history essay

jessica3

ChireauMedicalDoctorsCantDoYouNoGood.pdf

Home >History homework help >American history homework help >history essay

C h a p t e r 4

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You

No Good”

Conjure and African American Traditions of Healing

In the mid twentieth century the Reverend Addie Battle, pastor of the

Mount Zion Holy Trinity Spiritualist Church of Cleveland, Ohio, ren-

dered an account of her life. “I was born of farming parents on January

15, 1903, near Tuskegee, Alabama,” she began. “I had three older broth-

ers and five older sisters.” Toiling in the rugged cotton fields of the

Alabama black belt, Addie and her family saw few material returns from

their labor. “Most of the time we had almost nothing to eat because our

crops failed,” she recalled, “and the man who owned the farm, he was

white, would not pay papa and then we was destitute.” When Addie was

seven, her mother died and her siblings, older and more independent than

she, left her with her father, a violent alcoholic. During this trying pe-

riod she began to reflect on spiritual matters. “I guess I just had a ‘natchul’

calling then. I didn’t know it but I was always praying.”1

At the age of fifteen Addie became pregnant and suffered a miscar-

riage while she was working in the fields; at seventeen she left Alabama

with an older man, whom she later married. In an anecdote that is typ-

ical of Conjure narratives by women, Addie described being “hoodooed”

by her husband’s “other woman” and then falling ill. She sought the as-

Facing page illustration: founder of the Church of God in Christ (Pentecostal), Bishop C. H. Mason, with “God’s handiworks in nature,” early twentieth century. Photo courtesy Sherry Sherrod DuPree Collection, University of Florida, Gainesville.

Chireau, Yvonne P.. <i>Black Magic : Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition</i>, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223936. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2019-06-26 13:15:17.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

sistance of a Conjurer who eventually cured her. “I sent my husband a

telegram and he sent for me. He was still running around. Then he

“hoodooed” me so that I couldn’t leave him.” Then, one night, she re-

called, “something” told her to look inside of his pants pocket. There

she discovered the conjuring charm that she believed had captured her

will. Destroying it, she was able to leave her husband. Addie made her

way to a church. It was a Spiritualist congregation, a sanctuary where

divine spirits and the invisible dead regularly fellowshiped with believ-

ers. “I fasted and prayed two days and on the second day I was praying

. . . when the Holy Ghost came upon me and I spoke in tongues. I felt so

glad and pure and clean that I just had to tell it.” Thus Addie began her

life anew as a preacher, prophetess, and healer. “God was really work-

ing through me,” she exclaimed, “the Spirits have been working won-

ders through me and I’m trying to do all I can while I live.”2

Addie Battle’s oral history is a drama, with its devastating losses, its

self-discoveries, and its crowning achievements. Stylistically, it is remi-

niscent of the Afro-Christian testimonial, as it is a story of redemption.

It is also a story of healing, for at its heart it is a narrative of recovery

from emotional and physical affliction. Addie’s healing hinged on her

belief in the efficacy of Christianity against the threat of Conjure and su-

pernatural harming. The themes of supernaturalism, healing, and spiri-

tual power are woven through her life like threads in a tapestry.

This chapter highlights supernatural healing beliefs and practices

among black people in the United States from slavery times and after.

Throughout their history, African Americans have retained distinctive

ideas concerning sickness, its causes, and cures. Affliction expressed dis-

order in the physical body and conflict in the social body. Disease could

be physiological, or it could reflect the onslaught of malign spiritual

forces. As we will see, African Americans viewed healing as an integral

part of the ongoing struggle of good against the evil that plagued

humankind.

Using a language of invisible causes, African Americans articulated

health concerns by incorporating spiritual healing practices and beliefs

into their therapies. Two religious groups, the black Pentecostals and the

black Spiritual churches, also promoted ritual healing, actively conjoin-

ing supernaturalism and Christian piety. With the rise of Pentecostalism

in the late 1800s, and the black Spiritual churches after the turn of the

twentieth century, healing became a central concern in African American

religious life.

Certain parallels between the healing practices of black Conjurers and

92 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

those of black Pentecostals and black Spiritualists point to common

sources. Practitioners of all three traditions held similar assumptions

about the body and embraced analogous visions of misfortune, concep-

tions of disease, and the uses of spiritual power for extraordinary cures.

These traditions emerged in response to the intractability of black op-

pression in the United States, and all drew momentum from cultural

sources that had roots in indigenous African spirituality. The task remains

of examining the dynamics of these beliefs. In what ways was affliction

addressed by African American spiritual traditions? To answer this ques-

tion we must focus on the environments in which black supernatural heal-

ing practices developed.3

b b b

Given the harsh conditions under which most black persons lived in the

United States both before and after Emancipation, it is not surprising

that an emphasis on alleviating suffering emerged in African American

culture. The centrality of healing in slave and postslavery narratives

demonstrates the priority placed on collective responses to the diverse

forms of affliction that blacks experienced. Manifested as illness, bad

luck, or inexplicable misfortune, affliction was often viewed as an im-

balance in the otherwise harmonious social order on which a healthy ex-

istence depended.

African American healers utilized a variety of therapies. Sources from

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show a convergence of

spiritual beliefs, supernatural traditions, and practical techniques in black

healing practices. For many blacks, the distinction between spiritual heal-

ing and other forms of healing was often blurred. In order to be successful,

a healer needed to be familiar with spiritual interventions as well as con-

ventional techniques such as herbalism and traditional “doctoring.” The

overlap of these approaches reveals the pragmatic strain that has char-

acterized African American healing traditions.

Herbalism was a healing practice that evolved out of African Ameri-

cans’ assimilation of native African, native American, and Anglo botan-

ical techniques. “Root and herb” systems of medicine had been preferred

by bondpersons. “ ’Twan’t no used to send fo’ a docta,” recollected one

former slave, “’cause dey didn’t have no medicine. My grandmother got

out in de woods and got ’erbs.” Some herbalists shared similar perspec-

tives on affliction with Conjurers. Ex-bondwoman Patsy Moses recalled

a “Dr. Jones,” a Conjurer who first learned “ ’bout de medicine w’en he

wuz a slave boy in de piney woods from his ole granny” in Texas. “De

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 93

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

94 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

Conjure doctor, old Doctor Jones,” she explained, “walk ’bout in de

black coat like a preacher . . . and uses roots and such for he medicine.”

Many blacks found the herbal system to be superior to the medical care

offered by the slave masters. “We didn’t go to no doctor,” claimed the

ex-bondwoman Janie Hunter of South Carolina, “My daddy used to

cook medicine—herbs medicine.” For Mrs. Hunter, botanical cures were

a sound therapeutic option in the absence of other alternatives: “All this

from old people time when they hardly been any doctor. . . . Those old

people . . . worked their own remedy and their own remedy came out

good.”4

After Emancipation, blacks continued to turn to traditional healers

as they had done in slavery. Impoverished freedpersons usually lacked

access to formally trained medical practitioners, or, when they were avail-

able, patients were unable to afford the exorbitant fees that physicians

charged. By contrast the relatively low cost and easily acquired formu-

lations of herbalists and Conjure doctors were a sound medical alterna-

tive. “People couldn’t afford doctor,” recollected Mrs. Hunter. “Dey only

had homemade medicines,” asserted a former Alabama bondperson,

“and dat is unless dey got sho nuff powerful sick an den dey would to

see a doctor.”5

African Americans also had other reasons for seeking out their own

healing practitioners. White doctors often treated blacks with contempt.

The attitudes of many southern physicians reflected ideologies of nine-

teenth-century racism.6 Blacks also tended to mistrust white physicians,

who, they believed, were disinclined to sufficiently serve the needs of

African American patients. These suspicions sometimes reached folkloric

proportions. A newspaper report from Columbia, South Carolina, in

1889 stated that black patients in three counties were convinced that sin-

ister practices were being carried on by a local physician:

They claim that there is a white man, a doctor, who can make himself in-

visible, and who then approaches some unsuspecting darkey, and, having

rendered him or her insensible with chloroform, proceeds to fill up a

bucket with the victim’s blood, for the purpose of making medicine. After

having drained the last drop of blood from the victim, the body is dumped

into some secret place where it is impossible for any person to find it. 7

Frightening stories of physical mutilation, bodily theft, and other dia-

bolic acts by white doctors circulated in black communities for genera-

tions after slavery. Their consistent theme—that of health authorities who

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 95

deliberately harmed or experimented on unknowing patients—demon-

strated the acute misgivings of African Americans toward the “white”

medical establishment.8

Blacks also had little confidence in the invasive techniques and heroic

procedures that were common in nineteenth-century medical practice,

preferring the more benign treatments of root doctors and herbalists.

