Keywords
Wellness
Keywords for Black Louisiana views “wellness” expansively and radically to encompass an array of practices. For Africans in Gulf Coast Louisiana, wellness meant more than the physical health. Enslavers demanded control over Africans bodies, minds, and futures (via their reproductive labor). Wellness, for Africans, meant wresting control of their whole selves from enslavers. Wellness could mean body autonomy (laboring as they wished, playing as they wished, imbibing food and drink as they wished). It could mean spiritual practices that protected and preserve African systems of belief or maintained ways of organizing the supernatural that varied from Catholic doctrine. It could mean play, mischief, even behavior the French marked as crimes such as theft or running away, since these crimes often created space for broader wellness practices (feasts, gatherings, and marroonage).
Along with misreading wellness practices as crimes, enslavers also misread wellness practices as superstition. In 1734, Le Page du Pratz, for example described the creation of gris-gris, protective devices composed of natural and inanimate materials, as being “very superstitious and attached to their prejudices.” As Gwendolyn Midlo Hall notes, “Reference to grigri is found in New Orleans court records in 1773. Charms ritually fabricated and worn for protection, as well as charms intended to harm others, have kept their African names to the present day. Zinzin, an amulet of support or power in Louisiana Creole, has the same name and meaning in Bambara. Grisgris, a harmful charm, comes from the Mande word gerregerys. The words zvanga and grisgris are still widely used in New Orleans by speakers of English as well as by Creoles.”
