Research Associate Kinitra Brooks on ‘Celebrating the Women of the Black South’

Dr. Kinitra Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She is Associate Professor and the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies at Michigan State University and a 2022-23 Research Associate in the Harvard Divinity School Women’s Studies in Religion Program.

Drawing on extensive archival research, historical literature, and conversations with her own Louisiana southern Conjure ancestry, Brooks’s work uncovers the stories of her ancestors whose practices had been silenced by a Colonialist’s Christianity and fears of reprisal. Her 2023 spring semester course at HDS is “Conjure Feminism: Black Women's Spirituality in the U.S. South.”

Brooks has three books in print: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror, a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror; Sycorax’s Daughters, an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women; and The Lemonade Reader, a collection of essays on Beyoncé’s 2016 audiovisual project, Lemonade. She is also the co-editor of the “New Suns” book series at Ohio State University Press and has a soon to be released graphic novel called Red Dirt Witch.

Below, Brooks discusses her yearlong research project at the WSRP, titled, “Divine Conjurers: Recovering Black Women’s Intellectual Histories of Spirit Work,” which explores the origins of Black Southern women’s spirit work, with an emphasis on the West African influences upon the spiritual and physical healing practices of the conjure woman.

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I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana, a very Southern and very Caribbean city. Living in New Orleans is like living in a place of intersection—a place that I like to call magic, where the dead are present and living among us.

I grew up in a family culture where it was natural to talk with the dead and where the women could “do things.” We also held very Christian beliefs with deep ties to our missionary Baptist church, an Africanized Christianity whose practice is different from a Southern Baptist in that it’s the Baptist church of the Civil Rights Movement—justice-based with an autonomy that allowed Black folks the safe spaces to be leaders.

The “multiplicity of being” is accepted as how things are in New Orleans, but there is also an uncomfortableness at times, and it is this comfort/discomfort relationship that I wanted to explore.

I began my exploration by looking at the women in my family, connecting on a micro level to these macro conversations and movements of spiritual practices that held Black women as spiritual leaders in the presence of African religious practices. Much of my Conjure Feminism project is about this recognition and understanding that Conjure practices, such as in my family, occurred in many Black families in the presence of these multiple beliefs.

My great grandmother was a Conjure woman and a Christian child of God. She was a botanist and a root worker who practiced medicine. She was also a hairdresser and the matriarch of our family. Many Conjure women held other positions, such as midwives and spiritual leaders. Gradually, they were pushed out of these roles by the rising white male patriarchal medical establishment of OBGYNs, and pushed out of the classic Black church by the male preachers.

They went underground, and their power began to manifest in different ways. People would come to their kitchens with their problems, knowing that it was a place where you could find physical, emotional, and therapeutic healing, while having a tea or a tonic or a tincture. They continued to have clientele, but they developed a secretive nature to their practice that was no longer openly talked about.

As the Conjure practice went underground, it began to be seen as something we did in slavery and not to be carried on as before, or at least not to be spoken about publicly. In my research, I see that it was secreted for protection, or to develop a different sense of self, or to block off the traumas of slavery in order to survive.

Author Katrina Hazzard-Donald talks about the Hoodoo religion, which is sometimes used interchangeably with Conjure. The Hoodoo religion came from Africa, while the Vodou religion came from Haiti. Both spread with the trans-Atlantic slave movement when we were enslaved in the South. Post-emancipation, both traditions were no longer held as classic religions. They became more of a collection of practices, but it's my insistence that Conjure was still there undergirding some of the social political movements at the time.

So many times, in the Civil Rights Movement and in the Black Power Movement, folks talk about the presence of the Black church and the practice of Africanized religions. I am looking at these contemporary practices and looking at descendants to see how the past practices of Conjure are reflected in these movements.

Unfortunately, there are very few records of this that exist—and even fewer that are told through the eyes of the Black culture. There are some places in the archives where I am able to find this history, and as a professor of literature I have found that it is in literature where many of these histories are being told.

In doing this research I ask myself: How do I begin to tell these stories and find these women in our histories when they were purposely and specifically keeping these things secret? How do I respect their wishes knowing this? I have to have an ethic of care in deciding what should be kept secret and what should be translated and given out—all while ensuring that they are a part of history in the many different ways that it can exist.

In carefully telling these stories, I want to celebrate the complex intellectual and spiritual traditions of the Black South, shifting the conversation to celebrate Black Southernness. And in my case specifically, celebrating the women of the Black South.

In my course teachings, I tell my students to value the stories of their own families—find out what can be learned from the elders. Scholarship can be about having those conversations; it doesn't have to be so scholarly and pedantic and exclusionary. It's always important for me to write and create things that my family can also read. That is why I created my comic book, a graphic novel adaptation of a N.K. Jemisin story called Red Dirt Witch, about a Conjure woman in the South in 1950s Alabama. It will be coming out on Abrams Comics in 2025.

During my time at the HDS WSRP, I am writing a chapter for my book, Divine Conjurors, on Dona Kimpa Vita, a Congolese woman who was burned at the stake in 1706. She is often referred to as the Black Joan of Arc. I'm looking at her as an early inspiration and, in some ways, the foundation of Conjure feminism—with her mix of Christianity and traditional African religious practices and religions.

She was a priestess in her Indigenous religion of the Congo, and she was also a practicing Catholic who said she was possessed by the spirit of Saint Anthony. She became so much of a social political force that the Congolese monarchy and the Catholic Church found her to be a dangerous force to be reckoned with. The history that has been written about her has not been generous.

Through the WSRP, I went to Rome for five weeks to go to the Vatican Archives and the Propaganda Fide, where I got to see the papers that they had written about her. Unfortunately, everything in the archive that is written about her is through the monks' eyes. So again, I have to read under and in between in the gaps to find her true legacy, much like I have had to do with my research on the Divine Conjurers.

In changing this, I think I am doing the important work of my ancestors, and they are leading me in very specific places to find their stories.

—Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto, HDS correspondent