2. Conjuring Black Microclimates

Atmospheric Rootwork

Because the sensory regime of antiblackness has disproportionately exposed black populations to noxious or unbreathable air, black olfactory projects frequently manifest as everyday practices of resistance and life support. As historian Andrew Kettler has shown, enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world incorporated odor into a range of syncretic traditions including obeah, conjure, and rootwork. Whereas slaveholders employed bloodhounds to track fugitives by smell, conjure practitioners provided “powders designed to aid runaways by throwing tracking dogs off their scent.”16 Instead of facilitating racial abjection, smells could be deployed in ways that sustain black life.

Although, to some extent, these syncretic practices became decontextualized and commodified in the twentieth century, black urban communities continued to access conjure or hoodoo through local rootworkers and spiritual supply stores. While conjure was widely stigmatized as unscientific and non-Christian, its sensuous qualities also realized what the historian J. T. Roane characterizes as “the essential power of modes of discredited sensual connection in the reformulation of worlds devastated and abandoned by the dislocations of gendered racial capitalism, migration, and the resulting geographies of austerity and social murder.”17 Beginning in the 1920s, a range of scented products associated with conjure—including perfumes, incense, powder sachets, candles, fumigants, room cleaners, roots, and oils—circulated through mail-order catalogs and spiritual supply stores in northern cities.18 Advertisements and other marketing materials suggest that consumers attributed magical powers to these materials, including the capacity to enhance charisma, improve health, ward off enemies, purge harmful spirits, inspire love, and even influence legal decisions through the practice of “dusting the courtroom.”19 As the conjure researcher Carolyn Morrow Long notes, the “magic” of Hoodoo commodities “resides in the color and scent of the products. . . . In the early days of the spiritual business, preparations for ‘bad work’ had an offensive odor; now all products, regardless of their purpose, are highly perfumed.”20 Although it was often dismissed as superstition, the olfactory elements of conjure afforded black urban migrants some degree of control over the disproportionately polluted, poorly ventilated atmospheres they inhabited and inhaled. Subjected to noxious air, olfactory racial stereotypes, and hygienic discourses of deodorization, conjure practitioners transformed the air they breathed by connecting it with syncretic traditions that span black diasporic geographies throughout the Atlantic world. They thus enacted what M. Jaqui Alexander, in her discussion of Sacred knowledge in Vodou and Santeria, characterizes as a “rewiring of the senses” toward embodied encounters with Spirit and transgenerational memory.21

For example, Van Van Oil—a mixture of lemongrass oil and alcohol that Zora Neale Hurston identified as “the most popular conjure drug in Louisiana”22—features the scent of a grass indigenous to Africa (as well as Asia) and cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions such as Louisiana. “Used for luck and power of all kinds,” Van Van Oil’s fragrance evokes senses of place and diasporic longings far removed from the city’s noxious and deodorized spaces. Another popular substance in Hoodoo practice, High John the Conqueror Root, emits a “spicy” scent; practitioners are instructed to maintain the powers of the root by periodically treating it with perfume. Long explains that this “most famous of African American charms” is “carried in the pocket and rubbed when needed; kept in the house as an amulet; ‘fed’ or ‘dressed’ with various substances; boiled to make baths and floor wash; soaked in whiskey, oils, and perfumes for an anointing substance; or incorporated into mojo bags and lucky hands.”23 Even more than Van Van Oil, High John the Conqueror root links these olfactory practices with African roots: framing “John de Conquer” as a folkloric figure embodying laughter, trickery, song, and resilience, Zora Neale Hurston writes, “High John de Conquer went back to Africa, but he left his power here, and placed his American dwelling in the root of a certain plant. Only possess that root, and he can be summoned at any time.”24 These aromatic materials enact the transmission of memory that, according to sociologist Katrina Hazzard-Donald, is at the heart of Hoodoo practice: “Hoodoo serves as embodied historical memory, connecting African Americans across generations and tracing their lineage back to their African origins.”25

