Hoodoo

Abstract: Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. By Sharla M. Fett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp.xiii, 290. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95; paper $18.95.)Author Sylvia M. Fett bypasses more familiar biomedical approaches to slave health to demonstrate the survival and effects of African-inspired healing practices. Her careful research and clearly structured argument adds a fresh dimension to old questions of slave culture, treatment, and religion. Part one establishes the contrast between white and black concepts of health and healing. Part two examines how these differences played out between master and slave.Fett begins by acknowledging the importance of health or "soundness" to slaveowners in terms of the market value of human chattel. For slaves, the concept of soundness held little importance. Their concern, rather, was a person's general well-being. A nutritious diet and adequate shelter contributed to well-being as well as soundness, but a condition of well-being also relied upon community relationships. When a person fell ill, the master might administer home remedies or call in a physician, but bedside care primarily came from within the slave community.Particularly important were black healers, whose approach to health conflicted in fundamental ways with the emerging culture of scientific medical practice. The most important of these was a spiritual dimension. Body, mind, and soul were connected in black healing. Black medical practices drew upon the supernatural powers of ancestors. Humans did not rule the environment but existed in an intricate relation to it. Health and well-being could be restored by harnessing these resources. This required a knowledgeable and spiritually empowered practitioner. Although many antebellum whites recognized the curative powers of herbal medicine, they rejected its spiritual aspect as heathen superstition. The spiritual aspects of black healing practices therefore often were practiced in secrecy.A working cure required both considerable knowledge of local botanical resources and spiritual knowledge. This knowledge took years of experience; hence, practitioners were often elders who guarded their recipes, which could harm as well as help, closely. Especially guarded was the power to conjure: hoodoo rituals evoking supernatural forces to heal or harm. Slaveholders were a common target, but hoodoo also was employed within the slave community. Fett analyzes narratives by black victims to reveal how conjuring regulated discord over scarce resources, interpersonal power, and, especially, sex and romance. In the intimate conditions of the slave quarters, conflict affected everyone and demanded resolution. The victim of conjures suffered physical pain, but much worse was the psychic malaise. Relief required that the underlying problem be identified through the special knowledge gained by divination. Only then could the hoodoo be undone or reversed. Fett emphasizes that conjuring knowledge descended from African healing traditions. As a result, white control over black bodies was incomplete.Healing skill and power did not usually yield a respected place in the plantation hierarchy as defined by whites. Caring for the sick was part of the domestic work performed by all women. Owners might decide on the type of medical treatment and supervise its administration, but caring for the ill was menial and often repulsive work. Such responsibilities often were delegated to older female slaves whose value as field labor had declined. Whites tended to regard these women as ignorant and superstitious, and their market value was comparatively low. …

Abstract: In preparing to write this paper, I found myself repeatedly stopped by conflicting conceptions of the structure of address into which I was inserting myself. It was not clear to me what I, a white deconstructor, was doing talking about Zora Neale Hurston, a black novelist and anthropologist, or to whom I was talking. Was I trying to convince white establishment scholars who long for a return to Renaissance ideals that the study of the Harlem Renaissance is not a trivialization of their humanistic pursuits? Was I trying to contribute to the attempt to adapt the textual strategies of literary theory to the analysis of Afro-American literature? Was I trying to rethink my own previous work and to re-referentialize the notion of difference so as to move the conceptual operations of deconstruction out of the realm of abstract linguistic universality? Was I talking to white critics, black critics, or myself? Well, all of the above. What finally struck me was the fact that what I was analyzing in Hurston's writings was precisely, again and again, her strategies and structures of problematic address. It was as though I were asking her for answers to questions I did not even know I was unable to formulate. I had a lot to learn, then, from Hurston's way of dealing with multiple agendas and heterogeneous implied readers. I will focus here on three texts that play interesting variations on questions of identity and address: two short essays, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"' and "What White Publishers Won't Print,"2 and a book-length collection of folktales, songs, and hoodoo practices entitled Mules and Men.'

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction I Historical Paths to Healing1 Stories and Cures: De?ning African American Folk Healing 2 Healing, the Black Body, and Institutional Medicine: Contexts for Crafting Wellness3 Healing in Place: From Past to Present II Today's Healing Traditions4 Healing and Hybridity in the Twenty-First Century 5 Healing the Past in the Present 6 Religion, Spirituality, and African American Folk Healing 7 Hoodoo, Conjure, and Folk Healing Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index About the Author