In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis claims that sexual love became “a tangible expression of freedom” for newly emancipated blacks (Reference DavisDavis 1998, 8).Footnote ¹ In her analysis, sexual love became enmeshed with the meaning of freedom within the musical tradition of the blues (4). Although the emancipatory possibilities of the blues have become common knowledge in liberation literature (for example, Reference ConeCone 1972; Reference Russell, Hull, Bell Scott and SmithRussell 1982), we have often focused on the emancipatory effects of this tradition at the expense of engagement with its emancipatory mechanisms. For instance, Davis's insights have recently been adapted to film in Dee Rees's Bessie, where we are presented with black female characters who are fully resilient and resistant to the interacting oppressions of racism, classism, sexism, and regionalism. Yet missing from this extraordinary film was sustained reference to hoodoo, a vital (and deeply political) context for the emergence of Bessie Smith's defying resilience and resistance (Reference DavisDavis 1998, 155–60). So I return to Davis to investigate the connections she draws among sexual love, the blues, and hoodoo love rituals. Deepening Davis's initial insights, I argue that we cannot understand her claim about freedom without the cosmology the blues borrows from spirit workFootnote ² practices—for it is these practices that imbued sexual love with emancipatory possibilities.

Freedom has been a central concept in Davis's career from her first public lectures, “Lectures on Liberation.” Contrary to Western philosophical discourse, Davis argues that freedom is not a static, inherent characteristic of humans (given that large segments of societies have always been enslaved), but a dynamic process: a “struggle for liberation” (Reference DavisDavis 2010, 66). This struggle occurs on two levels.Footnote ³ First, “freedom of thought” (58–59), whereby the enslaved/oppressed gain a critical “consciousness” of their oppression that entails its rejection (50–52, 67). Second, “freedom of action,” or the “liberty to move, to act in a way one chooses” (48). In the life of the enslaved, the tension between freedom in the first sense and the denial of freedom in the second sense (that is, their material bondage) goads them to open acts of resistance, whereby the relationship between master and slave is reversed (51–57). This essay not only focuses on the struggle for “freedom of thought,” but also seeks to displace the binary of thought and action by exploring the conditions for the emergence of a critical consciousness.Footnote ⁴ If the basic “condition” of enslavement is “alienation” or “acceptance of [one's] master's will as the absolute authority over [one's] life” (55), how is the psychic distance needed to “find [an] independent [of oppression/enslavement] means of judging the world” cultivated (56)? And how might Davis's account of freedom in these lectures be further developed if we centered black female experiences of agency?Footnote ⁵

We can begin to answer these questions within the life‐giving nexus of black female sexuality, the blues, and hoodoo that Davis offers in her later Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.Footnote ⁶ Davis's insight is that, within this tradition, sexual love acts as a metonym for freedom (Reference DavisDavis 1998, 10).Footnote ⁷ However, when Davis says that the “blues registered sexuality as a tangible expression of freedom” (8), she not only means freedom in the second sense, or in terms of sexual autonomy.Footnote ⁸ She also means freedom in the first sense, or as a means of negotiating the alienationFootnote ⁹ that oppression causes via forging a critical consciousness (Reference DavisDavis 2010, 128–30, 135). And I argue that we cannot understand how the blues registered freedom in the latter way without taking into account the cosmology that the blues borrows from spirit work.

As Davis suggests in the lectures, turning to black literature can offer us a “much more illuminating account of the nature of freedom” (46)—in particular, the conditions for a critical consciousness that spurs resistance. In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison offers a similar insight to that of Davis about the connection between love and freedom.Footnote ¹⁰ For those who had endured the racial and sexual trauma of enslavement, freedom often meant the ability to “get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire” (Reference MorrisonMorrison 1987, 191). Within the context of spirit work, Morrison highlights the struggle for liberation for ex‐slaves. For example, once a main character, Sethe,Footnote ¹¹ escapes the material bondage of slavery, Morrison notes an inward emancipation that takes place in her community of fellow ex‐slaves. “Bit by bit, at 124 and the Clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself,” Morrison writes, “[f]reeing yourself was one thing: claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (111–12).

