Hoochie Daddy Hoodoo

12/30/2025

12/30/2025

12/22/2025

The Candy Lady Was the System
Across Black America, a front-room business became a neighborhood’s smallest, steadiest institution—priced in quarters and governed by respect.

For many Black Americans, “the Candy Lady” is a memory so universal it can feel folkloric—one of those childhood references that prompts a smile before you’ve even decided you’re smiling. Yet if you treat the Candy Lady as nostalgia, you miss what she reveals: a neighborhood institution built at the scale of the living room.

She sold candy, yes. She sold chips and pickles and juice and sometimes baked goods bought in bulk and resold as individual portions. She sold frozen cups—Kool-Aid or fruit drink poured into plastic sleeves and frozen solid—called different names in different places, but recognized everywhere as the price of surviving summer. And she sold something else, less sentimental and more consequential: predictability.

The Candy Lady was a micro-economy calibrated to scarcity and a safety system that didn’t call itself one. In neighborhoods shaped by segregation, underinvestment, food deserts, and over-policing, the Candy Lady’s enterprise often filled gaps the formal economy left behind. She made childhood more navigable: one less hungry hour, one less unsupervised stretch, one more adult who knew your name and knew how to enforce a rule without calling the state.

Read the full article at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2025/12/21/the-candy-lady-was-the-system/

12/20/2025

12/05/2025

🖕🏾

12/05/2025

12/04/2025

11/30/2025

The Night the Firehoses Ran Dry
Birmingham, Alabama – May 4, 1963 (the day after the dogs refused)
Bull Connor, furious that the dogs had failed, ordered every firehose in the city turned on the children full force.
At 1:14 p.m. the valves were opened wide.
Water shot out for exactly seven feet, then fell straight to the ground like rain.
No pressure.
No spray.
Just soft streams that soaked shoes but never knocked anyone down.
Firemen twisted valves harder.
Nothing.
The hoses stayed gentle.
The children walked forward, singing, and the water parted around them like a curtain.
When the last child passed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the hoses suddenly roared back to full power, almost ripping the nozzles from the firemen’s hands.
The city water department tore up streets for weeks looking for the “valve malfunction.”
They never found one.
Every May 4 at 1:14 p.m., the fire hydrants along Kelly Ingram Park leak a few drops, even when capped tight.
Old men who were children that day still come, put their palms under the drip, and say the water still tastes like freedom.