From the Back of the Mirror: "Quicksilver," Tinfoil, and the

Shimmer of Sorcery in African-American Vernacular Magic

Stephen C. Wehmeyer

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2017, pp. 163-185
(Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2017.0019

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/668573

Access provided by Champlain College (5 Jul 2018 18:29 GMT)

 From the Back of the Mirror
“Quicksilver,” Tinfoil, and the Shimmer of Sorcery
in African-American Vernacular Magic

STEPHEN C. WEHMEYER
Champlain College

They call it quicksilver. You wear it in your shoe, both of

them. Nuthin will harm you, nuthin can hurt chew by
walkin’ across anything.
(Hyatt informant 241, Wilmington, NC).

The esoteric pharmacopeia of Hoodoo or Conjure is replete with aesthetic

elements that are intended to introduce shining, glittering, or reflective sur-
faces into ritual performance and sacred assemblage. Polished silver dimes,
tinfoil cigarette papers, liquid mercury, and the silver shavings from the backs
of mirrors (the latter three examples known colloquially as “quicksilver” in
the vocabulary of Conjure) are all employed toward a wide array of pragmatic
ends—from cursing an enemy to winning at gambling, detecting hostile sor-
cery to keeping the law away from a bootlegging business. Through a close
examination of key examples drawn primarily from Harry M. Hyatt’s Hoodoo,
Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Rootwork—arguably one of the most substantive
collections of African-American folk belief from the twentieth century—I
wish to explore these particular aesthetic inclinations as they manifest in ver-
nacular belief and ritual practice. In addition to situating these examples
within existing frameworks of inquiry and analysis employed in the extant
scholarly and ethnographic literature on Conjure and other New World Afri-
can traditions, I wish also to explore the ways in which these concrete mani-
festations of aesthetic and metaphysical tropes persist in key examples of
latter-day visual and dramatic art.
WHY HYATT?
During the 1930s, avocational folklorist Harry Middleton Hyatt began an
extensive project collecting supernatural folk beliefs and ritual practices

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Summer 2017)

Copyright 䉷 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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164 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

throughout parts of the American Gulf Coast, coastal southeast, and the mid-
Atlantic.1 An Episcopal minister by profession, and the author of a substantial
history and critical analysis of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, Hyatt also pos-
sessed a voracious interest in conducting field-based folklore research, partic-
ularly among ordinary working-class people. “The academic world,” he
maintained, “is usually a generation behind. Periodically you’ve got to get
down and get out of your atmosphere. Work in a factory. Go to the slums.”2
Indeed, this would become his abiding passion as his life progressed. After a
successful collection project in Adams County, Illinois (which would be pub-
lished in 1935 as his Folklore of Adams County, Illinois), Hyatt became con-
vinced that the folklore forms and examples he’d collected from African-
American informants were the most interesting and meaningful in the collec-
tion.
He subsequently formulated a new, more extensive research project, set-
ting out to collect and document manifestations of African-American super-
natural lore in urban centers around the country. His methods involved
setting up shop in private homes or rented rooms in predominantly black
neighborhoods, and leveraging the local knowledge of a small army of “con-
tact men (and women)” who would introduce him to healers, Rootworkers,
Conjure doctors, and others with a substantial trove of supernatural narra-
tives, beliefs, and practices. A contact who showed particular promise might
be asked to bring others he or she knew to meet Hyatt—who conducted the
interviews without wearing his clerical collar, preferring to remain to his
informants, something of a “mystery man” (in his own words). In a number
of interviews his consultants wonder aloud whether he is working for local
law enforcement, the government, or whether he is, in fact, a Conjure
worker himself attempting to augment his spiritual knowledge. When Hyatt
began using wax cylinder recorders to make phonographic records of his
interviews, he often concealed the microphone beneath a hat on his desk—
purportedly to keep his consultants more at ease, as some evidently worried
their voices were being broadcast via radio.3 This dissembling is not the only
aspect of Hyatt’s research that would be considered somewhat problematic
according to the ethical standards of contemporary Folkloristics and ethno-
graphic research. After having the wax cylinder recordings transcribed, Hyatt

1. While the bulk of Hyatt’s research was conducted in the late 1930s, the final
volume of his five-volume collection also includes material collected from consultants
in Florida in 1970, just prior to the collection’s first publication.
2. Michael Edward Bell, “Harry Middleton Hyatt’s Quest for the Essence of
Human Spirit,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 16, no. 1/2 (1979): 12.
3. Bell, “Harry Middleton Hyatt’s Quest,” 18.

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 165

shaved them down so they could be reused—thus destroying the original

media. Only two remaining sound recordings survive—and when these are
compared with the written transcripts, it becomes evident that Hyatt’s tran-
scriber(s) overemphasized or exaggerated dialectical features stereotypically
associated with their own perceptions of black vernacular speech. While the
collection is thus not without its problems, it still stands as one of the most
significant single collections of African-American supernatural belief and
practice in the first third of the twentieth century.
The men and women Hyatt interviewed introduced him to a world of
everyday esoterica that he documented with relish and delight. This massive
collection—somewhat idiosyncratically organized—often reads like a long,
rich continuous conversation, with really very little academic editorializing
by Hyatt himself. Hyatt’s contacts and the consultants to whom they intro-
duced him were largely working-class folks—laborers, taxi drivers, service
employees. Many were involved in more marginally legal occupations as
well—gambling, bootlegging, or sex work. Those who lived in Southern or
border states had to contend with Jim Crow laws, and those from the North
dealt with the racism endemic to the era. The men and women whose stories
make up this collection lived under the daily pressures of considerable eco-
nomic hardship, racial prejudice and violence, and sexual inequality—their
beliefs about “extraordinary” experiences are inextricable from the tensions
and struggles that defined their ordinary lives. More than a mere collection
of otherworldly curiosa, Hyatt’s work offers a (largely unvarnished) glimpse
into worlds of everyday experience not frequently or openly discussed in
1930s academic discourse.
In one unintentionally hilarious interview with a consultant he identifies
as “Hustlin’ Woman”—a prostitute from Memphis, Tennessee—Hyatt asks if
the girls in her trade use any “different methods” (by which he meant occult
rituals) to attract and keep white (presumably affluent) customers. His consul-
tant misunderstands him, and launches into a detailed description of various
sexual acts that clients might request.4 Hyatt, it should be noted, does not

4. Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo - Conjuration - Witchcraft - Rootwork: Beliefs

Accepted By Many Negroes and White Persons, These Being Orally Recorded Among Blacks
and Whites, Vol. 2 (Hannibal, MO: Western Publishing, 1970), 1342 (Hustlin’
Woman, Memphis Tenessee). Volume 2 consists of longer interviews with informants
occasionally referenced by name or nickname, more often by a short descriptor (here
“Hustlin’ Woman”; other epithets are in the style of “Grandson talks about Doctor
Jones” or “Dropout Student”). Other volumes group short anecdotes from different
informants together thematically; anecdotes have entry numbers which are sequential
throughout all volumes. Entry numbers are thus given in citations to Volumes 1 and
3–5; epithets for informants are given only in citations to Volume 2.