Spiritual products—and the social networks in which they circulated—sustained ordinary practices of health and mutual care. In her discussion of the influence of Hoodoo on African American health practices, Hazzard-Donald reports that “Hoodoo drugstores were a significant component in urban folk medicine and home remedies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”26 The religious studies scholar Theophus Smith observes: “Notably omitted from conventional references is conjure as the use of natural and artificial materials for medicinal and quasimedicinal purposes—that is, conjure as a pharmacopeic tradition of practices . . . conjure as folk pharmacy.”27 Many Hoodoo practitioners were outlawed beginning in the late nineteenth century, when the medical establishment lobbied for legal regulations to expunge competing health practices.28 The tensions between Hoodoo and biomedicine are evident in their diametrically opposed approaches to olfaction: whereas Hoodoo deploys scents to modify the material and spiritual interface between body and environment, biomedicine demands deodorization as a means of upholding the fiction of a fortified body immunologically sealed off from its surroundings.29 For practitioners of Hoodoo, smell’s capacities to evoke collective and individual memories and to alter mood and behavior may exert considerable (though not easily measurable) effects on physical and mental health.

The techniques of atmospheric intervention associated with conjure draw attention to everyday spaces and activities—like breathing—as sites of constraint and contestation. Conjure remakes the air as a medium that can awaken diasporic memories and affiliations, sustain individual and collective health, and disclose alternative modes of knowledge and action. The works of Toni Morrison and Renée Stout, to which I’ll now turn, explore how the scented materials of conjure create microclimates supportive of black diasporic life and consciousness.

Atmospheric Care in Song of Solomon

Perhaps Morrison’s most evocative writing about scent appears in Song of Solomon (1977), a novel preoccupied with black people’s atmospheric interactions.30 Blending historical fiction with magical realist elements, the novel begins and ends with airborne men: in the opening scene, a life insurance agent leaps to his death from a hospital cupola in a failed attempt to “fly away on my own wings” (3); in the final scene, the protagonist, Milkman Dead, leaps off a promontory believing he’ll take flight. As Milkman learns toward the end of his quest for self-knowledge, his ancestor Solomon was one of the Flying Africans who flew back to Africa to escape from slavery (322).

Commentators (including Morrison herself) have framed this novel as a coming-of-age story oriented by the Flying African—a folkloric figure associated with Igbo Landing, where a group of Igbo captives who seized their slave ship immersed themselves in a stream after running aground in Georgia. Although some drowned bodies were recovered, enslaved West Africans and their descendants in the region believed that these individuals either flew back to their homeland or were borne back by the water. The Flying African thus emerges from Igbo Landing as a metaphor for both refusal and transcendence—a reminder of ongoing connections between the diaspora and their places and cultures of origin.

The titular “song of Solomon,” however, does not center the Flying African so much as those he leaves behind: “O Solomon don’t leave me here / Cotton balls to choke me [. . .] Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone” (303, emphasis in original). By juxtaposing the archetype of flight with the suffering and sorrow of the women and children left behind, Morrison offers a critical perspective on flight and the freedom of mobility as techniques of survival disproportionately available to able-bodied black men who were willing to leave kin and community obligations behind. At the heart of the novel, then, is the question: how can one “ride the air” without leaving loved ones behind?

As a counterpoint to flight, Song of Solomon explores smell as another technique for becoming atmospheric. If flight is Milkman’s patriarchal inheritance, scent is frequently associated with the novel’s women, along with the domestic spaces they inhabit and the acts of care they perform. Milkman’s aunt, Pilate, becomes an important mentor as he gains some measure of independence from his father’s devotion to bourgeois accumulation. Educated by a migrant “root worker” (142) and described by several critics as a “conjure woman,”31 Pilate lives with her daughter and granddaughter in an unkempt yet welcoming house suffused with a distinctive odor. Both Pilate and her house are introduced through olfactory details: her brother disparages her “sickening smell” (20); Milkman’s friend describes the house as “Shiny and brown. With a smell” (36). Although this smell violates deodorized bourgeois norms, Milkman learns that its main components are the pine trees near Pilate’s house and the fermenting wine she produces to support her family. Still, there is something inexplicably appealing about it: Milkman and his friend spend hours in the house listening to her talk, because “The piny-winy smell was narcotic” (40).

But not all of the smells in Song of Solomon can be traced to physical sources. In a pivotal moment, when Milkman and his friend Guitar are on their way to steal what they believe to be a bag of gold from Pilate’s house, Morrison puts the plot on hold to offer a description of an inexplicable smell that spans three paragraphs:

On autumn nights, in some parts of the city, the wind from the lake brings a sweetish smell to shore. An odor like crystallized ginger, or sweet ice tea with a dark clove floating in it. There is no explanation for the smell either, since the lake, on September 19, 1963, was so full of mill refuse and the chemical wastes of a plastic manufacturer that the hair of the willows that stood near the shore was thin and pale. (184)

Here, Morrison acknowledges the lakeside air, filled with industrial pollutants, as a vehicle of environmental slow violence that affects humans and nonhumans alike.32 But while the willows’ thinning hair indicates how vulnerable living beings are to toxic harm, the focus of this passage is on another inexplicable presence in the air: the elusive “sweetish smell . . . like crystallized ginger, or sweet ice tea with a dark clove” exceeds the issue of environmental toxicity, drawing our attention instead to materials—ginger, sugar, tea, and cloves—whose circulation and intermixture were bound up with the histories of slavery and empire.

If the sweetness of this atmosphere is comforting, it also situates the fictional town of Mercy, Michigan, in the “afterlife of slavery.”33 As Sidney Mintz argues in Sweetness and Power, our modern fascination with the sensation of sweetness was entangled with the histories of chattel slavery, empire, and industrialization. Behind the “mill refuse” and plastics factory in Morrison’s passage looms the Caribbean sugar plantation, which integrated production and processing under brutal conditions of enslaved labor and provided both a model and a convenient calorie source for industrial-era factories.34

The smell of ginger is also shot through with historical tensions, but these have more positive resonances. Like tea and cloves, ginger was brought to Africa and the Americas from Asia through colonial trade networks. Although it was not an inherently or exclusively “African” material, ginger was eventually incorporated into local culinary, health, and spiritual practice on both sides of the Atlantic. Holly Fils-Aime reads the novel’s sweet ginger scent as a reference to medicinal uses of ginger in Africa and in Caribbean and Southern practices of Voudun, conjure, and hoodoo, arguing that Morrison’s ginger “is the key to traditional beliefs about healing and transcendence that stymie Western rationalism. . . . Ginger itself is inextricably associated with life: as a stimulant for the heart, it serves to counteract some of the evil at large in the world.”35 Like other roots incorporated into African syncretic practices like rootwork and conjure, ginger is also an apt metaphor for rootedness, or connection with ancestral lands including in Africa, the Caribbean, and (for those who moved during the Great Migration) the South. At the same time, like the concept of “diaspora” (which refers to the sowing of seeds, often by the wind), the scent of ginger holds together the concepts of rootedness and volatilized mobility: “the air that could have come straight from a marketplace in Accra” (185).

In the next two paragraphs, Song of Solomon follows this “ginger sugar” smell onto shore, where it contributes to the production of a sensory and social divide. Morrison details a smellscape inflected by architecture, infrastructure, and a complex social geography that separates the wealthy people living near the lake from the those living in Southside, whose disproportionately black residents cannot afford air conditioning:

Yet there was this heavy spice-sweet smell that made you think of the East and stripe tents and the sha-sha-sha of leg bracelets. The people who lived near the lake hadn’t noticed the smell for a long time now because when air conditioners came, they shut their windows and slept a light surface sleep under the motor’s drone.

