Hoodoo

Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs created by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States assembled from various traditional African spiritualities, as well as a knowledge of remedies. Enslaved and free Africans acquired regional indigenous botanical knowledge after they arrived to the United States. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. As a syncretic spiritual system, it also incorporates beliefs from Islam received from enslaved West African Muslims as well as Spiritualism.[6][7] Scholars define Hoodoo as a folk religion. Hoodoo is the fusion of African indigenous spirituality and Abrahamic religion. The extent to which Hoodoo could be practiced varied by region and the temperament of the slaveholders. The Gullah people of the coastal Southeast experienced an isolation and relative freedom that allowed them to retain various traditional West African cultural practices. In the Mississippi Delta, where the concentration of slaves was dense, Hoodoo was practiced secretly. Slave codes prohibited large gatherings of both enslaved and free Black people. Slave religion often ignited slave revolts, and many of the leaders of slave insurrections were black ministers or conjure doctors. The Code Noir of Louisiana and other slave laws required enslaved and free African Americans to conduct their spiritual practices in secluded areas such as woodlands and churches, and other places. Slaves devised methods to decrease noise when they practiced their religion. "Invisible churches" were secret churches where enslaved African Americans combined Hoodoo with Christianity. Enslaved and free black ministers preached resistance to slavery and taught that the power of God through praise, worship, and Hoodoo rituals would free slaves from bondage. Hoodoo spells date back to the colonial era. A slave revolt broke out in 1712 in New York. Enslaved Africans set fire to buildings in the downtown area. The leader of this revolt was a free African conjurer named Peter the Doctor who made a magical powder for the slaves to rub on their bodies and clothes to protect and empower them. Conjure bags, also called mojo bags, were a form of resistance against slavery. Black Americans and Jamaicans shared their conjure culture and had similar practices.vThe Bakongo people in Central Africa incorporated cemetery dirt into conjuring bags to establish a connection with the ancestral spirits Free blacks in northern states provided fortune-telling and conjure services to both white and black clients. In Alabama slave narratives, it was documented that former slaves used graveyard dirt to aid their escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers rubbed graveyard dirt on the bottom of their feet, or put graveyard dirt in their footprints, to prevent the slave catcher's dogs from tracking their scent. Mary Middleton, a Gullah woman and former slave from the South Carolina Sea Islands related an incident of a slaveholder who was physically weakened from conjure. The slaveholder badly beat one his slaves. The beaten slave consulted a conjurer who made the slaveholder weak by sunset. Middleton said, "As soon as the sun was down, he was down too, he down yet. De witch done dat."