Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/379

 VOODOOISM.

BY MARY ALICIA OWEN.

not begin this paper as the little boy does his greeting on the morning of April 1st, with "look behind you!"—for my eerie acquaintance, the Voodoo "conjurer," is not behind you, a shadowy figure of your Southern neighbor's past. In substantial flesh and almost superhuman power for mischief, he stands, a verity of the present, shoulder to shoulder with you and me, instantly ready, at the instance of his own hate or another's hire, to jostle us from our place and despoil us of our goods and health. Here he is, grinning at conscience, mocking at law, jeering at all virtues but self-control. Utterly heartless, abnormally conceited, trained by self-torture to the highest pitch of endurance, he might be a menace to civilization were there not one talisman that sends him cowering as did the seal of Solomon the genii. The one talisman that wards him from his dupes is the star of our nineteenth century magician—the policeman—the star, not he who wears it; he is but as other men when he takes it off. Why the star has become a talisman, no Voodoo will, or possibly can, tell. If any one in this city knows, it is your Police-Detective Wooldridge, who has already given to the world through the agency of the press reporter an interesting account of Chicago's famous Voodoo, "Old man" Allen, and his troublesome followers, the Polk Street footpads, a band of negresses "rendered absolutely fearless by their belief in Voodooism."

Who is the founder of Voodooism?

Old Grandfather Rattlesnake.

"In the old, old times, the oldest times of all,"—I am quoting Alexander, the highest Voodoo I ever knew—"Old Sun took a notion to make some live things. He squatted down on the bank of a great river and began to make all sorts 313