Hoodoo and the Making of Frederick Douglass
A little-known magickal backstory shaped the abolitionist pioneer

Although a reader would not know it from most works of American history, the nation’s driving voice of abolitionism, nineteenth-century writer and speaker Frederick Douglass (c.1818–1895), placed the Black system of magick and spell work called hoodoo at the center of the defining chapter of his life—and his emergence as an abolitionist icon.
Douglass did not use the word hoodoo. But the episode, which the speaker and author recounted in all three of his memoirs across nearly fifty years—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1893)—is characterized by telltale occult references, for generations unnoticed by (and of little concern to) mainstream historians until I documented them in my 2009 Occult America.
“Nobody Can Say Where It Begins”
By way of history, hoodoo is among the most significant American movements in occultism.
“The way we tell it,” wrote novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston in her 1935 Mules and Men, “hoodoo started way back there before everything. . .Nobody can say where it begins or ends.”
Due to phonetic and cultural intersections, hoodoo is sometimes confused with Vodou. Vodou is an Afro-Caribbean religion with its own deities, priesthood, and liturgy, properly spelled Vodou in Haiti and Voodoo in the American South.
As Hurston noted, hoodoo has a lineage all its own. It was and remains a syncretic, spell-working system originated by enslaved people in the U.S.
Hoodoo began as a retention of traditional religious ideas from West and Central Africa which were combined with practices that enslaved people encountered in America, from Pennsylvania Dutch folklore to Catholic saint veneration to variants of Kabbalah.
The name hoodoo is lowercase. Its etymology is unclear. But hoodoo may come from huduba, a term used by the Hausa people of West and Central Africa meaning to arouse resentment against someone. In traditional blues songs, singers sometimes lament being “hoodooed”—i.e., crossed and tricked by spell casting.
In practice, hoodoo draws upon botanical and household items—roots, plants, soaps, minerals, animal parts, perfumes, candles, nails, pins—objects that displaced people adapted to retain ties to old rituals and spirits.
In the early twentieth century, scholars of folklore debated a thread of retention between hoodoo and West-African spirituality. As with modern witchcraft, it is very difficult to maintain lines of practice amid extensive historical schism and violence. But today, general consensus, which I share, identifies correlative practices. For example, in a dusty corner of New York’s Museum of Natural Historical sits a traditional Nigerian household altar that includes a ceremonial element common to hoodoo: using nails to deter enemies.
“A System For Which I Have No Name”
As I began researching Douglass’s life, including the cultural touchstones and language of his magickal incident, it was as though a light switched on. A neglected chapter began to emerge.
Douglass was born into slavery in 1817 or 1818, he did not know which. As a young child, he was separated from his mother—a woman who walked miles from another plantation for the rare occasion of rocking him to sleep or giving him a handmade ginger cake—and enslaved by a family in Saint Michael’s, Maryland. They later uprooted the adolescent Frederick to their home in Baltimore. Once more, in Frederick’s adolescence the family rearranged its household and took him back with them to the plantation fields in St. Michael’s.
But the man who headed Frederick’s household believed that a youth who tasted city life could no longer be counted on to work the fields.
So, in January of 1834, Frederick, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday or thereabouts, was shipped off to work for a farmer in the Maryland countryside named Edward Covey, known as a “breaker of slaves.”
Covey was a sadistic slaveholder, proud of his reputation for beating and tormenting his charges. Covey subjected Frederick to regular whippings and harassment for any trumped-up reason. The beatings grew so severe that one night Frederick escaped Covey’s farm and returned to his old household in St. Michael’s, begging them to take him back in. He was refused.
Terrified, bloodied, starving, and beaten, the youth trudged back to Covey’s farm. He hid in the woods outside Covey’s property, not knowing what to do.
Just at that time, Frederick wrote, he was happened upon by a local man named Sandy Jenkins. Frederick wrote that Sandy, also a slave, was known locally as a wise African spiritual advisor, a man who still retained some of the old ways.
