The Hoodoo Job Gwendolyn Brooks Would Rather Forget
Before Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, before she was Illinois' Poet Laureate or a literary icon etched in American memory, she was a 19-year-old girl in Chicago typing letters in a metaphysical office. For four short months, in the mid-1930s, Brooks worked under a man she referred to only as a “spiritual advisor” in a decaying former showplace known as the Mecca Building. She hated the job, but it shaped her all the same.
The Mecca: From Black Elite to Spiritual Sales Floor
Built in 1892 as a luxury apartment complex, the Mecca was once “a splendid palace, a showplace of Chicago,” featuring grand staircases and goldfish bowls in the lobby. By the 1910s it had become a hub for Black professionals, artists, and strivers, a “housing for the Black elite.” But by the Great Depression, it had decayed into a slum with boarded fire escapes and a shadowed reputation.
This was the setting where Brooks took a typing job through the Illinois State Employment Service after finishing a two-year certificate at Wilson Junior College (now Kennedy-King College) in 1936. It was her first real job and she loathed it. The position was with a man selling “magic remedies” under the guise of spiritual authority, a man she would later call “Reverend” or “Prophet Williams.” According to literary scholars and Brooks herself, he operated a religious mail-order business that catered to the desperate, the lonely, and the superstitious.
As she recalled later in a Negro Digest interview:
“The answers were brief:
My Dear Mrs. Jones: I am sure your husband still loves you. You must have faith and continue using the love potion. Thank you for your order.”
She and others in the office opened envelopes stuffed with coins and bills, typed reassuring replies, and “brewed the potions ourselves.” Despite the absurdity of the work, and perhaps because of it, Brooks was offered a promotion: assistant pastor of the man’s tiny adjoining church. She refused. “That was, as I remember it, the most miserable part of my life,” she said during a later interview. “I felt soiled.”
Was It Hoodoo?
What Brooks described sounds like a hybrid: part metaphysical mail-order ministry, part hoodoo business, part Depression-era spiritual hustle. She never used the word “hoodoo” herself, but the activities—making charms, brewing potions, writing out spiritual advice tied to payment—align with traditional African American folk magic and religious commerce of the time.
In a later talk, she would reflect:
“It was my very first job, typing. And I didn’t feel right in that situation.”
The spiritual advisor she worked for is remembered only vaguely in literary histories as someone "mildly recalled by Prophet Williams," a man described as dealing in “patent medicines,” a phrase often code for home-brewed remedies with spiritual significance.
Whether he believed in what he sold or merely profited off others’ belief is unclear. What is certain is the moral discomfort the teenage Brooks carried from the experience. And yet, as she freely admitted, the experience “was not wasted.”
Art from the Ashes
Years later, Brooks would return to the Mecca, literally and artistically. Her 1968 long-form poem In the Mecca is set within the building’s crumbling walls, once majestic and now fallen. The poem tells of a mother searching for her lost child among the apartment's residents, illuminating everyday Black life, Black grief, and the echo of failed promises.
It is hard not to see the fingerprints of her early job—the desperation, the spiritual hunger, the urban landscape—in the poem’s DNA. In Maud Martha, too, we glimpse the internal world of a woman grappling with class, dignity, and the gap between belief and truth.
“There are many things that I don’t understand,” Brooks admitted in a later interview, when asked about the job and its influence. “I haven’t sorted out all my feelings about religion yet.”
Still, when she flew, she prayed. When she remembered, she turned it into verse. That early, miserable job inside a faded palace of Black aspiration gave her an emotional archive she would mine for decades.
A Spiritual Hustle in a Changing Chicago
The Mecca was demolished in 1951 by the Illinois Institute of Technology to make room for expansion. It had become, in the eyes of city planners, a "slum." But in Brooks’s work, and memory, it never disappeared. In some ways, that short stint as a teenage secretary to a miracle-selling “prophet” captured something essential about urban Black survival in the 20th century: invention, vulnerability, hustle, and spirit.
That her art could transmute even the soiled, even the strange, into work that dignified the ordinary and asked us to listen harder, that is the real magic Brooks practiced. And it didn’t need a potion.
Further Reading:
“Gwendolyn Brooks Tells Her Story.” Negro Digest, July 1961.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part One. Third World Press, 1972.
Poetry Foundation: Gwendolyn Brooks biography.
The Morgan Library & Museum: Gwendolyn Brooks – In the Mecca online exhibit.
WTTW News. “Artifacts from Mecca Flats Found on IIT Campus,” August 7, 2018.
Wikipedia entry: Gwendolyn Brooks.
Chireau, Yvonne P. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. University of California Press, 2003.