Sinners Hoodoo Consultant Talks Working With Ryan Coogler & Protecting Black Spirituality On-Screen: ‘Blues Is the Music of Hoodoo’

According to Chireau, there are rarely accurate depictions of Hoodoo until the 21st century, given that many previous stories detail the practice through the lens of superstitions, primitive behavior, demonic implications, or sensationalizations of Voodoo. She credits young people to a current resurgence of interest in understanding the foundations of the Hoodoo practice.

“The strongest aspect of Hoodoo, I would argue, is that it is a tradition of healing,” Chireau says, which she believes Coogler accurately conveys in the film. “Hoodoo isn’t just practice, but thought. Hoodoo for enslaved people, [which] carried after slavery, was the means of healing relationships. Between lovers and families like we see with Annie and [Michael B. Jordan’s] Smoke, but also relationships between the living and dead. This is paramount to Black American people, because the chain between the living and the dead from Africa to America was severed during the Middle Passage.”

In her initial conversations with Coogler, he described for her what would soon be the pivotal Juke Joint scene, wherein Sammie, aka Preacher Boy’s song “I Lied To You” transcends the physical realm, connecting timelines of Black musical traditions from the continent of Africa to present day America.

“You are trying to convey the ancestral moment where time becomes past, present, and future,” she said to him. In African diasporic traditions it is through music that oral histories and traditions are preserved, connecting generations across time and articulated by griots. In this moment where Sammie embodies the spiritual role of griot, Coogler brings to fruition a story that details the higher power of the Blues, one Chireau was happy to help actualize.

In addition to gut-checking details such as Annie’s Hoodoo arsenal including playing cards as opposed to tarot, and foundational herbs such as High John the Conqueror, Chireau spent copious hours speaking with Mosaku about Hoodoo’s function and significance. As distinct Hoodoo practices are largely regional and dependent on familial ways and local herbs, the professor was less concerned with the specifics and more about the respect given to the tradition.