“Voodoo,” as Hollywood and the humanities have combined to present it, almost always seems to come from another time, another space, and from something other than accredited authority. The pin-pricked doll. The zombie. Frenetic drums in the distance.¹ The National Geographic Society’s 2009 Fast Facts Book, for instance, opens a prefatory section on religion titled “What Is Magical Thinking?” with a striking photograph bearing the caption, “ENTRANCED BY THEIR BELIEFS, Haitian women engage in ritual bathing during a pilgrimage.” Readers learn that Haitian religious practice “blends magical elements of voodoo with Christian traditions.”² On one side of the blend we...

From W. E. B. Du Bois to Jean Toomer, several key early authors of African American modernity turned southward to Gullah/Geechee terrain—the Altamaha, the Georgia rice fields, the shout-driven rhythms of the Charleston—to dip their art into living waters of a folk authority more complex and transfiguring than they could know. Their texts bear poignant, often opaque witness. As Toomer’s Cane, for example, depicts a Georgia folk culture in urban migration and modernizing transition, it also registers a conservative remnant, the “African Guardian of Souls” who, though “converted,” remains present as another kind of converting force working from...

There is a remarkable set of tensions between God and native land in the Negro national anthem. Marking a path grown from “the places, our God, where we met Thee,” the song lays implicit claim to a countercultural knowledge of the sacred’s blood-consecrated terrain.¹ Written by the agnostic James Weldon Johnson (and set to music by his brother, Rosamond) for a chorus of Jacksonville schoolchildren in honor of Lincoln’s birthday, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” traveled beyond its natal place and time—opening a new century at the nadir of postbellum race relations in the state with the highest lynching...

To balanse is to bring a catalytic ritual heat to bear on an otherwise stagnant situation. Balancing acts help swing us beyond the fixed score or script through otherwise uncharted, invisible, inaudible, or unthinkable zones of experience. Whether it be the time-space of a Haitian yam harvest celebrated in Brooklyn or the stage of a club in New Orleans’s Faubourg Marigny, the black Atlantic’s “balancing” systems of service to les Invisibles (the lwa and ancestral dead) have enabled adepts to make a way out of no way and to move through seemingly impassable gulfs. From such a ritual swing-perspective, it...

New Orleans has been America’s Creole City of the Sublime: a city both part and apart, a collection, a conglomeration that assembles ritually, seasonally, and as need or desire calls, to shake its parts together into an “I” (or Creole mo)—the componential soul of its ti-bon anj (“little good angel”), gwo-bon anj (“big-good-angel”), nam (animate force), zetwal (astral fate), and all the hipbones-reconnecting-to-thighbones of the dead stepping in revivification. The genius “mo” of New Orleans rises from an undead time-space of imagination that has crossed through erasures of history and waves of trauma. “Mo oulé mourrir dans lac-là!” (I...

“What is the truth?” Zora Neale Hurston was asked while doing what her Baptist minister father might have called “two-headed work” as a novelist-anthropologist serving the Mystères of Haitian Vodou. She received unforgettable ritual answer from a mambo who, “by throwing back her veil and revealing her sex organs,” gave bodily testimony that “this . . . is the ultimate truth”—“There is no mystery beyond the mysterious source of life.”¹ The mambo’s flash of revealed truth would find publication in 1938 in Tell My Horse, but it also shaped the “creaming” and “frothing” of the erotic beneath the blooming...

It makes sense that Yemaya was the first orisha with whom I had sustained ritual contact within Regla de Ocha (Santería). The mother of waters, oceans, terrestrial life, she is the genius of first contacts and aqueous beginnings. Her beach offerings grew increasingly familiar: fruit, flowers, and candles left at surf’s edge, fried pork rinds and plantains surrounding seven pennies. Her public face—the Virgin of Regla—confronted me daily in neighborhood bodegas that double as botánicas (spiritual supply shops) where her image on rows of candles found constantly marketed display. Through a life of travels (hers tied up with...

When Governor George Wallace took his infamous doorway stand to block a descendant of enslaved Africans from admission to the University of Alabama, he doubtless felt he was serving the intent of the state’s and nation’s founding fathers. He was not wrong in that conviction. Even America’s most liberal colleges of humanistic studies have yet to grapple meaningfully with what happens when gateways to the cross-cultural imagination and its repertory are opened. Canons change or crumble. Bodies of knowledge shift shape, and terrain we think we know or possess reveals baffling relations, unthought enfranchisements and interpenetrations calling for epistemological shape-shifting....