Abstract

This chapter considers the conflation of the Eurocentric conceptualisation of the devil with the African figure Papa Legba in an analysis of how the crossroads manifest as a key locus of cultural and ideological exchange in North American screen and popular culture. The focus is particularly the Southern Gothic genre – spanning film, television, music, and literature – and its constructions of “Voodoo,” which highlight how the Southern Gothic assimilates and reflects upon the otherness of the American South. Underpinning this otherness is the intermediate space of the crossroads, where the boundaries between life and death, good and evil, and Black and white break down to reveal some of the socio-historical tensions that have informed the construct of the Gothic South.

Keywords: Voodoo, Papa Legba, Southern Gothic, Crossroads, Folkloresque

The legend of US blues musician Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads in return for success has, for decades, shrouded Johnson's life and career in a mythic discourse, with proponents of the legend claiming that the proof of the story's veracity is in the lyrics. With references to hot foot powder, hellhounds, and walking side by side with the devil, the imagery evoked in Johnson's songs is more likely to evidence not a Faustian pact but the culturally specific folk beliefs and superstitions that circulated through the African American population in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where Johnson grew up. As Barry Lee Pearson and Bill Mc-Culloch (2003), researchers into Johnson mythology, argue, the legend was constructed “well after Johnson's lifetime to support a romanticized image of an American musical icon and make Johnson more appealing to people who were unfamiliar with his culture” (102). The “culture” Pearson and McCulloch refer to is the culture of the South: specifically, the culture of Black people of the South, whose links to their African roots and identity have historically manifested in spiritual practices that were imported with slavery and became enmeshed with Christianity, through both forced and voluntary conversion.