this article on was brought to my attention
by my homegirl, sheree thomas of
black pot mojo
i avoid posting articles in their entirety
unless i feel like it and so:
Excerpt from the Introduction to
Conjure in African
American Society
http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/Books/Fall2005/books/Anderson_Conjure_Excerpt.html
Jeffrey E. Anderson
Introduction
The Invisible Conjurer: The Disappearance of Hoodoo from Conceptions of
Black Society
Thomas Nelson Page, one of the major architects of the “moonlight and magnolias” myth of the Old South, published his most famous novel, Red Rock, in 1899. Set during Reconstruction, its pages are filled with the standard characters of Page’s genre: heroic southern planters, dutiful Union soldiers, and depraved carpetbaggers. One villain, Dr. Moses, is particularly overdrawn in the depiction of his physical as well as moral perversity. Rachel Welch, the novel’s heroine, observes, “His chin stuck so far forward that the lower teeth were much outside of the upper, or, at least, the lower jaw was; for the teeth looked as though they had been ground down, and his gums, as he grinned, showed as blue on the edges as if he had painted them.”
Moses is a trick doctor, a term Page felt no need to define. Modern readers are left to question why the bizarrely misshapen Moses should be such a threat to the white population. Other contemporary works provide answers. For instance, Philip A. Bruce, author of The Plantation Negro as a Freedman (1899), described the trick doctor as “a man whose only employment . . . lies in the practice of the art of witchcraft,” who “is invested with even more importance than a preacher, since he is regarded with the respect that fear excites.” Moreover, Moses’s physical appearance is typical of the numerous descriptions of trick doctors that appeared during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, in the early-twentieth-century article “Observations on the Practice of Conjuring in Georgia” Roland Steiner recorded the African American folk belief that the spells of blue-gummed blacks invariably caused death. Likewise, folklorist Mary Alicia Owen, using the language of her informant, in 1893, described a legendary “witcheh-man” as “de mos’ uglies’ man in de worl', wid er whopple-jaw an’ er har’-lip, sidesen er lop side an’ er crookid laig an’ one eye dat wuz des lak fiah an’ one dat was daid.” In short, published accounts of African American magic were so common during the era that Page had no need to explain what he meant by trick doctor. After Page’s time, however, literary and academic interest in black sorcery declined. The net result has been that the trick doctor, also known as the "hoodoo doctor" or "conjurer," has become virtually invisible in most Americans’ conceptions of black society, even while the vocation of conjuring lives on in many African American communities.
How can one explain such a drastic shift in attention to conjure? The answer lies in intellectual and cultural shifts over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have changed the ways both blacks and whites have constructed identity. Between the Civil War and World War II, Americans in general and southern whites in particular feared losing their cultural identity to the homogenizing effects of industrial capitalism, and conjure was one expression of peculiarity that they used to resist the threatened loss of national and regional distinctiveness. Once war catapulted America to the forefront of world politics and economics, regional distinctions became less important than national pride and a united front against Communism. For blacks, attention to hoodoo was likewise a question of identity. Unlike whites, however, they tended to view hoodoo as a negative feature of their society. Its practice, they thought, would have to be stamped out before they could hope to achieve equality. Recently, the influence of the closely linked forces of cultural pluralism, postmodernism, and the New Age movement and rising black assertiveness have made magic an acceptable expression of spirituality for many. Nevertheless, conjure remains an understudied facet of black society.
Before the Civil War, southerners, white and black, were well aware of
the existence of conjure. For instance, in a diary entry for 3 March 1816
the South Carolinian George Izard recorded an encounter with a sickly
Mr. Perkins, who explained his illness as a result of a spell cast by
a spurned admirer. After physicians’ remedies failed him, Perkins
turned to conjure. Izard’s experience was far from unique. Many
whites learned of conjure from their slaves. Such was the case with Thaddeus
Norris, author of “Negro Superstitions.” Writing five years
after the Civil War, he admitted that he had “firmly believed in
witches” as a child, a conviction he had acquired through his close
relationship with an elderly “house servant.” Frederick Douglass,
the most prominent of black abolitionists, included an account of hoodoo
in his antebellum Narrative, spreading knowledge of the practice
to northern readers. Nevertheless, few observers commented on the practice
beyond pointing it out as a sign of slaves’ intellectual backwardness.
