike those in African American newspapers of an
earlier era. Many of the same approaches and techniques of
appeal, such as the use of fictive kinship titles like “Mother,”
“Brother,” and “Sister,” were and are still part of the sales pitch.
Because these titles are also used in the African American
church, they carry and impart a certain level of legitimacy in the
world of African American spiritual work. As in the earlier
advertisements, the use of these titles by Hoodoo workers
signifies a connection with a church and thus an implied level of
both spiritual stability and legitimacy as well as an assurance
that the worker was doing only good work and not evil. But for
the marketeer, the use of the fictive title was merely a marketing
device.
According to psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, fictive kinship titles
such as these serve another important function: They raise the
potential client's expectations and they mobilize hope and
confidence in the worker's ability and experience.3 In the context
of the black church, these titles are earned by individuals and
bestowed by the congregation using the principle of working
community consensus. An important church mother never
assumes the title on her own; she cannot designate herself as
“Mother Johnson” or “Mother Catherine.” In core culture African
American communities, these high-status indicators are
bestowed by the church, sometimes formally in recognition
ceremonies, but only after an extended period of time and only
through community acknowledgment and consensus. The
marketeers who serve an African American clientele often bestow
these titles on themselves because they are not and will never be
black church “mothers” or “brothers.” Since the introduction of
Hoodoo to the Internet, there is a new twist on the theme of “title
taking” by those claiming to be Hoodoos. One can now see the
use of academic titles such as Doctor or PhD in Internet Hoodoo
Web sites. The false use of academic titles is not altogether new,
as an examination of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
black newspapers revealed. Web sites now make tailored,
misleading Hoodoo advertising possible and available. As this
investigator began searching for old tradition black belt Hoodoo
workers and root workers for this study, I turned to the ads in the
black confessions magazines to help me locate them. Wondering
where the search would lead, I assumed that the ads were for
legitimate African American Hoodoos. I would soon find out that
my expectations were far from correct. Certainly, clients in the
readership who need Hoodoo work performed turn to these
magazines as sources for locating a worker. I collected a set of
thirty-eight names and telephone numbers that frequently
appeared in the magazines over a five-year period from 1997 to
2002. I designated these names as “frequent advertisers” and
included those who advertised at least monthly for several years.
Some of them regularly advertised in more than one of the black
confessions magazines. I was searching for a traditional African
American root worker who appeared to be connected with the old
tradition and who had been trained by an older family member,
church member, or a community elder, as was done in old
tradition Hoodoo. I composed a list of thirty-eight names, all but
a few used either a fictive title with a black church legacy or
terms such as “gifted,” as in “gifted root worker” or “gifted
psychic.” Nineteen of the thirty-eight, or half, were unreachable
by telephone because the listed numbers had been disconnected
since the ad was placed. Of the remaining nineteen that I was
able to reach, none of them were African American Hoodoo or
root workers. Most of them were middle age or beyond and were
white women with a few palm readers from Romanian
backgrounds seeking to expand their market and clientele in
fortune-telling. Only one of the thirty-eight spoke to me with
sincerity about her work and her qualifications and admitted not
knowing the fictitious “Papa Juma” incantations, a name that I
invented to test the knowledge and integrity of the worker.
Several self-designated psychics that I spoke with assured me
that they could recite these nonexistent verses but only alone
and in secrecy. Several of them quickly told me that they could
solve my problems, even before I told them what the problems
were, and quickly added that I must immediately send them
sums that varied between $1,200 and $1,500.
After no success in locating a black belt tradition Hoodoo
worker through these magazines, I finally concluded that these
ads allowed a legion of spiritual exploiters direct access to a
wide-ranging readership of primarily young, poor, and lower-
middle-class working African American women who have, at
best, a slippery grasp on what appears to them as a fragmented
and moribund tradition. Lured to Hoodoo by their own cultural
legacy and social predisposition via folk stories and conversations
among African Americans that still tell of Hoodoo's efficacy, the
potential believers still seek spiritual help from a tradition now
forced to the margins of black culture and heavily infiltrated by
middlemen minority marketeers.
Black belt Hoodoo in the post–World War II period would find
itself confronted with yet another repositioning. As old tradition
Hoodoo became more invisible and marginalized, adaptations
such as the candle shop would become a more prominent feature
than they had been prior to World War II. Southern African
Americans who migrated from the rural South into northern
urban black communities after the war, would give the northern,
urban adaptation of old black belt Hoodoo its last infusion of the
remaining elements of the old tradition. Other modifications
involved simply importing a black belt tradition, as did the old
root doctors in Philadelphia when they began directly peddling
fresh roots, herbs, and medicinal plants in the city's northern
black neighborhoods.
Other adaptations were stimulated by both the new postwar
sociocultural environment and expansion of marketeering sites
that combined the sale of spiritual products, including roots,
herbs, candles, incense, and books from diverse traditions such
as Santeria, Wicca, kabbalah, Judaism, astrology, Christianity,
Hinduism, Islam, New Orleans Voodoo, and Hoodoo. Eventually,
the influence of the new age spiritual movements of the late
1960s and 1970s would be felt and demonstrated in the old
shops through the addition of products such as crystals, crystal
balls, astrology charts, tarot cards, and even spiritual wands.
Some shops would hire readers, some of whom were charlatans,
but who would perform readings and spiritual consultations right
in the store. The old curio shops and Hoodoo drugstores would be
forced to diversify or close; most closed.
In those shops that survived economically through the close of
the twentieth century, diversification would become a standard;
in the 1990s, Internet access would give a new avenue to both
marketeers and legitimate old tradition black belt Hoodoos as
well as potential clients. By the end of the twentieth century, a
diversifying and widening range of marketeered Hoodoo products
could be easily located by anyone with a computer and access to
online Web sites. Many of the sites offer a catalog of products for
sale and will ship them by mail order. Some of the sites will even
offer to make up a mojo bag for a price. Fabricated, marketeered
items such as “war water” or “peace water,” nonexistent in old
tradition black belt Hoodoo, as well as questionably constructed
imitation Hoodoo/mojo bags, money drawing oil, jinx-removing
oils, powders, incense, air fresheners, soaps, and floor washes are
all for sale. Some sites give information that contradicts historical
evidence as well as common sense, such as the use of a chicken
wing bone to indicate travel. Slaves were not likely to be
traveling unless they were attempting an escape. None of the
nineteenth-century conjurers' caches that this author examined
had chicken wing bones; there were what appeared to be rib
bones, but no chicken bones.
Old tradition black belt Hoodoo ingredients have always been
all natural, recently harvested, or ritually preserved by traditional
Hoodoo root doctor herbalists, using old techniques, incantations,
and prayers. These would have been obtainable in the plantation
environment before the emergence of marketeered Hoodoo.
Many imitated and marketeered Hoodoo products would depart
considerably, in both content and construction technique, from
their original old tradition Hoodoo predecessors. Much of the
material culture and nonmaterial aspect of old tradition Hoodoo
work would be lost to those who exploited and commercially
marketed these products. Two examples of this exploitation can
be clearly seen in the marketeering of something known in the
Hoodoo marketplace as hot foot powder and war water. No such
products existed in plantation-based Hoodoo. Hot foot powder is
an insufficient attempt to fabricate the old black belt Hoodoo
charm known to well-trained and knowledgeable old tradition
Hoodoo practitioners simply as “the walking foot.” War water
attempts to duplicate the old tradition use of a liquid substance
to harm or protect. But unlike marketeered liquids, the
individually prepared Hoodoo liquids usually contained some of
the client's bodily fluid as well as the “blood” or sap from certain
plants, roots, or herbs, depending on the intensity, speed, and
results intended. According to both African tradition and old
tradition Hoodoo, it was mandatory that the recipe be mixed from
fresh or ritually preserved supplies. Unlike old tradition
ingredients, some of the marketeered supplies have sat on the
shelf so long that the plastic bags containing the herb or root
became cloudy and brittle and the plant or root became stale
and ineffective.
When an authentic black belt Hoodoo recipe required that it be
diluted, only sacred water was used. Only water such as
rainwater caught on either the full or the dark of the moon, water
from the blacksmith's forge or foundry, or water from the
baptismal pool or “baptizin' place” in the local river or lake was
used. In the small town of Glen Allen, Mississippi, water from the
local “baptizin' place” was used in 1971 and perhaps more
recently. Local Hoodoo mythology often developed around the
“safety” of the local “baptizin' place.” It was believed that the
spiritual power left in the water after a sacred ritual such as
baptism rendered the water sacred and thus a “safe zone” where
one could not be bitten by venomous snakes or attacked by
alligators that normally inhabit the local waters. The spot was
also used for recreational activities such as swimming because it
was believed to be safe.
If a client needed to harness the swift power of the rattlesnake,
then the plant known only as rattlesnake master was added to
the mixture to speed the work along. Certain prayers,
incantations, and words of power were spoken as the mixture
was created; the words were changed to complement and call
out the spiritual power of the herbs, roots, and substances that
were used. Particular plants, with either short or extended
growing periods, were used to time the release of the power in
the mixture. With some mixtures, a counteractive substance was
used to either slow, mute, or limit the time span of the action.
The counteractive substance, particularly if it were a plant, was
usually found within about an arm's radius of the root used. This
rule was also applied to poisonous plants and their natural
antidotes. The root worker simply stood astride the plant, spread
his or her arms out to the side, and within an arm's length
somewhere an antidote was to be found.
The Internet has allowed a flowering of Hoodoo merchandising
and cyberspace exploitation. In the saturation of cyberspace, one
can purchase spells, including a death spell, a spell to bring back
a lover, get a husband, get money, get out of jail, harm an enemy
or rival, and a host of other actions. One can also purchase a
marketeered course on Hoodoo, find instructions on YouTube.com
on how to make mojoes, create spells, make Florida water, make
Hoodoo candles, and make Hoodoo oils. One can listen to radio
blogs on such sites as BlogTalkRadio.com that feature shows on
Hoodoo, which take calls while on the air. One can also learn to
read cards and divine with shells, sticks, and rocks. Most of the
Hoodoo products carry the label “sold only as a curio,” with no
refund. On at least one Hoodoo Internet site, the reader accepts
the money and the client has no way of verifying that the spell
was actually performed. In the case of an Internet mojo bag, the
client is sent the mojo in the mail.
As old tradition black belt Hoodoo became nearly publicly
invisible, some marketeers have been able to present themselves
as self-styled experts on Hoodoo, even offering classes and
certification. Lifting their information from others' scholarly
research and printed materials, marketeers present what is by
comparison a Hoodoo that is truncated, marked by disclaimers,
superficial, without spiritual substance or healing content, and
often fabricated by earlier marketeers. The sites that feature
commercially exploitable versions of Hoodoo are flooded with the
sale of their own products, many of which are poor imitations or
limited versions of old tradition self-obtained supplies. In this
vein, the marketeers have attempted to impose standardization
from the outside, thereby further enabling themselves to both
control and tap into the limited flow of African American dollars.
 Marketeered standardization and control would eventually
contribute to an open, oozing fissure of flowing black dollars into
outsiders' pockets. In addition, the middlemen minority
marketeers would also publicly present a badly misshapen image
of an oppressed people's long-standing spiritual tradition. The
problems that the marketeers claim to address are often
presented with cavalier, self-serving, questionable images that
substantiate and support old racist stereotypes. Some of the
images depict “Negroes” as foolish with money and lazy and who
would rather gamble than work, so much so that they seek
supernatural assistance to achieve a positive end. Gambling, sex,
police trouble, vice, broken families, and lack of work are all
marketeered as the stereotyped, narrow image of African
American concern and Hoodoo focus. Here Hoodoo is redefined in
the language and imagery of the marketeers. And the problems
that blacks have are the result of individual weakness and
shortcomings and not systemic racism.
In the post–World War II environment, the division between old
tradition black belt Hoodoo and the snake-oil Hoodoo of the
commercial marketeers would be wider than ever before in most
aspects except one. As the old harvest grounds continue to
disappear, some old tradition workers have succumbed to
pressure to use at least some commercial supplies. Though some
African American conjurers have turned to marketeered supplies,
most old tradition workers still use freshly harvested plants,
roots, herbs, and other supplies, though they may not dig them
themselves. Some still use diggers, professional harvesters, who
dig roots and herbs for them and who are continually on the
lookout for fresh wild-growing plants. On one of my visits to
Sheffield, Alabama, to interview an old tradition root worker who
now uses some marketeered products, Miss Mary, as she is
known, had one of her diggers harvest a giant poke root and
present it to me as a gift. Dried and pulverized, this legendary
root has numerous uses in old tradition Hoodoo. And on a trip to
visit Brother Gregory of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, I was
given two freshly harvested rattlesnake master plants as a gift. In
both instances, the diggers had spotted and dug up the fresh
roots for their old tradition root workers. Even those old tradition
specialists like Ms. Mary and Brother Gregory, who resist and limit
their dependence on marketeered products, have been recently
forced to concede and purchase some commercial supplies.
Wider sea changes in the sociocultural environment,
particularly end-of-the-century deindustrialization and its impact
on the overall economic health of African American communities
heavily dependent on industry, have impacted old tradition
Hoodoo workers. Significant numbers of them, like their clients,
are forced to commit more time to their regular jobs, so they
restrict their Hoodoo practice to a preferred specialty. Though
most of them have been trained as generalists, they now
specialize in a particular type of work, such as court case work or
love and family work, and they carefully screen their cases when
a request is made. The continuing loss of black-owned farmland
has also impacted old tradition Hoodoo specialists because many
of them had been independent small farmers feeding themselves
from the land and practicing their craft. The loss of land has been
a double curse upon Hoodoo that includes the loss of traditional
Hoodoo harvest grounds as well as the loss of farming land for
economic support and independence from wage labor.
In spite of everything that has contributed to old tradition
Hoodoo's demise, influential vestiges persist that connect
contemporary black belt Hoodoo practice directly back to the
plantation community as well as to its golden age before the
takeover by marketeers and ultimately back to areas of West and
Central West Africa, particularly Nigeria, Benin, Ghana,
Senegambia, Kongo, and Sierra Leone. Today black belt tradition
conjurers and root workers still perform some of the functions
performed by both plantation conjurers and African traditional
priests. In an interview with a contemporary black belt old
tradition root worker on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, the
informant, Brother A. B. Gregory, the great-grandson of Dr.
Buzzard, revealed that recently he had experienced an increase
in requests for two types of work. One type was in court cases
involving younger clients accused of murder, particularly
shootings of young African American men related to gang
violence or quasi-gang drug violence. The other type was in the
“community sanction” function, indicated by the number of
people who brought their children and grandchildren to him to
be verbally lectured and reprimanded. He further stated, “More
and more people are bringing their kids here for me to fuss at
them and tell them to obey and listen to their parents, stay out of
trouble.”4 Of significance to West and Central West African
tradition society and important to the slave community, conjurers
performed the community sanction function and passed it on to
freedmen as a component of the conjurer's role in community
life. This role and aspect of Hoodoo would not be replicated or
even addressed by marketeers.
In the rapidly changing post–World War II sociocultural
environment, contemporary root workers would interface with
those students of and practitioners of various traditions,
including African traditional religion, particularly Vodun,
Santeria/Lucumi, Yoruba, Akan, and Kongo traditions. Drawn
together in stores that serve as botanicas, Hoodoo curio stores,
and candle shops, all under one roof, spiritual believers from a
range of traditions would encounter one another. Each overheard
conversation represents an opportunity for cross-fertilization as
clients will sometime inform contemporary root workers of their
own dabbling in other traditions. In the post–World War II cultural
environment, there would be new venues in which old tradition
black belt Hoodoo would encounter and interact with other
African-derived spiritual traditions. Additionally, some children
and grandchildren of old tradition workers have become
educated in the fields of psychology and medicine and are
raising important questions about Hoodoo belief and its role in
African American community health. One such person is Dr.
Wilbert Jordan of Los Angeles who was reared in a household that
practiced and passed on the old plantation black belt Hoodoo
traditions. He is now a medical doctor sensitive in his medical
practice to his patients' folk healing and Hoodoo medical
traditions.5
To subsequent generations of African Americans born in the
North, three factors would further diminish the influence and
exposure of old tradition Hoodoo as a first choice problem-solving
spiritual alternative: the continuing black migration out of the
rural southern black belt northward into urban areas, increasing
income and identification with a northern urban lifestyle, and
increasing access to mainstream medical care and more money
to afford it. Though many African Americans did not trust white
doctors or the health care system, and justifiably so,6 greater
access to health care would further challenge belief in old
tradition Hoodoo's medical legacy and would completely and
finally drive it either underground or into prayer-based faith
healing rituals. Nevertheless, beliefs from the old plantation
Hoodoo tradition would still inform behaviors of millions of
younger African Americans. There is ample evidence that in spite
of black-owned supply networks dying at least some Hoodoo
belief is thriving.
Though Hoodoo would experience a diminished centrality
causing subsequent generations of African Americans to know
and experience less of Hoodoo than their parents and
grandparents, many of them still turn to Hoodoo as either their
system of last resort or to support actions initiated independently
by them. This appears to be particularly true of young African
American women in their late twenties and thirties who are
looking for husbands. According to old tradition practitioner
informants, work to “get a man, preferably a husband”
dominates a major part of their practice.7 And here we can note
central concerns among blacks as believers. In post–World War II
African American communities, the legacy and practice of old
tradition Hoodoo would continue in the more fundamentalist
African American churches. And today one can still find an old
tradition black belt root worker using certain African American
church networks. A significant number of those urbanized
practitioners would increasingly be forced into at least minimally
using commercially packaged curios or marketeered supplies
such as powders, candles, roots, and soaps.
As black consciousness and political struggles of the postwar
1950s and 1960s intensified in the atmosphere of the Cold War,
the influence of New World Pan-Africanism and popular black
nationalism would inadvertently provide a new undergirding for
old tradition Hoodoo. During the 1960s, a period of heightened
black consciousness, African Americans in some quarters would
view older elements of national Negro culture, including Hoodoo,
tap dance, jook activity, and the blues, as antithetical to the new
militant black man of the period. In some quarters, this view
would find compatibility with notions of racial uplift, but for
different reasons. The trajectories of Black Nationalism and
assimilationist uplift would intersect in the 1960s to further
stimulate the negative perceptions of Hoodoo as a relic of Negro
superstition and backwardness. Tap dance in particular suffered a
near-death experience.8
Though it would arrive at Hoodoo's doorstep in the late
twentieth century and after an ideological struggle, the influence
of both modern Pan-Africanism and African American nationalism
would provide old tradition Hoodoo with new exchange sites free
from the dictates and direct influence of exploiting marketeers
and outsiders. These new sites have been allowing old tradition
workers direct contact with both continental African and New
World African traditionalists, priests, shamans, and spiritual
specialists in African traditional religion.
African-founded and controlled licensing organizations such as
the National African Religion Congress (NARC) are providing safe
space for new types of exchanges free from the fear that
marketeers will appropriate the tradition and continue the legacy
of falsification, misrepresentation, and monetary exploitation.
Founded in Philadelphia in 1999, NARC has established a
governing body of African religion practitioners that includes
Akan priests; Nigerian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican Babalawos;
Olorishas; Iyalorishas; Kongo priests; Santeros; and Shango
Baptist priests. The governing body is a certification and
licensing body of African traditionalists. The safe spaces provided
by organizations such as NARC allow old tradition workers to
examine possible origins and to re-Africanize Hoodoo traditions
modified, polluted, and exploited by marketeers' standardization
and false fabrication of Hoodoo products. At NARC's yearly
conference, Hoodoos and other priests can learn the subtly
detailed tradition of making African traditional bagged amulets
or mojoes and gain exposure to the traditional African parents of
Hoodoo. Exposure to other New World manifestations of African
religious traditions allows practitioners to observe the
evolutionary history and variety of demographic circumstances
and their possible influences in producing other New World
African religious traditions such as Lucumi and Shango Baptist.
These conferences are rich in the exchange of old tradition
information and ritual materials such as authentically made
African traditional soaps, oils, powders, roots, herbs, and plants.
Some items must undergo long ritual curing periods in secret,
sacred locations before they can be exchanged; these sacred
places are only known to the priests and priestesses initiated in
the sacred tradition. The sites also serve as places for exchange
of herbal traditions.
Snake-oil and marketeered Hoodoo networks thrived partly on
African American disconnection from their own traditions,
cultural ignorance, and denial of self, resulting partly from racial
oppression from both past enslavement and contemporary social
dislocation.9 Economic marginalization and exclusion, cultural
denigration, deceptive marketeering practices, and outright
racist targeting of African Americans further contributed to this
process. Gunnar Myrdal made clear the racist dynamic inherent
in some exchanges between whites and African Americans in his
landmark study An American Dikmma: The Negro Problem and
Modern Democracy, in which he quotes interviewed whites as
saying, “The only way a man can make money from farming is by
stealing it from the Negroes. Some people get ahead by living
close…and then there are lots that steal from the Negroes. Some
of them will take everything a Negro has, down to his last chicken
and hog.”10
