The Hindu in Hoodoo: Fake Yogis, Pseudo-Swamis, and the Manufacture of African American Folk Magic

34 Amerasia Journal 2014 Amerasia Journal 40:1 (2014): 34-56 The Hindu in Hoodoo: Fake Yogis, Pseudo-Swamis, and the Manufacture of African American Folk Magic Philip Deslippe Introduction In 1936, Harry Middleton Hyatt, an Anglican minister by vocation and a folklorist by hobby, embarked on a wide and ambitious project that focused on the “magic rites and spirits” of African Americans.1 For four years, Hyatt traveled down the East Coast from New York City to Florida and throughout the South. As he would settle into each location, Hyatt would use his “contact men” to locate and screen local informants who he would then interview using Ediphone and Telediphone recorders. The result was eventually published in ive volumes as Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork, the irst two volumes being published in 1970 and the inal three in 1978. The enormity and scope of Harry Hyatt’s project, what he described as “a living text (of) one vast quotation,” was astounding: over 1,600 informants who gave over 13,000 different spells and pieces of folklore that were recorded on 3,000 cylinders and then meticulously (and often phonetically) transcribed.2 During his ield work, one of Hyatt’s informants in Memphis, “Madam” Myrtle Collins, told Hyatt that the magical materials she used, “most of the luck oils an’ things are made by those Hindu people. They understand it—has analyzed it down to a point where it’s luck.”3 While the association of Hoodoo, an African-derived practice emerging from the American South, with a place and people halfway around the world might seem bizarre, this was one of over a dozen separate times when Hyatt’s informants would connect Hoodoo with what was perceived to PHIlIP DESlIPPE is a doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work focuses on Asian and metaphysical religious traditions in modern America. 35 Amerasia Journal 2014 36 be Hindu. There were Hindu spirit guides, physically present teachers claiming to be from Bombay or Calcutta, and several turban-clad Hoodoo workers.4 Magical supplies were made by Hindu people or via Hindu method, and were procured from Hindu stores or mail-order Hindu companies.5 Hyatt dryly noted the sincerity of Collins’s statement, but the improbability of it being true, since “Hindu” was nothing more than “exotic atmosphere and advertising by hoodoo merchants.”6 A thousand miles away and almost simultaneous with Hyatt’s interview of Myrtle Collins, the New York Amsterdam News reported in 1937 that the streets of Harlem were “full of turbaned ‘wise men’” who were selling herbs and roots, telling fortunes, and offering lucky numbers.7 With a large illustration of a “Harlem swami” drawing a large crowd and playing on the term fakir, the paper lamented the presence of fakers “on every avenue.” The presence of these fakers was hardly a surprising development. For years leading up to the article, the advertisement pages of the Amsterdam News were consistently illed with a large cast of the very same igures: Madame Colman, “a real master Hindu Yogi”; De Larz, “the girl from India”; and the “Hindu psychic phenomenon” Professor Ranjit Hyloo Salada.8 They also ran ads for Hindu-themed mail-order magic supply companies in Chicago and los Angeles, and the paper even had a recurring feature in which “Yogi Chandu, Internationally Known Mentalist” offered psychic advice to readers framed as “Psycho-logical Analysis.”9 While the recent boom in works on the history of modern yoga in the West has largely focused its attention on antecedents to the currently popular forms of physical and postural practice, this focus on hatha yoga has largely excluded forms of early American yoga that did not revolve around the body. Early American yoga, in both its practice and the ways it was perceived at large, was much different from how it came to be known from the mid-‘60s until today. It was predominantly mental and magical, not postural and physical. Not only has this attention mostly missed the ways that yoga and yogis were imagined in popular culture and by the public, but they have completely left out those who called themselves swamis and yogis in northern cities like Harlem and throughout the South. Historians of Hoodoo and African American folk magic have noted the crossroads where Hindu and Hoodoo have met in the interwar decades and beyond, but it has always been as a minor aside or footnote with little understanding of how this intersection The Hindu in Hoodoo came about or how common it was.10 When the archive used to view Hoodoo is expanded to include mail-order catalogs, newspaper advertisements, print ephemera, and commercial products themselves, it becomes impossible to not see the connection between the two. The words “yogi” and “Hindu” were used to describe a vast array of magical materials, and a turban-clad wonder-worker was an unavoidable igure both in print and in person. Their ubiquity is not only an underappreciated phenomenon within Hoodoo, but it is also emblematic of the radical transformations that changed Hoodoo during the interwar decades. Manufactured Hoodoo Within the general public and popular culture, even by those deriding it from outside, Hoodoo has been understood as being an African American system of folk magic with its origins, to varying degrees, found in Africa. Serious treatments of Hoodoo have expanded an understanding of it beyond simple superstition to a complex and vital system of thaumaturgy that included important medical, therapeutic, and cultural dimensions. Perhaps the most important scholarly interpretation of Hoodoo is presented in the recent work of Katrina Hazzard-Donald, which also marks it with the strongest claim: “Hoodoo is the reorganized remnants of what must have been, albeit short-lived, a full-blown syncretized African-based religion among African American bondsmen.”11 The transformation of Hoodoo from its religious antecedents to reorganized remnants of that religion to traces in cultural memory by the late twentieth century was the result of large historical forces: irst enslavement and the plantation system, then emancipation and the failures of Reconstruction, and later the Great Migration that saw millions of African Americans move from the South to urban centers in the North. Hoodoo was swept up in the vast changes that were brought by the Great Migration. On one hand, Hoodoo was exposed to a much larger audience in urban centers where