The ancestral religious practices of the African diaspora were forced underground by the White church. (source images from Unsplash and Getty)
In 1928, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston drove her gray Chevrolet down to New Orleans to study under the city’s best hoodoo doctors. She was collecting information for a book on Black American folklore, and when
Mules and Men was published seven years later, Hurston declared that hoodoo was “burning with a flame in America, with all the intensity of a suppressed religion.”
In calling hoodoo suppressed, Hurston was making a point about the resilience of people in the African diaspora. Enslaved Africans who were brought to the United States and forcibly converted to Christianity didn’t unlearn the spiritual practices of their motherlands. As a matter of survival, some of these practices like hoodoo were taken underground. Others like spirit possession, reframed as “catching the Holy Ghost