In addition to serving marketeered Hoodoo, new sites in
cyberspace are challenging it through an African American
reclamation of old tradition black belt Hoodoo. Although the
Internet has become a favored medium of Hoodoo marketeers
and in some instances con artists, younger African American
conjurers, root doctors, and Hoodoos who work in the old
tradition all around the United States are circumventing the
marketeers and are in close contact with one another and are
exchanging traditional folk recipes, old formulas, and rituals
handed down in their families for healing, harming, and
controlling. And few if any of these recipes, formulas, or rituals
resemble anything peddled by catalog and Internet marketeers
who set themselves up as experts but who have limited and often
incorrect and corrupted information that could eventually even
prove to be harmful. In the post–World War II environment, the
Hoodoo ads that once proliferated in African American
newspapers would dwindle and in most instances disappear.
Only in the confessions market would the Hoodoo ads continue.
Hoodoo radio advertising has been limited to shows with
religious content, such as Gospel hours that featured African
American Gospel music and that attract fundamentalist
believers. Certain black churches still sponsor these shows, and
their listening audiences of potential clients can readily identify a
local “prophet's” ads. Unlike radio, early television attempted no
race-based marketing of Hoodoo practitioners or products. Only
occasionally would an African American church have a local
television show; Reverend Ike is the noteworthy exception here.
Born on June 1, 1935, in Ridgeland, South Carolina, Reverend
Ike carried one element of old tradition black belt Hoodoo into
the television age: the modified mojo bag and devotional amulet
known as the prayer cloth. Unlike other amulets, prayer cloths
were never prepared with the client present. And like the variety
of preparation techniques used with the healing string,
preparation of the prayer cloth involved different techniques. This
updated version of the old tradition mojo bag functions similarly,
and thousands of African Americans have sent for and received
Reverend Ike's prayer cloths. These modernized amulet prayer
cloths are internally conceived modifications and true
adaptations from within church-based Hoodoo rather than from
outsider middlemen minority marketeers. Similar cloths would be
used and distributed by Louisiana treaters as curative amulets.11
Both Reverend Ike and the treaters used only red cloth in the
amulet's preparation.
The 1990s would bring to the public access to an updated,
complex spiritual marketplace. Psychic hotlines, some endorsed
by celebrities, would flood the airways with televised ads.
Individual readers and advisors such as the now infamous Miss
Cleo offered the viewing public telephone hotlines through which
they could contact a psychic, astrologer, advisor, or reader.
Though the TV psychics appealed to a wide-ranging and
ethnically diverse viewing audience, Miss Cleo targeted black
potential clients by using a well established question in Hoodoo
discourse: “Has someone put roots on you?” This language,
designed to get the black viewer's attention, targeted not only
African Americans but also other blacks familiar with similar
traditions such as Jamaican Obeah.
Today in numerous communities, people still seek the help,
support, counsel, and assistance of community laypeople. Some
of these skilled lay community helpers have developed local,
regional, and in some instances national reputations as
knowledgeable and adept helpers, readers, and advisors. There
are perhaps thousands of these lay community health
practitioners in African American communities across the
country, and it appears that the most effective are still associated
with a traditional African American black belt style Sanctified
church. These practitioners still address concerns that range from
love problems and the general category of protection, to the
general condition of good or bad luck, as well as legal problems
and court cases, medical problems and concerns, and personal,
behavioral, and discipline problems within families, such as
disobedient youth. They also address a major concern for
economically marginalized African Americans: the acquisition of
money. Many of these lay practitioners have a considerable
degree of traditional knowledge on the uses of medicinal herbs
for healing teas and baths as well as for traditional spiritual
treatments. They are consulted not so much for their medical
knowledge as for their spiritual support and help in making
important medical decisions and exploring what questions to ask
a doctor. The most widely sought after lay helpers are still
connected with a Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal (AME), or
Holiness church that retains fundamentalist elements from the
African Religion Complex in the style of worship. In most of these
churches, there is an old style African-based exuberance in
music, dance, and physical movement as well as a strong
interactive, participatory style between preacher and
congregation. Where these churches are the most numerous,
visible, and dominant sites of sacred worship, old tradition black
belt Hoodoo beliefs appear to be the strongest.
 Though old tradition black belt Hoodoo was both originated
and developed by African American captives on plantations in the
southern slave states of America, today's workers in the tradition
serve a more ethnically and demographically diverse population
than ever before. Some clients are immigrants who have lost
touch with their own folk magical and medicinal systems and
now look for something familiar and spiritually compatible to
turn to. For all of my informants, their clients are Chinese
immigrants as well as first- and second-generation Southeast
Asians, African Americans; West Indians of African, Chinese, and
East Indian ancestry; Mexican and other Latinos; and southern as
well as northern white Americans. Most of the clients were raised
in a Christian environment, and most of them live in urban areas.
The problems the workers are consulted for are in those areas of
life addressed by both old tradition black belt Hoodoo and its
marketeered, snake-oil equivalent: love and family relationships,
work or job-related problems, financial problems, bad luck,
protection from negative forces and energies including those that
cause stress, as well as emotional and psychological difficulties,
criminal court cases, and other legal problems. Problems of love,
particularly those of finding a good mate, and finding a good job
are the most requested.
As the national stability and social conditions of the African
American family continue in rapid decline, marriage rates are
decreasing and out-of-wedlock births and single-parent
households are increasing. As the marriage picture in the African
American community grows more dismal each year, there has
been a noticeable increase in requests for work that would get a
husband. As one informant stated, “Because it's so hard for a
black woman to find a husband, you know with the white women
and all going after our men, I'm getting a lot of calls.” Most of
these requests come from African American women in their late
twenties and early thirties who want to get married immediately
and feel a sense of desperation. Sometimes the marriage request
is for a specific person, such as a professional athlete, or
someone who is already married. In the case of the latter, a
request to break up the existing marriage is frequently included,
but most workers will not do work to break up a legal union with
children.
Though few and far between, old tradition black belt Hoodoo
workers still exist; four women and four men were interviewed for
this study. They are Ms. Mary, Brother Gregory, Papa Ce, Djenra
Windwalker, Arthur Flowers, Hougan Dafusky Jones, Dancingtree
Moonwater, and Phoenix Savage. Each one is different and
represents a responding variation on a tradition that has evolved
underground and partly resisted commercialization. Ms. Mary
was born in 1945 in Sheffield, Alabama, a few miles from
Florence, Alabama, the birthplace of W. C. Handy, father of the
blues. She was submerged in the lifestyle and culture of the old
tradition black belt Hoodoo faith and the blues, the national
music of the old black belt South. As a child, she was, as were
many African Americans, reared in an extended family that
included close contact with her maternal grandmother whom Ms.
Mary remembers as an adept community healer, advisor, and
root and herb specialist. According to Ms. Mary, her grandmother,
a church mother known as Miss Mattie, who had “the calling,”
could treat any ailment and “could cure just about any type of
sickness,” including that with a supernatural cause; her
grandmother knew just which plants and substances to utilize to
successfully treat a range of maladies. While still a young child,
Ms. Mary spent more time in intensely close contact with her
grandmother than with her own parents. And as a result, she
began to participate in her grandmother's root and herb
operation by being sent to obtain certain items, such as plants,
herbs, roots, or other objects such as rusty nails, whenever
grandma requested them. Ms. Mary's mother lacked interest “in
learning about all this stuff, so as my grandmother continued to
use me in her errands, I learned more and more.”
Eventually, through the informal apprenticeship provided by
her grandmother, Ms. Mary acquired a storehouse of traditional
black belt Hoodoo and root worker knowledge that she would not
make active use of outside her own family and close friends until
years later.12 After doing the work for a number of years, Ms. Mary
stopped “for about fifteen or so years. Then I was called back
about fifteen or so years ago, and I've been doing it ever since.”13
Today she is both an active deaconess of her church and a
traditional root working Hoodoo. She occasionally uses elements
from the Lucumi tradition to enhance her work.
At the 2002 NARC meetings in Philadelphia, Ms. Mary became
the first African American old tradition root worker to receive a
membership certification acknowledging and verifying her
status. That same year, Ms. Mary and I drove from Philadelphia to
St. Helena Island, South Carolina, for several meetings and
discussions with Brother Gregory, great-grandson of Dr. Buzzard.
Brother A. B. Gregory was born in 1954 on St. Helena Island,
South Carolina, where he grew up; he resides there today. The
great-grandson of the famous Stepheney Robinson, known as Dr.
Buzzard of St. Helena Island, Brother Gregory, like Ms. Mary,
encountered and began learning the work from an elder, his
grandfather, Dr. Buzzard's son-in-law, in an extended-family
setting, saturated with spiritual belief. Dr. Buzzard himself began
training his son-in-law after his only biological son perished in a
tragic automobile accident. As a child, young Gregory was very
attached to and spent significant time with his grandfather, who
began involving him in his work by sending him to obtain certain
wild plants as well as giving him certain tasks to complete in the
ritual preparation of mojoes. All the while, Gregory was learning
the old black belt Hoodoo tradition and being exposed to a
significant number of Gullah Coast root workers with whom his
grandfather consulted. Gregory thus acquired the cooperative
network he would later need to inherit his grandfather's practice.
Both Gregory's grandfather and father were active practitioners
of old tradition black belt root work.14 Like Ms. Mary, Brother
Gregory is an active member of his church, though he is
sometimes questioned about his work and mildly admonished by
his reverend to relinquish it.
Papa Ce is an example of a socially conscious and socially
active Hoodoo working in the old black belt tradition. He uses no
marketeered supplies and he tailors his work to his clients'
needs. He sells no generic mojo bags or other untailored amulets
that could be harmful. What makes Papa Ce's work unique is that
he combines the techniques, materials, and methodologies of the
old tradition black belt South Hoodoo worker with those of the
traditional work of the Igbo of Nigeria, West Africa. His work
includes all aspects of black belt tradition Hoodoo, including
precision dream interpretation within the context of the client's
sociocultural and historical experience.
Born in the southern black belt town of Caddo Parrish,
Louisiana, on September 5, 1936, Papa Ce is like many old
tradition root workers whose birth is announced by an unusual or
significant occurrence, such as being born with a veil or an
unusual birthmark. In Papa Ce's case, his birth was announced by
seven peals of thunder. His family watched and waited as he
grew, then when he was about age three he was recognized and
designated as being two-headed. He had a gift picking winning
horses at races and did so for several months for his uncle's
friends. During his teen years, he ignored and ran from his gift;
friends, neighbors, and community members called him names
such as “spooky,” and for twenty years he shied away from the
work and refused to use the gift. All this would drastically change
upon receiving a reading from an Igbo traditional priest who told
him of his family history, recounting a kidnapped ancestor and
telling Papa Ce of one of his dreams as well as of secret personal
matters that only Papa Ce could know. He was told that he had
the gift of traditional priesthood and that he must resume that
work among his people here in the United States. His traditional
name became Chukwunyere Eze Ndubuisi, a complex delineation
of traits and status positions including “King, Chief Who Is
Servant of the People” and “Life Is Paramount.” Fifty years ago,
Papa Ce began gathering together all that he had learned and
began learning even more from grandparents, community elders,
and traditional Igbo priests. He is thoroughly acquainted with the
medicinal and magicospiritual properties of herbs and plants,
and he uses only fresh supplies and environmentally compatible
and available materials. He is a husband and father of ten.15
Diviner, priestess, philosopher, mother, grandmother, and wife,
Djenra Ta-Rotah Ir-n Wa, also known by her Internet screen name
Djenra Windwalker, represents another contemporary variant on
old tradition black belt Hoodoo. According to Djenra, “The
Hoodoo lexicon and pharmacology (roots) was where I started—
my cultural base, it is to my work what an individual's upbringing
is to the formation of their personality—a big part but not all….
My working style has been modified & expanded as I developed.
That is why I often refer to work done in the Systopia as a
‘remix.'”16
Djenra was born to parents who migrated out of the North
Carolina black belt to Mount Vernon, New York. Like Papa Ce's,
Djenra's childhood was upset by her spiritual gifts. But like many
traditionally called and gifted black belt tradition workers, Djenra
“was fortunate to have people around who helped me to survive
until puberty, when my personal questioning against all that a
Baptist upbringing deemed ‘holy' really kicked in.” She began
studying tarot on her own at age twelve before tarot and
alternative spirituality became a popular fad and she began
doing readings for friends and family.
In her early twenties, after graduating from Fordham University
with honors, she began spending evenings at the famous Tree of
Life on 125th Street in Harlem, sitting in on some classes taught
by John More, the late Hoodoo doctor. She went on to study with
a series of famous African American sages, including Ethiopian
Jewish scholar Yusef Ben-Jochannon, visiting professor at Cornell,
the widely revered Dr. John Henrik Clarke, also visiting at Cornell,
Dr. Ivan Van Sertima of Rutgers University, and psychiatrist Dr.
Richard King. She also discovered the teachings of Ki-Kongo
culture as espoused by Dr. FuKia Benseki of Kinshasa, Zaire, then
at the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York.
Djenra traveled to Egypt, the Sudan, Ghana, Senegal, then to
Havana, Cuba, where she was crowned Orisha Oya, thus the
online name “Windwalker.” She then took several trips to Haiti to
complete her Vodun initiation. Earlier she had been initiated into
both Palo Mayombe and Palo Kimbisa. Finally in the summer of
2002, she was initiated as a second rank (Reiki 2) practitioner.
According to Djenra, “I use the Reiki and crystal grids for healing
as an expansion of the ‘laying on of hands' techniques used by
traditional Hoodoo culture.”
Today Djenra's work includes dream interpretation, candle
work, bath preparation, making talismans or amulets, house
fumigation, and spiritual cleansing, any of which may include the
folkloric materials of old tradition black belt Hoodoo or other
methods and ingredients from other systems such as Palo, Ocha,
or Vodun, all of which she is initiated to. Like other workers in this
updating of old tradition Hoodoo, Djenra avoids marketeered
supplies as much as possible, preferring to mix and tailor the
work to the client's needs.17
Professor Arthur Flowers is another root worker moving in the
ways of the old black belt tradition. His primary focus is working
with High John root while learning the older recipes, formulas,
and uses. He is unusual in several respects; he is both a novelist
and an assistant professor of fiction at Syracuse University. By his
own admission, he came to working Hoodoo in the late 1970s,
inspired by the work of author and satirist Ismael Reed. Flowers
was familiar with Hoodoo from his mother's side of the family,
“My momma came from Hoodoo folks in North Carolina,” of
whom he says, “half of my family gives consultations, the other
half won't do anything without one.” He became so invigorated
by Reed's use and literary rendering of Hoodoo that he began to
study, inquire, and reconnect what he had been exposed to as a
child with what he was then reading. “In the process of inquiry, I
came across Hyatt's work and began to sort out what was
familiar to me, what I had seen or heard of growing up.”18
For Flowers, Hoodoo is both a spiritual science and an
inspiration for his work. He is a generalist but focuses most of his
work in the realm of working with High John and creating
protective and soothing mojoes crafted from High John the
Conquer root in the old plantation tradition. He is the founder of
The Hoodoo Way, a discussion group of mainly old tradition black
belt African American Hoodoos.19 Group members exchange
information on old tradition recipes, harvest sites for fresh
ingredients, and rituals for certain problems. A number of
members are in touch with grandparents and elders who worked
the old black belt Hoodoo tradition. In addition, a number of
participants are Hoodoos, priests, initiates, and practitioners of
other African religious systems, such as Lucumi, Palo, or Vodun.
They do not recommend using the services of anyone who is
outside of the Hoodoo faith or who does not have an African-
derived tradition as their primary religion; this includes the
Sanctified and spiritualist churches.
 Like Flowers, Phoenix Savage is an artist with a scholarly as
well as a practical interest in the spiritual practices of her African
American ancestors. Her recent master's thesis from the
University of Mississippi on contemporary health care and
Hoodoo in Mississippi explores the concurrent belief and practical
treatment parameters of Hoodoo as health care. Her findings
indicate that in African American communities, health care
providers must understand and in some instances integrate
Hoodoo belief into the treatment model and approach.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a family that on her
father's side had its ancestry in the Virginia black belt region,
Phoenix Savage came to Hoodoo early under the influence of an
aunt and the aunt's mother who both read tarot cards and
engaged in root work for their own purposes. She later
discovered that the aunt was working to assist others. Early on
Savage noticed certain gifts, such as the ability to will certain
happenings, and she began using it to empower herself. Later in
life, she would learn the details of her great-great-grandfather,
an itinerant Hoodoo known in her family as Prophet Jones, not to
be confused with the famous Prophet Jones from Detroit.
Savage began reading books on alternative spirituality but, as
she states, “None of it connected with my soul until I discovered
Haitian Vodun.” This quest began when she asked herself the
question, “What did black folk have before they got Jesus? I came
to an intellectual reckoning with old tradition Hoodoo.” For a
period of time, she embraced the New World Yoruba tradition
while living in Nashville, Tennessee, but Hoodoo was still at the
foundation of her spirituality. Her art work is inspired by old
tradition black belt Hoodoo as well as both the Kongo and Haitian
religions. Her work implores the viewer to question his own
senses through the use of energy-bound tactile and textual
strands. Savage only does spiritual work for people who contact
her. She does not advertise her spiritual work, and her reputation
has been spread by word of mouth. Although she is a generalist,
she concentrates most of her efforts in her specialty, assisting in
the breaking and restoring of love ties. The ritual to accomplish
such varies with each case. She uses no marketeered products,
only those ingredients that are obtained fresh as needed. She
currently resides in Louisiana.20
Dancingtree Moonwater is both an Olorisha of Ogun with the
first hand of Ifa in the Lucumi/Yoruba tradition and an old
tradition Hoodoo trained by a number of family members, most
notably Louise Johnson, her greatgrandfather's sister from
Waughs, Montgomery County, Alabama. Born in 1875 of
freedmen parents, Aint New, as she was called by family
members, passed away at the age of 102 in 1977 when
Moonwater was twenty-nine years old. On her yearly visits to
family in Cleveland, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, Aint New would
set up shop in one of her nieces' or nephews' small back rooms
or kitchens and begin receiving clients, some she knew before
the migration north. After church, family members would often
inform potential or past clients that Aint New was coming north
and would be doing work for just a few. Moonwater began doing
small errands for her great-great aunt, such as helping to mix
recipes and being called to recite prayers when an unbroken
prayer circle was required. It was in these prayer circles that she
was introduced to the use of Psalms as well as the tradition of
creating and tailoring a Hoodoo prayer to the needs of the client.
Having witnessed the invasion into and transformation of
preemancipation black belt Hoodoo's public face by marketeers,
Aint New never used marketeered ingredients and steered all of
her clients clear of outsider-owned Hoodoo drugstores and curio
shops. In addition to spiritual work, Aint New was an old-style
treater who used old tradition Hoodoo medicine combined with
originally created prayers to treat ailments, swellings, coughs,
headaches, and other maladies. Once while living in the Gulf
Coast region of Mobile, Alabama, she conducted a ritual that
restored her younger brother John's ability to walk.21 Though
Dancingtree Moonwater is a generalist who uses a traditional
Lucumi divination device to help with diagnosis of all types of
cases, her strength is with court or jail trouble primarily and love
issues and concerns secondarily. She does not advertise and is
contacted by word of mouth. Like other Hoodoos discussed here,
Dancingtree Moonwater is formally educated, she has a doctorate
from a prestigious university, and is currently a tenured professor.
 The founder of In the Old Tradition, a collective of African
American old tradition Hoodoo workers, Moonwater, along with
the Hoodoos profiled here, are working to restore some and
maintain other aspects of the old plantation black belt tradition
in Hoodoo and to use it to support problem solving in the African
American community where the need for a supportive alternative
spirituality is more pressing than ever.
Hougan Dafusky Jones, the youngest Hoodoo interviewed, was
born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1975. He was trained from an
early age by old tradition Hoodoos. In addition to being an
initiated Voodoo Hougan, he learned Hoodoo from the people in
his home community. It was all around him in his daily life. As a
child, he would hear older women particularly, quietly speaking
of work to control their men. Although it was all around him and
everyone did it and believed in it, no one spoke openly about it.
The elders maintained the traditional code of silence found in
African and black Atlantic communities. Jones collects his own
Virginia snakeroot, devil's shoestring, and numerous other
traditional medicinal and magical herbs used by his Hoodoo
ancestors. He has a large stock of both fresh and ritually dried
herbs that he collects according to African spiritual tradition.
With no botanicas within reasonable distance of their
communities, in the past all root workers dug their own roots and
harvested their own herbs. Today Jones and his family gather the
medicine at the right time of the year, right time of day, and
right season. His specialty is a type of mojo bag known as the
four corners of the earth. This is an old traditional mojo unknown
to and inaccessible to marketeers.22
In discussions with several primary care physicians in the
University of Pennsylvania system, it was confirmed for me that
significant numbers of African Americans, particularly those over
age fifty, believe in root work as a possible cause of illness.23
Some of them have had their beliefs left unaddressed, especially
in their health care. The medical profession is just beginning to
acknowledge that patients' mental states and spiritual beliefs as
well as prayer and ritual can affect the response both to illness
and to treatment as well as influence recovery time. It is my hope
that this culture sensitive trend will continue to strengthen so
that community practitioners can work with medical doctors and
community clinics when needed by clients with beliefs from the
old black belt Hoodoo tradition. Though the location and sites for
old tradition Hoodoo are severely limited and more difficult than
ever to locate, all black belt Hoodoo has not totally vanished. Its
old approach, though requiring much more effort, is still
preferred by African Americans knowledgeable of the old
tradition and who have faith in its ability to serve those in need.
 I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

POSTSCRIPT

With the previous discussion considered, it appears that the

future of old tradition Hoodoo is uncertain. The only era in
which Hoodoo was universally used by African Americans, as
a vehicle for liberation, was the era of enslavement. Hoodoo
initially focused on the needs of the enslaved African
American community. There it was universally used both to
protect one against slave owners, patrollers, and
punishment and to discover and redirect evil. It was also
used as a means to address both physical and spiritual
malady. Initially, Hoodoo was a spiritual system that, at its
core, assumed a posture of spiritual resistance to both
enslavement and racist domination. Socialized by the
enslaved African American women who reared, cared for,
and breast-fed them, numerous whites in the black belt
South encountered and believed in the tradition.
After emancipation, the rule of racial terrorism, mass
migration, family disruption, economic deprivation, and
racial circumscription rendered the newly emerging “free”
African American community vulnerable. Traditional spiritual
solutions were an arena in which blacks had a degree of
independent agency in unhampered sociocultural space.
That independent spiritual tradition would be seized,
commercialized, and transformed by middlemen minority
marketeers, many of them well educated. They would seize
control of Hoodoo at a time when both African Americans
and their folk spiritual traditions were most vulnerable to
exploitation and racialized control. Marketeered Hoodoo will
continue to misrepresent itself as a true rendering of the old
Hoodoo system and tradition. Though the short-lived Hoodoo
religion could not survive in North America, some practices
of the old Hoodoo system are still alive in some southern-
based African American churches. Knowledge of this led the
shrewder marketeers of the past to attempt to corner the
African American Hoodoo market by directly targeting black
churches; contemporary marketeers appear to have not yet
taken that approach.
In the fecund marketplace of cyberspace, self-styled
Hoodoo marketeers who offer themselves up as arbiters and
teachers of African American spiritual tradition abound. The
courses on Hoodoo offer little substantive traditional
information, but they do ensure both an immediate and
long-range market and that the “student” spends a
significant sum of money on the supplies sold by the
“instructor” or the business partner. With the proliferation of
Hoodoo marketeers and those seeking profit from it, Hoodoo
as a national African American cultural product and spiritual
tradition could disappear. Hoodoo currently occupies a less
significant place than it once did in defining the African
American psyche and national character.
Some contemporary Hoodoos and root workers,
particularly those not formally educated and those divorced
from the old tradition, have become dependent on profiteers
while seeking outsider sources for both their supplies and
information about their own tradition. This pattern revisits
previously documented themes in the literature and studies
of African American life, particularly the themes of racially
targeted, economic, and cultural exploitation. This pattern
replicates in microcosm those patterns that prevailed under
colonialism and slavery: the dominance and exploitation of a
people's culture, labor, and the materials necessary for the
continuation of that culture and tradition.
Hoodoo marketeers profit during periods of high social
distress. For African Americans, that social stress is largely
underpinned by America's racial caste system and
malfunctioning democracy. Black family destruction, mass
incarceration, job discrimination, high unemployment,
substandard education, and inferior housing are all part of
America's posture toward African Americans. The American
system of racial control has targeted blacks during their
four-century-long sojourn here. In both interviews and
conversations with old tradition hoodoos, as well as
marketeers, both reveal experiencing an increase in the
number of clients and frequency of visits around two key
issues: black family destruction and mass incarceration.1
These two issues reveal the long-standing and persistent
attacks on African American family structure through
exclusion from both jobs and education as well as from
racially selective law enforcement and racially motivated
mass incarceration of African American men.
While crafting sophisticated denials of their exploitative
practices, marketeers capitalize on the social distress of
African Americans. When interviewed, most of the white
marketeers and Hoodoo exploiters claimed either racial or
cultural solidarity with blacks. In an attempt to defend their
exploitative practices, they claim authenticity by asserting
that they either “were taught by blacks” or they “grew up
around blacks.” Still others assert that “race is not
important” or “Hoodoo is about ‘spirit,' not about race.” Yet
they play a game of deception covered by their sales pitch.
Hoodoo continued as the only African American spiritual
system producing amulets for legal immunity, family
stability, economic advancement, health concerns, as well
as general protection for the black community until the
infusion and exposure to African traditional religion in the
latter half of the twentieth century. During the last three
decades of the twentieth century, the updated Hoodoo bag
amulet known as the “prayer cloth” offered by Rev. Frederick
Eikerenkoetter, known to millions as Reverend Ike, made a
renewed appearance. For many African Americans, the
orthodoxy of marketeered Hoodoo is inaccessible and
plagued by the themes of fear and cultural self-loathing,
related to themes of assimilation and mainstream inclusion.
This is highly problematic because, like other aspects of
African American cultural tradition, Hoodoo is being seized
upon and further diffused by a variety of both exploiters and
legitimate spiritual practitioners.
Among the items that Hoodoo profiteers offer for sale are
Hoodoo kits, probably not unlike those peddled by door-to-
door Hoodoo salesmen in an earlier era. One can purchase
do-it-yourself mojo bags and Hoodoo Internet books and
courses by self-proclaimed experts, some who claim to have
been “initiated by the Gullah.” Having spent many years
with my Gullah fiancé traveling to and staying in the Gullah
community of “Buck Hall” Pineland outside of McClellanville,
South Carolina, I know that one cannot be “initiated by the
Gullah” as this marketeer has claimed.
Today, marketeers like those found at Internet Web sites
such as luckymojo.com, oldstyleconjure.com, and
conjuredoctor.com are typical of the marketeering effort but
are by no means the only examples of marketeered Hoodoo.
At this writing, by far the two best-marketeered sites were
luckymojo.com and oldstyleconjure.com. Although she does
not state it, the “hoodooist” at the latter site implies,
through subtle misrepresentation, that the African ancestors
who created Hoodoo are her own. This leads some clients to
believe that she is African American, even though she is
white. Her statements, as well as the write-up on the Web
site, lead potential clients to believe that she is in fact
African American. The owners of these and other sites were
not raised in the black belt Hoodoo tradition; are not African
American; have undergone neither a Hoodoo initiation, an
African traditional religion initiation, nor training in the old
tradition; and have no connection with a Sanctified church.
They have neither the authority nor the cultural knowledge
to properly make the traditional African American amulet,
the mojo bag, though they continue to do so and sell them
and other Hoodoo items for their own profit.
This author was once confronted by a white participant at
a meeting of the National African Religion Congress, who
showed me a mojo bag he claimed was made for him by the
“Hoodoo experts” at a well-known Web site; it in no way
resembled the old tradition wrapped mojo bags of the
plantation tradition. After speaking with the site owner, she
explained that a number of people have been lying about
being students of her course and that she creates
“authentic” mojos, which are sewn closed.2 Other sites were
equally defensive and outright hostile to inquiries. All the
sites viewed, except two African American sites, were
practicing marketeered Hoodoo, some quite aggressively
and with the zeal of religious fanaticism.
Oldstyleconjure.com offers fabricated “New Orleans-style”
“voodoo dolls,” which barely resemble either the amulets of
the old tradition, the spiritual effigies created in certain
types of work, or the Vodun packette. Instead, they resemble
the tourist Voodoo dolls that anyone can buy in the tourist
shops of New Orleans. The clever marketeers anticipate
challenges from the African American community and many
have issued statements intended to deflect and short-circuit
charges of “cultural theft,” “lack of authenticity,” and
“cultural exploitation by outsiders.” The claims are intended
as a cover by marketeers who have experienced or
anticipate challenges to the legitimacy of their Hoodoo
business. As a result, a large number of them have
contradictory information in their postings and on their
sites. An example of this can be found at a site that states,
on one hand, that Hoodoo came to the United States with
Africans; in another section, she states that Hoodoo is
Christian. These contradictory claims are on different pages
and difficult to observe by those not looking for
inconsistencies in information. An average observer could
ask the question, “Well, which way was it? Did Hoodoo come
with Africans or did it originate in Christianity?” Some
marketeers claim that Hoodoo is Jewish rather than
Christian. Others claim that it is an amalgamation of
numerous practices and traditions. The Hoodoo cyberspace
universe often contributes to the obfuscation and confusion
about the phenomenon known as Hoodoo.
When questioned about their background, ethnicity, or
race, the whites who own the most successful sites and
claim to “know Hoodoo” were all very defensive. All contacts
that I spoke with issued some sort of claim intended to
legitimate their “right” to make money from the sale of
Hoodoo. One marketeer claimed to be “raised around
blacks,” another claimed to have “learned from blacks in the
1960s,” another put a Negro client on the phone to validate
her “right” to exploit the sale of Hoodoo recipes and
supplies. All their responses indicate their own need to
deflect challenges from the African American community to
their authenticity, legitimacy, and intent.
To quote one of this author's informants, “To these people
Hoodoo is nothing more than ‘nigga wicca,' and it is not
that.”3 Many vulnerable and ill-informed potential clients
will see the false claim as legitimation and proof of
authenticity. The outrageous claims are all designed to
convey an air of legitimacy to the potential customer, who
usually knows little if anything of the old plantation black
belt Hoodoo system. At very best, the information that
marketeers offer has been gleaned from an uncritically
perused segment of scholarly literature on Hoodoo, such as
the Journal of American Folklore or Harry Middleton Hyatt's
five-volume work Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork:
Beliefs Accepted by Many Negroes and White Persons. This
generates concerns that need to be considered when using
them as accurate Hoodoo documents. Much of the Hoodoo
sold by marketeers is overlaid with fabrication. Items such
as “war water,” “death spells,” “good luck powder,” “lucky
candles,” and “money-drawing oil” in no way resemble the
Hoodoo of the pre–World War I black community. And here is
one dilemma for researchers who write about Hoodoo: The
Hoodoo that some researchers write about is marketeered
Hoodoo, which in few ways resembles the old African
American Hoodoo system developed by and for African
Americans.
African Americans' distrust, fear, and suspicion of whites
led some blacks to fabricate interview information for
money or to give inaccurate or limited information to white
interviewers. One problem recognized by both Zora Neale
Hurston and Hyatt was the possible “interviewer effect” in
which an informant changes his or her answer to suit the
expectations of the interviewer as perceived by the client.
This was typical of black-white exchanges in the South at
the time of Hyatt's work. By the time Hyatt started
interviewing Hoodoo believers and practitioners, the old
black belt Hoodoo system was already overshadowed by the
marketeered versions of Hoodoo. This can account for
consistencies in the interviews across time and region,
which could be mistaken as indicators of authenticity. Some
Internet marketeers publish these misinterpreted secondary
sources for their own monetary benefit.
Today there is an extensive proliferation of Internet sites
using the term Hoodoo; they number 1.5 million, and the
number is growing. The movement by African Americans
toward discarding black traditions to achieve racial
integration and approval by mainstream arbiters threatens
the remaining stability and possible rejuvenation of old
tradition black belt Hoodoo. The old black belt Hoodoo
system had been either completely driven underground or
dissipated into Sanctified church ritual so that it was
unrecognizable to most inside the African American Hoodoo
community, or it had been completely taken over by
marketeers.
On the other hand, there is hopeful evidence for the
preservation and recuperation of old tradition Hoodoo.
Several of this author's old tradition informants have
witnessed an increase in the number of young people both
turning to old tradition Hoodoo as a problem-solving
paradigm and requesting training in the old tradition. A
number of them are crossing over into African traditional
religion, thus attesting to the need for alternative
spirituality. As an Olorisha of Ogun in the Lukumi/Yoruba
tradition, this author has personally observed an increase in
the number of young people seeking assistance and support
from, as well as conversion into, one of the New World
Afrikan religious traditions, particularly Lukumi, Akan, Palo,
and Voodoo. When questioned about their need to convert
to an African traditional religion, some of them indicated
that their first choice was Hoodoo, but since it is now
controlled by whites, who sell the supplies and have limited
access to the black community, they turned instead to
African traditional religion.
In an earlier time, Hoodoo for African Americans was the
only accessible African-derived alternative spiritual source.
Certain African American churches, particularly those within
the Sanctified church heritage, have kept the threadbare old
tradition Hoodoo connection with the church alive and
provide the much-needed institutional backdrop to African-
styled alternative spiritual work. Within these sacred
institutional contexts, one can still find elements from the
African Religion Complex, the shout ritual, spirit possession,
and water immersion baptism still intact. Unfortunately,
many of the church-based root workers have few
alternatives but to turn to marketeers as the black church
becomes more assimilationist and continues to marginalize
Hoodoo.
When one seeks spiritual help through Hoodoo in the
context of the African American Sanctified church, one,
more often than not, is seeking to have “roots” removed
from rather than put on someone. Sanctified church
members who engage in spirit work will promptly admit to
being able to remove a Hoodoo fix but will readily claim to
never have or even know how to put “roots” on anyone,
though many will admit that they know someone who has or
who currently can throw a fix. Perhaps Hoodoo will look to
itself and its traditional African religious parents and New
World cousins for its own rejuvenation and survival. And
perhaps new workers in the old black belt Hoodoo tradition
will help Hoodoo's threadbare bones put on the flesh of a
healthy and rebounding supplemental spiritual system and
continue to support African American psychic and cultural
survival.
With respect to Hoodoo research, there are more than a
few unexplored research paths, which, like “the road not
taken,” can make all the difference. The African American
experience with Hoodoo must be researched and
documented and should include a thorough investigation of
Hoodoo's impact and influence on African American cultural
life, particularly as it related to health care practices and
health care decision making. The blues is full of references
to Hoodoo, root work, conjuring, and fixing of enemies,
rivals, mates, potential mates, and situations. But we must
have more than a simple documenting of Hoodoo references
as found in blues lyrics. Though largely absent from most
research on Hoodoo, including this work, the role of power,
class stratification, and race in the Hoodoo process should
not be overlooked. Though present in the blues, content that
references Hoodoo is for the most part absent from pre–Civil
War African American musical forms,4 as it is largely absent
from, though not totally nonexistent, in post–World War II
rhythm and blues. I cannot say that I have heard of any
references to Hoodoo in hip-hop music that emerged at the
end of the twentieth century. Future research on Hoodoo, as
well as Hoodoo itself, must place the African American
experience—rather than the interpretation of marketeers
and exploiters—at the center of the investigation, squarely
at the crossroads of the academic paradigm and the African
American experience. Only then can we meet the devil at
the crossroads and defeat him.
 Notes

PRESCRIPT
1. The term hoodooist was used to describe the alleged practitioner.
2. Kuna, “Hoodoo.”
3. The Ring Shout was the sacred circle dance performed by African American bondsmen and their descendants. The
dance was always performed in a sacred context such as worship, death rituals, and other sacred occasions. It was
observed from St. Louis to the Gullah Sea Islands, from Virginia to Mississippi, in Philadelphia, and in Maryland. The dance was
always performed in a counterclockwise circling formation, with the center reserved for those who fell under the spirit and
experienced possession. The ritual was modified with the introduction of church pews to the old “praise houses” and with
the standard church pew formation in black churches. The ritual continues today as “shoutin'” or as “ketchin’ the spirit.” The
Ring Shout can still, occasionally, be seen in its original circle formation along the Gullah Coast in older churches in
communities like Awendaw, Buck Hall, and Pineland, South Carolina, on special occasions such as Mother's Day.
4. Kulii, “Hoodoo Tales Collected in Indiana.” The informants in this study repeatedly stated that they learned about Hoodoo
from the discussions of older family members.
5. Chireau, “Conjuring.”
6. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion , 25.
7. Thomas, “Working Class and Lower Class Origins of Black Culture.”
8. Hyatt, Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork.
9. Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.
10. Hurston, “High John De Conquer; Hurston, “Hoodoo in America.”
11. Snow, Walking Over Medicine; Snow, “Sorcerers, Saints and Charlatans”; Snow, “Mail Order Magic”; Snow, “Folk
Medical Beliefs and Their Implications for Care of Patients”; Mitchell, Hoodoo Medicine; Fontenot, Secret Doctors; Savage,
“The Evolution of Hoodoo in Mississippi and Contemporary Black Health.”
12. Cooley, “Root Doctors and Psychics in the Region”; Cooley, “Conversations About Hoodoo”; Cooley, “Root Stories”;
Kulii, “A Look at Hoodoo in Three Urban Areas of Indiana.”
13. Robinson, “Black Healers during the Colonial Period and Early 19th Century America,” 81–86; Chireau, “Conjuring.”
14. Chireau, Black Magic.
15. Bell, “Pattern, Structure and Logic in Afro-American Hoodoo Performance.”
16. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society.
17. Most notably Luckymojo.com. The owner of the site was rude and off-putting, but only after I revealed both my status
as an Olorisha/priestess of Ogun and that I was not interested in purchasing her wares. I found Ms. Yronwode to be very
defensive, especially about the incorrect Hoodoo information she posts on the Internet. I found other Internet sites on
Hoodoo, and the owners of the sites were even more defensive and hostile than Ms. Yronwode. Another site owner whom I
contacted, calling herself “Starr,” screamed and cursed into the phone that she was busy doing “readings” and that I better
not “mess with her.” Like the marketeers who advertise in black confessions magazines, few of the Internet marketeers
were African American. Another site owner, who lists himself as both “Dr.” and “PhD,” became defensive and insulting when I
asked about his credentials.
18. Whoopi Goldberg's portrayal of an African American psychic in the 1990 Hollywood movie Ghost, starring Patrick
Swayze and Demi Moore, is reminiscent in certain scenes of Mantan Moreland's numerous portrayals in which he is fearful of
“ghosts.” These Hollywood attempts at humor ridicule African American deep spirituality.
19. See glossary for explanation of the term called.
20. Thomas, “Working-Class and Lower-Class Origins of Black Culture.”