Slaves were to be either worked or freed, not studied for their culture.
Immediately following the war southern whites were too busy restoring Democratic control of their states to devote increased attention to sectional identity and certainly to black folk religion. After all, their recent experience of military defeat and occupation had left no room to doubt their distinctiveness. One of the few whites to address black folk religions was Thaddeus Norris, who bluntly wrote that “the more refined a people, the more interesting its mythical legends. Those of the Caucasian race are attractive; while those of the negroes are repulsive, especially when connected with their heathenish religions.” Literate blacks generally felt the same way. A selection of letters on conjure published in the Southern Workman provides evidence. This newspaper was associated with Virginia’s Hampton Institute, one of the nation’s oldest black schools. In 1878 the school solicited reports from its students and graduates on the level of superstition among the freedmen. The response was more than one hundred letters, only six of which saw print. Most of the responders frankly stated that conjure was a negative but common feature of black society. One author, referred to as “L.” in the printed version of his letter, was particularly harsh in his denunciation of hoodoo, asserting, “Conjure doctors are not so numerous now as they were before our race became so enlightened, but still they are too numerous. They are a curse to their race.” Overcoming racist oppression and abject poverty through education was much more important to blacks than questions of culture. With both whites and blacks disgusted by Negro ignorance, few were interested in doing more than denounce conjure.
Since Reconstruction, interest in conjure has generally followed a wavelike pattern of increasing and decreasing interest. Since the end of Republican rule in the South, interest in conjure has crested three times. The first of these upturns began in the mid-1880s and persisted until shortly after 1900. Following the turn of the century, writings on conjure appeared less and less frequently until the 1920s, when a new wave of interest began. It had passed by the early 1940s, when conjure once again faded from public view. The second trough was much deeper than the first. With occasional exceptions, few works on hoodoo appeared until the 1970s. At that point, a new respect for black folk beliefs, including conjure, arose.
As local distinctions seemed threatened by industrial homogenization following the Civil War, whites searched for regional peculiarities in order to construct a distinct identity. Corporatism, national advertising, and consumerism threatened to transform the South into a carbon copy of the North. It is no coincidence that articles on conjure peaked in the 1890s, when a generation that had never owned slaves or fought in the Civil War came to prominence.
In addition to ending the most important distinction between the North and the South, emancipation had begun a process that would cause blacks and whites to grow more and more foreign to each other. Under the peculiar institution, members of both races had lived and sometimes worked side by side, occupying the same geographic space. Whites inevitably learned much about blacks’ culture, including their supernatural beliefs, from simple observation and conversation, and the same was true for blacks. Though convict leasing, sharecropping, and other forms of “free” labor that replaced slavery resembled it in many ways, they were a first step in a growing physical separation between the races. When the temporary political entitlement and citizenship rights that blacks had gained during Reconstruction faded during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, African Americans became increasingly vulnerable to racism. By the turn of the twentieth century a rigid system of economic and social segregation had developed throughout the states of the former Confederacy. During the first half of the 1890s the white Democrats’ “Solid South” had begun to crack in the face of the Populists’ agrarian radicalism. In part, the implementation of Jim Crow was the work of white politicians seeking to reunite their race under the banner of white supremacy. Whatever the cause, blacks and whites lived their lives ever more separately, and each culture became less familiar to the other.
Whites had long considered blacks a primitive and superstitious people. With African Americans safely cut off from political and economic power, their folk beliefs could now be used to bolster white superiority and regional distinctiveness. To white authors, the hoodoo doctor became a powerful image of the southern past, conjuring up images of aristocratic planters and their happy but dependent “servants.” Moreover, by describing blacks as a backward people, whites defined what their race was not. At the same time, African Americans began to develop a class system. As members of the small but growing middle class became educated and quickly adopted the scientific outlook and social Darwinism of the larger American society, they confidently expected conjure to disappear. In fact, according to many blacks’ ideology of racial uplift, such backward features of black society would have to give way before the race could hope to advance. Thus, while whites used black folk beliefs as a point of contrast to display their own glories, African Americans rejected whites’ self-serving characterization of blacks as superstitious.