So the ginger sugar blew unnoticed through the streets, around the trees, over roofs, until, thinned out and weakened a little, it reached Southside. There, where some houses didn’t even have screens, let alone air conditioners, the windows were thrown wide open to whatever the night had to offer. And there the ginger smell was sharp, sharp enough to distort dreams, and make the sleeper believe the things he hungered for were right at hand. To the Southside residents who were awake on such nights, it gave all their thoughts and activity a quality of being both intimate and far away. The two men standing near the pines on Darling Street—right near the brown house where wine drinkers went—could smell the air, but they didn’t think of ginger. Each thought it was the way freedom smelled, or justice, or luxury, or vengeance. (184–85)

The air conditioners in wealthy lakeside homes and the open, unscreened windows of the Southside function as technologies of sensorial worldmaking: the air conditioner produces comfortable, deodorized atmospheres where encounters with ambient smells, sounds, and temperatures are carefully controlled; the open window exposes residents not only to toxic industrial emissions but also to this mysterious scent that distorts dreams, desire, and space, evoking connections “both intimate and far away.” If the ginger smell evokes heterogeneous geographies of diasporic connection, it is mixed here with other, more familiar smells: “standing near the pines . . . near the brown house were wine drinkers went,” Milkman and Guitar are also smelling the “piny-winy” smell of the house they’re breaking into (40). Morrison also attunes us to the subjective variations of olfactory perception and association: instead of consciously registering the ginger scent, the young men project a range of abstract ideas onto the smell. The sweet ginger smell instigates Milkman’s actions and his eventual journey southward to explore his “roots,” his father’s, grandparents’ and ancestors’ communities—but at this stage of the novel he has only a murky sense of what it is calling him toward.

If flight is the novel’s most salient aerial motif, smell lingers in the background as an airborne medium of memory, affect, and black feminist care. For Milkman’s sister Corinthians and her lover, it has a soothing effect that sets the mood for acting on transgressive desires: “It was . . . hot enough to make people angry, had it not been for a pleasant smell in the air, like sweet ginger” (199). Porter suggests that making love in this common atmosphere is what they have instead of bourgeois accoutrements like “roses . . . and bottles of perfume” (200). When Milkman visits Circe—an impossibly old woman who once took in his father and Pilate—he is nearly driven away by the stench of the decaying house she inhabits, when the stench suddenly gives way to “a sweet spicy perfume. Like ginger root—pleasant, clean, seductive” (239). This bewitching scent enables him to enter the house, where Circe shares information about his “Indian mostly” grandmother, Sing, and the cave where his grandfather’s body was dumped (243). Morrison tells us that “the smell followed” Milkman out of the house; his “gingerly” entry into the woods suggests that he has internalized the scent (249). When he follows his grandparents’ roots to the town of Shalimar, Virginia, Milkman encounters “the smell of gingerbread baking” in the home of his grandmother’s niece (287, 320). Although the novel never offers a literal explanation for the sweet ginger scent that emanates from the lake over Mercy, Michigan, it repeatedly associates the scent with the everyday lives of black women: Pilate’s “piny-winy” home, Circe’s witchy “perfume,” Susan Byrd’s gingerbread.

The scent reappears in the novel’s final scene, when Milkman and Pilate return to Shalimar to bury her father’s bones where her grandfather Solomon is said to have taken flight. “A deep sigh escaped from the sack and the wind turned chill. Ginger, a spicy sugared ginger smell, enveloped them” (335). Here, Milkman’s grandfather, Jake,36 takes flight in the form of a volatile scent. Retroactively, this scene hints that the gingery smell in Mercy may have been emanating not only from the lake but from the sack of bones suspended over a doorway in Pilate’s house. It also suggests that the novel’s recursive sweet ginger smell is linked to Milkman’s inheritance, which encompasses both his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s capacity for flight and the care with which Pilate recovered and stewarded the bones for decades. Soon afterward, Guitar shoots Pilate and Milkman repeats his ancestor’s legendary leap: “For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (337, emphasis in original).