CHAPTER 1. TRADITIONAL RELIGION IN WEST AFRICA AND IN THE NEW WORLD

1. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony; Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of
Kongo, 1491–1750.” John Tucker places the conversion of the first Kongo ruler earlier than Thornton; Tucker, Angola, 29.
2. Schon and Crowther, Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schon and Mr. Samuel Crowther, 33.
3. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 6.
4. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South; Bradford, “The Negro Ironworker in Ante-Bellum Virginia,” Journal of
Southern History 25 (May, 1959): 194–206; Bromberg, “Slavery in the Virginia Tobacco Factories”; Green, “Georgia's
Forgotten Industry”; Green, “Gold Mining”; Galloway, “Sugar Industry of Pernambuco during the Nineteenth Century”;
Guthrie, “Colonial Economy”; Harrison, “The Evolution of Colombian Tobacco Trade to 1875.”
5. An example is observed in the age-grade organizational unit that required that the youth, within a certain age range, be
organized into mutual support groups based on age or location in the life cycle. These groups, which influenced all societal
members, helped maintain social order and enrich the meaning of the numerous transitional stages in African traditional life,
while grounding and locating the individual in a multilayered obligatory network of guidance support and assistance.
Traditionally these groups were responsible for members; they were their brother's keeper and were often assigned certain
duties to be performed for the village community, herding, for example. This assigned obligation and responsibility extended
into nearly all areas of life. For example, if a young man were interested in a young woman as a potential wife, a fellow age-
grade group member might be expected to initiate the courtship and marriage process according to the traditionally required
protocol. Group members who found themselves in foreign lands were expected to render assistance to age-grade group
members from their community back home. In traditional times, the obligation to these groups was binding and presented
the community with ready-made units for social action, change, or conservation, as these groups often moved as a unit,
especially in village social and ritual activities. The principle of age-grade organization, with respect for elders, came to the
North American mainland in the memories of African captives and was undoubtedly at least early on a small part of the way
slaves attempted to organize their own lives, labor, and community.
6. Aimes, “African Institutions in America.”
7. Sieber and Herreman, Hair in African Art and Culture.
8. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 49.
9. Peek, African Divination Systems; Serpos, “Un Procède de Divination au Dahomey”; Hounwanou, Le Fa, 249; Dorjahn,
“Some Aspects of Temne Divination”; Shaw, “An-bere”; Mendonsa, “Etiology and Divination among the Sisala of Northern
Ghana”; Devisch, “Perspectives on Divination in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa”; Jackson, “An Approach to Kuranko
Divination”; Bohannan, “Tiv Divination”; Gebauer, Spider Divination in the Cameroons.
10. Bascom, Ifa Divination; Bascom, Sixteen Cowries.
11. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion.
12. Beecham, Ashantee and the Gold Coast, 239.
13. Ibid., 174–176.
14. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 52; Imperato, African Folk Medicine.
15. Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, 83.
16. Milligan, The Fetish Folk of West Africa, 39.
17. Ibid., 223–224.
18. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 49.
19. Imperato, African Folk Medicine, 63; Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea,
73.
20. Schon and Crowther, Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schon and Mr. Samuel Crowther, 30–31.
21. Beecham, Ashantee and the Gold Coast, 181–182.
22. Milligan, The Fetish Folk of West Africa, 150–151.
23. Beecham, Ashantee and the Gold Coast, 189.
24. Sofowora, Medicinal Plants and Traditional Medicine in Africa, 30–32.
25. Ibid., 30©
26. Ibid.
27. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion , 192.
28. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, 133.
29. Milligan, The Fetish Folk of West Africa, 220.
30. Beecham, Ashantee and the Gold Coast, 204.
31. Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, 85.
32. Beecham, Ashantee and the Gold Coast, 49–50.
33. Ibid., 192.
34. Williams, “Development of Obeah in Jamaica.”
35. Raboteau, Slave Religion.
36. Gebauer, Spider Divination in the Cameroons, 15.

CHAPTER 2. DISRUPTIVE INTERSECTION

1. Katz, Black Indians.
2. Professor Michael Gomez has done a brilliant job of exploring the possible influences and cultural significances in the
development of African American identity and culture in the three areas and will not be repeated here. Rather, a brief and
succinct overview of the major African groups and some of their influences will be given; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country
Marks.
3. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 162–164; see also Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 50–51.
4. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 114.
5. Fu-Kiau, African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo; Stuckey, Slave Culture, 8–100; Thompson, Flash of the Spirit;
MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa.
6. Georgia Writer's Project, Drums and Shadows, 62; Burwell, A Girl's Life in Virginia before the War, 163. For further
descriptions of the Ring Shout, see Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands; Higginson, Army Life in a Black
Regiment; Forten, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten , 149, 151; Gannett, “The Freedmen at Port Royal,” 10.
7. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 36.
8. See glossary for explanation of “track gathering,” or “picking up tracks.”
9. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 129.
10. For discussions of African ethnic identity in Louisiana, see Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 42–55.
11. Raboteau, Slave Religion , 43.
12. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 196.
13. For an excellent analysis of the counterclockwise circle, see Stuckey, Slave Culture; Gaffney, The Function and Form
of the Ring Shout as a Religious Expression.
14. For a source on the variety of Kongo nkisi, see MacGaffey, Art and Healing of the Bakongo.
15. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; Gomez discusses the major African ethnic groups that were brought to the
United States during and after the colonial period. These groups include, but are not limited to, Mande-speaking Bambara,
Temne from Sierra Leone, Akhan, and Bakongo.
16. This date of 1807 marks the outlawing of the international slave trade.
17. Cooper, Satanstoe; in various places in the book, Cooper comments on the cultural relationship between African-born
and American-born slaves. Apparently, African-born slaves were revered as cultural leaders and advisors in the slave
community. Cooper describes scenes from a Pinkster festival in which African-born bondsmen advise American-born
bondsmen on culture.
18. For a discussion of the diversity of the slave population in colonial South Carolina, see Higgins, “The Geographical
Origins of Negro Slaves in Colonial South Carolina”; Higgins contends that a much higher percentage of American slaves than
previously thought were imported directly from Africa through the Carolinas; see also Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 42–
43.
19. Straight-line theory states that new immigrants discard their old ethnic identity for a new identity directly, with little
regard for outside influences. Bumpy-line assimilation theory sees the assimilation of immigrants as a complex, multifaceted
process with numerous political and social influences both encouraging and inhibiting ethnic transformation and assimilation.
20. Both Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Walter Rodney discuss the process of interethnic assimilation in Africa; Hall, Africans in
Colonial Louisiana; Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800.
21. For a discussion of this principle in action, see Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony; see also Thornton, “The
Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of the Congo, 1491–1750.”
22. Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands.
23. Johnson, Soul by Soul; this work documents the high degree of fluidity in the American slave population resulting from
sale and transportation from one region to another.
24. Emery, Black Dance from 1619 to 1970.
25. For a discussion of the possibilities of the Kongo cosmogram as a template for the Ring Shout, see Stuckey, Slave
Culture; see also Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; Thompson, Flash of the Spirit.
26. Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands; Stuckey, Slave Culture; Gaffney, “The Function and Form of the Ring
Shout as a Religious Expression.”
27. Melville Herskovits had this to say: “On the basis of such evidence from Africa and the New World as is available, then,
a prima-facie case can be made that the slave population included a certain number of representatives from African
governing and priestly classes”; Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past, 107.
28. “Tatler On the Management of Negroes,” 84–85.
29. Hall, “Negro Conjuring and Tricking,” 241; Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 221; Jones, The Religious Instruction of Negroes
in the United States, 128; Roberts, From Trickster to Badman , 65–107.
30. South Carolina Gazette, February 25-March 4, 1750; South Carolina Gazette, May 7-May 14, 1750; “The Negro
Cesar's Cure for Poison,” 103–104.
31. Robinson, “Black Healers during the Colonial Period and Early 19th Century America,” 81–86.
32. Beecham, Ashantee and the Gold Coast, 192.
33. Ibid.
34. Glave, “Fetishism in Congo Land,” 835.
35. Mather, The Angel of Bethesda, 107.
36. Report, June 29, 1729, to Board of Trades (CO 5) 1337:ff 132–133, British Public Record Office, Chancery Lane,
London, WC2; Virginia State Library, Richmond, Virginia, Paul I. Chestnut; see also Headlam, Calendar of State Papers,
418–419.
37. Kuna, “Hoodoo,” 273–275.
38. Lacy and Harrell, “Plantation Home Remedies.”
39. Robinson, “Black Healers during the Colonial Period and Early 19th Century America,” 92.
40. Ibid., 60.
41. Blanton, Medicine in Virginia in the Eighteenth Century, 45, 173, 212–213; Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South ,
165, 283.
42. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 224; Yetman, Life under the “Peculiar Institution,” 286.
43. Patterson, The Negro in Tennessee, 1790–1865 , 36.
44. Debien, Plantations et esclaves à Sain-Domingue, 60, 63, 68; James, Black Jacobins, 16–17; Naipaul, Loss of
ElDorado, 112, 171, 326–327; Pope-Hennessy, Sins of the Fathers, 65, 227; Brackett, Negro in Maryland , 132–133;
Phillips, “Slave Crime in Virginia,” 337–338; Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 192, 197–198, 241–242; McDougle,
Slavery in Kentucky, 38; Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 2, 330; Scarborough, The Overseer, 172; Rawick, The
American Slave, vol. 3, 158. According to Elenor Herron and Alice Mabel Bacon, writing in the late nineteenth century and
referring to the frequency with which poisoning was used, “there was on the plantations in the old days a vast amount of just
that sort of thing”; Herron and Bacon, “Conjuring and Conjure-Doctors in the Southern United States,” 143–147, 224–226.
45. The Pennsylvania Gazette, November 23, 1749.
46. The Pennsylvania Gazette, February 19, 1751.
47. The Pennsylvania Gazette, July 24, 1755.
48. Chesnutt, “Superstitions and Folk Lore of the South,” 233.
49. For a discussion of the use of African and Native American healing practices on the early frontier, see Wood, “People's
Medicine in the Early South.”
50. Leone and Fry, “Conjuring in the Big House Kitchen.”
51. Glave, “Fetishism in Congo Land,” 829–830.
52. Ibid., 829.
53. Stephen C. LaVere, Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, liner notes, Columbia Records, CBS Records, Inc.,
1990, 18. In the mid-1950s, this author was taken into an after-hours joint in Cleveland, Ohio, in which patrons were
discussing the ethic of never drinking from a bootlegged liquor bottle on which the seal was
already broken. In the more reputable jooks, honky-tonks, and after-hours joints, the seal on the bottle was broken at the
table when the liquor was ordered. This was done so that the patrons at the ordering table could see the seal broken and
know that the liquor was not tampered with.
54. Mbiti, Introduction to African Religion , 74, 77, 127, 139, 165, 170–173.
55. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 162–188.
56. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 95.
57. South Carolina Gazette, September 17, 1772.
58. Johnson, Soul by Soul.
 59. “Folk-Lore and Ethnology,” Southern Workman , 315.
60. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 79–81.
61. Torrey, Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists, 54–68. In this author's estimation, client expectation is especially significant in
the curative process.
62. In several personal conversations with Sterling Stuckey concerning the Ring Shout, he mentioned that the linear
organization of church pews prevents performance of the circular shout. I concluded that a linear shout is now performed,
which uses the isles instead of the center of the floor as had previously been done in the old rural Ring Shout. For a
description of how African American bondsmen handled church pews on the plantation, see Olmstead, A Journey in the
Seaboard Slave States, 449.
63. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk, 195.
64. Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.
65. Conjure men in particular were known to be marked by unusual appearance or strange features, such as “blue gums”
or “chicken breasted.” They were also known to behave in an unorthodox fashion in their style of dress or language.
66. Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool.”
67. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 195.
68. DuBois, Black Folk: Then and Now, 198.
69. Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, 254.
70. Wood, “Peoples Medicine in the Early South.”
71. Porteus, “The Gri-Gri Case”; Scott, “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712”; Davis, A Rumor of Revolt; Stuckey,
Slave Culture, 50–51; Starobin, Denmark Vesey; Chase, “The 1741 Conspiracy to Burn New York.”
72. Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 130–141.
73. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 108.
74. Owens, Voodoo Tales, 175.
75. With the loss of the old African traditional gods and the introduction of Christianity into the slave quarter, Psalms were
substituted to invoke results and tailor intention. Examples include Psalms 4. This was used by slaves for wealth, chance,
success, luck, and healing. Later this Psalm was used for winning at gambling, especially in the illegal lotteries known as the
numbers. Special thanks to Cassandra Wimbs for sharing information on this aspect of Hoodoo.

CHAPTER 3. THE SEARCH FOR HIGH JOHN THE CONQUER

1. Throughout this work, the spelling “Conquer” will be used. Though the assumption is that the correct term is
“Conqueror,” its pronunciation in southern African American communities in the United States was and is “Conquer.” The
term may or may not have anything to do with the term conqueror. John de Conquer could have originally been one word
such as jondekonka, which eventually became Anglicized in its pronunciation. There is room for much linguistic and
sociohistoric speculation.
2. Chireau, “Conjuring: An Analysis of African American Folk Beliefs and Practices.”
3. One can find this ridiculous, racist interpretation of High John root's power discussed at the white-owned marketeering
Web site luckymojo.com. This sexualized interpretation was developed and disseminated primarily by middlemen minority
Ashkenazi Jewish merchants as they sought to take control of the Hoodoo trade and shut out blacks who served their own
communities’ spiritual needs. In the process, they destroyed the old Hoodoo system developed on the southern plantations
by enslaved African Americans and further contributed to the racist ideology and deep-seated fear surrounding black male
sexuality. European Jewish middlemen merchants were like Christians and all other whites in this respect.
4. Linajes, Rico-Gray, and Carrion, “Traditional Production System of the Root of Jalap, Ipomoea purga (Convolvulaceae), in
Central Veracruz, Mexico,” 85.
5. Carroll, Blacks In Colonial Veracruz, 4.
6. Linajes, “Traditional Production System of the Root of Jalap,” 85.
7. Linajes, “Traditional Production System of the Root of Jalap,” 85; Blanco, “El cultivo de las plantas medicinales en Mexico
tiene gran porvenir; De Jauregui, “Estudios acerca de algunos purgantes indigenas”; Beaton, “Note on the Jalap Plant of
Commerce”; Balfour, “Notice of Some Plants Which Flowered Recently in the Edinburgh Botanical Garden”; Hanbury, “On the
Cultivation of Jalap.”
8. Hurston, “High John De Conquer,” 450.
9. Ibid., 452.
10. Ibid., 453.
11. Ibid.
12. Wimbs, “African American Theory, Belief and Practices,” 52–55.
13. Hurston, “High John De Conquer,” 452.
14. Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning , 125; Hurston, Mules and Men , 230.
15. Conversation with Babalawo Obalumi Ogunseye, Babalawo and Olorisha of Shango, October 1999, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.
16. For a discussion of “balance” as a universal African aesthetic and organizing principle, see Thompson, “An Aesthetic of
the Cool.”
17. The term incremental repetition is borrowed from Hurston's essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 44.
18. This John story was told to a group of us by James Peterson after a bid whist card game at his home in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, in November 1964.
19. Johnson, The Fabled Doctor Jim Jordan , 39.
20. McTeer, Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor, 24.
21. Ibid.
22. Schmalleger, “The Root Doctor and the Courtroom.”
23. Johnson, The Fabled Doctor Jim Jordan , 83.
24. Personal email communication with border control agent and botanist William Graves at Laredo, Texas.
25. Aptheker, “Maroons within the Present Limits of the United States.”
 26. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 76–77.
27. Ibid., 71.
28. Brown, The Narrative of William Wells Brown , 193, 210.
29. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 41.
30. Ibid., 71.
31. Ibid., 72.
32. Hall, Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy.
33. Guillot, Negros rebeledes y negros cimarrones, 80–85.
34. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru , 187–188; Lockhart, Spanish Peru , 189.
35. Arcaya, Insurrecion de los negros de la Serrania de Coro, 23–49.
36. Interview with Dr. Thomas Morton, professor at Temple University, author and expert on Palenque San Basilio,
Philadelphia, Pa., March 15, 2010.
37. Aptheker, “Maroons within the Present Limits of the United States.”
38. Carroll, “Mandinga.”
39. Kent, “Palmares,” 55; Diggs, “Zumbi and the Republic of Os Palmares”; Ennes, “The Palmares ‘Republic’ of
Pernambuco,” 208.
40. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 203.
41. Ibid., 226.
42. Ibid.; chapter 7 outlines valuable details of the relationship between Maroons, slaves, and people outside the slave
community.
43. Ibid., 232.
44. Dieterien, Essai sur la religion Bambara, 87, 94, 147.
45. Both the Creole French and English translation are taken from Cable, “Creole Slave Songs.” There is a slightly different
version in Hall's Africans in Colonial Louisiana that challenges Cable's translation of the opening line of the song. Zeinzens,
according to Hall, is a Bambara and Creole word referring to an amulet created from human remains for protection. Since the
slave population of New Orleans and parts of Louisiana contained a significant Bambara presence, Hall's interpretation may
be closer to the mark than Cable's translation. Among the Bambara, Sinzin is deeply associated with the birth of twins,
particularly when one twin has died; see Imperato, African Folk Medicine, 118; see also Imperato, “Twins among the
Bambara and Malinke of Mali”; Imperato, “Bamana and Maninka Twin Figures”; Imperato and Imperato, “Twins,
Hermaphrodites, and an Androgynous Albino Deity.”
46. For a more detailed discussion of Maroons within the limits of the United States, see Aptheker, “Maroons within the
Present Limits of the United States.”
47. Hurston, “High John De Conquer,” 455.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 458.

CHAPTER 4. CRISIS AT THE CROSSROADS

1. Henri, Black Migration, Movement North, 1900–1920 , 60–62, 135–136.
2. Pendleton, “Notes on Negro Folk-Lore and Witchcraft in the South,” 203204©
3. Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands; Bailey with Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man.
4. Szwed and Marks, “The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites”; Hazzard-Donald,
“The Circle and the Line.”
5. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , 3–4.
6. Bailey with Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man , 87.
7. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, 112.
8. Ibid., 113.
9. Ibid., 112.
10. Neal, Ju-Ju in My Life, 20–24.
11. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 69.
12. DuBose Heyward, “The Half Pint Flask,” in Hutchisson, A DuBose Heyward Reader.
13. Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
14. Ju-Ju Research Papers in Afro-American Studies (Spring 1975): iii.
15. Owen-Workman, Phillips, and Stout, Readers, Advisors, and Storefront Churches.
16. Special thanks to Cassandra Wimbs, who supplied me with a list of Psalms used by Hoodoo practitioners.
17. Hutchisson, A DuBose Heyward Reader, 186; “Mortuary Customs and Beliefs of South Carolina Negroes,” 318–319.
18. Rucker, Black Herman's Secrets of Magic, Mystery, and Legerdemain.
19. Haskell, “Sacrificial Offerings among North Carolina Negroes,” 267–268.
20. Zora Neale Hurston probably was among the last generation to undergo an actual Hoodoo initiation. She describes
these initiations in Mules and Men.
21. For a partial accounting of the relationship between the black church and Hoodoo, see Chireau, Black Magic.
22. Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, 168–169; Puckett interview with informant no. 124, Alf Goodman,
Columbus, Mississippi.
23. Bailey with Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man , 87.
24. Bell, “Pattern, Structure and Logic in Afro-American Hoodoo Performance,”
8.
25. Pendleton, “Notes on Negro Folk-Lore and Witchcraft in the South,” 203204©
26. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 96.
27. 195–197.
28. Hurston, The Sanctified Church; Baer, “An Anthropological View of Black Spiritual Churches in Nashville, Tennessee”;
Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis; Jacobs and Kaslow, The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans.
 29. Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, 254.
30. Henry Brown, quoted in Raboteau, Slave Religion , 73.
31. Hurston, Mules and Men , 277.
32. Cross, “Witchcraft in North Carolina.”
33. Dr. John Brickell, The Natural History of North Carolina (Dublin, 1737), 370–374, quoted in Cross, “Witchcraft in North
Carolina,” 219.
34. “Tail Dragger,” by Willie Dixon (Hoochie Coochie Music, Admin. by Bug/ Arc Music Corp., BMI), recorded by Howlin’ Wolf
on August 14, 1963.
35. Moore, “Superstitions from Georgia,” 226–228.
36. Cross, “Witchcraft in North Carolina,” 255.
37. “Aunt Memory,” in “The Florida Negro” Collection, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee, Florida, series 1585, carton 1,
Folder no. 35.
38. Bailey with Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man , 65.
39. Conversation with Willis James “Buck” Jones, July 1977, Leesburg, Texas. According to Jones, his sister, and his wife,
Vera, the victim would walk down the road past Jones's house. Most people in the area knew that he had been rooted.
40. Willis “Buck” Jones conversation, July 1977, Leesburg, Texas.
41. Hyatt, Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork , 4:2818–2936.
42. Parsons, Folklore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina, 198.
43. The Cleveland Gazette, Saturday, September 8, 1883.
44. Hurston, Mules and Men , 130.
45. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, 102.
46. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse, 162; Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers, and Hambones, 78.
47. Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers, and Hambones, 78.
48. Owens, Voodoo Tales, 169, 170, 171.
49. Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers, and Hambones, 101; Hoyt, Town Hall Tonight, 245–246.
50. Banks, First Person America, 186–187.
51. Kiser, Sea Island to City, 37.
52. Pittsburgh Courier, April 6, 1912, 4.
53. Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, 168–169.
54. Still, Early Recollections and Life of Dr. James Still.
55. Parsons, Folklore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina, 199.
56. Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro; Fontenot, Secret Doctors.
57. Moore, “Superstitions from Georgia” (1892), 230–231.
58. Parsons, Folklore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina, 206, note 1.

