How much time does it take to meet your future husband on an app that only existed for five and a half minutes? Let’s just say it was about three Clubhouse moan rooms, one hundred weird mute/unmute button rounds of applause, and one surprisingly good radio production of Dreamgirls before our first date.

In that broad frontier of early-mid COVID cloistered conversation, I heard a lot of shit that made me say hmmm, and what?! and please stop. For instance, I was in a LGBTQ wellness room and a stud was like—and I’m paraphrasing here—“healthy women don’t bleed. They call it a period because it’s supposed to be a dot!”

Marcel, my husband, hears this story like once per quarter because why the fuck did she say that? Then he goes “I wish I was there” and tells me his imagined scathing rebuttal, which always tickles me because my husband is…not a talker.

When that happened, I simply left the (digital) room. Yet as you may have guessed, I think about that moment quite often.

Within every Dr. Sebi lover is a Black person who wants a better understanding of their bodies. Within everyone who’s been scammed by a divine femininity coach is a person looking to connect to the healing power of ancestral memory.

There’s a tendency in Black ADR spaces to dismiss the scammed right along with the scammers. As I’ve said before, I think that’s sad. Black people long for the root lady, and the root lady can sometimes be hard to find.

It’s easy to presume that because more people talk about Hoodoo online that more well-trained practitioners of good character are available in every sphere of the tradition. How true is this though, especially when we are without governing bodies to determine either half of that equation? I’m not saying this is a unique situation, though in some ways it is, I’m simply wondering how we expect those entering the tradition or simply interacting with the tradition to tell the difference between trained and untrained practitioners.

These folks are getting scammed because they understand three essential spiritual facts: rootwork can help you in ways nothing else can, it has always been with us, and it always will be with us.

Fact #1: Rootwork Can Help You In Ways Nothing Else Can

If you’ve been reading black medicine || black magic for a while, you know I’m quick to bring up a historical example. Today, I don’t think that’s necessary, because I’m the beneficiary of my own rootwork, and living proof that rootwork is there when there’s nothing else the world can do for you.

I struggle to even pick the best example because there are just so many in my life. Was it the time when a drug interaction could have killed me, thus forcing me to quit psych meds cold turkey without being forced to take two grippy sock vacations in a row? Or improvements to problems that wouldn’t otherwise move? Or success and visibility when others would prefer my work and I go unrewarded?

We know that there is a way to make a way out of no way. We know there are solutions that go far beyond reason, but we don’t always know who to ask.

Hence the Dr. Sebi of it all.

When someone says to me “hey, you’re an herbalist: what do you think of Dr. Sebi?” I say “I don’t think about him a lot.” It’s the truth.

Even though I would never recommend anything by Dr. Sebi, I know why there’s still so much interest in his work so long after his death. Because it’s widely available, people recommend it to one another, and people remember that work like his worked for their ancestors.

Whenever I want to get mad about the popularity of Dr. Sebi and the like, I remember that so few trained spiritual workers put our work out there for others to recommend in the same way. It’s part of why I very rarely paywall an article. (You can help me keep this true by becoming a paid subscriber or a founding member.)

Fact #2: Rootwork Has Always Been With Us

Hoodoo is a specific continuation of African traditions. The root properties of Hoodoo have been with Black people likely since the beginning of whatever came to be called “time.”

The current manifestation of Hoodoo is the result of the conditions we and our most recent ancestors live and lived under. The ancestors before those ancestors had their own manifestation that fit their conditions, and so on and so forth.

Whether it is the changes that occurred both in the South and the North during the Great Migration, or the dissolution of the priest class, Hoodoo changes. Yet beneath these changes is an unbroken line of practice.

Even if you don’t know your people to have practiced, somebody’s people practiced. They practiced, they remembered, and they passed on. That’s part of the reason I reject the language of “revival” or even “renaissance” when it comes to Hoodoo. It didn’t go anywhere, it did as it was designed to do: be hidden when it needs to be hidden, be public when it needs to be public. I think that’s beautiful.

Three years after meeting Marcel on Clubhouse, I decided I’d marry him when we went to Florida to visit his mother, and I realized that she and I were (more or less) the same religion. We talked about dreams, and roots, and cards, and knowings we had known.

We didn’t do a ring shout or nothin’ (this sounds like a joke, but he’s the oldest of eight so we probably could have,) we just appreciated the plain-dealing ways that our ancestral traditions had survived in both of us though we’re vastly different people from vastly different places.

Whatever we call it, wherever we are, Hoodoo is always happening. We’re always remembering, and resisting forgetfulness.

Fact #3: Rootwork Will Always Be With Us

Rootwork is our tendency, it’s in our temperament; for some, it is our talent. The question is only what permutation is necessary now? What’s most needed? Where shall we apply our knowledge?

I finished a clinical herbalist program about one year ago. In that year, I’ve noticed that many people are taking massive amounts of supplements and herbs—some of which are contraindicated with the issues they’re experiencing or the medicines they take. This is what I mean when I say that people long for the root lady—in my case, the root ladyman.

We want to maintain our wellness in our ancestral ways. We want the wisdom of plants and the natural world to live alongside the miracle of modern medicine.

Those of us who practice must do what we can to make this possible for all Black people who need and want it without them losing their money and faltering in their belief.

We are the next link in an unbroken line of practice. It’s a responsibility we must take with the utmost seriousness.

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