Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  “In them days, the doctors used to come to your house.”

  “But this doctor—he wa’n’t no real doctor,” my great-uncle Curtis said. “He would ride around in the car with the top down and it don’t even rain in the car. He was a different kind of doctor.”

  “He was a witchcraft doctor,” my grandfather said.

  After this doctor left my family’s home, my great-grandmother was cured. According to Fred II, everyone in the community knew of Iris as a root worker. The only way to undo the root that Iris had put on her was to have a doctor of the same arts—who I later found out to be from Georgia also—perform a procedure. Why did my family abhor roots and yet rely on the power of witchcraft doctors to cure my ailing great-grandmother? I found this hypocrisy fascinating. Do its roots, so to speak, stretch farther than South Jersey? If so, could this hypocrisy have more to do with our movement away from the South and less to do with religious tenets within the black church?

  I was raised in the Pentecostal Church, an evangelical denomination of Christianity. Its origins began with the collaboration of a black Baptist preacher from Texas named William J. Seymour and a white Methodist evangelist from Topeka, Kansas, named Charles F. Parham. Pentecostalism is largely characterized by three elements: baptism, speaking in tongues (glossolalia), and divine healing. Those who could speak in tongues, languages indecipherable to those who utter them, can convey prophetic messages, and those who’ve been blessed to heal may do so with the laying of hands on a sick person.2

  It is arguably because of the Great Migration that my family is composed of Pentecostals. Many black migrants established their churches in storefront buildings or larger properties that white people used before they fled to the suburbs because of the burgeoning black populations.3 Pentecostalism worked in urban areas as the overcrowdedness of housing projects led to an outpouring into churches, where congregants could find enthusiasm and relief through praying, singing, and shouting. In 1919, there were over a hundred storefront churches in Chicago, and in 1926, there were 140 churches on 150 blocks in Harlem.4 My church, Evangelical Fellowship Church, is located in Pleasantville, and it faces the expressway that leads right into Atlantic City. Within a five-mile radius, there are several other black churches: Mount Zion Baptist, Grace Tabernacle, and Morning Star, to name a few.

  As much as my family eschews superstition, I believe Pentecostals are some of the most superstitious people that you’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting. Whenever a Pentecostal congregant moves into a new house, the elders of the church convene to pray so that they can drive out the spirits and energies of the previous owners. When I moved into my new apartment, my grandmother gave me a large bottle of anointing olive oil that she had prayed over. I keep it on top of my kitchen counter near the door for extra protection. That way whenever I enter and leave my apartment, I’m armored with an invisible shield to keep me from harm. When I’m feeling afraid, I pour some out and make the sign of the cross on my forehead for discernment and over my heart for love and vitality.

  I’m also very particular about touching. I believe that someone can transfer their energy, by something as small as the brushing of shoulders or a huge embrace, to someone else through touch. I remember quite vividly one occasion, when my mother had a falling-out with a relative and that relative gave me a mug for my birthday. She and I never had any ill will toward each other. Nevertheless, my mother made me promptly dispose of the gift and made sure that I obeyed her order as we talked on the phone. In her mind, that’s how people get sick: when they accept gifts or food from the hands of someone they do not entirely trust. She believed that if that relative couldn’t get to her, she could still get to the closest thing to her: her daughter—me.

  The women in my family always carry suspicion with them. My grandmother often dreams wild visions of birds and trees that are said to be premonitions. One time, an owl perched itself on one of my mother’s trees in her backyard in broad daylight. Although owls can be seen during the day if their sleep schedules are off, my mother took the owl as a bad omen. The following day, a bishop and lifelong friend of the family was hit by a car and subsequently died.

  If someone dies in the house, all the windows need to be open to let the spirits out. When someone is causing discord, they “got a spirit on ’em,” meaning that a demonic spirit has taken possession of the person’s body. Spirits hover among all of us but we generally identify them only when a situation turns adverse. We know that there are also good spirits, according to the Bible, but ironically, their invisibility and their immense impact on our lives make them all seem like a constant threat.

  The spirit world is just as much in alignment with the natural world for black Northerners as for black Southerners. In the South, roots have a multitude of meanings. There was one person in Darien whom I had to meet to talk about the power of the root and how spirits intercede in the lives of black people. His name is Griffin Lotson, federal commissioner of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Commission and mayor pro tem of Darien. He spoke so much like my grandfather, it was eerie.

  Born and raised in the town, Lotson emphatically and repeatedly told me that the song “Kumbaya,” which in Gullah means “Come by here,” was first recorded there by H. Wylie in 1926, an historical moment that was just recently recognized by Congress.5 A seventh-generation Gullah Geechee, Lotson can trace his ancestors back to Sierra Leone, finding stunning similarities between their rice coasts and Georgia’s. He admits that driving past rice plantations haunts him because of all the brutality that happened there. Like Tiffany Young, Lotson had ancestors who worked on Butler Island Plantation and later served in the Civil War. When it comes to survival through rootwork, Lotson said, “The root doctor and the root worker are sometimes the same person in our culture of Gullah Geechee. What it is, on the plantation of the slave masters now, you might find it interesting. We couldn’t go to those doctors. That just didn’t happen. So we had to figure out a way to stay alive as the Native Americans did and just about every other culture. You devise and you create a system where you learn about the things that grow around you.” Because of black people’s lack of access to proper medical care, they had to use what was readily available: the earth and whatever grew from it.

  Every morning, Lotson drinks tea mixed with sassafras, the life everlasting plant, to promote longevity and thwart digestive problems. His family did not have much money when he was growing up. If someone in his family got sick, relatives would find a tall blade of a certain grass whose name eludes Lotson and suck the tart juice from it. When Lotson was a child, he had bronchial problems that threatened his life on a number of occasions. He says of that period, “Never was I suicidal, but if you’ve ever been in so much pain consistently . . . death was beautiful to me. If there was a plug to pull, I would have pulled it myself.” Any time Lotson had a flare-up, his parents would bury a coconut in the ground for seven to ten days, dig it out, then guide Lotson to drink from the fruit. Lotson’s father would also take him to a nearby forest and tell him to stand up against a hardwood tree. His father would drive a nail into the spot above Lotson’s head. As the tree would continue to grow, so would the sickness grow out of the boy. When his grandmother Florence died, his father took thirteen-year-old Lotson to the funeral home where her body rested, opened the casket, and made Lotson talk to her. After that, his bronchial problems cleared up. At sixty-three years old, he can run seven miles when he’s never at any time in his life before run more than two. He does see traditional doctors from time to time, while upholding his beliefs. He does admit that the practices are not as prevalent as they once were, because a lot of root doctors have died off. When Lotson spoke, he never coughed or touched his chest. His voice was as clear as a whistle and strong as a gong. Wow! I thought. I believed him.

  Lotson’s community is vital. The midwife who delivered him is still alive to this day. He remembers the elders warning him against pointing at a graveyard and that one would have to immediately p
ut that finger into the ground, or else. But graveyards, particularly their dust, can also protect you. Lotson told me that he once collected dust off the grave of the last slave on Butler Island, Liverpool Hazzard. If a person was causing you trouble, you get a root worker to blow that dust into the face of the enemy. Lotson once found that he was being messed with himself. While living in DC, as he was entering his vehicle, he discovered a root on the mat near the brake and gas pedal and backed away from the car. “I was trying to lose my fear of this because once you get deep involved in this, it can overwhelm you. So, phew, I’m like, ‘OK, Lotson, you have got to beat this, you have got to beat this.’ Never can I forget all of those things that we did . . . this isn’t one of those fake ghost stories, these are real things.”

  There was an evil that Lotson had to overcome because someone put a root on him by literally sticking a root in his car. He never found out who placed the root there—perhaps a root doctor. I found that many of the most famous root doctors came from the South Carolina Lowcountry. Many took the names of animals: Dr. Eagle, Dr. Hawk, Dr. Snake, Dr. Crow, Dr. Bug. But none of them reached the kind of international acclaim as Dr. Buzzard due to his extensive client list, signature tricks, and showdowns with the local enforcement (which I will describe later).

  In her book, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man, Cornelia Bailey writes that they believed in the “properties of the earth and all forms of the supernatural . . . God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man . . . while people my age and older grew up praying to God, we also believed in Dr. Buzzard, the root doctor, whom people in other places call the voodoo man. . . .”6 In the Lowcountry, God and roots were not in conflict with each other, as they were in the North. For those who are not familiar with the terms, however, I must emphasize that hoodoo and Voodoo are not the same. Hoodoo is a system of magic practices, and many of its practitioners are also Christians. Voodoo is an actual religion with loas (spirits), deities, and veves. The word veve is pronounced in two syllables with a short e in each. It’s similar to a yantra, a mystic diagram used in several Eastern religions. Its purpose is to attract the spirits and focus the mind in interacting with them.

  It is believed that Dr. Buzzard put a root on Daufuskie Island, where I went after my time in Georgia. Daufuskie Island was home to more than two hundred Gullah people until the 1980s, when developers decided to make it the Martha’s Vineyard of the South. They didn’t know that they were building on top of a slave graveyard. The locals consulted Dr. Buzzard for help.7 Several of the plantations on Daufuskie Island were reconfigured into private-club resort communities. One of them is Melrose. Membership fees were to start at $50,000.8 In 1984, there was a real estate office at Melrose Plantation that sat on top of a slave cemetery. Golf courses had been laid out over other cemeteries on the island.9 Locals contacted the NAACP and the Christic Institute, a public interest law firm, for assistance in getting the Melrose Company developers to move the office elsewhere. A court date was set, but before the appointed time, a “flock of buzzards” swarmed the ferry landing. The developers ended up moving the office.10

  But the Melrose developers did not give up on the land yet. Over twenty years ago, developers funded by institutional investors including International Paper, Halliburton, and ClubCorp decided to build luxury condominiums and gated communities on Daufuskie. But things started to go wrong quickly with what was supposed to be an exciting new resort. In 1997, ClubCorp, an international resort management firm, purchased the Melrose Beach Club of Melrose Resort, along with some properties from Bloody Point—also named after a plantation—in order to combine the lots as “Daufuskie Island, a Pinehurst Company Resort.” At the Melrose Beach Club, ClubCorp developers projected that there would be thirty condominiums or ten single-family homes. The development would cost $30.1 million, and projected sales from the properties was $59.4 million.11 Just two years later, in 1999, it was reported to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission that ClubCorp lost $13.5 million in impairment costs, meaning that they abandoned the land when they figured that it was no longer profitable. Besides these costs, in 1998 and 1999, Daufuskie Island Club and Resort had operating losses of $6.3 million and $6.7 million, respectively.12

  The property changed hands several times, until its last owner, the Pelorus Group, filed for bankruptcy in 2017. The news was a repeat of 2008, when Bloody Point Golf Club and Beach Resort went bankrupt.13 Though the Melrose case was dismissed and the property can be sold again, the resort is currently abandoned and has become a bit of a ghost property.14 Some people believe that the failure of Melrose is due to the fact that Daufuskie Island, though only an hour outside of Hilton Head, is accessible only by ferry. Perhaps if there were a bridge, more people would have traveled there. Many locals, however, like Roger Pinckney XI, believe the downfall had Dr. Buzzard’s work all over it. They believe the Melrose venture was cursed.

  I had e-mailed Pinckney, a sought-after cultural historian, a month and a half earlier and was lucky enough to score an interview. He often rejected requests. Roger generally can’t stand Yankees, so maybe my request was granted because I was black. He was once arrested for protesting efforts by Saudi oil barons to build an enclave on the island. At his home, he even has a sign that says DON’T TREAD ON ME, which to him means “Do not displace me for further vacation-property development on the island.”