Elsewhere, I have argued that the Clearing can be read as a space of spirit work (Reference StewartStewart 2015, chapter 5). Framed with implicit references to the Ring Shout (Reference MorrisonMorrison 1987, 102–103, 111–12),Footnote ¹² the Clearing functions as one of the various sacred dancing spaces across the African diaspora where spirit work was performed.Footnote ¹³ Through spirit work, ex‐slaves were taught “that the only grace [or relief from slavery's trauma] they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it” (103). As anthropologist Katrina Hazzard‐DonaldFootnote ¹⁴ notes in Mojo Workin’, “[i]n the context of the Ring Shout, slaves could and did assert a limited independence from slavery's pain as well as agency in forging their community, personality, and place” (Reference Hazzard‐DonaldHazzard-Donald 2013, 48).

The need for the Clearing shows us that although the ex‐slaves have been freed from material bondage, there is still work to be done. If we recall Davis's insights about alienation, we can make more sense of why “claiming ownership” is essential to the struggle for liberation. Davis writes, “[t]he most extreme form of human alienation is the reduction to the status of property. This is how the slave was defined: something to be owned” (Reference DavisDavis 2010, 53). Claiming ownership of the self recently freed from material bondage, in turn, can be seen as a way of negotiating the traumatic effects of alienation produced during enslavement. In other words, claiming ownership foregrounds the self's relationship to the self instead of the self's relationship to oppression.

Throughout the novel, Sethe learns that freedom from material bondage means nothing if the soul is still imprisoned by the trauma of its enslaved past. For example, the racial and sexual trauma Sethe experienced at the hands of slave masters (that is, the “Schoolteacher” and his sons)Footnote ¹⁵ had produced a relationship of estrangement with, alienation from, and shame toward her own body. A change in legal status does not erase years of that kind of trauma. However, the practices in the Clearing produced a new relationship to her body, whereby she could learn that she is her own “best thing” (Reference MorrisonMorison 1987, 322). Put another way, these practices were “flesh”Footnote ¹⁶ practices that disciplined the body in a new way than previous enslavement, transfiguring the body in new meaning: “grace” that made possible “claiming ownership” of the freed self. These examples from the novel suggest that spirit work facilitated the processes of “claiming ownership”; I argue that it is this aspect of spirit work that is imported into the blues.

“Lady Sings the Blues”

As a historical record of African American consciousness during the period of transition from enslavement to emancipation, the blues tradition is relevant to liberation literature and feminist thought. Davis argues that the blues possessed a nascent critical consciousness that anticipated many feminist critiques and concerns to come decades later.Footnote ¹⁷ This is, in part, because blueswomenFootnote ¹⁸ inherited and actively upheld the “new standards of womanhood” their cultural foremothers forged under the institution of slavery.Footnote ¹⁹ While this has led some to argue that the blues functioned as a resistant cultural space (Reference CollinsCollins 2000, 106), I argue that this is not what Davis means by her conception of sexual love within the blues as a “tangible expression of freedom” (Reference DavisDavis 1998, 8). Rather, Davis's discussion of sexual love in this context highlights the processes of “claiming ownership”: processes that, I claim, involve spirit work. To demonstrate my claim, I turn to what Kameelah Martin calls the “symbiotic” relationship between spirit work and the blues (Reference MartinMartin 2013, 128).Footnote ²⁰ A key insight is the role spirit work plays within the blues: spirit work endows sexuality with power to heal (or harm).

Religion scholar Yvonne Chireau notes that “it was common for blues singers to identify the mojo with female sexuality, a powerful, valued ‘charm’ that all women owned and all men wanted” (Reference ChireauChireau 2003, 47). Martin further argues that the “mojo” referenced within the blues often functioned as a “remedy” for the blues: “Only through the work of some powerful mojo can the blueswoman relieve herself” of present misery (Reference MartinMartin 2013, 135). Indeed, mojo is a hoodoo term derived from the West African (BaKongo) minkisi, which translates, roughly, into “medicine of the gods” (Reference Leone and FryLeone and Fry 1999, 380–82).Footnote ²¹ As Davis focuses on Smith's work to illustrate the role of spirit work in the blues, I include an example of Smith's lyrics to show my point.Footnote ²² In “Down Hearted Blues,” the protagonist is a woman who has been abused by her lover: “once I was crazy ‘bout a man/he mistreated me all the time” (Reference DavisDavis 1998, 273). Her lover has produced so much devastation that he has given her “those down hearted blues,” with enough trouble to “follow [her] to [her] grave” (273). Yet the end of the song provides a turn:

The lyrics above refer to the common hoodoo love ritual of “stopping up” the intended lover's sexual desire in a bottle (for examples, see Reference HyattHyatt 1973, 2346–48). Success with this ritual would render her lover completely under her direction and control. As a result, the blues‐stricken woman will move from a position of powerlessness in her love relationship to one of immense command.Footnote ²³ While once alienated from her body, to the point of imminent early death, she is now in a position of ownership, using her sexuality as a source of power. And the means of this transformation was the hoodoo ritual described in the lyrics.

