Conjuring Moments in African American Literature This page intentionally left blank Conjuring Moments in African American Literature Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo Kameelah L. Martin conjuring moments in african american literature Copyright © Kameelah L. Martin, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-44434-2 ISBN 978-1-137-33681-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137336811 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, Kameelah L., 1978- Conjuring moments in African American literature : women, spirit work, and other such hoodoo / Kameelah L. Martin. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-137-27047-4 (hardback) 1. American fiction—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Literature and folklore—United States—History—20th century. 4. Magicians in literature. 5. African American women in literature. 6. African American aesthetics. I. Title. PS374.N4M365 2013 810.9'896073—dc23 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: January 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Copyright Acknowledgments vi Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 “Thou Shall Not Suffer a Witch to Live”: Women and Spirit Work 15 2 From Farce to Folk Hero, or a Twentieth- Century Revival of the Conjure Woman 55 3 Troubling the Water: Conjure and Christ 89 4 Of Blues Narratives and Conjure Magic: A Symbiotic Dialectic 127 5 Coda: “Literature and Hoodoo . . . Tools for Shaping the Soul” 159 Notes 165 Works Cited 175 Index 185 Copyright Acknowledgments Chandra Ya— The Goddess of the Evening Star Original Artwork by Norman “Selah” Dexter Used by Permission Selah Vision: Soul of the Brush- Motivational Painter and Graphic Artist www.selahvision.com /[email protected] /facebook.com/selahvision youtube.com/selahvision Hoodoo Say Words and Music by Eugene Fox © 1954 (Renewed 1982) TRIO MUSIC COMPANY, INC. (BMI)/ Administered by BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (US) LLC All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation Hoodoo Blues Words and Music by Spencer Williams Copyright © 1924 UNIVERSAL MUSIC CORP. Copyright Renewed All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation Gin House Blues By FLETCHER HENDERSON and HENRY TROY Copyright © 1926 (Renewed) CHAPPELL & CO., INC. (ASCAP) All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Acknowledgments I am indebted to a number of persons and organizations whose collec- tive influence and support made the journey to publication possible. I have had the good fortune of having amazing mentors to guide and direct my scholarly energy. I would especially like to acknowledge you and thank you for your unwavering support and encouragement: Dar- ryl Dickson- Carr, Alfred Young, Georgene Bess Montgomery, and Rich- ard Yarborough. I would also like to thank Jerrilyn McGregory, Tomeiko Ashford Carter, and Matt Childs for encouraging me and contributing to my project in various ways. I owe a special thanks to Shauna Morgan Kirlew and Patricia Coloma-P eñate, who served as my graduate research assistants. I truly appreciate your dedication to this project; your time and energy were invaluable. I would like to thank and acknowledge my edi- tor, Brigitte Shull; editorial assistant, Maia Woolner; and the anonymous reviewers for their time and dedication to Conjuring Moments. It was a pleasure working with you, and I thank you for making publication such a seamless process. I would also like to acknowledge the College Language Association (CLA) for providing a forum and safe space to share my work in progress and my CLA family for their scholarly support, professional network, and enthusiasm. The South Atlantic Modern Language Association and the Southern American Studies Association were also inspiring venues for developing my research. I would like to especially thank the National Council for Black Studies and Layli Phillips Maparyan for the Cutting- Edge Gender Research Grant with which I was able to bring this project to a close and initiate a second one. The manuscript could not have been completed in a timely fashion without the financial support of the Geor- gia State University English Department’s Summer Research Enhance- ment Grant (2007) and the Georgia State University Research Initiation Grant (2007). I am also grateful to Vanderbilt University’s Issues in Criti- cal Investigation: The African Diaspora unpublished manuscript com- petition (2009–1 0). I was a finalist in the inaugural competition, and I would like to thank Hortense Spillers and the anonymous readers for such sharp and stimulating constructive criticism. I would like to thank my GSU colleagues for their support and encouragement during my time in Atlanta: Elizabeth West, Carol Marsh- Lockett, Christine Gallant, Mary B. Zeigler, and Cora Presley. Thank viii Acknowledgments you for making my years there bearable. I am sincerely appreciative of James L. Conyers Jr. and the University of Houston Center for the Study of African American Culture for welcoming me as a visiting scholar and supporting my efforts rigorously. The University of Houston provided financial support for this project in addition to offering a supportive, scholarly environment in which to see the project to completion. Thank you to Norman “Selah” Dexter for his generous spirit and extraordinary cover art. Thank you to the reference librarians at the US Copyright Office for guiding me through the process of tracking down the current copyright holders for the blues songs quoted in Chapter 4 and to the librarians of the Roots n’ Blues series of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina Wilson Library for providing access to a number of hard-to-find recordings. Thank you to my family, who love and support me even when they really have only a vague idea of what I am doing. You all are my big- gest supporters: Mom, Grama, Auntie Sharon and Uncle Lawrence, Cha- son, Ashley, Jay, and Tanasa. Thank you to “the kids”— Maria, Ariyanni, Havana, and Isaiah— for making me smile and keeping me balanced with all your silliness. Thank you to Julia Livingston, Timothy Lyle, Joy Jones, Keith Samuel, and the Samuel family for your continued love and sup- port. And a most generous and humble thanks to my intimate circle of friends— Deborah Redding, Daaiyah Salaam, Typhany Grier, and Jona- than Davis— for your endless supply of emotional, spiritual, and mental support and for always, always seeing me through no matter what life crises might arise. Ours is a bond of the deepest kind of love and compas- sion. I simply could not do it without you. Lastly, I have to thank my former professor Harryette Mullen of Uni- versity of California, Los Angeles, who challenged me as a young and perhaps overly sensitive master’s student to develop a research project on the conjure woman that could not be “summed up in two sentences.” She is truly responsible for setting the fire from which my study of the conjure woman as literary archetype was born. I hope I have completed satisfactory work. Thank you for the tough scholarly love and inspiration. Introduction Where there are preachers, there are also Conjurers; where there are conversions, there are dreams and visions. And where there is faith, there is, and ever continues to be, magic. —Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic Yvonne Chireau’s assertion that there is a thin differential line between religious fervor and the supernatural speaks insightfully about the permanence of folk belief among people of African descent. In May 2003, that permanence moved to new levels of acceptance when Ameri- can Express aired an advertisement on primetime network television in which two members of the NBA team the New Orleans Hornets paid a local conjure woman—with their American Express card, of course—to put a “fix” on the jersey of Los Angeles Lakers player Kobe Bryant in anticipation of the first round of the postseason play-off series.1 As the commercial aired, I began jotting down ideas on how I planned to turn my fascination with black women and spirit work into a dissertation project for the completion of a doctoral program I had not yet entered. I was sighting these women—conjure women—in almost every facet of American culture: film, television, music, visual art, and most notably in literature of the African diaspora. I was determined to get down to the bottom of what was driving these figures to the most visible realms of popular culture and what exactly was the significance of such hypervis- ibility. Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work, and Other Such Hoodoo is the culmination of that journey. This monograph takes as its core focus African American literature and the conjuring tradition. I am most interested in the point where these two subjects intersect, particularly as it relates to Africana women and spirit work. By “spirit work,” I mean to suggest an intimacy with both the healing and harming ritual practices of African-derived religious prac- tices that evolved in the New World: obeah, Vodou, Lucumí, espiritismo, conjure and hoodoo, Candomblé, Voodoo, and others.2 Spirit work also involves, as the term suggests, communication with supernatural entities that in some cultures may be referred to as ghosts, ha’ints, specters, or