Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [60]
Was Douglass some kind of a half believer in hoodoo, intent on covering his tracks? Not exactly. The greater likelihood is that the same man who served as the moral anchor of the abolitionist movement wanted no one to misunderstand the true nature of his life story: His was an inner triumph, a realization of personhood against inconceivable odds, a transcendence in thought that permitted him to see himself as a man of agency and as an actor possessed of rights under God. Indeed, Douglass—a proponent of education and self-improvement in the deepest senses—would almost certainly have considered hoodoo and folk magic as distractions at best and at worst as chains of delusion. In an 1845 footnote that he also repeated ten years later, Douglass distanced himself from the question of hoodoo and magic: “This superstition”—root work—“is very common among the more ignorant slaves. A slave seldom dies, but that his death is attributed to trickery.”
But in both his earlier and later memoirs, Douglass proved resolute in his unwillingness to slam shut the door on the matter or to qualify the veneration he felt for Sandy. “I saw in Sandy,” Douglass wrote in 1855, “too deep an insight into human nature, with all his superstition, not to have some respect for his advice; and perhaps, too, a slight gleam or shadow of his superstition had fallen upon me.” Sandy, the “clever soul,” the “old adviser,” and the “genuine African,” provided a rare measure of wise counsel in a chaotic and brutal world. His authority was grounded in an occult tradition that no slaveholder could enter. In this way, above all others, was Sandy a man of magic—a medicine man in the most profound sense.
Mojo Bags and Menorahs
By the early twentieth century, Americans were becoming widely accustomed to buying their household items from commercial catalogs or right off the shelf—and magic made for no exception. Where others would see rows of ordinary drugstore products, hoodoo practitioners saw the raw material for spells. For instance, Octagon bar soap—still marketed by Colgate as a budget cleanser—was scented with the all-important ingredient lemongrass, a key hoodoo formula for “spiritual cleansing” or exorcising homes of bad humors or maleficent spirits. The earthy scents of Florida or Kananga toilet waters were used for household protection, as fragrant altar offerings, or for the honoring of the dead. Hoyt’s cologne was a favorite for gambling luck.
Richly illustrated “spiritual supply” catalogs came to sell items of a more specialized nature, such as lodestones (a favorite money-getting talisman), mojo bags (magical concoctions of herbs in small red flannel sacks to be carried on one’s body), and a wide variety of roots, herbs, charms, and amulets. The commercial hoodoo supply houses, which included Keystone Laboratories of Memphis and the Valmor Products Company of Chicago, were operated by pharmacists and cosmetics dealers, often first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants to urban areas, who were among the few white retailers catering to a black clientele. In a spirit of why not?, the catalog dealers remarketed Judeo–Christian devotional items as occult supplies, such as menorahs (the traditional Jewish candelabra) and mezuzahs (encasements for prayer scrolls to be nailed at the front door of Jewish homes). Black and white customers gamely stocked their homes with Jewish, Catholic, Spiritualist, Hindu, and traditional hoodoo formulas, herbs, and candles.
In thousands of interviews with Southern hoodoo practitioners beginning in the 1930s, Episcopal priest and folklorist Harry Middleton Hyatt found that hoodoo mixed easily with other religious systems. In a sense, it was becoming America’s first boundary-free faith. Hyatt’s informants frequently spoke of petitioning Catholic folk saints—historically and theologically suspect saints barely tolerated by church doctrine but the subject of loving cults among the faithful.