CHAPTER 5. THE DEMISE OF DR. BUZZARD

1. Long, Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce; Long gives a thorough history and description of the major
manufacturers and suppliers in the Hoodoo spiritual trade.
2. In urban areas such as Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, root and herb peddlers walked the streets
crying out their fresh and newly dried products. They belong to a cultural tradition of African American street-crying peddlers
such as the Arabbers of Baltimore, Maryland; see Roland Freeman, The Arabbers of Baltimore.
3. Ross, How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Cherokee Trickster Stories, 6–7.
4. St. Helena Island Cemetery Survey, October 15, 1999, 6; see also letter from Grace Morris Cordial, South Carolina
Resources Librarian in Beaufort County Public Library Vertical File, Beaufort, South Carolina.
5. McTeer, High Sheriff of the Low Country; McTeer, Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor.
6. Personal interview with Brother A. B. Gregory, great-grandson of Stepheney Robinson, Dr. Buzzard, St. Helena Island,
South Carolina, August 2000.
7. McTeer, High Sheriff of the Low Country; McTeer, Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor; this fact is mentioned in
both books by McTeer.
8. Personal interview with Gullah speaker Frances Nesbitt, age sixty-four, August 2003, Buck Hall community, Awendaw,
South Carolina.
9. Adams, “Dr. Bug, Dr. Buzzard, and the U.S.A.”
10. The phrase chew the root here refers to a type of courtroom ritual performed on the defendants behalf, in which a
magical root is chewed and the saliva is spit discreetly in the courtroom. It is believed that the defendant will win the case or
receive much lighter punishment if the root is chewed for them or by them on their own behalf. In most instances, the root is
galanga root, a relative of the ginger plant, known in Hoodoo work as “little John,” “low John,” or “chewing John.”
11. Adams, “Dr. Bug, Dr. Buzzard, and the U.S.A.” 71.
12. Ibid.
13. The use of bones, hair, and graveyard dirt is an indication of Kongo origins. Hoodoo shares the use of these items with
the practice of Palo in the United States.
14. Interview and conversation with Albert Hampton, longtime employee of Philadelphia's well-known Hoodoo supply store
Lady Dale's Curio Shop, April 1996, Philadelphia.
15. Long, Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce, 187.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 189–190.
18. Henri, Black Migration, Movement North 1900–1920.
19. Long, Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce, 189.
20. The term race records refers to a time when the music world was racially segregated. It designated music that was
recorded by and sold primarily to African Americans. Dream books were pamphlets containing the numerical interpretation of
dreams. These books were used by numbers gamblers to recommend a number to be played based on a dream and
sometimes on a vision.
21. Long, Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce, 199.
22. Ibid., 193–194.
23. Ibid., 198.
24. Ibid., 199.
25. Hurston, The Sanctified Church , 103.
26. Baer, “An Anthropological View of Black Spiritual Churches in Nashville, Tennessee,” 61; Hurston, “Hoodoo in America”;
see also Chireau, Black Magic.
27. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 613.
28. Ibid., 642.
29. Long, Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce, 200–201.
30. Ibid.; Hyatt, Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork , 2:10075–10088; Georgia Writers Project, Drums and
Shadows, interview with Mattie Sampson, Brownsville, Georgia 55–56.
31. Long, Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce, 201.
32. Wimbs, “African-American Theory, Beliefs and Practices,” 6.
33. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 26.
34. Wimbs, “African-American Theory, Beliefs and Practices,” 20.
35. Ibid.
36. Conversation with Mrs. Austin, age eighty-two, August 1998, Philadelphia.
37. Interview with Stonewall Hazzard, age ninety-three, October 1987, Cleveland, Ohio.
38. Numbers, also known as policy, were the illegal lotteries that proliferated in many urban black communities during this
period.
39. To hit a number is to win at the lottery.
40. Carlson, “Numbers Gambling,” 114.
41. Harry B. Weiss, “Oneirocritica Americana,” 522.
42. Ibid., 528–529.
43. Gardner, “The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book.”
44. Weiss, “Oneirocritica Americana,” 530.
45. Long, Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce, 163–165.
46. Ibid., 31–32.
47. Ibid., 32.
48. “Negro Superstitions: Bolita,” Florida State Archives, Tallahassee, Florida, Florida Negro Collection, Series 1585, carton
no. 1, folder 35, 1–16.
49. Egen, Plainclothesman , 60–64.
50. Carlson, “Numbers Gambling,” 12.
51. Ibid., 125.

CHAPTER 6. HEALIN’ DA SICK, RAISIN DA DAID

1. Kulii, “A Look at Hoodoo in Three Urban Areas of Indiana,” 140.
2. In July 1983 while vacationing near Negril, Jamaica, this author had the opportunity to converse with an apprentice bush
doctor, or traditional herbalist. I queried him about treatments for a chest cold, for a fever blister, and to stem bleeding. I was
familiar with treatments for several ailments because they had been used on me by my maternal grandmother, who was
from the black belt southern town of Mount Meigs, Alabama. When we discussed treatment for a chest cold or a cold
involving chest congestion, he prescribed exactly the same treatment that had been administered to me circa 1955: nine
drops of coal oil (highly refined kerosene) on a teaspoon of white sugar and swallowed by the patient. I was surprised that
the treatment the apprentice learned from an upcountry bush doctor was exactly the same one used by many blacks in the
United States; the treatment was administered to me in Cleveland, Ohio. We also knew other treatments, such as certain
cobwebs with styptic properties applied to cuts to stem blood flow and ear wax as a treatment for cold sores and fever
blisters. On a recent trip to Pretoria, South Africa, in March 2012, I interviewed a traditional healer, a South African Ndebele
Sangoma, who also knew the exact same treatments.
The words to the song by Bill Withers in the epigraph illustrate the role of the black midwife as healer in the African
American community. There are additional references that fill out the picture of Withers's “Grandma,” particularly the verse
that states:
Grandma's hands used to clap in church on Sunday
Grandma's hands shook a tambourine so well
As a member of the Sanctified Church (Sanctified churches are known for the use of tambourines), Grandma would have
been familiar with the root worker/ midwife tradition. There are indicators in the lyrics that signal and support this. Grandma's
description as outlined in the lyrics informs us of the values, behaviors, and role of the granny midwife from a particular era.
The popularity of the song in the African American community was informed by the cultural familiarity with the values
expressed in the song. Black grandmothers, often the maternal grandmothers, are legendary among African Americans,
particularly those blacks with strong and more recent southern black belt roots.
3. Robinson, “Black Healers during the Colonial Period and Early 19th Century America,” 69.
4. Ibid., 80.
5. Ibid., 84.
6. Ibid.
7. Pennsylvania Gazette, November 23, 1749.
8. Robinson, “Black Healers during the Colonial Period and Early 19th Century America,” 85; Morals, International Library
of Negro Life and History, 12.
9. Robinson, “Black Healers during the Colonial Period and Early 19th Century America,” 80–81.
 10. Rayburn, “The ‘Granny Woman’ in the Ozarks,” 147–148.
11. The term nature (pronounced “naitcha”) in this context refers to male sexual potency or impotence. An impotent
man or a man with erection problems was said to have “lost his nature.”
12. Mathews, “Killing the Medical Self-Help Tradition among African Americans,” 62.
13. Parsons, Folklore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina, 198.
14. Johnson, The Fabled Doctor Jim Jordan , 48.
15. Clayton, Mother Wit, 113.
16. Jessie L. Marriner, “Midwifery in Alabama,” 3, private manuscript in this author's collection.
17. Dougherty, “Southern Lay Midwives as Ritual Specialists,” 162.
18. Van Blarcom, “Rat Pie,” 324.
19. Neimark, Way of the Orisha; Neimark discusses his encounter with abiku both in the introduction and in early
chapters.
20. Van Blarcom, “Rat Pie,” 322, 328; Dougherty, “Southern Lay Midwives as Ritual Specialists,” 152–154.
21. For an example of this inaccuracy and mislabeling, see www.luckymojo.com/nationsack.html (accessed April 26,
2012).
22. In only one of Hyatt's interviews, an informant equates the so-called nation sack to tobies. This is a direct indication
that she was speaking of nature sacks. I believe there is confusion there and that the informant was familiar with the nature
sack and her account was of a traditional Hoodoo nature sack. She may even have corrected her English in an attempt to
give what she thought was a “proper” pronunciation while talking to a white man; African Americans still frequently do this.
The nation sacks that are offered for sale online through Web sites like luckymojo.com are imitations of the original and should
in no way be confused with old black belt Hoodoo nature sacks. Old tradition nature sacks contained no commercial
marketeered supplies. They contained no dragon's blood, magnetic sand, heart charms, or anything purchased from
outsiders; see “Scott Ainslie's Blues Notes” at http://cattailmusic.com/Blues/BluesNotes/NationSacks.htm (accessed March
15, 2012). This Web site gives an account of the tent preacher's donation sack but does not address the long-standing
confusion. Given that uneducated African Americans of the period did not pronounce their final consonants, it is not likely that
they would have said “nation” or explicitly pronounced the final consonant. This pronunciation falls well outside of black
American linguistic patterns. Whites hearing this would assume that the Negroes were attempting to pronounce “nation” and
conflated the tent preacher's donation sack/nation sack with the African American Hoodoo amulet nature sack.
23. Mathews, “Killing the Medical Self-Help Tradition among African Americans,” 62.
24. Reeb, “Granny Midwives in Mississippi,” 18.
25. Herbalist Tommie Bass, quoted in Smith and Holmes, Listen to Me Good , 40.
26. Ibid., 53.
27. Rayburn, “The ‘Granny Woman’ in the Ozarks,” 145–148.
28. Van Blarcom, “Rat Pie,” 327.
29. Bailey with Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man , 76.
30. Linda Janet Holmes, “African American Midwives in the South,” in Eakins, The American Way of Birth , 282.
31. Ibid.; see also Dougherty, “Southern Lay Midwives as Ritual Specialists,” 282–283.
32. Smith and Holmes, Listen to Me Good , 51.
33. Mathews, “Killing the Medical Self-Help Tradition among African Americans,” 61.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 67.
36. Ibid.
37. Fontenot, Secret Doctors, 35–36.
38. Robinson, “Black Healers during the Colonial Period and Early 19th Century America,” 87.
39. Onstott, Drum, 225, 226–227.
40. Sofowora, Medicinal Plants and Traditional Medicine In Africa, 52.
41. Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, 332.
42. Ibid., 379.
43. Ibid., 185.
44. 365.
45. Fontenot, Secret Doctors, 114–118.
46. Ibid., 114.
47. Ibid., 114–115.
48. Ibid., 115.
49. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, 224.
50. Bailey with Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man , 202.
51. Ibid., 204.
52. Interviews and conversations with Darlene Curry and Susie Isaac, John Isaac's daughters, age eighty-four and eighty-
two years, respectively, Cleveland and Ravenna, Ohio, October 1990.
53. Still, Early Recollections and Life of Dr. James Still 1812–1885 , 41
54. Ibid., 70–71.
55. African slaves and their descendants were frequently experimented on by the white medical profession. The infamous
Tuskegee syphilis study further supported black belief that they were frequently used in medical studies and experiments.
56. Both the night doctor and the needle doctor (as opposed to the root doctor) were believed to kidnap blacks who were
out walking alone at night in isolated areas, particularly those surrounding large research hospitals like Johns Hopkins in
Baltimore, Maryland; see Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; see also Washington, Medical Apartheid.
57. Results from a questionnaire distributed by this author in September 2002 in Arlington, Virginia.
58. American Social Hygiene Association, Preliminary Report of a Survey of Medical and Educational Aspects of Social
Hygiene in the City of New Orleans, 99–100.
59. Ibid., 99.
60. Ibid., 101.
61. Long, Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce, 143–144.
 62. Ibid., 145–146.

CHAPTER 7. BLACK BELT HOODOO IN THE POST–WORLD WAR II CULTURAL

ENVIRONMENT
1. Jones-Jackson, When Roots Die.
2. Snow, “Mail Order Magic.”
3. Torrey, The Mind Game.
4. Interview with Brother A. B. Gregory, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, July 20 and 21, 2005.
5. Telephone conversation with Dr. Wilbert Jordan, Los Angeles, April 2001.
6. For an account of the legacy of distrust resulting from medical experimentation on blacks, see Washington, Medical
Apartheid.
7. Interview with Ms. Mary Russell, Sheffield, Alabama, July 2003.
8. Interview and conversation with Honi Coles and Sandman Simms, October 1980, Ithaca, New York; Peters, “Passing
On.”
9. For more on the term social dislocation , see Wilson, When Work Disappears.
10. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 1242, n. 64.
11. Fontenot, Secret Doctors, 115–116.
12. Personal interview with Ms. Mary Russell, root worker, Sheffield, Alabama, July 20 and 21, 2002.
13. Ibid.
14. Personal interview with Brother A. B. Gregory, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, July 2004.
15. Personal telephone interviews with Chukwunyere Eze Ndubuisi, also known as Papa Ce, November 2005, Philadelphia,
and April 10, 2009, Chicago.
16. Email from Djenra Windwalker, November 30, 2005.
17. Ibid.
18. Telephone interview with root worker Arthur Flowers, Syracuse, New York, December 20, 2005.
19. Telephone interview with root worker Arthur Flowers, Syracuse, New York, January 11, 2006.
20. Personal interview with Phoenix Savage, Philadelphia, October 2004; telephone interview with Phoenix Savage, January
13, 2006.
21. His legs had suddenly become so weak that he couldn't walk, and doctors could neither explain the malady nor help
him, so family members made one final attempt. John was put on a bus and sent to his sister's home in Mobile, Alabama.
After performing the preliminary spiritual preparations, she and other Hoodoos buried John up to a little above his waist,
standing straight up in the sand as described in chapter 6. When the ritual was completed and John was pulled from the
sand, he was able to both walk and to return to his home free from crutches.
22. Telephone interview with Hougan Dafusky Jones, Philadelphia, August 4, 2010.
23. Personal discussions and conversations with Dr. Abba Barden, physician at the Penn Center for Primary Care in
Philadelphia, June and August 2005 and October 2006. Dr. Barden revealed that older African American patients, particularly
those over age fifty, often raise the possibility that their illness could have been caused by someone working roots on them.
Because Dr. Barden is Ghanaian, she is familiar with and often more understanding and tolerant of these patient responses
than are white physicians trained in the Western medical tradition. She revealed that she has seen similar responses at home
in Ghana, West Africa.

POSTSCRIPT
1. Interviews with Mary Russell, Sheffield, Alabama, 2002, 2003, and Papa Ce, Chicago, Illinois, April 1, 2010.
2. Email from luckymojo.com's Cat Yronwode, September 1, 2010.
3. Interview with Papa Ce, old tradition Hoodoo practitioner, April 1, 2010, Chicago, Illinois.
4. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals.
 Glossary

