Their abilities to graft their ancestral pasts, both fortunate and fraught, onto the medium of their present-day lives has made Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo one of the most optimistic novels about the post-civil rights era and an indelible part of the subsequent surge in Black feminist writing. But each sister is equipped with practices for living that are steeped in African American, especially Gullah/Geechee, history. For Charleston, South Carolina sisters Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, the journey to self-knowledge is uniquely their own. Indeed, how one comes to “know her magic” is the novel’s primary inquiry. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ġ78 CLA JOURNAL Black Feminist Hoodoo: Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo Dana Murphy A man or woman becomes a hoodoo doctor in one of three ways: by heredity, by serving an apprenticeship under an established practitioner, or by the “call.” -Zora Neale Hurston,“Hoodoo in America” Black feminisms and African American practices of hoodoo meet in the very first sentence of Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982):“Where there is a woman there is magic”(1).Throughout her novel,Shange invokesAfricanAmerican folk magic traditions within the context of Black feminist epistemology,acknowledging the historical roots of Black girls’magic and extolling our efforts to designate Black feminisms as a body of knowledge dedicated to our collective interests.As Shange clarifies,“Where there is a woman there is magic,”but “a woman who knows her magic.is a consort of the spirits” (1, emphasis added).

Sassafrass cypress and indigo