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This chapter 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. 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 period following emancipation was transformative in every sense for African Americans and black belt traditional Hoodoo. In particular, Hoodoo would find itself approaching a critical crossroads in its identity and existence from emancipation to World War II. This chapter examines how the black belt Hoodoo complex was modified and transformed under the influence of both internal and external factors from Reconstruction to World War II. It shows that conjure after emancipation would continue to figure significantly in black consciousness of self, family, and community under the new freedom.

This chapter examines Hoodoo as health care and the role of the African American midwife in the old tradition black belt Hoodoo complex. 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. This chapter considers how Hoodoo midwives, treaters, and root doctors mastered treatments and developed their regional pharmacopoeia. It discusses one technique used by all three types of Hoodoo health care providers: the method of using string to tie sacred healing knots. It also describes nine types of healing amulets used in Hoodoo: single-knot string amulet; multiknot amulet; root necklace; prayer bead necklace; prayer cloth; biblical scroll; walking cane; religious lithography; and silver coin.

This chapter examines the black belt Hoodoo complex between the two world wars, with particular emphasis on the demise of Dr. Buzzard. Also known as Stepheney Robinson, Dr. Buzzard is Hoodoo's most famous conjurer. 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. This chapter discusses the diversification in spiritual merchandising in the period between World Wars I and II and how it contributed to an ever-strengthening subversion and undermining of Hoodoo's traditional old black belt practice. It also considers the impact of the medical community's attack on midwifery, Hoodoo's thriving and powerful link with the black folk medicine tradition. This period witnessed 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 examines the place of the black belt Hoodoo complex in the cultural environment after World War II, with particular focus on several contemporary root practitioners working in the old tradition. In the aftermath of World War II, the black community enjoyed both incentives and opportunities for continuing migration northward. Increased income intensified the movement away from old black belt traditions. Especially in the northern urban environment, marketeered Hoodoo would dominate in many black communities. This chapter considers how some African Americans came to view participation in old black belt Hoodoo traditions as incompatible with notions of “racial uplift.” It also discusses how marketeering outsiders interested in the commercial exploitation of Hoodoo reduced the visibility of workers of old tradition Hoodoo during the period. Finally, it assesses the influence of New World Pan-Africanism and popular black nationalism on old tradition Hoodoo.

This book concludes with a postscript, which reflects on the transformation of Hoodoo and the black belt Hoodoo complex since emancipation. It shows how Hoodoo began as a practice that focused on the needs of the enslaved African American community and how, after emancipation, middlemen minority marketeers seized control of Hoodoo at a time when both African Americans and their folk spiritual traditions were most vulnerable to exploitation and racialized control. It considers the proliferation in the marketplace of cyberspace self-styled Hoodoo marketeers who offer themselves up as arbiters and teachers of African American spiritual tradition. It also discusses evidence indicating that old tradition Hoodoo can recuperate and be preserved and ends by outlining directions for future Hoodoo research.

This chapter is an introduction to a book that examines the role of black magic and religion in the African American spirituality. It begins by defining magic and religion, and explains that, in some African American spiritual traditions, ideas about magical and religious practice can enclose identical experiences. The study examines a range of African American spiritual traditions such as Conjure, Hoodoo, and root working, and contrasts them with the official doctrines of institutionalized religion: Protestant Christianity. African Americans have resignified the supernatural practices as religion, and it can be concluded that African American religion is not always distinct from what others call magic. Instead, these are complementary categories, and they have historically exhibited complementary forms in African American culture.

This book examines the sociocultural movement of Hoodoo in terms of its continuities with African religion. Hoodoo is the indigenous, herbal, healing, and supernatural-controlling spiritual folk tradition of the African American in the United States. 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. This book offers a fresh perspective on Hoodoo development and a reinterpretative glimpse at contemporary as well as preexisting Hoodoo practice. It 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. In this prescript, the author explains the process of his research that became the basis for the book.

This chapter discusses the major manifestations of African traditional religion in the New World. It 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. It considers the practice of spirit possession by a deity, spirit, or ancestor as part of West and Central West African religious tradition, and how it came to be observed in sacred contexts among African Americans in the United States in the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines the place of spiritual forces in herbal and naturopathic healing within the context of African traditional religion. Finally, it looks at the role of divination in the diagnosis of physical or mental illness in both traditional African society and in old plantation Hoodoo.

This chapter explores the movement and recoalescing of eight essential elements into the African Religion Complex (ARC), thus enabling the Hoodoo religion to emerge briefly: counterclockwise sacred circle dancing; spirit possession; the principle of sacrifice; ritual water immersion; divination; ancestor reverence; belief in spiritual cause of malady; and herbal and naturopathic medicine. Something resembling Hoodoo developed among the first generation of culturally diverse Africans born in the North American colonies. Enslaved Africans manifest a range of responses to contact with both slavery and Christian worship. 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.

This chapter focuses on High John the Conquer root, the most powerful and best-known root in Hoodoo practice. It asks how a root that is native only to Xalapa, Mexico, became so significant to African American Hoodoo practice, particularly in places like Virginia or other locales thousands of miles away, and how it was accessed by bondsmen and later freedmen. Zora Neale Hurston describes High John the Conquer as “our hope bringer,” an intermediary between man and God, a warrior martyr, a soul saver, and a virtual saint of the old Hoodoo religion. High John is used in numerous types of Hoodoo work and has been the most utilized Hoodoo root. This chapter discusses the possible sociocultural origins and movement of High John the Conquer root and its representative plant. It also examines the myth and legacy of High John de Conquer as well as the importance of the root in the Hoodoo pharmacopeia.

This chapter provides an in-depth description of the last few years of Hurston’s life in Fort Pierce, Florida, from 1957 to 1960, where she worked as a journalist and teacher. It includes interviews with her friends and former students and provides a detailed account of her death and funeral.