“duh root doctuh was all we needed,” explained William Newkirk, an

ex-slave in Georgia, “Dey wuz bettuh dan duh doctuhs now-a-days.

Deah wuzn all uh dis yuh cuttin an wen yuh sick, duh root doctuh would

make some tea an gib yuh aw sumpm tuh rub wid an das all.” Blacks

utilized root doctors and Conjurers for their medical needs not only

because there were few alternatives, but because these persons shared

their perspectives on sickness, therapy, and the sources of affliction in

their lives.9

For all their service to black communities, African American tradi-

tional healers were often scorned by whites, who derided their “quack-

ery” and “superstitious” practices. The former bondwoman Mildred

Graves, a midwife in Hanover County, Virginia, described how she was

ridiculed by two white physicians when she was called to attend a dif-

ficult delivery. “Something was all wrong wid dat chile an’ dey didn’t

know what. . . . I tell dem I could bring her ‘roun’, but they laugh at

me an’ say, ‘Get back darkie, we mean business an’ don’ want no witch

doctors or hoo-doo stuff.’ ” Yet, although whites generally had no re-

spect for the effectiveness of black healers, some were impressed by the

breadth of their experience. “The knowledge which some of these

Conjurers possess of the properties of every herb and tree of field and

forest is positively uncanny,” wrote one author, at the turn of the nine-

teenth century. “They have a tea or ointment for every ill that flesh is

heir to, and some of them would make the fortune of every dealer in

patent medicines.” A few white doctors derived benefits from the botan-

ical cures and treatments of African American slaves. The famous South

Carolinian physician and botanist Francis Porcher, for example, ac-

knowledged that some of his medical discoveries were obtained from

the healing knowledge of enslaved blacks. This appropriation of

African-based medical knowledge by Anglo-American practitioners had

historical precedents in cases that dated back to the colonial era, where

black healers had been consulted by white professionals for medical

assistance and doctoring expertise.10

Black-white healing interactions sometimes went both ways. A few

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

Conjure practitioners were admittedly influenced by techniques such as

homeopathy, an Anglo-American sectarian healing movement that chal-

lenged the excesses of professionalized medicine in the United States in

the nineteenth century. The educator Daniel Webster Davis visited the

office of a popular “Voodoo doctor,” as he called him, in Richmond,

Virginia, in the late 1800s. He recalled the signboard, which bore “the

inscription, ‘j.t. shelton, h.p.;’ the h.p. being supposed to stand for home-

opath.” Black patients sometimes viewed Anglo-American medicine as

a complex with multiple meanings. Laura Towne, a white Pennsylvania

teacher who made her residence in the Sea Islands in the 1870s, was

trained as a nurse, specializing in homeopathy and herbalism. The

Gullah residents welcomed her medical skills but reinterpreted her heal-

ing practices with a cultural framework that was more familiar to them.

Acknowledging the success of her treatment of an elderly woman for

dysentery, Towne found that they believed she had “neutralized” the ail-

ment by means of witchcraft.11

Although many utilized spiritual sources of knowledge in their treat-

ment of affliction, not all African American healers were supernatural

specialists. Many did not perform rituals or use charms and healing de-

vices, as did the Conjurers. “Ole Doctor Jones,” commented Patsy Moses,

referring to a local practitioner, “used roots an herbs fer his medicine an’

did not cast de spells like de Voodoo doctor did.” Zora Neale Hurston

found that a hierarchy of healing roles operated among African American

workers in southeastern mining and turpentine camps in the early twen-

tieth century. “Nearly all of the Conjure doctors practice ‘roots,’ ” she

noted, “but some of the root doctors are not Hoodoo doctors.” The for-

mer, Hurston found, “make medicine only, and white and colored swarm

around them claiming cures.” Another popular class of healers special-

ized solely in herbal remedies. Homeopaths like James Still, for instance,

the renowned nineteenth-century black doctor, used neither Conjure nor

spiritual cures, according to his famous autobiography. Some African

Americans considered the healing work of the Conjurers to be fraudu-

lent, even as they acknowledged other traditional healing practitioners.

“I don’t believe in Conjurers,” asserted a former slave. “because I have

asked God to show me such things—if they existed. . . . I believe in root

doctors because . . . we must depend upon some form of root or weed

to cure the sick.”12

Nevertheless, many African Americans saw the roles of “natural” heal-

ers and supernatural doctors as overlapping, even as they drew a dis-

tinction between natural and supernatural forms of illness. In general,

96 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

healing with herbs, roots and other organic substances was implemented

for common physical ailments, but supernatural healing was utilized for

illnesses that were not responsive to other methods. Hurston concluded

that there was little difference between the two types: “ ‘Roots’ is the

southern Negro’s term for folk-doctoring by herbs and prescriptions,”

she observed, “and by extension, and because all Hoodoo doctors cure

by roots, it may be used as a synonym for Hoodoo.” Another African

American writer distinguished between Conjurers and Root Doctors ac-

cording to their healing and harming roles. “the way I see it, a Conjurer,

they mostly jus’ put it down for you, and you be sick if you step over

it,” she declared, “a root doctor, he jus’ fix up medicines for you . . .

maybe in bottles, or put it in little sacks for you and things like potions

or charms.”13

The relationship of these diverse styles of healing practice is compli-

cated by the fact that some black herb doctors were identified with the

unusual attributes that were normally reserved for supernatural practi-

tioners. Henry Lewis, a former slave living in Beaumont, Texas, ac-

knowledged the healing abilities of his companion, Ada, noting that the

unusual signs accompanying her birth were special portents. “she got a

gif,” he insisted. “She know kinds of herb am good for medicine for dif-

ferent ailments. She born with a veil over the face and am wise to dem

things.” A practitioner’s ability to heal was often associated with his or

her spiritual power.14

Many healers were believed to possess supernatural insight and

knowledge. “They say root-doctors have power over spirits, who will

tell them who does the Conjuring,” declared Braziel Robinson, a slave

in nineteenth-century Columbia County, Georgia, “they ginerally uses

yerbs gathered on the changes of the moon, and must be got at night.”

Healers such as Aunt Darkas, a blind root worker in McDonough,

Georgia, maintained that she was blessed by God with healing knowl-

edge. “She always said the Lord told her what root to get,” explained

one of her patients, “Old Aunt Darkas said the Lord gave her power and

wisdom, and she used to fast for a week at a time.”15

Some African Americans acknowledged the supernatural sources that

enabled them to perform healing works. Mrs. Emma Dupree of Fountain,

North Carolina, had been known since in her youth as “that little med-

icine thing.” Mrs. Dupree ascribed her skills with healing plants to the

“power of Christ,” who she believed was the source of all healing, and

to the special events that accompanied her birth. Her words recall folk

traditions that can identify a healer according to a supernatural lineage:

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 97

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

98 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

When I was born, I was the seventh one, the seventh sister. And they say

the seventh one will be over-endowed in everything. Well, I was the seventh

child. . . . And my daddy went for the doctor. . . . When he got back it had

got day just like early in the morning. They had a glow — the yard, leaves

and the house glowed — and that light stayed until 10 in the day, and it was

brighter than the sun when I was born. [My mother] says that’s why I was

so different. 16

Many healers repeated the claim that their knowledge was a spiritual

gift. “Some people calls ’em two-headed doctors,” explained a black

woman in early-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., using a common

term for specialists who cured using natural remedies and spiritual power,

“That’s because they knows two kin’s o’ medicine. They can see both

ways.” “Two kinds of medicine” were also acknowledged by one African

American healer who considered herself “an instrument in God’s hand.”

