✦ A Saint Louis Series ✦
THE MUDDY BANKS
Down south ain’t the only place
Big steppers in conjure went to, came from, and lived right here on the Mississippi. Seven episodes from Auntie Tasha honoring her hometown of Saint Louis and the Missouri workers the history books tried to leave out.
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Why Saint Louis
The river carried Indigenous, French Creole, and African tradition into the heartland. The Midwest kept its own diviners, its own protection workers, and its own buried bundles. Every episode separates what an eyewitness saw, what the ground holds, what the court wrote down, and what is legend — and says each one plainly.
The seven episodes
Episode 1 of 7
Saint Louis and the River
A shout-out to Saint Louis — the river that carried Indigenous, French Creole, and African tradition into the heartland, and the two tools you need before the stories begin.
Episode 2 of 7
The Midnight Ceremony and the Unnamed Voodoo Queen
Brown's 1880 eyewitness account of a secret Saint Louis ceremony — and the discipline of saying plainly what we do and do not know about a queen whose name was never written.
Episode 3 of 7
Uncle Frank, the Diviner
William Wells Brown sat for a twenty-five-cent reading from an enslaved Saint Louis diviner — the gourd of water, the prophecy of freedom, and the doubt Brown wrote down too.
Episode 4 of 7
Dinkie, the Goopher King
On Poplar Farm, an enslaved African's protection working kept a whip away from his body — the deepest lesson of the series: conjure here was defense.
Episode 5 of 7
What the Ground Remembers
Archaeologists found two Nkisi bundles under the floorboards at White Haven — beads, crab claws, silver dimes, and four-hole buttons that speak the Kongo cosmogram.
Episode 6 of 7
Guinea Sam Nightingale: Legend and Boonville
Out of Saint Louis and into Boonville: Missouri's best-known conjure man, who arrived — by legend — from a cannon, and by record, carrying more than the papers could hold.
Episode 7 of 7
Conjure Goes to Market: Dr. Pearce
The series closes in the twentieth century, when the traditions moved into the mail — an Igbo-rooted doctor's arrest in 1927 Saint Louis, and the people who wrote away for hope.
The Muddy Banks is part of Hoodoo Foundations (HOO 101) — included with membership, or $77 on its own.