Smoke, Spirits, and Sorrow: Black Baby Loss and Spiritual Traditions in Sinners
Spoilers ahead!
In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Black baby loss is not just a tragedy, it’s a spiritual crisis, a familial rupture and a reckoning with legacy. For Annie (played by Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo practitioner and conjure woman in 1930s Mississippi, the death of her baby is a loss that ripples through the land of the living and the realm of the dead. During Black Baby Loss Awareness Week, Sinners offers a powerful meditation on grief, faith, and the question many grieving parents silently scream: Why couldn’t I save them?
That question is voiced by Smoke, Annie’s partner when he asks Annie why the magic didn’t work on their baby. It reflects the deepest kind of guilt and helplessness. Annie, who spent her life calling on ancestral wisdom and divine protection, couldn't save her child. And yet, Sinners challenges the idea that death is necessarily a failure of spiritual power.
Hoodoo is a spiritual tradition that originated among enslaved African Americans in the United States, drawing from a blend of various indigenous African spiritualities, as well as elements of Native American and European folk traditions. It emerged as a way for enslaved people to express their spirituality and resist the constraints of enslavement.
In Hoodoo, it is understood that some souls are so sacred, so protected, that they do not remain long in the physical world. A similar belief is present in the Yoruba religion with the concept of abiku, whereby children who die young are seen as spiritually significant. The baby’s death, in this light, is not a loss of protection but a fulfillment of it. Their soul was destined to return home early to the realm of the ancestors. Her baby was never unguarded, instead they were returned.
That belief transforms the meaning of Annie’s choices. Her baby, now an ancestor, is the compass guiding Annie’s spiritual decisions. This is why Annie rejects Stack’s attempts to turn her into a vampire. She understands that eternal life in that form would sever her from the afterlife and from the possibility of being with her child again.
In the film’s profoundly moving final scene, Annie is at last reunited with her baby and it’s here that the power of ritual becomes undeniable. Everything offered in love, in mourning, in ceremony, crosses over. The flower that Smoke placed gently on their daughter’s grave? Annie wears it in her hair. The small jug of milk left at the graveside? Annie uses it to feed their child in the spirit world. These aren’t just visual details, they are sacred affirmations that ritual matters, that love offered through symbolic acts transcends the veil between worlds.
In Hoodoo ritual is the bridge. The gestures made such as pouring libations, placing offerings, speaking names are not meaningless. They sustain the bond between the living and the dead to ensure the baby is sent to a safe place. In Sinners, ritual doesn’t just comfort the grieving, it restores the family. What was separated by death is reunited through spiritual continuity.
There’s also an aching beauty in Annie and Smoke’s final sacrifice. Both choose to die, not out of hopelessness, but out of devotion. Annie turns away from immortality to stay true to her child. Smoke, after years of running, finally stays. In choosing death, they embrace life in another form. Together, in the afterlife, they become whole.
As a doula, I was deeply moved by Annie’s spiritual clarity, her understanding that her child was not lost, but waiting. Her power was never in defying death. It was in knowing how to walk toward it with intention, love, and ritual. Her daughter was never alone. And neither was she.
References
https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/wunmi-mosaku-sinners-annie-interview
The Pan Africa – Libation Rituals in West African Communities: Pouring Out Tradition and Spirit
ÒRÌṢÀ ilúú – Beliefs and Myths About Abiku in Yoruba Mythology
