Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System

Abstract

Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion (Oxford University Press, 2004), for example, places the religious systems of Africa alongside the primarily Protestant Christianity of African Americans in the southern United States during antebellum slavery, while demonstrating the distinct spiritual traditions shared by both systems. [...]she demonstrates that urban blacks maintained these merchants through mail-order and drugstore purchases even though a number of African Americans snubbed Hoodoo as superstitious during the postwar period.

Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System. By Katrina Hazzard-Donald. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 248, 10 black-and-white photographs, 3 charts, notes, glossary, bibliography, index.)

In the past few decades, scholars have traced the roots and branches of the African spiritual experience in the New World. Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion (Oxford University Press, 2004), for example, places the religious systems of Africa alongside the primarily Protestant Christianity of African Americans in the southern United States during antebellum slavery, while demonstrating the distinct spiritual traditions shared by both systems. Katrina Hazzard- Donald's Mojo Workin' expands upon Raboteau's work and explores a system that has received intermittent scholarly attention: Hoodoo. HazzardDonald's conception of Hoodoo marks it firmly as a religion (hence, its capitalization in her text and this review), albeit a religion that flared up as an integrated system only briefly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then quickly segmented into distinct vernacular praxes. She does link the African American practice of Hoodoo with its African forebears, primarily through a set of criteria that she calls the African Religion Complex, but she then devotes the majority of the text to a general-if sometimes unfocused- study of Hoodoo's evolution on American soil. She pays particular attention to expressive elements such as dance, water immersion, divination, and naturopathic medicine, and interprets belief through the lens of folklore, such as the hero tales of "High John the Conquer" (pp. 68-83). She provides special critique of modern "marketeered" Hoodoo, which she believes to be an appropriative and abusive dilution of a rich religion into "snake-oil" sales and "Gypsy palm reading" (p. 119). Hazzard-Donald takes great pains to chart the historical course of Hoodoo while simultaneously attempting to understand its recent modes and its potential future.

Mojo Workin' is loosely divided into seven chapters with themes mostly distinct from one another, but occasionally blurred and overlapping. The first two chapters chronicle the African Religion Complex-or " ARC" as she calls it-and its key traits, which include the aforementioned divination, dance, water rites, and herbal-magical medicine. To these ingredients, she adds "spirit possession," the "principle of sacrifice," a "belief in [a] spiritual cause of malady," and "ancestor reverence" (p. xi). She interpolates the evolutionary chart of Hoodoo with tales of its great heroes, primarily High John the Conquer (her spelling) and Dr. Buzzard, a conjure man from St. Helena Island. She recognizes that the Hoodoo religion was neither born fully formed on American soil nor did it survive its first bloom intact and mi altered, but instead, "[t]hough 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" (p. 45). She draws key connections between distinctive African American religious practices found in Protestant groups-such as the African Methodist Episcopalian Church- and the Hoodoo religious paradigm. One of her strongest examples is the Ring Shout, a dance that she believes to be a primary form of expression maintained from the old system into recent years, and preserved in African enclaves like the Gullah of the Sea Islands of South Carolina. One of Hazzard-Donald's core tenets holds that the Hoodoo religion existed only during the days of the plantation, and that after the Civil War, it diminished and fragmented into three distinct regional zones: a "Southwest" region centered around the Mississippi Delta, a "Southeast" region, which includes the Sea Islands as well as Georgia and the Carolinas, and a final "Northeast" area around the Appalachian Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley (pp. 36-8). In each of these regions, she builds the religious system around its agricultural staples, such as tobacco in the Northeast or rice in the Southeast. She also charts the influence of other cultures, such as the Native American pharmacopeia and its effect on the medical practices of slaves, although she significantly downplays some of these interactions.

The chapters on Hoodoo heroes are particularly rewarding, with Hazzard-Donald's empha- sis on resistance to white dominion and the use of intelligence to subvert authority. She traces the figure of High John the Conquer to African and Mexican roots, centering the figure of legend on real historical rebels from whom the disenfranchised slaves could take heart. She chronicles how the stories of "Juan el Conquistador" could have spread "in major slave- trading centers, particularly the slave pens of New Orleans," where she demonstrates that diverse populations were housed together (pp. 77-8). While much of the work remains speculative in her folklore sections, the theories she presents are strongly supported by records from slave sales and later recorded accounts.

When she examines the magical and medical practices associated with Hoodoo, HazzardDonald makes a compelling case for regional botanical dependence, as differentiated from latter-day drugstore Hoodoo, which allowed people not initiated into the religion to practice with ingredients far more diverse than those available during the days of plantation root doctors. She draws parallels between African string-knotting practices and the manufacture of personalized mojos, which were tied onto the conjure doctor's patient to effect a desired change. She also correlates the decline of African midwives with an invasive and controlling hand exercised by organized professional medicine and federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration. In this discussion, Hazzard-Donald focuses on an in-depth criticism of the post-World War II incarnations of Hoodoo. These are documented in the work of Carolyn Morrow Long, whom the author cites. Throughout the book, Hazzard-Donald refers to this element of Hoodoo as "marketeered." Her case against outsiders co-opting African American practices seems at odds with some of her supporting evidence, which shows an evolutionary growth of Hoodoo into urban areas-some of which were indeed controlled by white and Jewish merchants. However, she demonstrates that urban blacks maintained these merchants through mail-order and drugstore purchases even though a number of African Americans snubbed Hoodoo as superstitious during the postwar period.

The final portion of the book primarily takes aim at contemporary practitioners of Hoodoo who do not conform to her vision of its evolution, and she draws upon a handful of personal correspondences to support her arguments. In these final pages, she faces a significant conflict, writing: " 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" (p. 183). HazzardDonald sees the two variants of old Hoodoo- its religious incarnation through groups like the Sanctified Church movement and its vernacular expression as a commoditized form of folk magic-as irreconcilable, and takes strong personal affront at the second form of Hoodoo and its adherents. Early on, she establishes herself as an initiate of an African Traditional Religion, so the personal nature of her vitriol is entirely understandable. But the tone of her writing sometimes undermines her own scholarly ethos.

Mojo Workin' is a key contribution to the study of Hoodoo in America, with some energizing new ideas about its origins, early expression, and broader religious aspects. While Hazzard-Donald sometimes presents a disorganized or an anecdotal case for her theories, her interpretation is novel and exhilarating. Building upon the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Jeffrey Anderson, Carolyn Morrow Long, and Albert Raboteau, while injecting new research into the field, Katrina Hazzard-Donald has reimagined Hoodoo as something more than amulets and "snake-oil" and has offered for examination by a new generation of scholars, a system broadly expressed and barely explored.