From the careful placement of furniture to the handwritten drink menu and printed out informational notecards about bulk herbs, it's clear that The Herbal Joint is rooted in intentionality.
At the drink counter, fresh herbs are finely chopped for every order. Fruits are muddled by hand. Ingredients including lemonade and mint concentrate are prepared in-house by co-owner Matthew Smith, Sr., who is also responsible for the careful crafting of the recipes.
Upstairs, more than 100 herbs line a massive set of shelves, each in a hand-labeled jar with a card describing its benefits to the body. A large wall covered in blackboard paint invites visitors to leave their favorite herbal recipes. Plant propagations grow across from a flourishing monstera. Paintings by Black artists hang on the walls.
Co-owner Erica Dickson regularly cleanses the space with smoke to clear the air and invite positive energy. She said all these choices serve the ultimate purpose of The Herbal Joint: to be a welcoming space that feels good to enter.
“If I don't want to buy anything but just want to come sit on the couch and put a puzzle together — if outside those doors, and everything that's going on that's so crazy, it's a space that feels good,” Dickson said. “And so, if you don't touch an herb on the shelf, we also know that that's healing to your body and your soul and your spirit.”
The intention infused throughout The Herbal Joint reflects the deliberate practice of herbalism, which Dickson is certified in. Also the founder of the Mid-Missouri Black Doula Collective, she started her herbal education after one of the first births she assisted with.
“She needed a couple stitches. They did that right on the couch, and then they administered some herbs to help with bleeding,” Dickson said. “And she did skin to skin. And it was uninterrupted for a good hour. It was beautiful to witness the bonding that was allowed to take place.”
To further facilitate this bonding time, the mother chose to leave the placenta attached and let it fall off on its own. To aid this process, it was dressed with salt and herbs. Dickson said seeing how the midwife incorporated herbal treatments during the birth and its aftermath inspired her to seek certification as an herbalist and use that knowledge in her doula practice.
“There are a wealth of things that are not harmful to your body that you could utilize to assist you while you're pregnant and also to assist you during delivery,” Dickson said. “We just talk about all of the structures and systems that are put in place that work against how this should really be, and having a holistic approach to reintroducing things that meant us well in the past could mean us well going forward.”
The intersection of herbalism and reproductive healthcare Dickson centers her current work on is not unique to her. Instead, it echoes 400 years of Black women’s magic in the U.S., a tradition often called conjure.
Conjure is history
Conjure is one of the oldest forms of folk magic in the U.S. It originated with enslaved Africans who combined their native traditions with elements of Christianity and knowledge of the new plants they encountered on American soil.
Lindsey Stewart is an associate philosophy professor at the University of Memphis and the author of The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic. Her book outlines conjure’s development over centuries, focusing on how its practitioners directly contributed to modern cultural staples like blue jeans, Vicks VapoRub and the many musical genres that spin off from the blues.
“It was important for me to make sure that people saw that the history of Black women in America, the magic that we practiced for over 400 years, has impacted your very life as an American,” Stewart said during her Online Author Series conversation through Daniel Boone Regional Library.
Stewart was partially compelled to write The Conjuring of America in response to how she saw Black history being addressed in academia. She said conversations are often limiting, focused on systemic oppression and the Black community’s positionality to white people.
“There’s a lot of our life that isn’t centered around white people and our oppression, and I wanted to get to that,” Stewart said. “And one of the ways that you get to how we think about ourselves, how we relate to each other as a community, is thinking through our spirit.”
Readers who progress through the book are offered a different lens on American history. To make the story more immediate and accessible to audiences, Stewart structured this history into five time periods with five cultural contributions, using specific women who are directly tied to them as central characters.
First is Wiley, an enslaved woman in North Carolina who was owned by the family of Lunsford Richardson, the credited inventor of Vicks VapoRub. In his childhood, he would have been in close proximity to Wiley and, after passing her herbal knowledge down to her daughter Miley Stancil, that daughter likely treated Richardson’s young son with a remedy akin to his patented treatment. Richardson then asked Stancil for the recipe and passed it off as his.
Stewart learned this alternative story of Vicks VapoRub from Wiley’s descendant, Crystal Sanders, who had it passed down to her from older generations of her family.
“It was really nice to go to her, the elders in her family, and say, ‘No, I've actually done this research, and it looks like your story is very, very likely,’" Stewart said. "And it was also, in some ways, kind of sad to think about the generational wealth that their family could have had if they'd been compensated for the knowledge that they contributed most likely to Vic's VapoRub."
Another woman Stewart follows in her book is Aunt Caroline Dye, a conjure practitioner who is referenced in multiple blues standards, including “Saint Louis Blues” by W. C. Handy.
“It's kind of like a tradition that the blues man or blues woman goes to Aunt Caroline Dye to get a mojo to fix whatever is ailing them, whether that be someone who has decided to be their enemy or a lover that's crossed them,” Stewart said.
Dye lived in Arkansas and was considered a powerful spiritual leader within the Black community. She was known for her mojos — bundles of certain objects with specific properties that are believed to be possessed by a spirit that can assist the user. Blues musician Will Shade said Dye could make a mojo so powerful you could win anyone’s money.
Stewart’s extensive research into women like Wiley, Miley Stancil and Aunt Caroline Dye meant they became a foundational part of her day to day while she wrote The Conjuring of America.
“These women have been with me for two years, and they've been so encouraging. They've been part of the reason why I get up in the mornings, because I love reading about them, learning about them, writing about them. And now the book is done.”
While the book follows many women whose conjure reputation precedes them, one in particular has a more personal connection to Stewart. It’s her great grandmother, after whom Stewart was named.
