Black Tarot: African American Women and Divine Processes of Resilience

Abstract

After our meeting in an online occult Facebook group, Amanda decided to come by my house to receive a tarot reading. Immediately, upon her entrance to my living room, we began getting to know one another. I introduced her to my six-month-old puppy and offered her coffee. I unwrapped my tarot cards from the gold and brown cloth where they are kept safe and asked Amanda to shuffle them while telling me what was on her mind. We spoke like old friends, sharing the deepest parts of ourselves. Amanda’s body language told me she was sad. Her shoulders hunched. Eyes cast down. She was struggling with depression. The medication that she was previously using was not working and she was scared to begin a new prescription, not knowing its effects. She was finishing college and beginning a path advocating for reproductive justice. Her goal: to become a doula and help other Black women receive quality care during childbirth. Turning to tarot, Amanda asked, “Will it work? Will I overcome this?” In America, “Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native (AI/AN) women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.” Helping Amanda through this reading felt important, not just for me, but for us all. This article explores African American women’s shifting tarot from a European-dominated tradition into one that cultivates resilience for Black people. Through a process of creolization, or “Hoodoo sensibility” as one of my respondents termed it, Black women make tarot Black by reimagining the Eurocentric deck into one that reflects brown and Black faces and connecting to ancestors long lost through the transatlantic slave trade. I argue that due to the reinterpretation of tarot within an Africana religious framework—what I’ve termed Black tarot—cultivates moments of resilience for Black women practitioners as a temporary experience of perseverance instead of a static state of being. As such, Black tarot acts as a resource for Black women cultivating this processual resilience by revealing the potentialities surrounding a situation, connecting the querent to her ancestors, and providing suggestions for possible courses of action. Additionally, many of my respondents—like Amanda, above—are actively engaged in social justice work. As such, Black tarot not only impacts individual decisions but has the possibility to transform wider networks through community-based action. I have been reading tarot almost all my life. My mother gave me my first tarot deck when I was twelve years old. She taught me about the suits, the major and minor arcana, and the