There were many reasons to conceal faith in conjure, and foremost among them was the fact that conjure offered an alternative not only to official faiths but also to dominant ideologies. Lawrence Levine points out that faith in conjure suggested the existence of forces more powerful than what the masters possessed. The whites, he points out, “were neither omnipotent or omniscient”; there were “forces they could not control, areas in which slaves could act with more knowledge and authority than their masters, ways in which the powers of the whites could be muted if not thwarted entirely” (73–74).
Witches had exceptional powers of mobility and could slip through keyholes, cracks, and windows. They had the power to turn sleeping people into their horses (“night-mares”) and ride them. As one informant reported: “You can always tell when such witches have been riding you; you feel ‘down and out’ the next morning” (Puckett 151). Hags could bewitch cattle and keep them from giving milk. And they made “witch balls” from the hides of cows or horses and inflicted injury by throwing them at images of their enemies.
Witches who embarked on nocturnal missions would slip out of their human skins, turn into animals (cats, gnats, horses, and buzzards), and ride their victims to the point of exhaustion. When they returned, they put their skin back on, although there was always the risk that someone might have found it and tampered with it. As was true in West African cultures, sprinkling salt or pepper on the skin—a common apotropaic gesture enacted in most witness accounts—made it impossible for the witch to return to her human form (Dayrell 1910, 11–19).
Professional “witchmasters” put themselves out for hire, and conjure doctors (like African witch doctors) could cure those who had been placed under a spell. Not everyone had to go to such lengths. Brooms placed across a threshold (compelling a witch to count every straw before entering) and sieves hung on the door (every hole had to be counted) stopped witches in their tracks and discouraged them from entering a dwelling. Strewing salt was also an effective deterrent, for witches evidently could not resist examining and counting objects in their path. Any granular material or objects with detail (newspapers, for example!) could slow witches down. The eating of salt is often also blamed for enslaving Africans to whites, whose “skin is white like salt,” as one poem tells it (Beier 1966, 56).
The stories below give accounts of witches and their powers to conjure and fly. Newbell Niles Puckett’s description of witches and their nocturnal practices suggests that there was great anxiety about a witch appearing in your bedroom and “riding” you, a feat with distinctly sexual overtones, but medical ones as well. In Southern states, sleep paralysis is described as “a witch riding your back.” The term hagridden goes back to the 1680s, with the meaning of “afflicted by nightmares.”
The “Cat-Witch” story and “Skinny, Skinny, Don’t You Know Me?” are tales of entrapment and punishment. Sometimes a witch is simply put out of business by fed-up victims, as in Zora Neale Hurston’s tale about a witch with thieving ways. “Macie and the Boo Hag” is another witness account, one that reveals the connection between psychological pain and physiological disorders with witches. Macie is haunted by the Boo Hag in adolescence and in old age, phases in the life cycle with disturbing bodily changes and unsettled emotions. Besieged by anxieties, the young Macie responds with a locked jaw and is unable to speak. The older Macie can speak and tell her story, but it is one of loss, the story of an old woman who feels “weak,” “down,” “fearful,” and “tired” in her old age. Macie was seventy-nine when she told the story to Chalmers S. Murray, who was at the Works Progress Administration, a federal agency that hired writers in the 1930s and assigned them to collect folklore and document folkways.
Facing down the evils of ghosts, hants, spirits, and spooks and eluding their stunts and pranks becomes a real challenge for many characters in African American lore. Long-dead ancestors, spouses, friends, and foe are animated in the nocturnal hours, alarming more than harming. “I believe in spirits ’cause I seen them,” one tale-teller reports. “I guess they can’t hurt you, like shadows” (Dorson 1967, 212). Filmy and flimsy, they often take the form of an animal, usually a dog, a cat, or a rooster. Some seek revenge but others are tortured by the need to divulge information to the living about buried treasure.
The dream of buried treasure was fueled by stories about Native Americans burying ornaments made of silver and gold, pirates entrusting their loot to the safety of the earth, and wealthy farmers storing their profits in underground vaults rather than banks. Plantation owners and their family members most likely buried riches when Union troops arrived. Hence the wealth of tales about the dead, who are haunted by the notion of lost wealth and need to reveal to the living the exact location of what they buried.
Newbell Niles Puckett writes about what he calls “Negro ‘Ha’nts’ ”: “In all the squalid lore of mankind there is nothing more ghastly than those unearthly beings who, for the most part, were at one time men. In Negro ghost-lore this hideousness is all the more patent, since the lovable fairy or brownie is completely subordinated to the goblin, incubus, or ogre, who seeks only the harm of mankind” (1926, 116–17). Yet malicious and evil as the “hants” of African American lore may appear, they often befriend the living and bequeath riches on them.
Puckett emphasizes that these specters are often badly mutilated, “forced to live a painful existence in the other world with some of their parts missing. Many are the apparently sincere stories I have heard related,” he adds, “about meetings with these headless prowlers of the night” and he relates some memorable examples:
One reputable Negro nurse tells me of driving down the road at night when suddenly the horses shied at the figure of a man dimly outlined in the gloom (horses generally show a great sensitivity to spirits). On looking closely she saw that this silent figure had no head. In another case a murderer chopped a man’s head off; to his everlasting horror the head began to talk to him. . . . A wife died, making her husband promise not to sell any of the household furniture. A short time afterwards the unfaithful husband sold a pair of bedsprings and a mattress to a Negress, who, of course, was unaware of the promise he had made. That night she and her sister went to bed, first jamming the ax under the door so that it could not be opened. In the middle of the night they woke up to see the ax mysteriously creeping from under the door. A woman clad in red (the fetish color) walked in. She had a great long neck but no head. There she stood “a-turnin’ dat long neck ’bout de room tryin’ ter look at us. Us hollered fur us’s brudder, he come runnin’ in, an’ dat ha’nt wuz gone!” Another Vicksburg Negro saw a little man walking across the fields with no legs, while in other cases, headless men, armless men, and dismembered limbs, falling down the chimney one by one, and acting as if they had some real unison, are featured. (127—28)
Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps offer an inventory of the many ways to conjure ghosts: looking over the left shoulder, peering through a mule’s ear, looking into a mirror with someone else, breaking a stick in two, going to the cemetery at noon and calling out a name, or wiping off a rusty nail and putting it in your mouth (1958, 163).
WITCHES
SKINNY, SKINNY, DON’T YOU KNOW ME?
Once there was a woman that could turn into a witch. When the husband would go to bed, she would slip out. . . . While she was gone, the husband missed her and got up. He saw her skin lying by the fire. He got some red pepper and put it inside the skin. Then he locked the door to keep her from coming into the house that night. When she came back, she slipped through the keyhole and went to get into her skin. Every time she went to get in, the pepper would burn her. She would say, “Skinny, skinny, don’t you know me?” Then she would try again: it would burn her still. She would say, “Skinny, skinny, don’t you know me?” The husband woke up. She got into it, but could not stay. Then she was tarred and burnt to death.
SOURCE: Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, 87.
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nbsp; SKIN DON’T YOU KNOW ME?
This old witch used to tantalize people out in the country. They didn’t know she was a witch; but every day there’d be something missing—diamonds, jewelry. She’d come in through a keyhole, or a crack in the door. So this night she went to a big fine castle. And a man, we’ll just call him Mr. John, he’s just coming in from a party, about 2:30 a.m. Everybody else is asleep. He looked and he saw a lady standing right at his doorstep.
“I’m just gonna stand here and see what she’s gonna do.”
First she reaches up, pulls her hat off, lays it down. She pulls off her shoes, and she also lays them down. She undresses, lays the clothes all in the same heap. He seen her hands go up, and her skin begin to move upwards. Up it went, up it went, till it was about five feet in the air. Then it settled back to the ground. Nothing else moved.
