Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-06.pdf/97

92 say, "He's gwine to die: he's seed de moonack."

Many of these superstitions, as the efficacy of the frog-bones and conjuring gourd, are no doubt handed down from their African ancestors. A few years back the rites of the "Hoodoo" were practiced and believed in in the city of New Orleans. From the description I have had from those who have witnessed the ceremony, it must have resembled the incantation scene in Macbeth.

It is well known in Louisiana that many a cargo of slaves from Africa was landed on the Gulf coast soon after that portion of our national domain was purchased from France, and that this traffic in human flesh was stealthily kept up for some years after the war of 1812. Labor was in demand, and this demand increased as the rich alluvial lands along the Mississippi and the lagoons and bayous to the west of New Orleans were opened to the culture of cotton and sugar. The planters, whether they were creoles of French or Spanish extraction or emigrants from the Atlantic States, were not disposed to quibble as to the legality of procuring slaves in this way: they were only too glad to get them; and the numerous lagoons running from the Gulf into the interior offered facilities for the landing of slaves. That the heathenish rites of the Hoodoo should exist in Louisiana even at the present day is therefore not wonderful.

But to return to the votaries of Hoodoo in New Orleans. There was the fire in the middle of the earthen floor, with the iron pot swung over it. What its contents were none but the official negroes knew; but as it boiled and bubbled, the negroes, with song of incantation, would join hands and dance around it until they were successively exhausted and fell on the floor. Amongst the votaries of the Hoodoo, it is said, could occasionally be found white women of wealth and respectability who had been influenced by their old negro servants.

For some years before the war of the rebellion it was my fortune to be connected in business with a firm in New Orleans. One of my partners, as an act of humanity and to secure his services as porter, bought a negro boy whom we had been hiring for some years by the month. His name was Edwa, and at the time of buying him he was about eighteen years of age. When not employed in his regular duties, he improved the hours by learning to read and write. He was constitutionally and practically honest. His services were valuable, and he was a favorite with all. Still, his hereditary aptness for such things led him to join in the Hoodoo; and as a matter of course he became bewitched, and, although a consistent professor of the Christian religion, he believed in this superstition. It was about three years after my partner became his owner that he was thus affected. All arguments against his foolish impressions were useless. He imagined that some one of his co-worshipers had put a spell upon him; that his enemy had poured frog-spawn into some water which he had given him to drink, and that this spawn had hatched and entered into the circulation of his blood; that his veins were full of small tadpoles.

Dr. H, a shrewd physician, became acquainted with Edwa's malady, and assured him that he was correct, and his master and friends unreasonable and entirely in the wrong, as to his complaint; and, to use an old saying, "to fight fire with fire" and restore this favorite servant, he put him under a course of medicine and made a final cure as follows: Procuring some hundreds of minute tadpoles from the ditches back of the city, he made an appointment with Edwa to be at his office at an hour of a certain day. Giving him a dose of some sickening and stupefying medicine, he then bled him copiously and shook the tadpoles from his coat sleeve into the basin of blood. His master and a few friends who were present acknowledged their error on seeing the tadpoles, and Edwa had ocular demonstration that he was