14 Atlantic African, American, and European Backgrounds to Contact, Commerce, and Enslavementfolktales permeated antebellum slave culture. Following
Levine, other scholars stressed the importance of Voodoo
and other African folk practices in the Americas. In Flash
of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy
(1984), Th ompson found in the United States, Brazil, and
Cuba the infl uence of Kongo herbalist healing and divina-
tion lore in the presence of “conjurors” and “root doctors.”
Th ompson also found the infl uence of African religion in
the presence of charms, ritual dances, and Voodoo cross-
road signs in New World black religions.
Known as Voodoo, Hoodoo, and conjure in the United
States, Voudoun in Haiti, Shango in Trinidad, Candomblé
and Macumba in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Cumina or Obeah
in Jamaica, Vodun is the West African belief in supernatural
phenomena manifested in the acts of healing, divination,
the casting of spells, and the use of curative herbs, roots,
rituals, amulets, charms, and oral and transcribed incan-
tation. As a religion that permeates the African Diaspora,
Voodoo is generally defi ned as a synthesis of religions of
Dahomey, Yorubaland, and Kongo with an infusion of
Roman Catholicism. Yet, the sacrifi cial rituals, conjuring,
and magic of the religion can also be traced to coastal West
Africa where the beliefs that parallel those of Voodoo had
stronger presence in Dahomey, Kongo, and Nigeria than
in Senegal, Mali, and Guinea. Th e West African traditions
of Vodoo creolized in Haiti where many African-derived
terms are used to describe the ritual.
Like Th ompson, William D. Piersen found elements
of African religions in black American culture. In Black
Yankees: Th e Development of an Afro-American Subculture
(1988), Piersen argues that 18th-century African Ameri-
cans believed, like Africans, that their soul would return
home [to Africa] when they died. Piersen tells the story of
Jin, a mid-18th-century Congo slave woman in Deerfi eld,
Massachusetts, who collected pierced coins, colored beads,
and stones as objects, believing that she would carry them
with herself to Africa when she died. In a similar tone,
Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture: Nationalist Th eory and the
Foundation of Black America (1991) identifi es many Afri-
can elements in African American folktales, ring shouts,
counterclockwise dances, and ancestral worships. In Going
through the Storm: Th e Infl uence of African American Art
in History (1994), Stuckey argues that songs, like folktales,
were forms of oral tradition that slaves used to develop a
context that placed them closer to Africa than the Western
Hemisphere.survived in African American culture. In Th e Negro Fam-
ily in the United States (1968), E. Franklin Frazier contends
that African Americans, in the process of adapting to life in
the Americas, created cultural modes and forms that had
little to do with Africa. Frazier’s thesis was inconsistent with
the new directions that anthropologists had taken since the
1930s with regard to the question of retention of African
culture in the New World.
By the late 1930s, the idea that African elements were
not retained in the United States had become scientifi cally
untenable. In Th e Myth of the Negro Past, Melville J. Her-
skovits championed the cause of African cultural reten-
tions in African American culture. Specifi cally, he argues
not only that African elements might have been retained in
African American worldviews, rituals, and folklore but also
that such retentions might have infl uenced Euro-American
culture as well.
Like Herskovits, Lorenzo D. Turner argues in African-
isms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) that African Americans
preserved their African culture and traditions and mixed
them with European American patterns to contribute to
the formation of the New World cultures. Turner discov-
ered many African elements in the syntax, word forma-
tion, and intonation of African Americans. In this book, he
found in the United States, especially in the South, words of
African origin such as guba (peanut) (Kimbudu, Angola),
gombo (okra) (Tshiluba, Belgian Congo), and tot (carry)
(Vai, Liberia and Sierra Leone). In Africanisms in the Gullah
Dialect, Turner also identifi ed hundreds of Gullah names
that derive from African words.
In a similar vein, the 1970s saw a new upsurge of works
seeking to connect African American culture to Africa.
John W. Blassingame’s Th e Slave Community: Plantation
Life in the Antebellum South (1979) is a major example of
this scholarship, since it argued that the antebellum slaves
were deeply rooted in their African worldviews and folk
rituals of courtship, wedding, drumming, and worshipping.
In his comparison of the courtship rituals of the Ewe people
of Africa with those of slaves in antebellum America, Blass-
ingame found a similar use of riddles and memorization of
poems that black men recited to the women they wanted
to court.
By the mid-1970s, great emphasis was placed on the
importance of slave folklore. Lawrence Levine’s Black Cul-
ture and Black Consciousness (1977) found that African folk
practices such as Voodoo, spiritual cure of sickness, and