African American Folk Healing

Introduction

Introduction When I was a child, a nosebleed was treated by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Earaches were treated with sweet oil drops. A child with mumps was rubbed on the neck with sardine oil. Measles called for a bath in chamomile. Various teas were given to children and senior adults at the beginning of spring or winter to build the blood or to eliminate worms. Castor oil and Vicks; glycerin and sassafras tea; paregoric and rock candy; whiskey and Three Sixes, all were part of our home health care routine. At the same time, my mother’s mother had been a practical nurse, and we melded aspirin and rubbing alcohol into our own range of folk practices. Doctors’ visits were but one tool for self-care, and not always the first line of defense . These kinds of practices continue in my family and did not disappear as older members died. While visiting my adult daughter, I mentioned that I was going to get my hair trimmed. She immediately began to caution me about how the hair was discarded or handled. I was surprised: when had I communicated these ideas to her? I remember that my mother had often told me to take such care. Her grandmother had said that if hair were thrown out, birds would pick it up and make nests with it—resulting in headaches. How did my child, living in the twenty-first century , come to adopt such ideas? I think often of these family groundings as I study and research black folk healing. Folk healing ideas, stories, and practices are common in black communities, and are often communicated through the women, reaching across regions where African Americans reside. We carry these folk remedies across generations. We find ways to continue practices in countryside and cityscape. They are not simply healing practices; they are linked to expressions of faith because they delineate aspects of a holistic epistemology. The belief that birds take cut hair and we get headaches as a result does not deny the existence of a Supreme Being but emphasizes the wonders of the Divine in new ways. 1 The stories and folk sayings that inform the concepts of folk healing are methods of defining our existence, often in sharp contrast to what is being said about black people among the majority of Americans. This book explores and contextualizes black American cultural concepts within folk healing traditions; its importance is that it opens new dialogical possibilities among all Americans. The stories about black folk healing are about American life and, sometimes, about our shared meanings or common misconceptions. Researching and writing this book is tied to my passion for understanding what underlies black faith expressions. If we can speak of “foundations of theology” that rest beneath the epistemological foundations of Western religious thought, then we can certainly find the roots of black faith understandings. This book’s exploration into the theme of healing is but one route. Much of my research has been on African American women’s faith lives, yet their religiosity is never separate from the black communities in which they stand. When applied to African Americans, the word spirituality is often a substitute for theological foundations. The theological foundations of black religiosity are shrouded in misunderstandings . Part of the reason is that so much of black life has been understood in a mythologized framework of interpretations of white researchers , who applied their own meanings to black folks’ actions. For example, a white colleague and I were speaking about research on African Americans and cancer. The colleague was developing an outcome -based program that might affect African Americans’ cancer testing rates. The program would determine its success on the number of black people tested for different forms of cancer. I replied that my interests focused on black Americans’ concepts of health, illness, and healing in light of spirituality in order to better understand health practices. I then presented several examples of the approaches that black people take regarding health care, resulting in what I called selfdirected healing methods. “Ah,” the researcher replied. “I often wondered why so many black people were fatalistic when diagnosed with cancer.” I understood intellectually how the researcher reached this interpretation of black behavior: many African Americans approach illness and health from a cultural framework that does not match the expectations of those in medical professions. The responses of black people to illness seems, to some, odd or even dangerous. But emotionally...