Welcome to “Phoning It In,” a gameshow I made up because I am tired and busy but also like to learn about new books!
I’m claiming to have made up this game, but if you’ve ever showed up for class without having really done the reading—and I taught long enough to know some of you must have—you’ve probably played it before. Here are the rules: I opened the book and looked at the introduction. Kind of. I definitely read the whole table of contents. I wrote down a few questions I could ask without actually engaging most of the text, because—and I cannot stress this enough—I didn’t actually read the book. And then I convinced the author to play along.
Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans
Ahmad Greene-Hayes
University of Chicago Press (2025)
The point of this exercise (aside from letting me chat with smart folks about cool-sounding projects) is for the author to help me, and by extension you, understand the most important parts of their work without getting bogged down in the particulars.
The particulars matter! If you have the time and the funds and the energy, you should read this book closely, as I know enough about the author to trust that their work is insightful and engaging even if I definitely didn’t give it the attention it deserved! But look, it’s been a long apocalypse, okay? Let’s start with the essentials and worry about the rest later.
Today’s contestant is Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Assistant Professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School, 2024-25 Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (Chicago 2025). Dr. Greene-Hayes has written for RD on why whiteness and maleness are drawing young white men to churches in record numbers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Challenge 1: Can I correctly identify the argument after skimming the introduction.
MPG: Okay first of all “Zora Neale Hurston descended into the underworld in New Orleans and the Black Atlantic in the late 1920s into the 1930s and never came back” is a great opening line. This is up there with “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Goddamn.
Second, I think you’re looking at New Orleans through the lens of all of this incredibly rich material that Zora Neale Hurston pulled together and arguing that religion and race—and specifically religion and Blackness—get made in this time, in this space, by all of these folks on the margins whom regular white Protestant history discards. And that we need to be taking that historical, spatial, and demographic specificity seriously when we think about the making of race and American religion, both outside a material world and also outside traditional religious spaces. Did I get it?
AGH: Part of it! But let’s back up for a second. The book emerged because I was frustrated with this narrative in African American history that seemingly all Black people become a part of the “Negro Church” in the afterlife of slavery. It’s an idea that’s so pervasive—and we know it’s not true! Yes, the church is important; institutions are important. But I was curious about other kinds of social and religious experiments, as I call them, in the afterlife of slavery.
During the 70 year stretch from the immediate post-emancipation period through the development of Jim Crow order and racial terror and well into the mid-century, we have people who have one foot in and one foot out of the church. Others are completely and wholly disinterested in church life. I wanted to see what happens when we follow Hurston’s journey through the underworld of early 20th century New Orleans.
When we follow Hurston, we find the queer people, the faith healers, the sex workers—all these unruly subjects who have a lot to say about religion, and they are not inside of the four walls of a church. These people are aware that Jim Crow is above their heads. They are also communing with ancestors, spirits, and deities that don’t work within the registers of this world. The underworld was a space in which they developed theories of religion.
Challenge 2: Can I—an eager but perhaps, uh, overcommitted and therefore slightly distracted reader—understand key concepts in the book without looking at the book.
MPG: “Underworlding” seems to be at the core of this book. I’m understanding the term to mean religio-racial [get footnote from KGL piece] self-, community-, and world-making work being done by the “conjurers, church mothers, sex workers, queer faith healers, and street preachers” Hurston is interacting with throughout New Orleans, well outside respectable avenues for Black religious authority. Can you expand on your concept of “underworlding” for us?
AGH: In the early 20th century, social scientists, police, and arbiters of the state used “underworld” in the pejorative, largely relating to the world of criminals—the underworld disguises, hides, conceals criminal activity. But for many of the individuals Hurston was in conversation with, the underworld was a site for making beauty, making a way out of no way, of “worlding” differently.
