Sunday, October 24, 1999

Herb’s roots are in African-American folk medicine

By RICK ANSORGE
Colorado Springs Gazette

The next time you pop a capsule of St. John’s Wort — the herb that’s become wildly popular as a treatment for mild depression — you’ll be taking part in an ancient and honorable folk tradition: African-American folk medicine.

For centuries, African-Americans have used St. John’s Wort, a plant once called High John the Conqueror, to treat scrapes, strains and burns.

“It was considered one of the most powerful herbs for healing and bringing good luck,” says Yvonne Chireau, a religion professor at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College and a leading authority on African-American folk medicine.

Long before such remedies received a stamp of approval from conventional medicine, African-Americans were using the wild horehound plant to treat colds and garlic to treat infections.

Some remedies were brought over from Africa. For instance, petals from the African plant okra were used to cure boils. Wild yam was used to cure indigestion.

Other remedies came from plants growing in the New World.

During the slavery era, African-Americans didn’t often have access to conventional medical care. So they used such everyday materials as herbs, clay, spiderwebs, axle grease and turpentine.

In America, many slaves became known as expert healers. In 1729, the lieutenant governor of Virginia praised one such healer who “performed many wonderful cures of diseases” with a concoction of roots and bark.

They also borrowed folk remedies from other cultures, including American Indians, Anglo-Americans and Haitian voodoo healers.

Medicinal melange

“African-American folk medicine is a melange,” says Chireau. “That’s what makes it unique.”

Only now is this tradition receiving due recognition, according to a report by the Kellogg Foundation’s African-American Health Care Project

“Today, mainstream scientists are finally acknowledging the efficacy of so-called folk medicines and other formulations devised and used for centuries by traditional practitioners throughout the world, including Africans and African-Americans,” the authors write.

Despite its rich history, African-American folk medicine has received relatively little mention in popular media. When it’s addressed at all, it’s usually in the context of African-American folklore. Only in academic circles has it received serious attention.

At the heart of African-American folk medicine were conjure men and women, also known as root workers. Unlike American Indian shamans, African-American root workers lived on the margins of society.

“They were seen as dangerous by some people because they could do as much harm as good,” says Paul Harvey, who teaches African-American history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. “If you wanted to harm an enemy, you’d go to a conjure man.”

He would cast a spell and give the person a small bag of various potions. Bags intended for evil purposes were tied with cat hair and left on an enemy’s doorstep. Bags intended for good — such as cleansing a house of sickness — were tied with dog hair and left on one’s own doorstep.

“African-American folk medicine is like a lot of other folk medicine,” Harvey says. “Some of it has genuine medical value. Some of it is purely fanciful.”

African-American folk medicine always has been tied up with religious beliefs.

“It’s not just about the material that was used,” Harvey says. “It’s also about what was spiritually put into the material by the conjure man.”

Not only did root workers prescribe remedies, they also performed elaborate ceremonies that imbued the remedy with good or evil spirits. Christian root workers also used prayer, the laying on of hands and anointment with oils.

Although many remedies had medicinal value, scholars suspect the placebo effect was behind many a supposedly miraculous cure. “If you think something is going to make you better, there’s some chance it will,” Harvey says.

Because African-American slaves were forbidden to learn to read or write, their folk medicine was mostly an oral tradition until the end of the Civil War. After that, however, books about traditional medical and spiritual practices circulated widely in black communities.

Bad smell

African-American folk medicine was widely practiced through the early 1900s. To ward off sickness, many people wore bags containing asafetida, a gum resin obtained from plants of the parsley family.

“Asafetida didn’t have any healing properties,” says Chireau, but it smelled so bad that it kept other people at arm’s length. Because people who wore the bags interacted less with others, they were less likely to develop infectious diseases.

“Practically speaking, it did the trick,” she says. “You find a lot of things like that (in African-American folk medicine).”

Voodoo medicine

Today, African-American folk medicine still is practiced in some areas of the South and in northern cities with large black populations. Voodoo medicine survives in Louisiana and western Missouri.

“It’s more widespread than I assumed. Some traditions, such as the use of barks and roots for making teas, are still practiced throughout the country,” says Chireau, whose forthcoming book is titled “Black Magic: The Supernatural in African-American Religion.”

Traditions fade

As African-Americans have become better educated, however, the old traditions have faded.

Today, asafetida bags are sold in New Orleans as tourist trinkets.

But African-American folk medicine lives on in mainstream America, especially in health-food stores that stock goldenrod, evening primrose, saw palmetto and other remedies once prescribed by conjure men and conjure women.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.