Critics have read this closing sentence as a culmination of Milkman’s patriarchal quest for independence, self-knowledge, and ancestral connection: as Michael Awkward puts it, the ending affirms the mythic significance of “transcendent flight” while also exposing this myth as “implicitly phallocentric in [its] inscription of a perpetually inferior—non-‘heroic’—status for the female.”37 However, flight also requires a material, aerial medium—an atmosphere that, like seawater, is filled with history’s particulates. As Sophia Nahli Allison observes in her documentary on the Flying African legend, “If energy cannot be created nor destroyed then the residue, particles, or remnants of the past and near future live among us, constantly overlapping with the present.”38 Smell attunes us not only to the body in flight but to the aerial medium that holds and sustains flight. Insofar as what we smell are volatile molecules (from the Latin volare, to fly), the idea of flight is inextricable from olfaction. The sweet scent of ginger—a root grounded in women’s everyday practices of care and conjure, and volatilized into airborne matter—offers another model for surrendering to the air and riding its currents of affect and polychronic resonance. The shift from Solomon to Shalimar—the town’s name, and the name that Milkman’s Native American great-grandmother always called the man (321)—in this final line also decenters the patriarchal myth of the flying, “invulnerabl[e]” body (220). “Shalimar”—traditionally a woman’s name originating from the name of the Mughal royal gardens—displaces the biblical Solomon, evoking the history of ginger’s circulation as a product of global trade and intermixture. It also echoes the name of an iconic perfume created by Jacques Guerlain in 1921. While the fragrance “Shalimar” did not contain ginger, several of its “oriental” notes (e.g., bergamot, lemon, rose, vanilla) would have been reminiscent of sweet ice tea.

“Zora Neale Hurston Meets . . . Octavia Butler in the Matrix”

Guerlain’s Shalimar also appears alongside references to ginger and the biblical Solomon in The Rootworker’s Worktable, a 2011 mixed-media work by Renée Stout (Figure 2). The work—which consists of “A 1920’s serving table embellished with an embedded light box, vintage technology, constructed ‘gauges,’ found and blown glass bottles, a ‘blackboard’ painting and a found rug”—draws attention the importance of aromatic materials in black folk medicine. The painted trompe-l’oeil blackboard conveys a process of improvisation and experimentation, elliptical connections criss-crossing a palimpsest of partially erased terms. In a section labeled “Remember to gather,” the blackboard includes the word “Solomon” followed by the letter “S” and an erased smudge—likely a reference to the flowering plant known as Solomon’s seal;39 the blackboard’s lower right corner includes “Ginger” and “*Shalimar Perfume” in a list of “THINGS I’LL NEED FOR THE SEDUCTION OF SteRLING ROCHAMBEAU.” Juxtaposed on the board with notes on the properties of High John the Conqueror Root and names of Yoruba and African syncretic orishas and loas, these materials present rootwork as a flexible, open-ended mode of ecological engagement that can incorporate both synthetic perfumes and materials whose origins lie beyond Africa and the Americas.

Like Morrison, Stout draws attention to how syncretic spiritual practices have been adopted and transformed in the diaspora—especially as techniques of atmospheric intervention that sustain black lives and futures. Stout has devoted much of her practice to developing exhibitions that explore African and African syncretic spiritual practices. She traces this interest to her fascination with a Kongo “nkisi nkondi figure that . . . enthralled her as a ten-year-old at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.”40 As art historian Lisa Collins explains, these figures prepared in Kongo territory are “sacred medicines and charms thought to enclose spirits,” and they typically contain “things such as leaves, earth, ashes, seeds, stones, herbs, and sticks.”41 Meanwhile, Stout traces her interest in conjure to a spiritual supply store she visited in 1986, and to her encounters with spiritual practices in New Orleans starting in 1989 (121). While conjure, Hoodoo, and related practices have long been suppressed—both within and outside black communities—by secular institutions, bourgeois morality, and Christianity, Stout frames her work as a “way of honoring the ancestors and asserting that, as an African American woman, I owe it to them and myself to keep the door open” (122). In centering black women’s everyday spiritual practices, Stout is inspired by Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1972), which documents “how generations of black women were creative even when they had little or no access to conventional art-making materials.”42 Over the years, Stout has taken on two artistic personae, Madame Ching (based on “a black fortune-teller from Stout’s hometown of Pittsburgh”) and Fatima Mayfield (“based on a local purveyor of healing herbs and potions”), whom she stages as the “descendants” of “old Southern Hoodoo spiritualists.”43 Stout approaches Hoodoo not as a fixed tradition but as a living practice and a resource for black futurity and liberation. She characterizes Fatima in terms that blend folk religion with Afrofuturism, as “a mysterious seer/herbalist/root worker, who can best be described as Zora Neale Hurston meets the science fiction writer Octavia Butler in the Matrix.”44

