Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System

Postscript

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. —Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” PoSTScriPT With the previous discussion considered, it appears that the future of old tradition Hoodoo is uncertain. The only era in which Hoodoo was universally used by African Americans, as a vehicle for liberation, was the era of enslavement. Hoodoo initially focused on the needs of the enslaved African American community. There it was universally used both to protect one against slave owners, patrollers, and punishment and to discover and redirect evil. It was also used as a means to address both physical and spiritual malady. Initially, Hoodoo was a spiritual system that, at its core, assumed a posture of spiritual resistance to both enslavement and racist domination. Socialized by the enslaved African American women who reared, cared for, and breast-fed them, numerous whites in the black belt South encountered and believed in the tradition. After emancipation, the rule of racial terrorism, mass migration, family disruption, economic deprivation, and racial circumscription rendered the newly emerging “free” African American community vulnerable. Traditional spiritual solutions were an arena in which blacks had a degree of independent agency in unhampered sociocultural space. That independent spiritual tradition would be seized, commercialized, and transformed by middlemen minority marketeers, many of them well educated. They would seize control of Hoodoo at a time when both African Americans and their folk spiritual traditions were most vulnerable to exploitation and racialized control. Marketeered Hoodoo will continue to misrepresent itself as a true rendering of the Hazzard_Text.indd 179 10/10/12 8:44 AM 180 Postscript old Hoodoo system and tradition. Though the short-lived Hoodoo religion could not survive in North America, some practices of the old Hoodoo system are still alive in some southern-based African American churches. Knowledge of this led the shrewder marketeers of the past to attempt to corner the African American Hoodoo market by directly targeting black churches; contemporary marketeers appear to have not yet taken that approach. In the fecund marketplace of cyberspace, self-styled Hoodoo marketeers who offer themselves up as arbiters and teachers of African American spiritual tradition abound. The courses on Hoodoo offer little substantive traditional information, but they do ensure both an immediate and long-range market and that the “student” spends a significant sum of money on the supplies sold by the “instructor” or the business partner. With the proliferation of Hoodoo marketeers and those seeking profit from it, Hoodoo as a national African American cultural product and spiritual tradition could disappear. Hoodoo currently occupies a less significant place than it once did in defining the African American psyche and national character. Some contemporary Hoodoos and root workers, particularly those not formally educated and those divorced from the old tradition, have become dependent on profiteers while seeking outsider sources for both their supplies and information about their own tradition. This pattern revisits previously documented themes in the literature and studies of African American life, particularly the themes of racially targeted, economic, and cultural exploitation. This pattern replicates in microcosm those patterns that prevailed under colonialism and slavery: the dominance and exploitation of a people’s culture, labor, and the materials necessary for the continuation of that culture and tradition. Hoodoo marketeers profit during periods of high social distress. For African Americans, that social stress is largely underpinned by America’s racial caste system and malfunctioning democracy. Black family destruction, mass incarceration, job discrimination, high unemployment, substandard education, and inferior housing are all part of America’s posture toward African Americans. The American system of racial control has targeted blacks during their four-century-long sojourn here. In both interviews and conversations with old tradition hoodoos, as well as marketeers, both reveal experiencing an increase in the number of clients and frequency of visits around two key issues: black family destruction and mass incarceration.1 These two issues reveal the long-standing and persistent attacks on African American family structure through exclusion from both jobs and education as well as from racially selective law enforcement and racially motivated mass incarceration of African American men. Hazzard_Text.indd 180 10/10/12 8:44 AM Postscript 181 While crafting sophisticated denials of their exploitative practices, marketeers capitalize on the social distress of African Americans. When...