Getting Your Holy Ghost Back: On Conjure, Ancestor Work, and the Sacred That Survived
- Indhira Udofia
- Apr 16
- 7 min read
Reweaving the Tear is where the work turns toward what is possible. After mapping the web, reading its vibrations, and naming what the patterns mean for the whole structure, the question becomes: what does the web need to return to integrity? This is not the section about deconstruction. This is the section about what comes next.
There is a piece I wrote that started as a blog post and became something else. I called it Whose Baby Iz Yew?: Getting My Holy Ghost Songs Back. It was about how a recent recall to understanding my maternal line and its roots in South Carolina, exploring the archive, and the pressure to forget from my father:
Mother Lloyd’s rebuke found me in the middle of that avoidance and named it. Because what she was really asking — what I have been circling in my research, in my spiritual practice, in the slow and sometimes reluctant work of returning to myself — is not just about music. It is about the archive. It is about what we have forsaken in the name of legibility and palatability. It is about the mother tongue we stopped speaking because someone convinced us a flatter, more acceptable language would serve us better.
What happened was: I cried. Not because I was sad. Because something came back that I had not realized I had given away.
I called it the Holy Ghost. I know that language is not available to everyone. I know that for some people who have left the church or been expelled from it, the language itself is part of what they are recovering from — that “Holy Ghost” arrives trailing all the other things that were attached to it in the institution: the judgment, the shame, the governance of who gets to receive the Spirit and under what conditions. I understand that. I am not asking you to take the language as given.
But I want to talk about the thing the language is pointing at. The capacity for transcendence that was formed in you by something that happened in sacred space — in the music, in the call and response, in the hands that laid on you in prayer, in the particular quality of a moment when something broke open and you knew you were not alone in the universe. That thing is real. It existed before the institution tried to own it. And when the institution harms you and you leave, or when you are expelled, or when you slowly stop being able to go back — that thing does not leave with the institution.
It goes somewhere. Getting it back is possible. On the journey of reclamation, I reflected about why I had to remember and re-member myself anyways:
What I understand now is that the prayer to close the gate was the same move my father’s words had produced in me. The flattening of something irreducible into something manageable. The CCM move — turning the wild, uncontrollable, untranslatable thing into a format legible to the mainstream. I prayed away a gift that was, in fact, my inheritance. That had always been my inheritance. That the Sea Islands and Berkeley County and Eutawville had been trying to return to me every time I came close enough to receive it.
What the Institutional Church Did Not Invent
The Black Church did not invent the sacred. It inherited it, and it shaped it, and in some cases it tried to contain parts of it that it found threatening — but the sacred was already there when the Church arrived, and the sacred has outlasted every attempt to fully domesticate it.
I mean this concretely. The practices that African people brought across the Middle Passage — the relationship to the ancestral dead, the understanding of the divine as multiple and present and embodied rather than singular and distant and abstract, the ritual practices that address the dead directly and ask them for help, the healing practices that understand the body and the spirit as a continuous system rather than a hierarchy with spirit on top — these practices did not disappear when the plantation forced conversion. They went underground. They hid in plain sight inside the Christianity that was imposed. They survived in what scholars of African American religion call the folk tradition: in the root work, the conjure, the Hoodoo, the stories about the ancestors.
The institutional Black Church, in most of its mainstream formations, has had a complicated relationship to this inheritance. It has often needed to distance itself from folk practice in order to claim respectability — to distinguish itself from “superstition,” to present a Christianity that was recognizable to white Protestant norms. This distancing was part of the respectability formation. It required the Church to mark certain practices as backward, as spiritually dangerous, as incompatible with genuine Christian faith.
What was marked as backward was often exactly the part of the tradition that the enslaved women who built the Hush Harbor had kept alive at the highest cost.
Getting your Holy Ghost back sometimes means going to find the parts of the inheritance that the institution tried to mark as dangerous.
What Conjure Is
I use the word “conjure” the way Kameelah Martin uses it in her work on conjure feminism — as a framework for understanding Black women’s spiritual practice that does not require the institutional church as the legitimating institution.
Conjure is the work of calling forth what is needed. It draws on the relationship with the ancestral dead, with the spirit world, with the healing properties of the material world, with the power of naming and speaking and making things present. It has African roots and New World adaptations. It has been practiced continuously in Black communities since enslavement, often by women, often by the people the Church tried hardest to contain, often in the spaces the Church’s surveillance did not reach.
I am not saying that conjure is for everyone. I am saying that the wholesale dismissal of African-derived spiritual practice — the marking of anything that does not look like European Protestant Christianity as dangerous, as demonic, as outside the reach of the sacred — has cost Black people access to parts of their inheritance that are genuinely healing.
The woman who talks to her grandmother’s photograph. The man who visits his mother’s grave and brings her food and tells her what is happening. The practice of lighting a candle and saying the names of the dead, of keeping the ancestors close, of asking them for guidance. These are not superstitions. They are continuous with practices that African peoples have carried for millennia, practices that survived the Middle Passage and the plantation and the respectability formation.
The Music
I want to say something specific about the music, because it is often the thread that leads people back.
The music of the Black Church — gospel, the spirituals, the praise and worship that developed through the twentieth century — is one of the most sophisticated spiritual technologies in human history. It was built to carry more than it was allowed to say. The spirituals encoded resistance and encoded cosmology and encoded grief and encoded hope in sonic forms that the surveillance of the institution could not fully read. The gospel tradition carries a sonic register of the sacred that is available to the body in ways that institutional theology has never fully been able to claim or fully been able to contain.
When someone who has been harmed by the church cannot go back but still weeps at a gospel song, they are not confused. They are experiencing the gap between the institution and the inheritance. The music is older than the institution’s governance of it. The music is carrying something the institution is only partly responsible for.
Getting your Holy Ghost back does not have to mean going back to the institution. It might mean building a practice in your own home. It might mean finding a maroon community that sings the same songs with different theology. It might mean sitting at your grandmother’s grave and playing her favorite hymn on your phone and talking to her until something settles in your chest that had been unsettled for years.
On Returning
I want to say something to the people who are not sure whether they want to return to any institutional form of the Church, and who are also not sure they can survive without it.
You are not required to choose. The maroon tradition does not require that you renounce the institution as a condition of finding what the institution couldn’t hold. The Hush Harbor was not against the church. It was in addition to it. It held the parts the church couldn’t hold.
You are allowed to love a gospel song and refuse to submit to the governance of the space that made it. You are allowed to keep your grandmother’s Bible and also keep the photograph you talk to. You are allowed to go to Easter service and cry at the choir and also know that you will not be staying, and that your leaving is not faithlessness but a form of fidelity — to the self that the institution tried to govern away from you.
And you are allowed to build something new in the tension between all of those things. You do not have to resolve it to live in it. The tension is not a problem to be solved. It is the web you are already inside.
Aunt Nancy sits at the center of the web and does not pretend the tension isn’t there. She reads it. She knows what every vibration means. She stays in the center and keeps spinning because the web needs tending, and she is the one at the center, and this is her work.
That is what getting your Holy Ghost back means. Not the resolution. The return to the center, with all the tension still present, and the commitment to keep tending.
— Church Gworl Maroon
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