Authors: Joseph Mitchell
“My friend decided it would be worth $2 to find out about the stuff. He asked the clerk if he had any more for sale and said, ‘What’s it good for?’ The clerk said it was simply wonderful for nervousness and sick headaches and syphilis and other diseases of the brain.
“My friend bought some and went immediately to a chemist. An analysis showed that my friend had paid $2 for as much talcum powder as could be held on a dime. Its monetary value was infinitesimal and its curative power zero.
“People who buy this stuff are endangering their lives and menacing the health of their families and the communities in which they live. While they spend their slim earnings on such worthless hokum they are losing precious time.”
Doctors and nurses from the Department of Health have found Negroes using scores of fantastic root and herb compounds for sicknesses. They have found West Indians in East Harlem treating asthma
patients with a broth made by boiling lizards in milk, for instance. The remedies vary according to the sections from which the herbalists came. West Indians, for example, treat “dropsy” by bathing the sufferer in a brew of mullein leaves and salt, but Negroes from Alabama apply a poultice of castor oil and okra blossoms. The remedies are equally inefficient.
The Harlem Health Center has often had trouble in vaccinating children because their parents insisted the conjure bags they wore around their necks were better than any vaccine. Bag-wearing is not confined to Negroes, however. People of many races wear bags filled with lumps of asafetida, a fetid Persian sap, and Italians in New York wear garlic bags.
A Negro policeman at the West 135th Street station, an unusually intelligent policeman, maintains that an asafetida bag will protect the wearer against influenza. Doctors say that there may be some value in the asafetida bag—its aroma probably discourages people suffering with contagious diseases from coming near the wearer. They say also that the aroma probably discourages people who are not suffering with contagious diseases from coming near the wearer.
The use of conjure bags is widespread in every community in which voodoo has any influence. Not so widespread, of course, is the use of incantations—the orotund chanting of incoherent, mystic
phrases to exorcise demons believed to be causing the pain. A conjure doctor has to be paid quite well for this service, since it involves the purchase and sacrifice of bats, snakes, goats, doves, chickens, etc. There are many women conjure workers in this line. Marie Bernard is typical. She was found guilty in Special Sessions of posing as a doctor, diagnosing diseases and prescribing remedies, and was sent to the workhouse for three months.
Marie operated in an apartment on East 109th Street. She did her work with sacred snakes, according to a policewoman who gathered evidence for Sol Ullman, the Assistant Attorney General, who prosecutes cases of illegal medical practice. The policewoman went to Marie’s apartment and told her she was ill.
“You sure are,” Marie replied, according to the policewoman. “Your body is diseased, and your head is filled up with a poison gas and your blood is bad. [The investigator was one of the healthiest policewomen in the department.] No doctor’s medicine can help you, because all your sickness and crippled leg and arm is due to a curse put on you by a bad spirit in the other world. I see a woman’s spirit, and you can never get well unless I cure you.”
“How much will it cost?” asked the policewoman, shuddering.
“I will have to get a sacred snake for my treatment,”
said Marie, after figuring on a sheet of paper for some time. “A big one will set you back $7, and one a little bit smaller will come to $5.50, but I can get a real small one for $4. The bigger the snake the quicker you will throw off your trouble.”
They decided on the smaller snake, and Marie figured the entire treatment would come to $7.25, which, she said, “does not include any charge for my power.” The policewoman paid $3 on account, and Marie told her she would prepare some “influence water.” On the next visit Marie was gloomy.
“After I worked with the snake the snake died,” she told the policewoman. “That shows how bad your illness is. I’ll have to get a $7 snake. This case is more serious than I had any idea.”
She gave the policewoman a milk bottle full of a liquid which she said was “influence water,” and told her to go home and sleep for two days. In the meantime she would work with the $7 snake. She told the policewoman to come back at the end of that time because “the spirits intend to cripple you like the hunchback of Notre Dame.” She refused to make the incantations or to work with the snake in the presence of the policewoman.
“It would profit you nothing to see what goes on when I am alone with the sacred snakes,” she said.
