What Do I Read Next?
Last Updated on July 29, 2019, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 288
- In American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World (1998), Rod Davis gives a personal account of his journey through America, primarily the South, to discover how African voodoo has been preserved and transformed in America. He describes his encounters with the practitioners of and believers in the many forms of African voodoo, such as hoodoo, root medicine, spiritual healing, and black magic.
- Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935) records the folk tales, songs, and voodoo customs and beliefs of Southern blacks that Hurston collected on her many travels through the South.
- Bruce Jackson's essay "The Other Kind of Doctor: Conjure and Magic in Black American Folk Medicine" in the book African American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (1997), edited by Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, pays serious attention to the long-ignored practice of hoodoo or conjure as a healing art in African-American folk culture.
- Paule Marshall's Praise Song for the Widow (1983) is about a black family's upward mobility in New York, its subsequent struggle with materialism, and the return of the widow Avey Johnson to her cultural roots on an island in the Caribbean.
- Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) tells the story of a mother's desperation to protect her children from slavery. The novel blurs the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, and the past and the present.
- In The Tempest, William Shakespeare tells the story of the magician Prospero and his efforts to retain control over his daughter, Miranda, and the other inhabitants of their secluded island. This play is often referred to by critics as an American allegory.
- Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" (1973) explores the importance of quilting to nurturing black sisterhood and keeping intergenerational ties intact.
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