riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (11/06/83)
A little while back, Vickie Klick et al. were discussing the meaning of
the word "mojo" in net.games.trivia. Among the meanings suggested were
some that didn't make much sense to me given the way the word is used in
blues songs I've heard. So I went to the library and tried to look it up.
According to J.L. Dillard's "Lexicon of Black English," a "mojo" or a
"mojo hand" is primarily a love charm. Its chief use is described well
in a lyric by bluesman Fred McDowell:
Lawd, I'm goin' down in Louisiana
I'mon' buy me a mojo hand;
I'm gonna fix my baby so she won't have no other man.
A mojo is used to "tie" the emotions and/or the sex organs of one's lover
in order to prevent infidelity. Typically, a man under the spell of a
mojo is impotent with any woman other than his bewitcher, while a "tied"
woman will begin to menstruate or to defecate if she attempts intercourse
with another man.
In other interpretations, a mojo is used not to "tie" a victim, but to
make its wielder extremely attractive:
Everybody says she's got a mojo
'Cause she's been acting that stuff
She's got a way of tremblin' down and ooh babe
I mean it's much too tough.
As with most terms, of course, the meaning is subject to extension.
"Mojo" can refer to other sorts of charms, and is often cited in dic-
tionaries of non-Black slang as referring to cocaine or heroin. Dillard
cites the use of "mojo hand" in Texas prisons for a man said to have
exceptional sexual stamina or even stamina at work. He also mentions
variant spellings and pronunciations: "moojoo," "jomo," "joomoo," and
even "Joe Moore (Mo')". The latter is "a piece of gamblers' lucky hoodoo."
Speculation as to the origin of the term goes back to African sources like
Fula "moca: to cast a magic spell by spitting." This presumably led to
Gullah (a creole spoken by Blacks in the Sea Islands off the Carolinan
coast) words like "moco: witchcraft, magic" and "moco'o: medicine man."
Nowhere, by the way, did Dillard mention that "mojo" could have a speci-
fically anatomical meaning, like somebody on the net who thought it meant
the female genitalia.
For those of you not familiar with his work, by the way, I heartily
recommend Dillard's books. He is one of the pioneer students of Black Eng-
lish and the African origins of various sorts of American speech. His books,
"Black English" and "Lexicon of Black English," are scholarly but quite read-
able and contain both a wealth of details for the packrats among us who like
trivia and more important observations about the nature of the English spoken
by American Blacks. His point, of course, is that Black English is a perfectly
valid and surpisingly different variety of English which arose for linguistic,
historical and social reasons and not because of the purported "stupidity" or
"laziness" of its speakers, past or present. (He states his case much better
than I can; if the last sentence is news to you, then read his book.)
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Prentiss Riddle
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