Rootwork: Arthur Flowers, Zora Neale Hurston, and the "literary hoodoo" tradition

This link between the characters' occupations and the community is another significant distinction between Flowers' text and Hurston's. Despite the novel's emphasis on the love between Janie and Tea Cake, Their Eyes Were Watching Cod is essentially the saga of Janie's coming to awareness and developing a voice; it is her story, and Tea Cake is important primarily as a catalyst to her growth. Another Good Loving Blues, in contrast, alternates between Lucas's and Melvira's viewpoints throughout the novel, creating the literary equivalent of the call-and-response pattern so central to African American musical forms. As this communally based, call-and-response pattern suggests, the story that they share involves not only their individuation and their love for each other, but their connections with and service to the African American community. Bodeen is aware from early in his career that the blues are important to African American culture and history, that "long before books and poems, it was the blues that kept the record. The blues told the stories, they held the delta's history, they held the delta's soul" (39). The extent to which Bodeen's blues reflect and respond to his community is clear in every passage describing him at work, but most especially in the scene where, for the first time since he has quit drinking, he sits down, nervously, to play the piano:

... he took a deep breath and played some tentative chords, cold dead licks. They could tell he was struggling with it. Then Joyce [his old friend, a singer] put a note on it for him, a high warbling note that filled the juke. One note of a whole song. He answered her almost instinctively with a walking bass. She came back with a lyric riff, and before you know it they were playing the blues. The crowd yelled appreciation. (142)

From this call-and-response interaction with Joyce, Lucas gains strength, and from their musical fusion emerges the blues catharsis that defines him and inspirits his people.

The community focus of Melvira's conjuring work is even more apparent, since she does not use her powers for herself. She refuses, for instance, to "hoodoo" Lucas to prevent his leaving. Instead, she preserves the good of the African American community. She believes that "to cut out the tribal poisons was her job" (150), and her sense of mission deepens under the mentor-ship of Hootowl, an elderly conjure man she meets in Memphis. Hootowl is troubled by the migration of indigent and disheartened African Americans from their failed sharecroppers' farms to the city. He tells Melvira: "'I know you see what I see, and I know you realize that they are our responsibility. Always have been. Just like you took care of your folks back in Sweetwater you got to do for the race'" (152). Under Hootowl's tutelage, Melvira comes to see herself as "Tribal Guardian. Tribal Guide" (161).

Melvira's meeting with Zora Neale Hurston takes on added import in this context, for after this encounter she learns that her conjuring and Hurston's writing do similar cultural work. "Melvira hadn't really thought about coloredfolks as writers," the narrator tells us, but one of the drugstore regulars opines that "'literature and hoodoo... both are tools for shaping the soul,'" and Hootowl concurs (119). "'Spiritwork,'" he calls it, claiming that "'if you would provide tribal guidance, you must work with the tribal soul.... if you want to have fundamental influence on the colored race's destiny, you shape its soul and the soul shapes everything else. Rootwork'" (120). During his youthful travels throughout the African diasporic world, Hootowl discovered the African basis of the diverse religious practices of New World blacks. He sees the commonalities in Haitian voodoo rites, Cuban Santeria, Jamaican Obeah, and his own hoodoo conjuring. In the United States, however, Hootowl finds true spirituality deterior ating into "hucksterism," and he "felt with all his heart that the colored race deserved a spiritual tradition of its own. Needed one desperately" (125). When he meets Melvira Dupree, conjure and Baptist, able to read roots and the Bible with equal facility, "he saw the future and the future was good.... He saw in Melvira Dupree his last chance to serve the colored race. [She had] true power, true vision, true compassion. She was the one.... Oluddumare mojuba ['God's blessings on us all']" (126).