The Conjuring of America:
Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic
By Lindsey Stewart (Legacy Lit)
Apropos of its subject, the book is beautiful, tragic, and messy, but its importance wins out.
The thesis of the book is a study in the contemporary relevance of the Black Diaspora. The culture of the United States is Black, or Black-derived, and that culture derives from religions and other usually mystical traditions of different African nations. It is not in a 1:1 parity, but religion and custom, passing through the extractive process of the Middle Passage and synchronizing with Christianity, resulted in enslaved Black culture.
Most specifically, the book is focused on cultural archetypes. It is like a real life commedia dell’arte, where individuals in the community found stock roles, which also served as stock characters in U.S. culture more broadly. These roles (or those looked at in this book) are those filed by Black women, and are customarily possessed of a mystical quality: the conjure of the title, which, outside of its latinate derived usage in English from Ye Old Norman Conquest, is an AVVE term for magicians in general. These roles are a tribute to Black resilience under slavery and show up repeatedly in U.S. culture, or something deriving from them is.
That is the head of the book. Its heart is somewhere else entirely. The contrast there makes this both a must-read and a read with a full panoply of criticism.
The book is a delight. The author’s enthusiasm is infectious, and her passion for her subjects is only matched by her sense of their contemporary import. But unfounded and unsupported assertions are everywhere. I have reservations about raising that as a complaint in that it drifts towards victim-blaming. What is the evidence, you ask. Hmm, funny that, it is almost as if there was systemic effort to obliterate it. Even if not intentionally, it sure is convenient that any effort to rectify the lacunae through reasonable supposition, removes that effort from an ability to challenge the existing paradigm.
When done with the heart of a feather it is necessary; done without it is how you get to racist Atlantis.
The range of influence points here is wide, including medicine, medical procedures, textiles, and food. The story here is important in that this is U.S. history, and the unique role of Black women therein is cool to read about, and particularly with as much spryness as this text does it.
If there is one thing that I wish to ask history writers it is to avoid trying to make everything sexy. History is interesting. You do not need to give it wings. Or indeed a tail, as in the case of this book, namely in the mermaids.
Explaining the mermaids is better done by investigating the more grievous accusation of the book’s anti-science position. It is not, and is not so much that it at one point argues that the Black woman’s folk magic is the real science, whereas medicine was just Christian-inflected nonsense. Except when the folk magic uses patent nonsense, like feeding people toenails, where the explanation becomes either the psychological treatment of people’s ailments, or the representational qualities, such as with the use of menstrual blood in magical rites. I gave the arguments here an excruciatingly close read, yet they never tip over into a full blown truth of the magic, only walking up to the line.
It is not 1996 anymore, folks. When the enemies of science are in charge, the flirting with mystical thinking is not harmless. Both the medical establishment and the folk practices were wrong, but the medicine looks harsher in hindsight. You do not need this to sell me on the idea of the importance of the traditions of Black women in the United States.
The mermaid section gets framed with the 2023 Disney live action remake of The Little Mermaid, staring Halle Bailey, a Black woman, as the titular character. There is a connection between the subject material and mermaids, in at least one folk story. There is also mermaid symbology used by conjure practitioners, as well as seeing the role of aquatic spirits and water deities in general from folklore of different African peoples. This is the part that I think is fruitful in providing context for the beliefs and pointing out missing bits of history.
But the book teases as if this was all some whitewashed version of Yorba mystery rite. Getting through both the the Hans Christian Andersen story and the Disney animated version wihtout an invocation of the queerness in either is something, as is the mention of European, but not any other, traditions of fish-people. None of this is necessary. None of this increases the power of the facts of the book, that is the power of the Black women who contributed to it.
I guess the argument is that I am not the audience for this book in its celebration of Black womanhood for those who have been denied the relevance of it. But I kinda think that I am the audience. I love this material. The body of work here is expressive, contrarian, and detailed, with interesting lines of suggested further research. But, as with some other magical stories by Disney, the grandiosity is the downfall.
My thanks to the author, Lindsey Stewart, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Legacy Lit, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 