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They gathered under the hush of the night. No one could know they were here. William Wells Brown peered into the ritual, where folks sat around a fiery cauldron, speaking in a medley of diasporic tongues.
The queen of the ceremony waved a wand over the pot before throwing in animal parts and ushering in a dance circle.
Our people used Hoodoo on plantations, as Brown witnessed. These practices required community care to keep one another spiritually safe during enslavement.
Uncle Frank sat in a chimney corner when Brown arrived one night. "Well, my son, you have come to get uncle to tell your fortune, have you?"
Brown went to see Uncle Frank, an older man known on the plantation for his fortune-telling wisdom. For 25 cents, he used a water-filled gourd to predict Brown's freedom. Brown later successfully escaped on a steamboat.
Then there was Dinkie, the Goopher King. He dusted himself in the herbal, powdery protective Hoodoo substance to conjure his way out of whippings and fieldwork.
Brown wrote, "Dinkie closely inspected the snake's skin around his neck, the petrified frog and dried lizard, in his pockets, and had rubbed himself all over with goopher." Dinkie was rarely in the field, and his enslaver never assaulted him again.
Leaning into ancestral wisdom creates a powerful layer of protection around us. How can you tap into the knowledge of those who came before you to ignite change right now?