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166 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

correct her, but lets her continue despite the misunderstanding—making this
particular interview a rather interesting diversion from the typical subject
matter in the collection! But it is precisely this “alternative” information that
makes Hyatt’s material so valuable and so vital. In recording supernatural
beliefs and practices, Hyatt was also documenting a whole range of otherwise
hidden histories. Even where its gaps and distortions exist (and must be
acknowledged and critically addressed), the Hyatt collection preserves the
narratives, experiences, fears, and aspirations of people often—if not always—
ignored or marginalized in more typically hegemonic perspectives on early
twentieth-century America.

DRAW ING/DEFLECTING—EMBEDDING/DIRECTING:
DIALECTICAL AESTHETICS IN H OODOO AND CONJURE

Those traditions of African-American folk belief, folk healing, and operative

ritual known collectively as Conjure, Hoodoo, or Rootwork serve to address
an array of quotidian needs, challenges, or conditions. Physical or mental
illness, unrequited love, financial hardship, injustice, and legal troubles—all
are approached through ritual actions (both simple and complex) operating
on a substantial catalog of material substances and objects. Existing collections
of Conjure lore (Newbell Niles Puckett’s Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro or
Zora Neale Hurston’s “Hoodoo in America,” for example), together with
Hyatt’s mammoth five-volume collection, all contain detailed descriptions of
vernacular rituals intended to harm or to heal with a diverse collection of
herbs, roots, oils, candles, and other materia sacra. These substances, Yvonne
Chireau maintains, are selected for both “sympathetic associations and for
aesthetic purposes: red pepper to produce heat or irritation; lodestone to
draw desirable forces . . . bone fragments to signify the passage of powers
from the otherworld . . . The inventory of conjuring materials has remained
remarkably consistent for hundreds of years.”5
Indeed, the particular aesthetic aspects of Conjure tools, substances, or ritual
actions are often the reasons underlying their particular symbolic associations.
This fact invites attempts to establish more fundamental structural categories
for the materials and actions of Hoodoo as a means toward understanding the
communal perceptions and attitudes out of which they emerge, and which
they in turn support.6 In his seminal work Conjuring Culture, for example,

5. Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradi-
tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 48.
6. Michael Edward Bell, “Pattern, Structure, and Logic in Afro-American Hoo-
doo Performance” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1980); David H. Brown, “Con-

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 167

Theophus Smith maintains that Conjure practice articulates the world as

pharmacosm—a universe composed almost entirely of healing and harming
(tonic and toxic) substances, acts, and entities. These concrete symbols are
the stuff out of which a network of complex relations is defined, negotiated,
and transformed, establishing what Smith identifies as the hallmarks of “con-
juring culture(s)”7 A Conjurational worldview operates on the premise that
at any given moment, everything can be perceived as either helping or harm-
ing, and Conjure ritual frequently operates on symbols referencing (or
manipulating) fundamental categories of desired and undesired. I once asked
a seasoned practitioner of these healing arts in New Orleans about the promi-
nent presence of a fork and spoon on her home altar, and she replied simply,
“The spoon to draw to you what you want, the fork to pitch away what you
don’t.”8 The categories of healing/harming and desired/undesired, together
with the most fundamental response to those categories—“draw what you
want . . . pitch away what you don’t”—make up one of the primary concep-
tual structures of Conjure. We might ask, then, what role do elements chosen
for their shining, shimmering, or reflective properties play in this Conjura-
tional dialectic between desired and undesired, tonic or toxic? Are such ele-
ments chosen because their glitter draws the eye? Or because they reflect the
unwanted gaze?
Conjure, it must also be stressed, is a polyglot and syncretic system of
thought and practice. Its practitioners directly or indirectly draw their inspira-
tion from such diverse sources as the textual and ritual traditions of western
esotericism, mid-nineteenth-century Spiritualist practices, early-twentieth-
century pop Orientalism, the rites and sacraments of Roman Catholicism,
Native American herb lore, biblical exegesis, old European vernacular magic,
and a variety of African and Afro-Creole systems of healing and spirit work
(among others). And while attempts to give primacy to only one or two of
these elements are potentially reductive, a number of the most insightful
analyses of Conjure and Hoodoo have chosen to focus on what seems to be
a particularly deep and rich taproot, namely the Bakongo minkisi traditions
associated with spiritual systems originating in Central Africa. In an effort to
understand the preponderance of complex charms in Conjure (vernacularly
called “hands,” “tobys,” “mojos,” “nation-sacks,” and the like), a number of

jure/Doctors: An Explanation of a Black Discourse in America, Antebellum to

1940,” Folklore Forum 23, no. 1/2 (1990): 3–46.
7. Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 44.
8. Bishop Efzelda Coleman, Personal Communication, 1997.

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168 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

scholars have argued that these constructs employ a semantic lexicon compa-
rable to the one underlying the creation of minkisi (sacred spirit bundles) in
Bakongo spirit work. Like Smith’s pharmacosmic categorization mentioned
previously, an exploration of this shared ritual syntax similarly divides the
sacred substances of these respective traditions into discrete categories.
In this case, the categories reference perceptions of the world as fundamen-
tally animistic, as spirit-filled. Ritual work consists of the cultivation and manip-
ulation of relations between incarnate and disincarnate agents and actors. Wyatt
MacGaffey argues that the components of minkisi are meaningful either because
they metonymically concentrate spirit presence and power—bits of human
bone, grave earth, or kaolin clay are understood to contain and condense the
power of ancestral or nature spirits into the charm; or because they direct the
activity of the spirit beings in question through aesthetic allusion, sensory puns,
and verbal metaphors—the incorporation of charcoal (Kikongo kala zima)
instructs and enables the spirit in the charm to extinguish or strike down
(Kikongo zima) witchcraft.9 Robert Farris Thompson applies a comparable
model to the analysis of Conjure charms—characterizing the components of
these charms as either “Spirit-Embodying”—ensouling each charm with a
living spirit presence—or “Spirit-Directing”—encouraging that spirit to act
through metaphoric instruction.
So where do the shining, glittering, and reflective components of Conjure
charms fit in these systems of dialectical categorization—tonic or toxic, spirit-
embodying or spirit-directing? Thompson, in particular, considers that shin-
ing elements in Conjure charms function primarily as embodiments of spirit—
citing as a noteworthy example a “luck ball” referenced by Puckett in Folk
Beliefs of the Southern Negro.10 The charm, first described in Mary Owen’s
Voodoo Tales, contains, among other things, a wad of tinfoil. According to its
maker, this was intended to represent “de brightness ob dat lil spurrit dat
gwine ter be in de ball.”11 Its knotted skeins of thread and yarn are further
encased in a second wrapping of foil, and then another of silk—the shining

9. Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particu-
lar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 84.
10. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and
Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), 130. The original account of the
creation of this charm comes from Mary Owen’s Voodoo Tales—a problematically
racist and classist account that nonetheless preserves some valuable aspects of Conjure
lore and practice. The “luck ball” in this case was created at the behest of Owen for
her friend and mentor, folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland.
11. Mary Owen, Voodoo Tales; As Told Among the Negroes of the Southwest. Collected
from Original Sources (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 176.

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 169

element buried at its heart doubly echoed in its outer layers.12 The other
components inside the ball—red clover, to represent the intended recipient’s
hair (the latter not available), and dust to “blind his enemies”—are clearly
instructional, spirit-directing elements intended to help the shining spirit of
the ball find its owner, and protect him in a particular way.
The components of both Conjure charms and minkisi defy simple and
reductive categorization, however; this is evident when we examine specific
examples drawn from the Hyatt collection. The shining elements we find in
both simple and complex Conjure rituals may function either metonymically
or metaphorically, and sometimes they appear to do so simultaneously. As
MacGaffey would maintain, “Metaphorical and metonymic relations were
not fully discrete; an element might be present in a complex for metaphorical
as well as metonymic reasons.”13 In addition to mediating these categorical
distinctions, the shining components of Conjure work may also be seen to
occupy a third aesthetic category identified by MacGaffey as a fundamental
trope in the creation of minkisi: that which expresses or contributes to
ngitukulu—Kikongo for “astonishment” or “wonder.” In the examples that
follow, the presence of the reflective also frequently seems calculated to culti-
vate an atmosphere of curiousness, wonderment, shock, or surprise. As an
aesthetic trope that can alternately—even simultaneously—embody spirit,
communicate a metaphoric message, and instill a sense of astonishment, the
shining/reflective principle becomes an effective tool for sophisticated
meaning-making in the sorcerous poetics of Conjure and Hoodoo.

APOTROPAIC DIMES AND NUMISMATIC “ENHANCEMENT”

The shine and glimmer of silver American currency—the dime in particular

—makes these objects particularly sought after as tools of Conjure practice,
used either alone or incorporated into a sacred assemblage. The propensity
of actual silver coins to tarnish—to turn black—also makes them ideal as

12. This juxtaposition of reflective elements that are hidden inside a charm, along
with those outside that are more clearly meant to be seen, is a persistent aesthetic
strategy throughout New World African traditions. Leland’s luck ball resonates with
a charm crafted for Raquel Romberg by the Puerto Rican bruja Haydée, which
encases shining silver bells inside a tightly folded envelope of tinfoil—the exterior
reflective surface hints at the interior shining elements, which will never be seen as
long as the charm’s integrity is preserved. See Romberg, Healing Dramas: Divination
and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). This same
strategy, as we will subsequently see, is frequently employed in the assemblages
described by Hyatt’s informants.
13. MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture, 82.

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170 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

diagnostic tools, their color determining the presence of threats to physical

or spiritual well-being (what Smith would term toxic forces) in the bodies or
immediate vicinities of the Conjure doctor or her clientele. The Hyatt corpus
contains entries drawn from every state in which he conducted research that
involved dimes employed as both diagnostic and apotropaic agents. One con-
sultant from Memphis, Tennessee suggests that dimes can be used “just like
usin’ de thermometer” to determine spiritual ills (a “tricked condition”)
rather than physical ones:

A medical doctor couldn’t tell yo’ but a spiritual doctor could tell yo’. They would
lay a silver dime undah de bottom of yore tongue an’ if yo’, were tricked, dat silver
dime will turn black. They used tuh put [wear] ’em around their leg, but that’s
nonsense. Dey use ’em underneath dere tongue just like usin’ de thermometer. An’ the
breath that chew blow on the dime, that dime will turn black - otherwise, if yore not
tricked, the dime will remain the silver color (emphasis mine).14

Clearly not all of Hyatt’s consultants considered the wearing of dimes around
the ankles or elsewhere as “nonsense,” since a considerable number recom-
mend this specific practice as a prophylactic for any “poison” that has been
“laid down” or “thrown at” a particular individual. A consultant from Bruns-
wick, Georgia recommends that a dime be worn around the neck and around
the legs (since much malicious magic in Hoodoo is understood to be effected
by powders or other substances laid down where the victim will walk over
them).

Well, if anybody dat put whut dey call roots at chew, yo’ see, yo’ kin wear a dime
wit a hole in it round yore neck an’ yo’ kin wear one round yore laigs. Course ah say
ah’ve tried dat mahself an’ de dime will change de color - it gits black, see. Dat’s fur
as ah could say on dat part.15

Another of Hyatt’s consultants maintains that in order to function properly,

the dime must be renewed (made to shine again) by applications of urine; if
one fails to do this, the “poison”16 will travel to one’s heart.

14. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 2, 994 (Madam Collins, Memphis Tennessee).

15. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 1, 484 (entry 1515, Brunswick, Georgia).
16. “Poison” in this case could indicate harmful substances administered either
physically (through food or drink) or metaphysically—as in the case of toxic sub-
stances laid down or buried in path of the victim, or placed in or around her home.

