A new book argues that Black women, from the colonial era through Jim Crow, shaped how America birthed its babies, nursed its sick, and fed its families.

September 4, 2025, 12:47 PM ET

In Ryan Coogler’s 2025 blockbuster, Sinners, Wunmi Mosaku plays a woman named Annie, who makes a living by supplying her neighbors in Clarksdale, Mississippi, with homemade medicinal cures. She has spent years studying the Bible, the human body, and the supernatural. And she is the only character who understands the trouble brewing outside the juke joint where the town’s Black residents have gathered one evening for a night of music and dancing. Sinners is the most recent depiction in pop culture of conjure—a spiritual practice created by enslaved people—and its creators are not the first to face the tricky task of respectfully invoking a tradition that is more complex, and more entangled in American history and culture, than many know.

Lindsey Stewart’s new book, The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic, arrives amid a wave of visibility for conjure practices. Conjure is a central element not only of Sinners but also of HBO’s 2020 series Lovecraft Country, where two characters summon a healer to purge a haunted house, as well as Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album, Lemonade, in which the artist calls on her ancestors and nature to heal her marriage. (It also arrives as Black people face the threat of rolled back civil rights under federal leadership that appears adamant to remove Black leaders from government and erase Black history from museums and websites.)

By LINDSEY. STEWART

As Stewart makes clear, conjuring has been enmeshed in American life for centuries. A hybrid practice rooted in religions from West and Central Africa, it has been shaped by influences from Christianity, Islam, and Indigenous groups in North America. Today, conjurers are not exclusively women. Still, most people familiar with its history associate the practice with them because it is largely a domestic art, carried forward through women’s hands and from their homes. Many conjurers believe the spirit world can be petitioned for healing and protection: They may commune with ancestors for guidance, seek remedies in nature, or perform rituals and spells to aid their communities.

Stewart makes the convincing case that the conjure woman “has managed to stamp her conjure onto American culture” so deeply that many of its traditions and cultural touchpoints actually originated in her rituals. If you’ve ever feasted on black-eyed peas at the start of a new year, danced to a wailing blues like “Wang Dang Doodle,” or carried a keepsake in your pocket for good luck, you’ve brushed up against conjure. By tracing a genealogy of conjure, Stewart also seeks to reveal many obscured contributions of Black women to American history. She argues that, from the antebellum years through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Black women—many of them guided by conjure practices and wisdom—shaped how the nation birthed its babies, nursed its sick, and clothed and fed its families.

Read: The Black religion that’s been maligned for centuries

In The Conjuring of America, Stewart finds the conjure woman’s influences in unexpected places. She sees them, for instance, in the women who inspired the “Mammy” stereotype: those who labored as nannies, cooks, or wet nurses, but also delivered babies, foraged for medicinal roots, and provided medical care for other enslaved people.

Conjure shares kinship with other practices forged during transatlantic slavery: Obeah in Jamaica; Santería in Cuba; Vodou in Haiti. These traditions have similar roots but evolved differently, shaped by the various ways African beliefs were suppressed across the New World. Conjure, or “hoodoo,” as it is often called, may be the “reorganized remnants” of what was once a more formal religion, Katrina Hazzard-Donald writes in Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System.

Today, if you know where to look—or listen—conjure’s traces are everywhere. Take denim. Once called “Negro cloth,” it was for a time made by enslaved artisans who brought knowledge of making indigo dye from West Africa. There, as Stewart writes, women were thought to have been gifted these techniques by the gods.

Or take the blues, that quintessential American genre that has shaped so much contemporary popular music. Its songs are stacked with nods to John the Conqueror root (a plant that’s thought to enhance luck), and spells to bring back a lover. Some people even believe that singing is itself a form of conjure: The writer Albert Murray claimed that one sang the blues in order to stamp out sadness—almost like an exorcism. W. C. Handy and Koko Taylor sang the praises of Caroline Dye, a formerly enslaved woman who made mojos—assortments of lucky trinkets, usually bound in red flannel—for Black and white customers. The same red flannel was often featured in caricatures of Mammy. Perhaps that’s why my second-oldest aunt collected Mammy figurines—she could have seen in them a symbol not of Black women’s submission but of their power.

Read: A revelatory way of understanding the Black experience

For many people, Stewart included, conjure’s echoes ring loudest in the kitchen. In the 1940s, the Creole chef Leah Chase turned a sandwich shop in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans into a sit-down restaurant called Dooky Chase. It became one of the few places that allowed interracial gatherings under Jim Crow. Chase prayed while she prepared food, believing that a person had to “love that pot” in order to cook well. Stewart connects this habit to the West African Dogon people, who believed that cooking vessels contained spirits. Some accounts of enslaved life recall people crying into pots in despair, which may have been a way of asking the pot’s spirit to intercede: to plead to God on the weeper’s behalf.

These practices nurture a feeling of safety and defiance, Stewart argues. In 1965, by which point Dooky Chase had become a gathering place for civil-rights organizers, a pipe bomb exploded outside the restaurant. “That didn’t scare me a bit,” Chase told the Times-Picayune. As the Freedom Rider Rudy Lombard had observed, when Black and white patrons used to eat there in defiance of segregation laws, the police never bothered them: “It was as though God threw a protective ring around the restaurant.”

Stewart’s book shows the many ways in which the conjure woman persists: in contemporary scholar-practitioners who host classes for their communities; in neighborhood “candy ladies” like Stewart’s great-grandmother, who not only sold sweets but also offered “spiritual support to families, along with child care and a bit of tough love if you needed it.” It endures in online chatter about #BlackGirlMagic, or in the women who tell you what perfume to wear to attract a lover. At a time when knowledge itself is being made to feel dangerous, when the Tuskegee Airmen and Harriet Tubman are being stripped from historical records, we can learn from conjure women how to maintain, and pass down, our heritage in a country that has frequently sought to quash it.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Explore More Topics