Lore 232: Empowered

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When they found them, all of the work had to stop.

These items were just too significant and important to risk destroying them.

And it's a good thing they did too, because what the researchers discovered was a rare and special find.

You see, back in 2021, the National Park Service in Virginia was in the middle of a massive rehabilitation of an old historic home on the site of a former plantation.

They were working on a room that's in the middle of the 1800s had been the living quarters for the Gray family, married couple Selena and Thornton, and their children.

But the Grays weren't the owners of the house.

No, they were the enslaved family who worked for them.

Now, this discovery was made below the floor.

The restoration team was removing some 20th century brick and carefully sifting through the dirt fill beneath them when they spotted glass.

And that's when they realized they had found a special hiding place, something that was common in the living quarters of enslaved people at the time.

If you think about it, it makes sense.

White people went to a lot of efforts to disconnect the people they enslaved from things that might give them hope.

So, like World War II prisoners and their escape tunnels, these people carved out little storage areas where they could keep special things safe and hidden.

Sometimes it was just food or a rare prized belonging.

But here, it was four empty glass bottles.

What were they?

Well, judging by their arrangement, there was something supernatural going on.

All of the bottles had been laid side by side with their tops facing north and the pit itself was to the east of the fireplace, north and east, freedom and homeland.

They were a cry for help, a grasp toward hope, and a tiny example of a massive tradition that is wildly misunderstood today.

Which is why we're going to go on a tour of it all.

So if you're ready, let's take a walk into the shadow of the south and enter the world of Hoodoo.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Few people documented history like Zora.

It's easy to read about a culture in a a library.

Anyone can open a browser and type a few keywords into a search field, but the way Zora did things was old school.

She traveled to the communities she wanted to write about, dug in deep and opened intimate doors, managing to discover things that no one else ever could.

Which is why we know so much about the rich traditions and practices of hoodoo.

all thanks to Zora Neale Hurston and her boots on the ground approach.

So much so that if you truly want to dig into that lore, there's honestly no one better.

Today's tour through this particular dark corner of history will be a love letter to Zora.

And when it's over, I encourage you to seek out her other work.

It is a treasure.

Zora was born in 1891, down in the southern state of Alabama.

Although just a couple of years later, her family packed up and moved to Florida and the township of Eatonville.

And maybe that's where her sense of empowerment and hope came from.

Eatonville was America's first incorporated black township.

It was a black town run by black officials in a world where that probably seemed like a pipe dream to most everyone else.

But not everything about her early years was idyllic.

At the age of 13, she lost her mother and was forced to grow up far too soon.

That led to a late start at high school.

Actually, late start might not really do that justice.

She was 26 when she started, having to lie on her application claiming to be 16.

Thankfully, she looked younger than she really was, so she managed to get in.

After that, she quickly dove into the world of writing.

Over her career, she wrote four novels and over 50 short stories, essays, and poems, and she elbowed her way into the powerful Harlem Renaissance, a sort of cultural revival of African-American arts centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.

But Zora Neale Hurston was more than just a writer.

She was a folklorist, and her area of passion was the subject I mentioned a moment ago, the practice of hoodoo.

Now, before we start, I need to set some ground rules.

First, hoodoo and voodoo aren't actually the same thing.

Voodoo is probably the more common word and it refers to a formalized religion with its own leaders, practices, and deities to be worshipped.

Hoodoo, on the other hand, is more of an unofficial set of black folk traditions that are all based on sympathetic magic.

That's a fancy term for magic that uses objects and actions that are meant to imitate real-world people and events, finding its power in the similarities between them.

Thus, sympathetic magic.

What sort of magic can you find within hoodoo, sometimes called conjure?

Well, it was used for healing ailments, fixing relationships, giving legal decisions a supernatural nudge, and sometimes even harming or killing an enemy.

And a lot of that involved communicating with the world of the dead.

Oh, and one last thing.

