Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System

4. Crisis at the Crossroads: Sustaining and Transforming Hoodoo’s Old Black Belt Tradition from

4 criSiSATThecroSSroAdS SustainingandTransforming hoodoo’sBlackBeltTradition fromemancipationtoWorldWarii The period following emancipation was transformative in every sense for African Americans. Both the physical and social boundaries of their cultural lives would be expanded and would develop a more prominent national profile. It was a period of fragmenting and recoalescing values and practices as the nation shifted gears between the Civil War and World War I. Black belt traditional Hoodoo would find itself approaching a critical crossroads in its identity and existence. Though emancipation would prefigure the forthcoming loss of certain traditions, freedom of movement would simultaneously provide the social backdrop from which regional cultural variations would cross-fertilize one another. The crisis that was approaching would challenge Hoodoo’s adaptability and would confront black America’s desire and ability to reinvest in a tradition that clung to the sociohistoric bones of an ever-evolving African American culture. The old tradition, the Hoodoo of the old black belt region plantation, would be modified and transformed under the influence of both internal and external factors as an interregional cross-fertilization process would disperse locally potent customs, traditions, and knowledge throughout the newly emancipated African American nation more rapidly than had been done previously. In Standin’ at the Crossroads, I tried to flag a ride Standin’ at the crossroads, I tried to flag a ride Didn’t nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by You can run you can run tell my friend—boy Willie Brown Lord I’m standin’ at the crossroad, babe, I believe I’m sinkin’ down —Robert Johnson, Cross Road Blues Hazzard_Text.indd 84 10/10/12 8:44 AM Crisis at the Crossroads 85 some locales, the breakup of the old slave-quarter community manifests its impact immediately as destruction of the slave quarter meant that new and different cultural spaces would have to be located or created. Prior to emancipation, the larger plantation slave communities, as well as areas of high black concentration, had functioned as culturally potent repositories and cultural germination sites where, partially due to demographics, the culture-making process was intensified. The intensification process supported African cultural retention, especially in slave communities where recently imported African slaves were deposited. The end of Reconstruction and withdrawal of federal troops from the South after 1877 left most African Americans at the mercy of local white citizens, many of whom were former slave owners. With a reign of racial terror raging around them in a violently antiblack atmosphere, freedmen had few defenses. The increased stress attending the movement from slavery to freedom, coupled with the terrorism and racist exclusion of the period, strained every role in the black community, exacerbated both psychological and physical malady, and made successful assimilation and individual societal adjustment difficult if not impossible for all but a minority of blacks. Legal marginalization and racial terrorism unraveled still-developing and stabilizing community traditions and propelled blacks into a mass exodus, first into southern cities then northward into large urban areas, many lured there by the promise of “good” employment made by labor recruiters.1 The massive migration began as a trickle, hardly resembling the great deluge it would soon become. In this massive flow of humans from the rural countryside into more urban environments, certain aspects of African American cultural life, including Hoodoo, would become more visible to the wider society than they previously had been. In the postemancipation environment , blacks would continue to depend on Hoodoo’s support and protection both to anchor and to provide them with a degree of certainty in an uncertain new world. With the black community confronting an unfamiliar and less certain future, Hoodoo workers experienced an increased demand for protective mojoes during this period. There was certainly an increase in the visibility and number of Hoodoo practitioners in at least one southern Hoodoo center, New Orleans.2 Hoodoo’s new visibility and presence would immediately stimulate mainstream popular artistic and scholarly interest that would continue into the twenty-first century, as the July 9, 2007, issue of Fortune Magazine demonstrates when it asks on its cover, “Can Harvey Weinstein get his mojo back?” In the American mainstream, the rapid commercial secularization of Hoodoo ’s sacred dance, the Ring Shout, would give America the foundation for Hazzard_Text.indd 85 10/10/12 8:44 AM 86 chapter 4 dances such as the Big Apple, a “called” counterclockwise circling dance with high arm gestures; the Eagle Rock...