the practices of different geographical regions were brought together.12 On a practical level, however, the shift made many Hoodoo practices improbable if not impossible; for instance, one could only imagine how a spell that required a person’s footprint on a dirt road could be executed on the sidewalks of Chicago. As HazzardDonald has noted, the transplantation of Hoodoo made much of its tradition unsustainable in its new environment.13 Natural materials like herbs and roots that were previously local and 37 Amerasia Journal 2014 38 reasonably accessible became removed at a distance of hundreds of miles from urban centers in the North. Many of the social and supply networks that existed in the South were cut off by either geographic shifts or concurrent events, such as the policing of midwives. Filling this void were several large companies that began to appear in the late 1920s and started producing and distributing the materia magica of Hoodoo from major cities. Whatever changes the Great Migration brought to Hoodoo were dramatically accelerated and enhanced by these new forms of Hoodoo that, as Yvonne Chireau describes, were “reproduced as a commodity, reshaped by innovative proiteers, and appropriated by commercial interests and industries.”14 Hazzard-Donald refers to this as “marketeered Hoodoo,” but the term I employ here is “manufactured Hoodoo,” since several meanings of the word “manufactured” point back to signiicant and interconnected aspects of this shift in Hoodoo. The clearest connotation is the shift from the use of natural and bodily materials (such as roots, plants, hair, and saliva) towards the literal manufacturing of Hoodoo materials as mass-produced and commercially packaged products by these companies. This also bypassed systems and lineages of knowledge that were built upon apprenticeships and cultivated knowledge of practice and the natural world. A second deinition of “manufacture”—to shape or fashion something together—is also applicable: Many of the shifts in the Great Migration from rural South to urban North necessitated a change in many Hoodoo practices, but large companies would put traditional items to new uses, such as the lottery games of numbers and policy, as well as pull items new to Hoodoo, such as candles that were scarce in plantation-era Hoodoo, into a framework that was claimed to be traditional.15 This leads into a third facet of the word “manufacture,” to fabricate or invent. As Hazzard-Donald, Carolyn Morrow long, and others have noted, these companies were overwhelmingly run by middlemen, often Jewish immigrants, who were outside any familial or lineal connection with profound loyalty to the Hoodoo tradition.16 With a stronger eye towards proit than continuity, the large companies that were central to manufactured Hoodoo added foreign elements to the practices of their customers. Further, to protect themselves from the law—Carolyn Morrow long describes the U.S. Postal Service’s prosecution of mail fraud in the early twentieth century “as the greatest threat to the spiritual merchant”—these companies often described their The Hindu in Hoodoo products in advertisements, their catalogs, and on product packaging itself with nearly ubiquitous qualiications, such as “alleged,” “curio,” “supposed,” “claimed,” and “novelty.”17 While arguments could be made for the possible inluence of Native American botanical knowledge or points of contact with European occultism and folk-magic before the period of manufactured Hoodoo, the presence of the yogis and swamis is indisputable. This is what makes it signiicant. The Hindu in Hoodoo can be seen as a distinct marker for not only the different character of early American yoga and popular perceptions of India in the early twentieth century, but also the dramatic changes within Hoodoo as it changed and became increasingly manufactured through the Great Migration and beyond. The Hypnotic Wonder-Worker Most accounts of yoga’s birth in America begin with Swami Vivekananda’s appearance at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, usually with an acknowledgement of the preceding encounters with Hinduism made by a relatively small number of Transcendentalists and Theosophists. Two years before Vivekananda, another formative event occurred in Chicago, which might be more indicative of yoga’s American birth and how it was popularly encountered in the irst half of the twentieth century. In an article for the Chicago Tribune on August 8, 1890, John Elbert Wilkie, reporter and future director of the Secret Service, described the Indian rope trick for the irst known time, telling a wild tale of an “Indian fakir” who could throw a rope up in the air that remained suspended; as part of the trick, he would then order a young boy to climb up the rope, with both the boy and rope ultimately disappearing. The story caused a sensation and whetted the American appetite for further fantastic tales of Hindus, yogis, swamis, and fakirs. The rope trick did not suddenly appear sui generis. For decades leading up to the Great Migration, and well back into the nineteenth century, the wider American perception of India and Hinduism, and by extension, yoga as a form of mental magic, was taking shape through a web of science, politics, religion, and popular culture. In true Orientalist fashion, religion in India was grossly distorted into an imagined circus of idol worshiping and widow burning that was deployed as a representation of an exotic other to help establish the supremacy of Christianity in the civilized West, a metaphor for arguments within Christianity (such as portraying 39 Amerasia Journal 2014 40 Catholics as idol-worshipers comparable with Hindus), and justiication for the need for missionary activity to India. Hinduism was also deined and essentialized in racial terms. Both critics and sympathizers in America saw a natural link between Hindu religious thought and practice and a perceived “Hindu mind” that was so given to abstraction and nihilism that it, and not colonialism, was the clear cause of poverty on the subcontinent. A parallel igure to the yogi is the “Oriental monk.” In her 2011 work Virtual Orientalism, Jane Iwamura suggested that the popular American understanding of a wide array of Asian religions, as iltered through mass media and visual culture, could be understood through the icon of “the Oriental monk,” exempliied in D.T. Suzuki, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Kwai Chang Caine from the television series Kung Fu, and others. As the icon