Hoodoo is a mix of old and new.

Because enslaved African families were kept together in Haiti, they tended to be able to pass ancient traditions down through the generations.

But American-born families were typically broken up, so those communities started to build new folklore based on the plants, animals, and even the landscape of southern America.

So, that's a bit of an academic tour of the world of Hoodoo.

Transplanted far from home, evolved over generations of enslavement, and leaned on as a source of hope and power in a world where people had very little control.

Although it was widespread all across the South, today we mostly associate Hoodoo with New Orleans, a place that Zora visited in August of 1928.

She had just earned a degree in anthropology and wanted to learn a bit about Marie Laveau and the hoodoo practices of the community there.

What she discovered, though, was something bigger and deeper than she had ever expected.

Because she was a black woman visiting a black culture, she was given a certain level of access and trust that white anthropologists would have been denied.

Think of it like cooperative undercover work.

She really truly wanted to learn, and the people there welcomed her in and allowed her to experience it all.

She sat in on rituals, listened to storytellers, and apprenticed with practitioners.

And in October of 1931, she published 100 pages of that project in an issue of the Journal of American Folklore with a focus on spells learned from hoodoo doctors.

What sort of spells?

Well, here's a quick sample of some of my favorites.

Let's say that you wanted a spell that would drive someone mad.

All you had to do was get a hold of nine strands of their hair and bury them in a sinner's grave.

Want Want to make your man stay true?

Get some of his hair from the intimate locations of his armpits and groin, and then burn those hairs while wishing for his devotion.

Mix the ashes from that with a bit of his blood, and you're all set.

There were darker ones too.

To kill an enemy, Zora learned that a spellcaster must set their altar with black and white candles, place a mirror in the center of them, and then get a basin of water and a sharp knife.

There were certain passages of scripture to read out loud, and when that was done, the image of the person they wished to harm would appear in the mirror.

All they had to do after that was stab the water with a knife, and if the water turned red, their enemy would be struck down.

I could go on.

Spells to keep a secret safe from being discovered, or to obtain ultimate power.

There's even a spell that was said to make a targeted person's body swell up.

They are equal parts fascinating and entertaining, and I wish I had the time to share them all with you here.

But some of these stories are better experienced when we see see them play out in the tales that Zora wrote down after learning about them.

Right from the source.

Every community has a larger than life character, that person who everyone looks up to, has respect for, or even fears above all else.

And for those folks in south central Florida, that person was known everywhere as Old Man Massey.

Now there's not a lot of detail about who he really was.

Even Hurston's own writings are sparse on his personal details.

But you and I know that sometimes the best way to learn about a topic is through story.

And thankfully, I have some fantastic tales to share.

It's said that once a bride failed to show up at the altar on her wedding day and that the groom's family was upset.

So they turned to Old Man Massey for help, which came in the form of a curse.

The bride's punishment, no man would ever love her longer than the cycle of one moon.

In another story, Old Man Massey was hired to kill a local woman.

How did he do it?

He sent an alligator to her house with a red bandana tied around its neck.

From outside, the alligator called out the woman's name, and when she opened the door to see who it was, the beast turned around and walked away.

The woman passed away three days later.

But the strangest tale about Old Man Massey focuses on another local hoodoo practitioner named Aunt Judy Cux and it was all about rivalries.

You see Aunt Judy believed that she was more powerful than he was and she bragged about it all over town.

As you might imagine, it was an opinion that ruffled a few feathers.

One evening though, according to the story written down by Hurston, Aunt Judy was overcome with a compulsion to go fishing, which was honestly pretty weird considering she wasn't the fishing sort of person.

But the urge was so overwhelming that she managed to track down some fishing gear and then headed out to the lake near her home.

For a while it was peaceful.

The sun was up, the water was calm, and I would imagine the air was full of bird song and the hum of insects.

Now, I'll be honest, I don't know if she caught anything while she was there.

