Jeffrey E. Anderson's "Voodoo: An African American Religion"

Jeffrey E. Anderson is professor of history and associate director of the School of Humanities at the University of Louisiana–Monroe. He is author of The Voodoo Encyclopedia: Magic, Ritual, and Religion; Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook; and Conjure in African American Society.

Anderson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Voodoo: An African American Religion, and reported the following:

Page 99 is one of my favorites in Voodoo: An African American Religion. At the top of it is a picture of Lala Hopkins, a Voodoo practitioner interviewed and photographed by the Louisiana Writers’ Project sometime around 1940. She was dressed in a Mardi Gras costume and was performing a ritual while dancing or pacing beside some burning candles, which are just visible at the right-hand bottom of the image. Below the picture, the first full sentence reads, “Lala Hopkins likewise provided them [Louisiana Writers’ Project workers] with a spell that combined the Catholic feature of candles with distinctly non-Christian elements of animal sacrifice and supplication of a deity whom she called Onzoncare, known elsewhere as Assonquer.” Immediately following this sentence is a new paragraph that focuses on amulets from Missouri, known as luck balls.

While the picture and small amount of text do not capture every aspect of Voodoo, they certainly hit on some of its key features. First, both the picture and text regarding Lala Hopkins is an excellent illustration of my overarching goal of explaining Voodoo as a distinctly African American faith. While it clearly embodied African spirituality, it was not simply an African or even Haitian religion transplanted to the U.S. Instead, while its ancestry stretches most directly to the religions and magic of Benin, Senegal, and the Congos, it has been far from static and readily adapted to its new home in the Mississippi River Valley.

The second paragraph, which describes an aspect of the style of Voodoo once practiced in Missouri, illustrates one of my secondary goals: emphasizing that the religion was not confined to New Orleans. While it is true that most of the written sources describing the faith focus on the city, that is primarily because it was a major urban area well before the Civil War with multiple newspapers and a constant stream of new arrivals to whom journalists could direct sensational tales of Voodoo rites. The reputation of New Orleans as the home of Voodoo survived the Civil War and attracted later writers and researchers, among them Zora Neale Hurston and Robert Tallant, who elaborated on the work of their predecessors. On the other hand, credible witnesses describe the religion elsewhere along the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast, with the best descriptions surviving from Missouri.

Having defined Voodoo as an African American religion centered on the Mississippi River Valley, I have done my best to accurately trace its history starting with its African roots through the ordeal of slavery in the colonial and antebellum South to the 1940s, when the Louisiana Writers’ Project supplied both the best and last descriptions of its initiations.

Learn more about Voodoo: An African American Religion at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue