Hoodoo (Conjure, Rootwork)

Hoodoo is the African American folk magic of the southern United States, made in slavery and sharecropping out of West and Central African ritual logic, the material conditions of the plantation and the tenant farm, and the Protestant Christianity that enslaved people were given and re-made. It has no founder, no canon, no congregation and no central authority; it is carried in families and by professional root doctors who take clients, and it travelled with the Great Migration into Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Scholars disagree about how much of it is direct African survival and how much is American invention, and that disagreement is real rather than a gap to be closed.

A rootworker reads a client's case, names the cause and prescribes a course of work: a run of spiritual baths, a hand to be carried on the body, a trick laid where a person will walk, a candle dressed and set to burn, a psalm said a set number of times. The materia is homely and specific - roots, herbs, minerals, salt, sulphur, camphor, personal concerns such as hair, nail parings, worn clothing and footprints, and the dirt of a grave. Most of it is unwaged and domestic, done at a kitchen table by a grandmother, and only some of it is professional service.

To cure and protect, to draw luck, money and love, to hold a household together, to read and answer harm, and to settle matters that the law and the church would not touch

Hoodoo is African American culture, not a neutral technique that anyone who buys the right oil may adopt. It was made by enslaved and segregated people as a means of survival, and its knowledge belongs to their descendants and to the families and communities that carry it. Outsiders, and especially white practitioners in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have taken it up, renamed it and sold it, often while the people who made it were being dispossessed; that borrowing is a live grievance with a documented history, not a historical footnote. What is closed is not only a list of formulas but the standing to work: lineage, community recognition, and the trust of the people a worker answers to.