Entry · catalog no. 1294
conjure
/ /ˈkʌndʒɚ/ /KUN-jer
noun, verb · The Black South; densest documentation along the Gulf coast and in New Orleans, with strong records in the Carolinas and Virginia · 1880s
✓ Verified
1.
The body of African American spiritual and magical practice also called hoodoo or rootwork: healing, protection, luck, love, harm.
“There was conjure on that house, and everybody on the road knew who put it there.”
2.
To work that practice on someone or something, for or against.
“They said the old woman could conjure a man's sleep away from him.”
3.
Attributively, of the practitioner or the materials — conjure man, conjure woman, conjure doctor, conjure bag.
“You went to the conjure woman before you went to the doctor.”
Origin & Attribution
The English word is ordinary and Latin-derived. What is Black American is the absolute noun use — conjure as the name of a whole system — and the practitioner compounds built on it. The tradition is African American, formed under slavery out of Central and West African religious practice and taking in European and Native American elements over generations; North Carolina court records name enslaved conjure doctors as early as 1767. Writing in 1931 as a Black anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston recorded that conjure was in free use among Black Americans as a name for these practices, with New Orleans and the Gulf coast as the center of highest development. Two errors are worth correcting: that conjure is a corruption or branch of Haitian Vodou, and that it is a general Southern folk-magic tradition shared equally with white Appalachian practice. White Southern folk magic exists but travels under other names — witching, granny magic, power doctoring.
1767
Enslaved people in Johnston County, North Carolina travel to consult a conjure doctor named Quash (recorded in a modern state encyclopedia; period wording unverified)
1887
Charles Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine" runs in the Atlantic Monthly, printing cunjuh 'oman and cunjuh medicine
1931
Zora Neale Hurston publishes "Hoodoo in America," documenting conjure as a term in current Black use
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
The Black South; densest documentation along the Gulf coast and in New Orleans, with strong records in the Carolinas and Virginia · 1880s
Spoken by
Black Southerners and their descendants in the Great Migration cities; practitioners and clients alike
$CONJURThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising139 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
68/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1887
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston — "Hoodoo in America" — Journal of American Folk-Lore 44:174 · 1931
p. 318; records that conjure is freely used by Black Americans for these practices and that it reached its highest development along the Gulf coast
■
Charles W. Chesnutt — "The Goophered Grapevine" — Atlantic Monthly · Aug 1887
Cape Fear Black vernacular; the first story by a Black author in that magazine
■
+ Cite a sourceGeorge Stevenson Jr. — "Conjure," Encyclopedia of North Carolina — reference · 2006
UNC Press; the 1767 and 1779 Johnston and Dobbs County cases
See also