Time to gwine ‘ome to hoodoo

It’s Hoodoo Heritage Month, and I usually post “So Hoodoo Ain’t Voodoo?” Every year, I get a lot of love for that article, but I get a lot of backlash too for saying hoodoo ain’t a religion. And I still stand by that. Those who categorize it as a religion ain’t wrong though. I just personally don’t think it is, and I also don’t think it’s disrespectful or diminishing to believe it ain’t. I do, however, think our ancestors would suck they teet at us going back and forth about it. It’s bigger than that.

Tryna explain hoodoo is like tryna pin God down on paper.

You ain’t gon’ never get everybody to get agree. To me, God is Nature. God is the water, air, fire, and earth that exists everywhere we are and that we can’t live without. God is also the force of those elements coming together to create and sustain life. I wrote that article when I was trying to pin down exactly what hoodoo and voodoo were, and what they had to do with me and my personal heritage.

My West African ancestors were brought to this country against their will. Many from what’s now called Nigeria, Cameroon, and Mali. Beaucoup from Benin (previously named Dahomey) too. Eventually ending up in North Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana. Me and my parents and grandparents were born in North Louisiana, in the Delta. My mama sat down in Savannah. Daddy in New Orleans. I am Geechee, Creole, and just plain ole’ country.

My mama’s mama was hoodoo.

She ain’t call it that; she just was. And it only make sense for hoodoo to go deeper in the tree. She was a churchgoing woman—a white-gloved Baptist usher with the plaques on the wall to prove it. That’s partially why I ain’t grow up knowing we were hoodoo. That and the fact that we didn’t name it.

But if you swept her feet, she was spitting on that broom.

She’d tell you to quit answering dead people if you answered to your name being called when it really wasn’t.

Made collard greens for the New Year.

Kept poles in one piece.

Concocted homemade remedies for colds, fevers, and pains.

Burned the hair leftover in the comb.

Warned you not to turn around for whatever you forgot after you’d already left. 

Hoodoo is African af. And intuitive af. 

It was my people’s way of turning their luck around because it wasn’t no promotion or raise or better job to look forward, wasn’t no easy access to trustworthy healthcare, and they needed a way that was faster than the Bible to protect themselves from “the evils of Lucy” (as Kendrick Lamar said in reference to the devil).

Everywhere our enslaved African ancestors were taken is where you’ll find Hoodoo. It thrives in the bush, or in the country as we call it in the U.S., the same places we’ve tried so hard to disassociate ourselves from. Folk who migrated from the farms left many of their old ways behind, including their accents.

In Krak Teet, Ms. Carolyn Dowse said her parents migrated from Sapelo Island to Savannah and were ridiculed for how they spoke. “So then they changed so they could speak like the other children,” she said. Dick Cavett said to Sidney Poitier in a 1971 interview, “You had an accent problem when you first started to work in New York…Can you show us what your speech was originally like?” Poitier answered: “A line like ‘I’m going home.’ When I was a child, we would say, ‘I gwine ‘ome.'” In his quest for success in the big city, he had to leave that language behind.

It’s impossible to only change how you say something.

You’ll also change what you’ll say, which requires you to change what you believe and therefore how you act. As I wrote in “So Hoodoo Ain’t Voodoo,” terms like black magic, witchcraft, and devil work were born out of fear. What folk don’t understand, they fear. What’s feared is often called out of its name. Once those fear-based names are accepted, then others start looking down on it too. If you ain’t careful, other people’s fears and lack of understanding will have you disassociating from your own culture.

So when I say it’s time to go home to hoodoo, I’m talking about to getting our hands back in the dirt; eating, healing, and surrounding ourselves with plants as much as possible; choosing silence more often; building villages and fulfilling our roles within those communities; checking our goals to see if it’s our true desire/calling or if it’s capitalism’s need for us to constantly want more; and krakin teet with our elders and sharing what we learned with the chi’ren. 

If you like this post, you’ll love the book. Get yours. If you wanna Cashapp a dolla or two for all the love + time put into the research and writing, I thank you in advance: $KrakTeet