The next time the policewoman went to see
Marie she put her under arrest, sacred snakes and all.
A more common form of voodoo medicine is the “laying on of hands.”
The conjure men who use this technique smear their hands with any one of a dozen types of oil mixtures—mixtures which may contain animal blood as well as herb juices—and then they go to work on the sufferer. These healers use the “laying on of hands” for luck as well as to heal. For example, if a client wants “fish-fry luck,” or success in business, the conjurer will mix up six or seven drugs and pour them on, slapping the client meanwhile with his sticky hands.
The hand-healers are deeply respected, and a conjure man will go through torture to obtain laying-on ability. The faith Negroes have in hand-healers is indicated by the fact that Grant Biddle, a cemetery caretaker in Baltimore, reported last June 22 that the body of John D. Johnson, a celebrated Negro healer, had been dug up and the hands cut off.
The shabby, side-street depths to which voodoo has fallen in its transition from the Congo to Dixie to Lenox Avenue may be gauged by the fact that now all but the very best conjure men make use of ectoplasm boxes in their negotiations with demons.
These boxes are put up for lazy spiritualist mediums, and for the humorless magicians who expose them, by a small factory in Chicago, and are sold to conjure men at $15 a box by voodoo supply houses in Manhattan and New Orleans. When the box is lit, a smoky shape, roughly resembling a hooded man, floats upward. Even the little wax images resembling naked humans into which conjure men stick pins, inflicting long-distance torture, are made in candle molds in a Manhattan loft.
You do not have to study voodoo long to realize that it has gone sour. To work their furtive wonders the kings of gris-gris and the two-headed doctors now need something more powerful than rooster blood, or jungle drums, or the Essence of Bend-Over, or Southern John the Conqueror root, or Four Thieves vinegar, or gooferdust, which is, after all, only earth stolen from the fresh grave of an infant sometime around midnight. The public schools have played hell with the powers of the conjure men. The most deadly enemy of voodoo is a movement upward in the literacy rate; witches find roosting places only on the shoulders of the ignorant.
The bones which compose the altars of the Harlem conjure men are likely to be beef bones or old soup bones, and the skulls they sometimes hold in their laps come from medical supply houses, like as not. In the whole country today there is not a single
conjure worker with the power of Marie Leveau, the illegitimate quadroon who kept an aged, fat rattlesnake lying on her altar, who used to make policemen get down on their knees and bark like dogs when they came to her house in St. Anne Street, New Orleans, to arrest her. She had no respect for the law at all. Is there a conjure woman in Harlem who can make policemen from the West 135th Street station get down on their knees and bark like dogs? No!
There are conjure men in Harlem who claim to have sections of skin from Marie’s old altar-snake, but they do not have any of her brain-grease. Marie never ordered any of her conjure goods from a supply house. She dug in the malaria swamps for her own roots, grubbing them up at exactly the right time of the year, when the sap and the moon were both just right.
Marie never rooted out any herbs unless there was some blood on the moon hanging up above her. And she didn’t want any ectoplasm boxes in her way when she got ready to have a few words with the goblins. But Marie is gone (what day and what year nobody knows), leaving as disciples the strongest conjure men in the United States, but none as strong as she—leaving fiery legends which will someday take places on the brightest pages of American folklore.
However, old dead-and-gone Marie hasn’t got
anything to do with ectoplasm boxes, which this article is supposed to be about, and will be, too, if High John the Conqueror will quit bothering me. Get out of here, High John!
The use of the ectoplasm box was described by the man who sells voodoo supplies but does not want his name printed because he is afraid the ministers to whom he sells orthodox incense and candles will not be as tolerant as he is. This man is very tolerant; he believes voodoo worshipers have a right to their religion and that the right is guaranteed by the Constitution. He made the same remark made by the old man who kissed the nanny goat—“Every man to his own taste.” He said he sells comparatively few ectoplasm boxes because they are expensive, as voodoo goods go. For many years they were sold only to mediums, but now a good portion of the ectoplasm boxes manufactured in the United States are sold to voodoo doctors.
