Care and Creation in the Conjure Women’s Garden: An Ecological Perspective

Abstract:

In June 1945, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois, proposing the establishment of a cemetery in Florida for housing the remains of the “illustrious Negro dead.” As an initiate of New Orleans Hoodoo, Hurston perceived the non-embodied presence of spirits within the living forms of plants, trees, and other flora. Her proposed cemetery recalled African American practices of root-working, where Conjure women foster vitality from the very soil of human decomposition for healing and remembrance of venerated ancestors.

Placing Hurston’s envisioned cemetery within the context of a Conjure woman’s garden serves as a prime example of a speculative vision of Black womanist/feminist ecologies—what Kameelah Martin terms Conjure Feminism. Although most often viewed through a religious lens, Conjure, which is often glossed as magic, might also be interpreted through Britt Rusert’s concept of “fugitive science,” African American vernacular cultural production and knowledge (including magic performances and other artistic formations) derived from older forms of African American naturalism that stand in relation to the formal styles of study and observation that have persisted in.

Encompassing Christianity as well as indigenous African and native American styles, Conjure (also called Hoodoo) employs natural materials to connect its practitioners to the visible and invisible worlds for purposes such as healing, protection, and empowerment. In this conversation I define the Conjure woman’s garden as a co-created space, initiated and given purpose through magical intent. Whether adorned with plants flowers and fauna or whether housing the bodies and bones of revered ancestors, as a healing space the Conjure woman’s garden is dedicated to the edification and wellbeing of the supporting community, with the divine impulse serving as partner in designing and operating this specialized ecosystem. These aspects of spiritual engagement resonate with practices in African diasporic religions such as Yoruba-derived Lucumi and Haitian Vodou.

My talk will use a Conjure methodology to address three key themes. First, I will discuss Elonda Clay’s concept of the backyard garden as sacred space for African American women, emphasizing the development of an ethics of Conjure practice in Hoodoo traditions of healing and care. Second, I will revisit recognized sites of Conjure-Hoodoo earthcare, such as the Chesapeake Conjure Society, who continue to build upon local practices of land veneration and plant medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Finally, I will focus on the cemetery itself as a potent space for embodying the material and non-corporeal dimensions of a Conjure ecology—a garden of spirits that includes divinities, elevated humans, and ancestors.

Bio:

Dr. Yvonne Chireau is the Peggy Chan Professor of Black Studies and Religion at Swarthmore College, where she teaches classes on American religions, Africana and Afro-Atlantic religions, and Magic and Religion Studies. She is the author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (2003) and the co-editor of Black Zion: African American Religions and Judaism (1999). She is interested in spiritual pluralism in the United States, as well as topics concerning the theoretical and practical intersections of religion and magic. Her varied thoughts on the historical intersections between magic, Africana religions, comics, and popular culture tropes of black spirituality can be found at the research blog “The Academic Hoodoo” (academichoodoo.com). She is currently writing about contemporary reclamations of the African American ancestral traditions known as Conjure, Hoodoo, and Rootwork by millennial practitioners, artists, educators, and entrepreneurs.