“Often I have gone to work and pray for patients and seen them through

after the doctors have given them up for dead,” claimed the woman, a

trained nurse. “I always take Dr. Jesus with me and put Him in front and

if there is any hope He lets me know.” Many African American healing

practitioners, whether herbalists or Conjurers, considered themselves ves-

sels through which supernatural power was channeled.17

Some black healers credited their skills to unseen personalities, such

as Jesus and the Holy Ghost, who guided them in dreams, visions, and

other divine revelations. “Dr. Jesus tells me what to do,” explained one

woman who had been directed by the “Spirit” to seek a specific herbal

cure. A song offered by a black woman at an early-twentieth-century re-

vival meeting, conveyed a similar sentiment:

I know Jesus am a medicine-man,

I know Jesus kin understan’

I know Jesus am a bottle uv gold

He takes jes’ one bottle ter cure a sin-sick soul. 18

Thus for many black people, the healing experience encompassed re-

ligious dimensions. Narrative accounts that relate healing to religious

conversion confirm the bond that exists in African American culture be-

tween spirituality and physical well-being. A sixty-year old ex-slave in

Georgia told how he had become “sin-sick” and remorseful over the state

of his soul, as a young man. “One day while I was very sick,” he re-

counted, “I saw the heavens open and [a] voice said to me, ‘If you are

sick, behold I am a doctor!’ ” After receiving his healing this man “prom-

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 99

ised to serve the Lord and try to become a Christian.” Similar accounts

of supernatural healing characterized the ministries of African American

religious practitioners, to be discussed below.19

Black Americans drew from a broad selection of meanings in their in-

terpretations of affliction. Their attitudes were sometimes strongly pre-

destinarian. “Disease and death were unalterably fixed in the plans of

Providence,” observed W. S. Harrison, a white commentator on black

southern life in the nineteenth century. “The Negroes rarely ever looked

to imprudence or local causes to account for these things. God willed it

so, and they could only submit.” In the Sea Islands after the turn of the

twentieth century, white teachers and missionaries were struck by the fa-

talistic attitudes of blacks toward physical ailments and disease. The ex-

perience of one teacher, Grace Bigelow House, on visiting an elderly black

woman in the Gullah community, was not unusual. House could not see

that the woman’s conceptions of healing and therapy fit into a more com-

prehensive perspective that viewed affliction as having both human and

spiritual sources:

One of the older women . . . had an affliction which she said no “medical

doctor cayn’ cure.” “I had dis affliction before,” she said, “and I ben to

Parris Island doctor and all de doctors, an’ dey say it could do no good.”

“But you can tell me what the sickness is like?”

“Hump, hump!” shaking her head, “dey is some illness come from God,

and some come from man!”

“Do you think this sickness came from God?” asked Miss House.

“No,” she whispered, “No, no! Dishyuh sickness came from man.”

“Do you think some one wished some evil on you?”

“Yes,” came back the expected answer in a whisper.

In a parallel case, when a white doctor visited smallpox-infested areas

on St. Helena Island after the turn of the twentieth century, he found that

some persons there were hesitant to take inoculations because they

thought that such treatment would be with “going against God.” He re-

ported that African Americans there feared that the smallpox plague was

divine retribution. “Fever was God’s method of punishing his people,”

one woman explained, “and if we went against it, He would punish

more!” In an article written nearly twenty years later, tuberculosis was

said to be viewed by blacks in Jacksonville, Florida, as a “favorite form

of punishment meted out by God for one’s sins.” African Americans

placed great emphasis on the conduct of individuals in relation to the

moral codes of a community in their consideration of probable causes

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

of affliction. This perspective can also be seen in African Americans’ as-

sessments of epidemics and other outbreaks of pestilence as manifesta-

tions of divine judgment, the belief that individual actions could result

in sickness extended to the collective community.20

In their characterization of disease, blacks paid particular attention

to supernatural causes. This does not mean that they dismissed physical

or organic etiologies in their quest for explanations for disease; it is just

that their views of illness were more inclusive of external agencies. The

body was the bridge that linked physical disorder and spiritual imbal-

ance by its mediation of the two worlds. Affliction was much more than

the physical symptoms that were so incisively described by victims as bod-

ily states. It was viewed as a kind of attack by an invisible agent, moti-

vated by human intent.

Adopting an idiom of the spirit to interpret affliction, African

American healers used both conventional techniques and magical ritual

to treat their patients. “There’s a cure for every disease, and I can cure

most anything,” asserted one female healer who came of age in Recon-

struction Virginia, “but you have got to talk with God and ask him to

help out.” The North Carolina Conjure doctor Allen Vaughn’s patients

received physical and psychic treatments for their ailments. The doctor,

according to one patient, would “give them medicine to ease the pain,

and pull the tricks to ease the mind.” Combination remedies were often

successful. Govan Littlejohn, who was emancipated from slavery as a

youth during the Civil War, believed that he had been conjured when he

began to have difficulties with his foot. He called the local physician for

help. “He lanced my foot three times,” he claimed, “but nothing but

blood would come.” Littlejohn suspected that the source of his ailment

was the work of a jealous rival. He was healed when a herbalist admin-

istered an effective treatment. “One day an herb doctor came to see me

and said he could cure my foot. He took corn meal poultices, rhubarb

roots and some other things, and it wasn’t long before my foot got well.”

His suspicions of Conjure were confirmed, however, when he found a

bag of “pins, feathers and something else” buried at his front door.21

Govan Littlejohn’s comments are indicative of the logic that underlay

African American interpretations of affliction in the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. For Littlejohn, the painful symptoms of an inflamed

foot were linked to a larger complex of beliefs. Each of the stages in the

healing process—the defining of the illness, its cause, and its treatment

by the healing practitioner—connected to specific notions of explana-

tion, prediction, and control of affliction. For Littlejohn, illness was not

100 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

solely a matter of physical disorder. Because he believed that he was the

object of another’s enmity—in this case, malice conveyed through a hid-

den “trick”—the combined power of the charm and the evil intentions

of its creator had direct consequences on his physical person. Conjure

healing was therapeutic, but Conjure also caused the afflictions that ne-

cessitated treatment.

Black slaves and ex-slaves, as did their African forebears, connected

physical suffering with the spiritual forces around which their lives re-

volved. Personal affliction was rarely attributed to chance. Rather, ill-

ness, and misfortune were seen as the outcome of malicious human

actions or destructive powers. Disease had moral implications; a life-

threatening illness could derive from an individual’s own sinful deeds,

or it might evolve from the ill will of an enemy. Unanticipated misfor-

tune could be a consequence of witchcraft or the evil thoughts of a mean-

spirited person. In the cosmology of supernatural affliction, misfortune

was never random or abstract.

In order to identify the sources of affliction, some healers resorted to

divination. Divination ritual was essential to the diagnostic process that

began the healing process. Using clairvoyance and prediction, Conjurers

were believed to be able to locate the direct sources of spiritual misfor-

tune that had occurred, whether they were the destructive practices of

another Conjurer or the deleterious effects of an enchanted object. Others

used more idiosyncratic methods. The avid scratchings of a wildly feath-

ered, “frizzled” chicken in the earth, for instance, revealed that some dan-

gerous, unknown maleficence lay beneath the surface. Discarded grounds

in an otherwise ordinary cup of tea or coffee also gave forth hidden facts.

Other healing experts gazed at cups, gourds, and crystals for camouflaged

signs. Others read mysteries in a deck of cards. “I remember once of be-

ing at a woman’s house,” wrote a correspondent in the late nineteenth

century to Virginia’s Hampton Institute publication, the Southern Work-

man, “and a Conjurer came there . . . and he threw his cards to the top

of the room and called them out one by one until he called them all down.”

The practitioner told her that she needed to be saved from a “fix.”22

Practitioners often combined techniques in order to detect harming

magic, as described by Virginia Hayes Shepard, an ex-slave in Virginia.