Stout’s traveling exhibition, Tales of the Conjure Woman (2013), presents a mysterious, multisensory assemblage of works unified by the persona of Fatima Mayfield. These works span a range of media: a poster advertising Fatima’s services, glass sculptures of Hoodoo roots, a vending machine that appears to dispense roots and herbs, an etching of a recipe for seduction, drawings of figures Fatima saw in dreams, and multimedia installations (including The Rootworker’s Worktable) that include scented media such as organic materials and perfume bottles. Stout’s exhibition includes a number of embedded plots: a Hoodoo seduction, a pilgrimage to the tomb of Marie Laveau, a Christian minister’s campaign to suppress Hoodoo, and an encounter in which Fatima seduces and dominates a misogynist. These embedded tales frame the conjure woman as a threat to both patriarchal hierarchies and the church’s efforts to monopolize spiritual authority in the service of bourgeois respectability.

Stout’s work frequently alludes to the material and spiritual significance of scent in practices of conjure. An etching titled The Seduction (2010) presents a set of “Notes for the Seduction of Sterling Rochambeau” that focuses on the qualities of perfumes. After noting that “Perfume is very important. . . . A hard choice,” the work lists and reflects on ten possible perfume choices: “Hmm . . . TABU is a good one—it has that sexy/‘skanky’ factor (wink)”; “Also BAT-SHEBA! it’s perfect for this seduction of ‘Biblical’ proportions” (75). This olfactory seduction plot, which Stout returns to in several later works, flips the patriarchal script of seduction by playfully countering the respectability associated with the terms “Biblical” and “sterling” with black feminist funk.

Another work in the exhibition, The Return (2009), documents Stout’s visit to New Orleans three years after Hurricane Katrina. A handwritten account details how the artist employs scent to create an affective microclimate for a stroll through a dramatically altered cityscape: “before i step out for my first walk, i apply the scent of douce amère to my neck and wrists in honor of this bittersweet occasion.” Stout’s first walk is a pilgrimage to the tomb of the nineteenth-century Voudun practitioner and midwife Marie Laveau: “i lay flowers, a cigar, and perfumes from [the New Orleans perfumerie] hové at the tomb of marie laveau. i hug her spirit . . . glad that i am ‘home,’ at peace and whole again.” Stout’s olfactory offerings—along with her own scent of Douce Amère—affirm her relationship to the Laveau’s memory and to the spiritual practices Stout has studied in New Orleans. Throughout her pilgrimage, scent sustains a microclimate that makes it possible to feel whole and at “home” again in the changed city: “many of the places i once loved have vanished, but i can still feel the magic at her core.”

Like Morrison’s ginger smell, Stout’s work acknowledges conjure’s open-ended capacity to incorporate new encounters with more-than-human materials in and beyond the Atlantic world. With a flexibility that reflects the (often coerced) mobility of diasporic experience, the conjure woman remobilizes commercial perfumes, plants from all over the world, and an array of circum-Atlantic spirits and deities as material supports for the lives and desires of black women. Erzulie’s Arsenal (2013)—a found wooden container that Stout filled with glass bottles and vials containing organic substances—invokes Erzulie, a group of Haitian (Voudun) loa associated with femininity, women’s sensuality, and love.45 Another work depicts a bottle labeled “Patchuli/ Suerte en Amor”—a reference to both the multilingual communities that use syncretic spiritual products and to a fragrant plant (patchouli) native to Southeast Asia but widely cultivated in the Caribbean for its essential oil. Ironically, this bottle also prominently features a stereotypical portrait of a Native American man in a feather headdress labeled “Indio Ponderoso” (probably an intentional misspelling of “Indio Poderoso”)—an image that draws attention to how diasporic olfactory practices can contribute to the transformation of Indigenous smellscapes (and, here, to the problematic rhetorical indigenization of diasporic scents).

