Arthur Flowers has a complicated relationship with his hometown — a place he loves and a place, he feels, doesn’t respect him enough.

“I couldn’t get a job there, man,” Flowers said of Memphis. “Not even as a secretary at the Board of Education. But you know, it’s that thing about being a prophet in your hometown. I got family there that needs me. I want to be a myth of Memphis, in the (Mississippi) Delta holy ground.”

Flowers — the native South Memphian, novelist, Syracuse University professor emeritus and self-proclaimed High Hoodoo of Memphis — is coming home from New York this week to perform with what he calls “Rickydoc’s Traveling Medicine Show.”

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“I’ma take steps to make sure that title sticks,” Flowers said. “Me and my hoodoo buddies gon’ blow their f-----g minds.”

At 7 p.m. Sept. 22, Flowers, Sheree Renée Thomas, and several others, including Delta musicologist Ekpe Abioto, will perform at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. 

Flowers grew up in a middle-class family in South Memphis. His father, with whom he shares a name, was a local doctor. Flowers was “always in the smart kid classes, growing up.”

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Flowers earned a bachelor’s degree from what was then Memphis State University and later moved to New York.

There, Flowers found mentorship in John Oliver Killens, an author and civil rights activist from Georgia. His tenure under Killens’ guidance led Flowers to become the executive director of the Harlem Writer’s Guild — a position that gave him power that he ultimately “drove into the ground.”

In an email, Flowers writes about being a leader in the Black Arts Movement around the time of the publication of his first novel (1986):

“I was a power freak. It permeated my work and my organizing, and John determined that he didn’t want me, as his student, to continue to evolve on that path.”

And Flowers didn’t. He was humbled by life.

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“John told me, ‘Arthur, you’re a brilliant writer. But with some compassion, you could be profound. At the time, I only heard the ‘brilliant’ part.”

It took Flowers 16 years to realize what his late mentor was trying to tell him. He began to see life through a lens of empathy instead of power, to live with a philosophy of grace instead of anger.

“When you get broken, you can either stay broken or come back together on a higher plane,” he said.

Healing through hoodoo

Flowers, on his way out of New York to recollect himself, came across a Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower pamphlet that would reconfigure his life purpose:

“I read that and said, ‘If I could write an African-American holy book, I wouldn’t feel so bad about proving myself inadequate.’”

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It was this goal that would shape Flowers’s professional and spiritual career as an author, griot orator and High Hoodoo of Memphis.

Hoodoo is a form of spiritualism created by enslaved Africans in North America. Its methodologies include divination, conjuration and soul healing.

“Hoodoo is not about pantheons,” said Sheree Reneé Thomas, an author, editor and mentee of Flowers. “It’s not about hierarchies. It’s about you connecting to wisdom.”

The practice of hoodoo was shrouded in secrecy during slavery in the United States, but spread widely throughout the American South, including Memphis.

“We weren’t granted doctors, we weren’t allowed to become doctors,” Thomas said of hoodoo rootworkers (healers). “They had to not only heal the bodies of those in the community, but also their spirits. They were almost like their life coaches in a way.”

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Flowers’ familiarity with hoodoo runs in his family.

“My hoodoo name is ‘Rickydoc’ because my middle name is Richard, and my father was a doctor. Lots of people called me ‘Doc’ growing up,” Flowers says. “My mother’s family was deep in hoodoo, but they turned their backs on it.”

The family’s estrangement from hoodoo wasn’t an isolated happening for the spiritual practice. Hoodoo in Memphis, according to Thomas, has long gone understudied and undervalued.

“Sometimes for a culture to survive, it has to be almost invisible,” Thomas said. “If you don’t share the signs and symbols for others to know what they’re looking at, then that knowledge can be lost.”

Flowers has dedicated his life to the preservation of the hoodoo tradition by retooling it, in his words, “for a 21st century sensibility.”

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“Hoodoo today is still primarily a folk magic system,” he said. “Early in my practice I abandoned folk magic as a viable paradigm and started retooling hoodoo to be a viable indigenous spiritual system. Folk magic was fine for a folk people but we ain’t been a folk people for generations, that’s the hoodoo past.”

Flowers calls what he does “custodial” and “literary hoodoo.” Custodial, because he takes responsibility for the wellbeing of his tribe — Black people, but also all of humanity.

He said his brand of hoodoo has been called literary hoodoo, “because it is manifested through literary and sacred works.”

He is just one generation in a legacy of prolific writers — such as Ishmael Reed, Henry Dumas and Zora Neale Hurston — whose oeuvres have preserved and educated on the teachings of hoodoo. 

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His holy book — the one he sought out to write all those years ago on his way out of New York — was published in 2019, titled “The Hoodoo Book of Flowers.” He has also published two novels, three children’s books, and a memoir. He taught in the creative writing program at Syracuse, having been a faculty member since 1996. 

“You don’t write literature for yourself,” says Flowers. “You write it for the generations to come.”

“Arthur Flowers is one of our city’s living legacies,” Thomas said. “Any opportunity we have as a city and as a community to witness what he does so well — and to give him his roses — is an opportunity well-utilized.”

Rickydoc’s Traveling Medicine Show will perform at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 22 at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.