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 171

[I] Hear of ’em usin’ a dime fo’ sech as poison. Says if dere’s any poison an’ yo’ have
a dime roun’ yore ankle an’ yo’ walk in de poison, dat dime will turn black; an’ if yo’
urine in [on] dat dime it will gradually take all dat poison away, but if yo’ don’t renew
it, it will go on to yore heart.17

There are upwards of a hundred entries throughout the Hyatt corpus

which recommend carrying or wearing a dime (usually pierced and worn
around waist, ankle, or neck), and several dozen more that reference placing
it under the tongue to detect witchcraft. Several recommend ingesting the
dime (often after being filed or cut down), often in a preparation of sweet
milk. In all but the latter cases, the emphasis seems not to be merely on the
apotropaic power of silver-as-substance, but on the important aesthetic shift
between the shining dime (a tonic element) and the tarnished surface (an
indication of toxic presence). I have elsewhere argued that Conjure supports
a conception of the self as fundamentally permeable; that is, it is open to both
malign and benign influences from the world around it.18 But while the per-
meable state is irrevocable, defense of the body’s natural and supernatural
openings is possible, and the dime allows one to move through the world
forewarned of danger, as well as forearmed. As another of Hyatt’s consultants
from Mobile put it: “Dey can’t git up to yo’ long as yo’ wear dat piece of
money - that silver dime. Well, yo’ kin tell if they trying to throw at chew
or do anything by that dime turning black.”19 Rituals involving apotropaic
and diagnostic dimes are thus in part a response to prevailing anxieties about
this permeability and the omnipresent fear of being “tricked” or “hurt.” The
shine indicates a state of spiritual health and well-being, of bodily integrity.
It attests to a physical and spiritual self that, though permeable by nature, is
at least temporarily protected.
An interesting alternative application for the sublingual dime that extends
this belief complex somewhat concerns its value as a sexual charm, ensuring
the fidelity and devotion of a lover by controlling her “nature.”20 Consider
this example from Fredericksburg, Virginia:

17. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 1, 493 (entry 1558).

18. Stephen C. Wehmeyer, “ ‘Yo’ Kin Cut All Kinda Tricks’ - Crossroad Ordeals,
Peavine Drills, and other Technologies of Self in Afro-American Vernacular Esoteric-
ism” (paper presented at the annual meeting for the American Academy of Religion,
Baltimore, Maryland, November 23–26, 2013).
19. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 1, 204 (entry 605, Mobile, Alabama).
20. “Nature” is a common sexual euphemism in mid-twentieth-century vernacu-
lar speech of the Gulf South and southern Atlantic U.S. It encompasses both the
capacity for sexual desire and the ability to perform sexually. Conjure ritual is fre-
quently concerned with “nature”—which may be “tied up,” “sent to one’s head,”

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172 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

You can take a dime, a silver dime, an’ put it underneath your tongue when you’re
on top of a woman, and keep that dime under your tongue all the time [during
intercourse], and she’ll have no nature for any other man, and no man can raise a
head for her.21

Still other examples suggest that both sublingual dimes and those worn
around the ankles could be understood to be elements in malefic22 magical
rituals used by women to either “tie up” the nature of their male partners
(ensuring their monogamy) or to inflict sexually transmitted diseases:

“To give a man a disease, she kin take an’ hole [hold] a silvah dime in ’er mouth. See,
she take an’ hole a silvah dime in ’er mouth23

“You hold a silver dime in your mouth and when a man is dischargin, yo’ hold that
dime on him, an’ he’ll take the claps.24

One of Hyatt’s consultants from Baltimore offers a comparable reinterpreta-

tion of the dime worn around the ankle. It’s neither apotropaic, nor “for
cramps,” but is instead evidence of hostile love magic:

A woman kin git a man’s seap [penis] an’ measure it. Don’t measure yo’ roun’ but
measure disaway [lengthwise], an’ war [wear]. Put a hole in a silvah dime an’ put dis
string [used in measuring] through dis silvah dime, an’ war dat cord aroun’ ’er leg

“taken away,” or otherwise manipulated. “Nature problems” of this sort are fre-
quently addressed through appeal to Conjure—especially those which are believed to
have been caused by sorcery.
21. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 3, 2375 (entry 3265, Fredericksburg, Virginia).
22. It should be made clear that it is largely from the perspective of the (presum-
ably male) “targets” of these particular rituals that they might be considered
“malefic.” Spells to “tie up a man’s nature” might be seen as positive acts of
healing—or righteous retribution—from the perspective of a woman with a philan-
dering partner. The sheer number of tools and techniques in the Conjure pharmaco-
poeia that are concerned with controlling, compelling, or otherwise managing the
sexuality of a partner or partners—together with implicit or explicit statements about
the ways that sexuality might be connected to economic and social stability—further
demonstrates the way a study of Conjure can offer us a more substantive understand-
ing of gender politics and networks of financial and social capital in marginalized or
underrepresented communities like those that Hyatt documented.
23. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 3, 2375 (entry 3266, New Orleans, Louisiana).
24. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 3, 2376 (entry 3267, New Orleans, Louisiana).

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 173

[left ankle]. An’ as long as she war dat cord dis man would nevah have no dealin’s
wit dat [any other] woman - no feelin’s fo’ her.25

The prescription for one so afflicted is a silver dime—of course—

administered directly to the affected area:

Den ah wus told another one - take a silver dime an’ - see, dis is his private—fo’ nine
mornin’s rub it up dere - dat silver dime once fo’ nine mornin’s.26

Quite apart from any prurient fascination one might have with Conjure prac-
tices in the bedroom, these examples add an intriguing complexity to the
traditions surrounding the shiny silver dime as an apotropaic tool. On the
one hand, these beliefs suggest that even the most intimate of human rela-
tionships are understood as potential battlegrounds in the war of wills that
defines a Conjurational worldview. At no point are the body and soul imper-
vious, unless they are protected—and even then, the tool by which a tricked
condition may be discovered and cured is the very tool by which it was
effected in the first place. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the dime as
currency is also loaded with symbolic associations, and that the same complex
of belief and ritual that turns the act of sexual love into skirmish of sorcery
also turns it into a series of (secret) financial transactions—with implicit moral
ambiguity and comparable fears about risk and loss.

CURSES (AND BLESSINGS): FOILED AG AIN?

A variant of the “sublingual dime” love spell, collected by Hyatt from a

consultant from Sumter, South Carolina, illustrates an important divergence
from the widespread use of the silver dime as a magical agent. In this case,
while the rite itself is the same, the dime is replaced by the silver foil used to
wrap cigarettes:

“If yo’ wanta be wit a woman a long time, yo’ kin place de silvah dat be roun’ a cigarette
package undah yore tongue an’ dere nuthin she kin do. She jes’ have a fit den an’ yo’
jes’ continue tuh stay dere an’ she can’t make yo’ [come], nuthin lak dat.”27

That the selfsame sorcerous virtues accorded to the substance of silver—and

to the exchange value of silver coin—should accrete to a flimsy piece of

25. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 3, 2422 (entry 3476, Baltimore, Maryland).

26. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 1, 193 (entry 589, Brunswick, Georgia).
27. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 3, 2380 (entry 3282, Sumter, South Carolina).

