Nation Sack

The nation sack is a woman's hand, made to hold a man to her, and it is one of the few hoodoo objects whose making Hurston describes at length from the inside - she was taught it, and records both the object and the obligations that come with it. The name is explained in the tradition by the sack's power over a man's 'nature', and the object is bound up with the wider body of hoodoo work on fidelity, sexual hold and the settling of a household.

A nation sack is tied from cloth or leather with cord, in a fixed number of knots, and holds roots and personal concerns of the man it is meant to hold - a hair, a piece of clothing, a bodily fluid - together with the woman's own petition. It is worn on the body, often between the breasts or at the waist, and the tradition holds that the man must never see it or untie it, and that if he does, the work is broken. In Hurston's account the sack also carries rules about the woman's own conduct, which are part of its efficacy.

This is coercive love work, and the tradition knows it: a nation sack binds a person's will, and hoodoo's own ethic treats work done to hold someone against their choosing as the kind that has to be justified by a real injury or a real obligation - and even then as dangerous to the worker. It is also women's knowledge, taught by women to women inside the tradition, and Hurston's account is one of the few that exists because she was trusted with it. It is not reproduced here as a set of instructions.