African American Folk Healing

Stephanie Mitchem

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814796351
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión étnica y tribal

Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, often communicated through women. Such folk practices shape the concepts about healing that are diffused throughout African American communities and are expressed in myriad ways, from faith healing to making a mojo.

Stephanie Y. Mitchem presents a fascinating study of African American healing. She sheds light on a variety of folk practices and traces their development from the time of slavery through the Great Migrations. She explores how they have continued into the present and their relationship with alternative medicines. Through conversations with black Americans, she demonstrates how herbs, charms, and rituals continue folk healing performances. Mitchem shows that these practices are not simply about healing; they are linked to expressions of faith, delineating aspects of a holistic epistemology and pointing to disjunctures between African American views of wellness and illness and those of the culture of institutional medicine.

PART II

Today’s Healing Traditions

Global influences: An African American spiritual supplies and services store in Columbia, SC, includes healing products derived from locations around the world: Goji (the Himalayas); hoodia (African continent); and magosteen (East Asia). Weight control and detoxification are clearly modern health concerns. Juju and demon slaying are services provided by the storeowner. (Photo taken by author.)

4

Healing and Hybridity in the Twenty-First Century

Don’t put your pocketbook on the floor; if you do, you will lose money.

Don’t sweep someone across the feet with a broom or there will be illness. If it happens, the person whose feet were swept should spit on the broom.

To determine the sex of an unborn baby, drop a pin on the table in front of the pregnant woman; if the head points toward her, she’s carrying a boy.

If your right hand itches, it means money is coming. Scratch it to ward you and thank God.

To lower blood pressure, take some Spanish moss from a tree and put it into your drink.

—Healing and protective concepts collected by author, 2003–2006

Introduction

Discussions of African American folk healing today take significantly different twists than did past discussions. There were hints of the differences to come in the interviews of the Wayne State University Folk Archives. Folk healing reflects black cultural changes born of the civil rights, feminist, and Black Power movements. Each movement challenged the status quo to remove or lessen the barriers to greater social dialogue for those who had been completely shut out of full participation in public life. Each changed the landscape of social possibilities for African Americans, benefiting some and leaving others behind.

Some of the changes in black American culture and social structures are evident in the contrast between the Slave Narratives and the WSU Folk Archives records. In the latter, black people were able to take the lead in some aspects of scholarly methods and theories about themselves. Not all of the changes were welcomed or appreciated by the scholars who self-identified as classicists and opted to maintain the dominance of Western European thought as the only legitimate source of knowledge. The several scholarship camps created some tensions that have not yet been resolved. Nevertheless, African Americans today are able to use research in new ways in analyzing their identities. One way has been to read the subtexts or to identify subjugated voices of black people. But what is sometimes confusing to scholars is that these subtexts or voices are hidden in plain sight in black public spaces. New scholarship has begun to analyze what one scholar has called the black counterpublic: “In black public spaces, in black organizations, and through black information networks, African Americans enter into dialogue with one another . . . an everyday talk that helps black people to develop collective definitions of their political interests.”¹

Black bodies continued to be politicized, through images of the media, work and education, and institutional medicine. As we have seen, the reasons for the continuation of African American healing practices into the current day are numerous. The need to resist oppressions was certainly as much for African Americans who lived during the 1970s Folk Archives era as for those who experienced slavery and the Great Migrations. When black people are compared with other groups in American society, no matter the measure, they are usually found to be in the lowest tier of social success. When considering the number of AIDS cases or the numbers in prison populations, for instance, some people blame African Americans for imprudent sex or criminal tendencies rather than recognizing the effect of structural inequalities that impact black lives.

But resisting oppressions cannot be considered the singular motivation for folk healing’s continuance. Certainly, although racism is still experienced, black Americans proactively use religio-cultural forms such as folk healing to construct views of life that advance their own humanity. Black views of humanness can simultaneously be more positive and more complex. African American folk healing encompasses these nuances of resistance with construction, and this adds depth and texture to our study.

Folk healing continues to provide a cultural place where African Americans can define health or illness, care for their bodies, and utilize their spiritual concepts of a holistic universe. The healing advisories at the head of this chapter are an indication of the persistence of ideas about self-care that continue to circulate in black folk healing. These ideas do not mean that other forms of medical care are not sought. Black folk healing in the twenty-first century has become an informal space in which to define self. As folk healing focuses on balancing and renewing life, adaptations take place to fit the present. Relationality and the importance of the interconnections in life have become more important. Relearning the past and finding new ways to move into the future become healing themes.

Ann

Ann is an African American healer living in Detroit whom I interviewed in March 2003. In her early fifties, she also is a writer, media consultant, and teacher. She grew up in the Episcopalian faith, but it did not satisfy her spiritual needs. She explored other religious traditions, and the quest led to different forms of spirituality, such as meditation. As part of one exploration, she visited a hypnotist to lead her through a past-life regression. During this session, she found that she had been a healer in Bahia, Brazil:

This was in the 1500s . . . in my twenties, I was somehow initiated into a group of women who did healing work, but they did energy work in various forms. For instance, if you were having problems with crops they would come and live with you and work on the crops, which meant they had to work on the family. . . . I was a healer so I had to work on people’s sickness.

Following this, Ann believed that one purpose in her life was tied to returning to Bahia. She traveled to Bahia to “reunite her soul to the village.” After the trip, she came to another understanding: she felt that greater forces had directed her toward healing work today. “It’s like the universe said, no Ann, that ain’t why we sent you to Bahia.”

Some months later, Ann’s mother was scheduled for an operation for colon cancer. The surgeons voiced some concern that she would not survive. “I went back to the hospital, they let me in and she was in prep. So I didn’t know what to do. I took my hands and I put them over her stomach and I began to rub. I had no clue. She made it out of the operation, but the doctors were amazed. Then I began to say, Well, I wonder did I do anything—or didn’t I?”

Because of these experiences, Ann wanted to study energy healing. She found a program, Healing Touch, through the local alternative medicine newspaper and attended one class session.

At the end of Sunday, Kathy and Kim [the instructors] came up to me and said, “[We] think you should really continue with your healing touch.” And I said “Why?” They said, “Because we really think you have a gift.” And I said, “Well gee, thanks. That’s like telling me that I should just drop everything that I have been doing and become a mechanical engineer. I’m not really interested.”

But Ann did continue taking classes: “It just seemed like whenever a class came, there was money available to take the class.”

Ann is now a certified energy healer. She describes the feelings of the healing process.

It’s just awesome. . . . You’re not using your energy, what you are doing is channeling the energy of the universe that is out there. You are creating, you are like a wire creating this channel that goes in through your hand and you sort of disrupt disharmony in the energy field and sort of repattern it, so that the person comes back into balance. If a human gets nothing more than that, the fact is that most people are so stressed and off centered, they don’t even know what centered is. I’ve had people come in who say there is nothing wrong with them, but [after a healing session] they go “Wow! This is what it is like to be integrated, to be whole, to be centered!” And you go, “Yeah.”

Some African Americans reject Ann’s offers of a healing touch session because they interpret it as voodoo. “I have had people tell me, ‘Oh no, if it’s like yoga, then it’s the work of the devil. . . .’ Some people have been taught that anything other than what they can see and hear, if their pastor didn’t say so, then it’s the work of the devil. I don’t get it, I don’t understand.”

Ann believes that the current climate of institutional medicine makes the need for practices like healing touch more pressing:

But you don’t have fifty dollars for a doctor’s visit and a hundred and some odd dollars for a test and the medication and the prescriptions. I think necessity breeds creativity. If everybody had adequate health care, we may not be seeing all of these alternative things come up again. But people do not have health care. And the health care that they do have—“Just kill me now because that shit’s worse than the sickness,” you know?

Ann understands that what she does is directly related to any form of healing using energy, and that includes the work of African traditional healers. Connecting ideas of energy work to the history of enslaved Africans, she believes that some of the “power” for hoodoo or voodoo was the use of energy by practitioners. “The thing is that you are sending energy, that’s what it is, period. The energy is not good, it’s not bad, it’s just energy. You know, the same stuff that fuels a television set, can set off a bomb. It’s still electricity that goes through. That’s neutral. It’s the intention of the person that affects positively or negatively.” The energy in healing work is what makes it effective and connects other forms of alternative healing: “I could heal you, I could work on you, if you are not here. Reiki can do it. Healing Touch can do it. Therapeutic Touch can do it. . . . I concentrate on sending healing energy to the person.”

Healers must be clear on who they are and why they are in healing work. “You have to come in with no judgment because then you start blocking stuff. . . . If you are out there and you are not clear on who you are, or what your problems are or are not, and . . . if you are not real centered in what you are doing, you might as well not do the healing.”

The mission of the healer is tied to this use of energy and a holistic understanding of the body. Ann explained:

Part of the mission of the energy healer is to get the person to understand that we are not just dealing with the physical. The physical, that’s the last thing that happens. If it comes through the layers, it comes through mentally, physically, so if you are thinking, or you got guilt, you can’t let go of stuff, you are ashamed, you are whatever, this builds up energy that eventually manifests. Now it’s the energy healer who says, “I’m seeing this in your aura, I’m seeing it, I’m feeling it, or I’m sensing it in your field.” So you have to figure out whatit is that you can do, so that you will not have a recurrence of this, or it won’t build up. . . . Because we don’t heal the person, we are the catalyst that kind of works the energy to have the person heal because the body has rejuvenating powers itself. So if you’ve got blocked energy, I’ll help you unblock it so that your body can heal itself. The body has this rejuvenating power, but the physical isn’t separate from the mental, the mental isn’t separate from emotion.

Energy work, Ann went on, encompasses African healing methods. “That was voodoo, that’s African religion. And considering the fact that we were the first humans, and they didn’t have [medical] doctors around, that we are probably one of the first people to understand energy.” She noted that she would like “to study different African religions to begin to see how they use energy.”

Contemporary African American Folk Healers

African American folk healing has hybridized from past knowledges and practices. It no longer looks or feels the way it had been represented in the Slave Narratives or even the WSU Folk Archives records. Some aspects appear similar—as do the cures cited at the head of the chapter. All of the opening comments were gathered in passing conversations with African Americans. None of those speakers asserted that he or she had taken the prescribed cure, but the knowledge was simply present in their communities. Most of the statements were collected from black college students.

Ann clearly identifies herself as a healer, yet she appears different, more educated than the people in the 1930s or 1970s. By some views, Ann would be disconnected from past folk healers and dropped into a category of “alternative” healer. Yet she still connects with the black community and sees herself as very much embedded in African American cultural perspectives. That she also has a sense of being connected to her past life demonstrates a sense of connections between living and dead. She has chosen to be a healer but based on her gift and her past life; from this base she sought help to hone her gift. By some other views, Ann should have moved so comfortably into Western cultural mores that her racial identification would be optional, if not completely erased. But that has not been the case for Ann, or for the black college students who were included in the opening quotations.

Ann’s decision and the decisions of the middle-class college students to remain connected with ideas of healing and thereby folk healing resonate with a study by psychologist Fayth M. Parks. After having conducted two hundred interviews of mostly middle-class, Christian black Americans, she found that “folk healing beliefs and practices were identified as important coping strategies. I found that traditions were kept alive within families via storytelling.”² From her survey, Parks also identified four elements that identified and framed African American folk healing for her interviewees: (1) a sense of connection with a spiritual dimension; (2) the use of ritual to connect with the spiritual dimension; (3) belief in the power of words; and (4) the use of dreams as omens of, or providing direction for, the future.³ These elements also underline the definition of folk healing that is used in this book.

Ann’s story demonstrates that forms of folk healing in black communities have taken new shapes. Folk healing is not as it was in the past, when African American communities were isolated enough to retain and pass on folklore practices. Ann’s education, gender, and class are factors in the retention and hybridization of folk healing. A look at how events of the mid-twentieth century shaped the current realities is necessary to understand these developments.

Social Changes

The case Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas, et al. (347 U.S. 483, 1954) was more than a simple challenge to the past structures of inequalities in America. The 1954 decision ended a system of segregation that had kept many black men and women in positions that were little more than neoslavery since the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 5337, 1896) “separate but equal” decision that reinforced sharecropping, day labor, and domestic work at unequal pay rates. Brown v. Board of Education, although focused on one social arena, effectively began dismantling segregation through mandating access to public education.

Although black Americans heralded the Brown decision as critically important, using it as a catalyst for further actions in the civil rights movement, it was not well received by white segregationists. Many white students were pulled from public schools and enrolled in private schools. The concentration of black students in U.S. urban schools became an additional factor in precipitating white flight from cities to suburbs and beyond.

Social class structures were built into these educational battles. As African Americans continued to seek education as a way for self and community improvement, many all-black communities became places where lower-quality goods and services, including education, became normative because of high poverty rates. Black Americans have significant populations in twenty-one states but are more heavily concentrated in urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit.

At the same time, black people who are college educated use their education to retain and preserve their cultures and history. Attending college is not a panacea for racial relations. With few exceptions, cultural and racial identification is reinscribed through encounters with white mainstream America. Many college-educated black women and men will blend what they have learned in colleges and universities and in the workplace with their own cultural referents, emphasizing the idea of hybridity. This blending of classroom information with lived experience reconstructs knowledge to fit their lives. Some black people, therefore, help to maintain folk healing as they use their college educations to find ways to preserve their folk cultures.

When I began this research, I was surprised to find the number of women who either pursued healing as a folk art or blended folk ideas into their training from institutional medicine. I had expected a greater balance of men and women in folk healing. Later, I came to understand the importance of embodied spirituality, and the continued impact of race, class, and gender oppressions. The number of women I interviewed and encountered helped me understand the sharp differe...