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174 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

ephemera like the silver foil used to keep tobacco products dry suggests that
it is really the shared aesthetic property of reflection and shimmer that is of
importance here. This silver foil—frequently glossed as “quicksilver” by
Hyatt’s consultants—finds its way into a variety of simple and composite
Conjure charms and rituals. As in the cases discussed previously, the purpose
of these charms varies from the apotropaic to the infliction of harm, from the
cultivation of luck to the casting of ruin.
Three examples of the traditional domestic horseshoe charm recorded in
Petersburg, Virginia; Memphis, Tennessee; and Florence, South Carolina all
recommend augmenting the inherent protective power of the horseshoe—
intended to keep malevolent spirits, witches, or law enforcement out of the
home—with this particular variant of “quicksilver.” The silver foil should be
wrapped around the horseshoe, as its shine seems intended to make the
horseshoe more effective as a banishing agent:

Take a horseshoe and put it over the door and take some silver paper [tin foil] and
wrap it around it, and hang it over the top of the door and you won’t have any
trouble with the spirit coming back - the prongs down.28

An’ if it’s possible dat chew kin git a brand-new horseshoe, one dat nobody has evah
walked on, an’ cover it with dat silver - lak dat come offa cigarettes [tin foil] an’ hang
it dere - it be best tuh put dat in de middle of yore house. Jis’ say fo’ instance if dere
a do’ heah, put it up ovah dat do’. Dey not supposed - den yo’ supposed tuh not
evah be bothered wit ’em [the Law] any mo’.29

Dey take quicksilvah [see later] an’ take three ten cents an’ den drive three holes
through ’em, an’ drive ’em through dat one [“hole through de horseshoe” later] an’
tack dat horseshoe up, an’ take quicksilvah an’ dress ovah it [cover it] wit some paper.
An’ dat’ll keep him [the Law] down - he won’t come dere no mo’.30

Throughout the contemporary United States, botanicas and metaphysical

supply shops that cater to current practitioners of Conjure and related arts sell

28. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 1, 454 (entry 1343, Petersburg, Virginia).

29. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 1, 699 (entry 2521, Memphis, Tennessee).
30. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 2, 1808 (Dropout Student, Florence, South Carolina).
During the course of my own field research with the Spiritual Church community in
latter-day New Orleans, I several times observed foil-wrapped bricks incorporated
into altar assemblages. These cryptic ingots embody two apotropaic elements: the
reflective shimmer of the foil, combined with brick dust—a well attested spiritual
prophylactic in Hoodoo or Conjure work, often used to “dust” thresholds and door-
ways to keep malign influence at bay.

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 175

comparably prepared horseshoe charms (usually termed “dressed”)—which

are often wrapped in shining fabric, and dotted with sequins or paste costume
jewels. These latter-day preparations are more elaborate than the homely
charm involving cigarette paper, but the aesthetic strategy is clearly still the
same.
If a shining horseshoe above the door was a common specific to keep both
ghosts and policemen away, another shining charm involving both cigarette
foil and silver dimes could be placed below (on the door threshold or “saddle”)
to draw customers to a boarding house or business. One of Hyatt’s consul-
tants from Brunswick, Georgia maintains that a particular Conjure worker—
one “Ole man” Bill Jones—had a signature technique for drawing customers:

He take dis quicksilver jes’ lak dat an’ take an’ put dat dust in it, yo’ see, an’ fold it,
an’ he’d take so much of dat money - ten or fifteen cents silver money or somepin
like dat - an’ put it right in dere wit dat dust.
...
He take dis heah quicksilver like dat, an’ de dust be in dere an’ den he’d take dimes
an’ put in dere. Well, after he do dat he’d let chew fold it, an’ as yo’ fold it, make
yore wishes In de Name of de Lord. Den he go tuh work den an’ whip dat up an’
put it right in de middle. Well, after he do dat he takes a penny, an’ take jes’ a small
tack an’ nail it jes’ on top [demonstrates].
(On top of the saddle of the door.)
Right chere.
(Right in the center of the saddle.)
Yes sir, an’ yo’ walk right across it. Haven’t yo’ seen plenty houses wit dat in ’em?
Any time yo’ walk in a house in Savannah wit a penny dere, why dat’s his work. Ole
Man Jones - dat Bill.
(That is what he did to bring in customers?)
Yes sir.31

Once again, we can see that the shining element of “quicksilver paper” can
serve both to deflect and draw, and that charms like this one often multiply
their shining elements in consecutive layers and strata—we have dull grave-
yard soil juxtaposed with shining dimes, hidden from sight, but wrapped in
a parcel that is itself composed of shining foil, nailed down in the center of
the door “saddle.” Just as with Charles Leland’s “luck ball,” we have here

31. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 2, 1752 (Grandson talks about Doctor Jones, Brunswick,
Georgia).

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176 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

successive layers of shimmering elements—some of them present but deliber-

ately rendered unseen. Conjure charms are opportunities for complex aes-
thetic play in which visually striking elements are calculatedly placed beyond
the limits of sight (wrapped in yarn, covered in dirt, etc.), creating a kind of
dynamic, multilayered sensory tension. These are visual riddles, puns—akin
to Zen koans, perhaps. They beg perceptual and existential questions: if a
wad of tinfoil is hidden from light and no one is there to see it, does it still
shine? Like the mirrors capping the medicine-filled bellies of Bakongo minkisi
statues, the shiny packet of tinfoil hints at the shine of the dimes hidden inside
it. Hidden reflective elements are embodiments of hidden knowledge—since
only the maker(s) of the charm know about their presence. But those ele-
ments that are only hinted at, alluded to, more-hidden-than-not contribute
to the overall aesthetic charge of wonder that animates these objects and con-
tributes to their impact on the senses and the psyche.
One particularly notable example of this aesthetic strategy is the private
ritual described by a gambler from Vicksburg, Mississippi, who “tricks” his
dice table with a secret charge of lodestone powder and silver foil:

I keep my [gambling] table, just like I got this cloth on here. I take and get me some
tobacco silver.
(What’s that?)
Silver off of tobacco, chewing tobacco.
(Silver paper off of tobacco [tin foil], I see.)
Yes sir, take that silver and I pad it under this here tablecloth. I keep a shooting on
the cloth all the time. Well, I pad that under there and I get me some - some pound -
you see, it’s pound lodestone, pound lodestone.
(You mean like powder?)
Yes, it’s made up like dust. Well, I get some of that and I put that silver down and I
sprinkle that lodestone under that silver and put that silver over it.
(I see.)
I put that cloth over that. Well, you don’t know what’s under that. But it’s all in my
favor, none in yours - it’s coming in my favor all the time but it is none in yours.
(I see - in shooting the dice.)
In shooting the dice.
...
And you’re going miss.
(That silver [tin foil] under the table[cloth] then makes the fellow you are playing
against - makes him miss?)
Yes, sir.32

32. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 1, 548 (entry 1836, Vicksburg, Mississippi).