The story leaves that detail out.

But what I do know is that she stayed all afternoon, right up until the sun started to dip toward the horizon.

Aunt Judy knew that she needed to head home.

Soon enough, the pathway home would be fully dark, and that would make it harder to look out for snakes and other dangers along the way.

In fact, the hour was so late that she was starting to get worried.

But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't pack up her things and leave.

And then, darkness came.

And the moment it did, something else happened.

A bolt of light, almost like lightning, crashed down on her and tossed her body into the waters of the lake.

Then, as she was bobbing there, struggling to stay above the surface, the water beneath her started to glow as if an enormous blue spotlight had been set on the bottom.

More lights appeared after that, little tendrils of red light that snaked and wove their way across the surface of the lake toward her.

And there, walking on that pathway of light as if it were solid ground, was Old Man Massey.

And he wasn't alone.

Swimming beside him were thousands of alligators, like a swarm of birds moving in unison as he traveled the glowing red road.

And then, when he was finally standing over her, he

Where is all that power you make out you got?

He asked.

I brought you to the lake and made you stay here till I got ready for you.

I threw you in, and you can't come out till I say so.

When you acknowledge to yourself that I am your top superior, then you can come out of the water.

And then he added, I got to go about my business, but I'm going to leave a watchman, and the first time you holler for help, he'll tear you to pieces.

The minute you change your mind, though, I'll send help to you.

A heartbeat later, Old Man Massey vanished into thin air.

All that remained of his entourage was a single gator who swam closer and locked her in its gaze.

So now Aunt Judy had a choice, scream for help and risk getting killed by the alligator, or admit that she wasn't as powerful as Old Man Massey and escape with her life.

Pride or preservation?

Defeat or destruction.

It can't have been an easy choice.

In the end, she chose to wait patiently for help, knowing that Old Man Massey, her top superior, would use his power to save her.

And sure enough, hours after sunset, her family came out looking for her and found her there, still treading water in the lake.

From that day forward, Aunt Judy chose a new path for herself, and she never practiced hoodoo ever again.

Hurston recorded a number of stories about the power of hoodoo.

A lot of them have that flavor of legend and nothing more, but quite a few have something else, a visceral, real-world tone that makes it really difficult to immediately dismiss them.

And one of those stories is about a very bad man.

John Wesley Roberts was what you might call a rake.

He had been traveling around the country from New York to Chicago and onwards and had eventually arrived in Orange County where he took a job at a hotel there.

Maybe moving west had been his goal all along or perhaps it was just a rest stop on a larger journey but for a while it was where he stayed.

While he worked there he played the field.

Like I said, he was a bit of a rake, never afraid to use people, mostly women, to get what he wanted.

And one of those women was Janie.

They were young, looking for fun, and the world was their oyster.

But then Janie got pregnant and everything changed.

Maybe Janie was hopeful.

Maybe she was traditional.

Perhaps she thought that she knew John Wesley Roberts better than she actually did.

Any of those could explain why she assumed that they would get married.

But John's response quickly proved her wrong.

Her pregnancy was her own fault, he told her, her problem to deal with, and it probably wasn't his child anyway.

So John laughed at her and broke off their relationship.

A short while later, Janie spotted him with another woman on his arm, and it shattered whatever remained of her already broken heart.

For weeks, she was bedridden, unable to climb out and get back to normal life.

Worried about her health, Janie's mother came to stay with her, sitting beside her on the bed all day, every day, holding Janie when she could, as any mother could understand.

The way Hurston describes those days is painfully beautiful too.

She writes about how all of Janie's tears dripped one by one onto the heart of her mother, And over time, those tears turned her heart to stone.

Which is why, after a week of caring for her daughter, Janie's mother stood up and went looking for vengeance.

She went looking for Old Man Massey.

His door swung open before she even had a chance to knock on it.

Old Man Massey was standing there, a knowing expression on his face, and simply said, How do you want him killed?

