Low Country Voodoo

Lowcountry Voodoo: Beginner's Guide to Tales, Spells and Boo Hags

$18.00

Our Lowcountry Voodoo is a plain spoken introduction to the folk magic of the South Carolina Sea Islands, where Gullah Geechee families kept West African spiritual knowledge alive through root doctors, protective customs, and the stories told after dark. Boo hags, plateyes, haint blue porch ceilings, Dr. Buzzard, and the spells that went with them, all set in the culture that produced them. A good first book if rootwork is new to you.

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Our Lowcountry Voodoo: Beginner's Guide to Tales, Spells and Boo Hags opens a door onto one of the most distinctive folk magic traditions in the American South. Along the coastal Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, enslaved West Africans carried their cosmology, their healing knowledge, and their relationship with the ancestors across the water. What grew from that root in the Sea Islands became Gullah Geechee culture, and the spiritual work living inside it is known locally as Lowcountry voodoo, though it is closer kin to hoodoo and rootwork than to Haitian Vodou or the Voodoo of New Orleans. Terrance Zepke makes that distinction early, and it is a good part of why this small book works as a starting point.

Inside, you will meet the figures every Lowcountry child grows up hearing about. The boo hag, who slips out of her skin at night. The plateye, who takes whatever shape suits it. The Hound of Goshen, running the old road at dusk. You will also meet the root doctors who held real standing in their communities, including Dr. Buzzard of St. Helena Island, whose name still carries weight generations later. Zepke sets the folklore beside the practice: the signs and customs people lived by, protective habits like painting a porch ceiling haint blue, the spells and rituals passed down at kitchen tables, and the food that anchored it all, Hoppin' John included. A chapter on the Kingdom of Oyotunji, the Yoruba village founded in Sheldon, South Carolina, follows the thread back to West Africa.

This is an introduction, written plainly and illustrated throughout by Michael Swing, and that is its strength. If you are new to rootwork, curious about your own Gullah Geechee heritage, or you simply want to understand where a practice came from before you take it up, our Lowcountry Voodoo hands you the landscape in an afternoon. Pair it with a deeper working text once you know which paths are calling you.

Paperback. Written by Terrance Zepke, illustrated by Michael Swing. Published by Pineapple Press. ISBN 9781561644551.