For example, an 1897 New Orleans mayoral edict criminalized Hoodoo and Conjure and Vodou. You could be arrested if the police found a mojo bag on your person. There’s a real sense that the state was actively trying to cast out all material evidence of the African past. So practitioners who were Black and Christian, but also Black and non-Christian, Black and what I call quasi-Christian—all of them are aware that being Black and religious, being Black and concerned with the mystical, is a criminal enterprise.
The underworld is where they are doing this criminalized re-making of religion. I wanted to spend time with the underworld as a site for theoretical entry. In many ways, I see my work as a kind of archival necromancy. I have a real desire to recover what Black people from the past have said about themselves, to amplify what these archival intellectual ancestors were already saying almost 100 years ago.
Challenge 3: A critique of the book that has absolutely nothing to do with the substance of the book.
MPG: I suspect this might actually speak to the substance of the book, but your chapters aren’t “chapters.” You call them “visitations.” Can you walk me through that decision?
AGH: I wanted “visitations” to signal that before we get into the nitty-gritty of the chapters themselves, we need to earnestly sit with Hurston as an underworld worker, as a theorist of religion. And I wanted readers to get a sense of my process. We have to commune with Hurston, to sit with what she’s saying. By doing that, you might find yourself talking back to Hurston—might start underlining or raising questions. Because she doesn’t get everything right.
When we’re working with archives and primary sources, we feel things. We sense things. So through these visitations, I’m talking back to Hurston, raising questions of her, critically assessing what she’s offered us. And I’m inviting readers to do the same. This approach blends theory and ethnography and history as modes of interpretation in the study of Black religion. We desperately need methods and approaches that allow us to tell more capacious stories.
Challenge 4: In which I try to deflect attention from not having read the book by asking a question I think makes me sound clever.
MPG: So when I haven’t done my homework, I often find myself trying to relate whatever I’m supposed to be discussing with stuff I already know really well. (It’s not not a Hegel Boy compulsion.) I have, as you know, done a fair amount of yelling on the internet about cults. In Underworld Work, you called New Orleans “the womb of cults.” Please say so much more about that.
AGH: It’s always interesting to me when the term “cult” is invoked, and it’s all over this archive. Black religionists are “cultists.” That’s the really basic and reductionist argument the state makes against these practitioners of any kind of non-Christian or quasi-Christian religion. I want us to ask what it means when “cult” gets invoked—because so many of the things we say about “cults” we can say about mainstream religion too! Calling Black religions “cults” is a way to delegitimize and dismiss their religious innovations. But some of these practitioners re-inscribed, re-valued “cult” with a different meaning, one that defied the state’s power to define them or their practices.
MPG: Yes! And one of the things that I see you adding to the existing work on Black religions as “cults” is a sustained attention to sexuality and the role it plays in the making of religion and race.
AGH: Underworld Work definitely shows that American ideas about religion, race, and sexuality are worked out on Black bodies, through lynching, sexual terror, all of that. In chapter one I trace the usage of “cult” in early 20th century Louisiana. The sources I worked with—social scientific resources, police records, WPA records—use sexualized language to interpret Black religion. They call Vodou “the midnight orgy.” Their description of spirit possession uses eroticized imagery. There’s a discomfort or fear about who is possessing Black bodies that I find fascinating. If it’s not a plantation owner, it must be these African gods.
Challenge 5: In conclusion, I did not read the conclusion.
MPG: Your conclusion gives us the story of King Louis Herbert Narcisse as a way to encapsulate how Black non-Christian and quasi-Christians in New Orleans created and practiced religion(s) as ways to survive and maybe even flourish under Jim Crow’s racial and sexual terrorism and America’s anti-Blackness. What should we learn from this person’s life?
AGH: Narcisse was born just outside New Orleans and was deeply influenced by the religious cultures of the city. The Baptist, Spiritualists, Vodou, all these things merged together in the religious culture he brings to Oakland. He’s a migrant, part of the Great Migration. He was raised by conjurers. He was gay. He just encapsulated the spirit of all the other people that readers would have encountered throughout Underworld Work.