has been repeatedly used, the solitary, enigmatic Oriental monk is the holder of ancient mystic wisdom from the East and is often paired up with a Westerner who can act as a bridge igure and transmit the wisdom held by the Oriental monk. For Iwamura, the Oriental monk functions as far more than just a recurring character type; he is also a projection of “our assumptions, fears, and hopes,” and a igure who, when analyzed, can unearth “the underlying nexus of Western interests, desires, and repressions.”18 Similar to the rise and development of the Oriental monk in popular culture, we can see the igure of the yogi arising during the same time as a “Hypnotic Wonder-Worker.” The yogi seemed to embody all that was mysterious, magical, threatening, and backward within larger discourses that rendered Hindus as fundamentally different and other, and the yogi’s power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was clearly mental. The most commonly accepted explanation for the Indian rope trick, in both popular and scientiic explanations of the time, was that it did not actually happen as it was claimed, but rather that the performer was able to hypnotize the attending crowd into believing they saw it happen. This also conveniently explained why it could not be captured with a camera.19 Feats of dramatic mortiication or self-burial were similarly the result of self-hypnosis in which the yogi could control the involuntary functions of his body. As an heir also to the public’s fascination with hypnotism and fears of the power it held, the yogi was usually cast as manipulative, carnal, and duplicitous. Between restricted immigration and sensational coverage, there was little to dissuade Americans away from a belief in The Hindu in Hoodoo the Hypnotic Wonder-Worker, either through sensible accounts from the media or by way of the presence of actual immigrants from India. At the turn of the century, a Wisconsin newspaper breathlessly declared on its front page the presence of a traveling fortune teller with the headline “Real Hindoo in Eau Claire.”20 With a census igure of roughly 3,000 East Indians throughout the country in 1930, mostly on the West Coast, it is possible that imposter Hindus outnumbered actual Hindu immigrants in major cities such as New York and Chicago. Indian writer and political activist Krishnalal Shridharani noted the power of America’s imagined sense of a mystic India and how eficiently it dovetailed with their limited exposure to actual Indians. In “My Brief Career as a Yogi,” a section of his memoir about his time in the United States during the ‘30s, Shridharani recalled with no small sense of humor how effortlessly and immediately he was cast into the role of a wonderworker and a guru by his educated American hosts once they learned he was from India, and how easily they accepted rank frauds, such as his rival and composite character “Yogi Tincanwalla.” “Not all Indians,” Shridharani was compelled to remind his audience, “enjoy a religious station. They are not all Swamis, or Yogis, or Sadhus, or Rishis.”21 Starting as early as the late nineteenth century, there were legions of vaudeville magicians, stage hypnotists, and fortune tellers who capitalized on these perceptions and fanned out across the United States, using Orientalized personas to create an exotic allure for their audiences that played on the dominant popular American understanding of yogis as wonder-workers with fantastic mental powers. The classiieds sections of major newspapers were illed with ads for Hindu fortune tellers and entertainment sections routinely announced stage performances by alleged Indian magicians with turbaned portraits. So vast were the numbers of these performers that mind-reading and mentalist routines were often referred to with the shorthand term “swami act” and yogis were most commonly represented in popular media and advertising as fortune tellers with crystal balls. “White Mahatmas” and “Yellow Negroes” If the igures of the yogi and swami were mysterious and alluring, they also confounded the racial binary in America at the turn of the century. In 1910, the Chicago Examiner described the Indian Swami Abheyananda to its readers as a “Yellow Negro” and two 41 Amerasia Journal 2014 42 years later, one of the irst federal decisions on the eligibility of Indian immigrants for American citizenship declared that the applicant A.K. Mozumdar was “neither a free white person nor a negro.”22 A pair of Supreme Court cases on granting American citizenship to Asians in the early ‘20s involving the Japanese-born Takao Ozawa and the Punjabi Sikh Bhagat Singh Thind would further entrench the nebulous space Asians held between whiteness and blackness. Ozawa’s arguments for citizenship based on a white natal skin color were denied. Following the decision, Thind based his eligibility upon a claim to whiteness through “the sole fact that he is of high-caste Hindu stock, born in Punjab, one of the extreme northwestern districts of India, and classiied by certain scientiic authorities as of the Caucasian or Aryan race,” and was denied as well.23 The Supreme Court threw the deinition of “free white person” into the murky and contested waters of common speech, familiar observation, and popular understanding. For white Americans offering themselves on the stage to the public as yogis during this era, distinctions needed to be made within this uncertain racial territory. Numerous stage magicians during this time billed themselves as “The White Yogi” and “The White Mahatma.” Many claimed to have traveled to India, or to have been raised there by missionary or colonial British parents and have learned yogic secrets from teachers there to eventually bring that knowledge to the West. They possessed authentic Hindu wonder-working, but still maintained racial purity, even if they donned turbans and exotic garb. This was the backstory for the radio serial drama Chandu the Magician syndicated nationwide in the ‘30s, in which the American-born Frank Chandler, armed with astral projection and a crystal ball, was able to use the mystical powers he learned from India to ight evil.24 Fittingly, the show was sponsored by White King brand soap. The illogic and inconsistencies of race and citizenship in the United States often fell into sharp relief when Asian immigrants and African Americans were juxtaposed as foils. Although Helen Jun has noted the use of dominant Orientalist rhetoric against Chinese immigrants by the black press in the nineteenth century to assert claims to citizenship, there was also a long history of African Americans and Asians inding common cause.25 As shown by Vijay Prashad, Bill Mullen, Gerald Horne, and others, there was a vibrant transnational exchange between Indian and black artists, intellectuals, and activists who drew parallels between capitalist America and colonial India, linked racial discrimina- The Hindu in Hoodoo Advertisement for Prince Rajbar’s Performances at Franklin Theater (Chicago, 1923) Collection of the author tion and discrimination based on caste, and envisioned global alliances.26 For African Americans, the racial and cultural confusion that surrounded Hindus offered a practical loophole. With little, if any, familiarity with anyone from South Asia, they could pass as Indian, at times with the help of a turban and affected foreign accent. Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, an African American who was adopted by his mother’s second husband, an Indian medical student, allowed the assumption that he was “Hindu” to help him bypass the segregation of the South while he played football for Syracuse.27 In 1944, the year following Wilmeth Sidat-Singh’s death, John Roland Redd, an African American born in St. louis, reinvented himself as the Indian-born, turban-clad son of a Brahmin named Korla Pandit and enjoyed a long and successful career as a musician and television personality.28 Dizzy Gillespie would wear a turban and pretend not to speak English while in Europe and let people assume he was “an Arab or Hindu.”29 The most famous case of passing as a Hindu was that of Reverend Jesse 43 Amerasia Journal 2014 44 Wayman Routte in 1947: Four years after being insulted under Jim Crow in Mobile, Alabama, he returned to the city with a purple turban and a Swedish accent and was bowed to as a Hindu in ine restaurants and hotel lobbies. In a sharp piece in the Chicago Defender titled “What the Power of a Rag Does in a Democracy,” Reverend Routte was quoted as saying that “(the) turban worked like magic.”30 While his intention was to make a critique of race and citizenship in America, the turban was also being literally used for magic in clubs and halls across the country. For several preceding decades, African American stage magicians passed in a similar manner and performed under the persona of East Indian fakirs, a move that allowed them both entry and a gimmick. Beginning with Prince Joveddah de Rajah at the turn of the century, this rich tradition of turban-clad, robe-wearing African American stage magicians, often posing as Hindu royalty, included such igures as Prince Ali Mona, Professor Maharaja, Rajah Tiller, and Norice de la Roache.31 like their white counterparts, many of these African American stage magicians crossed over into fortune telling and offering magical services for a price, which helped make the swami igure a suitable and ready new vessel for Hoodoo workers after the Great Migration. The clearest crossover between stage and thaumaturgic magic was Benjamin Rucker, who as Black Herman became well known and successful as a sleight-of-hand artist whose dramatic performances (which included being buried alive) sold out large venues in Harlem for weeks on end.32 Rucker parlayed this reputation into sales of dream books to divine lucky lottery numbers and other magical materials. After his death in 1934, the name and likeness of Black Herman was repeatedly resurrected by several companies for products ranging from incense, oils, and candles.33 Beyond popular accounts and stage magicians establishing the yogi as a powerful igure of mental magical to be employed in Hoodoo, there are also some other possible afinities between them. As Jeffrey E. Anderson has noted, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a strikingly unusual appearance that set the conjurer and rootworker apart from others was “typical of the numerous descriptions of trick doctors.”34 Jeweled turbans and lowing tunics on urban storefront conjurers in the interwar decades could be seen as functioning in parallel to the chains and patchwork clothes that Samuel Taylor saw on a Hoodoo doctor in Tennessee during the 1890s, “cultivat(ing) an aura The Hindu in Hoodoo of mystery which lent credibility to their reputations as men familiar with supernatural lore.”35 An Orientalized repackaging of Hoodoo in the urban North could have also allowed many people in places like Harlem and Chicago to engage in a familiar system of magic and divination, while avoiding the connotations of the practice of Hoodoo being Southern, old, or country. It may even be possible that the homonym of “Indian” allowed for a confused blurring in some between the collective memory and mythologizing of the historical exchanges between Native Americans and African Americans and those who claimed to be from South Asia in the early twentieth century. Hindu Magic by Mail and in Person By far the most powerful force that connected Hindu and Hoodoo were the large manufacturers and distributors of Hoodoo products in major cities, primarily in the North, that began in the ‘20s, then grew massively in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Atlanta had Ambro Altar and the Hussey Distribution Company. Memphis had lucky Heart, Keystone laboratories, Collins laboratory, and Curio Products. New York had Oracle laboratory. Chicago had Ar-Jax, J.C. Strong, Red Star Novelty Company, Sovereign, Mr. luck’s Curio, and, the largest of them all, Valmor, with its King Novelty Company and Famous Products. Promoted in display ads in large African American newspapers, these companies would do a brisk mail-order business through their catalogs. Many also sold their products through a large network of sales agents, often numbering in the thousands, who would promote and sell products throughout the country in their own areas and supplement their income. Magical products were sold by these companies alongside more mundane goods, and the addition of cosmetics, toiletries, and household products allowed for the entry of their catalogs and sales agents into more markets. One of the main recruiter of sales agents for lucky Heart in Memphis was Bishop McEwan of the Church of God in Christ, and promotional materials for lucky Heart included church fans with Jesus as shepherd on one side and an advertisement to “Buy from Your lucky Heart Agent” on the reverse.36 It would be dificult to overstate how far-reaching the inluence of these companies was, especially in light of the fact that reaching the neglected customer in rural