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By Root 387 0

had taught him to read, until the lessons were stopped by his master. “If you teach that nigger how to read,” the man told his wife, “there would be no keeping him.” But Douglass discovered ways to keep educating himself through whatever books or newspaper scraps could be found. Soon, however, the Baltimore family rearranged its household, and Douglass was abruptly returned to plantation life. His new master in St. Michaels, Maryland, was suspicious: Could a young man who had tasted city living still work the fields? To be brutally certain, at the start of 1834 he “loaned out” Douglass for a year to Edward Covey—a petty, cruel farmer who used every opportunity to beat his new charge on trumped-up offenses. The beatings became so severe that, by August, Douglass sneaked back to his old St. Michaels master to beg for protection. His plea was rejected—and the youth, still bruised and caked with blood, was turned back to Covey’s farm. Once there, he hid all day and into the night in the woods outside Covey’s fields, not knowing what to do.

The days that followed, however, turned out differently than anyone could have imagined. To the shock of Covey, Douglass did return to the farm—and when beatings came, the youth stood up and fought back. For two hours one morning the men struggled, and Covey could not get the better of him. Embarrassed by his inability to control a teenager who finally said enough, the slave master was forced to back down. For Douglass, it was a moment of inner revolution from which he would never retreat: His act of self-defense had freed him in mind and spirit, leaving him to wait for the opportunity when he would finally be free in body as well. It is one of the most remarkable emancipation narratives in American history.

Yet tucked within the folds of Douglass’s inner revolution there lies another, lesser-known drama. It arises from deep within African–American occult tradition—and it is an episode that Douglass would revise and downplay between the time when his earliest memoirs appeared in 1845 and when he published a more widely read account a decade later. It is a window on magic and slave life. And, to find it, we must return to the darkened woods outside Covey’s farm.

The Magic Root

As Douglass hid in the woods on Saturday night, he was discovered by another man in bondage, Sandy Jenkins—someone Doug lass described in his memoirs as “an old adviser.” Sandy, he wrote in 1855, “was not only a religious man, but he professed to believe in a system for which I have no name. He was a genuine African, and had inherited some of the so-called magical powers, said to be possessed by African and eastern nations.”

Sandy Jenkins was a root worker. He practiced an African–American system of magic and folklore that drew deeply upon Western and Central African religious tradition, Native American herb medicine, and sources as diverse as Jewish Kabala and European folklore. It was called hoodoo. White observers would often mistake it for the Afro–Caribbean religion properly called Vodou in Haiti and Voodoo in the American South, particularly in Louisiana, the home to Voodoo’s nineteenth-century high priestess Marie Laveau. Reporters and anthropologists would routinely conflate Voodoo and hoodoo—but the two were very different.

The religion of Voodoo grew from the traditions of the Fon and Yoruba peoples who occupied the West African coastal states. These were the men and women of the “middle passage” who were hurled into slavery throughout America and the Caribbean. In the Fon language, the term vodu meant “deity” or “spirit.” The Fon–Yoruba practices also morphed in the religion of Santeria, an Afro–Caribbean (and, today, increasingly American) faith that often associates ancient African gods with Catholic saints. In Santeria, for example, the great spirit Babaluaiye, guardian of health and sickness, is frequently associated with Saint Lazarus, a patron to the ill. This is the same “Babalu” that Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz serenaded to the unknowing ears of I Love Lucy audiences.

Hoodoo was not a bastardized