“When you sent for the Conjure doctor he always brought a pack of cards

and a bottle with a live bug in it—a string tied around the neck of the

bottle,” declared Shepard. “He shuffles cards, you cut them, and he calls

them off. All the time he is watching his bottle with the bug in it called

a ‘walking boy.’ ” According to Shepard, when the insect shifted in the

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 101

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

underside of the bottle, the specialist was able to determine the direction

in which the victim’s enemy went. Another healing practitioner used the

“walking boy” to uncover a charm believed to be hidden beneath the

grass in someone’s yard. “After he had walked over and around the yard

several times,” related an observer, “the “boy” fluttered and kicked

as though he would come out of the bottle.” A person was ordered to

dig quickly in that spot, for a “trick bag” could be found. Divination

with a silver dime was one of the more popular practices that was

used to determine the presence of malign Conjure for blacks in the early-

twentieth-century South. “A dime will turn black or blue in the presence

of evil,” noted an anthropologist in North Carolina. Dimes could also

be boiled with potential tricks and charms, and if the dimes would “jump

around” or become discolored, it was seen as a sign of maleficia. A dime

placed under an individual’s tongue would also reveal if that person had

ingested magical poisons. These diverse, esoteric techniques for discov-

ering the causes of affliction served to reinforce African American pa-

tients’ confidence in supernatural healers.23

Through divination, African American healers distinguished between

sicknesses that were the result of natural causes and those that involved

supernatural forces. “Well, dey’s some believe in cunjuh an some would

don’t,” stated Charles Hunter, a son of slaves on St. Simons Island,

Georgia. “Dey’s lots would say sickness ain natchul an somebody put

something down for you.” The frequency with which life-threatening dis-

ease struck was, for some, a sure sign of evil magic. “Everytime some-

body gets sick it ain’t natchel sickness,” observed a black woman in

Richmond County, Georgia, in the late 1930s. “I have seed folks die with

what the doctors called consumption, and yet they didn’t have it. I have

seed people die with heart trouble, and they didn’t have it. Folks is havin’

more strokes now than ever but they ain’t natchel.”24

Conjure was suspected when an ailment was chronic or unresponsive

to treatment; when sickness manifested especially unusual signs and

symptoms; or when illnesses were dramatic and unanticipated. Afflictions

that could not be corrected by conventional medical means were often

believed to have been caused by Conjure, and these necessitated special

care. “They’s lots of those kind of cases the ord’nary person never hear

about,” said the ex-slave William Adams when questioned concerning

such ailments. “You hear of the cases the doctors can’t understand, nor

will they ’spond to treatment.” “The medical doctors aint no good for

nothing lak that,” asserted Jasper Millegan, whose uncle had been poi-

soned by supernatural means, he claimed. “He nebber did get any bet-

102 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

ter and he died.” A former bondwoman in Yamacraw, South Carolina,

argued for the effectiveness of supernatural remedies in especially stub-

born cases. She believed that she had been Conjured, and ordinary med-

icine had failed her: “I call a regluh doctuh, but he didn seem tuh do no

good.” She was encouraged by the treatment that was offered by the

Conjure practitioner. “three weeks ago I went tuh a root man,” she stated,

“I guess I soon be well.”25

In some instances a previously sick patient would relapse under the

ministrations of regular physicians. “I knew an old lady that had not been

able . . . to even sit up in bed,” stated a letter in the Southern Workman

journal in 1878, “She was pronounced incurable by all the other doc-

tors.” Called at the last minute, a Conjurer restored her health. “How

he managed to do it,” the writer pondered, “I do not know.” The ad-

ministrator Alice Bacon, who collected folk beliefs from over twenty years

at Hampton Institute, observed that among blacks “the surest sign that

[a] disease [was] the result of a spell or trick” was that a patient would

grow “worse rather than better under the treatment of regular physi-

cians.” The Southern Workman also printed a letter describing an old

man who was “ill with palsy,” who “after spending much money em-

ploying medical doctors and getting no relief,” sought a Conjurer, a spe-

cialist who “found the cause of his illness.” “Not many days elapsed,”

the account concluded, “before he was walking as well as ever.” It ap-

pears that from the perspective of many African American patients, con-

ventional medicine was inadequate because it did not consider the spec-

trum of possible causes in its diagnosis. “Let me tell you right here, when

you done been Conjured, medical doctors can’t do you no good,”

claimed Rosa Millegan, a daughter of slaves in Atlanta, Georgia, “you

got ter get a nudder Conjur doctor ter get it off you.”26

A range of physical afflictions were treated with conjuring methods.

Pneumonia, rheumatism, and arthritis were included among the infir-

mities for which blacks described supernatural cures. The black novel-

ist Charles Chesnutt observed that Conjure-related ailments among

African Americans accompanied hard lives, worn bodies, and old age.

“To many old people in the South . . . any unusual ache or pain is quite

as likely to have been caused by some external evil influence as by nat-

ural causes,” he wrote. “Tumors, sudden swellings due to inflammatory

rheumatism or the bites of insects, are especially open to suspicion.

Paralysis is proof positive of Conjuration.” Other ailments that were

sometimes believed to be caused by Conjure included anemia, boils, chills,

and depression.27

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 103

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

Some illnesses manifested distinctive characteristics that were specif-

ically associated with Conjure. Pellagra, a respiratory disease that af-

flicted many African Americans in the South in the nineteenth century,

was accompanied in its late stages by symptoms of dementia and insan-

ity, which was seen as a sign of supernatural harming. Another affliction

was neuralgia, a nerve disorder that was frequently attributed to the work

of witches. Some Conjurers acted as disease specialists who treated par-

ticular disorders. The talent of one root doctor in Alabama lay in cur-

ing venereal disease. And because supernatural afflictions were usually

portrayed with specific physical symptoms, healers were called on to treat

a substantial number of the ailments that affected members of African

American communities.28

Persons with unusual symptoms were prime candidates for Conjure

healing. When the ex-slave Alex Johnson experienced an unbearable

burning sensation in his feet, as if there was “a fire in them,” he imme-

diately surmised that he had become a target of malign conjuring. “It

struck me in the right foot, and then in the left, but most in the right

foot,” he explained, “then run over my whole body, and rested in my

head; I went home, and knew I was cunjered.” Even more frequently,

African Americans described Conjure sickness as an intrusion of entities

within the body. In these narrative accounts, physical affliction is por-

trayed as a state in which the body becomes a living menagerie. “In 1873

I was going down the street and came across a Conjure doctor, and he

asked me where did a certain lady live, and I told him and he went there,”

related one witness, “the woman told him she had some kind of pain in

her head and side and told him something kept coming up in her throat.”

The Conjure doctor discovered that she had been fixed by a cup of tea

that she had been offered. According to the witness, he gave her his own

formula, told her to drink it, and “in five minutes a scorpion came out

of her mouth.” Nathaniel John Lewis of Tin City, Georgia, was another

witness to such a bodily intrusion. “My wife Hattie had a spell put on

her for three long years with a nest of rattlesnakes inside her,” he insisted.

“She just lay there and swelled and suffered.” Another story was related

to Hurston in 1928 by Rachel Silas, of Sanford, Florida. “Ah seen uh

‘oman wid uh gopher in her belly,” she asserted. “You could see ‘m movin’

‘round in her. And once every day he’d turn hisself clear over and then

you could hear her hollerin’ for more’n a mile. Dat hard shell would be

cuttin’ her insides.” Such descriptions, related in grim detail, graphically

conveyed the powerlessness and agony of Conjured victims.29

Accounts of reptiles and small animals circulating throughout the in-

104 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

ternal system are peculiar to African American sickness narratives.

George Little, a root doctor in Brownsville, Georgia, described the deadly

consequences of this kind of Conjure attack. “Frawgs an lizuds and sech

tings is injected intuh people’s bodies an duh people den fall ill an some-

time die,” he maintained. Usually, these stories were relayed with the firm

conviction of their veracity. “since I came to talk with such good old

Christians who I known would not tell a lie,” declared one unidentified

writer in a letter to the Southern Workman, “they told me they have seen

ground puppies jump out of folks feet, and lizards and snakes.” Another

account described a man that had been made sick by another’s malicious

“work:” “Everytime they tried to give him soup or anything to eat, some-

thing would come crawling up in his throat and choke him,” stated one

onlooker. “This fortuneteller said it was a turtle in his throat.” After the

man died, it was explained that the “turtle come up in his throat and

choked him to death,” although most around him believed that the cause

of his suffering was the deadly, malevolent power of Conjure.30

Since the Conjurer was a diagnostician and healer, he or she was able

to relieve afflicted persons by removing the invading creatures and de-

termining the precise origins of the malady, thereby treating the symp-

toms and their source. Some of their techniques were intense and dra-

matic. In 1919 a folklorist in Virginia reported that he had seen a black

Conjure doctor use a cow horn to treat his patient, a device that closely

resembled the cupping and blood-letting instruments of practitioners in

traditional Africa and premodern Europe. Summoned to attend a des-

perately ill woman, the Conjurer “pricked the back of the woman’s neck,

drew blood, and put his cupping horn to it,” according to the account.

