Mules and Men

“Marie Leveau” (her last name is usually spelled Laveau; more information about Leveau can be found in the “Key Figures” section of this guide) is perhaps the most famous historical hoodoo practitioner who lived in New Orleans in the 19th century. Seeking the truth about the mysterious Leveau, after having “already studied under five two-headed doctors” (191), Hurston meets Luke Turner, a man who claims to be Leveau’s nephew. Turner works as a hoodoo practitioner in New Orleans, where he has many regular clients who pay for his services. 

Turner first tells Hurston his version of Leveau’s life story; however, it should be noted that the details he recounts align more accurately with Marie Laveau II, Marie Laveau’s daughter. According to Turner, Leveau rose to power after a rattlesnake visited her, calling her to the powers of hoodoo. Leveau used her “Great Altar” for her rituals, which involve using candles, idols, and offerings to invoke spirits. She rose to fame in New Orleans and held a “great feast every year on the Eve of St. John’s, June 24th” (193), which refers to the Catholic liturgical calendar. She would disappear for nine days before and after the event. It was at one of these events that Leveau called Turner to join the hoodoo practice. Shortly after calling him to learn from her, Leveau summons a great storm that symbolizes her death and dies.

Hurston is initiated into Turner’s practice. Initiation rites are an important component of hoodoo that use physical symbols to represent spiritual actions. In Turner’s practice, Hurston lies naked on a couch for three days, crosses “running water,” then dresses in new underwear and is painted with symbols. She makes a blood oath with Turner and the other elders in his practice, and a feast is shared after. The initiation ends at midnight when the group goes to the woods to sacrifice a live sheep. Hurston continues working under Turner for five months, learning “the Leveau routines” and some of Turner’s own rituals (202). One of his “routines” involves using a string and burning body hair to make the woman’s husband faithful to her. Another involves burning the feathers from nine chickens, killing them, and leaving each dead chicken at one mile increments at the edge of town to prevent a troublesome man from returning. Turner tells Hurston that he wants her to stay for the remaining “one year and seventy-nine days” of his life, but she “could not say yes” (205).

Anatol Pierre, a Catholic man from New Orleans who “lays some feeble claim to kinship with Marie Leveau” (207), is Hurston’s next hoodoo teacher. He quickly welcomes Hurston to study when she illustrates her experience with other hoodoo practitioners, and her initiation occurs within a week of beginning her studies with him. This initiation begins with Pierre bathing Hurston in a bath of special oils, perfumes, salt, and sugar with sacred candles lighting the room. A blood bond is made while she is still in the tub. She then dresses in clean underwear and must “read the third chapter of [the book of] Job night and morning for nine days” following the bath (208). She goes on to study beneath Pierre for four months. 

During their time together, Hurston recants several rituals they practice. Pierre acts righteously with his clients, denying them service when he feels they are lying to him or seeking his services for the wrong reasons; however, he also uses this as a tactic to charge more money for his services. This is the case for a client who asks for help in luring a married woman away from her husband: Pierre initially denies him service until the client agrees to pay $200. The ritual involves placing a paper with the name of the woman’s husband written on it nine times into a cow heart, pinning the heart closed, and dropping it into a jar of vinegar. Then they sacrifice a live cat and chicken and light nine black candles each day at midnight. After a month, a doll symbolizing the husband is buried over the chicken and cat, and a cow brain is prepared “with nine hot peppers” and placed on the altar. Hurston reports that the woman’s husband died. However, at the initial consultation, the client mentioned that the husband was already sick with “consumption.”

Father Watson, also called the “Frizzly Rooster,” is a hoodoo practitioner and Protestant who holds meetings in “Myrtle Wreath Hall in New Orleans” twice a week with his wife Mary (213). His nickname refers to a type of chicken some people use to find and remove any hoodoo items left by others to cause harm. Hurston begins to study his hoodoo practices. At first, she is tasked with “running errands,” or going to locations specified by clients to perform small hoodoo rituals—primarily leaving small tokens that symbolize a desired outcome. Hurston’s initiation into Watson’s practice involves fasting and abstaining from sex for five days, arranging nine candles in the figure of a serpent in front of the altar, then moving Hurston from the altar around the candles in a ceremonial manner. This renders Hurston the “Boss of Candles” (216), granting her the authority to light a candle to invoke a spirit. 

Watson tasks Hurston with conducting her own ceremonies after her initiation, three of which are described in this chapter. The first involves a woman who wants to ensure that a man who shot her husband will be indicted. Hurston and Pierre mix black and red pepper, a nail, ammonia, and keys in a bowl with the criminal’s name. The second involves a woman who wants her mother-in-law out of her house. They tell the woman to prepare an onion to roll out the door after the mother-in-law leaves, then Hurston and Pierre visit her house at night to break a glass onto the house. The final ceremony Hurston involves a man who opposes “a very popular preacher” in town. They use a doll representing the preacher to garner failures for the preacher in his immediate future.

Watson also leads Hurston in the ceremony of getting a “Black Cat Bone” (220), which will grant her stealth. They collect rainwater for Hurston to bathe in while she fasts for a day, then they find a black cat and put it into a pot of boiling water and cook it. At midnight, Hurston must taste the bones in the pot until she finds one that is “bitter.” Watson and Mary are frenzied as she tastes the bones, and Hurston recalls the “indescribable noises, sights, [and] feelings” they experience at the fireside.

