Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery by Young Jason R

Author:Young, Jason R. [Young, Jason R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2007-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Root doctors often drew their power by virtue of a peculiar birth. Lowcountry blacks regarded children born with a caul, a thin membrane adhered to the forehead, as specially gifted with psychic power. Removed at birth, the caul must thereafter be cared for and preserved, for if the caul tore, the owner would die. Many slaves believed the caul to be so powerful that even deaf people born with one can hear spirits talk.122 James Washington reported that he “wuz bawn wid a double cawl wut wuz sabe fuh me till I wuz grown [and] duh spirit show me ebryting.”123

In addition, the seventh son or the seventh daughter in a family was also deemed specially invested with the power to commune with the other world. A. T. Edwards certainly perceived of the power of seven as wonderfully portentous, as he explains in this 1860 advertisement: “A. T. Edwards is naturally a Doctor—having a gift from the Lord. My mother was her mother’s seventh daughter, and I am her seventh son…. I am a seven months’ child, and walked seven months after I was born, and have shed my teeth seven times.”124 Other root doctors enjoyed special ritual powers in line with their African birth. For slaves, the idea of Africa took on potent meanings, assuming a mystical character as the magical site of supernatural healing, the final destination for the souls of the deceased, and the ultimate cure for the pains and oppressions of plantation life.125

In addition to distributing sacred poisons and their remedies, the root doctor’s role extended well beyond the strictly spiritual. As in any society, the slave community had to manage any number of grievances, tensions, jealousies, and competitions, both major and minor. Without access to the formal legal and political institutions of the master class, the root doctor served as a mediator, an enactor of social and community justice. Planters often lamented the root doctor’s role as community mediator because they saw it as a hindrance to the operations of plantation production. For many slaveholders, the root doctor was as a “secret agent … gratifying all the animosities that find lodgment in [the slaves’] breasts, thus allowing them to reek their ill-feelings with absolute immunity.”126 As James Sweet argues in the case of enslaved Africans in Brazil, “an attack on another slave using African religious powers was always more than a personal attack; it was also a strike against the master’s economic and social well being.”127 In this way, every act of conjure from one slave against another represented a critical form of resistance, and the depletion of the plantation workforce due to conjure amounted to a blow against the system.

Lowcountry slaves often articulated community grievances through the idiom of conjure so that “it [was] doubtful whether a violent contention ever [arose] between members of the race, that the parties … are not convinced … that an evil charm has been laid on him.”128 A former slave in South Carolina recounts the experience of his father,

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