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 177

Note the observation: “Well, you don’t know what’s under that. But it’s all
in my favor, none in yours.” The striking visual element (tobacco silver) that
is nonetheless made invisible continues to exert an aesthetic influence on the
gambler himself. His awareness of the shining substance beneath the table-
cloth—together with his opponent’s ignorance of the charm’s presence—
ensures his victory: “it’s coming in my favor all the time.”
Cigarette foil or the like is also used in operations of malice, cursing, and
harm—some relatively simple, some complex:

Just like if you want to run anybody crazy or something like that, well now you can
take their hair out of the mole of the head, and wrap it up in silver paper, this nice
quicksilver paper [tin foil], and put it in running water, and that’ll run them crazy.33

A comparable, but more complicated, cursing spell from Algiers, Louisiana—

also intended to “run” the victim or “put him on a drift” (i.e. send him
wandering aimlessly away) involves a hollowed coconut stuffed with all man-
ner of toxic Hoodoo specifics: “red peppah . . . [and] yo’ take war powder
an’ yo’ take separation powder [and] yo’ take hot foot powder - yo’ put all
dat into dis coconut.” The prepared coconut is then finished off with the
shining element:

Den yo’ plug it up wit dat quicksilver [tin foil] an’ yo’ carry it, de coconut - git on a
ferryboat or anywhere an’ when yo’ git in midstream, middleways of de stream, yo’
throw it ovahbo’d. Dat sends ’em on off.34

In each of these latter cases, the reflective foil is placed mostly, if not entirely,
beyond human sight—plugged in a coconut, dropped in the river, etc. If
anything, the aesthetic strategy in these two charms seems to revel in the
partially concealed and partially revealed; on the one hand, the coconut is
not gilded with quicksilver paper, but neither is the paper placed deep inside
it (like the other elements of its dangerous, aggressive “charge”). The shining
plug intimates the coconut’s contents without revealing them, leaving all but
the maker to wonder: minimum visibility yields maximum suggestibility.
AT TH E BACK OF TH E MI R RO R
It should come as no surprise that mirrors—eminently more reflective than
either silver dimes or tinfoil—should also be employed in the arsenal of Con-
jure work. Among other things, mirrors play a number of different but inter-
woven roles in what is probably the most well known initiatory rite in

33. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 4, 3015 (entry 6182, Florence, South Carolina).
34. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 2, 1354 (Nahnee, Boss of Algiers, Algiers, Lousiana).

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178 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

Conjure practice: the Crossroads Ordeal/Black-Cat Bone rite. Briefly stated,

the ritual involves boiling a black cat alive, usually at a crossroads, in order to
obtain the Black Cat Bone, a celebrated charm that is believed—among other
things—to make one invisible. In several versions of this rite, the feline vic-
tim’s reflection must be captured in a mirror before its death by boiling. In
other versions, the mirror is used to test the validity of the bone talisman
when it has been acquired. Since one of its properties is to confer invisibility,
in these instances, the bones of the cat are passed through the mouth while
one looks in a mirror; when one’s reflection disappears, one has found the
right bone:

After he cooks all to pieces, then you take him out and pour that water off of it. Dash
them bones in some cold water and take a looking glass, and put that stuff before this
looking glass. And take ev’y bone and pass it between yore teeth and look in this
glass. An’ the bone that yo’ pass between your teeth and yo’ can’t see yourself in
this glass, that’s the right bone. Yo’ can tote that bone and do anything you wanta.35

Mirrors, and shards or pieces of mirrors, find their way into other Conjure
rituals as well. Another substance frequently termed “quicksilver” in the
Hyatt corpus is the metallic amalgam backing from inexpensive, commer-
cially available hand mirrors. This is scraped off and employed in a number
of ritual preparations. Some of the most noteworthy juxtapose the shifting
mimetic properties of mirrors against the more permanent mimetic properties
of photographs.
Zippy Tull, a celebrated Conjure woman from Maryland, was reputed to
have loaded shell casings with the scrapings from the back of a mirror. These
she would fire into a photograph of an intended victim as part of a ritual to
induce “slow death”:

All she [Zippy Tull] wanted was the photograph. She could take this photograph, and
she had a regular little gun, she put it [photograph] up, she get her quicksilver [and]
steel dust . . . And she’d shoot this picture full of holes and tell you to take this
picture - you bring her first thing, this goes with a red brick, a right brand-new brick
never been used. She’d have you go to work and write this party’s name on this new

35. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 5, 3934 (entry 10091, New Orleans, Louisiana). This pre-
occupation with invisibility recalls some of the protagonist’s observations in Ellison’s
Invisible Man, whose unseen hole in the ground is filled with “light and warmth”—
rather like the tinfoil in Leland’s luck ball: eternally shining, but forever out of sight.

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 179

brick. You take this picture, this new brick, go to the graveyard, you bury that cross-
ways on a man’s breast, and it wouldn’t be many days before [the victim] commenced
to linger. If something wouldn’t change, you never got better unless that was moved.
Now, she called that slow death. And it was slow death, too!36

A similar cursing rite collected from a consultant in Waycross, Georgia

employs a bit of broken mirror to absorb the image from the victim’s photo-
graph, resulting in illness and disfigurement:

Git chew a little piece of looking glass - a mirror, an’ break it jest like yo’ wanta. An’
den turn dat looking part of it down on de face of [the photograph] an’ den let it -
shove in dat witchhazel - den [that] will git all dat [picture] offa dat piece of paper
an’, de paper will come to be jest as white as dis heah han’chief heah. . . . An’ den de
first thing yo’ know yore face done bloated up - done swell up an’ yore eyes puffin’
out an’ don’t nobody know whut’s de matter wit yo’.37

Numerous other rites from the Hyatt collection intended to bring back
recalcitrant lovers or wandering spouses involve replacing the cardboard
backing on small commercially available mirrors with the target’s photo-
graph, turned upside down and facing the metallic amalgam behind the mir-
ror’s glass. Combined with prayer and candle-burning, this ritual is said to be
profoundly effective, as one consultant from New Orleans attests: “Take his
photograph and turn it up bottom [upside down] to the [looking] glass and
burn the candles, nine of them; claim if you’s in Europe that would bring
you back.”38
Whether scraped off and fired at a photograph, added to a hand or toby,
or simply juxtaposed against the image of a wandering lover, the back of the
mirror is a zone of power in Conjure, a zone of simultaneous aesthetic and
conceptual ambiguity. Considered in light of other Afro-Atlantic spiritual
traditions, this should not be surprising. A popular chant pwen (ritual song)
sung in Haitian Vodou ritual imagines the surface of the ocean as a mirror,
behind which Giné (simultaneously Africa and Heaven), the eternal world of
the spirits, exists. “Anonse o zanj nan dlo,” the lyrics run, “bak odsu miwa”
(“announce to the angels down in the water, back beneath the mirror” [emphasis

36. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 1, 928–29 (entry 3106, Princess Anne, Maryland).
37. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol 2, 980 (The Patient Doctor, Waycross, Georgia).
38. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 5, 3954 (entry 10162, New Orleans, Louisiana).