In addition to depicting scented roots, herbs, and perfumes, several works in the exhibition include scented powders and perfume bottles: “There are scents. If I open up these cabinets that have the roots and soaps, perfume-like smells come out. There’s incense.”46 Noting that “There’s even a display of perfume bottles that you can uncork and sniff,” critic Mark Jenkins reports, “The scents of musk and flowers may dominate, but just as symbolically important is the aroma of earth—from graveyards and, ultimately, Africa.”47 According to critic Ed Hall, Stout’s inclusion of scents “signal[s] a grasp of neuropsychology—of the way olfactory stimuli intertwine with memory, of contemporary mind models that construe the self not as I but as the jostling collective that makes me.”48 Scents enable Stout to materialize the atmosphere of conjure in a way that makes her installation not only a representation but an immersive performance: “the work is not just operating on a visual level, as my creative process often becomes a literal ritual with candle and incense burning and the gathering of special herbs, etc., to insert into the work in an effort to promote healing and evoke the protective energies of ancestral spirits.”49 Through the scents of roots and perfumes, Fatima’s magic permeates, penetrates, and transforms the bodies and psyches of visitors.

Both on its own terms and as it is represented in works like Song of Solomon and Tales of the Conjure Woman, conjure attunes us to how scented media can reshape black breathers’ sense of the world, even when immersed in antiblack “weather.” As a syncretic practice of atmospheric intervention, conjure creates and maintains microclimates conducive to collective memory and black life. In Quashie’s words, conjure’s atmospheres enable breathers to “[perceive] differently what the world is or looks like or can be—worldmaking.”

Notes

1. 1. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant, in The Motion of History and Other Plays, 131–50 (William Morrow & Co, 1978), 132. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

2. 2. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (Penguin, 2003), 58.

3. 3. Paulla Ebron, Performing Africa (Princeton University Press, 2002), 210.

4. 4. David Llorens, “Ameer (LeRoi Jones) Baraka,” Ebony (August 1969): 82.

5. 5. L. H. Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (University of Illinois Press, 2015), 4, 6.

6. 6. Tanaïs, In Sensorium, 137.

7. 7. Renisa Mawani, “Atmospheric Pressures: On Race and Affect,” unpublished MS, cited with permission.

8. 8. See Mark Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (University of North Carolina Press, 2006); also Andrew Kettler, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

9. 9. For a historical study of the “scientific” practices that normalized the notion of racially differentiated lungs, see Lundy Braun, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from the Plantation to Genetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

10. 10. Christina Sharpe, “Antiblack Weather vs. Black Microclimates,” interview with Léopold Lambert, Funambulist 14 (November–December 2017): 104.

11. 11. Sharpe, “Antiblack Weather vs. Black Microclimates,” 109.

12. 12. Sharpe, “Antiblack Weather vs. Black Microclimates,” 52.

13. 13. Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016), 2.

14. 14. Sharpe, “Antiblack Weather vs. Black Microclimates,” 53.

15. 15. Sharpe, “Antiblack Weather vs. Black Microclimates,” 109.

16. 16. Jeffrey Anderson, Conjure in African American Society (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 84.

17. 17. J. T. Roane, “Plotting the Black Commons,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 20, no. 3 (July 2018): 21. Roane describes the black women who gathered and sold herbs and roots as “[looking to] the wider Black commons for elements for a fleeting social world despite the ongoing enclosure marked by urbanization” (260).

18. 18. Carolyn Morrow Long, Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 99–126.

19. 19. Long, Spiritual Merchants, 106.

20. 20. Long, Spiritual Merchants, 103.

21. 21. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2005), 308.

22. 22. Zora Neale Hurston, “Paraphernalia of Conjure,” in Mules and Men, 277–80 (Harper, 1990).

23. 23. Long, Spiritual Merchants, 221.

