Everything Is Hoodoo

The first rootworker you met wore a church hat and carried a prayer cloth. The praying grandmother on the front pew has always protected you.

Disclaimer: Hoodoo is a closed practice. This ain’t an explainer, a how-to, or a history lesson. Heavy on the if you know, you know. I wrote this for the Black folks who know what collard greens and black-eyed peas mean on New Year’s, who keep a broom by the door, and who pour one out for the homies who crossed over.

Mind your business.

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Roots.

Daddy — Georgia and Mississippi.
Momma — Louisiana and Georgia.

It’s in me, not on me.

Great-grandma passed in her sleep. Her three-piece suit and church hat hung on the door. The Bible was open to Psalm 23 on the mantle in the living room. I was only four, but even then, I knew: Addie was a piece of me I’d always carry.

Ancestors — we all got ’em. But do you know them? Do you talk to them? How many times you been to that graveside to change out the flowers?

Think about it.

We all remember our first funeral. And when you’re Black, transitions — death especially — can feel like a fever dream. It’s community. It’s storytelling. It’s celebration.

We wear colors. Songs are sung (His Eye Is on the Sparrow, specifically). Your cousin might walk in with all-black shades, still smelling like weed and Hennessy — grieving the only way they know how.

Not everybody mourns the same, but the spirit still lingers after the body’s gone.

What’s interesting is how death always leads us back to church. That might be the only time in the year you sit through a sermon. And the preacher always ends it the same way: keep God in your life.

Birth. Death. Union.
That’s when the church calls you home.

Then the texts and calls come in — You should come back more often.
And for a second, maybe you feel like you’ve been missing something.

But thats the thing — sometimes I wonder if slavery will forever be threaded through us. Those services with master watching us still feel like they exists but only evolved. There is power in black church — black voice, blackness period.

While writing this piece, I kept thinking about that wave of Black choirs showing up in fashion shows and “cultural” moments after Trump got elected.
Pyer Moss runways. Kanye’s Sunday Service. Pharrell albums.

Sunday Service - Lord You're Holy Ballin' (Live From Paris, France)

All of them leaning on the most sacred traditions of our people — sound, spirit, presence — dressed up in lights and camera angles.

But do they know what they're invoking?
Do they know that sound came from fields and funeral homes, from grandmothers moaning in kitchens, from church basements after somebody’s son got locked up?

There’s a difference between conjuring and performing. Between spirit work and spectacle.

Sometimes it feels like they want the goosebumps, but not the ghosts.
They want the harmony, not the history.
They want the sound of survival, but not the story behind it.

A friend of mine posted on Instagram Notes:
“If a white person witnessed Black church, they would be scared.”

And that’s the truth.

Hoodoo isn’t limited to church — but church was the first place I saw it, even before I had the language for what it was, or how I fit into its larger picture.

Speaking in tongues.
Laying hands.
Prayer service on a Wednesday night.
And above all — the power of testimony. The kind that comes from a Black woman crying her heart out, singing to the only one she believes truly understands her: God.

I’ve written in my journal more than once that sometimes it feels like a privilege not to need religion to believe in life.

People ask why so many Black folks still hold on to God.
Why we still call His name, still dress up for service, still testify.

But when life feels like it could slip through your hands with every breath —
When the world hates the very fact of your existence —
You have to believe in something.

Even if it’s just to make it through the day.

When Ryan Coogler released Sinners on Easter Sunday, I watched in awe. All the threads of Black culture were woven across that screen. It was us — all of us.

He’s shown time and time again that we don’t just belong on the stage — we are the stage. We’ve been the silent actors and the unseen orchestrators of life throughout history.
Always opening the door. Always inviting them in.

Stop extending invitations.

So when the debates flooded TikTok about the importance of Annie on screen, I just shook my head.

Her story — her presence — is the story of so many of us:
The Black woman who prays protection over everybody.
Who sees what’s coming.
Who warns and shields and gives — and still goes unheard.

Church is in everything Black art has ever made.
It’s in the organ behind every R&B ballad.
It’s in the wail behind every blues guitar.
It’s in the breath between stanzas in a Lucille Clifton poem.
It’s in the ad-libs on a trap song that sound like prayer if you really listen.

Toni Morrison wrote our spirits into existence.
Zora Neale Hurston pulled our language straight from the soil.
They conjured spells with every sentence, writing us into myth and memory at the same time.

Every rapper from Pac to Babyface Ray gave us affirmations —
spells for making it out the mud, for believing we deserve more than just survival.

Basquiat painted his own altar. Wrote his name in holy oil and neon.
Died before the world understood him — just like a prophet.

Even Eve’s Bayou —
that film knew what it meant to see too much, to feel too much, too young.
Eve could see into the spirit world before she even understood her own.
That wasn’t just coming-of-age. That was divination.
That was knowing — the kind that lives in Black girls and scares everybody else.

Hoodoo is creation.
It’s death.
It’s being born again with every innovation we bring into the world.

Even in my own life, I’ve had to lift the cloak of protection I wrapped around men I thought I’d spend forever with.

Because eventually, I had to face the truth:
My magic wasn’t theirs to claim.
It was mine to carry.

It’s sacred.
It’s the reason I was created —
To bring life into my own promise.

So to the people who get this piece —
remember, you’re not just living history.
You’re continuing the work.
Every step, every breath, every word, every prayer —
you’re moving the roots deeper.

Always.