Many Candomblé terreiros in Bahia maintain a garden area in which plants are cultivated, as well as an uncultivated space, if available, for wildcrafted herbs. A major emphasis in the religion is ritual and herbal healing. Each of the orixás³² is considered the owner of specific, proprietary herbs. Each herb is associated with certain songs and prayers, without which, their magical properties do not function. The plants are used in baths, ceremonial cleansings and healing ceremonies as well as in initiatory rites and the preparation of sacred foods. Some of the herbs are aromatics common to many places in the hemisphere, like basil, marjoram and varieties of mint; others are rarer and require special visits to forested areas, or to herb specialists in neighborhood markets. Interdependence of human beings and nature is central to Candomblé cosmology. In fact, the presence and use of herbs (collectively known as folhas, “leaves”) in the religion is extensive and so important that a common saying insists, “without leaves, there is no Candomblé.”

A frequent use of herbs in Candomblé is a banho de folhas, an aromatic ritual bath prepared to calm an anxious or chaotic mind. To ease a ravaged psyche. This bath can also be a descarrego, (literally, “unburdening”); that is, the washing away of traumatic and negative energies so that the underlying good can emerge. A cleansing, a way of getting to balance, getting to grace. Another familiar usage of herbs in Candomblé is in special preparations to sacralize the body, or bundled branches swept in the corners and along the walls of a room to ritually cleanse the space. There is also a ceremony known as cantando folhas, “singing the leaves,” in which leaves liturgical songs in African languages are offered to the leaves of healing plants for the physical and spiritual well-being of an individual or a group. This rite, singing the leaves, is generally conducted as part of larger ritual obligations, part of the overall rhythm of ceremonial activities that keep people connected to their sources of support, and that help develop devotees as human beings.

These uses of herbs resonate in the ways spirituals have been songs of deep comfort and sustenance for African Americans. One striking example comes from the writings of a Presbyterian abolitionist, James Miller McKim, who visited the South Carolina Sea Islands in the early 1860s. Hearing the music of the slave community he took note of its distinctive and powerful sounds and asked one of the Black men he met where the songs had come from. “Dey make em sah,” the man replied and then explained further. “I’ll tell you, it’s dis way. My master call me up and order me a short peck of corn and hundred lash. My friends see it and is sorry for me. When dey come to de praise meeting dat night dey sing about it. Some’s very good singers and know how; and dey work it in, work it in, you know, till dey get it right; and dat’s de way.”³³

This explanation of the way spirituals were created is richly suggestive of a great many things related to the larger complex of Afro-Atlantic religions, especially the use of song as a form of healing. The man who spoke to McKim essentially described one of the most powerful uses of the spirituals within the enslaved community: that is, as a balm offered to help assuage one another’s pain. Reagon affirms this meaning of the music: “Spirituals were songs created as leverage, as salve, as voice, as a bridge over troubles one could not endure without the flight of song and singing.”³⁴

Whether in response to the physical grief and humiliation of public beatings or the profound heartbreak of having a family member sold away as if cattle, there was song to speak to the unspeakable. The “good singers” mentioned in the passage above were not only women and men with strong voices, but, perhaps even more importantly, they had to have been individuals who knew an alchemy of spirit, sound and compassion that could be brought to bear on the great woundedness of the community, and give it the ingredients of healing. This role of singers as medicine people, musicians and artists as the priests/healers of the community, is one that the creators of the spirituals shared with their relatives in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname, Jamaica and other parts of the diaspora as well.

During the days following Hurricane Katrina when tens of thousands of Black people were horrifyingly abandoned in the New Orleans Convention Center, there were reports that one of the evacuees, Mrs. Anita Roach, choir director of a New Orleans church, gathered family, friends and strangers in her vicinity to sing spirituals as a way of diffusing tensions and giving one another encouragement in the face of debilitating psychic assault. A man sitting nearby, Mr. Jesse Jones, who had recently watched a close friend die of dehydration, explained that the songs managed to soothe his spirit a bit. He remarked that the music also helped keep the mass of people calm in a potentially explosive situation. “We had some rioting going on the other night,” Jones recalled, “but when she broke out in the spiritual song it just sent a wave of calm through the whole crowd.”³⁵

VIII. Retirer d’en bas d’leau: Reclaiming Ancestors: Haitian Vodou