Stewart grew up with her great grandmother practicing conjure in the kitchen. She was a candy lady — a community fixture who fed and looked after the neighborhood kids when school got out, but their parents were still at work. Stewart said the process of writing The Conjuring of America allowed her to explore this side of her great grandmother.
“This was kind of the first time that I really spent a lot of time with my memories of her, and I see her differently now, having written the book. I'm always kicking myself with, like I should have asked her so many more questions while she was alive,” Stewart said. “I feel connected to conjure women through her.”
Conjure is family
Columbia resident Philana Crite has been in alternative spirituality spaces for her entire adult life. She said practices that are new to many, such as the use of tarot and crystals, are ones that she’s been familiar with for years, if not decades. But she has recently started returning to another practice, one she first learned about through her mother and grandmother.
“That process even expanded more here with rootworking, what people call folk magic, folk medicine,” Crite said. “What my mom learned from her mother about what you do for something if you're not well.”
Rootworking is a subtype of conjure, according to The Conjuring of America. It combines aspects of Yoruba religion, such as herbalism, with the minkisi of the Congolese and Protestantism.
Crite remembered being the young mother of a colicky son in Kansas City. Her grandmother sent some members of the family off to an obscure drug store in the middle of an old, weathered neighborhood to buy catnip tea. Once that was secured, she instructed Crite to mix some whisky and rock salt into the tea to treat her child.
“That was my first time experiencing my grandmother saying, ‘Here, go get some of this and do this and do this,’ and you know what? As a young mother, growing up away from farm life, that was like, ‘What are you giving my son? And what's going on?’” Crite said.
Crite also remembered her grandmother telling her about the medicinal benefits of tobacco and comfrey. She said back in the 1980s, remedies like these were being directly challenged by the medical system. Fears of toxicity in high doses made them harder to access.
Crite and her mother and grandmother are not the only conjure users in her family. Her uncle recently introduced her to an older cousin with an extensive knowledge of herbalism, and they briefly spoke over the phone.
“I was like, I really need to come and just sit with you, because you have amassed all this information on natural healing, herbals, things like that, and nobody else in our family seems to be real concerned about that,” Crite said to her. “But I really want to know what you know, because that's how we stay alive.”
Crite’s spiritual practice also heavily involves reiki and the use of tuning forks for sound healing. She said different musical intervals can be used to address different client concerns, such as anxiety or feeling ungrounded. Crite said she deliberately does not adhere to a single spiritual system and has respect for all of them, so long as they are being used to assist people on their soul journeys.
Crite passed on her eclectic practice to her sons. Including them, there are four continuous generations of Crite's family who have engaged with conjure and adjacent spiritualities. She said her deepest hope for her sons' spiritual lives is that they are able to find like-minded men to build community around.
"They are very spiritually focused, but being able to create and be a part of community is very challenging for them, because it just doesn't exist like that," Crite said. "I'm the mother of sons — that means a lot to me — and I always have a concern about how men's spiritual lives are evolving."
Crite's investment in the spiritual lives of men, which she does not think is nurtured by broader society, is reflective of another central tenet of conjure: political resistance and societal evolution.
Conjure is resistance
Lindsey Stewart's book emphasizes that conjure was used by Black women throughout American history as a form of resistance. A passage from its introduction reads, "Black women have always had to live in a world that was hostile to them. Conjure is one way that our foremothers survived and at times, defied that world."
Marie Laveau is one historical example of a conjure woman who made personal power through her craft. In The Conjuring of America, Stewart wrote that Laveau was widely believed to have sway over the police, favor in the courts and success in managing love affairs through her gris-gris, which during her lifetime referred to anything used to harm or heal someone through spiritual means.
Laveau's gris-gris was associated with social rebellion, which upset those in power.
"Marie Laveau was often invoked in acts of rebellion and resistance, whether that was against slave masters or whether that was against husbands who were treating their wives badly," Stewart said.
During Laveau's time, Black women were very vulnerable to abuse. According to The Conjuring of America, most stories about Laveau focus on romantic autonomy, particularly as a response to romantic mistreatment and intimate partner violence. She also assisted women with abortion and other reproductive health concerns.
Almost 150 years after Laveau's death in 1881, women like Erica Dickson are still joining the reproductive healthcare system and, like Laveau, this can be seen as an act of rebellion. Even more rebellious is the inclusion of herbalism and other conjure-adjacent work to reproductive treatment.
"When there was this insertion of white culture into the systems, or patriarchy into the systems, there was this erasure of the practices that were ours," Dickson said. "It's very powerful to see people moving into the spaces and reclaiming it and being very public and forward facing in a way that would allow us to get back to places that serve our communities in ways that will not only keep us alive or allow us to survive, but also allow us to thrive."
Reclamation and visibility have also been part of Crite's journey. Her exploration of alternative spiritualities began in the 1980s, when the metaphysical stores she visited were predominantly white.
"There were very few people who were not white when I was walking in places, but because you're so used to that in America, it is kind of like you just deal with it," Crite said. "The assumption of the majority culture is that you are perceiving and making use of this information in the same way that they are. And I think that is unfortunate."
Crite said the very nature of existing as a Black woman in America makes the understanding of alternative spirituality different, because there is a shared set of life experiences that directly affect how Black women see the world.
The Conjuring of America is a deep dive into this way of seeing, offering historical context for an often overlooked practice that was established and perpetuated by Black American women. Although conjure belongs to the Black community, its central message can apply to everyone.
"No matter how dire things are, it's always possible to drum up a little bit of power," Stewart said. "And sometimes that power comes in really unexpected places."
