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Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo

Liber XXXIV · Vodou & Hoodoo · Chapter III: Hoodoo & Rootwork

Harry Middleton Hyatt and His Great Hoodoo Collection

Harry Middleton Hyatt's Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork: how an Illinois minister recorded 1,600 conjure informants, what it holds and its limits.

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Harry Middleton Hyatt (1896–1978) was an Illinois clergyman and folklorist whose five-volume Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork (1970–1978) is the largest record of African American conjure ever assembled. Based mainly on interviews he recorded between 1936 and 1940 with roughly 1,600 informants across the American South and the Atlantic seaboard, it preserves the words of root doctors, clients and ordinary believers, and remains the single most important source for the history of hoodoo and rootwork.

Who Harry Middleton Hyatt Was§

Hyatt was born in 1896 in Quincy, Illinois, a Mississippi River town in Adams County. He became an Anglican clergyman and developed a lifelong interest in folk belief. His working life as a folklorist was largely independent of universities. He financed his research and publications privately, and his later volumes appeared under the imprint of the Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, named for his wife, with printing and distribution by a firm in Hannibal, Missouri.

His first major project was Folk-Lore from Adams County, Illinois (1935; revised 1965), a compilation of thousands of beliefs, customs, cures and charms that he gathered from residents of his home county, white and Black, of many backgrounds. Among the items he collected were practices that informants called hoodoo, and he noticed that African American residents described a coherent body of magical practice with its own specialists and vocabulary. That observation set the direction of his later work.

Fieldwork in the South, 1936–1940§

In 1936 Hyatt began a series of collecting trips that took him through the eastern and southern United States. He worked in cities and towns from New York, Maryland and Washington, D.C., through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, to Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, including New Orleans and Algiers across the river. He returned to the material and to some fieldwork around 1970, as he was preparing the volumes for publication.

His method was practical. Arriving in a town, he took rooms in a hotel or boarding house and relied on local African American contact men to spread word that a visitor wanted to hear about conjure and would pay for interviews. Informants then came to him, one at a time, to describe what they knew: personal experiences, cases they had witnessed, remedies they used and the practices of root doctors in their neighbourhoods. Some were themselves professional practitioners; many were clients or simply people who had grown up with the tradition.

The sheer number of these encounters gives the collection its weight. Roughly 1,600 people are represented, from rural farm workers to urban professionals, and their testimony comes from a decade before the Second World War, when the tradition was still transmitted largely by word of mouth.

Recording Conjure: Cylinders, Transcription and Informants§

Hyatt used two kinds of office dictating machine, first an Ediphone and later a Telediphone, which recorded speech on wax cylinders. With these he could capture long stretches of informants' own words, rare for folklore collecting at the time, which usually relied on handwritten notes. The cylinders were later transcribed, and Hyatt prepared the text himself for publication.

In print, informants are generally identified by number and by place rather than by name, a measure that protected individuals whose practices could attract the attention of the police or the disapproval of churches. Hyatt sometimes added descriptions of the speaker or the circumstances of the interview, and his own questions and comments appear in the text.

His transcriptions attempt to represent Southern Black speech phonetically, a choice that modern readers often find difficult or uncomfortable. They also preserve a great deal: specialist vocabulary, rhythms of speech and the way people framed conjure through Christianity, family history and personal experience. Some of the original recordings appear to have been lost over the years, which makes the printed volumes the main surviving witness.

What the Five Volumes Contain§

Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork is organised by subject rather than by informant, although long interviews with individual practitioners are also printed in full. Its topics cover the whole range of conjure as people described it in the 1930s:

  • Protective and luck-bringing objects, especially the cloth bags known as hands, mojos or tobies, and the use of roots such as High John the Conqueror (for the wider Atlantic history of charm bags, see Bolsas de Mandinga).
  • Harmful work and its cure, including the belief that an enemy could "lay a trick" or "fix" someone, often using personal materials such as hair or footprints, and the work of root doctors who claimed to "take off" such conditions.
  • Candles, oils and powders, many bought from mail-order curio companies, a trade discussed in Hoodoo Money Magic.
  • Bible and Psalm use, including the reading of particular Psalms for protection or success, and the influence of the grimoire known as the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, which some informants owned or referred to.
  • Graveyards, crossroads and spirits, including graveyard dirt, dealings with the dead and stories of going to a crossroads to acquire a skill.
  • Signs, dreams and divination, together with accounts of how root doctors received their gifts.

These subjects are presented here only as categories of belief. The volumes themselves record many detailed procedures as informants told them, but their value for historians lies in what they reveal about how people understood misfortune, illness, justice and power in the Jim Crow South.

Assessing Hyatt: Value, Limits and Ethics§

Historians of conjure, including Yvonne Chireau in Black Magic (2003), Jeffrey E. Anderson in Conjure in African American Society (2005) and Katrina Hazzard-Donald in Mojo Workin' (2013), all rely heavily on Hyatt, and all note the problems of his method.

Payment was the most obvious issue. Informants who were paid for each interview had reason to say a great deal and perhaps to repeat what they had heard others say or what they thought the visitor wanted. Hyatt was a white minister working in the segregated South, and the power imbalance must have shaped what Black informants chose to tell and how they told it. He was interested above all in practices and rarely asked about meaning, belief or the social circumstances of his informants' lives, so that much of the context historians now want is missing.

Hazzard-Donald argues that Hyatt's informants nonetheless document an older, African-derived hoodoo that was already being transformed by commercial products; others stress the diversity of what they describe and caution against treating it as a single system. Unlike Zora Neale Hurston, who collected in some of the same places at nearly the same time and wrote as an insider with literary ambitions (see Zora Neale Hurston and Hoodoo), Hyatt aimed at completeness rather than narrative. Read together, their works offer complementary portraits of conjure in the 1920s and 1930s.

Hyatt's Afterlife in Scholarship and the Hoodoo Revival§

Because it was privately published in a small print run, the collection was long hard to find, and it became known mainly to specialists. Folklorists such as Michael Edward Bell, whose 1980 dissertation analysed the structure of hoodoo practice, drew extensively on it. From the 1990s, practitioners and writers in the contemporary hoodoo revival also began to mine the volumes as a record of "old-time" practice, and indexes and digests of their contents have been prepared to make them easier to use.

This second life raises questions of its own. Some African American practitioners see Hyatt's informants as ancestors whose words should be honoured and studied, while others are wary of a tradition being reconstructed from a white collector's notes and sold back to the public. Scholars continue to treat the volumes as a historical source, to be read alongside other evidence such as Newbell Niles Puckett's Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1926), slave narratives and Hurston's Mules and Men.

Frequently asked questions§

What is Hoodoo—Conjuration—Witchcraft—Rootwork?§

It is Harry Middleton Hyatt's five-volume collection of interviews about African American conjure, published between 1970 and 1978. It transcribes the testimony of roughly 1,600 informants recorded mainly between 1936 and 1940.

Who was Harry Middleton Hyatt?§

Hyatt (1896–1978) was an Anglican minister and independent folklorist from Quincy, Illinois. He is known for Folk-Lore from Adams County, Illinois and for his massive collection of Southern hoodoo testimony.

Is Hyatt's collection reliable?§

It is the richest source available, but it must be read critically. Informants were paid, the interviewer was a white outsider in the segregated South and the questions focused on practices rather than beliefs, all of which shaped what was recorded.

Sources and further reading§