with catherine yronwode
NOTE FROM MOTHER PYRITE: I missed the first 10-15 minutes of the show! If anyone has a clear memory of what happened at the start of the show, please post!
(I have added my recollections, as best i can reconstruct them, up to the point where you wrote "We now join..." --cat)
MISS CAT: I've known Jeff for a numbr of years, since he was fist working on his doctoral thesis, which was the basis for this book. First, i want to say that this is an excellent book, filled with historical information about the role played by conjures in their communities. So, jeff, why did you write this book, how did you get interested in it?
JEFF ANDERSON: I gree up in Alabama, but I never heard of conjure as a child. I first encountered hoodoo in a book called "Stars Fell On Alabama," which was about different cultural groups in Alabama, and in it there was a description of a Black conjure woman, and I had never heard of this before at all and it interested me, so I began to research it.
MISS CAT: Are you a hoodoo pracitioner?
ANDERSON: No, I am not.
MISS CAT: One of the central ideas in your book is how important conjure doctors are in their communities.
ANDERSON: In my opinion, those who became conjures were often among the most educated and intelligent in their communitites.
MISS CAT: You follow the social position of conjures from early times to present, how they were perceived. There are great pictures too, of conjure doctors as drunkards, as powerful mystics -- the whole gamut of evolving attitudes... and you see them as influential people?
ANDERSON: Yes, people like Jim Jordan, Aunt Caroline Dye; one thing that I learned in researching this book was how influential they were. Jim Jordan was practically the mayor of his own town!
MISS CAT: And Aunt Caroline Dye was prosperous enough to be able to take in foster children and raise them, as a charitable work.
ANDERSON: Yes, this is information that has been suppressed to a certain extent.
MISS CAT: You mention the recent revival of interest in conjure, a sort of reclaiming of the tradition, particularly from within the African American community.
ANDERSON: Especially in fiction we now see the image of the strong, pwoerful conjure woman. Alice Walker, Toni Morrison...
MISS CAT: ... Ricky Doc -- Arthur Flowers -- and his Literary Hoodoo poetry movement...
ANDERSON: And Ishamael Reed...
MISS CAT: ... who probably started the entire literary revival of hoodoo.
(We now join the program in progress ...)
MISS CAT: As you know, Eoghan and i have discussed the debate about whether hoodoo is a religion or a system of magic. What is your take on this, given that some conjures use such titles as Reverend or Doctor, alluding to spiritual or medical degrees?
ANDERSON: It depends! - on church membership, the scope of the
conjure's work, who's asking (black people tend to be ambivalent about the distinction, whites draw a clear line); but there are many who combine the role of Christian leadership and hoodoo. This is a European kind of question. Some people *do* say it's a religion, even though there are no unique spirits or gods involved in it.
MISS CAT: Protestant Hoodoo has fewer liturgical/clerical trappings
than Catholic hoodoo does. You include a great chart of African gods w/
Catholic equivalents in the book.
ANDERSON: Yes; mostly New Orleans "voodoo", so called. References
to these unique entities persist as recently as the 1940's in the US. Mind you, I can't identify African equivalents for all of them; some of them may be Native American rather than African, such as Black Hawk. These possibly Native American figures probably entered through the medium of African culture, however. There are a few Yoruba, Fon elements as well as Congo.
MISS CAT: What are you doing now? Teaching in Middle Georgia College? Teaching what?
ANDERSON: This is a 2-year school converting to 4-year; I'm mostly teaching survey courses in American history, history of minorities,
occasional lecture in hoodoo; not teaching classes in it. I plan further work in this subject: hoodoo in the Mississippi Valley (anything along Mississippi River & its navigable tributaries -- anyplace where culture could spread; culture generally moves from east to west, but in Mississippi Valley, moved up from mouth of river. Will include St. Louis, Arkansas, as far north as Ohio; I found at least one ref to voodoo ceremonies in Cincinnati. Usually places w/ old settlements. Certainly Memphis.
MISS CAT: Same pattern of movement up the river toward the north appears in history of music (song verses), as tracked by recording dates. For non-American listeners: Most of the Mississippi Valley is rural, has preserved older cultural patterns.
LINE DROPPED (Fill-in attempted by cat)
MISS CAT: The Mississippi Valley does not include Eastern Seaboard states like Georgia, Virgian, nd the Carolinas, where hooodoo was more influenced by British and Germanic sources.
ANDERSON: What has come forth, in this book, and in the work I am doing now, is that there are considerable regional variaions in hoodoo. The next book will draw on historical sources... to make hoodoo accessible to those who have grown up with scary stories about "voodoo." Looking for scholarly (academic) publisher - and i want to present the complete manuscipt to prospective publishers. I am hoping that LSU will again bethe publisher.
MISS CAT: _Conjure in African American Society_ is hardback, *densely*
filled w/ info, specifically role of conjure doc in black society; one important section is a table of conjure curios, their scientific names, uses, and *origins* by cultutre. This table contains deep historical bckground that today's urban conjure docs don't necessarily know, goes far beyond "Well, my grandma taught me this."
LINE DROPPED (Fill-in attempted by cat)
ANDERSON: Working on that one table took me almost as long as writing a complete chapter of the book!
MISS CAT: We'll now take questions.
EOGHAN BALLARD: Hello, Jeff. On the subect of whether hoodoo is a religion or a form of magic, I want to say that academics are now disabusing themselves of old dichotomy arising out of colonial endeavor.
ANDERSON: That's right.
SINDY: _Conjure in African American Society_ is a fabulous guide - fabulous footnotes, bibliography. Everybody read it. Anyhow: What is the most vital fact you learned in your reaserch that you wish everyone to understand?