The local color literary movement typified whites’ construction of identity. In the South, this impulse often found expression in collections of black folklore, relayed in the dialect of the plantation “darkie.” Most prominent among these works was Joel Chandler Harris’s 1880 book Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, a collection of African American animal stories ostensibly related by an elderly former slave to a child whom he had befriended. Over the next twenty-five years numerous authors sought to duplicate Harris’s success, with the result that black folklore became staple reading for white American youths until well into the twentieth century. In practice, local color works provided a bridge between the romanticism of the early nineteenth century and the realism that came to characterize the twentieth. As such, it was the perfect vehicle for whites to record the exoticism of the plantation past, dovetailing nicely with the chivalric tales of Thomas Nelson Page. At the same time, it allowed authors to glorify the region’s race relations by providing “records” of friendly interaction between superior whites and dependent blacks through the medium of African American stories told in dialect. In an age when white southerners sought sectional reconciliation while maintaining their distinctiveness, local colorism helped them write their past and present racial systems in a way that made their acceptance by the rest of the nation more palatable.
The growth of the social sciences, especially professionalized folklore, provided another vehicle for white southerners’ search for identity. Brought to prominence in Europe by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm during the early and middle nineteenth century, folklore quickly became a popular pursuit. By the late 1870s, folklorists had begun to professionalize their field. One of the earliest signs of this development was the founding of the English Folklore Society in 1878. Ten years later, American folklorists created their own national organization, the American Folklore Society. The international expositions of 1889, 1891, and 1893, which stressed the importance of progress, hosted folklore congresses in order to emphasize the backwardness of primitive societies, while preserving their beliefs for future generations. During the 1891 exposition, Mary Alicia Owen helped bring conjure to scholarly attention by presenting a paper entitled “Among the Voodoos,” which described the magical practices of Missouri’s blacks. The newly founded Journal of American Folk-Lore (later the Journal of American Folklore), an organ of the American Folklore Society, published numerous articles on conjure and related practices throughout its early volumes. Following an article on Haitian Vodou in its 1888 inaugural issue, the journal published W. W. Newell’s “Reports of Voodoo Worship in Hayti and Louisiana” in its second volume. The journal did not confine itself to Voodoo proper, however, and over the next decade and a half numerous brief notes and full-length articles appeared. Typically they resemble Roland Steiner’s “Observations on the Practice of Conjuring in Georgia,” an essay that combines conjure stories with instructions for using particular magical materials.
After 1893 southern African Americans had their own folklore society, based at Virginia’s Hampton Normal School, later to be known as the Hampton Institute. In a notice to students announcing the founding of the Hampton Folk-Lore Society, an anonymous author stated, “The American Negroes are rising so rapidly from the condition of ignorance and poverty . . . that the time seems not far distant when they shall have cast off their past entirely.” If a record of conjure was not preserved, blacks would become a people without a history beyond what whites chose to give them. Progress, destined to wipe out folk beliefs like conjure, would nevertheless preserve knowledge of such “savagery” for future generations through the work of professional folklorists. To this end the Southern Workman, the school newspaper, published numerous articles on black folklore during the late nineteenth century.
Throughout the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century the Southern Workman frequently included a column entitled “Folk-Lore and Ethnology,” which regularly addressed conjure. Like the articles appearing in the Journal of American Folklore, these accounts tended to be simple descriptions of hoodoo beliefs. Nevertheless, a few accounts display a high degree of analytical sophistication. The most important example is A. M. Bacon’s “Conjuring and Conjure-Doctors,” published in 1895. Bacon divided conjuration into two types, those involving charms and those involving poisons, and argued that conjurers provided five primary services to their clients, roughly summarized as follows: diagnosis of afflictions caused by magic, discovery of those who had cast spells, searching out and destroying tricks, curing those who had been conjured, and turning spells back on those who had cast them.
