Title & author
Conjure Women by Afia Atakora
Synopsis
Rue and her mother, Miss May Belle, are healers and conjure women. But because of a strong connection to Varina, the plantation slaveholder’s daughter, Rue must navigate not only her relationship with earth and nature, but how far she is willing and able to go to protect herself and those she loves. In Conjure Women, Afia Atakora adds to the body of novels written by influential women about a critical period in American history, dismissing the notion white supremacy is in our country’s past and demonstrating how society still enables and perpetuates systemic racism. .
Who should read this book
Fans of Julia Alvarez and Natashia Deón
What we’re thinking about
Intersectional environmentalism
Trigger warning(s)
Physical violence, sexual violence, slurs, substance abuse, abortion, racism
As the Black Lives Matter movement surges across the world, carrying cries of systemic oppression and the need to abolish the police, still too many are inclined to dismiss racism and our country’s history as a thing of the past. But in Afia Atakora’s novel Conjure Women (Random House, 2020), history is not easy to dismiss. Instead, like Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and many other Black women before her, Atakora’s use of fiction, lyrical language rooted in nature, and bold female protagonists allow readers to conceptualize the impact of slavery and white supremacy on the present day. With this debut novel, Atakora adds to the body of novels written by influential women about a critical period in American history.
We are first introduced to Rue, who has been “under Miss May Belle’s tutelage the whole of her life” (Atakora, 8). Through a dual timeline, we learn of Rue’s past and present as the daughter of a healer and conjure woman, first enslaved and then free on a plantation in the years surrounding the Civil War. From her mother, she learns the medicinal properties of local plants, how to help birth children, and various curses. And because of her close proximity in age to the slaveholder’s daughter, Varina, “the two of them [are] bundled up together and trapped for it. No feet, or knees, or thighs. No legs to run with” (343). The addition of a white female protagonist, let alone a slave owner’s daughter, establishes an interwoven storyline that complicates the novel in a powerful way.
Immediately, though Rue and her mother’s connection to nature, the novel establishes earth at its core. The novel opens with “the black baby’s crying [that] wormed and bloomed” (3). Voices are “thin like river silt” and babies are “like apples” (4, 7). Throughout, the text emphasizes the importance of nature through descriptions and Rue’s profession. And while she professes, “Not next year. Next year I be done” with her healing work, there is no denying that the connection is natural for her, as “there was just her knowing” (7). Rue attempts to separate herself from her mother’s passed-down line of work, but ultimately, it’s in her blood, a connection she cannot separate herself from. In the woods, “her place, her conquered ground,” Rue finds that “all her roots and flowers scattered and fell, for a moment forgotten and reunited with the earth” (34). Rue draws power from the earth, a source that she ultimately is unable to give up.
And it is not just her-- throughout the novel, the novel makes apparent the strength women find in the earth throughout its entirety. “I tell them to come to me if they find themselves bothered by a man, any man, if they need a remedy,” Miss May Belle says (355). She encourages women to come to her for natural medicine to prevent and abort pregnancies, giving them a sliver of control over their bodies that are not considered their own. Airey, an enslaved woman with a “spangled pattern of white skin” across her body makes it north only because she “sprouted big, thick black wings” (20, 27). With a constellation of stars lining her skin, Airey is able to escape the plantation, shifting before Rue’s eyes into a bird. And “after Miss May Belle dies, “they said the river swelled up fit to weep for her. It occluded the roads and the old byways; it ruined the roots of the trees. Living water, it swallowed up the old, proud stalks of cotton, and still the river rose” (54). The reaction to May Belle’s death suggests the connection the woman had to nature, her ability to shape its actions to impact those around her.
But the natural connection and power these women find within nature is challenged by whiteness, particularly the introduction of the white man’s religion and medicine. Bruh Abel, “a rootless man” who could “easily pass for white,” “came to preach and to perform miracles” a few times a year (44, 46, 44). Rue distrusts Abel due to his faith in the religion taught to him by his previous master, using earthly imagery to express her feelings. And soon after he arrives, Sarah, who once approached Rue for contraceptive medicine, now believes “it aint’ a godly thing to do” (97). At his urging, the women sacrifice a choice they used to possess, a form of power. He promises to “baptize Bean… to save him” (67). Black-eyed Bean, named for his eyes’ uncanny similarity to the food, is professed soon after Abel’s arrival as the devil, needed to be cleansed. And when Varina is in need of healing, her father orders Miss May Belle to not “give my daughter any a’ yo’ shit black grass” (370). Treated instead with laudanum, a medicine May Belle was given by a white doctor to use on her master’s wife, Varina never truly heals.
Rue, in many ways representing a daughter of Mother Earth as opposed to Abel’s son of God, is the only one able to save them. Though Abel’s religion is “water and sky” as he baptizes the townspeople in the river, it is Rue that saves Bean (174). They are Rue’s “eyes [that] had spied” Bean’s hand sticking out of his casket as he “looked around, blinking away the dust of death” (261). Only Rue takes notice of Bean, saving him. And after Varina is made sick by the white man’s medicine, it is Rue that takes care of her, nurses her back to a semi-state of health.
“Women, she realized then, were...for crouching, for becoming heavy-bellied, for bearing down and pushing close to the earth, that different sort of running, that sedentary sort of endurance” (184). Atakora’s novel enforces how our connection as women to the earth is inherent and natural-- and does so in a way that beautifully underscores the racist and sexist complications of America’s history, womanhood, and intersectional feminism. “Varina and Rue, they were bound to their roles, and always had been...simply, they’d been raised to be the women they had become” (292). The novel displays the burden Black women carried-- and still carry-- as both women and members of the Black community. Rue cares for Varina throughout the entire novel, even though Varina is in full control of Rue, her body, and her life. Throughout history, Black women have born countless burdens, including those of white women. And while we expect them to bear our burdens, to help us fight our “feminist” fight, we don’t ever turn to them to do the same. But in Conjure Women, nature’s power emphasizes the importance of rejecting white supremecist novelties engrained upon society through colonialism, including rejecting white feminism, and turning to support the Black women that have carried us so far.
“And was a mama the warm body that made you in a time and a place and a land you couldn’t remember? Or was a mama what you made for yourself— the good warm body, the first kind memory of the older woman who slept beside you in the hayloft, who let you fold into her warmth that first evening you were owned?”
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Does the text suggest any coexistence of feminism and religion? Why or why not?
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