Also called Chinese Wash, Scrubbing the steps, Spiritual floor wash
In African American Hoodoo, floors and front steps are scrubbed with a spiritual wash, such as the lemongrass-scented Chinese Wash, to clear out bad conditions and draw in luck.
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Take care: Never mix cleaners that contain ammonia with bleach; plain soap and herbs are enough. Rinse floors that babies or pets crawl on, and wear gloves if your skin is sensitive to essential oils.
Chinese Wash is a commercial soap scented with lemongrass, sold for decades by Southern and urban curio shops and drugstores for cleaning away bad luck. Despite the name it has no link to China, a common style of exotic product naming in the trade.
Uses: Chinese Wash, water
After washing, the front steps were scrubbed or lined with powdered red brick, believed to stop harmful work from crossing the threshold. New Orleans households kept up the practice well into the twentieth century.
Uses: red brick dust
Hyatt interviewed some 1,600 informants, many of them practising rootworkers, and recorded dozens of floor and step washes for luck, protection and business, using ingredients from salt and sugar to perfumes and herb teas. The direction of scrubbing and where the water was thrown mattered as much as the mix.
Uses: salt, sugar, perfume, herb tea
Hoodoo is a body of folk magic developed by enslaved and free African Americans in the South, blending West and Central African spiritual ideas, Protestant Christianity, Native American plant knowledge and European folk practice. It is not a religion with initiations but a practical craft, and household cleansing is among its most common work. Zora Neale Hurston studied it in New Orleans and published Hoodoo in America in 1931.
Between 1936 and 1940 the Anglican minister Harry Middleton Hyatt recorded interviews with about 1,600 people across the South, later published in five volumes. Floor and step washes appear again and again. By the mid-twentieth century curio companies sold ready-made washes. It is a living African American tradition, so honor its roots and buy from Black-owned suppliers where you can.
A wash with the American cologne Florida Water, first sold in New York in 1808, used across Hoodoo, Latin American curanderismo and Caribbean spiritual traditions to cleanse a person or a room.
A raw egg is passed over the body to absorb heaviness, envy or the evil eye, then cracked into water and read. Widespread across Mexico and Latin America.
In Japan salt (shio) is a common means of purification rooted in Shinto ideas of cleansing impurity: sprinkled after a funeral, heaped in small cones at doorways, and thrown by sumo wrestlers before a bout.
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