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

Given Flowers' opening invocation of the African ancestry of his own art, it is significant that both Melvira and Lucas practice arts designed to heal the spiritual malaise of the African American community, and that both are based partly on African traditions. Just as hoodoo resembles the spiritual practices of other African diasporic religions that combine African and Christian elements, the blues emerged from the combination of Western elements (language, situation, instruments) and African musical techniques (blue notes, the call-and-response pattern, contrapuntal rhythms) that the slaves brought with them. And a primary function of the blues is to raise the spirits of both blues performer and audience. As Flowers' Swampdog, a juke joint owner, recalls," 'No matter how much trouble you got in mind, the blues tend to remind you that the sun is going to shine in your back door someday'" (156).

Lucas's twentieth-century blues and the twentieth-century form of conjure that Melvira practices thus overlap in heritage and function: Both blend Western and African influences to nourish the people's spirits. Flowers has identified both blues and conjure as African spiritual retentions in the Americas (Mojo 20), and many blues critics agree on the similarity between them. William Ferris asserts that "blues singers are associated in folk tradition with Voodoo. ... When he links his music with Voodoo, the bluesman is doubly effective, and many singers actually boast of their supernatural powers" (77). Julio Finn concurs, noting that "the blues is the culmination of a tradition of which conjuring is an indivisible part" (209). Such interpretations are validated by the recurring hoodoo men, black cat bones, mojo hands, John the Conqueror roots, and bad signs that pervade blues lyrics. Within the novel, Flowers emphasizes this concurrence between hoodoo and the blues near the end, when Lucas and Melvira set off together to New Orleans, the voodoo capital of the United States and the birthplace of jazz, to enlarge their roles as "Tribal Guides."

Before Lucas and Melvira are ready to walk off into the Southern sunset and live happily ever after, however, they must each complete another task central to African-based cultures: They must achieve peace with their ancestors. Deep and lasting relationships with ancestors, whether people remembered by the living or spirits of the long dead, are common in African religions (Floyd 15-17). According to novelist Toni Morrison, this tradition of ancestor contact characterizes much contemporary black fiction, and a character's relationship to an ancestor can be seen as a barometer of his or her spiritual health. For Morrison, these "ancestors" are parents or other elders; "they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom" (343). Hootowl is obviously one such "ancestor" for Melvira, but both Lucas and Melvira must seek reconciliation with a birth parent before they can achieve spiritual wholeness and a union with each other. As Morrison notes, often "the presence or absence of the [ancestor] figure determine[s] the success or happiness of the character" (343).