“He took it off, and dropped out of it a young snake and a lizard. ‘From

dishyere on you gwine to be a well woman,’ he said. And she was.”

Another specialist who was paid to treat a sick patient “took out of her

right arm a spool of thread, and out of her leg a lizard,” stated a letter

in the Southern Workman. “This is the truth, what I saw with my own

eyes,” the correspondent professed. Chesnutt told of a man who had been

poisoned when a lizard had entered his system. “This lizard, according

to the ‘doctor,’ would start from the man’s shoulder and pass down the

side of the body to the leg,” he wrote. “When it reached the calf of the

leg the lizard’s head would appear right under the skin. After it had been

perceptible for three days the lizard was to be cut out with a razor, or

the man would die.” Having no other explanation for the story, Chesnutt

turned to evidence from his observations of the natural world. He guessed

that the tradition of bodily intrusions may have “derived its existence

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 105

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

from the fact that certain tropical insects sometimes lay their eggs be-

neath the skins of animals, or even of men, from which it is difficult to

expel them until the larvae are hatched.” He concluded that blacks drew

these ideas from their observations of subcutaneously burrowing insects

and parasites.31

The usual species of animal invaders in Conjure accounts included rep-

tiles, turtles, spiders, scorpions, frogs, groundpuppies (salamanders),

worms, and snails—all creatures associated with mud, water, or slime.

Whether the aftermath of poisoning, where the creatures were believed

to be introduced by way of ingestion, or just as often the result of a

charmed object somewhere in the proximity of the victim, complaints of

bodily invasion were always accompanied by great physical suffering.

Their presence — beneath the skin, infiltrating the cavities, spilling

throughout the body without restraint, overwhelmingly present in the

body but very clearly not of the body—conveys the image of a human

container. The narratives suggest porosity of the inner person.32

The traditional cultural association between lower animals and pol-

lution indicates that African Americans might have interpreted some af-

flictions as a moral sign. Descriptions of creatures whose presence en-

gendered an unclean inner self may explain the regular identification of

the animal invaders as serpents or crawling, serpentlike reptiles. The sub-

sequent release of the creatures could denote an individual’s freedom from

corruption, or sin. When the Georgia ex-slave Ellen Dorsey called a spe-

cialist “to wawd off conjuh” in her legs, the practitioner who treated her

described “a big black snake” that slithered out of her foot. As the snake

retreated the Conjurer remarked, “Deah goes duh devil,” and Dorsey

later recovered. Sarah Handy noted that one doctor’s treatment included

the burning of “various vile-smelling powders” in a patient’s room, fol-

lowed by his opening a window “to let the devil out.” The devil was in-

carnated in the form of a snake, an archetypal symbol for evil in the bib-

lical tradition.33

These accounts offer numerous possibilities for understanding phys-

ical affliction among African Americans. Some patients and practition-

ers balanced multiple ideas in order to interpret the causes of sickness

and misfortune in their lives. A late-nineteenth-century ex-slave narra-

tive shows how individuals might propose a variety of reasons for their

victimization. In this case, an African American woman explained the

causes of her sudden onset of blindness by positing divine judgment, her

own immorality, and evil Conjurers, as potential sources. Her story, like

most other Conjure narratives, begins with an account of her relation-

106 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

ships with other persons and provides evidence of the social nature of

supernatural harming:

a man and he wife and I was workin’ as woodchoppers on de Santa Fe

route up Beaumont to Tyler County. After us git up and I starts ’way, I . . .

hear somethin’ say, “Rose, you done somethin you ain’t ought.” I say, “No,

Lawd, no.” Den de voice say, “Somethin gwine happen to you,” and de

next mornin I’s blind as de bat and I aint hever seed since. . . . Some try tell

me snow or sweat or smoke de reason. Dat aint de reason. Dey a old, old,

slewfooted somethin’ from Louisiana and dey say he de Conjure man, one

dem old hoodoo niggers. He git mad at me de last plum-ripenin’ time and

he make up powdered rattlesnake dust and pass dat through my hair and I

sho’ ain’t seed no more. 34

As victims so often did, the narrator made sense of her affliction by look-

ing at others within her immediate environment as possible perpetrators.

Conjure harming, as we have seen, was a vehicle of conflict, and hence

bodily infirmities originated at the site of human intention, where fear,

greed, and anger pitted person against person and ensnared victims in a

cycle of pain and suspicion.

Turning from the multifaceted complex of Conjure beliefs to explic-

itly religious understandings of affliction and healing, we find similar

ideas with no clear provenance. Some blacks may have reconfigured heal-

ing beliefs and practices to fit within the framework of institutionalized

Christianity. Not only does it appear that some black Christians rein-

terpreted the older Conjure healing traditions, but the corresponding ex-

periences of many religious healers and Conjure practitioners suggests

that they drew from a common cultural vernacular.

b b b

One of the most significant events in American religious history at the

end of the nineteenth century was the formation of the Holiness-

Pentecostal movement. The modern Holiness movement had roots in the

perfectionist strands of Wesleyan Methodism, which taught that a life of

complete righteousness, called sanctification, was available to the be-

lieving Christian through a “second work of grace” by the indwelling

Holy Spirit. Sanctification began with the conversion and justification

of the individual and continued as a process in which the Christian was

empowered in a baptism of the Spirit that allowed him to live a devout,

sin-free life. Holiness practitioners believed that sanctification was

achieved by God’s grace, although they differed in their ideas of what

the human role in this process would be. Various doctrinal views con-

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 107

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

cerning the attainment of sanctification developed in the mid-1800s and

were complemented by the establishment of a number of new churches

that embodied various wings of the Holiness movement.35

Although the movement became increasingly middle-class in its ori-

entation after the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans of

the poor and working classes were some of its most active early partic-

ipants. The attraction of blacks to the Holiness tradition, it has been ar-

gued, had to do with its espousal of values that harked back to tradi-

tions and forms of worship that had been disavowed by upwardly mobile

freedpersons after Emancipation. Holiness churches represented a “con-

servative counterweight” to Christian liberalism, for Holiness practi-

tioners sought to keep alive the “old-time religion” that seemed in dan-

ger of dying out. African American Holiness churchgoers revived the

spirited practices of the slave church, including its inspired preaching and

song, its shouts, ecstatic devotionals, and visionary experiences. In their

pursuit of a folk primitivism, blacks in the Holiness movement rekindled

the embers and traditions of a religious culture that belonged to the past,

which had been abandoned by many mainstream African American

Protestant churches.36

The blossoming of the African American Holiness movement initiated,

in part, an institutionalization of the folk traditions of the former slaves.

Pentecostalism, which emerged as its outgrowth, also expressed strong

affinities with some ex-slave traditions. Two of the pioneers of Pen-

tecostalism, William J. Seymour, a black preacher from Texas with Afro-

Baptist roots, and Charles F. Parham, a white Methodist evangelist hail-

ing from Topeka, Kansas, had carried forth the old-time practices and

biblically fundamentalist beliefs of their forebears. Yet their particular

innovations regarding the sanctification doctrine marked a departure that

ultimately was to shape the course of modern Christianity. Both Seymour

and Parham insisted that the sanctification experience should be ac-

companied by a manifest sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, glosso-

lalia, or speaking in tongues. They began to popularize this “third bless-

ing” of the gift of tongues. While Parham is credited with having

introduced the practice in his bible school as a “formally stated doctrine,”

it was Seymour who is considered responsible for its institutionalization

in the public revival that inaugurated the Pentecostal movement at the

Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, California, in 1906.37

Divine healing became a cornerstone of Pentecostal theology. The con-

viction that physical healing, along with unknown tongues and other gifts

of the Holy Spirit such as prophecy and miraculous signs and wonders,

108 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

existed in the present-day church stemmed from the Pentecostals’ em-

phasis on biblical authority. For Pentecostals, physical affliction ran

counter to God’s will for the faithful Christian. In this tradition, cause

of all disease was sin, which had originated with the fall of humanity.

