Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (57 page)

I was glad I had given the young chieftain my bronze sword. Perhaps its possession will help him in establishing his authority over those Old Ones: that giant from whose hand I originally snatched it there in the temple may very well have been their head man. He was big enough, and fast enough on his feet; had the primitive leadership qualities, in all conscience. He had been mightily impressive as he came bounding ahead of his followers, charging upon us through the clouds of dust.

I have kept the sliver Wilkes, poor fellow, cut from the palm of the great Hand. I discovered it, rolled up and quite hardened and stiff, in the pocket of my trousers there in the hotel in Belize when I was changing to fresh clothes.

I keep it in a drawer of my bureau, in my bedroom. Nobody sees it there; nobody asks what it is.

‘Yes – a sliver cut from the superficial scarf-skin of one of the ancient classical demigods! Yes – interesting, isn’t it!’

I’d rather not have to describe that sliver. Probably my hearers would say nothing much. People are courteous, especially here in St Thomas where there is a tradition to that effect. But they could hardly visualize, as I still do – yet, fortunately, at decreasing intervals – that cosmic Entity of the high atmosphere, presiding over His element of air; menacing, colossal; His vast heart beating on eternally as, stupendous, incredible, He towers there inscrutable among the unchanging stars.

Obi in the Caribbean

Shortly before the annual Christmas horse-races on the American West Indian Island of Santa Cruz, in 1922, a young colored man named Anduze, living in Christiansted, was murdered, and the murderer was subsequently convicted in the American district court. The object of this murder was to procure Anduze’s heart and liver. An obi-doctor had been engaged to work voodoo on one of the racehorses owned by a black man, and the heart and liver were the necessary materials for the magicking.

The horse in question, which had been ‘obi-doctored’, happened to win the race. Immediately afterward one of the gentleman-planters of Santa Cruz went over to Porto Rico to purchase a first-class race-horse with which to make certain that the obi horse should be beaten at the Easter races. The new horse won his race against the ‘doctored’ horse, and what gave promise of a recrudescence of black African magic on this island of Uncle Sam’s newest colony, the Virgin Islands, died a natural death.

Obi bottles hanging on fruit trees, particularly those which bear the nutritious avocado pear, are common sights in the West Indies. These are ordinary bottles, ornamented weirdly with seeds, bits of string, scraps of red flannel, etc. These obi bottles are usually effective deterrents against theft of the ripening fruit. They are tabu signs, which, if disturbed, will arouse the malicious anger of Jumbee!

Of course only the black people use magic, although belief in it is not wholly confined to the ignorant black population of those jewel-like islands which form the sweeping northern boundary of the Caribbean Sea. There is something weirdly approaching the ‘sacramental’ about the West Indian magical practices. Here is a perverted application of the principle of the outward and visible being bound up with the inwardness – the ‘spirituality’ – of affairs. The invisible creation of God, as the black African West Indian sees the matter, may be either good or evil – like the visible creation – and may be invoked and even compelled. The West Indian hills are full of this magic – obi (obeah). It is part of the very atmosphere breathed by West Indians. The black shadow of obeah and voodoo (‘bad’ magic, i.e., deleterious) lies, a great cloud, over the minds of the blacks, once, of course, the slave-population of these incredibly fruitful and lovely isles.

‘T’ank Gahd it drap!’ A bit of food has fallen from the hand in eating. It means that Jumbee wants that bit of food – is favoring the eater. Therefore he thanks God for Jumbee’s favor, a characteristic anomaly.

