Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition ...

Notes to Pages 12–16 159
pp. 15–18. In addition to his career as a hoodoo doctor, Abraham became one
of the most highly successful strawberry farmers in Florida. After his death in
1937, his daughter carried on his ministry for five years. For further sources on
Abraham see Sherry Sherrod duPree, African-American Holiness Pentecostal
Movement: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996),
pp. 366–67.
2. For recent discussions of Conjure as a religious complex, see Theophus H.
Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); and Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible
Institution” Among Blacks in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978), pp. 275–88.
3. Jeanette Robinson Murphy, “The Survival of African Music in America,”
Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly 55, 1899, reprinted in The Negro and His
Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Bruce Jackson (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1967), p. 335. While this story may be a case of folkloric invention,
the retelling of such incidents as “real” events underscores their use as
historical sources for important values and beliefs in black communities. On factual
truth and moral truth in African American folklore sources, see William D.
Piersen, Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1993), pp. 35–50. For a conjuring formula for a preacher to
“hold” a congregation, see Zora Neale Hurston, “Hoodoo in America,” Journal
of American Folklore 44 (1931): 375.
4. William Wells Brown, My Southern Home, or The South and Its People
(Boston: A. G. Brown, 1880), p. 70. John Blassingame, The Slave Community:
Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press,
1972), p. 45.
5. Rawick, American Slave, Mississippi Narratives vol. 6, pt. 1, s.s. 1, p. 271;
Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey to the Seaboard States in the Years 1853–54,
with Remarks on their Economy (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856), p. 114;
William Owens, “Folklore of the Southern Negroes,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine,
December 1877, reprinted in The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-
Century Periodicals, ed Bruce Jackson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967),
p. 146; Charles Raymond, “The Religious Life of the Negro Slave,” Harper’s New
Monthly Magazine, August 1863, p. 816.
6. William Webb, History of William Webb (Detroit: E. Hoekstra, 1873), pp.
20–22.
7. Mary Livermore, The Story of my Life, or The Sunshine and Shadow of
Seventy Years (Hartford: A. D. Worthington, 1899), p. 254. Raymond, “Religious
Life of the Negro Slave,” pp. 820–23; Rawick, American Slave, Florida Narratives
vol. 18, pp. 184–88.
8. Elwyn Barron, “Shadowy Memories of Negro Lore,” in The Folklorist
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 50; Frederick Douglass, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1846), reprinted in
Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 280; Henry Clay
Bruce, The New Man, or Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine years as a
Free Man (York, Pa.: P. Anstadt, 1895), p. 56.
9. Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom (1897;