Underlying the Pentecostal faith healing doctrine was the establishment

of a “healing contract” with God, in which the health of the believer was

linked to a biblical promise that was accomplished through Christ’s re-

deeming work of atonement. Thus encapsulated within the Pentecostal

healing process was the entire experience of repentance, conversion, sal-

vation, sanctification, and baptism by the Holy Spirit. As Seymour wrote

in a publication from the Azusa Street revival, “Thank God, we have a

living Christ among us to heal our diseases. . . . We that are the messen-

gers of this precious atonement ought to preach all of it, justification,

sanctification, healing, the baptism with the Holy Ghost, and signs fol-

lowing.” Faith healing, which vied against tongues and Holy Spirit bap-

tism for preeminence in the early stages of Pentecostal revivalism,

emerged as the dominant focus of the movement by the mid twentieth

century.38

Early African American Pentecostal traditions show similarities with

many of the supernatural traditions that were prevalent among the slaves

and their descendants. Pentecostal belief revolved around invisible forces,

beings, and powers in the spiritual realm, and like the Conjure practi-

tioners, Pentecostalists viewed unusual events as signs of divine or sa-

tanic intervention in the physical realm. In a sermon, for example, enti-

tled “Storms—Storms—Storms,” Charles Harrison Mason, founder of

the largest black Pentecostal denomination, described some of the mirac-

ulous activities that he attributed to “God’s strange work:”

in His strange act He put a woman in a well and the water felt as cotton

under her feet, then in His strange way lifted her out, unhurt. . . . It is said

in one home a lady had lately installed a new gas range but God came and

swept it out of the house and set a coal stove in its place. Was that not one

of God’s strange acts? . . . In a little town . . . where there was so much race

hatred, I am told that a sign bearing these words was raised, “Negroes,

read and run.” God performed another one of His strange acts. The town

was completely destroyed. 39

Healing testimonials by black Pentecostals described similar acts of

supernatural intervention. “He reveals to me the revelation of his mys-

teries,” wrote C. S. Reese of Memphis, in the Church of God in Christ

magazine. “He gives me power to cast out devils, to lay hands on the

sick, and they recover.” Other Pentecostal testimonies emphasized vi-

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 109

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

sionary experiences and acts of supernatural healing. “I saw a man stand-

ing near my bedside, who said to me, ‘you have a very bad stomach and

you will have to have an operation,’ ” stated one account. “Then sud-

denly the man disappeared. I then turned to the Lord and began to pray.”

After praying for “ten days,” claimed the writer, “God truly healed me

of my infirmities.” Reports of Pentecostal faith healing highlighted its

supernatural dimensions. “Some of the miracles which God performed

in healing,” wrote Mason, were “the extraction of the jawbone of a

woman who came to the meeting in Memphis, Tennessee, a few years

ago. . . . Another who was suffering with toothache came up. . . . The

tooth came out of her mouth and she showed it to all who were present.”

Such accounts resonate with the African American conjuring narratives

of supernatural healing by slaves and ex-slaves.40

Pentecostals employed techniques such as prayer, the “laying on” of

hands, and anointing with oil, as prescribed in the Bible, for healing.

These practices may have revalidated older African American beliefs in

the efficacy of special material objects as sources of supernatural power.

Blessed cloths and handkerchiefs, for example, popular with both black

and white evangelists in the early twentieth century, were standard ac-

coutrements in African American Pentecostal healing services. A notice

in The Whole Truth magazine, the newspaper of the Church of God in

Christ, illustrates the currency of these traditions among black American

Pentecostals in the early twentieth century. “Sister Larry of Columbus,

Mississippi, writes . . . that God has so wonderfully healed her son

through the prayers of Elder Mason and others. He was very sick with

appendicitis. She wrote to Lexington to Elder Mason to send her an

anointed cloth, which he did send, and today her son is at work.” Another

testimonial, published more than twenty years later, related an account

with a similar emphasis on the efficacy of certain materials for healing.

“My little granddaughter was totally blind. . . . I told Elder Samuel to

pray for her. He sent an anointed cloth. I put it on her eyes and her sight

came back. Glory!” Articles of spiritual potency, cloths and handkerchiefs

embodied divine grace. “My heart rejoiced and the power of God came

upon me as I applied the cloth to my breast,” read one account, “I could

feel the affected part being drawn, and when I applied the second cloth

it completely left. I have not felt the hurting any more. I thank the Lord

for being healed.”41

“Casting out” various ailments from the bodies of the sick was an-

other practice that was widely utilized in the ministries of Pentecostal

faith healers. Elder Lucy Smith, a preacher in depression-era Chicago,

110 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

told how she once rebuked the “death demon” of a woman who was

“past talking or seeing.” The performance of this “work of deliverance,”

as such spiritual traditions came to be known, strongly resembled the

ritual gestures of Conjurers, who made a common practice of extract-

ing afflictions in the form of small animals or objects from their patients.

Similarly, Pentecostal healers claimed power over diseases that they lit-

erally delivered from the bodies of the sick, which were sometimes man-

ifested in visible malevolent tumors or growths.42

Some Pentecostal healers personified the anomalous traits of super-

natural practitioners. Bishop Mason, for example, was said to have been

endowed with visions and remarkable gifts at an early age. During his

ministry he had demonstrated such talents as “spiritual” writing and

singing, and had once levitated, according to his own account. Mason

owned a collection of unusually formed objects including roots, branches,

and vegetables that he consulted as “sources for spiritual revelations,”

revisiting the tradition of conjuring charms. Mason would illustrate his

sermons by referring to these “earthly signs” and “freaks of nature,” as

he called them. “When scriptural texts seem to fail and audiences seem

to tire of the monotony of sermons,” wrote C. G. Brown, a secretary of

the Church of God in Christ in the early twentieth century, “the Spirit

directs Elder Mason’s mind to a sign. As he turns it over and from side

to side, God’s mystery comes out of it.” Mason delivered divine inter-

pretations while meditating on misshapen tree limbs, stones, or the en-

trails of chickens. “It appears that he is reading one of the recesses of the

object from which he is preaching,” commented Brown.43

The accent on magic-as-miracle figured in the practices of other pop-

ular healing practitioners who were influenced by the Pentecostal tradi-

tion, such as Charles Manuel Grace, the African American sect leader

who attained prominence in the 1930s as “Sweet Daddy Grace.” Grace,

a former member of the Church of God in Christ, tapped a potent vein

in black supernatural culture by infusing Christian practices with bibli-

cal magic. Grace attained a loyal following by promising salvation, good

fortune, and physical wholeness to his devotees. A stream of enthusias-

tic letters in his Grace Magazine attested to the spontaneous healings that

resulted from his touch, the sound of his voice, or meditation on his por-

trait. Bishop Grace’s followers also used the Grace Magazine as a charm:

chewed and swallowed, its pages remedied internal ailments and diseases

of the vital organs; made into a poultice or bandage, they rehabilitated

fractures and wounds. A patch of “Grace healing cloth,” tucked away

or worn about the neck like a Hoodoo bag, provided special blessings

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 111

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

and supernatural protection. A marketplace of Grace products, includ-

ing soap, lotion, toothpaste, coffee, writing paper and other accessories,

brought the supernatural into the everyday lives of persons whose phys-

ical and spiritual needs were experienced as a single condition. As one

testimonial exclaimed, “there is healing power in the Grace Magazine

and the products is [sic] my doctor. I use them for medicine, and I be

healed both soul and body. Thank God for that, and for Daddy Grace,

for he is the cause of it all.”44

Paralleling the Conjure doctors, religious leaders such as Mason and

Grace established their approaches to healing within the cultural worlds

of their patients. As religious practitioners, they affirmed and acknowl-

edged the divine sources of their power. And in Indianola, Mississippi,

the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker located several sectarian

