Hoodoo in St. Louis: What Enslaved People, a Memoirist and Archaeology Reveal

Two cloth bundles of charms found by archaeologists tie a St. Louis site best known for a Civil War general to a hidden spiritual tradition. An article from the National Park Service on Hoodoo in St. Louis draws on a formerly enslaved writer's accounts and on archaeology at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site to describe what the tradition was and how it survived.

No images exist of Hoodoo being practiced in St. Louis, the article says; this painting, "An Obeah Practitioner at Work, Trinidad, 1836," shows a ritual of the similar Obeah tradition in the Caribbean. Image from Slavery Images.

What Hoodoo is

The article defines Hoodoo (not to be confused with Voudou) as a spiritual tradition created by enslaved African Americans, inspired by Central and West African religions. Its practices include herbal healing, veneration of African ancestors, the counterclockwise circle dance called the Ring Shout, water immersion, sacred music, spirit possession, divination, and charms for protection and for conjure. Enslaved Africans were often forced to become Christians, and African practices blended with Christianity. Because slave codes banned large gatherings of Black people and made African traditions a crime, some Hoodoo practices were hidden inside African American churches, producing what the article calls Afro-Christianity. After the Civil War many of these practices survived, and Hoodoo, also called conjure or root work, continues in African American communities. The earliest known use of the word to describe African American conjure is around 1870, in a book by the Black American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph.

William Wells Brown's accounts

William Wells Brown (circa 1814 to 1884), born enslaved in Kentucky, was hired out in St. Louis after his enslaver moved near the city in 1827. After escaping on the Underground Railroad he became an abolitionist and recorded what he saw.

William Wells Brown. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

• A fortune-teller. In his 1849 narrative Brown describes visiting an old enslaved man known as a fortune-teller before his escape. For a fee, the man looked into a gourd of water and told him he would be free but would face severe trials, which Brown thought any fool could have predicted.
• A midnight ceremony. In his 1880 book My Southern Home Brown describes a secret gathering of enslaved people around a cauldron into which animal parts were thrown, a "Voudoo queen," people speaking in several languages and a circle dance that grew frantic. The article reads this as probably African languages and spirit possession, a regional form of Voudoo or Hoodoo.
• The Goopher King. Brown also wrote of an enslaved man on a farm in St. Louis County known as the Goopher King, skilled in goophering, a practice using protective "goopher dust." The man used charms and conjure against an overseer who planned to whip him, and Brown wrote that it worked: he rarely worked in the field and was never assaulted. Whites in St. Louis visited him to have their fortunes told, and some of the enslaved feared him. Brown concluded conjure was an established institution in slave communities.

Evidence from the ground

The White Haven estate in St. Louis in 1860. National Park Service.

Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site is the historic home of the Dent and Grant families, who owned White Haven for most of the nineteenth century. Frederick Dent enslaved 30 African Americans before the Civil War. Archaeologists and historians there found two minkisi bundles, cloth bundles of objects hidden under floors or near doorways and chimneys in Central African tradition; an nkisi is a container for a spirit. The design suggests Bakongo origin. Items in such bundles include beads, crab claws, military buttons, a peach pit, crystals, seashells, iron and projectile points, each with a spiritual meaning. The numerous four-hole buttons are interpreted as matching the Kongo cosmogram, a Bakongo sacred symbol whose four points stand for birth, life, death and rebirth, which the article says influenced the Ring Shout. African beads were worn as charms, and silver dimes found in the winter kitchen are used in Hoodoo as protective charms.

Artifacts discovered at White Haven during excavations in the 1990s. National Park Service.

Other practices at White Haven included prayer in nature, and Christmas and Whitsuntide festivals with songs, corn shuckings and feasts. Julia Dent, later Grant's wife, recorded an enslaved man known as Old Bob going into the meadow to pray and sing, and described the festivals in her memoir.

After slavery

Hoodoo did not die with slavery. In 1927 a man from Nigeria who had moved to the US from Hamburg in 1920 was arrested in St. Louis for using the mails to defraud: he sold potions, powders and charms by mail order to African Americans hoping for work, protection or healing. Under Jim Crow, some African Americans turned to Hoodoo for jobs and for protection from law enforcement and racial terror, and used herbal teas and tonics to treat illness. By the twentieth century, the article says, people who were not of African descent had appropriated Hoodoo to profit from African American spiritual traditions.

Sources

• National Park Service, Gateway Arch National Park and Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, Hoodoo in St. Louis: An African American Religious Tradition; the reading list, one nineteenth-century image of enslaved people singing and the name of the man arrested in 1927 left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.