ANDERSON: How to choose? Much of this was new to *me.* I think the most important point is to keep in mind *how important* conjure docs are in their societies. This is mostly ignored/suppressed in literature on African-American life, especially during mid-20th century.
MISS CAT: There certainly was a near-loss of academic understanding of hoodoo at mid-20th century -- for instance Mimi Clar's 1959 article on blues music and hoodoo shows almost total ignorance of hoodoo. She had to go to books pub in 1926; didn't even know that mojo bags were still being made. Her work treats hoodoo as something lost.
BALLARD: A lot of people in 1959 were still trapped in scholarly idea that folklore was something you were rescuing from extinction. But folklore is a living entity, things are always being revamped and invented.
MISS CAT: Yes, but the joke is: Because she thinks hoodoo is something lost, Clar ref's Herb Jeffries's song with Duke Ellington Orchestra about "Snake Marie" and wonders if this is "Marie Laveau." She didn't think to ask Herb back in 1959, but Ferne Campbell is in our list, and she is Herb's daughter, and Herb is still alive, and she asked Herb and he said, "No, it's Snake MARY" -- which rhymes with "weary" -- and Herb tells Ferme that he knew about a "Snake Mary" -- a conjure working with snakes -- in Chicago and had never heard of Marie Laveau!
ANDERSON: I hate cut-n-paste, circular-reasoning scholarship.
MOTHER PYRITE: Someone -- Eoghan? -- said the three forms of John the Conqueror root are a American replacement for one African plant. Which one?
MISS CAT: That was me. The idea of substitution occurred to me because some people talk about chewing High John, which will make you throw up. Dixie John is used for female problems; John the Conqueror, the "man root" of the Iroquois and other tribes, is an emetic, and this points to an African ordeal poison.
ANDERSON: Cat's theory about "John plants" all being substitutions for one single African plant is substantially correct, but there may not be only one African original. "John plants" are known all across South. Probably an issue of convergence or regionalism: Congo tradition of twisted roots w/ magico-religious powers; NA roots w/ their own significance - and other cultures - this actually needs more research. Probably * not* just one African original; rather, more than one.
MISS CAT: The issue is important enough that Carolyn Long devoted an entire chapter to it in her book "Spiritual Merchants."
MOTHER PYRITE: Could the idea of chewing High John be a mistake on the
part of informants?
MISS CAT: Yes, not all of Hyatt's informants had their act together; most were professional root doctors or knowledgeable clients, but a few were were drunk, some rambled. There were more than a thousand people, not all on the same level of knowledge. Regarding what Jeff said about regionalism, he is right, traditions vary by region, see luckymojo.com/hyattinformants.html for my attempts to reconstruct which of Hyatt's informants knew one another, shopped at same shops,and shared recipes. This is why Hyatt should be in a searchable database.
ANDERSON: Next edition of _Conjure in African American Society_ will include much more about regionalism. Re chewing John the Conqueror: some people may be calling *something else* "High John." Maybe Solomon's Seal was called High John at first. John the Conqueror (jalap) root was not available everywhere that people used the term.
BALLARD: So substitutions may have varied regionally - and African
originals may have varied too.
MISS CAT: This all comes down to: What does the name High John the Conqueror mean? I don't think it's an English phrase, but an African-language descriptive term of a *kind* of plant, not a single plant. I'm waiting on confirmation from African language professors. Clue: idiomatic speech has it as "John-the Conquer," changed to "ConquerOR" to make it sound more mainstream English. Compare situation with American and European Mandrake. Similar names because similar purposes, and both roots were thought to be shaped like a man - but they are taxonomically unrelated and one is Native American and the other is European.
JEFF ANDERSON IS A CLASSMATE!
SINDY: So are you practitioner? w/ all this knowledge, . Don't you *want* to? Don't you feel you could? At least for yourself?
ANDERSON: It's certainly alluring. But I'm a historian above all, I'm an outsider and I like dissecting things from that standpoint.
SINDY: What I really want to know is how much you believe it, whether it works.
ANDERSON: I do believe it works, but I'm not becoming a participant observer.
MISS CAT: Academic world slowly coming around to academics "going native" without losing their perspective. My mother Lilo Glozer once researched this very subject for Irving Wallace (the novel about the anthropologists who go native; can't remember title). It was quite the scandal back inthose days, "going native."
ANDERSON: There's still an awful lot of prejudice against participant observers and sympathetic researchers.
QUEEN MABULLA: A lot of people are double-faced that way. Most of my clients are well-educated and are shocked to see their colleagues in my office. Pastors come for money-drawing or steady-work jobs and then go to the pulpit and preach against it.
ANDERSON: In Georgia, lots of public opposition to conjure. Had recent cancellation of conjure lecture b/c *students* were afraid I was going to "promote" it.
MISS CAT: Not only preachers speak against it; we oten see news reports where "Cult Crime" cops alk of it as "black magic."
DARA: And yet so many cops are intuitive people - their job practically requires it. I know some cops who are conjures, too.
QUEEN MABULLA: I make oodles of protection bags for cops.
BALLARD: This fearful opposition is an evangelical Christian phenomenon.
NAGASIVA YRONWODE: What is your religious background? Did it predispose you to studying conjure, or raise a barrier?
ANDERSON: Southern Baptist - yes, evangelical. It gave me no problems w/ studying conjure. Because it is vitally important to understanding African-American history.
(Thanks, Micahaele. I hope my additions from memory, attempting to cover the portions you missed, are not too far off-track, When the audio goes online we'll see how well i did.
--cat)
