152 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Presentregion’s confl uence of French, Catholic, and Haitian infl u-
ences. In annual ceremonies featuring elaborate decorations
(with altars surrounded by hundreds of lighted candles),
the cult of voodoo invoked, among other deities, Legba, a
trickster of West African and Haitian origination. Initiation
into the voodoo cult involved rites of passage (seclusion,
fasting, special wardrobes, dancing and possession, ani-
mal sacrifi ces) that closely paralleled various religious rites
practiced in West Africa and Haiti. One fi gure associated
with voodoo was Marie Laveau, whose legendary initiation
into the cult involved being coaxed to join the New Orleans
cult by a rattlesnake. Th e African American fascination
with snakes can be traced back to Africa, where the ser-
pent was an important supernatural being. For instance, in
Dahomey, two rainbow-serpents (named Aido Hwedo and
Damballa Hwedo) were believed to have been present at the
creation of the world; similar myths concerning serpent-
spirits were found in Haiti.
Another Africanism was the African American belief
in haints (ghosts). According to many West African cul-
tures, haints were spirits at one stage of their being. Haints
could be benefi cent, such as the spirits of loved ones return-
ing from the dead to help, protect, and counsel the living.
Haints could also be evil, such as the spirits of masters who
returned to renew their abuse of slaves. To protect them-
selves from such evil spirits, slaves practiced various ritu-
als, including putting heavy rocks on top of their masters’
coffi ns to keep them weighted down, placing a Bible by a
door to prevent spirits from entering the house, and chant-
ing magical charms to keep evil spirits away. Believing that
they were not safe from their masters even in death, slaves
requested for their burial to be as far as possible from their
masters.
As the slaves became Christianized, African American
religious services began to combine African/Caribbean and
Judeo-Christian elements. One manifestation of this fusion
was the ring shout, a religious, highly ritualized dance that,
in the pre-emancipation South, served as an acceptable sub-
stitute for secular dancing. Aft er the Civil War, ring shouts
increasingly came under the scrutiny of African American
ministers, who judged them to be uncivilized, if not anti-
Christian.
A secular African American dance originating during
the days of slavery was the cakewalk, a stylized caricature
of the Anglo American waltz. By 1895, the dance had be-
come a mass cultural phenomenon and was appearing inOne recent musical style, rap, is an urban version of an
African American verbal tradition dating back to the pre-
emancipation era. Historically, a rap was a partly spoken,
partly sung poetic statement, characterized by rhymed cou-
plets, verbal wit, and rhythmic brilliancy. Within African
American society, rappers have been respected for their
powerful verbal gift s and feared for their extraordinary in-
sights into human experience.
African American customary folklore includes, among
other traditional rituals and activities, behavioral expres-
sions of religious belief (the verbal components of such
expressions are part of the oral tradition). Many aspects
of African American folk belief can be traced back to Afri-
can sources, including the conviction that, in the realm of
the supernatural, there is no dichotomy between good and
evil, both being attributes of the same powers. Also Afri-
can were some of the spiritual rituals of the slaves. When
black conjurers attempted to arouse the spirits of dead an-
cestors, they sometimes used goofer—grave dirt. Th is term
was derived from the Ki-Kongo verb kufwa, which meant
“to die.” According to a Kongo tradition, earth from a per-
son’s grave was considered to be at one with that person’s
spirit.
Another Africanism was the emphasis on revelation
among African American folk medicine practitioners in
their quest for useful plant remedies. In order to manufac-
ture and administer folk remedies, medicine practitioners,
who generally were women, collected roots, leaves, herbs,
barks, and teas. Th ese women became medicine practitio-
ners either by apprenticeship or by being “called” to practice
medicine. Some practitioners claimed that in times of cri-
sis, they heard a voice informing them about medicines that
would help people.
Black men practiced with magic as well. Generally,
men became conjurers by inheritance—a man might be the
son of a conjure man, obligating him to accept inherited
powers or face misfortune or illness. A man could also be-
come a conjurer voluntarily, such as if he were his father’s
seventh son (assuming that the father and his mate had not
produced a girl).
Several types of African American folk belief involved
the occult: hoodoo, a magical charm practiced by a rela-
tively small number of people, mostly by men; signs, a more
popular magical belief practiced largely by women (hoodoo
was more exclusive and complex than signs); and voodoo,
which developed principally in Louisiana because of that