This glossary is by no means comprehensive; rather, it is

both an overview of and an introduction to some Hoodoo
terminology and concepts.
Born with a veil—Children who are born with a caul or a
piece of amniotic sack covering their faces are said to be
born with the veil and are believed to have heightened
spiritual power and were often recruited into the root worker
tradition.
Bottle tree—A dead tree on which numerous colored
bottles (some people prefer blue or blue-green bottles, but
all colors are used) have been placed on the ends of
branches or hung from the branches. It is believed that the
brightly colored bottles, gleaming as the sun shines through
them, attract potentially evil spirits and keep them from
getting into the house and causing problems.
Burn bread on—Essentially this phrase has a meaning
similar to the expression “put the bad mouth on.” When and
how it entered the Hoodoo phraseology and lexicon is
uncertain. It is not widely used but heard occasionally. The
more frequently heard phrase “burn a candle on” is more
widely known.
Called—Being “called” is one way to legitimately enter
Hoodoo practice. The ritual of being called involves some
unusual or supernatural event that signals the God-given
ordination of a potential conjure doctor. The unusual event
attending the calling may be at birth, such as being born
with a veil, or it may happen later in life, signaled by some
unusual event, like the clapping of thunder or lightening
striking a tree. Or it may be signaled by the appearance of a
birthmark or any unusual aspect of the called person's life.
Chew the root—Term used to refer to part of the once well-
known “court case ritual” in which a conjurer, after other
ritual preparations, attends the court hearing of his client
and chews galanga root (chewing John), recites secret words
of power, and spits in the courtroom, spreading the spiritual
protection of the root and turning the entire court
proceeding in favor of his client. In some cases, the client
can chew the root on his own behalf.
Conja (conjure)—Another name for either the Hoodoo
tradition or a conjurer/ root worker.
Cross—Means the same as “to trick,” “to gopher,” “to
hoodoo,” or “to root” someone. May refer to the sacredness
of crossed or intersecting places, such as the crossroads, or
the sacred cross of the Kongo cosmogram.
Dancing dime—A Hoodoo divination device used to
diagnose a malady caused by Hoodoo. A root doctor usually
boils a silver dime in water; if the coin moves around,
jiggling and flipping, it has a meaning, which is read by the
root doctor. This ritual has been performed with coins or
metal slugs resembling coins or even with metal buttons as
a substitute for the silver dime. Silver dimes were difficult
for slaves to acquire, so the ritual substituted other coins or
coinlike objects.
Doctor—Usually meaning a “root doctor.”
Dodywood—A powdery substance taken from the stump of
dead or decaying pine trees. This dust was used to treat cuts
and was used by midwives to seal and heal the umbilicus.
Dress—In the context of Hoodoo, this simply means “to
prepare.” To dress a candle means to prepare it to be burned
for a specific purpose. This term also means to put a certain
type of Hoodoo on someone. A woman, for example, can
dress a man so that he cannot achieve an erection, so that
he will lose his job, or so that he will have a long streak of
bad luck. The same can be done to a woman to prevent her
from leaving or for any other purpose. Oftentimes when
protective powders are spread around a room, such as a
courtroom, that room is said to be dressed. Almost anything
can be dressed, such as beds, pillows, articles of clothing, as
well as locations.
Feed the hand—This phrase refers to the practices
necessary to refresh and maintain the power and potency of
the amulet/mojo. This is usually done with some kind of
alcohol, such as corn liquor, gin, whisky, or perfume or
cologne. When ingestible liquid such as wine or liquor is
used, it is taken into the mouth and sprayed onto the mojo
bag. When perfume or cologne is used, it is simply dripped
or sprayed from an atomizer onto the mojo.
Fix—To put roots on, to hex, or to dress.
Goober dust—Goobers are peanuts (pindas); goober dust
was ground peanut hulls used in traditional West African
and Kongo religion and in old tradition black belt Hoodoo.
The severe reaction to goober dust was undoubtedly due to
peanut allergy, unrecognized then, unlike today where we
guard against such a reaction that could possibly cause
death. The two terms goopher dust and goober dust have
shifting meanings and are often used interchangeably today.
Goopher, goopher pack—A type of amulet that often but
not always contains graveyard dirt. Those packs that contain
graveyard dirt sometimes have to be returned to the root
worker that made it so that the power will not reach out and
harm the client. When used as a verb, to goopher means the
same as to Hoodoo.
Goopher dust, goofy dust—Has a range of meanings; as
a verb, to goopher means “to fix.” It also is another name for
graveyard dirt.
Haint, hant—Another name for an evil witchlike
supernatural being that is believed to chase its victims to
their death or to mount them during sleep and ride them
like a horse until exhaustion sets in or sunrise appears.
Haints are sometimes referred to as witches.
Haint blue—A deep, rich sky blue color believed to repel
haints. Believers used this color paint to protect their
windows and doors from entry by a haint. It can still be seen
on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, today.
Hand—A name for a mojo bag. Often referred to as “lucky
hand,” hands come in different types, just as all mojoes do.
A mojo/hand prepared for luck in gambling is a gambling
hand. Originally a hand was made specifically for a client's
needs—each hand was different. A special type of hand was
wrapped or prepared for left-handed people. The label hand
is used because originally certain types of mojos were
tailored to the size and shape of the client's left palm.
High John the Conquer root—A tuberous type of morning
glory root native to the area around Xalapa, Vera Cruz,
Mexico. Known botanically as Ipomoea jalapa, it is probably
the most sacred and powerful root in contemporary Hoodoo
work.
Hoodoo—The traditional black belt African American folk
healing and spiritual controlling system. This system draws
most heavily from African traditional religion but later, as a
result of enslavement, integrates elements of Native
American traditional religion and beliefs and some Old
World European folk beliefs. The term also is used to
designate a root worker, conjurer, two-head, or root doctor,
as in that person is a Hoodoo.
Hot foot—A term probably devised by snake oil hoodoo
marketeers. This term refers to the old tradition Hoodoo fix,
known in some regions as “the walking foot” (pronounced
without the final g, walkin’ foot), and the traditional African
and African American practice of picking up tracks. The
medical malady known today as restless leg syndrome (RLS)
could be judged to be a variety of the walking foot.
Jack—Another name for a type of Hoodoo amulet or mojo
bag.
Jack ball—This term has two usages: one for the divination
device similar to the walking boy in which a weighted mojo
ball was suspended from a string about eighteen to twenty
inches long and used the same way as the walking boy. The
other use for the term is to designate a type of amulet
carried for protection and luck. As in I got my jack ball with
me tonight. The African American dance known as Ballin’
the Jack is a Hoodoo reference.
Juju—A generic term referring to any and all types of
traditional and alternative African religious practices. This
term is recognizable to, and means the same thing to,
anyone who knows of the controlling aspect of African
traditional religion. When terms such as Santeria, Hoodoo,
or Vodun fail to register, the term Juju means the same to
blacks in both Africa and the African diaspora.
Jump the broom—A Hoodoo marriage ritual in which the
woman was required to jump over the broom to prove to her
new spouse that she was not a witch. It was believed that a
witch could not jump over the broom until she counted each
straw. By jumping the broom, the new bride proved that she
was not a haint or witch disguised as a woman.
Lightening dust—Dust used in Hoodoo rituals that has
been gathered from a decomposing tree that has been
struck by lightning.
Long head—Another name for a conjurer or root doctor.
Mojo—A traditional African American amulet. A genuine
mojo or mojo bag can only be wrapped properly by an old
tradition root worker.
Nature sack, nation sack—A type of mojo originally
controlled only by midwife conjurer women. There is some
confusion about this type of mojo. The use of the term
nation sack is a mispronunciation by whites who are
“correcting” black English. The term used among southern
black belt African Americans was and is nature sack,
referring to male sexual potency, virility as nature. To say
that a man has lost his nature means that he either cannot
achieve an erection or has difficulty with such. The term
nature (pronounced “naitcha” the final consonant r is never
pronounced) sack was used by women who wanted to
control their man's sexuality and virility and keep him from
infidelity. The sack had to be tied during coitus, with the
final knot tied upon the man's sexual climax. It could prove
to be a complex and dangerous ritual, especially if the
woman was discovered while doing it. A woman who had
tied a nature sack on a man hid and protected the amulet.
The location was considered so secret that many men feared
even touching a nature sack; some even feared mentioning
it. For an explanation of how it becomes confused with the
tent show preacher's donation sack, see note 22 in chapter
6.
Numbers—The illegal lotteries that flourished in African
American communities from around World War I until state-
operated lotteries displaced them across America beginning
in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Package—Another name for an old tradition mojo bag,
amulet, or charm.
Pick up tracks, gathered track—Though rarely
performed today, this old tradition Hoodoo practice was
once one of the most feared. As the victim walked along and
left footprints, the dust forming the footprints was picked up
and used to fix that particular individual. This practice is
long standing and largely unchanged, performed today as it
was on the plantation and in West and West Central Africa
before the enslavement of Africans in the United States.
Each use was tailored to the individual, and any attempt to
use the marketeered hot foot powders would pollute the
ritual and could even prove harmful to the client.
Plat-eye—An evil spirit that changes form or shape-shifts in
order to lure its victims into danger or into the woods, where
they are left to die. Matches and sulfur taken from matches
were used to repel Plat-eye. This spirit may have derived
from Native American influences or sources.
Possum bone reading—A divination system in which
seven or nine opossum vertebrae are use to divine
information for the client. This was one of the primary
divination systems used on the plantation. Believed to be
close to the ancestors, the opossum was chosen because it
was often seen in the cemetery. Today, all the intermediary
forces known as New World Orisha are said to enjoy eating
possum, and they are “fed” possum for a variety of purposes.
Put the bad mouth on—This phrase refers to the
traditional West African and Hoodoo belief in the power of
the spoken word. Putting the bad mouth on someone is the
same as forecasting negative occurrences for that person.
Only the spoken forecast has the potency to bring the
occurrence into existence. An example: If someone says to
you, “I hope you don't get into trouble on your job,” a
response might be, “Don't put the bad mouth on me and
make that happen.”
Root doctor, rootman, root woman, root worker—A
traditional African American community lay Hoodoo
practitioner, folk herbalist, and healer.
Roots, put roots on, to be rooted—To cast a spell,
usually negative, on someone in the Hoodoo tradition is to
root them.
Seer—A root worker with power to predict the future or to
see unrevealed phenomena. Sometimes incorrectly referred
to as “psychics,” this title, almost always urban, updates and
legitimizes root workers who use it. The term is most
frequently used by non-African Americans who practice
other traditions such as palm reading.
Spiritualist—A title adopted by some old tradition workers
who may be closely associated with a spiritualist church.
The title is most often used by palm readers and crystal ball
and tarot card readers and may or may not have anything to
do with old tradition Hoodoo.
Swamper—An old tradition black belt conjurer or root
worker who goes out and harvests his or her own plants,
roots, and supplies.
Throw at—To put a fix on. If someone is throwing at you, he
or she is trying to put Hoodoo on you somehow. Ritual
objects are used, including roots, stones, iron, alligator
teeth, dried and pulverized peanut shells, animal hair, and
chicken feet, when throwing at someone.
Tie—A term describing part of the preparation process of a
traditional, personalized mojo amulet. This term also refers
to the general use of tied knots in both medicinal and
spiritual work. Tying is an important gesture in and of itself.
Incantation of sacred words or prayer is used to sanctify
each knot as it is tightened. When stitches are used instead
of tied knots, each stitch, or series of stitches, receives an
incantation or verse. The infamous nature sack (mistakenly
dubbed nation sack) is tied with the final knot tied during
coitus. Someone seeking an old tradition mojo might ask
the root worker, “Can you tie the bag for me?” This process
must include the proper prayers to activate the power in the
amulet.
Toby—Another name for a mojo bag, perhaps from a
medicine show or snake oil Hoodoo.
Trick—Another term for Hoodoo used as a verb. To trick
someone is to Hoodoo them. Laying a trick means
depositing a Hoodoo amulet or powders or goopher pack so
as to harm or change the behavior of the person targeted.
The term trick has multiple meanings and is widely used in
several contexts in African American culture, such as
tricking or turning a trick, meaning prostitution, and trick
bag, literally and figuratively referring to spiritual and
physical connections to important people or beings and
objects. The ability to make things happen. The tools, skill,
and connections necessary to make things happen.
Trick bag—A conjure pack or root pack designed usually to
bring harm or to ward off a certain individual. Used also to
mean spiritual and medicinal resources, as in “I have a few
items in my trick bag that will help.”
Two-head—An old tradition black belt Hoodoo name for a
conjurer, root doctor, root worker, or Hoodoo practitioner.
The term refers to the belief that the root worker can see
into two worlds: the corporeal world of everyday existence
and the invisible spirit world.
Walking boy—A traditional divination device used by
African American conjurers working in the old black belt
tradition. This device was used on plantations throughout
the Deep South. A small bottle was attached to a string or
cord about two feet long. The bottle was then allowed to
swing freely like a pendulum. This device was also used to
locate conjure packets or negative mojoes that had been
buried near the home of or in the potential pathway of an
individual.
Walking foot—A type of old tradition Hoodoo charm and
ritual used to make the target walk constantly and in an
unconventional and unusual manner. This may be the
source or origin of the snake oil Hoodoo hot foot powders
and sprays. It appears that this is what the snake oil or
marketeered Hoodoo is attempting to imitate.
Wrap—A term that means the same as “to tie.” Mojoes are
either wrapped or tied. A client might ask, “Can you wrap
the package for me?”
 Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1959.

