distinctively charleston

All of this is off the record.

We never spoke about this because you don't speak about it. You don't ask questions, you don't get curious, and you don't decide to call it by its name if you are asking. In fact, it doesn't have one. It's nothing, just some stuff, but if I see you walking down the street backwards, your face drawn and your spirit looking bound, I will know you kept asking. If you want to know bad enough, it will open up to you. The people will give you what you want, but you have to be prepared to take it to get the consequences of messing with things you ought not to be messing with, things that sometimes you need so bad that the needing is like a fix in itself, you see.

Hoodoo is alive and well in the Lowcountry.

A direct descendant of African root-magic, "hoodoo" or "rootwork" is not a religion like Voodoo, but a botanical mystical art that can be mixed sometimes with religion, but more often works outside of it, along with everything and connected to nothing. It places a lot of emphasis on personal power for a people, the Gullah and Geechee, who traditionally were without political or economic power, but it crosses all racial and socio-economic boundaries, always has.

It's a practical art, one that asks something and expects results. It has brought lovers together, kept people out of wars by inflicting temporary irregular heartbeats, healed the sick, and caused some people to become sick. To some, you have to believe it to have it worked on you, but for most, it doesn't matter if you believe it or not. It just is, and if you're fixed, you're fixed. Fixing can be good, but it can also be very, very bad.

Hoodoo encompasses human experience, and many times it can just be about asking for more: more love, more money, more success. That's what all the personal curios are about; they are about a problem you feel you have and subsequently the "magic" you put on yourself. Then there are the actions that influence others, the thing from which hoodoo's reputation often stems. Because it's rarely spoken about, this can be "rooted" or "fixed" or "crossed," all meaning the same thing one person is exerting influence over another through hoodoo.

"I once rooted two women, one to leave me alone and the other one to come to me," says Roger Pinckney, author of Blue Roots: African-American Folk Magic of the Gullah People and lifelong resident of Daufuskie Island. "The one left me alone but the other one came to me, and it was disastrous. It continued until I took the thing [charm] and threw it in the river on the outgoing tide. I don't think I ever want to root another woman."

Pinckney's father was the Beaufort County coroner for 36 years, and he occasionally saw people whose passing he declared "death by undetermined natural causes." Roger grew up with that as reality. And it's reality today.

"When I first decided to write Blue Roots, I thought I should document this stuff before it all went away with the older generation," he says, then chuckles. "But it ain't going away. I found out that it's here, and the next generation does it, just as strong."

In Charleston, there once was a place you could go if you wanted something to help with a problem. (In case you want to know, that's how you ask: "I have a problem," and you have to mean it.) That place was Cut Rate Drug on upper King Street, an honest-to-goodness drug store that had some curios in the back curios such as Hot Foot Powder, Lucky hair dressing, Come to Me oil and candles to cross and uncross a lover. There were neatly folded packets of bath salts, amulets and lucky charms for the pocket, and it was there for the buying.

When Cut Rate Drug was sold a few years ago, most of the inventory was sold to Eckerd Drug on Calhoun Street. A few weeks later, someone went into Eckerd's and asked where all the Cut Rate "stuff" was. He was told that it was sold off the truck in Eckerd's parking lot the day it arrived, before men could even unload it into the store. And it was gone, dispersed in an afternoon, melting undetected back into the Lowcountry like water through pluff mud. But of course, no one admits that is what happened, and as for where it is now? It's where it always was in the hands of the people.

It runs through the land, is of the Lowcountry as much as the water. It changes direction and flow, but it's here. You watch, child; and if someone asks, "oye fix?," they already see that you are.