Drawing Customers and Business Luck

A woman bootlegger in Richmond told Hyatt she once had so much trade in New York that “then I took mah sign down ‘cus too many people was cornin’ in the house” (Hyatt 2663 · Richmond, Va. · informant 383).

Hyatt gave business and customers a whole subsection of his first volume, and it is one of the longest. His informants ran cafés, rooming houses, beauty parlours, juke joints and whiskey houses, and what they wanted from rootwork was a full room and a full till.

What it is

Business luck is drawing work. Its aim is to pull people through a door, keep them spending, and bring them back.

The work centred on three places:

• The floor and steps, scrubbed or mopped with a dressed water.
• The door and posts, where coins, horseshoes and dressed items were nailed.
• The room itself, where incense, stones and roots worked on everyone who came in.

What Hyatt’s informants said

The scrub was the backbone of it. The Richmond bootlegger burned sulphur, sugar and cinnamon every morning, and said plainly, “when I want trade, wash it to me.” She washed her house with urine (Hyatt 2663 · Richmond, Va. · informant 383).

She was far from alone. Urine in the scrub water turns up again and again: with brown sugar and lye on Wednesdays and Fridays in Memphis (Hyatt 2700 · Memphis, Tenn. · informant 927), with brown sugar in Algiers (Hyatt 2669 · Algiers, La. · informant 1594), and with oil of cinnamon and garlic in Vicksburg.

The Vicksburg informant mopped from the front steps back into the house before sunrise, and silence was part of it: “Jest hold your peace – don’t say nothing to nobody” (Hyatt 2689 · Vicksburg, Miss. · informant 768).

Direction mattered to all of them. The water was carried from the front steps inwards, to wash the trade into the house, never out of the door.

Coins, stones and the door

• Pennies. One nailed head up to the front door, one to the back door and one to the back post down the steps (Hyatt 2119 · Brunswick, Ga. · informant 1214).
• Indian head pennies and the glass. A Florence bootlegger poured a customer a drink, set the empty glass on sulphur for an hour, washed it, and nailed Indian head pennies at the front and back doors (Hyatt 2115 · Florence, S. Car. · informant 1322).
• The silver dime. Kept damp with alcohol over the door where customers came in (Hyatt 2072 · Vicksburg, Miss. · informant 756).
• The penny and the horseshoe. An Indian head penny with its face to the street and a horseshoe over the door. It worked, he said, “In any kinda house where dey operatin'” (Hyatt 2110 · Brunswick, Ga. · informant 1192).
• Lodestone. A he and a she piece set in the building and fed whiskey when the power ran down (Hyatt 2069 · St. Petersburg, Fla. · informant 992).
• Incense burned in the four corners of the house to gain customers (Hyatt 2044 · Waycross, Ga. · informant 1074).

The lodestone man was specific about the upkeep: “Ah creates it up by giving it some whiskey”. If he went three or four weeks without, he said, he could feel it go down.

Whose business it was

A good share of this work came from the illegal trade. Bootleggers, gamblers and house-keepers needed customers and needed the police kept off at the same time, and many of the same washes and nails did both jobs. Hyatt’s informants often gave one rite for both purposes in a single breath.

In their own words

“One will bring the other and everyone pays his own way”

(Hyatt 2072 · Vicksburg, Miss. · informant 756)

“people going just pouring in.”

(Hyatt 2577 · New Orleans, La. · informant 797)

“Ah creates it up by giving it some whiskey”

(Hyatt 2069 · St. Petersburg, Fla. · informant 992)

How it’s worked today

Business work is among the most commonly commissioned rootwork today. Shop owners, salon owners and online sellers still wash their thresholds and floors from the front inwards, and still dress coins and lodestones for the till or the door.

Commercial drawing oils, business powders and customer-drawing incense descend directly from the drug-store products Hyatt’s informants bought in the 1930s. Bodily fluids still go into the scrub water in traditional practice, as they did then.

Learn the work

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Source: Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo – Conjuration – Witchcraft – Rootwork, 5 vols., 1970-1978. Numbers refer to Hyatt’s own item numbers; the town and informant number follow. Written by Hoodoo Witch in our own words, with short quotations from Hyatt’s informants for reference.