Meanwhile, other authors began to tentatively introduce new interpretations. For instance, Leonora Herron, in her essay “Conjuring and Conjure-Doctors” (not to be confused with Bacon’s article of the same title), argued that conjure functioned as a means of redressing wrongs, for which slavery had provided no other mechanism. In addition, Herron proposed that conjure was not solely of African origin but had also been influenced by “association with the white race . . . till it became a curious conglomerate of fetichism, divination, quackery, incantation and demonology.” Despite the growing volume and analytical rigor of such articles, few authors saw conjure as a positive aspect of the black past. Instead, African Americans followed the lead of whites, condemning hoodoo as a sign of backwardness. While whites used conjure to bolster their supremacist assumptions, however, blacks saw its supposed decline as a symbol of advancement.
Southerners’ attempts to build a new identity brought hoodoo to national attention. Knowledge of conjure ceased to be the purview of southerners who had experienced it firsthand. Instead, a growing number of books intended for popular consumption began to treat hoodoo as an important part of black culture. Publications reporting on the progress of the black race, such as Bruce’s Plantation Negro as a Freedman, increasingly came to address the backwardness of conjure. Likewise, autobiographies of ex-slaves often pointed to antebellum conjure to demonstrate how far blacks had risen from bondage. Such was the case with Jacob Stoyer, a former South Carolina slave, who made much of slaves’ belief in magic, recording their use of red pepper and salt to repel witches. Another former slave, William Wells Brown, author of My Southern Home, used the semihumorous character Uncle Dinkie, a conjurer, to demonstrate the “ignorant days of slavery.” In addition to being a fraud who earned his reputation by fortunetelling, love potions, and “medicine,” Uncle Dinkie had learned to serve the devil instead of God “kase de white folks don’t fear de Lord.”
Another class of publication that usually addressed conjure comprised the collections of black folklore that appeared during the years around 1900. Harris’s Uncle Remus refers to conjure only briefly, but some of his imitators dealt with it in greater depth. For instance, in Charles Colcock Jones Jr.’s Gullah Folktales from the Georgia Coast, “Buh Rabbit” must contend with conjure doctors as well as wolves and tar babies. Two works appeared that were entirely devoted to stories of hoodoo. The earliest of these was Mary Alicia Owen’s Voodoo Tales as Told among the Negroes of the Southwest, first published in 1893. As its alternate title, Old Rabbit, the Voodoo, and Other Sorcerers, suggests, Owen’s work was a collection of animal stories in which magic was the driving force. Rabbit, Woodpecker, and the Bee-King appear as the animal kingdom’s principal conjurers. Another work from the period that centers on hoodoo was Virginia Frazier Boyle’s Devil Tales. Unlike Harris, Colcock, and Owen, Boyle recorded stories of human hoodooists, usually locked in combat with the devil. Nevertheless, her underlying aim was the same: glorification of the southern past. Describing her sense of loss at the death of her storytelling black “Mammy,” she wrote, “The swaying form, crooning in low rich voice, like some bronze Homer blind to letters, a weird primeval lore into the ears of future orators, is shut within the feudal past of the old plantation days.”
A final group of books that began to appear during this era were fictional works built around the workings of African American magic. The most remarkable of these was black author Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman, which recounts a series of tales told by Uncle Julius, an ex-slave, to white Ohioan immigrants to North Carolina. Though the tales are ostensibly a collection of conjure stories from plantation days, Chesnutt’s Julius uses them to persuade his white acquaintances to favor him with gifts and other considerations. For example, in the story “Po’ Sandy” he persuades the Ohioan narrator and his wife not to tear down an old building because it had been built from a person whom a conjure woman had changed into a tree. Shortly after, Julius himself asks for the building, which he uses for a church. Chesnutt, who was only marginally interested in the practice of conjure, used stories of the occult to demonstrate the overriding power of whites. Only by preying on whites’ sense of sentiment did Julius succeed in achieving his goals. Nevertheless, white readers used The Conjure Woman to bolster their own version of the pre–Civil War South, including the primitive superstitiousness of blacks
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