It was his forwardness that caught her off guard, so much so that she didn't know how to answer his question.

But she stepped inside and he quickly got to work.

Immediately, Old Man Massey gathered everything he needed.

He set his altar with a huge mirror, a lamp, a dagger, a pistol, and a bucket of water with a drinking gourd.

Then he offered her a dipper of the water and asked her to spit some of it out and swallow the rest and then name the way she wanted John Wesley Roberts killed.

The moment she did as she was told, she knew.

She wanted to shoot him.

With that, Old Man Massey nodded and got to work.

He motioned toward a chair in front of the altar, and Janie's mother took a seat.

Then he told her to look deeply into the mirror and watch for something strange to happen.

Get your pistol in your hand and cock it, he told her.

When you see your man, shoot.

Aim at the heart.

A moment later, it happened.

First, the mirror began to haze over, as if it were filling up with fog, but from the inside.

And then the fog cleared, and there, as clear as day, was John Wesley Roberts, the man who had broken her daughter's heart.

and he was standing right in front of her, facing her, as if the mirror were a window instead.

Taking a breath, she raised the pistol.

After taking aim at his heart, she pulled the trigger and a loud bang filled the room.

Now, she expected to find the glass of the mirror shattered by the bullet, but it was still intact and spotless.

A moment later, the fog began to return.

eventually filling the entire surface once more.

Ole Man Massey nodded and Janie's mother paid him what he was owed.

and then she went on her way, heading back to her daughter and the heartbreak that had swallowed her.

The next morning, while flirting with a young chambermaid, John Wesley Roberts mysteriously collapsed.

He was dead before he hit the floor.

I'll I'll be the first to admit that stories like these are tough to believe.

They are asking too much of our sensibilities, stretching our trust a bit too thin.

At least, that's what most people think.

Toss in a reminder that Zora Neale Hurston was not just an anthropologist, but also a writer of fiction, and you really do have all the ingredients necessary for a whole bunch of doubt.

And yet, there's something else that keeps pulling us in, making us want to believe.

But here's the thing.

Hurston was criticized over her career from from all sides.

Academics felt that she was a bit too creative with her stories, while other writers felt that she was a bit too unrefined for their taste.

She prioritized documenting the natural folk style of the people she studied and befriended rather than polishing them up to be more acceptable.

Heck, other black writers felt that she was a bit too lowbrow, all because she simply wrote what she saw and heard.

So while the stories she wrote down for us are difficult to believe, there's always that voice in the back of my mind that that whispers about her integrity and commitment to the truth.

I'm not naive enough to think that that means that I can believe every story she told, but it certainly gives me reason to at least consider the possibility.

Ultimately though, it doesn't matter whether these stories are fact or folklore, because they serve as a map to the values, lives, fears, and passions of the people who told them to her.

At their roots is something powerful that Hurston managed to get a glimpse into such a well-guarded and deeply rich set of traditions and then share it with us.

But of course, there's always one more thing to consider.

Our slimy rake, the young John Wesley Roberts, did indeed drop dead on the job in the hotel, and like many mysterious deaths, his was investigated by the coroner.

After performing an autopsy to find the true cause of such an untimely demise, they came to a conclusion that would have seemed relatively natural to their medical minds, but magical to those who knew Janie's story.

John Wesley Roberts, it seems, died of heart failure.

The tradition of hoodoo is filled with tales that stretch the imagination and offer a fresh glimpse into the many ways we humans have tried to control the world around us over the years.

I really do hope today's brief journey into this ancient belief system has helped open your eyes to a whole new world of amazing stories.

But we're not quite finished.

In fact, one of the most powerful stories Hurston wrote down had a very unique main character, herself.

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Zora Neale Hurston did more than observe.

I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that along with listening to storytellers and watching rituals, she also apprenticed with some of those very same hoodoo practitioners.

