The Practice of a Hoodoo Baptist

In this very special episode, I’m joined by my partner, Nore Davis. Grief can be hard, especially when you experience multiples losses in a short period of time. Nore shares how he navigates grief through his new understanding of ancestral veneration. The ancestors don’t stop speaking just because they’ve crossed over. If anything — they finally have room to speak louder. Through dreams, signs, an...

I’ve been a full spectrum doula for over a year now. I’ve been a doula concentrating on menstruation since the inception of my charity’s programming. Every time I show up as a doula, I’m practicing rootwork. I’m not just holding space for periods, fertility, or birth — I’m standing at a spiritual threshold. The womb has been undervalued and underestimated for too long. Where new life enters. Where...

I never had to choose between the Bible and the jar, or prayer and rootwork. Between the cross and the candle. Both live in me. And both lived in the women and men who came before me. The truth is: Hoodoo was never separate from the Black church — it was woven into it. The lie that you can’t hold both? That was taught. That was imposed. That was colonized thinking trying to make us forget how we s...

Before there was a candle lit or an oil blended. Before the roots were gathered. There was discernment. That was my great-grandmother Madear’s greatest spiritual gift. She didn’t trust everybody. She didn’t speak on everything. She moved when Spirit told her to move — not a moment sooner. And that’s how she kept herself, her children, and her family covered. In Hoodoo, discernment is rootwork. It’...

They’ve called it evil for centuries. But the only evil was how they tried to separate us from it. Hoodoo is not evil, it’s not the devil, and t’s not something to be feared. It’s survival. It’s a way of being. My great-grandparents, especially my maternal great-grandmother practiced Hoodoo with discernment and protection. They were not conjuring demons — they were protecting the family from a wor...

I was born into this. Not through books, but through blood. One of my great-grandmothers was an Alabama Creole woman. A descendant of enslaved Black Americans and Native Americans, who practiced what the world tried to demonize: Hoodoo. She lived it with discernment. Quiet power. Protection. Spirit and blood guided her hands. And now, it guides mine. I am an Afro Indigenous woman, because I am bot...