Fear of Being Hexed

What the tradition is

Hoodoo is a set of spiritual observances, traditions and beliefs, including magical and ritual practices, developed by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States out of various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous North American botanical knowledge. Its practitioners are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men, conjure women and root doctors, and regional synonyms for the system itself include roots, rootwork and conjure.

It centres on gratitude to deceased family members, on justice, and on rootwork, a botanical practice used both for healing and for protection. Many of its traditions draw on the beliefs of the Bakongo people of Central Africa, and over the first century of the transatlantic slave trade an estimated 52 percent of enslaved Africans transported to the Americas came from Central African territories within the modern boundaries of Cameroon, the Congo, Angola, the Central African Republic and Gabon.

The first documentation of the word Hoodoo in English appeared in 1870. Its origins are obscure; one proposal derives it from the Ewe word hudu, meaning spirit work. Christian conjurers within the tradition hold that their powers to heal, hex, trick and divine come from God.

Why the fear of rootwork produced statutes

Enslavers feared a slave revolt and feared being poisoned by the people they enslaved, to the point of refusing to allow enslaved African Americans medical knowledge at all, and they passed preventative medical laws to that end.

In 1748 Virginia passed a law preventing African Americans from administering medicines, because white Americans feared that Black folk practitioners would poison them. In 1749 the General Assembly of South Carolina passed a law prohibiting enslaved people from practising medicine or dispensing medication, and made the offence punishable by death.

Those two statutes are the clearest surviving measurement of the fear. A belief that one person can harm another invisibly, held strongly enough to be legislated against within a year in two colonies, and enforced at the cost of denying an entire population access to medicine.

The same pattern appears without law attached. West African blacksmiths enslaved in the United States were respected and feared by other enslaved people because they could forge weapons and because of their connection to the spirit of iron, which is why horseshoes and metal tools appear in Hoodoo as protection from physical and spiritual harm, the job the nazar bead does in another tradition.

What rootworkers actually used conjure for

What the material describes practitioners doing with conjure is largely protection. Conjure bags, also called mojo bags, were used as resistance against slavery, and their form derives from the minkisi bundles of the Bantu-Kongo. The word mojo comes from the Kikongo mooyo, the indwelling spirit that natural ingredients are held to carry, and the Mandingo people were known for equivalent bags called gris-gris, some of which were carried aboard the slave ships.

The named cases are specific:

• William Webb helped enslaved people on a Kentucky plantation resist their oppressors using mojo bags
• a man called Dinkie, known in the enslaved community as the Goopher King, used goofer dust against a cruel overseer, carrying a dried snakeskin, a frog and a lizard and speaking to the spirit of the snake to wake its power
• Louis Hughes, enslaved on plantations in Tennessee and Mississippi, carried a mojo bag to prevent his enslavers from whipping him
• Gullah Jack carried one at all times for spiritual protection

Goofer dust, whose name comes from the Kikongo kufwa, meaning to die, has snakeskin and graveyard dirt among its primary ingredients. A conjure doctor known as Doc Harris made bags resembling Kongo minkisi bundles for the specific purpose of removing curses from people.

What the fear became

The protective use continued after emancipation and changed its object. During the Jim Crow era, conjure services were provided in Black communities for love, money, employment and protection from the police, and for protection against the law generally. From after the Civil War to the present, including within the Black Lives Matter movement, Hoodoo practice has included spiritual protection from police brutality.

That is the shape of the record. Two hundred and eighty years of documented use in which the practice is aimed at protection, alongside two colonial statutes and a long tradition of fear aimed at the practitioners. The fear of being hexed is real, well attested and consequential, and almost none of the consequences fell on the people who were afraid.