24. 24. Zora Neale Hurston, “High John De Conquer,” in The Sanctified Church (Marlowe & Co., 1981), 71–72.

25. 25. Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System (University of Illinois Press, 2012), 11.

26. 26. Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’,154–55.

27. 27. Theophys Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (Oxford University Press, 1994), 5.

28. 28. See Kodi Roberts, Voodoo and Power: The Politics of Religion in New Orleans 1881–1940 (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 158.

29. 29. See Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Duke University Press, 2009). On the prominence of smell in the ecological “miasma” theory of disease emergence that preceded germ theory, see Melanie Kiechle, The Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (University of Washington Press, 2017).

30. 30. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (Knopf, 1977); subsequent references cited parenthetically. On Morrison’s other olfactory writings, see Ally Louks’s discussion of intersectional olfactory othering in Tar Baby, “The Smell of Misogynoir: Representing and Redressing Intersectional Olfactory Stereotypes Surrounding Black Women and Girls,” in “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose,” PhD Dissertation (Cambridge University, June 2024), 99–114, and Tanaïs’s account of the perfume they designed as a tribute to Beloved (In Sensorium, 156–57).

31. 31. See, e.g., Kameelah Martin, Conjuring Moments in African American Literature: Women, Spirit Work & Other Such Hoodoo (Palgrave, 2012), 79; Donna Aza Weir-Soley, Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings (University Press of Florida, 2017), 85.

32. 32. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011).

33. 33. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6.

34. 34. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin, 1986).

35. 35. Holly Fils-Aime, “The Sweet Scent of Ginger: Understanding the Roots of Song of Solomon and Mama Day,” The Griot 15, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 32.

36. 36. “Jake” was also slang for Jamaican ginger, a patent medicine and bootleg drink made from Jamaican ginger that became popular during Prohibition.

37. 37. Michael Awkward, “‘Unruly and Let Loose’: Myth, Ideology, and Gender in Song of Solomon,” in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Casebook, ed. Jan Furman (Oxford University Press, 2003), 89.

38. 38. Sophia Nahli Allison, Dreaming Gave Us Wings, documentary video (2019), https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/revisiting-the-legend-of-flying-africans.

39. 39. Long notes that Solomon’s seal root is among of the roots that herbalists have identified as either High John the Conqueror or Low John the Conqueror root (Spiritual Merchants, 228). Stout drew this list of herbs from Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs and the glossary of Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (Doreen St. Félix, “Playing Hoodoo: Renée Stout and ‘The Rootworker’s Worktable,” New Yorker [May 27, 2017] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/playing-hoodoo-renee-stout-and-the-rootworkers-table).

40. 40. Mark Sloan, ed., Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman (Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, 2013), 119. Subsequent references cited parenthetically.

41. 41. Lisa Collins, “Economies of the Flesh: Representing the Black Female Body in Art,” in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders (University of Michigan Press, 2002), 120.

42. 42. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, “Foreword,” in Renée Stout, ed. Mark Sloan, 10.

43. 43. Nikki Greene, “The Feminist Funk Power of Betty Davis and Renée Stout,” American Studies 52, no. 4 (2013): 72.

44. 44. Charles Rowell, “Renée Stout,” interview, Callaloo 38, no. 4 (2015): 880.

45. 45. See Roberto Strongman, Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou (Duke University Press, 2019), 43–44.

46. 46. Renée Stout, in Lisa Collins, “‘The Evidence of the Process,’” interview, Transition 109 (2012): 50.

47. 47. Mark Jenkins, “Women’s Work Is Never Done,” Washington Post, February 25, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/museums/womens-artwork-is-never-done/2016/02/25/1e423d50-d690-11e5-b195-2e29a4e13425_story.html?noredirect=on.

48. 48. Ed Hall, “Renée Stout’s Three Rs: Rootwork, Religion, and Recovery,” Burnaway: The Voice of Art in the South (March 13, 2014), https://burnaway.org/review/tales-conjure-woman/, emphasis in original.

49. 49. Rowell, “Renée Stout,” 881.