Hurston works with Dr. Duke, who “is a member of a disappearing school of folk magic” (223). One of the primary differentiating factors about Dr. Duke’s hoodoo practice is that he is a “swamper,” or someone who collects most of their hoodoo ritual supplies from the wild. Many of Dr. Duke’s clients seek legal help. One such client, James Beasly, asks for help when he is imprisoned for “assault with intent to murder” (223). The ritual begins with Dr. Duke mixing dirt collected from the graves of nine children with sulfur and sugar, which is then dusted onto a set of underwear that Beasly will wear in court. Beasly must read a passage from the Bible each day as well. Dr. Duke’s practice emphasizes that people are different, and therefore he must use multiple rituals for each client. Hurston also describes Dr. Duke’s ritual to “uncross” people, which refers to the notion that hoodoo magic can undo or negate negative forces enacted on a person, often freeing them from a bad relationship or punishment. 

Hurston also works with Dr. Samuel Jenkins, whose “specialty is reading the cards” (226). This refers to the practice of using cards, often tarot cards, to communicate with spirits. Hurston relates several instances where Dr. Jenkins’s card predictions come true: A woman is told to be faithful to her husband or there will be consequences, which she faces months later; a sociologist visiting Hurston is told he will be called away for a long trip and is summoned the next day to visit West Africa. Hurston specifies that Dr. Jenkins works primarily with wealthy white clients.

Hurston also describes some hoodoo superstitions about “the dead,” most of which stem from the “Ewe-speaking peoples of the west coast of Africa” (227). Ewe is a language spoken in Ghana and Togo, and many enslaved Africans were from this region. Some of the superstitions listed at the end of this chapter include offering spirits alcoholic beverages to appease them, burying people with their feet facing east, and stipulating when the dead are permitted to walk the earth. There are several superstitions concerning murderers, which primarily deal with how to bring the murderer to justice and protect the victim.

This chapter contains four “conjure stories” that aim to illuminate how Black communities of the Deep South feel about hoodoo (231).

The first is about Old Lady Celestine and her neighbor. Celestine asks her neighbor for five nickels, and the neighbor gives her the money. The neighbor’s friend warns her that Celestine must be trying to hurt the neighbor due to her request for small denominations of coins. When the neighbor and her friend look into Celestine’s home to investigate, they see her performing a hoodoo ritual using black candles, a sieve with shears in it, and the change given by the neighbor. The neighbor and Celestine fight. 

The second story is about Mr. and Mrs. Grant, a woman who is feuding with Mrs. Grant, and Dr. Strong, a hoodoo practitioner. One night, the woman goes to Mr. and Mrs. Grant’s house to leave “War Powder,” a special powder designed to conjure negative outcomes for the recipient, outside their door. Mrs. Grant, however, discovers the woman and works to counteract the War Powder with lye, river water, and urine. Dr. Strong advises her to collect some blood from the woman. The collection goes awry when the woman bites Mrs. Grant, which leads Mrs. Grant to cut open a live chicken to counteract her own loss of blood.

The third story is about a racist, wealthy white farmer who “boast[s] of being ‘unreconstructed’” (234). This man employs a Black family as his servants. When he kills the family’s daughter and forces her parents to clean up the body, the family moves away. The father, Dave, keeps a handkerchief soaked with his daughter’s blood to seek revenge through hoodoo because the family “knew better than to expect any justice” due to the racist practices of the legal system (234). Dave then uses hoodoo to make each of the farmer’s family members go insane, forever upsetting the farmer’s stability. 

The fourth story is about Levi Conway, a relatively wealthy man who loses his many properties, begins hoarding “junk,” and falls ill after ten years of despair. Conway’s family hires a woman to find out what is wrong with him. The woman uses a conjuring ritual to summon the man who caused Conway’s downfall: Pere Voltaire, a notoriously vindictive man connected to several other strange occurrences in the region.

Hurston finishes her hoodoo studies under Kitty Brown, who specializes in marriage rituals and uniting lovers. Hurston and Brown participate in the sacred hoodoo practice of a “death-to-the-enemy” dance (239). This dance is important because it is rooted in older African and Bahamian dance traditions. These dances are a primary source of misconception about hoodoo, especially for white people. The dance in this chapter is conducted for Rachel Roe, who approaches Brown seeking revenge against her ex-lover who has married another woman. Hurston is one of seven dancers. The ritual begins when an idol representing death is placed on the altar with nine black candles, and the dancers are arranged in a circle around the altar. One by one, the dancers begin to dance in the middle of the circle. The dance lasts three hours, and each dancer is allotted an equal amount of time during which they must dance. The intended victim “is not supposed to live more than nine days after the dance” (243), but Roe immediately forgives her ex-lover and Brown removes the spell. 

Hurston describes several methods of returning lovers to each other, using a woman named Minnie Foster as an example. Foster often seeks Brown’s help in ensuring her lover’s faithfulness. Brown explains the rituals to Foster, and Foster is to perform them on her own. The three described in this chapter involve: placing pins in candles and through a piece of paper with the lover’s name written on it and burning the candles at a specific time of day; burying a sock, placing a candle over it, and covering and burning the candle at a specific time of day; and using her lover’s hair, his sock, lodestone, and a dime to create a bundle kept above a door. Each ritual is highly specific and aims to reify the lover’s feelings toward Foster.

This part concludes with a final, short folktale explaining why cats groom their faces after they eat. Sis Cat—the feminine version of the Brer title and a truncation of the word “sister”—catches a rat who tells Sis Cat to wash her face and hands before eating. While the cat washes, the rat escapes. Sis Cat decides to wait and wash after she eats to prevent this from happening again.