Sandy “was not only a religious man, but he professed to believe in a system for which I have no name,” he wrote in 1855. “He was a genuine African, and had inherited some of the so-called magical powers, said to be possessed by African and eastern nations.”
Sandy took Frederick back to his cabin, cleaned him up, fed him—and something more. Douglass wrote in 1845:
He told me, with great solemnity, I must go back to Covey; but that before I went, I must go with him into another part of the woods, where there was a certain root, which, if I would take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me. He said he had carried it for years; and since he had done so, he had never received a blow, and never expected to while he carried it. I at first rejected the idea, that the simple carrying of a root in my pocket would have any such effect as he had said, and was not disposed to take it; but Sandy impressed the necessity with much earnestness, telling me it could do no harm, if it did no good. To please him, I at length took the root, and, according to his direction, carried it upon my right side.
There is no record to bear the matter out, but the object Sandy pressed upon Douglass was very likely a rock-hard, bulbous root known within hoodoo as John the Conqueror or sometimes High John.
John de conker is the pronunciation in oral records and songs. It is the ultimate protective object, used for everything from personal safety to virility, traditionally carried by a man rather than a woman. In the magickal lore of “like bestows like” (conceptually echoing the Hermetic dictum as above, so below), the dried root is shaped like a testicle.
Historical conflict exists over the root’s species; botanical drawings differ among catalogs of hoodoo supply houses of first half of the twentieth century. (These consumer supply houses harbor a remarkable history of their own, explored in Occult America.) Most careful observers and practitioners of hoodoo today agree that the likeliest source is the jalap root, which dries into a rough, spherical nub.
Armed with what he warily called “the magic root,” Douglass set off for Covey’s farm. On arrival, he received a shock. Covey was downright polite.
“Now,” wrote Douglass in his first memoir, “this singular conduct of Mr. Covey really made me begin to think that there was something in the root which Sandy had given me.”
But then it struck him: it was Sunday; ever the upright Christian, even Covey took a day of rest. Come Monday, the skies darkened. “On this morning,” Douglass continued, “the virtue of the root was fully tested.” Covey grabbed Douglass in the barn, tied his legs with a rope, and prepared to beat him.
“Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight.”
Here began the historic turnaround in Douglass’s life: “I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”
Douglass was no believer in magick. But in both his earlier and later memoirs, he proved resolutely unwilling to slam shut the door on the matter or to qualify the veneration he felt for Sandy.
“I saw in Sandy,” he wrote in 1855, “too deep an insight into human nature, with all his superstition, not to have some respect for his advice; and perhaps, too, a slight gleam or shadow of his superstition had fallen upon me.”
Sandy, the “clever soul,” the “old adviser,” and the “genuine African,” provided a rare measure of counsel in brutal world. His authority was grounded in an occult tradition that no slaveholder could enter.
Freedom Finally
The “magic root” episode framed the inner revolution of Douglass’s life. He knew that even though he was, for the time being, a slave in fact, he would never again be a slave in spirit. As he liberated himself in spirit, he determined to free himself physically at the first possible opportunity.
In 1836, Frederick attempted to escape and was captured. Two years later, he made a second attempt and succeeded. He fled Baltimore to New York City and from New York to upstate New York, not far from the Burned-Over District. He became one of the critical voices of abolitionism in America and around the world.
In a sobering and sorrowful coda, Douglass noted in his latter two memoirs that Sandy Jenkins himself might have betrayed Douglass and his would-be escapees during his first attempt.
He surmised in 1893:
Several circumstances seemed to point Sandy out as our betrayer. His entire knowledge of our plans, his participation in them, his withdrawal from us, his dream [foreseeing the capture] and his simultaneous presentiment that we were betrayed, the taking us and the leaving him, were calculated to turn suspicion toward him, and yet we could not suspect him. We all loved him too well to think it possible that he could have betrayed us. So we rolled the guilt on other shoulders.
Human nature, for all its corruptions, conveys systems and ideas—whomever their messenger—that prove liberating in unexpected ways.
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