It pools inside her, flowing with the pulse of her blood, tingling along her nerve endings. Dana pulls a deep breath, cool, invigorating excitement rushing into her lungs. The air pricks at her skin like sharpened fingernails, biting her ankles beneath the hem of her slacks, curling underneath the collar of the jacket he has lent her, although she has it turned up against the breeze. Buildings crowd above their heads, orange light seeping from their upper windows, bathing them in a soft, warm glow. In the distance, traffic rumbles and horns blare, the occasional siren wails by. They walk back through the cold to his studio through the familiar dishevelled corners of downtown New York. Professor Eddie Glaude at Princeton University defines Hoodoo as part of African-American religious life with practices influenced from Africa that fused with Christianity creating an African-American religious culture for liberation These origins developed a slave culture in the United States that was social, spiritual, and religious. Raboteau in his book, Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South, traced the origins of Hoodoo (conjure, rootwork) practices in the United States to West and Central Africa. Thompson was an African Art historian and found through his study of African Art the origins of African Americans' spiritual practices to certain regions in Africa. Robert Farris Thompson was a professor at Yale University and conducted academic research in Africa and the United States and traced Hoodoo's (African American conjure) origins to Central Africa's Bantu-Kongo people in his book Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. By placing seashells on graves, African Americans were creating a boundary (barrier) between the recently deceased and them, keeping the spirit in the realm of the dead below the Kongo cosmogram.ĭr.

Seashells represent the watery divide located on the horizontal line of the Kongo cosmogram that is a boundary between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.

African Americans decorated the graves of their family members with white items such as white conch seashells. In Bantu-Kongo spirituality the spirit realm is in the color white. The T shape headstone peculiar to black cemeteries in north Florida during the 1920s through the 1950s corresponds to the lower half of the Kongo cosmogram that symbolizes the realm of the ancestors and spiritual power. Headstones with a T shape were seen in Black cemeteries and at grave sites in the Kongo region. Researchers noticed the similarities of grave sites of African Americans in Florida and those of the Bakongo people in Central Africa. Bantu-Kongo burial practices by African Americans were found in Florida.

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