  “The high priest of Daufuskie Island,” Pinckney is white and the author of numerous books on African American religion, magic, and folkways. He knew all about Dr. Buzzard and his root. I drove by golf cart from Daufuskie’s Freeport Marina to meet Roger and his wife, Amy, for lunch at the Old Daufuskie Crab Company. He greeted me with a bag of sachet powder that bore a graphic sticker of a man pursuing a woman. Sachet powder is common in hoodoo rootwork. It is often some combination of sand, salt, sugar, black pepper, sulfur, red pepper, and even graveyard dirt.15 I was instructed to keep the bag inside my purse if I wanted to find love. I wondered if this was the same powder that Iris used to pull men to her. Inside a bag, inside a hatband.

  The name Pinckney is very prominent in South Carolina. There is Pinckney Island, Pinckney Colony, Pinckney Road, and of course Charles Pinckney, the thirty-seventh governor, a member of the House of Representatives, and a signer of the Constitution. Roger was brought to Daufuskie as a toddler, and his father, also named Roger, a Beaufort County coroner, was partly responsible for bringing electricity there. As a child, Roger knew about rootwork through his father’s profession. As a coroner, Roger Pinckney X could not list “rootwork” as a cause of death, so instead he would write “dead of undetermined natural causes.” When it comes to the protection of him and his family on the island, Roger believes he owes that to Dr. Buzzard.

  For about two hours, Roger told me more about this island’s ways. As on other Sea Islands, graves would face east, but if the people of the community believed you to be a bad person, you would be put in the grave the wrong way, facing south, to be directed toward hell or, more or less the same thing, to remain in the South. “Nothing normal ever happens here,” Roger says with a squint, not to scare me but to underline his own inability to make sense of his environment.

  I surmised that if nothing is normal, it’s best to lean into the strange—all the rules enforced from the spirit realm. There is goofer dust, a mixture of graveyard dirt and other ingredients, like powdered snakeskin and salt. Your intention and the time of day you collect the goofer dust makes all the difference. Dead time is between 11:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. If you want to do good, you collect dust from the grave of a good person and leave coins as recompense. This has to be done before midnight. After midnight, the intention is for evil, and you collect dust from the grave of a bad person.

  All kinds of tales circulate around the island. Cemetery watchkeepers say they see graveyards lit up like day in the middle of the night. People have experiences with ghosts, which locals like Roger just cuss out to leave them be. There are tales of buzzards hanging around developers
. And there are plat-eyes. At mention of the word plat-eye, Roger and his wife shift uncomfortably in their seats. According to West Indian and Southern American folklore, plat-eyes are monsters, animals with glowing eyes or spirits that can pass through gates without opening them. One man, suicidal after breaking up with his girlfriend, took a bottle of liquor off one of the graves on Edisto Island at three a.m. and was found neck-deep in nearby rice fields the next day. Legend has it that after he took the bottle, a plat-eye took the form of his ex-lover and lured him to those fields, where he almost drowned, but he survived. Roger and Amy are thankful that they have never seen a plat-eye, but others have, and they say plat-eyes can take the shape of anything from a horse to a two-headed dog.

  The shapeshifting narrative echoes across regions. The stories that my grandfather tried to tell to me as a child, the ones I tried to ignore, were similar.

  “A demon followed him all the way home. People say it was a ghost, but it was really a demon,” my grandfather said at his dining room table. He was sitting across from his older brother, Sam.

  “What happened, Uncle Sam?” I asked and turned toward him.

  “Mother sent me to the store. I just had a weird feeling and I didn’t want to go. I had to walk down there at night. It wasn’t dark until I got to that hill and it started getting darker and darker. I was coming through the woods and I was moving a little slower. I seen this great, big, white thing—bigger than any sheet. Maybe four or five sheets. I don’t know how tall it was, but it was coming right for me. It kept on, kept on.”

  “Were you on your way to the store or coming back?” my grandfather asked Uncle Sam.

  “On my way to the store, and I had to go the same way back. Boy, I prayed a prayer that time. It got closer and closer and I didn’t know what to do. I was throwing dirt like crazy at him. Just throwing dirt.”