locations was often their express intent. Tangential to these companies was Delaurence, Scott & Company, a Chicago-based occult book publisher and mail-order 45 Amerasia Journal 2014 46 dealer of books and magical supplies. The owner and face of the concern was lauron William Delaurence, whose standard portrait depicted him in a bejeweled turban and tunic. Delaurence packaged his books on occultism (many pirated) in an Orientalist frame with titles such as India’s Hood Unveiled and The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic and East Indian Occultism, while he freely gave himself titles such as “Master lama,” “Yoghee,“ and “High-Caste Adept.” He shrewdly offered not only occult books in his large catalog, but also the materials needed to carry out the work and rituals within those books. Delaurence branded many of his products with his own name and turbaned likeness, and even that exotic appearance could be had for a price. For $35, customers could order item #55, a complete outit modeled in a photograph by Delaurence of a “purple silk tunic, complete with turban, yellow silk girdle, star and crescent pin, and pin of sparkling brilliance.”37 DeLaurence, both as igure and merchant, had a staggeringly large inluence on magical practice and belief for over a century throughout the Black Atlantic, especially in Nigeria, Jamaica, and the United States. Perhaps the most signiicant aspect of this inluence was in the popularizing and dispersing of the magical text known as The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.38 Texts played an important role in bringing in the outside inluence of European magic into manufactured Hoodoo, as well as disseminating and standardizing many of the formulas and practices that comprised this new synthesized form. These texts also helped to bolster the impression that yogis were magical igures of power and the knowledge and that the material stuff of Hoodoo was connected to India and Hindus. Several popular titles published in the ‘30s, such as 7 Keys to Power; Legends of Incense, Herb, and Oil Magic; and The Ancient Book of Formulas, were attributed to the igure of Lewis DeClaremont. Throughout these titles DeClaremont’s portrait was given to readers in an “artist’s conception” of him “in tunic and turban with spirit guide.” Within Legends, there are references to Hindu Grass oil overpowering New Orleans Van Van oil, and “wizened old Hindu fakers (sic)” being the source for love oils.39 like l.W. Delaurence and lewis DeClaremont, a turbaned man, usually holding a crystal ball or bottles of oil, or else in front of an Oriental landscape with Taj Mahal-esque buildings, was a ubiquitous presence on the covers of mail-order Hoodoo catalogs.40 Inside these catalogs were a myriad of products that continued to advance the theme. lucky Heart offered Hindu Style Dou- The Hindu in Hoodoo ble Mystic lovely Brand oil to be worn on the body and a Hindu Style room spray and loor wash.41 One of lucky Heart’s items known as Mystic Mojo incense, with a turbaned seer on its label, was described by a lucky Heart sales agent in late 1930s Georgia as the “same incense used by duh Hindus.”42 Through its King Novelty catalog, Valmor sold India incense, Durbar incense that was “Named After a Hindu Prince Durbar,” and Hindu God incense.43 The Standard O&B Supply Company offered consumers a Yogi Mystic incense burner and Yogee Ouija board.44 Two companies in Chicago, Sovereign and Hindu laboratories of Incense respectively, sold a “Hanuman” curio ring and “Hindu lucks-Me” incense.45 Mr. luck’s Curio Co. bundled together a box of incense, two books, a lodestone, jinx stick, and a good luck seal, offering it up as the “(Alleged) Old Yogi Lucky Number Outit.”46 The image of a yogi or swami igure was so present in the body of products for many of these large companies that it was often turned into a brand. Valmor used the head of a bearded and turbaned igure for a line of “Go-Bo” branded products that were sold through their various catalogs and included roots, incense, perfume, and lodestones.47 Go-Bo was joined within Valmor’s ranks by the “lucky Mo-Jo” brand, represented by a beardless man in a turban decorated by a jewel with the word “MOJO” emblazoned on it. The lucky Mo-Jo brand was used by Valmor to sell almost every conceivable piece of materia magica: herbs, root, rings, oils, incense, perfumes, sachet powders, sprinkling salts, lodestones, candles, and magnetic sand. In the late ‘30s, a rival to lucky Heart and Keystone laboratories in Memphis used a similar type of branding for the name of the company itself: lucky Mon-Gol. There were numerous smaller operations that advertised mailorder products and services in African American newspapers that had visibility and reach across the country. Many of them also featured Hindu themes and images similar to their larger rivals. Papers like the Chicago Defender, Atlanta Daily World, and New York Amsterdam News had their advertising sections illed with such ads, many of them out of state. One example of how prevalent the Orientalist mode was among these companies can be seen in a 1935 issue of the Pittsburgh Courier, which had four display advertisements clustered together that included: the turban-clad Kandu the Great from New York offering a lucky ring; Sargon from Jersey City, also in a turban, offering his “Five Master Key Systems”; an “Astrological Character Analysis” from the Yogi Brothers of 47 Advertisement for Mojo Brand Curio Bag, Printed in King Novelty Catalog No. 77 (Chicago, late 1930s) Amerasia Journal 2014 Collection of the author 48 Chicago; and over a dozen types of incense from Hindu laboratories of Incense in Chicago.48 Many of these entities also had a strong local presence and were anchored by a storefront Spiritualist church or store for magical supplies that also served as a base for an owner/Hoodoo worker to see private clients. This was yet another, but more embodied, avenue for the connection between Hoodoo and East Indian magic. Dr. M. Pryor, the self-described “Founder and Supreme Ruler” of his King Solomon’s Temple of Religious Science in Chicago, is shown in a photograph inside his Japo Oriental Incense mail-order catalog wearing a suit and bow tie at his pulpit with a white turban around his head. The cover of his catalog is a depiction of his face, with a crescent moon on his turbaned head.49 One of Dr. Pryor’s contemporaries in New York was Rajah Rabo, who advertised “Indian Herbs” on the sign of his storefront Temple of Knowledge.50 The Rajah’s