preachers who were known as “Voodoo doctors,” including a “Reverend

D.,” who likewise claimed that his power came from God and that his

ability to heal was “learned by listening to the ‘old folks’ ” as a young

man. “In addition to curing illness, he gives advice and aid in any sort

of predicament,” wrote Powdermaker, “instructing people how to act

and giving them a charm to insure success.” Reverend D.’s clients included

women seeking mates, businessmen involved in lawsuits, and others who

sought to retrieve stolen property, attain money, or locate sources of

livelihood. “His practice and his religion are firmly interwoven,” con-

cluded Powdermaker, “so that each is reinforced by the other.” Like the

slave Conjurers, Reverend D. helped alleviate physical afflictions while

addressing the salient conflicts in his clients’ lives.45

Other African American healing practitioners such as Madam Truth,

a professed “fortune-teller and clairvoyant” and member of the early-

twentieth-century Holy Sanctified Church of Sandfly, Georgia, combined

religious piety with supernatural artistry. Madame Truth identified the

causes of clients’ afflictions that came about from conflicts over money,

work, and the interpersonal relationships. “I advise on business and love

affairs,” she maintained. “Deah’s a remedy fuh ebry trouble and I hab

dat remedy, fuh a spirit hab brung it to me.” Madam Truth’s healing prac-

tices extended to social and emotional distress as well as physical disor-

ders that were perceived to possess spiritual origins.46

Even as they offered a variety of possibilities for addressing affliction

within an individual’s life, black sectarian healers, Pentecostalists, and

Conjurers all shared fundamental beliefs concerning the underlying

sources of affliction. To African American Pentecostal Christians, dis-

ease was a manifestation of God’s judgment, or evidence of a demonic

112 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

spiritual assault upon the body. Immoral behaviors such as fault-find-

ing, jealousy, and criticism were conceived as forms of sin and deemed

responsible for bodily afflictions as well. Pentecostalists understood heal-

ing as an exorcism of evil spirits. In some cases, the healer would speak

directly to an offensive entity, rebuking and commanding the presence

to withdraw from the body of the afflicted. Similarly, in the Conjure heal-

ing tradition, practitioners placed liability on spiritual powers that had

operated through the actions of malign practitioners and spiteful per-

sons. Affliction originated in relationships. Furthermore, like the

Pentecostal healers, Conjure specialists emphasized the supernatural di-

mensions of affliction and their own authority over the powers that had

brought about sickness and disease.

Even as the spiritual and physical worlds converged in the human

condition in these traditions, the supernatural beliefs themselves over-

lapped and intersected in the lives of the afflicted. Thus victims of un-

treatable ailments might seek out both for treatment. Conceived as min-

istry in black churches and as therapy by conjuring specialists, African

American healing traditions reinforced the belief in supernatural power

and the ability of certain individuals to draw on invisible forces to re-

store wholeness.

One significant theological difference separated Afro-Christian reli-

gious healers from supernatural practitioners like the Conjurers.

Pentecostals claimed that God was the vehicle of all miracles and won-

ders, and all curing rituals were conducted in His name and legitimated

by their understanding of sacred Scripture. The nature of the source of

spiritual power in Conjure was more ambiguous. Some Conjurers

claimed that the origins of their abilities were divine, and others believed

that spiritual force emanated from the objects and charms that they had

themselves created. Still others were less forthcoming on the origin of

their powers. Finally, although black Pentecostalists’ supernatural beliefs

exhibited significant similarities with those of practitioners in the con-

juring tradition, acknowledged practitioners of Conjure were rarely ac-

cepted in the Pentecostal churches. Conjure was viewed by many church-

goers as something evil and negative—a danger to be opposed and

subdued with a stronger, Christian “magic.”

b b b

A more explicit adoption of supernaturalism in a religious context oc-

curred within the black Spiritual churches, a network of congregations

that emerged within cities in the United States after the turn of the twen-

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 113

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

tieth century. Its earliest officially chartered congregation was the Eternal

Life Spiritualist Church, founded in 1913 in Chicago. The city was a ver-

itable mecca for thousands of blacks who left the South between 1914

and 1918, and subsequently between 1939 and 1945, during what be-

came known as the Great Migration. Fleeing labor exploitation, a dev-

astated agricultural economy, and Jim Crow segregation, masses of black

southerners poured into Chicago and other northern cities, filling a de-

mand for cheap labor in northern industries. Concurrent with the rising

tide of urbanization developed an increasingly diverse religious situation,

as African Americans founded and joined Baptist and Methodist con-

gregations, Holiness churches, Muslim temples, Judaic sects, and a host

of fraternal and nationalistic associations. The rise of the Spiritual

churches fit into a larger pattern of spiritual pluralism that characterized

black American religious life in the first quarter of the twentieth century.47

The early Spiritual churches have been aptly described as urban

“wayside shrines” where persons in black communities sought guidance

on a variety of secular and spiritual matters. Many of these churches were

actually private venues that offered personal consultations for individu-

als in need of employment, protection, or healing. Spiritualist advisors

sometimes doubled as pastors, forming new congregational bodies with

their regular clients. In this manner many new storefront churches were

organized around Spiritual ministers.48

The decentralized structure of the Spiritual church movement per-

mitted considerable eclecticism in the groups’ theology and practices.

Although the churches shared a common origin, Spiritual tradition var-

ied from congregation to congregation. The emphasis on church auton-

omy might have fostered religious syncretism. In New Orleans, for ex-

ample, home of some of the first Spiritual churches in the country, church

practices were shaped by unique regional influences. Even as most

Spiritual churches developed as singular entities—with a few mush-

rooming into national prominence—the culturally distinctive congrega-

tions in New Orleans in the first quarter of the twentieth century bore

only a slight resemblance to their counterparts in other areas of the United

States.49

In the New Orleans Spiritual tradition, the integration of Christianity

and supernaturalism was openly acknowledged. The churches drew from

a variety of cultural and religious sources, including Roman Catholicism,

Caribbean vodou, Italian American folk tradition, and African American

Conjure and Hoodoo. Regarding the New Orleans churches, Hurston

wrote in 1932 that “in addition to herbs, reptiles, and insects, [they] make

114 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

use of the altar, the candles, the incense, the holy water, and blessed water

of the Catholic church—that being the dominant religion of the city and

state.” Another reporter observed of these churches that while they pub-

licly disavowed Conjure and Hoodoo, most of the Spiritual ministers in

New Orleans maintained practices that were virtually identical to those

traditions. “All present day Mothers [Spiritual church leaders] deny they

practice Voodoo, and many of them don’t,” claimed Robert Tallant, a

local writer. “However, others use many of the oils and powders and sell

a mild sort of gris-gris.” Outside New Orleans, in cities like Chicago,

Detroit, and Harlem, the supernatural orientation of the black Spiritual

religion was also well known. “The attraction of the Spiritualists was

their straight-forward utilitarian use of religion,” asserts one source,

“Magical objects in the form of charms or amulets were used to guard

against any possible evil or attain some cherished good.”50

Despite its highlighting of the supernatural, Spiritual worship was vir-

tually indistinguishable from that of black Pentecostals and Holiness

practitioners. Like African American churchgoers in these traditions,

Spiritualists participated in expressive singing, jubilant dancing, shout-

ing, and glossolalia. A hallmark of black Spiritual liturgy was possession

by the Holy Ghost, an activity demonstrating the dynamic influence of

Protestant revivalism. Furthermore, like their Pentecostal counterparts,

black Spiritualists incorporated prayer, the laying on of hands, and

anointing with oil into their healing services. A primary difference be-

tween the Spiritualists and other Afro-Christian churches concerned the

emphasis that the former placed on human mediation with the diverse

forces of the spiritual world. In the black Spiritual tradition, a pivotal

event was the believer’s interaction with divinities, sacred entities, per-

sons who had “passed on,” Roman Catholic saints, or other powerful

beings. While some Spiritual churches instituted public ceremonies for

“calling up” the spirits, such rituals more frequently occurred in the con-

text of private séances or in personal sessions with Spiritualist mediums

(also known as prophets, divine healers, and advisors) outside regular

church services.51

The emphasis on supernaturalism in the Spiritual churches can also

be seen in particular practices. While retaining the liturgical trappings

of Christianity, black Spiritualists put a distinctive accent on devotional

spaces, objects, and rituals that facilitated the invocation of “Spirit.”

