Hoodoo What?

"...Seventeenth century slave traders threw their net across west Africa and snagged an amazing catch. Ethnic Bantus. Yorubas. Senegambrians. Angolans. Some were already slaves, sold by their African masters to Europeans. Others were warriors, farmers, blacksmiths, boatmen, net weavers and holy men captured in continuing inter-tribal warfare. A quarter million to North America; more than half through Charleston and Savannah.

Isolated on coastal plantations, the slaves created a lingua franca-- a common tongue. The pleasant English words of their overseers; a smattering of Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish of their captors; and a great stewpot of West African words created a syntax, diction, intonation and rhythm unique to the area.

We call it Gullah. Maybe after Angola. Maybe from the West African Gola River. Nobody knows.

Gullah slaves may have been stripped of everything but their names but they came from oral cultures. They had no books, no saved scrolls that could be torn away and flung overboard. They remembered what was sacred. Assimilation worked its dubious power in Harlem, Detroit and Philly but here on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia--as well as on sunny islands around the grand Caribbean rim, children and grandchildren of slaves passed those memories to their descendants in a rich and lastng oral tradition. A tradition that survives to this day.

In Cuba, they call the magic Santeria. In Belize, obeah. In Haiti, voudoun. In New Orleans, voodoo. But the Gullah do not call it anything. Perhaps it is too fearsome for utterance. Certainly, casual talk is a faux pas of cosmic proportions. Nonbelievers are ashamed of their forebears' credulity. Belivers are afraid of spiritual retribution.

Folklorists call it hoodoo, conjuration, rootwork. I call it voodoo, simply because hoodoo and conjuration evoke blank stares and slack jaws.

Call it what you will. South Carolina has had its share of great sorcerers. A short but dizzying summary:

Gullah Jack the Conjurer, who led slaves in bloody revolt along the Stono River in 1739. John Domingo of Charleston, who once told a man he was a jackass and the man brayed for a week. Doctor Bug of Laurel Bay Plantation, who helpled hundreds dodge the World War II draft by giving them hippity-hoppity hearts.

The copyright of the article Hoodoo What? in Folklore is owned by Virginia Marin. Permission to republish Hoodoo What? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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