Davis's insight is that the blues’ focus on sexual love is a type of metonymical musing on the meaning of freedom for the newly emancipated; I develop her insight by arguing that spirit work is the means by which the blues muses on the struggle for liberation. That is, hoodoo love rituals register freedom, or the struggle for liberation, in terms of sexual power whereby we claim ownership of the self. As I will argue in the next section, this is because hoodoo love rituals made possible multiple meanings of the body through a cosmology that imbues objects with power via metonymical proximity to the dead. Under hoodoo, freedom becomes flesh, and sexual love becomes the source of new (positive) valuation of the body.

“Day in, Day out/That Same Old Hoodoo Follows Me About”Footnote ²⁴

One of the manifold West African‐derived spiritual systems throughout the African diaspora, hoodoo is a complex set of practices whereby a person's physical, psychic, and spiritual life is fundamentally altered through a relationship to the dead (specifically the ancestors). These practices rely upon a cosmology in which the dead are present enough to make impositions on, and bestow help upon, us, the living. Not only our own futures, but the futures of those yet to be born, are determined, in part, by how we negotiate this relationship with the dead among us. As Zora Neale Hurston writes in “Hoodoo in America,” “[w]herever West African beliefs have survived in the New World, this place of the dead has been maintained” (Reference HurstonHurston 1931, 319). Similarly, Hazzard‐Donald notes that a defining feature of many West African religions was a divination system whereby direct communication between the living and the dead is conducted through practices of ancestor reverence that enabled practitioners to “seize the power and memory of [their] ancestors for support, direction, and protection” (Reference Hazzard‐DonaldHazzard-Donald 2013, 22–26). Through an intimacy with their dead, practitioners harnessed power that could be used to alter or influence the “overall aspects” of their existence, a “general spiritual condition” called “luck” (44).

To see the connection to “claiming ownership” over their freed selves, consider some of the language of hoodoo practitioners’ self‐reports of love rituals used. With menstrual blood as a primary ingredient, several types of hoodoo love rituals imbued sexual love with supernatural power. It was common knowledge in New Orleans, for instance, that one “way a woman could hold a man was to take some of the blood from her menstrual flow and mix it with her man's food” (Reference TallantTallant 1946, 109).Footnote ²⁵ Men lived in daily fear of being “fixed”Footnote ²⁶ by women in this way (as well as in daily suspicion that their woman had already done this to them) (109).Footnote ²⁷ In Harry Middleton Hyatt's Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork (volume 3), over forty pages are devoted to these menstrual‐blood rituals. Practitioners report that, through these rituals, a lover's “whole heart and mind falls right into her … [t]here's nobody else and he ain't contented until he be's right with her” (Reference HyattHyatt 1973, 2532). A woman could “do anything in the world” by use of them (2534). And, in fact, if she could not “rule over” her lover, use of these rituals was said to put her lover firmly “under [her] jurisdiction” (2514). In the language above, the body is made an immense tool of power through ritual. We have to remember, however, that this is the self‐report of people for whom enslavement, being owned by another, was a living memory. This means a relationship of ownership toward their bodies, in light of their previous alienation, is a tremendous achievement.

The use of mojos can help to bring the liberatory implications of these practices into relief. Athough there are several ways mojos were used and made, in this context a “mojo” often refers to a bundle of objects, bound together by cloth, box, or bottle, that worked metonymically to “fix” a person. Anthropologists Gladys‐Marie Fry and Mark Leone identify three categories of objects within mojos.Footnote ²⁸ In hoodoo love rituals, these objects were often bundled together within a container or cloth used to catch menstrual blood.Footnote ²⁹ I want to focus on the third category of objects within the bundles: the graveyard dust, riverbed clay, or funeral paraphernalia that acted “metonymically” to “provide direct access to the spirit” (Reference Leone and FryLeone and Fry 1999, 380).

Objects in the third category were considered to be “alive with a spirit” and, as a result, allowed practitioners to touch their dead (Reference Leone and FryLeone and Fry 1999, 380). Bringing the dead close enough for help, these bundles spelled out the practitioners’ success in negotiating their relationships with the dead. And it is the objects in the third category, via the presence of the dead within them, that transformed a bundle of ordinary, mundane objects (fingernails, hair, herbs, and so on) into life‐altering entities. Timothy Ruppel, Jessica Neuwirth, Mark P. Leone, and Gladys‐Marie Fry call this transformation an instance of “crossroads thinking,” a major part of spirit work cosmology.Footnote ³⁰ A common place of harvesting the third category of items was graveyards, which were considered a type of “crossroads” where the living meet the dead (Reference Ruppel, Neuwirth, Leone, Fry and AmericanRuppel et al. 2000, 329). These liminal spaces were considered to possess immense power that could radically alter a person's life, as they represented the immanence of the dead within this world. Gathered from these liminal spaces, the dirt placed within mojos was believed to transfer that same power to what were otherwise everyday, cast‐away objects. Put another way, the place of the dead in the cosmology of spirit work endowed what would have been considered trash to many with radical, life‐altering stakes. I would argue that this liminal space, represented by “crossroads thinking,” makes possible the psychic distance needed for a critical consciousness in that it imbues material objects with alternate meanings: both small, mundane objects and bodies in terms of sexuality (that is, “claiming ownership”). By the creation of alternate meanings, this cosmology could facilitate the struggle for liberation in transforming the traces of alienation within the newly freed.

The cosmology present in these practices was also often represented by a cosmogram, an oval with an X drawn within, symbolizing the relationship between the living and the dead (Reference Ruppel, Neuwirth, Leone, Fry and AmericanRuppel et al. 2000, 326–28). I introduce the cosmogram to stress, again, that spirit work prioritizes a relationship with the dead, through which sexual love is imbued with supernatural power. And the relationship to the dead in spirit work is a special one: it is one of submission. For example, consider the spirit work ritual implicitly referenced in Beloved, the Ring Shout. Hazzard‐Donald writes that this ritual was also a visual representation of spirit work cosmology as it “traced the circle of the Kongo cosmogram on the ground” (Reference Hazzard‐DonaldHazzard-Donald 2013, 48). Placing the Ring Shout within this context also means that it can be seen as “the gateway to a broader spirital experience, that of spirit possession” (48), a supreme form of submission to the dead.Footnote ³¹ Yet, as noted earlier, Hazzard‐Donald argues that the Ring Shout was one of the cultural practices by which the enslaved exhibited agency. If the cosmology present in spirit work was indeed the means by which sexual love became the “tangible expression of freedom” within the blues, then this has deep implications for how we conceptualize liberatory practices, agency, and resistance.

First, we have an example of a form of agency where power is gained through submission. Not only is power conceived on a register different from that of their oppressors,Footnote ³² but power is worked out in terms of submission rather than subversion. While these practices could ultimately be used to resist oppression, they only “work” through submission to the dead—which temporarily sidesteps the issue of oppression. In such cases, these practices would “hit a straight lick with a crooked stick” (Reference HurstonHurston 1995, 561): the liberatory (that is, resistant) effects are not the intentions of the practices themselves (which are bound up with submission), but a by‐product.

Second, being beholden to a different power source could give practitioners the distance needed to prevent internalization of their oppression.Footnote ³³ However, I would argue that this psychic distance is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for liberation. These practices are not liberatory in themselves, as they could easily be used for nonliberatory ends. (For example, consider that an abusive lover could use these practices to manipulate her or his partner into staying in an oppressive relationship.) Put another way, these practices are the means by which power is secured; they do not necessarily prescribe the uses of that power. As Davis writes of spirituality, “[r]eligion can play both a positive and a negative role in [the] road towards self‐knowledge. It can thwart liberation … or it can provide powerful assistance” (Reference DavisDavis 2010, 67).