smiling turbaned visage was widely dispersed through his Pick ‘Em Dream Book. Across the country in los Angeles, the owner of Bombay Incense and Novelty Shop, Julius Suares, advertised himself as a “Far East Wonder Worker of Algiers” and had laurence Chapell as an assistant fortune teller, who was “a noted American and East India psychic.”51 The connection would become so ubiquitous that the swami igure could function as a tacit symbol for luck, magic, and even Hoodoo itself. In a catalog for J.C. Strong, an image of a turbaned man in a tunic consoling a troubled everyman was used to advertise a promotional lodestone and book of advice.52 The turbaned The Hindu in Hoodoo swami head image was centrally featured on lucky coins stamped by Sovereign and Valmor and non-afiliated pieces like the “Lucky Talisman of the Orient.” In catalogs like those by lucky Heart and other companies, and on the cover of dream books by the Plough Chemical Company, it was also placed alongside more common lucky emblems like horseshoes and four-leaf clovers. The inluence of the imagined Hindu was so profound in African American folk magic that it was not only present on its commercialized exterior and with newly emerging manufacturers in the interwar decades, but it went right to the core with one of its oldest and most central elements. Important within the Hoodoo tradition for long before the era of manufactured Hoodoo was High John the Conquer, which was both a root and personiied igure of power. In his 1845 Narrative, Frederick Douglass recounted that Sandy, “an old adviser. . .a genuine African. . .(who) professed to believe in a system for which I have no name,” gave him a root to wear on his right side to overcome a sadistic and vengeful slave master named Covey; many believe that the root held by Frederick Douglas was High John the Conquer. A century after Douglass’s autobiography, Zora Neale Hurston wrote an article for American Mercury in which she described High John’s existence as a symbol of hope and resistance, a folkloric trope of the heroic trickster, comforter, liberator, and “the source of courage that endures.”53 Katrina Hazzard-Donald has traced the botanical High John to the Mexican jalap root and a likely source of High John’s personification to Gaspar Yanga, an enslaved African prince who became a rebel leader in the sole native habitat for the jalap root. Carolyn Morrow long devoted the last chapter Portrait of Professor Noi Ram from The of her work Spiritual MerBlack Cat Dream Book (New York, 1937) chants to High John and Collection of the author 49 Amerasia Journal 2014 50 a discussion of how the root so central to an African American system and so often depicted as a strong African man could end up in manufactured Hoodoo being personiied “most often (as) a bearded European king with royal robes, crown, and a scepter or sword.”54 Attesting to not only the power and authority of the trope of the Hindu igure, but also perhaps as the sharpest example of how deep the artiicial inluence of manufactured Hoodoo was, High John was also frequently portrayed as an East Indian wonder-worker. Valmor’s Famous Products Co. depicted him as a turbaned sovereign on an Oriental throne for their John the Conqueror Incense; as part of their Mo-Jo Brand, they sold High John and Southern John roots juxtaposed with the swami head image.55 The lucky Heart Company in Memphis sold High John the Conqueror Root in a jar of scented oil with a turbaned man in a tunic on the label who was lanked on either side with a Hindu swastika.56 The Standard O & B Supply Co. sold a High John the Conqueror brand candle with a turbaned mustached man with earrings on its label.57 After being in business for nearly ninety years, the Sonny Boy Company in Birmingham, Alabama still depicts High John as a bearded man in a turban to this day.58 In 1943 the street photographer Arthur Fellig, popularly known as Weegee, took a photograph of a spiritual store on lenox Avenue in Harlem. Hand-painted advertisements above the awning announced the advising services of “Alleged Yogi and Professor Philipps” and his “Hindu Mysterious Store” that stocked “All Hindu Cosmetics” and a range of Hoodoo materials, such as lodestones, in addition to titles written and made popular by Delaurence and DeClaremont. Frozen in time within Weegee’s snapshot, we have all the elements of the nationwide feedback loop that could do nothing but reinforce the idea that a mystic India had some hand in the magic and power of Hoodoo as it was being practiced in the early twentieth century. Sales agents, catalogs, and newspaper advertisements would bring the link to the remotest corners of black America, while the concentration of storefront businesses and professionals in urban centers would make separating the two nearly impossible for those in the cities. The same swami igure that could be seen on numerous product labels, catalog covers, and dream books was then embodied in storefront conjurers and fortune tellers, as they, in turn, would foster even more products and print materials. With all these elements, it is not hard to see how the connections between Hinduism and Hoodoo were both diffused widely The Hindu in Hoodoo Label for John the Conqueror Brand Incense, Famous Products Company (Chicago, c. 1940) Collection of the author and solidiied until they became deeply emeshed in Hoodoo and conventional wisdom for practitioners such as Myrtle Collins. Conclusion The inluence of middlemen and manufactured Hoodoo marked by the swamis and yogis in the early twentieth century continued after the Second World War to the detriment and further confusion of old Hoodoo traditions. The large numbers of African American candle shops and drugstores dwindled and the mail-order interests and storefronts that did not fold were often bought out and subsumed into larger ones. Companies like lucky Heart, Valmor, and Keystone became almost exclusively concerned with beauty supplies. By 1975, the eighty-page Valmor catalog only contained a single page dedicated to the magical supplies that dominated several of its catalogs four decades earlier.59 The following year in 1976, Ebony feigned shock 51 Amerasia Journal 2014 52 at the very existence of even traces of Hoodoo. Along with a photograph of incense cans and roots, it told its African American readers “Would You Believe It. . .Superstition lives!” Today, many of the contemporary outsider “preservers” and “revivalists” of Hoodoo unwittingly and ironically point to the practices and imagery