And that gave her a first-person perspective that few others have ever experienced, let alone published for all to read.

It all began in New Orleans.

That was where she learned of a Catholic hoodoo doctor who claimed to be the grandnephew of the legendary Marie Laveau.

His name was Samuel Thompson, and it was said that he could trace his family's involvement in hoodoo all the way back through their time in Santo Domingo to life in Africa.

Hurston arrived to find him in the fall of 1928.

The first time she knocked on Thompson's door and told him that she wanted to become one of his disciples, he shooed her away.

The second time, he named an insanely expensive price, close to $6,000 in modern money, for the privilege of studying with him.

It was finally on the fourth attempt though that Thompson seemed to crack.

He invited her inside and then began a ritual to see if she could indeed be taught.

He wrapped an old snakeskin around his shoulders, one that he claimed had come from Marie Laveau's own serpent, and then placed his hand on her head.

After conversing with the spirits of the dead for a moment, words that Hurston described as being in a language she had never heard before, he nodded.

Yes, he told her, she could be taught, and she was to return at 11 a.m.

on Thursday to begin the process that process was long and drawn out too upon returning when instructed she was asked to help set the altar with candles flowers and holy water then she was sent home to perform a number of personal rituals such as sleeping for nine nights with only her right stocking on and abstaining from impure thoughts oh and thompson wanted her to bring back three specific snake skins from a king snake a rattlesnake and a moccasin.

And Hurston did as she was told.

When she returned to Thompson's house, he took the snakeskins and gifted her with a ceremonial crown, and then she was instructed to lay face down and be still for three additional nights, during which she was told she would have a number of psychedelic experiences that would confirm whether she was accepted or not into his study.

When it was over, she had succeeded.

To celebrate, Thompson and five other hoodoo leaders threw a banquet for her, and honestly, the list of delicious foods served reads like a description of dinner at Bilbo's house in The Hobbit.

But while the party party might have seemed like the culmination of a whole lot of work, it wasn't the final step.

At 10 p.m.

that night, the entire group piled into an old Studebaker sedan and drove down Route 61, following behind Thompson, who was driving an old pickup truck.

After an hour of travel time, they arrived at the edge of a swamp, where they all hiked out to a secret clearing near the water.

There, they chanted and sang while they laid out all sorts of materials they gathered from the woods around them.

And then a crate was opened, and a black sheep was led to the center of the clearing, all while the chanting grew louder and faster.

And then, and this is not for the faint of heart, so be warned, there was a flash of silver as someone drew a knife across the throat of the poor animal.

As it bled to death in front of them, they swept the pooling blood back and forth across the grass and soil of the clearing until it had all been accounted for.

The body of the sheep was then buried and a candle was placed on its grave.

After that, they climbed back into their vehicles and headed home.

Their long, fruitful day was finally over.

One last thing.

Hurston did indeed go on to study with Samuel Thompson and they grew so close that he would later tell her that she would be his final disciple.

No one else would ever study at his side.

She was it, the end of the line, one that stretched across oceans and generations, from the streets of New Orleans all the way back to Africa.

Thompson told Hurston that his days were coming to a close and that he would soon pass away.

So he asked her to stay until the end.

But however much it pained her to decline, she told him that she had so many more stories to go write and much more research to delve into.

And so she left New Orleans and bid her friend goodbye.

She never saw Thompson alive.

Ever again.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Jenna Rose Nethercott and music by Chad Lawson.

As a reminder, the only reason the stories we discussed today exist at all is because Zora Neale Hurston got out of her comfort zone and stepped into this special community.

Aside from encouraging all of you to stay curious and go learn something new, I think every one of you would find her full article to be super informative.

For that, you're going to need to track down volume 44 of the Journal of American Folklore and read her entire 100-page experience titled, Hoodoo in America.

I've put the reference material in the episode description to help you search for it.

Of course, lore is much more than just a podcast.

There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

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