We might also raise the question of what mode of agency these practices exhibit. For instance, spirit work highlights the interrelationFootnote ³⁴ between, and perhaps undermines a strict dichotomy of, the two levels of freedom described earlier. However, a narrow focus on resistance may cause us to miss this aspect of these practices. That is, these practices fail to fully register on the logic of oppression and resistance,Footnote ³⁵ as their “revolutionary content” (Reference DavisDavis 2010, 63) may lie precisely in the sidestepping mentioned earlier. While resistance “reverses” the roles of master and slave (Reference DavisDavis 2010, 83), this reversal preserves the binary power relation. However, as L. H. Stallings writes when considering black female sexual stereotypes, full liberation means much more than reversing “the binary logic of stereotypes about Black women's sexuality” (Reference StallingsStallings 2007, 2–3)—it means destruction of the binary (3). This requires a psychic distance that, again, I think spirit work practices could cultivate by way of “crossroads thinking.” In other words, by privileging a relationship other than master and slave, we may be able to generate an “independent means of judging the world” that is not merely reactionary.

“I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl”

My argument thus far has been that an investigation of hoodoo love rituals is needed to fully flesh out Davis's claim that, through the blues, sexual love becomes a “tangible expression of freedom” (Reference DavisDavis 1998, 8). To demonstrate how the previous discussion figures into the blues, I take up another hint that Davis buries. Namely, the connection that “West African philosophical traditions” make between “spiritual and sexual joy” (130). Within the blues, spiritual and sexual joy is coupled through the practice of “jooking.” In “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Hurston identifies the Jook as one of the blues’ primary sites of cultural production, where “Jook” is the “word for a Negro Pleasure house,” and the singing and playing inside is called “jooking” (Reference HurstonHurston 1995, 841). Jooks are especially interesting due to their diversity of traffic, their liminality, and their express designation of purpose. These spaces were often situated on the outskirts of city centers, in the liminal space between the rural and urban, gaining (foot and vocal) traffic from blacks in surrounding rural areas, blacks in town, and blacks (just) passing through (Reference Hazzard‐GordonHazzard-Gordon 1990, 76–77, 80–81).

What defined these spaces—back rooms in houses, sheds on the banks of bayous, riverside restaurants—as “Jooks” was simply the purpose for which they were designated: sexual pleasure that took on spiritual meanings. Similar to how “crossroads thinking” in hoodoo love rituals imbued everyday objects with life‐altering meaning, the spiritual traditions that framed jooking elevated sexual pleasure to life‐“fixing” status. As Hazzard‐Donald notes, the Jook was a “secular institution rooted in West African traditions that intertwined religious and secularized elements” (Reference Hazzard‐GordonHazzard-Gordon 1990, 16). One example of these religious elements is worship celebrations characterized by “raucous joy” from which jooking takes its form (77).Footnote ³⁶ Another element is the Ring Shout, from which much of African American dancing has evolved.Footnote ³⁷

Hurston notes that, within jooking, movements are “slow and sensuous,” for what matters most is “gaining sensation” (Reference HurstonHurston 1995, 842). I would argue that this emphasizes the quality of sexual pleasure gained through the dance, rather than the terminal fulfillment of said sexual stimulation. This shift of emphasis resonates with Audre Lorde's discussion of the erotic—which not only pertains to “what we do … but how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (Reference LordeLorde 2000, 54). For Lorde, the erotic, or the “sharing of joy,” can be a tremendous source of empowerment (56–57). This is not to say that the erotic, in itself, is liberatory. Rather, the information gained from tapping into the erotic can be used for liberatory ends.

For instance, Hurston writes toward the end of her discussion of the Jook:

Earlier in the essay, Hurston draws attention to the tendency of many white theater shows during the time to choose light‐skinned women for lead roles (842–43). This devaluation of dark‐skinned women also permeated several aspects of black culture, from popular songs and jokes to the selection of romantic partners. Across class there was internalized racism (that is, “colorism”), and upward social mobility, via a move to the North, often meant choosing lighter‐skinned romantic partners. However, within the Jook, this colorist and classist devaluation of dark‐skinned black women was overturned. For the blueswomen knew the only thing that matters when “jooking” is the “jelly roll.”Footnote ³⁹ Hurston writes:

The system of valuation within the practice of jooking ranked the quality of sexual love, through pleasure, at the top. As a result, the devaluation of dark‐skinned women due to the multifaceted oppression they faced was overturned and replaced with a rough egalitarianism. Hurston writes, “[t]he woman in the Jook may be nappy headed and black, but if she is a good lover she gets there just the same” (843). With the practice of jooking, alienation due to the interaction of sexism and colorism is reversed. Through their sexuality, blueswomen could reclaim their bodies as sources of power.

