Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/306

 298 beliefs, superstitions, and traditions of the negro population in Missouri, taken down from the lips of old negresses, steeped in the folk-lore, wildly grotesque, of their race. Much of it probably echoes from their original African abodes. The eighteenth chapter is devoted to stories of "Jacky-mi-Lantuhns" or "Wuller Wups", as told by old aunts and grannies to listeners of a younger generation. The whole book is printed faithfully in the negro dialect, a jargon so grotesque that I could not undertake to read the passages quoted, nor even to copy them as printed, but must transcribe them in ordinary terms. The ancient granny describes "Jacky-mi-Lantuhns" or "Wuller-Wups", thus: "When men who have been running after other folks' wives have been enticed on amid marshes and drowned, the Devil's old woman goes and catches their spirits, and ties them up in big bladders, and lights them and turns them loose in the bogs and sloughs, and so they fool and entice other sinners into the bogs, making them think they see a man or woman with a lantern; this is the way they draw folks on. There is a man-jacky and a woman-jacky. If a man going along in the night loses the road, he sees in front of him what he is certain is a woman with a lantern. He sees the lantern plain, and he thinks he sees the woman: but he can't see her plain, and he follows and he follows—he can't help it—and he thinks he hears her say something, though he can't tell what, so he follows on through the mud, and down in the slosh he falls, from which he won't get out till the Judgment Day. If a woman lose the road, she imagines she sees a man with a light, and she tries to catch him up, and follows and follows, till down she goes" (p. 274). Much of this, as well as the names of the misleading lights, seem to be echoes of Old-English tradition, though how it became current amongst the negroes in America is not clear.

But the negro imagination gives a more gruesome and "voodoo" colour to these stories, for the old witch-negress goes on to tell her hearers that "the worst kind of