WHAT'S A BLACK CAT BONE?

WARNING TO PETA MEMBERS AND MODERN ART SNOBS! If you're excessively sensitive about furry creatures and/or modern art, DO NOT read the following.

"We Negroes in Eatonville know a number of things that the hustling, bustling white man never dreams of. He is a materialist with little care for overtones. They have only eyes and ears, we see with the skin.

For instance, if a white person were halted on the streets of Orlando and told that Old Man Morgan, the excessively black Negro hoodoo man, can kill any person indicated and paid for, without ever leaving his house or even seeing his victim, he'd laugh in your face and walk away, wondering how long the Negro will continue to wallow in ignorance and superstition. But no black person in a radius of twenty miles will smile, not much. They know." - From "Black Death" by Zora Neale Hurston.

The Southern African-American writer and cultural anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, dedicated years of her life to traveling the South in search of documenting vanishing Southern African-American cultural and spiritual practices and traditions, especially all things Hoodoo.

One of the most controversial of Hoodoo practices is the infamous Black Cat Bone ritual. Hurston herself admitted to participating in a Black Cat Bone ceremony.

So did my Choctaw Indian grandmother in Mississippi; I inherited her Black Cat Bone upon her death.

What’s a Black Cat Bone? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In Hoodoo magic culture, the Black Cat Bone is good luck charm, especially to bring back the wayward lover. Costly and valued, its scarcity was largely due to the elaborate ceremony which was required for its preparation – again, you have been warned and the fainthearted and/or animal lovers are advised to skip the next part.

WARNING! EXTREMELY SENSITIVE MATERIAL FOLLOWS!

According to catherine yoronode, author of "Hoodoo In Theory and Pactice", Hoodoo practitioners "believe every black cat has within its body one bone that will either grant the owner invisibility or can be used to bring back a lost lover. To secure this bone, they said, a black cat must be thrown alive into a cauldron of boiling water at midnight. The animal dies in agony, and the heartless practitioner boils the carcass until the meat falls off the bones. Some say that the special bone will be the top one left when the water boils away, others say it can only be found by placing each bone in turn beneath the tongue while an assistant stands by to notify the practitioner that he has become invisible, and still others swear that if all the bones are thrown into a stream that runs north (uncommon in most of North America), the desired bone will be one that floats on the water and heads south. Once found, the black cat bone is carried in a mojo bag and anointed with Van Van Oil to bring back a lost lover. The oil or fat of the cat is bottled for use as a candle dressing and for anointing gambler's charms."

I got a black cat bone
I got a mojo too
I got the Johnny Concheroo
I'm gonna mess with you – “(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man” by Willie Dixon, Mississippi Blues Artist.

Like Willie Dixon, I’m from Mississippi too and I’ve got my Black Cat Bone and mojo working as did he; and I intend to mess with the world of modern art and for the purpose of bringing its lost lovers back.

The modern art world long ago turned its back on American society. Perhaps, with a little Hoodoo, things can change.

This site will attempt to burn the flesh off modern art in an effort to find its Black Cat Bone - and I’m convinced that it does exist.

I’m also convinced that if this Black Cat Bone of modern art can be found, anointed and given to the American public in a mojo bag, that tens of millions of Americans who have been alienated from the personal experience of art will reclaim it as a vital cultural practice from the elitist class of art snobs – Artfanistas, I call them - that have attempted to control it for their own purposes for far too long.

We’ll be going down a dangerous path with this discovery – just like Zora Neale Hurston did when she began to seriously investigate the meaning of Hoodoo and participated in the Black Cat Bone ritual.

The journey to discover what happened to art in this country is a dangerous path to walk, but I think you may find it interesting and worth the risk.

I’ll look forward to sharing my ideas, opinions, concepts, thoughts, art and art projects that explore the the state of the art in the world of contemporary American art. I hope you will consider sharing yours with me as well.

So, grab your mojo bag and let's get ready to hit the road through the Mississippi Delta to the ivory towers of the Whitney Museum of American Art!

Don't worry...you won't have to skin any live animales...I'll supply the Black Cat Bone.

James W. Bailey