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In this reported feature, writer Cierra Black speaks with the Hoodoo consultant of Ryan Coogler's Sinners, Dr. Yvonne Chireau, explores the film's spiritual parallels between Hoodoo and Blues music, and analyzes Coogler's thematic commentary on faith, music, and freedom.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a triumph by many definitions. In his record-breaking vampiric horror film starring Michael B. Jordan, the acclaimed director depicts the perennial dance between music and spirituality, particularly through the ‘30s era Blues music of the Mississippi Delta and the sacred African American spiritual practice of Hoodoo.
Committed to portraying Hoodoo with reverence and accuracy, the Cooglers — Ryan and wife and producer Zinzi Coogler — tapped African American and American Religious scholar and author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition Dr. Yvonne Chireau to serve as the film’s official Hoodoo consultant.
“Blues is the music of Hoodoo,” Dr. Chireau, who is currently a professor at Swarthmore College, tells Teen Vogue over an early morning Zoom call. Music and spirituality often run in tandem, as many cite affecting music to invoke a spiritual experience; through the depiction of this dynamic in Sinners, and once one has a deepened understanding of Hoodoo, it has never been clearer that music and spirituality are intrinsically connected, indivisible even.
Dr. Chireau defines Hoodoo as an African American ancestral tradition. On her website The Academic Hoodoo, a digital space dedicated to “[celebrating] the power and presence of Africana spirituality” and Black religious experiences, she has detailed Hoodoo as a practice that uses “natural and supernatural elements” with the purpose of “[creating] and [effecting] change in the human experience.”
It can be considered a magic system, a practice, and a way of thought, initially stewarded by enslaved Africans in the American South, and is grounded in nature — the environment most available to them — with methods such as rootwork, herbalism, and ancestral reverence.
Informed by the ancestors through both knowledge preserved pre-abduction and characteristics of the new lands they inhabited, the belief system of Hoodoo is unique from religious practices with concrete hierarchies, like the oft mistakenly conflated religion Voodoo or Vodou, as its tangible details can differ by region and lineage; Hoodoo has also been historically employed by Black Americans of various religious beliefs and practices. For these reasons, defining practices on a granular level is not so simple, an understanding that Chireau used to guide her work with the Cooglers, Sinners producer Sev Ohanian, and actress Wunmi Mosaku as they brought her character Annie, a Hoodoo priestess, to life.
Keeping Hoodoo Sacred On-screen
Though Dr. Chireau makes an important distinction on her role as a Hoodoo “expert” — “The expert on Hoodoo is the practitioner,” she says, “I am a scholar. I am a historian. I can tell you what happened in 1835, but I am not that expert” — she recounts her time as a consultant on the film as a “wonderful experience” due to the intelligence, creativity, and sincerity Mosaku and the Cooglers applied to their roles as storytellers.
“I give all the credit to [Ryan] Coogler and Zinzi. They were very clear that they wanted a true and authentic presentation of this religion because of the kinds of things that we see in Hollywood,” she says, describing how often African spiritual traditions are demonized and commodified by Hollywood in ways that bastardize the practices for entertainment. Chireau’s willingness to consult on the film was dependent on the filmmakers’ intentions. “Coogler understood that this was a sacred tradition.”
According to Chireau, there are rarely accurate depictions of Hoodoo until the 21st century, given that many previous stories detail the practice through the lens of superstitions, primitive behavior, demonic implications, or sensationalizations of Voodoo. She credits young people to a current resurgence of interest in understanding the foundations of the Hoodoo practice.
“The strongest aspect of Hoodoo, I would argue, is that it is a tradition of healing,” Chireau says, which she believes Coogler accurately conveys in the film. “Hoodoo isn't just practice, but thought. Hoodoo for enslaved people, [which] carried after slavery, was the means of healing relationships. Between lovers and families like we see with Annie and [Michael B. Jordan’s] Smoke, but also relationships between the living and dead. This is paramount to Black American people, because the chain between the living and the dead from Africa to America was severed during the Middle Passage.”
In her initial conversations with Coogler, he described for her what would soon be the pivotal Juke Joint scene, wherein Sammie, aka Preacher Boy’s song “I Lied To You” transcends the physical realm, connecting timelines of Black musical traditions from the continent of Africa to present day America.
“You are trying to convey the ancestral moment where time becomes past, present, and future,” she said to him. In African diasporic traditions it is through music that oral histories and traditions are preserved, connecting generations across time and articulated by griots. In this moment where Sammie embodies the spiritual role of griot, Coogler brings to fruition a story that details the higher power of the Blues, one Chireau was happy to help actualize.