I want to stress that this informative pleasure, whereby blueswomen reclaimed their bodies, emerges within the coupling of spiritual and sexual joy. Within the blues tradition, sexual love was contextualized by an alternative meaning of the body than that under oppression (that is, “grace”). However, this alternative meaning is made possible through the “crossroads thinking” that hoodoo love rituals imported into the blues. It is this borrowed cosmology in the blues, in turn, that lifts the sexual pleasure in jooking from embodied ecstasy to spiritual heights.

A more contemporary example of the liberatory possibilities within this coupling of spiritual and sexual joy is Aretha Franklin's performance of “Dr. Feelgood” at the Filmore West Stadium. There are many blues examples to choose from, but I am interested in this one for its implicit references to hoodoo in the midst of coupling sexual and spiritual joy. I would argue that the resolution to the blues via sexual love would be misunderstood (and misguided) if we failed to appreciate how sexual love is framed within the context of the spiritual traditions mentioned earlier. Consider how Franklin describes Dr. Feelgood's loving:

The lyrics here suggest that physical solutions given by the doctor—“pills”—will not fix her affliction. But the sexual love offered as a solution is surely physical. To make sense of this, we have to consider that the sexual love Franklin is singing about has been imbued with spiritual power. This is why Dr. Feelgood's loving is an appropriate remedy to the “blues”Footnote ⁴⁰ she is feeling.Footnote ⁴¹

The turn of the song occurs at the “yes” refrain that marks the transition from the backwoods blues porch to the Sanctified Church altar during the performance.Footnote ⁴² Once in her pulpit, Franklin ministers to her audience‐congregation with the “information” gained from her tapping into the erotic: that “you'll be surprised at what big bridges you can meet” when troubles come. As James Baldwin describes in “Uses of the Blues,” the ethos of the blues is “this ability to know that alright, it's a mess, and you can't do anything about it … so, well, you have to do something about it” (Reference BaldwinBaldwin 2011, 72; italics mine). Spiritual joy,Footnote ⁴³ as exemplified by Franklin here, is an acknowledgment that no matter how dismal the situation is, we cannot stay there, we are compelled to act. My point is that the coupling of spiritual and sexual joy, granted by the cosmology in hoodoo, made possible the resolution to act or “meet” our “big bridges.” While these practices are not necessarily aimed at overturning oppression, is this not the type of resolve we need to “be able” to stand firm in our fights against injustice?Footnote ⁴⁴

In this essay, I have explored how sexual love, as conceived within the blues, became a terrain of freedom for the newly freed. I have argued that making sense of this claim requires an investigation into how spirit work imbued sexual love with supernatural power, thus supplying the ex‐slave's body with an alternative meaning than that provided by their former regime of oppression. As a result of this investigation, I have argued that the terrain of freedom Davis envisions is that of “claiming ownership” over their newly freed selves. Although the mechanisms of “claiming ownership” are practices that are not necessarily resistant to oppression, the effects of these practices, such as alternative understandings of the body, established the preconditions of resistance to interacting oppressions in the case of blueswomen in the Jooks.

While this essay has had a historical focus, the conclusions have significant theoretical and practical implications for liberation work today. For instance, McWhorter notes in “Post‐Liberation Feminism” that certain feminist liberation strategies no longer gain (much) traction due to our current political climate (neo‐liberalism) (Reference McWhorterMcWhorter 2013, 63–66). However, McWhorter is clear that we can still understand women as oppressed. As an alternative, McWhorter offers practices of freedom (similar to “claiming ownership”) as a way to destabilize power relations of oppression. This important insight, however, is not new. Hurston recognized in “Crazy for this Democracy,” for instance, that the structure of institutional racism is to make “concession[s] from the throne” of oppression rather than granting true “human right[s]” (Reference HurstonHurston 1995, 948); that is, to grant emancipation in name while maintaining institutions that leave oppression safe. This is precisely the situation ex‐slaves found themselves in upon gaining “legal” emancipation during Reconstruction. In an age that scholars such as Michelle Alexander are calling the “new Jim Crow” (Reference AlexanderAlexander 2012), we should follow the example of our ancestors and find new ways to “work the root.”