“Oh, that’s a curious sight.” He goes up and examines the clothes. “Huh, this is old Grandma Jane’s clothes, what stays over the hill.” Then he feels the skin. “Hm, I don’t know what this is, but if it’s moisture, I know how I’ll find out. I’ll get some pepper and salt and I’ll put them on it.” So he eased in the kitchen, gits his red pepper and salt, and sprinkles the hide good all over.
“Now, I’ll see what’s gonna happen.”
In a few minutes he seen the skin begin to work. Next he heard a whistle, and a voice said, “Skin don’t you know me?”
The skin was so hot she couldn’t get in it. Three times he heard the whistle at the burning, and “Skin don’t you know me?”
Next thing the voice said was, “If you will wash this skin with soap and water, I’ll give you all the diamonds and jewelry I’ve stolen from you. This is Grandma Jane.” (She had looked and saw him.) Then he obeyed, washed it, and soaped it and greased it good for her. And she was the same old Grandma Jane when she got back into her skin.
Then she restored all their jewelry and became a poor old widowed woman. That salt had taken away all her power of witchcraft.
(They claim that salt kills the power—it holds the dampness, and the witch can’t never get power enough to work. Same thing with hyp’tizing—some people got more salt in their blood than others.)
SOURCE: Richard M. Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan, 145–46.
“Skinny, Skinny, Don’t You Know Me?,” from Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, 2006. By permission of University of California Press. “Skin Don’t You Know Me?,” from Negro Folktales in Michigan, collected and edited by Richard M. Dorson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1956 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
THE CAT-WITCH
This happened in slavery times, in North Carolina. I’ve heard my grandmother tell it more than enough.
My grandmother was cook and house-girl for this family of slaveowners—they must have been Bissits, ’cause she was a Bissit. Well, Old Marster had sheep, and he sheared his sheep and put the wool upstairs. And Old Miss accused the cook of stealing her wool. “Every day my wool gets smaller and smaller; somebody’s taking my wool.” She knowed nobody could get up there handy but the house-girl. So they took her out and tore up her back about the wool, and Old Marster give her a terrible whipping.
When grandma went upstairs to clean up, she’d often see a cat laying in the pile of wool. So she thought the cat laying there packed the wool, and made it look small. And she said to herself, she’s going to cut off the cat’s head with a butcher’s knife, if she catches her again. And sure enough she did. She grabbed the cat by her foot, her front foot, and hacked her foot with the knife, and cut it off. And the cat went running down the stairs, and out.
So she kilt the foot she cut off, and it turned natural, it turned to a hand. And the hand had a gold ring on the finger, with an initial in the ring. My grandmother carried the hand down to her Mistress, and showed it to her. Grandma could not read nor write, but Old Miss could, and she saw the initial on the ring. So it was an outcry; they begin to talk about it, like people do in a neighborhood, and they look around to see who lost her hand. And they found it was this rich white woman, who owned slaves, and was the wife of a young man hadn’t been long married. (Witches don’t stay long in one place; they travel.) Next morning she wouldn’t get up to cook her husband’s breakfast, ’cause she didn’t have but one hand. And when he heard the talk, and saw the hand with his wife’s gold ring, and found her in bed without a hand, he knew she was the cat-witch. And he said he didn’t want her no longer.
So it was a custom of killing old witches. They took and fastened her to an iron stake, they staked her, and poured tar around her, and set her afire, and burnt her up.
She had studied witchcraft, and she wanted that wool, and could get places, like the wind, like a hant. She would slip out after her husband was in bed, go through keyholes, if necessary be a rat—they can change—and steal things, and bring them back.
Grandma told that for the truth.
SOURCE: Mary Richardson in American Negro Folktales, ed. Richard Dorson, 247–49.
WITCHES WHO RIDE
The chief activity of the witch is riding folks, though occasionally there is that evil succubus who steals wives. One informant regards witches as identical with conjurers: “Dey’s who’ hoodoos, Marse Newbell, dey sho’ is. Dey’s done sold deir soul ter de debbil, (the old European view) an’ old Satan gi’ dem de po’r ter change ter anything dey wants. Mos’ gen’ally dey rides you in de shape uv a black cat, an’ rides you in de daytime too, well ez de night.” You can always tell when such witches have been riding you; you feel “down and out” the next morning, and the bit these evil friends put in your mouth leaves a mark in each corner. When you feel smothered and can not get up, (“jes’ lak somebody holdin’ you down”) right then and there the old witch is taking her midnight gallop. You try to call out, but it is no use; your tongue is mute, your hair crawls out of its braids and your hands and feet tingle. My old mammy was very sick one time. Something heavy was pressing upon her chest. A good woman touched her, the load was lifted, and a dark form floated out through the window. “Hit mus’ ’er been a witch.” When you find your hair plaited into little stirrups in the morning or when it is all tangled up and your face scratched you may be sure that the witches have been bothering you that night. In Virginia “the hag turns the victim on his or her back. A bit (made by the witch) is then inserted in the mouth of the sleeper and he or she is turned on all-fours and ridden like a horse. Next morning the person is tired out, and finds dirt between the fingers and toes.”
There is one Negro song about an old woman who saddles, bridles, boots, and spurs a person, and rides him fox-hunting and down the hillsides, but in general, the Negroes deny that the person ridden is actually changed into a horse. But, horse or not, when a person talks or cries out in his sleep a witch is surely after him. Horses as well as humans are ridden; you can tell when the witches have bothered them by finding “witches’ stirrups” (two strands of hair twisted together) in the horses’ mane. A person who plaits a horse’s mane and leaves it that way is simply inviting the witches to ride, though they will seldom bother the horses except on very dark nights, and even then have a decided preference for very dark horses.
SOURCE: Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, 151–53.
“Witches Who Ride,” from Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Copyright © 1926 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
OUT OF HER SKIN
A white man had a wife. Eve’y night his wife go, but he don’ know where his wife go to. He had a servant to wait on dem. So de servant whispered to his master, “Master, don’ you know mistress kill all my chil’run?” Say, “Mistress is a hag.”—“You think you can prove it? You think you can ketch her?”—“Yes, suh! You let me sleep here one night. I kyan ketch her.” So de servant an’ his master make de agreement how to ketch ’em. He said to his serv
an’, “Don’ you go home to-night. You sleep hyere. I’m goin’ away soon in de mornin’.” Dey bof (de man an’ de wife), dey went to baid, de servan’ on de watch. Late in de night de mistress woke up. De servan’ watch her. Somet’in’ she put on her flesh an’ take off her skins. After take off her skins, she roll it up an’ put it in her dirty clo’es in de back o’ de baid. An’ she gone out. After she gone out, de servan’ call to her master, said, “Master, mistress is gone. To proof to you dat mistress is a hag, I come now an’ show you what she done.” She went back ob de baid an’ get de clo’es what de skin in, an’ bring it to her master, an’ say, “Here is mistress skin.” An’ he said to his servan’, “What shall we do wid de skin to ketch her?” She said, “Put black pepper an’ salt in de skin on de inside.” So de master did dat. So later on de mistress came an’ get her skin. An’ she ’mence to put it on; an’ eve’y time de skin bu’n her so much, she said to de skin, “Skin, skin, you don’t know me? ’Tis me.” Still she couldn’ get it on. So she went to her baid an’ wrapped up. Master was out now. She lay down till late. Her husband ’mence to p’ovoke her to get up. Still she won’t get up. Jus’ keep po’vokin’. All at oncet he snatched off de cover off her, an’ dere she was raw like a beef. So he called witnesses to prove. So dey make a kil’ of lime an’ put her in it, an’ bu’n her down. But as much as de fire a-bu’nin’, she never holler ’til dey t’row de skin in. De skin ’mence to scream. So dat was de en’ of his wife.
The Annotated African American Folktales Page 21