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180 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

mine]).39 Another ritual song invokes the doorkeeper spirit, Papa Legba, to
“sound (the depths of ) the mirror” (“Kreyol sonde miwa atibon Legba!”).40
The mirror serves as the primary symbol in Vodou for both the barrier and
the gate that stands between this world and that of the spirits. Is it any won-
der that Conjure traditions seeking to place individuals under the influence
of the spirit world—for good or ill—should employ ritual actions involving
the backs of mirrors?
Similarly, in the New World recension of Bakongo religion known as las
reglas de Palo (including such variations as Palo Mayombe, Monte, Briyumba,
Kimbisa, etc.), mirrors form a crucial ingredient in the elaborate ritual assem-
blages called prendas, ngangas, or nkisis (the latter term exactly cognate to the
original Kikongo nkisi).41 Todd Ramon Ochoa, in his splendid ethnography
of a Palo Briyumba house in present day Cuba, offers a telling description of
the role the mirror plays in the construction of a prenda:

Before the nfumbe [spirit of the Dead] could be settled into the little cauldron, Pedro
positioned a small piece of broken mirror atop the white chalk drawing he had made
in the bottom of the vessel. Holding the cauldron in his hand, Pedro stared into the
bottom and contemplated the mirror glimmering from its depths. He took a moment
to drown it in aspirations of aguardiente and white wine. He moved slowly and took
his time, looking down at the mirror after each soaking. He then filled the little
cauldron with smoke by blowing through his inverted cigar. He was deliberate in
studying the tendrils, watching them flow and twist around one another. He said,
“The cauldron no longer has a bottom. [esta cazuela ya no tiene fondo]/ Now it opens
onto the world of truth [el mundo de la verdad], which is the dead [que es el muerto].
. . . “Now,” he said, “all you see is the sky. Look in, see the sky. Wherever the prenda
goes it will always be close to the sun, and the moon, and the stars.”42

39. Karen McCarthy Brown, “Staying Grounded in a High-Rise Building: Eco-

logical Dissonance and Ritual Accommodation in Haitian Vodou,” in Gods of the
City: Religion and the Urban American Landscape, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), 83.
40. Some variants of this song contain the line “lajan kase wóch”—“money [spe-
cifically silver] breaks rock”—which echoes the Conjure belief in the power of
reflective coins to break barriers, to transcend that which is thought to be fixed.
41. Like their American cousins, the hands and tobys of Conjure and Hoodoo,
these accumulations of sacred substances—human, animal, and vegetative—are the
tools by which the world of spirit is accessed and worked in Palo.
42. Todd Ramon Ochoa, Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in
Cuba (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 167.

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 181

The placement of a mirror to make this sacred cauldron “bottomless,” with

access to the all-powerful and all-pervasive world of the dead, sounds
remarkably like a cursing rite collected by Hyatt some sixty years earlier in
Mobile, Alabama, quite possibly an echo of the same ritual tradition:

Ah heard a lady dat ah knew, she wanted tuh do a person a very bad trick. She taken
a bran;-new bucket, a tin bucket dat nevah been used. Put dat bucket dere an’ put some
graveyard dirt in it. An’ put dat lady’s name in whut she jis’ didn’t care much fo’ in
dere. An’ walked tuh a place an’ took ’er left foot, mashed it in de ground, so she
could git de print of ’er foot. An’ put dat in dat new bucket, an’ bought a bran’-new
looking glass – bran’-new ten-cent glass an’ put dat in de bucket. An’ den she buried dat.
Dat’s tuh turn them down against de world. She buried dat glass an’ de left print of
foot, an’ de graveyard dirt, an’ put it in dis new bucket an’ buried it. She wuz buryin’
’er down. (emphasis mine)43

As with other examples discussed previously, the more significant aspects of

this rite consist of the repeated juxtaposition between seen and unseen—where
visually striking elements are deliberately placed out of sight. A mirror is
buried under earth inside a shiny new bucket, then the whole collection is
buried in the ground. Similar aesthetic strategies are at work in the construc-
tion of the prenda—the mirror that reflects the sun, moon, and stars will be
buried beneath layers of other materia sacra. Once completed it will serve as a
living shrine for the nfumbe—the dead spirit whose bones it contains—and it
will receive offerings in exchange for its protection and the blessings it dis-
penses for its keeper and its devotees.
These offerings invariably include the blood, viscera, and bones of sacri-
ficed animals, drops of human blood collected during initiatory scarification,
and aspirations of rum, chamba, or other powerful beverages. A well-tended
prenda acquires a glossy veneer when bathed in sacrificial blood and other
holy liquids. The mirror at its bottom—never to be looked in again after its

43. Hyatt, Hoodoo, Vol. 4, 2849 (entry 5457, Mobile, Alabama). While this ritual
is quite specifically intended to inflict harm, bucket shrines that serve as spirit
containers—akin to the Palo prenda, and meant to bless rather than blight—are part
of contemporary Spiritual Church practice in New Orleans and elsewhere. Like this
spell, and like the prenda, they also contain unseen reflective elements (usually ritual
offerings of silver coin). See Stephen C. Wehmeyer, “Indian Altars of the Spiritual
Church—Kongo Echoes in New Orleans,” African Arts 33, no. 4 (2000): 62–70. As
with several of the examples cited earlier, the buried, unseen shining substances are
echoed in the sheen of the external pail or bucket—“a tin bucket dat nevah been
used.”