Cabin doors are carefully closed at nightfall, lest Jumbee plague the sleepers. It is better to swelter through an airless night than to risk Jumbee’s pranks or malice. ‘Jumbee,’ so visitors may be assured, ‘was invented by the old planters to keep the blacks indoors after nightfall.’ Belief in him seems nearly universal through the islands. In the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, he is ‘Zombi’, a close philological relative. Probably Jumbee originated on the African west coast, in the hinterlands all the way from Dakar to the Congo Basin. He is one of the most important personages in the West Indies. He is a kind of demon – any kind. The term is generic. On Martinique and elsewhere among French-speaking Negroes, one of his varieties is the ‘Zomblesse’. A Zomblesse is half man (or woman), half demon, a person able, like Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet, to shed his skin, hang it on a nail, and go out marauding after nightfall when the tropic dark ushers in the myrmidons of Eblis, to plague Ham’s sons. Finding and salting the skin renders the discoverer immune from any subsequent injury from that particular Zomblesse.

On the doors of Negro cabins ‘in the country’, i.e., outside the towns, crosses may be seen, much like those the Hebrews made with the blood of the Passover lamb. This is ‘to keep out de wolf’. The werewolf, especially inimical to prospective mothers, may also be kept out by placing sand on the cabin roof, since the marauder must, by the nature of his being, pause to count the grains before proceeding to tear up the roof. This is ‘wolf curiosity’, and that is almost an epithet! All the usual characteristics of the werewolf are also present in the West Indian variety.

There is ‘canicanthropy’ as well as lycanthropy extant. The central figure of this belief takes the form of a little black woman who transforms herself into a little white dog, which bounds up steps. Touching the dog with any part of the body is certain, immediate death. A blow from a stick will turn the dog, which increases in size and fierceness with every step upward, and then the little old woman may be heard pattering away howling with the pain of the blow.

Under certain ancient tamarinds and up sundry canefield ranges lurks the dread Sow with Seven Pigs. It is a dreadful portent if these run across the path of a late-returning reveller.

Many varieties of West Indian obi cannot be described, and these include not the least interesting from the viewpoint of the ethnologist. In them, definite phobias are invoked, more or less successfully. It is a question of beliefs, ‘
les ideés fixes
’.

‘Snake-Cut’ (recently described in
Harper’s Magazine
by an eyewitness) is still practised in the Guiana hinterlands, though I think it is unknown in the West India Islands proper. There back of French, British and Dutch Guiana, is a little transplanted Africa, and Africa changeth not! In the police court at Frederiksted, Virgin Islands, in October, 1925, before the late Justice J. L. Curry, a case of slander was tried. One old woman had entitled another, ‘to me face, Yer Honor!’ a ‘wuthless old Cartagène!’ That means ‘a Carthaginian’, i.e., a pirate, a marauder. It was Cato the Elder who enunciated ‘
delenda est Carthago
’ so insistently before his
confrères
in the Roman Senate, in the second century,
B
.
C
. But to this day black West Indians call each other ‘Carthaginians’ when they desire denunciatory emphasis. Carthage was an African seaport!

Readers of William Palgrave’s
Ulysses
, which is a more profitable book than James Joyce’s similarly entitled obscenities, will note that Queen Victoria’s consul-general at St Thomas during part of Mr Seitz’s Dreadful Decade has nothing to say about the Danish West Indies (now the Virgin Islands) though he gives very full accounts of his various other appointments in the British consular service. The fact is that Palgrave, who had published in the
Corn-hill Magazine
certain animadversions on the ways of St Thomas society, was literally driven out by a song made by the blacks about him during their spring ‘magicking’ in the hills back of the town:

Weelum Palgrave is a cha-cha, bal’hoo;

He is a kind of a-half-a-Jew!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Him go back to Trebizond.

He did! There had been certainty – hypnotism – ‘put’ into that silly little song, which contains delicate ironies quite imperceptible on its surface, which penetrated Her Britannic Majesty’s consul-general’s head and literally drove him out, so that St Thomas society was rid of its gadfly.

Love-philtres, curative ‘simples’ made from common West Indian herbs, and ‘charms’ of every description are in common, everyday use among the blacks, as well as the practices deriving from all the usual superstitions. Many authentic cures are recorded, for obi means both good and bad magic, obeah being, strictly, the good or curative variety.