“I know about one demon session where an ectoplasm box was used,” he said, shoving a big pile of paper-bound copies of “The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses” out of his chair, so he could sit down.
“There was an Italian sailor who came in here and wanted some advice. He said a Harlem drugstore man gave him my address. He said he had a wife and two small daughters, and he was worried about
their future. He wanted a conjure doctor to let the demons know they could have him as a sacrifice in return for ten years of prosperity. He figured he could save enough in ten years of prosperity to leave his family well fixed.
“I told him I couldn’t do a thing for him, that such things weren’t in my line at all. I wouldn’t even give him the names of any of the doctors I know. They don’t like to have strangers know their names, as a rule. However, he found a man for himself, a Negro man who used to come around to my place. This man came to me and wanted to buy an ectoplasm box, but at that time I was out of them, didn’t have a one in stock. He finally got one from another doctor.
“He wanted to use the box for this client he had, this Italian sailor. I always wondered why this sailor didn’t get an evil-eye woman to do the job. Anyhow, one way and another I found out everything that happened between this conjure man and the sailor.
“They went out on a Friday night. They went into some woods somewhere near Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey. The conjure man had an automobile. He took a bag with him, a bag that had a black cat in it. Well, they got into a dark place deep in the woods, up on a hill. It was a windy night, and they got to a place where the wind wouldn’t hit them so hard.
“Sometime around midnight the conjure man drew
a big circle on the ground with a piece of Dragon’s Blood root. It makes a red mark. Then he drew an inner circle, and between the outside and the inner circle, he wrote down the five names of God. He only knows the five names, but some know the seven names. The five he wrote down on the ground were Tet-rag-ram-maton, Yah, Seleh, Elohim and Yad-he-vey-he. That was for protection. No demon can break through a circle which has these names on it. It’s absolutely impossible.
“I better tell you that I think that doctor was something of a faker. I don’t believe any of the doctors can get demons to give ten years of prosperity, but you never can tell about these things. He might have been sincere. He tried hard enough, anyway.
“The doctor put three candles in the circle to form a trinity, and he prepared himself and the sailor. He anointed the sailor. Then he took and wrapped his sacred cloth around his body and tied fourteen knots in it. He wrapped the band around seven times. He put a band around his forehead. That was all for protection. You have to be careful. You never know how many demons you are going to invoke. I know a man who has invoked 130 demons personally, but that was over a period of fifteen years.
“When everything was ready the conjure man put on his invoking robes of white and stuck a cross up in the circle. Then he took the cat out of the bag and cut
its throat. He and the sailor drank the blood of the cat. Then they built a fire and roasted some of the cat. The sailor got sick, but he ate enough to protect him. When that was over the conjure man began yelling and chanting and hitting the ground with this stick. After he had been chanting in this peculiar tongue for a while he turned to the sailor and told him he was in communication with the demons, and that he was trying to make the deal with them. The sailor told him to do the best he could. Then he went back to his chanting. He jumped up and down and twisted and hit the dirt with his wand. He kept talking in this tongue for a good long time. He would talk to a demon on the north edge of the circle, and then he would turn and talk to one on the south edge.
“Finally he turned to the sailor and said he had everything fixed up, that he was going to have ten years of wonderful prosperity, but at the end of that time he would have to give himself to the demons. The sailor was pleased, and he said he wanted to shake hands with the demons. The doctor told him that was out of the question, but the sailor kept insisting. He kept saying, ‘I want to shake hands.’
“Well, the doctor had decided he wouldn’t use his ectoplasm box unless he got into a pinch. So when the sailor kept on insisting he decided to turn on the ectoplasm. He struck a match and lit the box.
“Up into the air issued this thing, this white, filmy shape, like a man covered up with a robe. It had a shine to it. It shook a little. The doctor turned to the sailor and said, ‘O.K., brother, shake hands with it.’ But the sailor was writhing on the ground, gibbering. Then, all of a sudden, he jumps up and tears out of the magic circle. He was yelling in Italian and screaming like a stuck pig. The conjure man tried to catch him, but he outran the conjure man. He tore down acres of bushes getting out of the woods.”