In this paper I will explore the ways in which African Americans, especially African American women, in the 19th and early 20th centuries made use of fortune telling and knowledge of the occult to exercise power over white Americans. I will argue that, denied access to other sources of power and authority, African Americans, especially black women, utilized white stereotypes regarding African American knowledge of the “dark arts” to influence white behavior and belief systems. African Americans achieved this power over white Americans in their roles as fortune tellers, who advised whites on matters of love, marriage, business, and financial investments, and as “doctresses,” who treated illnesses in ways that white male physicians did not. African American women, I will also argue, were especially successful in gaining influence over whites because their traditional roles as domestic servants enabled them to inculcate occult beliefs in the white children they cared for and to instruct them and their mothers in fortune telling methods and occult rituals. In this way, African Americans helped to create and maintain alternative, traditional sources of knowledge at a time when white male knowledge was increasingly based in science. Finally, I will explore how the growing reliance of white society on science and technology and its eschewal of European folklore and folk traditions as sources of knowledge, led whites to regard the occult beliefs and practices of African Americans as “foreign,” exotic, and primitive when, in reality, many of these beliefs and practices were European in origin and not African.
About the presenterAnn Kordas
Ann Kordas is a professor in the Humanities Dept. at Johnson & Wales University. She teaches courses in American history, food history, and the supernatural.She has published two books, The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America and Female Adolescent Sexuality in America, 1850-1965. She is at work on a book on occult belief in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.