of manufactured Hoodoo as a touchstone of timeworn authenticity and an authentic tradition. Currently, the largest manufacturer of magical products is Indio, a massive supplier that does millions of dollars in annual sales. With traces of Hoodoo throw in with Santeria and the New Age, Indio offers such a vast selection of wholesale products that a latino bótanica or African American candle shop would have little need for any other supplier, and many do not. In its growth, Indio relentlessly bought out other magical companies (including Chicago’s Dr. Pryor’s) and often kept the brand names of its acquisitions while dropping the original formulas and using artiicial materials to drive down costs as much as possible. A general manager at Indio’s distribution center was quoted on the company’s candles in 2007 as saying, “Our wax is a by-product of oil. It comes from Exxon. . .there’s nothing in the wax itself.”60 Over the last few years, the manufacture of many of these products has been outsourced to Asia, and they are now sent to the United States across the ocean in large industrial shipping containers. Globalization and corporatization has actualized the mythology of Asian manufacture behind products like Oriental Incense that was set into motion a century earlier and was such a strong feature of Hoodoo in the wake of the Great Migration. From the vantage point of contemporary yoga, looking back on the turbaned fortune tellers and the yogic conjurers is disorienting. Yoga today is a ubiquitous billion-dollar industry that has established itself at the very center of American culture. None of the toned lexible bodies nor earnest seekers of enlightenment that have become synonymous with yoga today can be found at the crossroads between Hindu and Hoodoo that existed nearly a century ago. Instead, we ind disorienting personas, suspicious claims to magical power, and dated a collection of ideas about the East. But the same scholarship that has overlooked the swamis of Harlem and yogis of Bronzeville in its surveys of modern transnational yoga may also offer a type of legitimacy for them by showing how much of postural yoga depended on bricolage and imagined origins. As scholars such as Mark Singleton have shown, The Hindu in Hoodoo posture-based yogic practice in the form and style it is commonly engaged with today is relatively new and not purely Hindu. By the time African Americans moved to northern cities in the 1930s and imagined ideas of Hindu magic were being inserted into Hoodoo, yogic innovators in India were incorporating Swedish gymnastics, Western bodybuilding, and even parts of military drills.61 As we would expect during the time that postural yoga was forming, the yoga that was present in the United States during the irst decades of the twentieth century was largely a matter of mental powers and magical abilities, and the Hindu in Hoodoo is both a product of its time and an emblem of it. When we move further back in time by several centuries we ind that the igures who called themselves yogis were often not thought of as lexible athletes, but wonder-workers holding supernatural powers. The medieval characters that David Gordon White has dubbed “sinister yogis” were not dissimilar from the turbaned African Americans in storefronts who claimed their own thaumaturgic powers and made a living by offering protection, fertility, and good fortune for a price.62 lee Siegel has illustrated the long running connections in the Indian “Net of Magic” between yogis and wonder-working, both sacred and staged.63 In a delicious irony, igures such as Dr. Pryor and Rajah Rabo, although they may mark major breaks with an older Hoodoo tradition that existed during slavery and Reconstruction, might at the same time be seen to have a partial claim of similarity to the practices of older yogic traditions in India, just like the toned, celebrated gurus that grace the glossy pages of Yoga Journal today. Notes 1. Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork (5 volumes) (Hannibal, MO: Western Publishing, 1970-1978): i. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 1019. 4. Ibid., 951; 11271 and 781; 700, 857, 4170, and 4670. 5. Ibid., 1308 and 1390; 1010, 1018-1019, 1948, and 10219. 6. Ibid., 1019. 7. Ken Jessamy, “Harlem’s Fakers: Streets Full of Turbaned ‘Wise Men’,” New York Amsterdam News, August 28, 1937: 11. 8. Classiied ads in the New York Amsterdam News from August 16, 1933; November 22, 1933; February 28, 1934. 9. “Yogi Chandu, Internationally Known Mentalist,” New York Amsterdam News, March 28, 1936: 17. Years earlier, the 1934 RKO short musical com- 53 Amerasia Journal 2014 edy ilm Bubbling Over that was set in Harlem featured a turbaned con artist fortune teller named “Swami Rivers.” The swami was offered to the ilm’s African American audience as an instantly recognizable stock character without any explanation required. 54 10. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 141-142; Jeffrey E. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society (Baton Rouge: louisiana State University Press, 2005): 60; and Carolyn Morrow Long, Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001): 117-118. 11. Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013): 2. 12. Garvey F. lundy, “Hoodoo,” in Encyclopedia of African Religion, Vol. 1 (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2009): 317. 13. Hazzard-Donald, 112. 14. Chireau, Black Magic, 8. 15. Hazzard-Donald, 126-127. 16. Most signiicant among these were Morton G. Neumann, who started Valmor in Chicago in the late 1920s, and Morris Shapiro and Hubert Menke from Keystone laboratories in Memphis, which spun off into other companies such as lucky Heart, lucky Mon-Gol, and Clover Horn. In an appendix to his 2002 work, Dream Singers: The African-American Way with Dreams, Anthony Shafton notes that within the genre of dream books, intertwined with much of Hoodoo, “none of the. . .major dream book publishers has black antecedents”(238). 17. long, 129. Chapter six of Spiritual Merchants contains a lengthy discussion of mail fraud prosecution and the changes it brought to Hoodoo and those who sold magical goods. 18. Jane Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010): 6, 22. 19. See Peter lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004). 20. “Real Hindoo in Eau Claire,” Eau Claire Leader, May 1, 1904. 21. Kirshnalal Shridharani, My India, My America (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941): 96. 22. “Swami Woman Charmer,” Chicago Examiner, September 5, 1910. 