1. Murphy, Jeanette Robinson, “The Survival of African Music in America,” Appletons Popular Science Monthly 55 (May-October 1899): 663.Google Scholar The hand, in African American magic traditions, is believed to be spiritually efficacious and powerful for its owner. Such objects were featured elements in the magical repertoire of black occult specialists. For descriptions and ingredients of African American hands and other charms, see Haskins, James, Voodoo and Hoodoo: Their Tradition and Craft as Revealed by Actual Practitioners (New York: Stein and Day, 1978), 155-70Google Scholar; and Puckett, Newbell Niles, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), 231-41.Google Scholar

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3. Earlier studies of black Conjure traditions in the United States include Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro; Hyatt, Harry Middleton, Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork: Beliefs Accepted by Many Negroes and White Persons, These Being Orally Recorded Among Blacks and Whites, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Hyatt Foundation, 1970-74)Google Scholar; Haskins, Voodoo and Hoodoo; and, more recently, Theophus Smith, who finds at the heart of African American spirituality a “conjurational” perspective, as exhibited in black biblical traditions. Smith, Theophus, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

4. See, for example, Puckett, , Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, 520-21Google Scholar; see also Mitchell, Henry, Black Belief: Folk Beliefs of Blacks in America and West Africa (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 26–27.Google Scholar

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6. My usage of “magic” as a category distinct from other “religious” means of mediating the supernatural may be misleading. Although the terms are exogenous, Africans themselves have distinguished between magical and religious acts based upon the intentions of the practitioners rather than the focus of specific practices. In a frequently cited Statement on Zairois religious movements, anthropologists de Craemer, Vansina, and Fox argue that the difference between magical and religious acts in African cultures lies in the formulation of their goals: magic is selfish, deriving from personal motives, and is socially disapproved. Religion is group-oriented, collective, and holds positive implications for the larger Community. Of course, they note that in life the categories overlap, such as with the use of charms that may affect the individual but may benefit the entire Community. See de Craemer, Willy, Vansina, Jan, and Fox, Renee, “Religious Movements in Central Africa: A Theoretical Study,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 4 (October 1976): 458-75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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13. See de Craemer, Vansina, and Fox, “Religious Movements in Central Africa,” 460; and MacGaffey, Wyatt, “Fetishism Revisited: Kongo nkisi in Sociological Perspective,” Africa 47, no. 2 (1977): 179–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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25. See McTeer, J. E., High Sheriff of the Low Country (Beaufort, S.C.: Beaufort Book Co., 1970), 22.Google Scholar

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38. Murphy, “The Survival of African Music,” 334.

39. Oral narrative, Rev. P. L. Harvey, Lynchburg, Virginia, University of Virginia Special Collections, n.d., folder 2, heading 279, 1-4.

40. Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 13, Georgia Narratives, pt. 4, 248.

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43. Supernatural beliefs were not unfamiliar to participants in the Christian tradition. For example, a kind of manipulation of natural forces was also sanctioned in some cases within nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism. Two black female preachers, Rebecca Jackson and Amanda Smith, recorded as evidence of their “gifts of power” their abilities to control the weather and curtail threatening human behavior. See Humez, Jean, “‘My Spirit Eye’: Some Functions of Spiritual and Visionary Experience in the Lives of Five Black Women Preachers, 1810-1880,” in Women and the Structure of Society: Selected Research from the Fifth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, ed. Harris, Barbara J. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984), 136, 277Google Scholar; Humez, Jean, ed., Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 22–23 Google Scholar; and Smith, Amanda, An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord's Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist (Chicago: Meyer, 1893; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 158.Google Scholar

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53. Three twentieth-century sources mentioning “letters” or “books” point to the possibility that there was a magical significance attached to such articles. The concept of the mystical power of the word that is written, so prominent in Islamic lore, was possibly fused with the African notion of spirit-embedding charms, which were adopted by black Americans as objects of power. For examples, see Hurston, Zora Neale, The Sanctified Church, 17–18 Google Scholar; Whitten, Norman, “Contemporary Patterns of Malign Occultism among Negroes in North Carolina,” Journal of American Folklore 75 (October-December 1962): 315 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Powdermaker, , After Freedom, 294-95.Google Scholar

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55. Chesnutt, Charles, “Superstition and Folklore of the South,” Modern Culture 13 (1901)Google Scholar, repr. in Mother Witfrom the Laughing Barrel, ed. Dundes, 39.

56. Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 4, Georgia Narratives, 17.

57. Lea, M. S., “Two-Head Doctors,” American Mercury (October 1929): 237.Google Scholar

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59. See, for example, the comments of Ellen Dorsey regarding the devil and Conjure in the Georgia Writers' Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940), 27; and Handy, “Negro Superstitions,” 736.

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