When a woodpecker comes and pecks a hole in Sandy's arm, Tenie uses
conjure to get a sparrow hawk to guard the tree.
The work neatly collapses all kinds of seemingly contradictory elements: Its precisely scooped-out negative forms, carved with a router, fuse an aesthetic of the machined and the handmade, while its wraparound sequences
conjure a narrative that is both linear and circuitous.
Bynum reveals that his dead father was a "
conjure man" whose song had the capacity to heal, a vocation consistent with the shaman's principal objective--to alleviate spiritual and physical suffering through interaction with the spiritual world (Eliade 28).
In
Conjure Blues there are places where the language seems filled with the wrong measurements and ingredients.
A number of other images isolate specific objects so that they take on the abstract quality of enlarged details, enabling banal light fixtures to
conjure the strange forms of Karl Blossfeldt's plant photographs.
Wonham's selection of stories no doubt follows Twayne dicta: It is The
Conjure Woman, in part or in whole, that most often makes it into classrooms where Chesnutt' s stories are studied, not The Wife of His Youth.
A fundamental source of Reed's subversive imagery is hoodoo, with its rituals,
conjure men and women, and its spirits, or loas, of whom chief examples are the trickster deities Legba, Guede, and Erzulie.
Eve relies upon magic or the power of
conjure in curing Jesse's addiction to heroin by engineering a series of well-crafted illusions which allow Jesse to have unlimited access to the enslaving drug.
The brilliant Afro-American comedian Richard Pryor was able to make his character Miss Rudolph, the
conjure woman, into a comic masterpiece because so many of us grew up with Miss Rudolph's "sisters." Shouting down the blocks of Southern towns and Northern cities, we still hear voices warning foolhardy souls, "Don't mess with Miss Rudolph, 'cause she'll put a spell on you!"
Buzzard, the maternal ancestor Sapphira Wade--in addition to Mama Day herself, and the reader may be at a loss about how to treat the subject, since the conjurer, and especially the
conjure woman, has existed mostly on the margins of folklore and ethnography and is therefore barely credible.
The second part details the occult rituals and folk medicine practices of the
conjure artists of New Orleans.
A "
conjure doctor," with a strong attachment to folk traditions and an African heritage, he was widely respected by all, including Douglass himself.