23. U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). 24. John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998): 148-149. 25. Helen Jun, “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship,” American Quarterly 58:4 (December 2006): 1047-1066. 26. See Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); 27. Charles H. Martin, Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1980 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010): 34. 28. R.J. Smith, “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit,” Los Angeles (June 2001): 7277 and 146-151. As an ironic aside, Korla Pandit played the organ for the Chandu the Magician radio program during the late 1940s. 29. Dizzy Gillespie, To Be, Or Not to Bop (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1979): 293. 30. lucius C. Harper, “What the Power of a Rag Does in a Democracy,” Chicago Defender, November 29, 1947: 1. 31. Jim Magus, “A History of Blacks in Magic: Hindu Fakers,” The Linking Ring (December 1983): 38-43. 32. Yvonne P. Chireau, “Black Herman’s African American Magical Synthesis,” Cabinet 26 (Summer 2007). 33. In the early 1940s, the King Novelty Company of Chicago sold Black Herman brand incense powder and copies of his book Secrets of Magic-Mystery & Legerdemain. (King Novelty Catalog, No. 82: 28.) The Standard O&B Company sold the same as well as Black Herman Mystic Oil.; see Catalog (Chicago: Standard O&B Supply Company, 1944): 25. Today, Indio sells “Alleged Black Herman” oil; see online at: http://indioproducts.com/ index.php/oil-psyc-black-herman-1-2oz-1.html. 34. Anderson, 1. 35. Ibid., 75. See also Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 276 36. lucky Heart Cosmetics, “A Brief History of lucky Heart Cosmetics, Inc.” (Memphis: Lucky Heart, no date); fan from collection of the author. 37. The DeLaurence Company Catalog, No. 9 (Chicago: Delaurence, Scott & Co., c. 1920s): 574. 38. The best accounting to date of DeLaurence’s life and his inluence can be found in Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 215-231. 39. lewis de Claremont, Legends of Incense, Herb and Oil Magic (Dallas: Dorene Publishing, 1939): 32, 22. 40. Examples of such catalogs include those from Ambro Altar (Atlanta, c. late 1940s), Dr. Pryor’s (Chicago, 1938), King Novelty (Chicago, No. 45, 77, 81, 86, 87, and 89), Lucky Heart Curio (Memphis, No. 7-11), Master’s Supply House (New York City, c. 1957), and Standard O & B Supply (Chicago, 1944). 41. Seen in a framed display of product labels at the headquarters of the lucky Heart Company in Memphis on January 7, 2009. 42. Georgia Writers’ Project, Savannah Unit, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986): 56. The Hindu in Hoodoo Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Gerald Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). 55 Amerasia Journal 2014 56 43. King Novelty Catalog, No. 77 (Chicago: Valmor, c. 1940): 42; and King Novelty Catalog, No. 78, (Chicago: Valmor, c. 1940): 29. 44. Catalog (Chicago: Standard O&B Supply Company, 1944): 12, 24. 45. Sovereign Products Co. Catalog of Curios (Chicago: Sovereign Products Co., c. 1930s): 17; Display Ad, Pittsburgh Courier, May 18, 1935. 46. Mr. Luck’s Curio Catalog (Chicago: Mr. luck’s Curio Co., no date): 22. 47. As time went on, artists at Valmor would trim Go-Bo’s beard, curl up his moustache, and rename him “The Great Go-Bo.” 48. Display ads, Pittsburgh Courier, February 23, 1935. 49. Dr. Pryor’s Good Luck Catalogue (Chicago: Japo Oriental Incense Co., 1938). 50. A glimpse of this storefront can be seen in the March of Time Newsreel, “Harlem’s Black Magic,” from March 19, 1937 (Vol. 3, Ep. 8). 51. “Bombay Incense Shop Procures Notable Psychics,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 20, 1935: 2. 52. J.C. Strong Catalog (Chicago: J.C. Strong, c. 1935): 34. 53. Zora Neale Hurston, “High John de Conquer,” American Mercury 57 (October 1943): 450-458. 54. long, 239. 55. King Novelty Catalog, No. 93 (Chicago: Valmor, 1948): 2, 6-7; King Novelty Catalog, No. 86 (Chicago: Valmor, 1944). 56. Lucky Heart Curio Catalog No. 7-11 (Memphis: lucky Heart Co., c. late 1930s): 7. 57. Standard O & B Supply Co. Catalog (Chicago: Standard O & B Supply Co., 1944): 14. 58. See the Sonny Boy website: http://www.sonnyboyonline.com/600.html. 59. Valmor Catalog (Chicago: Valmor, 1975): 51. 60. Rocío Zamora and Alison Brody, “Holy Proits,” Tu Ciudad (November 2007): 18. 61. Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 62. David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 63. lee Siegel, Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Amerasia Journal ¥ur{sk":62"T{shkx"7" 867: Gyogt"Gskxoigt"Xkromouty"ot"g"Mruhgro\kj"]uxrj GUEST EDITORS:""Yʼr¦og"Ingt3Sgroq"gtj"Qnʼgzo"̲4"Puyno Contents Zu"U{x"Xkgjkxy KEITH L. CAMACHO AND DAVID K. YOO v INTRODUCTION Gyogt"Gskxoigt"Xkromouty"ot"g"Mruhgro\kj"]uxrj SYLVIA CHAN-MALIK AND KHYATI Y. JOSHI vii I. Interracial Religious Intersections Xkäkizouty"ut"znk"Vk}"Lux{s"ut"Xkromout"gtj"V{hroi"RolkÙy Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths Data and Report JANE NAOMI IWAMURA, KHYATI Y. JOSHI, SHARON SUH, AND JANELLE WONG 1 “A Space for the Spiritual”: A Roundtable on Xgik2"Mktjkx2"gtj"Oyrgs"ot"znk"[tozkj"Yzgzky MODERATED BY SYLVIA CHAN-MALIK, WITH EVELYN ALSULTANY, SU’AD ABDUL KHABEER, AND MARYAM KASHANI 17 The Hindu in Hoodoo: Lgqk"̲umoy2"Vyk{ju3Y}gsoy2"gtj znk"Sgt{lgiz{xk"ul"Glxoigt"Gskxoigt"Lurq"Sgmoi PHILIP DESLIPPE 35 II. Reorienting Christianity The Gospel According to Rice: Znk"Tk˜z"Gyogt"Gskxoigt"Inxoyzogtozʼ RUDY V. BUSTO 59 Iuruxkj"Lgozn@""Vietnamese American Catholics Struggle for Equality within Their Multicultural Church THIEN-HUONG T. NINH 81 iii Znk"W{kyzout"ul"Nʼvujkyiktz@ Gt"G{zuhoumxgvnoigr"Znkurumoigr"Xkäkizout 97 JOSEPH CHEAH COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT The Sikh Coalition 102 Book Reviews WAR BABY/LOVE CHILD: MIXED RACE ASIAN AMERICAN ART. Edited by Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis. SUSETTE MIN 107 WAR, GENOCIDE, AND JUSTICE: CAMBODIAN AMERICAN MEMORY WORK. By Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. LUCY MAE SAN PABLO BURNS 110 PLURALIST UNIVERSALISM: AN ASIAN AMERICANIST CRITIQUE OF U.S. CHINESE MULTICULTURALISMS. By Wen Jin. STEVEN S. LEE 113 AND PIONEER GIRL: A NOVEL. By Bich Minh Nguyen. SHARON TRAN 116 Amerasia Journal 2014 THE COLOR OF SUCCESS: ASIAN AMERICANS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MODEL MINORITY. By Ellen Wu. JUSTIN K.H. TSE 118 iv