Next to interior Africa, Haiti is probably the most magic-infested place in the world. There even the continental, European-educated intellectuals appear to believe in magic, and Haiti has always labored under the dead weight of these beliefs. It is not uncommon for a qualified physician to be called in and requested to demonstrate on a cadaver by means of a bodkin thrust through the heart that the dead person actually is dead. The belief back of this practice is in the magic of being ‘near-dead’. This state is attributed to some enemy or to the papaloi (witch-doctor) himself, who will, after the obsequies, dig up the ‘dead’ person, restore animation, and hold him in slavery for the rest of his life. Slavery is the bugaboo of which all West Indian blacks stand in fear.

A ‘toof from a dead’ is the equivalent of the American rabbit’s foot. Armed with this trophy a gambler is supposed to be consistently lucky. Having a dead man’s hand in the possession renders a thief more bold, or immune to capture, or even invisible! Various other members of the human body are believed to possess magical properties. A piece of string is often tied about a great-toe to cause the toe to ‘see’, and so prevent stumbling. The psychology here is simple and really practicable. The person who devoutly, unquestionably, believes that his toe can be made to see, will usually correct automatically a propensity to stumble.

Under the mental burden of these characteristic superstitions the blacks of the West Indies live continuously. It is a part, and a very important part, of their lives. It is only too frequently concealed beneath the honest piety of primitive people, their genuine religious conviction and the regular practice of their religion.

In the minds of these simple people there is being waged always a silent, desperate battle between ‘Gahd’ and His good angels, and the powers of darkness. This is no dry theological belief, of the sort ordinarily shelved in the minds of persons preoccupied otherwise by daily affairs, and with scant inclination to consider the matters of the spirit, whether good or evil. It is, rather, the literal condition under which ordinary life is lived. In the West Indies God and Satan are fighting out the destiny of mankind hand to hand, and the strange echoes of that desperate, incessant conflict resound in the preoccupied minds of the Negroes. In the daytime, under the glorious, reassuring sunlight of the Antilles, God reigns, in the minds of a grave but happy and carefree people. But after nightfall, even under the Caribbean moon, which seems twice as large and twice as near as the American moon, the evil powers come forth from their lurking dens variously to plague the children of Ham, accursed with a lingering, nameless fear – because their ancestor once dared to be so bold as to break a commandment and laugh at Noah, his father.

Jumbee

and other Voodoo Tales

Jumbee

Mr Granville Lee, a Virginian of Virginians, coming out of the World War with a lung wasted and scorched by mustard gas, was recommended by his physician to spend a winter in the spice-and-balm climate of the Lesser Antilles – the lower islands of the West Indian archipelago. He chose one of the American islands, St Croix, the old Santa Cruz – Island of the Holy Cross – named by Columbus himself on his second voyage, once famous for its rum.

It was to Jaffray Da Silva that Mr Lee at last turned for definite information about the local magic; information which, after a two months’ residence, accompanied with marked improvement in his general health, he had come to regard as imperative, from the whetting glimpses he had received of its persistence on the island.

Contact with local customs, too, had sufficiently blunted his inherited sensibilities, to make him almost comfortable, as he sat with Mr Da Silva on the cool gallery of that gentleman’s beautiful house, in the shade of forty years’ growth of bougainvillea, on a certain afternoon. It was the restful gossipy period between five o’clock and dinnertime. A glass jug of foaming rum-swizzel stood on the table between them.

‘But, tell me, Mr Da Silva,’ he urged, as he absorbed his second glass of the cooling, mild drink, ‘have you ever, actually, been confronted with a “Jumbee”? – ever really seen one? You say, quite frankly, that you believe in them!’

This was not the first question about Jumbees that Mr Lee had asked. He had consulted planters; he had spoken of the matter of Jumbees with courteous, intelligent, colored store-keepers about the town, and even in Christiansted, St Croix’s other and larger town on the north side of the island. He had even mentioned the matter to one or two coal-black sugar-field laborers; for he had been on the island just long enough to begin to understand – a little – the weird jargon of speech which Lafcadio Hearn, when he visited St Croix many years before, had not recognized as ‘English’!