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182 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

burial under layers of earth, bone, plant, and animal matter—presages the
more subtle reflective properties it will demonstrate when it is being effec-
tively honored or “worked.” Ochoa’s description of his own encounter with
a constellation of prendas that have just received offerings is a meditation on
the sacred shine of sacrificial blood:

The prendas were black. Everything in them was black. Little sticks and jagged edges
poked out of them. They shimmered black under a viscid patina of blackness that
confused the eye. When we were able to approach them unobstructed, we could see
that they were covered in glistening new blood. This stood out iridescent against the
blackness of the prendas, glowing almost orange.44

Whether the effect is created with sacrificial blood or layers of cigarette foil,
shining elements indicate spiritual presence and agency. Striking visual flashes
hint at unseen realities, at hidden resources of knowledge and power, and a
shimmering outside betokens the presence of spirit inside. The power of these
shimmering objects to affect bodies and minds is a quintessential aspect of the
Conjurational worldview, and reflects (pun intended) latter-day theoretical
shifts in the way we think about the agency of objects and their power to
captivate.45

“SHINING LIKE NEW M ONEY!”—LITERARY AND ARTISTIC

REFLECTIONS O N T HE SHIMMER O F SORCERY
The aesthetics and metaphysics of Conjure have been employed by a number
of latter-day visual and literary artists. Renee Stout and Betye and Alison Saar
have created art installations that directly engage with the lore of Conjure
and Hoodoo, including its predilection for shimmering, reflective aesthetics.
Stout’s 1988 sculptures Fetish 噛1 and Fetish 噛2 evoke the Bakongo roots of
Conjure practice: the former, a darkly brooding sacred bundle dotted with
sullenly shimmering buttons and beads; the latter, a body cast that turns the
artist herself into a living nkisi hung about with bags of spirit-directing medi-
cines and sporting a reflective surface capping her belly (in this case, a framed

44. Ochoa, Society of the Dead, 192. Ochoa’s subsequent description of the raya-
miento initiation at which these prendas are encountered extends the meditation on
reflection. He is compelled by the way the blade of the razor used to scar the initiate
picks up the tones of her skin, the flicker of candle light, etc. It would seem at this
moment that Ochoa has fully surrendered to the aesthetics of Palo ritual, invested as
they are—like Conjure—in the metaphysics of reflection.
45. See Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998).

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 183

childhood photograph rather than a mirror). Her earlier installation, Dear

Robert, I’ll See You at the Crossroads (1994–95)—a frank reference to the
Crossroads initiation believed to be the root of Robert Johnson’s musical
prowess—employs neon, twinkling Christmas lights, and a brightly shining
tinfoil-covered “window.” In Betye Saar’s Garden Reliquary (1989), silver
saints’ medals and ex-votos wink from within a forest of Spanish moss, and
her later Gris-Gris Box (2008) features a grinning poppet crowned with an
artfully shattered circular mirror.
Perhaps the most significant literary evocation of the Conjurational preoc-
cupation with shine and shimmer is August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and
Gone. Part of Wilson’s epic Century Cycle, the play is set in 1911 and features
as one of its central characters the Conjure man Bynum Walker, who
received his supernatural gifts from the hands of a man who “shines like new
money.” Bynum describes this experience in a conversation with Rutherford
Selig, a peddler and “people-finder” whom Bynum has engaged to track
down his “Shiny Man”:

Bynum: You around here finding everybody how come you ain’t found my shiny
man.
Selig: The only shiny man I saw was the Nigras working on the road gang with the
sweat glistening on them.
Bynum: Naw, you’d be able to tell this fellow. He shine like new money.46

Bynum narrates a visionary experience in which the Shiny Man instructs him
to cleanse himself with blood (“Told me to take it and rub it all over me . . .
say that was a way of cleaning myself”) after which his senses are flooded
with brightness (“I had to cover up my eyes for being blinded. He shining
like new money with that light”). Sweat, blood, and money are all currencies
in systems of exchange—systems that created the world of the black Atlantic,
and that ultimately gave rise to the existence of Conjure in the New World.
Like the silver paper around tobacco (another currency), sweat, blood, and
money all shine under the right circumstances.
Bynum eventually finds his shining man in the person of one Herald
Loomis, a lonely traveler who has recently served time on a chain gang.
Loomis arrives at the boarding house where Bynum is staying, and his efforts
to find his missing wife eventually lead to a violent reunion. At the climax of

46. August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: A Play in Two Acts (New York:
New American Library, 1988), 8.

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184 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft  Summer 2017

this confrontation, Loomis slashes his chest and bathes himself in his own
blood:

Martha: You got to be something, Herald. You just can’t be alive. Life don’t mean
nothing unless it’s got a meaning.
Loomis: What kind of meaning you got? What kind of clean you got, woman? You
want blood? Blood make you clean? You clean with blood?
(Loomis slashes himself across the chest. He rubs the blood over his face and comes to a realiza-
tion.)
Loomis: I’m standing! I’m standing. My legs stood up! I’m standing now!
(Having found his song, the song of self-sufficiency, fully resurrected, cleansed and given breath,
freed from any encumbrance other than the workings of his own heart and the bonds of the flesh,
having accepted the responsibility for his own presence in the world, he is free to soar above the
environs that weighed and pushed his spirit into terrifying contractions.)47

The same ritual procedures that signal initiation in several New World Afri-
can religions—cutting the flesh and anointing the body with sacrificial
blood—here mark the moment in which Herald Loomis comes into himself.
Loomis, scarred on the chest and anointed with his own blood, is finally
“standing up” by his own admission. His transformation is acknowledged by
Bynum Walker, who utters the triumphant last line of the play: “Herald
Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!” Bynum’s words high-
light the fundamentally reflective nature of Loomis’s new state of being—he
shines. Wilson’s play gives us a powerful narrative of personal transformation
and transcendence, but one firmly and properly rooted in the existing aes-
thetics and metaphysics of Conjure and other New World African religions
in which the reflective property of blood—akin to the shine of silver dimes,
mirrors, or “tobacco paper”—marks the state of transcendence and the
moment of wonder. Bynum’s exultant shout—that Loomis shines “like new
money”—brings us squarely back to the ritual deployment of silver dimes in
Conjure work. The state of “shining” is a marker of health, well-being, and
bodily integration.
Whether expressed through the words of celebrated dramatists, in the
imaginative installations of modern artists, or in the no less creative rituals
undertaken by ordinary folks seeking health, love, luck, or triumph over an
enemy, shining aesthetics are a hallmark of Conjure tradition. Shimmering
elements like foil, mirror shards, and polished dimes serve as complex and

47. Ibid., 93–94.

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 Wehmeyer  From the Back of the Mirror 185

sophisticated metaphors—reflections of the very real blood, sweat, and per-

haps tears—that are all part and parcel of everyday life. A bit of foil or a
polished dime offers the practitioner of Conjure a multifaceted tool for artic-
ulating and expressing quotidian dreams and desires. As “poets of the con-
crete,” they manipulate these aesthetics in active response to the spurs and
shackles of vernacular circumstance, and find powerful messages of triumph
and revelation in objects as humble as a fragment of broken mirror or a
shimmering cigarette wrapper.

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