In addition to gut-checking details such as Annie’s Hoodoo arsenal including playing cards as opposed to tarot, and foundational herbs such as High John the Conqueror, Chireau spent copious hours speaking with Mosaku about Hoodoo’s function and significance. As distinct Hoodoo practices are largely regional and dependent on familial ways and local herbs, the professor was less concerned with the specifics and more about the respect given to the tradition.
Take the mojo bag Annie creates for Smoke: the contents of the bag were not displayed, but its purpose was understood. A mojo bag made by a conjure woman in South Carolina may look different than one made by a practitioner in the Delta, and the contents, frankly, are not anyone else’s concern. What is, is the understanding of its usage and power. Though Smoke may not have fully grasped the how or why, he knew and trusted enough, like many men generations before him, that this form of protection would carry him through.
This reverence lives in the depiction of Annie and how other characters respond to her, like the little girls who seek her services in her introductory scene and the Juke survivors intuitively trusting her instincts — these details illustrated how important her role as the conjure woman is to her community. As Dr. Chireau explains, it matters not whether one “believes” in her practice, but they must understand that this spirituality, and this music, is what our ancestors used to get us through unimaginable hardships and everyday life.
Misunderstood Salvation
In 1984’s Blues From the Delta written by William Ferris, musician Billy Taylor shares that the Blues is “deeply rooted in shared experience.” He depicts how enslaved Africans transported to the U.S. were prohibited from practicing their native languages or cultures, and therefore, “were forced to re-shape work songs, field hollers, and other musical expressions as survival tools. Music gave aid and comfort to the individual as well as the group. These early spirituals often served both sacred and secular purposes. As time passed, the secular strain of the music evolved into the Blues and other musical forms.”
To understand the cultural significance and functionality of the Blues is to also understand that of Hoodoo: Reworked and concealed in a newfound society, the two became necessary tools for Black expression and survival utilized by global Black communities amidst the material and spiritual battles we’ve had to endure.
Through these parallel cultural frameworks, enslaved peoples alchemized their pain into creative visions of freedom. American Christianity gradually moved to deem Hoodoo demonic, and eventually, the secular nature of Blues music with its raw, melancholic subject matter earned the same label.
Sinners highlights these conflicts with Christianity while revealing the necessity of each tradition. Black Americans would lean on the church and the juke joint for respite — for every element, there is a counterpart. For every Smoke, there is a Stack. Neither superior to the other, simply diverging ways African Americans reckoned with their realities.
“The Blues is the story of realness. Jesus is going to make it alright, but you need some way to talk about [loss],” Dr. Chireau offers.
The Pursuit of Freedom Ancestral Reconnection
In Sinners, Preacher Boy Sammie occupies the liminal space between the parallels — as Hoodoo might call it, he spiritually stands at “the crossroads.” This ancestral connection is the key to understanding his position in the story, as well as that of the vampires.
As a vampire, Remmick is interested in siphoning Sammie’s life force literally and figuratively, representing the ways Black cultural traditions, namely music, are lusted after and stolen. Black music’s power lies in the ancestrally-bestowed ability to connect us through time and space, and transmute violence into life-preserving art; art that, despite centuries of attempts, cannot be duplicated by an oppressive culture.
Remmick’s Irish heritage adds another layer to this, as the Irish were also colonized, also stripped of their folk traditions, and not yet considered white — Remmick is drawn to Sammie’s ability as a griot to connect to the ancestral realm, a connection he has been deprived of. The symbol of vampirism also seeks to describe the attempt to survive, or even thrive in an oppressive system by submitting to and joining ranks, though time has demonstrated that seeking refuge this way has yet to bring forth tangible freedom.
The Our Father prayer seemed to prove ineffective on Remmick and the vampires because of this. The prayer was taught to his people, as it was to Sammie’s, while denying them access to their relative ancestral knowledge and traditions; a tool designed for spiritual guidance and peace yet used for subjugation, could not be used by one oppressed group against another. In comparison, the Hoodoo mojo bag Annie made for Smoke provided the only successful protection against the vampires’ evil.
Ultimately, I believe vampirism and seeking refuge through faith, music, and life-compromising deals are forms of escapism the characters in Sinners pursue to achieve freedom — a concept that, it can be argued, Ryan Coogler defines as the return to our ancestral roots.
Invoking the wisetale of ‘30s Blues artist Robert Johnson — who, legend has it, sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi Delta crossroads in exchange for musical commercial success — Coogler concludes the film with Sammie choosing the Blues as his final form of spiritual freedom. Harmonicist Delta Slim’s words must have resonated: "Blues weren't forced on us like that religion. We brought this with us from home."
