Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/279

 Superstitions from Central Georgia. 267

boil with the flint, then stick the flint in the ground again, in the same position as you found it. Turn around and leave it, walking backward for a few steps.

81. To cure chills and fever: After you have had three or four chills, take a piece of cotton string, tie as many knots in the string as you have had chills, go into the woods and tie the string around a persimmon bush, then turn around and walk away, not looking backward.

82. To wash your face in water in which eggs have been boiled will bring warts.

83. To take off a wart, take a grain of corn, eat out the heart or white kernel, strike or cut the wart till it bleeds, then take a drop of the blood, put it in the corn where the heart was taken out, and throw the grain to a chicken. The wart will go away.

84. To strengthen your wind in running, eat half-done corn-bread.

85. Negroes believe that if one borrows a hat from a diseased person, and ther wearer sweats round the forehead where the hat rests, he will take the disease.

86. Don't step over a child ; it will stop the child from growing. Stepping over a grown person is a sign of death.

87. If you cut a mole on your body till it bleeds, it will turn into a cancer and kill you.

88. To eat a peach, apple, or plum that a bird has pecked is said to be poisonous.

89. To scratch the flesh with the finger-nails till it bleeds is said to be poisonous.

90. The bite of a "blue-gummed negro " is said to be poisonous.

91. If a pregnant woman raises her hands high above her head, as for instance to carry a water-bucket on the head, it will cause the navel-string of the child to tie about the neck and choke it to death. The child will be born dead. All children so born are supposed to have met their death in this way.

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