The Marvellers

Content Warning: This section discusses racial prejudice and enslavement.

The Marvellers is set in a magical realm that invites comparisons to the Harry Potter heptalogy. The Potter books are set in England with a largely Caucasian cast of characters. Most of the magic and mythology in the novels is drawn from European folklore. In contrast, The Marvellers uses a globally diverse cast and draws much of its magical lore from Africa. While intolerance and prejudice are depicted in the novel, these reactions are not racially motivated. Marvellers look down on Conjurors as inferior magicians and don’t want to associate with them, but there are many non-white Marvellers in the book who exhibit prejudice against Conjurors.

That said, the author takes inspiration for her Conjuror lore from the folk religion of the approximately 11 million Africans transported to the islands in the Caribbean and the Americas during 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade. These beliefs took multiple forms, such as hoodoo, voodoo, conjuring, Santeria, root work, and other variations.

Because Ella’s family lives in New Orleans, Clayton reflects the city’s historical interweaving of Voodoo and Catholicism in the novel’s lore. Voodoo existed as a covert practice in New Orleans because of the legal ban on the practicing of religions other than Catholicism for the African population. Over time, the local folk religion incorporated aspects of Catholicism into its rituals. In the novel, Clayton shows Ella bringing statues of well-known Catholic saints to her dorm room. These figurines can talk, and they function in the same way as ancestral guardians in African folk religion.

Some parallels in the novel to real-world voodoo religious symbols and practices include the top hat that Sebastien Durand wears. Conjuror High Walkers wear tall top hats, a well-known feature of the attire of New Orleans voodoo priests. The novel also locates the entrance to the Underworld in Congo Square, a historical landmark in New Orleans legally designated as a Sunday gathering spot in 1817 for free and enslaved Africans. Starting in the 1830s, voodoo practitioners such as the famous priestess Marie Laveau held rituals in the square. The subset of folk beliefs known as root work involves a knowledge of the properties of plants, and The Marvellers illustrates this practice in Sera Baptiste’s class on the Conjure Arts. In the novel, Clayton describes Conjurors as being much more closely aligned to nature and the underworld than the Marvellers, who dwell in the sky.

While the novel does not attempt to separate Marvellers from Conjurors based on their skin color, African folk religion in the real world carries explicit racial overtones. These beliefs were brought to the New World by the enslaved people of West Africa. Their oppressors feared and deliberately suppressed their religious practices in much the same way that the Marvellers fear and try to avoid contact with Conjurors. The novel also draws a parallel between the experience of enslavement and the darkness associated with Conjuror magic. Sera tells her niece:

The Conjure Arts are about crossing. Movement. Work. The crossing of waters which led to a crossing between life and death, and through pain. [...] The crossing of West Africans to the New World, the Caribbean, and South America during the Transatlantic Slave Trade (177).

Clayton weaves real characteristics of African folk religion into the magical lore of the novel and uses this device as an access point for young readers to examine issues of diversity, integration, and identity.