Spiritual sanctuaries and altars were filled with statues of saints, photo-

graphs of Spiritual forebears and leaders, colored candles, and tall vases

with colorful bouquets. Using techniques such as prayer and bibliomancy

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 115

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

(guidance through biblical revelation), Spiritualist practitioners ad-

dressed clients’ concerns. Some Spiritualists embellished older conjuring

techniques by utilizing the dramatic visual impact of miraculous heal-

ings. For instance, according to witnesses, Mother Catherine Seals, a leg-

endary Spiritual leader in the early twentieth century, removed a black

cat, a wasp’s nest, and an assortment of other rustic creatures from the

bodies of afflicted patients at her church in New Orleans.52

African American Spiritualists also stimulated the advent of an active

public economy of store-bought supernatural merchandise. Spiritualists

and their clients traded and sold amulets, accumulated charms, and cre-

ated talismans in order to fend off evil forces and ensure the presence of

positive spiritual forces. The most popular items of Spiritual practition-

ers were used sanctify impure environments. Hans Baer, an anthropolo-

gist who researched the black Spiritualist movement in the 1970s and

1980s, observed that a profusion of commercial goods that guaranteed

prosperity, wealth, and other extravagant promises was bought by be-

lievers. “Sprays, incenses, baths, floor washes, perfume oils, special soaps,

powders, roots and herbs” were trade items for Spiritualist practition-

ers. “It was not uncommon,” Baer found, “to see ‘jinx removing’ can-

dles or ‘Dr. Japo’ anointing oil used in Spiritual churches.” The ritual

procurements utilized in Spiritual ceremonies were often the same as those

obtained in the occult drugstores and religious markets frequented by

Conjure practitioners.53

A concern for healing was prominent in the ministries of Spiritualist

leaders from the beginning of the movement. Like Conjure practition-

ers, black Spiritual practitioners treated affliction in the context of the

conditions that shaped the lives of members of their congregations. In

Nashville, Tennessee, where the state’s first Spiritual church was estab-

lished in 1924, narratives by African American practitioners testified of

the web of relations that bound family members, neighbors, and ac-

quaintances in sickness and health. These ties encompassed the living and

the dead. One man, a seventy-year-old member of the church, told how

his mother, his brother, and his spouse, all deceased, frequently visited

him and expressed great concern for his well-being. “My wife comes to

comfort me,” he claimed, “in the spirit, so often . . . she told me to check

up on myself in some of the things I was doing. She said, ‘you ain’t go-

ing right, now watch your step, now you must go straight.’ ” Another

woman, an embattled wife in a lover’s triangle, spoke of the healing power

of a Spiritual minister who cured her of “madness” when she was

“hoodooed” by her adulterous husband and his mistress. The minister,

116 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

she claimed, “had power above. She had a strong power to heal,” she

professed, “I just . . . thank God that He enabled me to get myself back

to be myself from that way they fixed me.” Another congregant com-

mended a Spiritual medium for helping her after a series of “unlucky”

accidents caused her to become sick. “I was nothing but a shell,” she de-

clared, “I went up there to [the medium] and she told me to fast and pray

on Monday for my health and fast and pray on Wednesday for my

strength. . . . She sure has helped me a lot. I tell you I came out.” Spiritual

churchgoers attested to recovery from ailments that ranged from alco-

holism and substance abuse, to crippling disabilities and handicaps.

Spiritual beliefs, they acknowledged, had provided an effective system

for healing their afflictions.54

One of the most important services that Spiritual practitioners pro-

vided for clients and congregation members was psychotherapeutic. Their

treatment emphasized the active role of the individual in overcoming the

inner, self-inflicted obstacles that could hinder one’s progression to good

health. The faith that believers placed in Spiritual ministers allowed per-

sons to take charge of their own afflictions, and by extension, to take

charge of conflicts that had occurred within their lives as well. Spiritualist

healers offered valuable counsel to African American men and women

whose control over their own environment—often tainted by racism and

discrimination, economic inequalities, and damaged interpersonal rela-

tions—was uncertain or precarious. By providing remedies and spiritual

“work,” Spiritualists bolstered individuals’ beliefs in their ability to care

for themselves. “I tell the people what the spirit directs and they go back

to work out their problems,” asserted a medium in the Nashville church

during the depression era. “So many of them worry about jobs now and

that’s the thing I try to advise in some way. But you see people must live

right and clean to get God’s full blessing.” A Spiritual minister in

Chicago offered similar insights into the relationship between her con-

gregants’ afflictions and the quality of their lives. “People around here

are very insecure,” she claimed. There is nothing so upsetting as fear of

losing your job. A lot of people are troubled and nervous, and I’m here

to help them. . . . What I do is advise people what to do to better them-

selves.” An ethic of responsibility informed Spiritualists’ approaches to

healing. Coupled with the emphasis on supernatural empowerment, black

Spiritual healing traditions offered a multifaceted approach to affliction

in the human condition.55

Correlations with other supernatural traditions are rarely acknowl-

edged by ministers in the present-day black Spiritual churches. Like the

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 117

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

Pentecostals, Spiritualists are adamant in denying the similarities between

themselves and the Conjure practitioners. In fact, the negative linkage of

Conjure and malign supernaturalism has caused wary black Spiritualists

to publicly repudiate such practices in connection with their own beliefs.

Nevertheless, such a connection may exist; in the early twentieth cen-

tury, Zora Neale Hurston noted that several Spiritual congregations in

the South were “stolen” by Hoodoo doctors who later became minis-

ters. She found what she called “a strong aroma of hoodoo” hovering

about the churches that she visited. Still most black Spiritualists continue

to view Conjure as contrary to their sacred intentions. “if you believe in

Hoodoo, don’t come in here,” warned one Spiritual minister in Nashville,

“If you got dimes in your stocking or bags about your necks, take ’em

out of here, we don’t deal in that.” Others corroborated a genealogical

relationship to Conjure, although with some qualifications. “Some

branches of the [Spiritual] church are under the influence of Voodoo, or

Hoodoo, as some call it,” claimed Elder B. S. Johnson, an archbishop in

one of the New Orleans churches, “but . . . all my works come directly

out of the Bible.” Despite a continued emphasis on supernatural heal-

ing, séances, charms, divination readings, and spiritual advising, black

Spiritualists eluded public disapproval of their tradition by adopting

many of the standard worship practices in black Protestant revival

churches.56

Black Spiritualists established churches that integrated supernatural-

ism into their practice and theology. Like the Pentecostals and like the

Conjurers, Spiritualists utilized spiritual power for healing. Spiritualists

and Conjurers alike explained the presence of disease and misfortune as

products of both supernatural agents and social actors, acknowledging

the human potential for evil and the intransigence of the invisible forces

that battered body and soul. Connecting both of these traditions was their

promotion of physical well-being through invocation of the supernatu-

ral. Supernatural therapy brought resolution in the physical and spiri-

tual arenas and further allowed for the prevention of future afflictions.

Through healing, Conjure and spiritualism intersected with the social and

cultural forces that shaped black Americans’ lives.57

As a spiritual practice, Conjure was woven into the fabric of black

life. Yet it also inevitably entered the public sphere and colored the sen-

sibilities and convictions of others. As it became more visible in the United

States, Conjure took on varied, complex meanings in American culture,

meanings that practitioners embraced and questioned. After slavery, and

well beyond, as African American supernaturalism revitalized older prac-

118 “Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good”

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

tices, new traditions emerged. Art, music, and literature, as we will see

in the following chapter, were widely influenced by the ferment of African

American supernatural traditions that began in slavery. The dramatic ur-

banization of African American life, and attempts to repress Conjure,

would have a powerful impact on these beliefs and practices. We turn

then to the rise and fall of Conjure and its transformations in the African

American cultural experience.

“Medical Doctors Can’t Do You No Good” 119

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 00

3. U

ni ve

rs ity

o f C

al ifo

rn ia

P re

ss . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed