For generations in the United States, being born into slavery nearly guaranteed you would live your whole life and eventually die as the legal property of someone else.

How could anyone possibly find joy and even hope in such a life that people needed magic, the kind quietly brought from West Africa, refined in forests, around plantations, and then passed down like an heirloom through generations of women.

From KERA in Dallas, this is think I'm Kris Boyd.

Black girl magic is an empowering phrase to print on water bottles and workout gear and add to social media posts, but my guests research traces the roots of this 21st century hashtag deep into history, and reveals the places this magic is still hiding in plain sight throughout American culture.

If we can learn, read a book.

Lindsay Stewart is a black feminist philosopher and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis.

Her book is called The Conjuring of America Mojos, mermaids, medicine, and 400 Years of black women's magic.

Lindsay, welcome to.

Thank.

Thank you so much for having me.

So this hashtag, black girl magic is like just a little over a decade old as a widely shared meme.

But even if users don't know the origins of the idea, your sense is that people have been tapping in all this time to a much older idea.

That's right.

Um, so part of what I try to do in the book is look at how, um, even though the the phrase was coined in the last decade or so, um, black women have been using magic for over 400 years in this country.

A lot of the things that we associate with black girl magic, in terms of our natural talent or resilience has been forged, um, under slavery.

So the origins of this seem to lie in West African religious traditions, specifically this Nigerian goddess.

The internet has multiple ways of pronouncing her name.

Do you say ocean or ocean?

So ocean is a Nigerian goddess of the Yoruba faith.

And in the Yoruba faith, there's kind of a supreme god.

And then different personalities are manifestation of that god who are Orishas.

A student has been worshiped for thousands of years and in all kind of all over the world, um, especially in the Caribbean along with the Americas.

She's the most beautiful woman in the world and a very old, stately, wise woman.

She's, um, vengeful and she's sweet.

She kind of, uh, she's kind of holds a lot of different aspects of of women and is the idea that all women could sort of, kind of collectively share in some of the powers that she had in the realm of deities.

Right, right.

She's known to be kind of a patron of of all kinds of women.

Um, a supporter of women.

One who will kind of go to bat and be a warrior for women.

So a lot of women find hope in a soon and find kind of a model of how to embrace, um, being a woman.

Um, and that includes, again, all types of women.

Are there physical depictions of her or is she left to the imaginations of people who worship her?

It's kind of like, you know how beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Um, there's lots of different ways that people have depicted her in both myth and in paintings and stories.

Um, sometimes she's dark skinned.

Sometimes she's light skinned.

A lot of that also has to do with how race and colorism plays into the landscape.

So in some places, um, in the Caribbean or in Brazil, she might be pictured as light skinned.

Um, sometimes she's overlapped with the merry figure or the Madonna figure.

Um, so it's kind of interesting to see in some places, a black Madonna.

Um, and really, that's, that's Russian as well.

Well, this takes me to my next question, which is how kidnaped Africans managed to hang on to their beliefs when their enslavers really wanted them to convert to Christianity ASAP.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Yeah.

So a lot of them learned how to hide their beliefs in plain sight.

Sometimes that meant that they would literally go into the woods, um, away from the eye of the master and kind of worship God in their own way.

Sometimes that meant, um, hiding their beliefs within Christianity.

So you see this a lot again in the Caribbean, where people are more Catholic.

Also in Louisiana, where Catholicism definitely gained some, some ground.

Um, they were able to blend the saints with the orishas.

So you could say you're worshiping Mary, but you're also worshiping Oshun for a lot of these people.

Oh, that's so interesting.

So there are no demigods in Christianity, but there are these saints that are all sort of given a specific responsibility and that matched up really well.

Mhm.

It seems like Catholicism had a lot of flexibility and just kind of took up a lot of different indigenous gods in areas.

Um, so it definitely has this kind of rich history of being able to, um, allow some of these practices to still live and breathe.

So, Lindsay, most people know and use the word conjure as a verb.

What does it mean when we take it in the noun form?

So I'm when I'm thinking about conjure, I'm thinking about a spiritual tradition that developed within the United States.

Um, and there's different regions of the United States where it developed, but mainly is these, um, West African religious practices that ended up sorry, that blended with Christianity.

And, um, they were kind of used as a way to manage your luck.

Um, so that's kind of the way that I like to explain to people what exactly the practice is.

It's more about managing your luck, um, than, you know, trying.

I mean, sometimes there were cursing and blessing and things like that, but it was more about, we're in a really bad situation, like slavery.

Um, how do we keep it from getting much worse?

And they did that by, um, this kind of knowledge of herbs and roots that they had for medicine, um, but also spiritual practices that help them fortify their spirit, um, and even resist.

Um, again, it's all about kind of managing your luck and as much as what you have under your control, trying to make things better.

When these women, these conjure women treated physical illnesses with herbal medicine and other remedies.

They took what I think today we would call a holistic approach, right?

They weren't treating diseases.

They were treating the spiritual and emotional needs that a patient brought to them, in addition to feeling sick in some way.

Can you talk about that.

Mhm mhm.

So for um, a lot of West African religions, especially um, the Yoruba faith, um, illness isn't just something that happens physically.

Illness is about kind of balance in a bunch of different relationships.

Your relationship with the earth, your relationship with your family, your relationship with your dead, your ancestors, um, friends and whatnot.

So they really thought of healing as taking place not just in the body, but also within a community.

So a lot of the things that people in, you know, in the Yoruba faith would do is they would give you some herbal medicine that does have medicinal all effects, but they would also make sure that you have a sacrificial meal with your community to kind of shore up your strength because, you know, having friends, having community support is a part of how you recover as well.

And enslaved women took that belief with them, or the sense that healing is not just dealing with the physical, it's also dealing with the psychological and spiritual effects.

So they were kind of like lay therapists.

Um, in addition to having these, um, kind of medicinal recipes, I think lots of people listening will have grown up with a jar of Vicks VapoRub somewhere in the bathroom, or maybe in their grandparents bathroom.

But for listeners who maybe are not familiar, will you explain what the product is and what it's meant to do?

So Vicks VapoRub is a kind of thick salve.

It, um, smells a little bit like menthol, which is one of its main, um, chemical ingredients.

People use it to kind of rub on their chests or under their nose, and it's thought to kind of open the nasal passageway so that you can at least feel like you're getting better and kind of helps you breathe easier.

Um, and part of what I do in the book is look at how a lot of black women, um, from, from slavery, um, were developing selves like this and using it in that way to, um, instead of what doctors in the 19th century were tended to do, which is blood.

Let you or, um, kind of use these methods that made you be in pain.

Um, and so if women would use these methods that weren't invasive.

So, um, again, using these salves to kind of help you breathe better while you're sick.

Um, it doesn't get rid of the virus.

Um, they didn't even really know about viruses at that time.

All it does is help you manage those symptoms and help you recover a little bit better?

It's so interesting to me because, I mean, the smell of Vicks VapoRub is very polarizing.

People either love it or hate it, but there's something you can't use it without someone.

I mean, I suppose you can put it on yourself, but for the most part, our memories are of someone that cared about us rubbing this on us.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, and that's some of our.

I mean, my earliest memories.

Is my mother doing that for me, my grandmother doing that for me.

And I think it's also because it's so such a thick salve.

It definitely feels like love is tactile in those moments.

So what is the official story from the family that made a great deal of money from selling this stuff about how it came to be?

Mm.

So according to, um, the family.

The Richardson family.

Um.

Lunsford Richardson.

Um, a little shortly after slavery patented, um, Vicks VapoRub and the.

The story is that he was a chemist and, um, he had a very sick son on his hand who had the qu the crew.

Um, and that's a really tough illness for children because they they just can't seem to catch their breath.

So the story is, he kind of locked himself into his office and, um, in the nick of time, came up with Vicks VapoRub, and, um, it became like, kind of this instant success.

And when the, um, 1918 flu pandemic came into effect, um, everybody was kind of turning to Vicks VapoRub, and that's what really made it become this kind of million dollar success.

Um, so it's kind of due to him being a chemist, him having a doctor as a father.

Um, and just a little bit of luck and ingenuity.

Okay.

But there's another family, the stencil shepherds, and they claim that this is part of their legacy.

Yeah.

So it's really surprising to me to, um.

I literally just put up a post on Facebook and said, hey, does anyone remember, you know, their family using Vicks VapoRub?

I just wanted to get a sense of how common it is still among people today, especially in the South.

And, um, this one woman, Crystal Sanders, popped up and I knew her from graduate school.

She said, yeah, my family has always claimed that, um, Lunsford Richardson stole that recipe from my their enslaved ancestor.

And when I was digging into the research, it definitely seemed like it's possible that that occurred, um, maybe even likely, given that the methods that Lunsford Richardson probably knew from as a doctor had nothing to do with salves.

It was more about, I'm going to take this blood to help balance.

They thought it was bad humors.

Bad humors, um, to kind of help you recover.

It was really invasive and heroic, the methods that he would have learned from his father.

But there is a tradition, a consistent tradition across the south of enslaved women who were using specific ingredients that are the primary ingredients of his salve.

Like menthol and turpentine, they were getting it from pine trees, the turpentine, and meant the menthol from mint plants.

Um, and they were already using that method of salves.

And once you realize that Lunsford Richardson grew up on a plantation, um, spent a lot of time around these enslaved women who were already making these salves.

That kind of puts the pieces together.

Like, wait a minute.

Um, it seems like they were already using that formula before he even, you know, patented it.

So, in other words, he may not have come upon this idea, even if the exact formulation was a little bit different.

He didn't come upon it just out of nowhere.

Right.

Right.

It's likely he saw it in enslaved quarters.

Lindsay, you use a term in the book that I would be reluctant to use outside of this conversation, and that is naming these women who were practicing herbal medicine on plantations, Negro mamas.

This is what they would have been called at the time.

Can you talk about your choice to just use that phrase?

Mhm.

I partly used it because when I was looking at enslaved interviews, um, from the Federal Writers Project, which is this really massive archive, they of writers who went out and found people who were enslaved and, and got their stories.

A lot of their women called themselves Negro.

So I wanted to be, um, kind of respectful of of how they called, how they name themselves.

But I also wanted to get at this image of enslaved women that a lot of black women have been taught to be ashamed of.

There are all sorts of caricatures in American society of these women.

Um, there's kind of this belief that these enslaved women who usually worked in the in the big house after years and years and years of field work, um, and took care of the children on the plantation that, um, there's this idea that they were kind of docile and supported slavery.

And a lot of that is a myth that came from people who were, um, in favor of slavery and mainly, um, slave owners who were in favor of slavery.

Um, and I grew up with going.

You know, I'm from Louisiana, so I grew up with going to New Orleans on family trips, going to the tourist shops, and seeing these really gross caricatures of Negro mammy's in the shops.

I remember the kind of shame I felt with with looking at that.

So I wanted to attack that and kind of give people a story, a different story about Negro mammy's that helps them see that these women are people to be proud of if you descended from them.

So looking for this pride, you came upon sort of the back story of what has become a very, very divisive, uh, fictional character, the one depicted for many years no longer being used of of Aunt Jemima, the pancake brand ambassador.

I just found this story so interesting, and it speaks to so many of the things you've just talked about.

So tell us about how Aunt Jemima came to be known to many Americans well outside the South starting in 1893.

So Aunt Jemima kind of, um, had this grand debut during the Chicago World's Fair.

Um, the people who created the character of Aunt Jemima.

They based it on a Negro mammy, because they were selling a product that was unfamiliar to the American public.

Um, lots of people were familiar with the kind of, um, pancakes that were being made in the South called ho cakes that are primarily made of corn.

Um, the people who were trying to push this new product, Aunt Jemima's pancakes, um, they were using white flour, um, along with cornmeal and rice and trying to say, like.

And it was an innovative product.

It was the first self-raising kind of pancake mix on the market.

Um, and they were trying to convince people to take a chance on this product.

And, um, in order to do that, they thought, well, hey, let's use this woman who, um, is kind of known as being this excellent cook on plantations, Negro, mammy's and, um, at the World's Fair.

People just fell in love with the exhibit.

People were very excited about it.

People were buying the pancakes like crazy.

Um, they actually casted a woman who was a former enslaved Nancy Greene to play the figure of Aunt Jemima.

And it really, that exhibit kind of tapped into these, um, real fears that white Americans were having at that time.

Um, at that time, lynching was going on.

So a lot of African Americans were fleeing the South, moving to places like Chicago.

A lot of white northerners were worried about what that would mean.

Would these black, new, black people compete with our jobs?

Would they try to take over our cities?

Um, a lot of southern whites were upset that they no longer had these, these servants because African Americans were leaving the plantations.

So kind of one of the things that, um, made this character really sing was playing on a lot of these fears of this newly freed black population.

So in other words, she was presented to white consumers.

Like, if you were to meet this woman, she would be delighted to serve you delicious pancakes.

She wouldn't complain.

She wouldn't campaign for her rights.

She would be more than happy to be in your kitchen working for you.

But there's a subversive story, um, based on a song about another fictional Aunt Jemima.

Mhm.

I mean, this really blew my mind because I definitely could see how, um, the Aunt Jemima that we've been presented with all these years would make white people feel at ease because she is a black woman who knows her place, um, in scare quotes, knows her, knows her place.

Um, but the Aunt Jemima character is really based off of a minstrel show.

Um, and the song and dance routine was actually created by, um, a black man who had been enslaved.

Um, so you had this really ironic moment of a black person playing a caricature of a black person in blackface.

So that was really odd to see.

Um, but then when you dig into where he got the idea from an Aunt Jemima character from, it's actually based on a protest song during slavery called Promises of Freedom, where enslaved people are kind of mocking their slave masters for promising them freedom and never fulfilling that promise.

So, um, when you have this menstrual performer, Billy Carson's black Man, performing the song in this dance routine.

Aunt Jemima during reconstruction and at the onset of Jim Crow, it becomes a really powerful protest song of, um, hey, look out, America, you promised this freedom and you have it yet?

Um, so it's amazing to me how Aunt Jemima has had this incredible life in American culture.

So how did you feel when it was announced that the company that made the most recent version of those pancakes would no longer use that character to sell their product?

I mean, I understood in a way.

Um, but I also felt a little sad, partly because, um, I worried that a lot of people would miss the real story of Aunt Jemima and what miss this kind of hidden history.

Um, because once you erase her from the box, we don't remember her anymore.

Um, but there was, um, a real woman that we should remember.

Many real women.

And that's enslaved women.

So I was I was a little bit sad that people might not get that history anymore.

Yeah.

I just think it's so interesting because I know a lot of black activists were behind the campaign to get rid of the character.

It sounds like that was something they were motivated by, the fact that they maybe didn't know the real kind of deeper, richer story.

I mean, I'm not I'm not sure if they did or not.

Um, I do know that it it seemed like from, um, the stuff that I read and encountered on social media, there was this sense that Aunt Jemima was someone that we should be ashamed of.

And Negro mammy, or someone we should be ashamed of.

So let's get rid of this image.

Um, and that really concerned me as well, because again, you're erasing this really powerful history.

At the same time, I did understand how if that alternative history isn't presented, then the Aunt Jemima figure can do a lot of damage.

Mhm.

Something else you write about in the book that had not occurred to me is that when these women were going out into the forests and collecting herbs, and it was maybe a time that they could escape this constant oversight and just be alone to think and learn and pray.

It was time to themselves when they were gathering these medicinal plants.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Yeah.

It made me think about how um the forest was, had a lot of different, um, registers for African-Americans.

Um, enslaved people sometimes the forest was this place that was dangerous.

Um, but oftentimes it was a place where they could escape, they could run away, they could hide out.

Um, and where these, these women could, um, find a sense of who they are Outside of the the slave master.

Why did so many people in the Antebellum South?

It sounds like black and white alike prefer to be treated when they were sick by black mammy's, as opposed to the white doctors of the day.

Mhm, mhm.

I mean some of it is uh some of it is.

I mean you probably don't want to be cut up with knives either.

Bled.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um so there was that.

Right.

Just in terms of the methods, um, the methods that Negro mammy's use were a lot gentler.

Um, even though the teas didn't taste that well, it was it was a lot gentler.

Um, but also Negro mammy's were more effective than a lot of the, um, white male doctors at the time.

Again, this is before people that really discovered viruses.

Um, so you're really dealing with this kind of field of, um, people who are trying to force you to be better by again white male doctors, by bloodletting you by putting leeches on you to suck out the blood, um, by kind of depriving you of fluids to or giving you, um, really harsh chemicals to make you throw stuff up or or defecate.

Um, it's really violent measures, um, for healing and puts the body under a lot of stress and trauma.

And on the other hand, you had Negro Miamis who they to believe that illness was an imbalance, but they believed that you should try to work with the immune system.

They wouldn't have called it the immune system.

But I kind of think that's what it was.

It was, um, let's work with what the body is already doing and try to enhance that, um, and not invade the body, not cut you up and things like that.

So, um, they were seeing a lot of results for their methods.

And I think that's also part of why people prefer to go to them.

Of course, it changes once we learn about viruses and germs and things like that.

My guest is Lindsay Stewart, a black feminist philosopher and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis.

Her book is called The Conjuring of America Mojos, mermaids, medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic.

You're listening to Think I'm Chris Boyd.

All right, let's let's move on to mermaids here.

A lot of people, I'll say probably mostly white people, freaked out when Disney's live action remake of The Little Mermaid cast a black actress in the title role.

The way you see it, a black mermaid was probably the right choice all along based on legends and history.

Tell us about that.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Right.

Um, and also just based on the relationship that the United States has to the Caribbean and how, um, the 1989 film had a lot of Caribbean elements.

It kind of made sense to me that they would cast a black woman.

Um, given that in the Caribbean and in New Orleans, um, and in West Africa, lots of people believed in black mermaids, um, during slavery.

Lots of people brought those stories about black mermaids to the Americas.

And, um, so it was just kind of surprising to me that people would get as angry as they did over that, given that there are all these other stories, um, at the same time.

Um, like the actress said, maybe we should have expected some of the hate.

What could a mermaid, uh, in Black Legend do for you if you needed help?

Um, she's a little bit, like, again, the Mary figure in Catholicism.

She's someone that you can can pray to for all sorts of help, whether it be reproductive help, help with romantic relationships, or just help out of oppressive situations.

And part of why I was interested in looking at black mermaids and how they show up in the United States is, it seems like black mermaids, um, did a lot for helping people revolt.

Um, in terms of, um, they were kind of these symbolic figures that people would appeal to when they were, um, trying to resist slavery.

And I found that really interesting.

I don't hear a lot of people talk about that.

I think it's well known in African-American communities, but kind of in the broader American public, it's kind of missing, um, how black mermaids were called upon, um, during revolts.

Did mermaid lore play a role in the Haitian Revolution?

Oh, absolutely.

Um, so there, um, it's kind of well known that there was a voodoo ceremony that kind of sparked off.

The Haitian Revolution was kind of less well known, is that there were a male and female priestess who are kind of conducting the ceremony, and at least the female priestess, um, Cecile Mambo, she, um, she was mounted or possessed by the, um, lower or kind of spirit in Haitian voodoo called Ursula.

Um, and Ursula sometimes takes the form of a mermaid.

Um, Ursula is kind of like the, um, Haitian counterpart to Oshun.

What sort of overlap can be observed between the practices of Negro mammy healers and voodoo queens of New Orleans who were mostly free black women?

Yeah, yeah.

And again, that sort of history is kind of not so well known that there are places in the US where during slavery there there were some free black people.

Um, and in New Orleans especially, this really kind of interesting, um, group of free black women.

Um, there were some overlaps in the sense that, um, negro mummies and voodoo queens were using herbalism, um, and maybe even believed in some of the same type of spirits.

Um, in New Orleans it was more voodoo, um, which blends Yoruba, um, kind of beliefs from the Kongo and Catholicism versus, um, hoodoo, which blends kind of Yoruba and Congolese beliefs with more Protestantism.

Um, so there are some, some differences.

In, in New Orleans there.

Um, there's more of a kind of catalog of spirits or Lolas than you would get in hoodoo.

Um, but still there are overlaps in terms of the herbalism in terms of, um, kind of stuff that they would do, like create magical amulets that could help fortify the spirit, um, and kind of encourage people to resist their oppression.

So they, again, were in the business of kind of luck management and and resilience and resistance.

Mhm.

Mhm.

Absolutely.

Lindsey.

Voodoo queens worked very hard to sort of keep alive their ancestors gods, especially the ones that were powerful enough to exact revenge.

And maybe, maybe voodoo queens had more freedom to do this than people practicing herbal medicine while enslaved.

Yes, partly because a lot of the voodoo queens were were free, um, and were even able to hold property, um, and kind of had less restrictions, Unlike Negro mummies who were really tied to the plantation.

Um, voodoo queens were in bustling cities.

They were free to move around as they wished.

Um, it doesn't mean that they didn't face discrimination, but, um, they had more opportunities than than a lot of Negro members.

Um, they also were considered kind of pillars of their communities.

Um, and they were able to, um, as pillars of their communities call these meetings, um, voodoo meetings, where they were able to get people of different backgrounds in the city and save people, free black people.

Um, white women, just a whole range of people.

Um, have them mingling in one area.

And that's partly why they, um, were so feared and threatening to kind of the powers that be in New Orleans.

Because once you get a whole bunch of people from different backgrounds together, it makes it easier to plot rebellions, um, and trade information that you maybe don't want one class to know about.

Why is Marie Laveau name still pretty famous today?

Um, I think for a lot of reasons, I think for one reason, there's still this kind of image of the, um, black evil witch that persists.

Um, so I think Marie Laveau is kind of there for that reason.

That image still persists in America.

I think she's also been kept alive by a lot of black women, especially black women writers and filmmakers, because I think to us she represents, um, a desire for justice.

Um, even if that takes the form of vengeance, um, she represents ingenuity and the ability to make a way out of no way.

Um, and she represents, um, kind of help for the downtrodden.

So I think a lot of people pull on Marie Laveau law and imagery, um, especially black women, black feminists, because we've kind of carried that figure with us for, um, over a hundred years.

There's another woman whose name shows up a lot in traditional early blues songs.

Aunt Caroline die.

What?

What what should we know about her?

Um, so, you know, there was Marie Laveau in New Orleans, um, during the reconstruction period.

But there was Aunt Caroline.

Die during Jim Crow.

Um, she was very famous for making her, um, spiritual amulets called mojos.

Um, she also, you know, she was she couldn't read or write, but she ended up with a lot of money and property on her hands when she died.

And that's partly because she had a lot of, um, clients.

Um, people who were sick came to her.

She was a very good nurse.

Um, but also businessmen came to her and asked for her advice.

So she was kind of like a money manager on on Wall Street.

Um, she's kind of this amazing conjure woman that was really well known in the Mid South.

If if you were in, um, Tennessee or Arkansas and you had an issue, um, and you just couldn't seem to solve it on your own, you would go to Caroline, die.

Um, and a lot of blues blues musicians, um, kind of took what she did and what she represented to black communities and worked her into their music.

So blues is really one reason why we know about on Caroline die is because so many blues musicians, um, kind of saw her as this powerful figure that they wanted to remember.

Of course, there would have been a lot of enslaved women who within their own communities acted as midwives.

But this wasn't like a full time job in most places, and a lot of them were also weavers.

This is so interesting.

Talk a little bit about how they took their skills as weavers and and if you'll pardon the pun, sort of wove those into the work they did helping women with female issues and helping bring children into the world.

Right.

This was a kind of amazing connection to me, this idea that in a lot of West African, um, religious traditions, um, weaving is kind of tied to, um, prayer, but also, um, giving birth.

Um, and that's not unique.

Um, I think there are some indigenous, um, cultures in the US that also kind of link weaving with, with birth.

Um, so it's really nice to kind of trace Race that in, um, African American history, um, a lot of, um, midwives would.

Um, enslaved midwives would create these quilts, um, that they would use to birth babies to bury people.

Um, and these quilts were kind of like visual prayers.

Um, and kind of called attention to, um, what many people believed were this was this threshold between the living and the dead that you needed to be in touch with in order for a successful birth to happen.

Um, so there is like the spiritual side of it, but there is also the medicinal side of it as well, that a lot of the, um, textiles that they were making, everything from, um, blue jeans to, um, tablecloths and linens, um, they were using a lot of raw plant materials that do have, um, effects on birthing and reproductive health.

Um, so they were using things like cotton and indigo to cause abortions if needed.

Um, they were using all sorts of teas that, um, would also the plants would be used as dyes.

Um, for when they were weaving.

So there was a lot of overlap between the herbalism and the, um, textiles as well.

It's so interesting that this was happening during a time when the so-called father of gynecology, this white physician Marion Sims, was earning his name and learning his profession by experimenting on enslaved women.

Mhm.

Mhm.

I mean, it's really, um, sad to me, um, how.

How slavery took this turn.

Um, so at the, um, kind of beginning of the 19th century, um, the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed.

So a lot of, um, so they could no longer bring, um, at least not legally, um, kidnaped West Africans to America.

Instead, slave owners really tried to interfere with black women's reproductive systems to get them to bear more children so that they could have more property.

Um, and in that context, you have people like, um, um, the father going to college, um, experimenting to try to increase our, um.

Our children and, um.

Here's a doctor.

He's supposed to cause no harm, but, um, it was almost as if these doctors and not just him, there were other doctors as well who, um, really cut their teeth in gynecology by experimenting on enslaved black women.

Um, it's almost as if, you know, when they saw that black women were having issues with fertility, um, they they could not entertain that.

Maybe it's the institution of slavery that was messing with our fertility.

Um, not, um, some issue internal to us.

But when you don't give people enough to eat, when you overwork them, of course they're going to have issues with having babies.

Why did the white medical profession try to drive black midwives out of the business?

Mhm.

I mean, during the 19th century there in in the 18th century there was um a lot of reticence to go to doctors.

Um, and I think sometimes people don't realize that the um, medical industry is really new.

And in terms of history, it's really new.

Um, it, um, there was a time where doctors were considered quacks and, um, weren't considered serious, that they were just kind of playing around with chemicals.

Um, so doctors really wanted to legitimate their practice so that they could get more clients.

Um, and the people who were kind of standing in their way were midwives.

Um, and, and these kind of women healers who didn't have a medical degree but were highly effective in what they did.

Um, so they were really trying to establish that.

No, you need this medical degree from these institutions that we've sanctioned in order to practice medicine.

And what that did, especially since a lot of these women, um, couldn't go to college, um, and didn't have the means.

Um, it meant that you can kind of make these rich, um, or, um, kind of privileged white men become the center of medicine and displace, um, these women who have been responsible for healing their communities for generations.

You know that the story most of us have heard about black women's hair is that enslaved women were forced to adopt and try to meet white beauty standards.

And you've discovered that's not entirely accurate.

Yeah.

Um, it was really interesting to me to dive into, um, ex-slave interviews and find that there are all these hairstyles that black women were, were using, um, and were kind of emulating that can be traced to West Africa.

Um, a lot of it was, was braiding, um, which has interesting overlaps with, um, how black women, especially midwives, were also weavers.

And I try to see I think that there's a case to be made that hair is just another textile and it's part of our weaving tradition.

And once you really start to look into how the role that hairstyles would play in West Africa, you get the sense that what we were doing with our our hair wasn't really about the the slave master necessarily.

It was it was about, um, kind of connecting with the divine.

Um, a lot of these elaborate kind of cornrows and things like that were used in West Africa to communicate to specific gods, um, or to communicate specific requests.

And it seems like we've kept that.

Um, not necessarily the, um, specific messages or the specific gods, but we've kept the sense of even today that our hair is kind of like our our essence, our spiritual essence, um, and that messing with our hair is kind of messing with our our soul, which is partly why black women do not want you to touch their hair.

Finally, you write about the magic of people you call candy.

Ladies in black communities of which your great grandmother was one.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, I was looking for, you know, where do you find the candy?

So where do you find the conjure women?

Um, kind of in my own childhood.

Um, I didn't grow up with.

With granny midwives.

Um, I'm really kind of sad that I didn't grow up with with granny midwives.

The the person that I had, um, was my great grandmother, but but also other black women in my community who were kind of there to take care of the, um, the kids when, um, usually when we got out of school, there was this black woman in the community, in the neighborhood.

Again, sometimes my great grandmother who could provide you a meal.

Who could take care of, you know.

Minor ailments.

And if you were sick, you know, give you medicine.

Who could give you spiritual advice?

Um, and I kind of I like to, to think about them as, um, kind of in the tradition of, of conjure women because, um, Oshun, um, is known to be.

She's known to be a weaver.

She's known to be a hairstylist, she's known to be an herbalist, but she's also known to be a market woman.

Um, someone who knows how to hustle and sell her her work, um, and kind of feed the community off of that.

And that's what I see.

Candy women.

Um, candy ladies doing so.

These traditions are still alive, but we need to sort of know where to look for them in 21st century America.

Absolutely.

Um, a lot of them have persisted as, um, superstitions as, um, weird habits that we might do.

Um, they also persist in southern churches, both black and white.

Um, and one of the things that, you know, I'm, I'm currently at the University of Memphis.

One of the things that I like to do with my students, um, is just show them how a lot of the things that you grew up with in the South, um, come from our conjure traditions.

Um, and there are things that you're doing without realizing why you're doing them.

Um, but you've been conjuring all along.

If you, um, are eating black eyed peas, collard greens, collard greens and cornbread for New Year's, you've been doing conjure.

Right.

And that comes from from us.

And, um, it's it's a way of helping people see their world differently, um, and kind of really understand their origins.

I, I, I worry in this climate that, um, we are so busy talking about what it means to be American, that that we forget that it's a lot of people who were brought to America, forced to come to America, who have really shaped American culture.

And for you to understand what it means for you to be American.

You need to understand what these people brought to America as a whole.

Lindsay Stewart is a black feminist philosopher, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis.

Her book is called The Conjuring of America Mojos, mermaids, medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic.

Lindsay, this has been fascinating.

Thank you for making time to talk.

Thank you so much for having me.

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Think again I'm Chris Boyd.

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