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More than any of the other three folk magic systems we explore in this book, Hoodoo is a living, breathing tradition that experienced an ongoing process of evolution and synthesis as societal and cultural influences brought incredible pressure to bear. Throughout its stages of development, those within the practice faced untenable oppression. And yet Hoodoo endured.
As we explore the development of Hoodoo, or “Rootworking” as it is also known, we chart a course through treacherous waters. Whereas Appalachian Granny Magic, Brujería, and Curanderismo have a relatively known and undisputed history, in Hoodoo there are what I can only describe as “multiple truths.” Although my intention is to find the middle road that is mostly accurate, I in no way hold up what I present as the only truth, and it’s certainly not everyone’s truth. It is almost impossible to make definitive statements about the history and development of Hoodoo without offending the understood facts of another historian or rootworker. I will, however, do my best to present a reasonable composite view of the history and development of this heavily nuanced folk magic system.
The most commonly agreed upon description of Hoodoo is that it is an amalgamated folk magic practice developed in the United States on a foundation of the traditional healing and spiritual modalities of Central and West Africa, with varying degrees of European and Caribbean influences and integrations. The degree and value of the non-African components, as well as the involvement of non-Christian rootworkers in a previously fully Christianized healing and spiritual process, fuel intense arguments among Hoodoo practitioners.
A recent revival of interest in Hoodoo attracted many students who have no ancestral connection to any aspect of the practice, much to the ire and derision of some who do. Divisive issues such as these create a hotbed of conflict within the Hoodoo community. Most rootworkers, however, find their own stride and thrive within this powerful and vibrant practice. In its modern presentation, Hoodoo represents a large and varied network of magical techniques and traditions.
Hoodoo is a perfect example of history being written by the victors. A good bit of what we know about Hoodoo comes from whitewashed—and that pun is quite intentional—versions of the story of this folk magic system, often with the underlying motive of legitimizing the involvement of and contributions by non-African American rootworkers.
I speak as a Caucasian rootworker who received a calling and followed it into active practice despite my concerns about accusations of appropriation. I honor those who question my place within the Hoodoo community and understand why they feel that way. I feel strongly about presenting the development of Hoodoo from the most reliable sources available, and it is from that perspective that I write this book.
For over three hundred years, the transatlantic slave trade forcefully relocated indigenous people from the Western coast of Africa to the eastern, southeastern, and Gulf areas of the United States, as well as to Haiti, Cuba, the West Indies, and Latin America. It is estimated that over 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and transported by ship to these areas, with over two million of them dying en route, due to the horrific conditions onboard. Although this information is familiar to most readers of this book, I restate it because it is vital that at a minimum, an academic awareness of the conditions that created what we now know as Hoodoo remains in the forefront of our minds as we explore its history.
Each individual African region had its own set of spiritual and healing practices, with similarities to and differences from those in surrounding areas. Through inaccurate societal and media representations, many people think of the captured slaves as uncivilized people who were little more than animals. In my own childhood in the early 1960s in rural Kentucky, there were people who lived around me who truly believed that African American people had tails. This sort of thinking comes as the result of an aggressive campaign of untruths spread by those who traded, sold, and kept slaves, to justify the poor treatment of their chattel. If they depicted the people they sold as more animal than human, there was no reason to afford them the dignity and rights of a human being.
Hollywood especially portrays the African slave as ignorant, superstitious, and even feral, when in fact, many of the captured Africans brought into the American South came from organized, hierarchical, and structured cultures. Within these cultures, charms, chants, and other practices we would now call magical governed medical treatments, including successful surgeries. These magical practices also dictated social experiences such as relationship management among families and neighbors, the mediation of disputes, hunting, animal husbandry, and the cycles of life (including the management of birth, pubescence, marriage arrangements, and formal burials). Among those captured were healers, surgeons, midwives, blacksmiths, hunters, trackers, shamans, cooks, priests, and musicians, many of whom had honored positions in their homelands.
If you ask a contemporary rootworker to define Hoodoo, their interpretation often includes a strong distinction of Hoodoo from any religious connotations, isolating Hoodoo as a magical practice devoid of ties to any religion or spirituality. While that might be the case in today’s presentation of Hoodoo, it was not always so. This position over-simplifies the roots of Hoodoo, which was, in its early development, a deeply spiritual process. In the African cultures from which Hoodoo derived, the spiritual life merged so deeply into the mundane that the secular and the sacred were nearly inseparable.
Slave traders delivered their human cargo to different ports of call throughout the Americas, and the African diaspora began. Traumatized and often near death from the neglect and mistreatment aboard slave ships, these Africans settled onto plantations or other work arenas, bringing nothing but their memories of the homeland and their knowledge of healing and conjuring.
Almost immediately, cultural diffusion began, as retained memories and shared information spread among the displaced Africans, with geographical and cultural variances blending into common and accepted practices. Forced to adapt their healing processes to the vastly different flora, fauna, and roots in America, the now mixed African cultures commingled their sacred chants, recipes, charms, dances, healing modalities, and common societal theologies such as the veneration of nature, elders, and the ancestral dead. With no hope of replicating what they left behind, they developed something new, which would eventually come to be known as Hoodoo.
In some locations, slave owners had friendly relations with Native American tribes, many of which owned slaves, were slaves, married slaves, and/or hid slaves. The familiarity of Native Americans with the healing herbs and roots indigenous to the area helped the displaced African healers learn appropriate substitutions for the natural pharmacopeia used in Africa.
Author, diligent researcher, and professor at Rutgers State University, Katrina Hazzard-Donald writes, “[Hoodoo] was a glue that held the slave community together” (Hazzard-Donald 2013, 15). Hoodoo served not only as a system of medical, psychological, and spiritual treatment, but defined the uniqueness of a culture facing aggressive and abusive pressure to mainstream into a society that offered them no respite or acceptance.
Hazzard-Donald defines Hoodoo as “the indigenous, herbal, healing, and supernatural-controlling spiritual folk tradition of the African American in the United States” (Hazzard-Donald 2013, 4).
In his 1977 seminal paper by the same title, Ralph R. Kuna calls Hoodoo, “the indigenous medicine and psychiatry of the black American.” By my own analysis, these two experts aptly summed up the true essence of Hoodoo as it began in the United States.
The evolution of Hoodoo since the 1700s brought influences from France, Germany, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as from the local Native American tribes, changing how Hoodoo presents itself in our modern society. The most fundamental shift in the true nature of rootcrafting is the influence of what Katrina Hazzard-Donald calls “Marketeered Hoodoo,” which occurred in post-Emancipation America and resulted in the form of Hoodoo we see today. Some researchers refer to this subsequent modernization of Hoodoo as “Urban Hoodoo.”
Of all the changes Hoodoo experienced as it developed, the transition of the folk magic practice out of the hands of swampers, conjure doctors, and authentic rootworkers and into the mass-produced, factory generated, for-profit realm proved to be the most singularly destructive of any influence. Not only did it disrupt the reputation and integrity of Hoodoo, compromising its inherent authenticity, but it also served to inject a viciously competitive streak that still manifests in some of its most well-known contemporary workers.