Adams, George C. S. “Rattlesnake Eye.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 2 (1938):
37–38.
Adams, Samuel Hopkins. “Dr. Bug, Dr. Buzzard, and the U.S.A.” True (July 1949):
36, 69–71.
Aimes, Hubert H. S. “African Institutions in America.” Journal of American Folklore
18, no. 68 (January-March 1905): 15–32.
American Social Hygiene Association. Preliminary Report of a Survey of Medical
and Educational Aspects of Social Hygiene in the City of New Orleans. New
York: ASHA, 1931. (Manuscript in the Amistad Collection, Tulane University, New
Orleans, Louisiana.)
Anderson, Ann. Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland,
2000.
Anderson, Jeffery. Conjure in African American Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2005.
Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International, 1969.
Aptheker, Herbert. “Maroons within the Present Limits of the United States.”
Journal of Negro History 24, no. 2 (April 1939): 167–184.
Arcaya, Pedro M. Insurrecion de los negros de la Serrania de Coro. Caracas,
Venezuela: Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, publ. no. 7, 1930.
Backus, E. M., and Ethel Hatton Leitner. “Negro Tales from Georgia.” Journal of
American Folklore 25 (1912): 125–135.
Bacon, Alice Mabel. “Work and Methods of the Hampton Folklore Society.” Journal
of American Folklore 11, no. 40 (January-March 1897): 17–21.
Baer, Hans. “An Anthropological View of Black Spiritual Churches in Nashville,
Tennessee.” Central Issues in Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 2 (1980): 53–68.
Baer, Hans, and Yvonne Jones, eds. African Americans in the South. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1992.
Bailey, Cornelia Walker, with Christena Bledsoe. God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito
Man. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
Balfour, J. H. “Notice of Some Plants Which Flowered Recently in the Edinburgh
Botanical Garden.” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 44 (1848): 200–205.
Banks, Ann. First Person America. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Barnes,
Sandra. Africa's Ogun: Old World and New. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1997.
Barrows, Julie. “Herb Cures in an Isolated Black Community in the Florida Parishes.”
Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 3, no. 1 (1970): 25–27. Bascom, William R. Ifa
Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Bascom, William R. Sixteen
Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Bastide, Roger. The African Religions of Brazil. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978.
Beaton, D. “Note on the Jalap Plant of Commerce.” Garden Management 15
(1839): 328–329.
Beecham, John. Ashantee and the Gold Coast. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall,
1968. “Beliefs and Customs Connected with Death and Burial.” Southern
Workman 26 (1897): 18–19.
Bell, Michael Edward. “Harry Middleton Hyatt's Quest for the Essence of the
Human Spirit.” Journal of American Folklore 19 (1979): 1–27. Bell, Michael
Edward. “Pattern, Structure and Logic in Afro-American Hoodoo
Performance.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1980.
Berendt, John. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. New York: Vintage
Books, 1999.
Blanco, M. G. “El cultivo de las plantas medicinales en Mexico tiene gran porvenir.”
Tierra 4:81–83.
Blanton, Wyndham B. Medicine in Virginia in the Eighteenth Century. Richmond,
Va.: Garrett and Massie, 1931. Bohannan, Paul. “Tiv Divination.” In Studies in
Social Anthropology, edited by J. H. M.
Beattie and R. G. Lienhards, 149–166. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Bolton, H. Carrington. “The Decoration of Graves of Negroes in South Carolina.”
Journal of American Folklore 4 (1891): 214. Bowser, Frederick P. The African
Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650. Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1974. Brackett, Jeffrey Richardson. Negro in Maryland:
A Study of the Institution of Slavery.
Baltimore: N. Murray, Johns Hopkins University, 1889. Bradford, Sydney S. “The
Negro Ironworker in Ante-Bellum Virginia.” Journal of Southern History 25 (May
1959): 194–206.
Brady, C. M. “The Negro as a Patient in General Practice.” New Orleans Surgical
Journal 56 (19°3–4): 431–445. Bromberg, Alan B. “Slavery in the Virginia
Tobacco Factories, 1800–1860.” Master's thesis, University of Virginia, 1968.
Brown, William Wells. The Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave.
New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970.
Burwell, Letitia M. A Girl's Life in Virginia before the War. New York: Frederick A.
Stokes, 1895.
Cable, George W. “Creole Slave Songs.” The Century Magazine 31, no. 6 (April
1886): 814–815.
Cannon, Walter B. “Voodoo Death.” Psychosomatic Medicine 19 (1957): 182–
191.
Carlson, Gustav G. “Numbers Gambling: A Study of a Culture Complex.” PhD diss.,
University of Michigan, 1940.
Carroll, Patrick J. Blacks in Colonial Veracruz. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1991.
Carroll, Patrick J. “Mandinga: The Evolution of a Mexican Runaway Slave
Community, 1735–1827.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, no.
4 (October 1977): 488–5°5.
Chase, Jeanne. “The 1741 Conspiracy to Burn New York: Black Plot or Black
Magic?” Social Science Information 22, no. 6 (1983): 969–981.
Chatelain, Heli. “Angolan Customs.” Journal of American Folklore 9, no. 32
(January-March 1896): 13–18.
Chesnutt, Charles W. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.
Chesnutt, Charles W. “Superstitions and Folklore of the South.” Modern Culture
(1901): 231–235.
Chireau, Yvonne. Black Magic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Chireau, Yvonne. “Conjuring: An Analysis of African American Folk Beliefs and
Practices.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1994.
Clar, Mimi. “Negro Beliefs.” Western Folklore 18 (1959): 332–334.
Clark, Joseph D. “North Carolina Popular Beliefs and Superstitions.” North Carolina
Folklore Journal 18, no. 1 (1970): 1–68.
Clayton, Edward T. “The Truth About Voodoo: Despite Claims That Cult Is Dead,
Voodoo Practices Still Flourish as Lucrative Racket in New Orleans.” Ebony (April
1951): 54–56.
Clayton, Ronnie W. Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers
Project. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
Cohen, Hennig. “Burial of the Drowned among the Gullah Negroes.” Southern
Folklore Quarterly 22, no. 2 (June 1958): 93–97.
“Conjuring in Arkansas.” Journal of American Folklore, “Folklore and Ethnology” 1
(1888): 83.
Contributor's Club. “A Negro Witch Story.” Atlantic Monthly 75 (1895): 715–717.
Contributor's Club. “Some Negro Superstitions.” Atlantic Monthly 75 (1895): 136–
139.
Cooley, Gilbert. “Conversations About Hoodoo.” Indiana Folklore 10, no. 2 (1977):
201–215.
Cooley, Gilbert. “Root Doctors and Psychics in the Region.” Indiana Folklore 10,
no. 2 (1977): 191–200.
Cooley, Gilbert. “Root Stories.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 23, no. 2 (May
1975) : 35–43.
Cooper, James Fennimore. Satanstoe: A Tale of the Colony. Garden City, N.Y.:
Dolphin Books, 1962.
Cross, Tom Peete. “Witchcraft in North Carolina.” Studies in Philology 16 (1919):
217–287.
Cunard, Nancy, ed. Negro Anthology. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.
Cunningham, Eloise. “The Negro Storefront Church in Cleveland.” Manuscript in
Cleveland Public Library, John G. White Collection, Newbell Niles Puckett
Collection, “Religious Beliefs of Southern Negroes,” Box 1, item II (May 1947):
1–33b.
Davenport, Fredrick Morgan. “The Religions of the American Negro.”
Contemporary Review 88 (September 1905): 369–375.
Davis, Daniel W. “Conjuration.” Southern Workman 27 (December 1898): 251–
252.
Davis, Thomas. A Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York.
New York: Free Press, 1985.
Debien, Gabriel. Plantations et esclaves à St. Domingue. Dakar, Senegal:
Université de Dakar, 1962.
De Jauregui, M. F. “Estudios acerca de algunos purgantes indigenas.” La
Naturaleza 7 (1887): 104–113.
Devisch, R. “Perspectives on Divination in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa.” In
Theoretical Explorations in African Religion , edited by W. Van Binsbergen and
M. Schoffeleers, 50–83. London: Kegan Paul, 1985.
Dieterien, Germaine. Essai sur la religion Bambara. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1950.
Diggs, Irene. “Zumbi and the Republic of Os Palmares.” Phylon 14, no. 1 (1953):
62–70.
Dorjahn, Vernon. “Some Aspects of Temne Divination.” Sierra Leone Bulletin of
Religion 4, no. 1 (June 1962): 1–9.
Dorson, Richard M. “Hoodoos and Two-Heads.” American Negro Folktales, 186–
212. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1958.
Dougherty, Molly C. “Southern Lay Midwives as Ritual Specialists.” In Women in
Ritual and Symbolic Roles, edited by Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring. New
York: Plenum Press, 1978.
Douglas, S. W. “Difficulties and Superstitions Encountered in Practice among the
Negro.” The Journal of the Arkansas Medical Society18 , no. 8 (January 1922):
155–158.
Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. New York: Collier,
1962.
Drake, St. Clair, and Horace Cayton. Black Metropolis. New York: Harper and Row,
1962.
Drolet, Patricia Lund. “The Congo Ritual of Northeastern Panama: An Afro-American
Expressive Structure of Cultural Adaptation.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, 1980.
DuBois, W. E. B. Black Folk: Then and Now. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1975.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1996.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1973.
Dutton, Wendy. “The Problem of Invisibility: Voodoo and Zora Neale Hurston.”
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 13, no. 2 (1993): 131–153.
Eakins, Pamela S., ed. The American Way of Birth. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1986.
Egen, Capt. Frederick W. Plainclothesman: A Handbook of Vice and Gambling
Investigation. New York: Arco, 1959.
Emery, Lynn F. Black Dance from 1619 to 1970. Palo Alto, Calif.: National Press
Books, 1972.
Ennes, Ernesto. “The Palmares ‘Republic’ of Pernambuco.” The Americas, 5, no. 2
(October 1948): 200–216.
Epstein, Dena. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Evans, David, Don Stephen Rice, and Joanne Kline Partin. “Parallels in West African,
West Indian and North Carolina Folklore.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 17, no.
2 (1969): 77–84.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House, 1984.
Fitchett, E. Horace. “Superstitions in South Carolina.” The Crisis 43 (1936): 360–
361 370.
Florida Negro. “Aunt Memory” and “Negro Superstitions: Bolita.” Florida State
Archives, Tallahassee, Florida, Series 1585, carton no. 1, folder no. 35.
“Folk-Lore and Ethnology.” Southern Workman 28 (1899): 315.
Fontenot, Wanda. Secret Doctors. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1994.
Forten, Charlotte. The Journal of CharlotteL. Forten. New York: Dryden Press,
1953.
Fortier, Alcee. “Customs and Superstitions in Louisiana.” Journal of American
Folklore 1 (1888): 136–140.
Freeman, Roland. The Arabbers of Baltimore. Centreville, Md.: Tidewater, 1989.
Fu-Kiau, Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki. African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo, 2nd
ed. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Athelia Henrietta Press, 2001.
Gaffney, Floyd. “The Function and Form of the Ring Shout as a Religious
Expression: From West African Origins through the Era of Slavery in America.”
Master's thesis, Adelphi University, 1962.
Galloway, J. H. “Sugar Industry of Pernambuco during the Nineteenth Century.”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 58 (June 1968): 285–303.
Gannett, Edward Channing. “The Freedmen at Port Royal.” North American
Review 101 (July 1865): 1–28.
Gardner, Eric. “The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book: An Antebellum Text
by Chloe Russel, A Woman of Colour.” New England Quarterly 78, no. 2 (June
2005): 259–288.
Gebauer, Paul. Spider Divination in the Cameroons. Milwaukee, Wis.: Milwaukee
Public Museum Publication in Anthropology, no. 10, 1964.
Genovese, Eugene. Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York:
Vintage Books, 1976.
Georgia Writer's Project. Drums and Shadows. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1940.
Gibb, Eleanor. “Conjure and ‘Suasion: Plantation Chronicles.” Atlantic Monthly 128
(1921): 761–770.
Gibson, H. E. “Folk Medicine among the Gullahs: African Legacy.” Negro Digest 11
(August 1962): 77–80.
Glave, E. J. “Fetishism in Congo Land.” Century Magazine 41, no. 6 (April 1891):
835.
Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998.
Granberry, E. “Black Jupiter: A Voodoo King in Florida's Jungle.” Travel (April 1932):
32–35, 54.
Green, Fletcher M. “Georgia's Forgotten Industry: Gold Mining.” Georgia Historical
Quarterly 19 (June-September 1935): 93–111, 210–228.
Green, Fletcher M. “Gold Mining: A Forgotten Industry of Antebellum North
Carolina.” North Carolina Historical Review 14 (January-October 1937): 1–19.
Guillot, Carlos Federico. Negros rebeledes y negros cimarrones. Buenos Aires,
Argentina: Farina Editores, 1961.
Guthrie, Chester L. “Colonial Economy: Trade, Industry and Labor in Seventeenth
Century Mexico City.” Revista de Historia de America 7 (December 1939):
103–134.
Hall, Arthur L., and Peter G. Bourne. “Indigenous Therapist in a Southern Black
Urban Community.” Archives of General Psychiatry 28, no. 1 (January 1973):
137–142.
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1992.
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and
Genealogy, 1699–1869: Computerized Information from Original Manuscript
Sources. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press: CD-Rom Edition, March
1, 2000.
Hall, Julien A. “Negro Conjuring and Tricking.” Journal of American Folklore 10, no.
36 (January-March 1897): 241–243.
Hanbury, D. “On the Cultivation of Jalap.” London Pharmaceutical Journal 39
(1867): 352–356.
Hand, Wayland. “Physical Harm, Sickness, and Death by Conjury.” Acta
Ethnographica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae (1970): 169–177.
Hand, Wayland D. “The Folkhealer: Calling and Endowment.” Journal of the History
of Medicine 26 (1971): 263–275.
Handy, Sara M. “Negro Superstitions.” Lippincott's Magazine 48 (1891): 735–
739.
Harrison, John P. “The Evolution of Colombian Tobacco Trade to 1875.” Hispanic
American Historical Review 32 (May 1952): 163–174.
Haskell, Joseph A., “Sacrificial Offerings among North Carolina Negroes.” Journal of
American Folklore 4 (1891): 267–269.
Hazzard-Donald, Katrina. “The Circle and the Line: Speculations on the
Development of African American Vernacular Dancing.” Western Journal of Black
 Studies 20, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 28–38.
Headlam, Cecil, ed. Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series: American and West
Indies 1728–1729, vol. 35. Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1964.
Hearn, Lafcadio. “Jot—The Haunt of the Obi-Man.” In Children of the Levee, edited
by O. W. Frost, 49–53. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957.
Hendricks, George D. “Voodoo Powder.” Western Folklore 17 (1958): 132.
Henri, Florette. Black Migration, Movement North 1900–1920. Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Books, 1976.
Herron, Elenor, and Alice Mabel Bacon. “Conjuring and Conjure-Doctors in the
Southern United States.” Journal of American Folklore 9, no. 33 (1896): 143–
147, 224–226.
Herron, Lenora, and Alice M. Bacon. “Conjuring and Conjure Doctors.” Southern
Workman 24 (1895^117–118, 193–194, 209–211.
Herskovits, Melville. “Folklore After a Hundred Years: A Problem in Redefinition.”
Journal of American Folklore 59, no. 232 (1946): 89–101.
Herskovits, Melville J. “Letter to the Editor concerning the Review of Zora Neale
Hurston's “Mules and Men (#5467) by Joseph J. Williams.” Folk-Lore 48 (1937):
219–221.
Herskovits, Melville J. Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1951.
Higgins, Robert. “The Geographical Origin of Negro Slaves in Colonial South
Carolina.” South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971): 34–47.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. Boston: Fields,
Osgood, 1870.
Hill, Carole E. “Black Healing Practices in the Rural South.” Journal of Popular
Culture 6, no. 4 (Spring 1973): 849–853.
Hounwanou, Remy. Le Fa: Une Geomancie Divinatoire du Golfe du Benin:
Pratiques et Technique. Lomé, Togo: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1984.
Hoyt, Harlowe R. Town Hall Tonight. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995.
Hughes, Louis. Thirty Years a Slave. 1897. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities
Press, 1969.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” In Negro Anthology,
edited by Nancy Cunard. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “High John De Conquer.” American Mercury 57 (1943): 450–
458.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Hoodoo in America.” Journal of American Folklore 44
(October-December 1931): 317–418.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Perennial Library, 1935.
Hurston, Zora Neale. The Sanctified Church. Berkeley, Calif.: Turtle Island, 1984.
Hutchisson, James, ed. A DuBose Heyward Reader. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2003.
Hyatt, Harry Middleton. Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork: Beliefs
Accepted by Many Negroes and White Persons, These Being Orally Recorded
among Blacks and Whites, 5 vols. Memoirs of the Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation.
Hannibal, Mo.: Western, 1970–78.
Imperato, Pascal James. African Folk Medicine. Baltimore: York Press, 1977.
Imperato, P. J. “Bamana and Maninka Twin Figures.” African Arts 8, no. 4 (1975):
52–60.
Imperato, P.J. “Twins among the Bambara and Malinke of Mali.” Journal of Tropical
Medicine and Hygiene 74, no. 7 (1971): 154–159.
Imperato, Pascal James, and Gavin H. Imperato. “Twins, Hermaphrodites, and an
Androgynous Albino Deity: Twins and Sculpted Twin Figures among the Bamana
and Maninka of Mali.” African Arts 41 no. 1 (Spring 2008): 40.
Ingersoll, Ernest. “Decoration of Negro Graves.” Journal of American Folklore 5
(1892): 68.
Jackson, L. P. “Religious Development of the Negro in Virginia from 1760–1860.”
Journal of Negro History 16 (1931): 168–239.
Jackson, Michael. “An Approach to Kuranko Divination.” Human Relations 31, no. 2
(1978): 117–138.
Jacobs, Claude F., and Andrew J. Kaslow. The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
James, C. L. R. Black Jacobins: Toussaint l'Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1963.
Johnson, F. Roy. The Fabled Doctor Jim Jordan: A Story of Conjure. Murfreesboro,
N.C.: Johnson, 1963.
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Jones, Rev. Charles C. The Religious Instruction of Negroes in the United States.
Savannah, Ga.: Thomas Purse, 1842.
Jones-Jackson, Patricia. When Roots Die: Endangered Traditions on the Sea
Islands. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Katz, William Loren. Black Indians. New York: Ethrac, 1986.
Kennedy, Stetson. “Naningo in Florida.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 4, no. 3
(September 1940): 153–156.
Kent, R. “Palmares: An African State in Brazil.” In Maroon Societies, edited by
Richard Price. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973.
Kiser, Clyde Vernon. Sea Island to City. New York: Antheneum, 1969.
Kulii, Elon. “Hoodoo Tales Collected in Indiana.” Journal of American Folklore 16
(1979): 75–96.
Kulii, Elon Ali. “A Look at Hoodoo in Three Urban Areas of Indiana: Folklore and
Change.” PhD diss., Indiana University, June 1982.
Kuna, Ralph R. “Hoodoo: The Indigenous Medicine and Psychiatry of the Black
American.” Ethnomedizin 3 (1974/75): 273–294.
Lacy, Virginia Jane, and David Edwin Harrell Jr. “Plantation Home Remedies:
Medicinal Recipes from the Diary of John Pope.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly
22 (September 1963): 259–265.
Lauer, Roger M. “Urban Shamans: The Influence of Folk-Healers on Medical Care in
Our Cities.” New Physician 32 (1973): 486–489.
Lea, M. S. “Two-Head Doctors.” The American Mercury (October 1927): 236–
240.
Lee, Collins. “Some Negro Lore from Baltimore.” Journal of American Folklore 5,
no. 17 (April-June 1892): 110–12.
Leone, Mark P., and Gladys-Marie Fry. “Conjuring in the Big House Kitchen.” Journal
of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 372–403.
Letcher, James H. “The Treatment of Some Diseases by the Old Time Negro.” The
Railway Surgical Journal 17 (1910/11): 170–175.
Lett, Anna. “Some West Tennessee Superstitions about Conjurers, Witches,
Ghosts and the Devil.” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 36, no. 2 (1970):
37–45.
Lex, Barbara W. “Voodoo Death: New Thoughts on an Old Explanation.” American
Anthropologist 76 (1974): 818–823.
Linajes, Alberto, Victor Rico-Gray, and Gloria Carrion. “Traditional Production
System of the Root of Jalap, Ipomoea purga (Convolvulaceae), in Central
Veracruz, Mexico.” Economic Botany 48, no. 1 (1994): 85.
Lockhart, James. Spanish Peru, 1532–1560. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1974.
Long, Carolyn Morrow. Spiritual Merchants, Religion, Magic and Commerce.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001.
MacGaffey, Wyatt, trans. and ed. Art and Healing of the Bakongo, Commented
by Themselves: Minkisi from the Laman Collection. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991.
MacGaffey, Wyatt. Religion and Society in Central Africa. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986.
Maddox, John L. “Modern Voodooism.” Hygeia 12 (February 1934): 153–156.
Marees, Pieter de. Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of
Guinea. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Martineau, Harriet. Society in America, vol. 2. New York: Saunders and Otley,
1837.
Mason, John, and Gary Edwards. Black Gods: Orisha Studies in the New World.
Brooklyn, N.Y.: Yoruba Theological Archministry, 1998.
Mather, Cotton. The Angel of Bethesda. Edited by Gordon W. Jones. Borre, Mass.:
Barr and American Antiquarian Society, 1972.
Mathews, Holly F. “Killing the Medical Self-Help Tradition among African Americans:
The Case of Lay Midwifery in North Carolina, 1912–1983.” In African Americans
in the South , edited by Hans A. Baer and Yvonne Jones. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1992.
Mathis, James L. “A Sophisticated Version of Voodoo Death.” Psychosomatic
Medicine 26 (1964): 104–107.
Mayer, Phillip. “Gusii Initiation Ceremonies.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 83 (January-June 1953): 9–36.
Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy, 2nd ed. Portsmouth, N.H.:
Heinemann Educational Books, 1990.
Mbiti, John S., Introduction to African Religion , 2nd ed. Portsmouth, N.H.:
Heinemann Educational Books, 1975.
McCall, George J. “Symbiosis: The Case of Hoodoo and the Numbers Racket.”
Social Problems 10 (Spring 1963): 361–371.
McDougle, Ivan E. Slavery in Kentucky. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press,
1970.
McTeer, J. E. Fifty Years as a Low Country Witch Doctor. Columbia, S.C.: R. L.
Bryan, 1976.
McTeer, J. E. High Sheriff of the Low Country. Beaufort, S.C.: Beaufort Book, 1970.
McWillie, Judith. “Writing in an Unknown Tongue.” In Cultural Perspectives on the
American South , vol. 5, “Religion,” edited by Charles Reagan Wilson. New York:
Gordon and Breach, 1991.
Mendonsa, Eugene L. “Etiology and Divination among the Sisala of Northern
Ghana.” Journal of Religion in Africa 9 (1978): 33–50.
Michaelson, Mike. “Can a Root Doctor Actually Put the Hex on You or Is It a Great
Put-on?” Today's Health (March 1972).
Miller, Kelley. “The Historic Background of the Negro Physician.” Journal of Negro
History 1, no. 2 (April 1916): 99–109.
Milligan, Robert H. The Fetish Folk of West Africa. New York: AMS Press, 1970.
Mitchell, Faith. Hoodoo Medicine: Sea Island Herbal Remedies. New York: Reed,
Cannon, and Johnson, 1978.
Moore, Ruby Andrews. “Superstitions from Georgia.” Journal of American Folklore
5 (1892): 230–231.
Moore, Ruby Andrews. “Superstitions from Georgia.” Journal of American Folklore
7 (1894): 305–306.
Moore, Ruby Andrews. “Superstitions from Georgia.” Journal of American Folklore
9, no. 2 (1896): 226–228.
Morals, Herbert M. International Library of Negro Life and History: The History of
the Negro in Medicine. New York: Publishers Company, 1967.
Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998.
“Mortuary Customs and Beliefs of South Carolina Negroes.” Journal of American
Folklore 7, no. 27 (1894): 318–319.
Mullen, Patrick. “The Function of Folk Belief among Negro Fishermen of the Texas
Coast.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 33 (1969): 80–91.
Munoz, Nelida A. “Haitian Voodoo: Social Control of the Unconscious.” Caribbean
Review 4 (1972): 6–10.
Murchinson, Carl, and Ralph Gilbert. “The Religion of the Negro Male Criminal.”
Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology 32 (1932): 447–
454.
Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy. New York: Harper and Row, 1944.
Naipaul, V. S. Loss of El Dorado: A History. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1970.
Nassau, Robert Hamill. Fetichism in West Africa. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1904.
Neal, James H. Ju-ju in My Life. London: George G. Harrap, 1966.
“The Negro Cesar's Cure for Poison.” Massachusetts Magazine 4 (1792): 103–
104.
“Negro Superstitions in South Carolina.” Journal of American Folklore 8 (1895):
251–252.
Neimark, Philip John. Way of the Orisha: Empowering Your Life through the
Ancient African Religion of Ifa. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Norris, Thaddeus. “Negro Superstitions.” Lippincott's Magazine 6 (July 1870): 90–
95.
Nye, Russel B. The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America. New York:
Dial Press, 1970.
Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960.
Olmstead, Frederick Law. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. New York: Dix
and Edwards, 1856.
Omari, Mikell Smith. “The Role of the Gods in Afro-Brazilian Ancestral Ritual.”
African Arts 23 (November 1989): 54–61, 103–104.
Onstott, Kyle. Drum. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1962.
Orr, Ellen. “The Bottle Tree.” Mississippi Folklore Register 4 (Winter 1969): 109–
111.
Osofsky, Gilbert, ed. Puttin’ on Ole Massa. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Owen-Workman, Michelle A., Stephen Bennett Phillips, and Renee Stout. Readers,
Advisors, and Storefront Churches: Renee Stout, A Mid-career Retrospective.
Kansas City, Mo.: UMKC, Belger Arts Center, 2002.
Owens, Mary A. “Among the Voodoos,” In Proceedings of the Second
International Folk-lore Congress, 1891, edited by Joseph Jacobs and Alfred Nutt.
(London: David Nutt, 1892): 230–248.
Owens, Mary A. Voodoo Tales. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.
Parrish, Lydia. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age
Press, 1942.
Parsons, Elsie Clews. Folklore of the Sea Islands, South Carolina (Memoirs of the
American Folk-Lore Society, vol. XVI). Cambridge, Mass.: American Folk-Lore
Society, 1923.
Parsons, Elsie Clews. “Tales from Guilford County, North Carolina.” Journal of
American Folklore 30 (1917): 168–200.
Patterson, Caleb Perry. The Negro in Tennessee, 1790–1865. New York: Negro
Universities Press, 1968.
Payne, Daniel Alexander. Recollections of Seventy Years, 2nd ed. New York: Arno
Press and the New York Times, 1968; originally published in Nashville Tenn.:
A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1888.
Peek, Philip M., ed. African Divination Systems. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991.
Pendleton, Louis. “Notes on Negro Folk-Lore and Witchcraft in the South.” Journal
of American Folklore 3, no. 10 (1890): 201–207.
Peters, Donna Marie. “Passing On.” PhD diss., New School for Social Research,
New York, 2002.
Phillips, U. B. Life and Labor in the Old South. Boston: Little, Brown, 1929.
Phillips, U. B. “Slave Crime in Virginia.” American Historical Review 20 (January
1915): 326–327.
Pitts, Walter F. Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Pope-Hennessy, James. Sins of the Fathers: A Study of the Atlantic Slave Traders
1441–1807© London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967.
Porteous, Laura. “The Gri-Gri Case.” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 17 (January
1934): 48–63.
Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973.
Puckett, Newbell Niles. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Montclair, N.J.:
Patterson Smith, 1968.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Rawick, George, ed. The American Slave: South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972.
Rayburn, Otto Ernest. “The ‘Granny Woman’ in the Ozarks.” Midwest Folklore 9
(1959): 145–148.
Reeb, Rene M. “Granny Midwives in Mississippi: Career and Birthing Practices.”
Journal of Transcultural Nursing 4, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 18–27.
Richardson, Clement. “Some Slave Superstitions.” Southern Workman 41 (1912):
246–248.
Richter, Curt P. “On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man.”
Psychosomatic Medicine 19 (1957): 191–198.
Roberts, Hilda. “Louisiana Superstitions.” Journal of American Folklore 40 (1927):
144–208.
Roberts, John. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and
Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Robinson, Jean. “Black Healers during the Colonial Period and Early 19 th Century
America.” PhD diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1979.
Rodney, Walter. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1982.
Ross, Gayle. How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Cherokee Trickster Stories. New
York: Harper Collins, 1994.
Rucker, Herman. Black Herman's Secrets of Magic, Mystery and Legerdemain ,
15th ed. Dallas: Dorene, 1938.
Savage, Phoenix. “The Evolution of Hoodoo in Mississippi and Contemporary Black
Health.” Master's thesis, University of Mississippi, 2001.
Scarborough, William Kauffman. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the
Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966.
Schmalleger, Frank. “The Root Doctor and the Courtroom.” North Carolina
Folklore 29 (1981): 102–105.
Schon, James Frederick, and Samuel Crowther. Journals of the Rev. James
Frederick Schon and Mr. Samuel Crowther, Who with the Sanction of Her
Majesty's Government Accompanied the Expedition up the Niger in 1841 on
Behalf of the Church Missionary Society, 2nd ed. London: Frank Cass, 1970.
Scott, Kenneth. “The Slave Insurrection in New York in 1712.” New York Historical
Society Quarterly 45 (1961): 43–74.
Serpos, Abdou. “Un Procède de Divination au Dahomey: La Gourde-Pendule.”
Bulletin deIIFAN 5, no. 1–4 (1943): 122–135.
Shaw, Rosalind. “An-bere: A Traditional Form of Temne Divination.” African
Research Bulletin 9, no. 12 (1978): 3–24.
Sieber, Roy, and Frank Herreman, eds. Hair in African Art and Culture. New York:
Museum for African Art, 2000.
Simpson, George Eaton. “Four Vodun Ceremonies.” Journal of American Folklore
59, no. 232 (April-June 1946): 154–167.
Sisk, Glenn. “Funeral Customs in the Alabama Black Belt, 1870–1910.” Southern
Folklore Quarterly 23, no. 3 (September 1959): 169–171.
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown, 2010.
Smith, Margaret Charles, and Linda Janet Holmes. Listen to Me Good. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1996.
S. M. P. “Voodooism in Tennessee.” Atlantic Monthly 64 (1889): 376–380.
Snow, Loudell F. “Folk Medical Beliefs and Their Implications for Care of Patients: A
Review Based on Studies among Black Americans.” Annals of Internal Medicine
81, no. 1 (1974): 82–96.
Snow, Loudell F. “Mail Order Magic: The Commercial Exploitation of Folk Belief.”
Journal of the Folklore Institute 16 (1979): 44–74.
Snow, Loudell F. “Sorcerers, Saints and Charlatans: Black Folk Healers in Urban
America.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 2 (1978): 69–106.
Snow, Loudell F. Walking Over Medicine. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993.
Sofowora, Abayomi. Medicinal Plants and Traditional Medicine in Africa. New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1982.
Starobin, Robert. Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970.
Starobin, Robert. Industrial Slavery in the Old South. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1970.
Steagill, Archie. “The Voodoo Man of the Brazos.” Publication of the Texas Folklore
Society no. 17 (1941): 113–114.
Steiner, Roland. “Brasiel Robinson Possessed of Two Spirits.” Journal of American
Folklore 13 (1900): 226–228.
Steiner, Roland. “Observations on the Practice of Conjuring in Georgia.” Journal of
American Folklore 14 (1901): 173–180.
Steiner, Roland. “Superstitions and Beliefs from Central Georgia.” Journal of
American Folklore 12 (1899): 261–271.
Still, James. Early Recollections and Life of Dr. James Still 1812–1885. New
Brunswick, N.J., 1973; Medford, N.J.: Medford Historical Society, 1971.
Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Szwed, John, and Morton Marks. “The Afro-American Transformation of European
Set Dances and Dance Suites.” Dance Research Journal 20, no. 1 (Summer
1988): 29–36.
“Tatler On the Management of Negroes.” Southern Cultivator 9 (June 1851): 84–
85.
Thanet, Octave. “Folklore in Arkansas.” Journal of American Folklore 5, no. 18
(April-June 1892): 121–125.
Thomas, Richard W. “Working-Class and Lower-Class Origins of Black Culture: Class
Formation and the Division of Black Cultural Labor.” Minority Voices 1, no. 2 (Fall
1977): 81–103.
Thompson, Robert Farris. “An Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance.” African
Forum 2, no. 2 (Fall 1966): 13.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit. New York, 1983©
Thornton, John. “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of
Kongo, 1491–1750.” Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1984): 147–167.
Thornton, John. The Kongolese Saint Anthony. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998.
Tinling, David C. “Voodoo, Root Work and Medicine.” Psychosomatic Medicine 29
(1967): 483–490.
Torrey, E. Fuller. The Mind Game: Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists. New York:
Emerson Hall, Bantam, 1973.
Truesdell, Seneca E. “Buffalo Chips as a Remedy.” Journal of American Folklore 12,
no. 47 (October-December 1899): 295.
Tucker, John. Angola: The Land of the Blacksmith Prince. London: World Dominion
Press, 1933.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Penguin Books USA,
1985.
Tyler, Varro. “The Elusive History of High John the Conqueror Root.” Pharmacy in
History 33, no. 4 (1991): 164–166.
Van Blarcom, Carolyn Conant. “Rat Pie: Among the Black Midwives of the South.”
Harpers Monthly Magazine 160 (1930): 322–332.
Waring, Mary A. “Negro Superstitions in South Carolina.” Journal of American
Folklore 8 (1895): 251–252.
Warner, H. E. “Folk Medicine of Pension Claimants.” Journal of American Folklore
2, no. 4 (1889): 238–239.
Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical
Experimentation on African Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
New York: Doubleday, 2007.
Webb, Bernice Larson. “A Study of Voodoo Mail-Order Advertising in Louisiana.”
Louisiana Review 2 (Summer 1973): 65–71.
Webb, Julie Yvonne. “Louisiana Voodoo and Superstitions Related to Health.”
H.S.M.H.A. Health Reports 86, no. 4 (1971): 241–301.
Weiss, Harry B. “Oneirocritica Americana.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library
48, no. 6 (June 1944): 519–541.
Whitney, Anne. “Items of Maryland Belief and Custom.” Journal of American
Folklore 12, no. 47 (October-December 1899): 273–274.
Whitten, Norman E. Jr. “Contemporary Patterns of Malign Occultism among
Negroes in North Carolina.” Journal of American Folklore 75 (October-December
1962): 311–325.
Williams, Joseph J. “Development of Obeah in Jamaica.” Voodoos and Obeahs:
Phases of West Indian Witchcraft. New York: Lincoln MacVeagh Dial Press,
1932).
Wilson, David J. “Bishop E. E. Everett and Some Aspects of Occultism and Folk
Religion in Negro Philadelphia.” Keystone Folklore 14 (1969): 59–80.
Wilson, William Julius. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.
New York: Knopf, 1996.
Wimbs, Cassandra. “African-American Theory, Beliefs and Practices: Candle
Shops.” Master's thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1989.
Wintrob, Roland M. “The Influence of Others: Witchcraft and Rootwork as
Explanations of Behavior Disturbances.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
156 (1973): 318–326.
Wood, Peter. “People's Medicine in the Early South.” Southern Exposure 6
(Summer 1978): 50–53.
Work, Monroe. “Some Geechee Folklore.” Southern Workman 35 (1905) : 633–
639.
Yetman, Norman R., ed. Life under the “Peculiar Institution.” New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.
 Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages
in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search
for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index
are listed below.

