African American Superstition Origins

            While reading Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine,” I became very interested in the idea of the conjurer and all of the superstition that seemed to surround Henry and the grapes. I wanted to look further into superstition in the South and ended up coming across an essay by Chesnutt on this very topic. This essay, titled “Superstitions and Folklore of the South,” discusses how many of the beliefs held by Southern African Americans, which we would now call superstitions, were more like a religion at the time. These superstitions likely came from a variety of sources. The first place that Chesnutt sees these superstitions deriving from is African Fetishism, which focused on the worship of material items, maybe like this one…

Chesnutt also sees similarities between African American superstition and Voodoo, which has many superstitions on its own, like these…

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African Fetishism and Voodoo combined with witchcraft and ghost lore.

            The combination of all of these different traditions led to a unique set of Southern African American superstitions, which we see in “The Goophered Grapevine.” The conjure woman was a central figure in this African American ‘religion’ of the time. Many whites saw this belief in the supernatural as an indicator of African American’s racial inferiority. While some African Americans did try to change to more ‘western’ religions in order to gain more credibility as a race, the conjure tradition and superstitions still permeated African American culture.