Word: hoodoo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...perception of them. Literature offers a useful look, but most often it is a look at that minority of tormented adolescents whose members grow up to write novels about the pain of puberty, not the joy. Films of the traditional sort did not risk truthtelling, largely because of the hoodoo of sex. What they gave us was Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland sipping one soda through two straws. The suggestion that Judy wore a bra, and that Mickey might have wanted to unhook it, would have been so unthinkable that to mention it, even now, seems boorish...
...area celebrated by Berlitz is the heavily traveled stretch of sea extending roughly from Bermuda in the north to Miami and beyond Puerto Rico on the south. It has been known variously as the Triangle of Death, the Devil's Triangle and the Hoodoo Sea. Berlitz reports that some 100 ships and planes carrying a total of more than 1,000 persons have mysteriously disappeared without a trace while traversing the triangle, most of them since 1945. Those statistics may well be the most indisputable facts in the book...
...novel owes its title partly to a blistering chili pepper sauce. It marks the return of an earlier Reed hero, Papa LaBas, the great black shamus. To white readers, he is soul's answer to Sherlock Holmes. To Reed, he is torchkeeper of "HooDoo," the 19th century AfroAmerican folk religion and business that dealt in magic cures, spells and charms...
...essential spirit of HooDoo is called Jes Grew. It slips into New Or leans and spreads across the country like a science-fiction plague. It is the jazz in the Jazz Age. Even Warren G. Harding is reported locked in the Lincoln Bedroom listening to The Whole World Is Jazz Crazy. Ranged against Jes Grew are the forces of the Wallflower Order (read those who do not dance...
Reed himself keeps prancing on his drum, preaching the glories of HooDoo culture. It is a welcome alternative to the bludgeoning lectures of LeRoi (Imamu Baraka) Jones. Or is it? The club is a quicker and more merciful weapon than the feather. -R.Z. Sheppard