abiku
Abosom
Achebe, Chinua
Achmed ibn Sirin
advertising; catchphrases in; confessions market; Internet; television
African Americans: assimilation of; cultural life of; ethnic identity of; as nation within
a nation; problems of; spirituality of; stereotypes of. See also religion, slavery
African Religion Complex (ARC): cultural elements of; eight components of; and
Hoodooized Christianity
African traditional religions (ATRs); ancestor reverence in; bonds of sacred and
secular in; chart; continuum of life; divination systems of; evolution of;
flashpoints; healing power of; herbal knowledge in; names of; oral transmission
of; pejorative labels attached to; sources of; spirit possession in; string used in;
syncretic transfer of
Akan society
Albertus Magnus
amulets; mojo bags; Native American use of; prayer cloth; and track gathering
Anansi/Anancy
ancestor reverence
Anderson, Ann
Anderson, Jeffery; Conjure in African
American Society
animal intestines, eating of
animals, sacred
animal sacrifice
animal signs
ants: charms made from; as diagnostic tool
Artemidorus
Ashanti/Ashantee
astrology
Aunt Memory
Aunt Nancy (spider)
Aunt Quintilla
Aztec culture
Babalawos
Babaloricha/Babalorisha
Bacons, Alice M.
Bailey, Cornelia Walker
Bakongo society
balance
Bambara society
Beecham, John
Bell, Michael Edward
Berendt, John
Bess, Willie
Big Apple (dance)
Bioho, Benkos
birthing ritual
black belt Hoodoo complex; adaptations of; chart; and Christianity; commercial
exploitation; and crossroads; decline of; diversification process; and
emancipation; and great migration; problems addressed by; from
Reconstruction to World War II; speaking and pronunciation; track gathering;
tradition of,
black consciousness movement
blackface performers
Black Herman
blues singing
bones
Bradfield, Mattie
Brazil: religion in; slavery in
Brickell, John
Brown, Henry
Brown, William Wells
burial traditions
Burnett, Chester Arthur (Howlin’ Wolf)
Buzzard Lope (dance)

candles
Candomble
Carlson, Gustav
Carroll, Patrick J.
Catholicism
cauls
Cayton, Horace
cemetery, as power site
Cesar (healer)
Charleston/Savannah, Hoodoo in
charms. See amulets
Chesnutt, Charles W; “Hot Foot Hannibal”; “Po Sandy”
Chireau, Yvonne
Christianity: adaptation to; and black belt Hoodoo; competition with; Islam as
backlash against; missionary work; Psalms
cloud formations
community sanction
compensation
confessions market
conjure; in Chesnutt's work; and community sanction; early research in; evolution
of; survival of. See also Hoodoo
conjure doctor: authority of; root doctor; as slave
conjurers; caches of; as cultural signposts; midwives as; oral textbooks of; poisons
known to; post-Reconstruction; and preachers; roles of; root doctors separated
from. See also root doctors conjure women
contemporary hoodoo complex, chart
continuities
Cooley, Gilbert (Elon Kulii)
core culture
cotton
courtroom ritual
Cracker Jack Drug Store
Cross, Tom Peete
crossroads, as power site
Crowther, Samuel
crystal ball gazers
Cuba: religion in; slavery abolished in
curses, protection against

dance: African American core culture; Big Apple; Buzzard Lope; counterclockwise
sacred circle; distinguishing qualities of; Eagle Rock; exotic themes of; and
muscle memory; “picking up or harvesting leaves”; Ring Shout; social; tap; West
African
Dancingtree Moonwater
deamon spirits
“death of the Gods”
death rituals
de Laurence Company, Chicago
devil's work
dice
diggers
dime: amulet; dancing
divination systems
Dixon, Willie, “Tail Dragger”
DNA or life code
dominoes
Donahue, Phil
donation sacks
Douglass, Frederick
Drake, St. Clair
Dr. Bug
Dr. Buzzard (Robinson),
Dr. Duke
dream books,
dream interpretation
Dr. John of New Orleans
DuBois, W. E. B.; The Philadelphia Negro
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, “We Wear the Mask”

Eagle Rock (dance)

Eikerenkoetter, Rev. Frederick (Reverend Ike)
Elfe, Willie
Ellis, Charles and William
emancipation; and black belt tradition; and vulnerability
Esu/Elegba
Ewe culture

faith healing
Fang people
Fantee people
Faulkner, William
Ferdon, Jim
fetish
fictive kinship
fingernails, safeguarding
fix (spell)
flashpoints
Flowers, Arthur
folk magic
Fon culture
Fontenot, Wanda
fortune-tellers

GaGa
galanga root
Garrison, Ann
Gentile, Benedetto
Glave, E. J.
glory hand
Goldberg, Whoopi
Gomez, Michael
Gooch, William
Granny Ya
gravediggers
grave site decoration
graveyard dirt
great migration
Gregory, Brother A. B.
gris-gris
Gullah church
Gullah Coast
Gypsies

haints
hair trimmings
Haiti: revolution in; Vodun in
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo
Hall, Julien A.
Hallam, Lewis
Hampshire's Horse
Hampton Institute, Southern Workman
Harris, Hattie
harvest grounds, loss of
Harvey, Brantley
head shaving
healing ritual
healing symbol
herbal healing: and conjurers; and knowledge of plants; and medicine; and
midwives; Native American influence in; and poisons; and religious traditions;
and root doctors; and slavery; and spiritual forces
herbs, harvesting of
Herron, Leonora
Herskovits, Melville
Heyward, DuBose; “The Half-Pint
Flask”; Porgy
High John the Conquer; and Gaspar Yanga; Hurston on; and John the Prophet;
legacy of; low John; middle John; “Mr. Jim's Bawdy John Tale”; myth of; running
John; and St. Malo
High John the Conquer root; chewing, and courtroom work; names of; significance
of; sources of
Hippocrates
Hobley, N. H.
home remedies, negative effects of
Hoodoo: adaptability of; artifacts of; and black nationalists; evolving; false claims of;
golden age of; harm caused by; healing symbol; influence on literature of; as
intergenerational; labels of; legends and myths; national identity of; opposition
to; recruitment and training in; regional clusters of; and Ring Shout; scope of;
signs and gestures; and slavery; snake-oil or marketeered; sources of; supplies
and paraphernalia of; survival of; uses of the term. See also religion “Hoodoo
clergy”
Hoodoo drugstore
horse races, betting on
hot foot powder
Howlin’ Wolf (Burnett)
Hughes, Louis
Hurston, Zora Neale
husbands, women seeking
Hyatt, Harry Middleton

idol worship
Ifa divination
Igbo society
illness, spiritual origins of
incantations
inclusive-integrative principle
Internet: advertising on; exploitation on
internment soil
interviewer effect
Isaac, John
Islam
Iyalorichas/Iyalorishas
jalap root
James, U. P.
Jesus of Nazareth
Jewish merchants “Jim Crow”, first portrayal of
Jingo's Horse
Johnson, F. Roy
Johnson, Louise (Aint New)
Johnson, Robert; “Come on in My Kitchen”
Johnson, Walter
John the prophet
Jones, Hougan Dafusky
Jordan, Wilbert
Juan el Conquistador
Juju
juju bag
Julian, J. C.

Kay, Ed
Keystone Chemical Company
Kirby, Aunt Molly
Kiser, Clyde Vernon
knot tying
Kongo: charms and amulets of; cosmogram of; missionary work in; power of
plants in; religion in; string healing in
Kulii, Elon (Cooley)
Kuna, Ralph R.

Laveau, Marie
life force potentiality
lightening dust
Long, Carolyn Morrow
Long Lost Friend
lotteries
luck
luck balls
Lucumi/Lukumi

maggots, medicinal use of

Mandingo culture
Maroon communities
Mather, Cotton
Mathews, Holly F.
Mbiti, John S.
McTeer, J. E.
medicine: black people's distrust of; patent medicines; protective; regulation of;
religiomagical tasks; self-medication; traditional practice of
medicine bag
medicine men
medicine shows
Mere Angelique
Meridillogun
Mexico, abolition of slavery in
midwives; and birthing ritual; decline of; granny; herbs used by; medical
community's attacks on; and nature/nation sacks; and postpartum care; roles
of; social position of; supply networks of
Milligan, Robert H.
minstrels
Minton, Aunt Jo (Sephine)
Miss Cleo
Miss Katie
Miss Mattie
Mitchell, Faith
mojo bags
money, acquisition of
Moore, Ruby Andrews
Moreland, Mantan
Morgan, Philip D.
Morrison, Toni
Mother's Day
Mpongwe people “Mr. Jim's Bawdy John Tale”
Ms. Mary
Muller, Rev. T.
Murray, Peter (Dr. Bug)
music, and dance. See dance Myrdal, Gunnar
mythology

Nassau, Rev. Robert Hamill

National African Religion Congress (NARC)
Native Americans: cultural contact with; and herbal healing; and slaves; spiritual
traditions of
nature: elements of; forces of; signs in
nature/nation sacks
naturopathy. See herbal healing Neal, James H.
Neal, Larry
Neimark, Philip John
Nesbitt, Frances
New Orleans: Hoodoo in; slave pens of; Voodoo in
New World Pan-Africanism
Nganga (priest)
numbers

Obasi, Myra
Obeah
occult
Onesimus (servant)
oracles
Orisha tradition; and abiku ; author's initiation into; healing practices in; survival of
Otto, David
Owens, Mary Alicia

palm readers
palms, rubbing
Palo Mayombe/Palo Monte
Papa Ce
paradigm of silence
Parrish, Lydia
Parsons, Elsie Clews
Payne, Bishop Daniel
Pendleton, Louis
perception
Perry, Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit”
placentas
Plat-eye
playing cards
poisons, knowledge of
Porgy and Bess (Broadway)
prayers, healing
Primus (slave)
protection from whites
protective medicine
protective objects
Protestantism, and African American
spirituality
Pryor, Richard
Psalms
Puckett, Newbell Niles
(Quarra St. Malo/Dirge of St. Malo
Raboteau, Albert
race: delimitations of the term; marginalization through; stereotypes of “race
betterment”
racial terrorism
racism, white supremacy
railroad tracks, as power site
rattlesnake, power of
reciprocity
Reconstruction; end of; and Hoodoo's second stage
Regla de Ocha
Regla de Orisha
religion: and adaptation; ARC; and artistic creation; belief in supreme being; black
church tradition; and dance; definitions of; functions of; fundamentalist; and lay
helpers; and ritual; and slavery; and superstition; syncretic transfer of
Reverend Ike
Reynolds, John P.
Rice, Thomas “Daddy”
rice plantations
Richmond, Hoodoo in
Ring Shout; commercial secularization of; and counterclockwise sacred dance
circle; and Hoodoo; possession ritual; worship services
rites of passage
Robination Horse
Robinson, Jean
Robinson, Stepheney (Dr. Buzzard)
Roediger, David R.
root chewing
root doctors; adaptation of; and conjurers; conjurers separated from; networks of;
and poisons; roles of
roots, harvesting of
root work
Ross, Gayle
Russel, Chloe

sacred days
Sanctified Church
sand, healing
Santeria
Sapelo Island, Georgia
Savage, Phoenix
Schmalliger, Frank
Schon, Rev. James Frederick
secret societies
Seven Sisters of Algiers
shaman
Shango
Shango Baptist
shape-shifting
sharecropping
shoes
Shout. See Ring Shout sign interpretation
Silverberg, Alex Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses
slave doctors
slavery; African-based culture of; codependence in; and cotton; end of; historic
memory of; and Hoodoo; paradigm of silence; on plantations; and religion; and
role structuring
slaves: assimilation of; as conjure doctors; cultural exchanges among; ethnicity of;
families disrupted; healing practices of; and inclusive-integrative principle;
involuntary transfer of; labor of; mojo bags of; and Native Americans; networks
of; poison plants known to; rebellions of; runaway; sacred dances of; sales of;
and spirit possession
slave stewards
snakebite cures
snake-oil Hoodoo: advertising; limitations of; marketeered; use of term
Snow, Loudell F.
Sofowora, Abayomi
southern style, use of term
speaking in tongues
spells
spiders, sacred
spirit healing
spirit plant
spirit possession
spirit realm
spiritualism
Spiritualist Church
spirit work
spit
Steiner, Roland
St. Helena Island
Still, Dr. James of the Pine Barrens
St. Malo
Stout, Renee
string: in healing; in mojo bags
Stuckey, Sterling
supernatural phenomena
superstition
swampers

Tarzan
Temne society
Thomas, George A.
threshold, as power site
tobacco plantations
Torrey, E. Fuller
track gathering
treaters
trickster deity
Turner, James
Twain, Mark
twitching eye
two-head (conjurer)

umbilical cords
Uncle Nero
undertakers
universal balance
urbanization

Valmor Company
Vaugn, Jim
vocalization
Vodu
Vodun
Voodoo; in New Orleans; use of the term

Walker, Alice; The Color Purple

Walker, Madam C. J.
walkin’ foot
walking boy
wanga amulets
water: baptism in the river; flowing; from the foundry; healing; immersion in;
sacred water; war water
Welsing, Frances Cress
West Africa: breakdown of religion in; healing rituals of; religious leader's roles in;
secret societies of; status hierarchy in; tradition of
Wimbs, Cassandra
Windwalker, Djenra
witchcraft
witch doctors
words: mystical power of; pronunciation of
World War II; postwar environment
World Wars: and national identity; period between

Xalapa, Mexico

Yanga, Gaspar
Yoruba tradition; and abiku ; healing practices in; High John the Conquer myth; and
Orisha; religion in

zinzin amulets
 Katrina Hazzard-Donald
is an associate professor of sociology,
anthropology, and criminal justice at
Rutgers University-Camden and the
author of Jookin′: The Rise of Social Dance
Formations in African American Culture.
 The University of Illinois Press
is a founding member of the Association of American
University Presses.

Designed by Jim Proefrock

Composed in 9.75/13 ITC New Baskerville
with Poplar display
at the University of Illinois Press
Manufactured by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
University of Illinois Press
1325 South Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820-6903
www.press.uillinois.edu