Underworld Work
Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans
9780226838861
9780226838847
9780226838854
Underworld Work
Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans
A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.
288 pages | 28 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2025
Class 200: New Studies in Religion
History: American History, Urban History
Religion: American Religions, Christianity
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
VISITATION 1 Zora on “Voodoo”
1 “Midnight Orgies”: Voudou and the Problem of Possessed Black Flesh from Haiti to Louisiana
VISITATION 2 Zora on Lynching
2 “Smoke Out the Negro Devils”: Black Cosmopolitan Eclecticism in the New Century and the Terror of Lynching
VISITATION 3 Zora Eats the Salt
3 “Making a Place for Negro Untouchables”: Black Sexual Victorianism and Its Counterconducts
VISITATION 4 Zora Talks “Hoodoo in America” and Elsewhere
4 “Dangerous and Suspicious”: Hoodoo, Faith Healing, and Sex Work in the Black Slum
VISITATION 5 Zora’s Unpublished Satire on Marcus Garvey: “The Emperor Effaces Himself”
5 “The Right Idea of God”: Sinners and Saints in the New Orleans Division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
VISITATION 6 Zora Worships with the Sanctified
6 “We Ain’t Spiritualists, We’s the Sanctified Church”: Black Pentecostals and the Politics of Distinction
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
VISITATION 1 Zora on “Voodoo”
1 “Midnight Orgies”: Voudou and the Problem of Possessed Black Flesh from Haiti to Louisiana
VISITATION 2 Zora on Lynching
2 “Smoke Out the Negro Devils”: Black Cosmopolitan Eclecticism in the New Century and the Terror of Lynching
VISITATION 3 Zora Eats the Salt
3 “Making a Place for Negro Untouchables”: Black Sexual Victorianism and Its Counterconducts
VISITATION 4 Zora Talks “Hoodoo in America” and Elsewhere
4 “Dangerous and Suspicious”: Hoodoo, Faith Healing, and Sex Work in the Black Slum
VISITATION 5 Zora’s Unpublished Satire on Marcus Garvey: “The Emperor Effaces Himself”
5 “The Right Idea of God”: Sinners and Saints in the New Orleans Division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
VISITATION 6 Zora Worships with the Sanctified
6 “We Ain’t Spiritualists, We’s the Sanctified Church”: Black Pentecostals and the Politics of Distinction
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index