“You never told us about this,” my grandfather said.
“Scared me to death,” Uncle Sam said.
My great-grandmother warned her children not to use the path that led to Iris’s house. But my Uncle Curtis was what he called hard-headed, so he went down the path anyway. “That night when I left, I was coming back home, and I heard this”—he starts tapping on the table—“tipping in the woods and the leaves. I’m walking and I’m hearing these footsteps. Those footsteps and those leaves followed me until I got to the highway. Then when I got to the highway, it seemed like it was a dog following me, because you could hear its nails hitting the concrete. Then when I got ready to make that right turn and go down to Jackson Road to go to our house, I’m scared to death ’cause I don’t know what this thang is that I’m hearing. I’m looking but I ain’t seeing it.”
“Wasn’t it dark, though?” I asked.
“The moon was shining bright. So I’m coming down that road, and all of a sudden, when I get there to the house, I’m scared to run—and I could run pretty fast in those days. If I run, I might run past the house. But we had the light up. Just as I got to the house, this thang went through the woods. It was broomstraw grass, look like the broom that you sweep, and that thang went through the woods like that. You could see the grass parting.”
“Curt made it home that night,” my grandfather said. Everyone was silent for a moment. I was afraid to ask if they’d worried that Uncle Curtis wouldn’t, or if anyone else’s children weren’t as fortunate. Their faces showed that they were indeed terrified.
Was it a dog? Was it a witch? Was it a spirit? Was it a demon? Uncle Curtis couldn’t say. All he could rely on was his hearing. To be honest, I thought this story was funny. But then again, unlike my grandparents and his siblings, I have never lived in an environment where the supernatural injected itself into everyday living. My concept of the supernatural came from books, movies, and TV shows. I didn’t know that world. Luckily, nothing happened to Uncle Sam, as nothing happened to Roger Pinckney and his wife. Back at lunch, Pinckney called over one of his friends, a black Daufuskie native, to talk about the shapeshifters on the island. He maintained a polite smile, but besides acknowledging and greeting me, he said nothing else. He obviously didn’t want to talk about shapeshifters, perhaps out of fear that he would summon them or trigger some terrible memories.
As for my Uncle Sam, I found it odd that at the time when he saw this large, ghostly figure, he made no mention of screaming. Instead, he grabbed some dirt and flung it at the apparition, almost as if he instinctively knew exactly what to do. Nothing happened to Uncle Sam, either. Uncle Curtis’s apparition fled once he made it home. Sam wasn’t near home, but he could grab a piece of the soil and banish whatever spirit that was. In hoodoo, dirt, especially graveyard dirt, is used to ward off evil intentions and spirits. As Stephanie Rose Bird says in her book, Sticks, Stones, Roots, & Bones, “Graveyard dirt . . . contains the spirit of the ancestors, the folk who look after us and mediate the spirit world.” Moreover, dirt in general is potent “because the earth is our mother . . . we can go to her for comfort, contemplation, and peace of mind.”16 Although my uncle Sam doesn’t practice hoodoo and condemns it all as demonic, he still knew in a moment of fight or flight to grab for the earth as the only defense he had.
I often wonder how my family toggles between belief and disbelief, disdain and acceptance of spiritual forces. There seems to be no reconciliation between the two. Somehow, they believe that to acknowledge its strength and not immediately tie it to something evil would be to spite God himself. But in Uncle Sam’s story, in that moment of fear, something instinctive was activated inside him, to use earth to protect himself. How was that any different from what Griffin Lotson or Tiffany Young did? Maybe his method was simple, because he didn’t have time to do anything elaborate or he didn’t remember, just as he didn’t remember what exactly that root doctor did to cure his mother.
Maybe roots, like water, evoke disdain, fear, and loss. Maybe we were conditioned to stay away from them because no one could recall a time when rootwork was in harmony with the Bible. But when Uncle Sam said that he prayed and then grabbed some soil, I felt hope. God and the earth were never enemies. After visiting Darien and Daufuskie, I knew better. Uncle Sam’s spirit knew better, and so did the ancestors.
I thought once more about Iris and how the desire for a man—someone else’s man—can be the motive for rootwork. When I traveled to Saint Helena Island in South Carolina, I saw the outcome of said motive in real time. I met with Victoria Smalls, program manager of the International African American Museum there, who intimately knew about roots and the depths of their power when a woman—or women—are envious. Victoria is a light-skinned six-foot-four-inch woman with dark, curly hair. She gave me a warm hug, as if we were reuniting after a long absence. Spiritually, perhaps we were.
There is a difference between root doctor and a root worker. As Victoria puts it, “So there’s root working, root practitioners, and root doctors, and root doctors can do ’em all. A root worker is someone who’s maybe gonna put a spell or conjure something up. A practitioner is someone who can maybe also do some holistic care, and a doctor is someone that can do all of the above, and do [psychic] surgery and heal you.”
Now things were making sense in my grandfather’s story. There was a reason why he called Iris a root worker and the person who cured my great-grandmother a root doctor. Iris wanted a curse, and the doctor could heal and undo said curse.
Before Victoria had taken her current position, she was the director of history, art, and culture, as well as the director of development and public relations at the Penn Center, where we stopped first on our tour.17 The Penn Center has been a National Historic Landmark since 1974, and two major buildings on campus were declared part of a Reconstruction Era National Monument by former President Obama just before he left office in 2017. It was a school for blacks that was begun in 1862 by abolitionist missionaries soon after the Union captured Saint Helena and gave plantation land to freed slaves. In less than seventy years, enrollment ballooned from eighty to six hundred students. From 1901 on, in addition to regular subjects, like math and reading, students learned industrial trades, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, and agriculture, as well as the requirements of land ownership. Tuition was twenty-five or fifty cents, depending on your family’s income, and work-study was also an option: girls tended to do laundry or make sweetgrass baskets to sell, and the boys would cast nets. The Penn Center is also significant for its role in political activism. Members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) would meet here in secret, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s early drafts of his “I Have a Dream” speech were written at the center. A cottage was built for him, but he was assassinated before he ever had a chance to use it.
Victoria has a personal connection to the center, as well as a professional one. After we drove through the forest behind the Penn Center and past Dr. King’s cottage, we sat down on a gazebo that overlooks Chowan Creek, where she told me about her family. Her father, a Penn Center alumnus, was first married to a black woman, and together they had six children. His wife later passed, and her father continued to live with Victoria’s grandmother on heirs property, land passed down from generation to generation, usually with no will. Her mother, Laura, who lived in Petoskey, Michigan, was a white woman, a widow with four children of her own. Laura traveled to the Penn Center for a Bahá’í Faith conference, where in the 1960s she met Victoria’s father and fell in love with him. It was against the law for interracial couples to marry in South Carolina, so they traveled to Michigan and returned to Saint Helena as husband and wife. According to Victoria, her parents were the first to integrate the island, but that union came with a price.
You see, her father was well loved. He stood six-six, had a deep bass voice, and projected command in whatever room he entered. When his first wife died, there were many women waiting to be the new Mrs., but when he chose
a woman outside of the community—a white one at that—the local women banded together and consulted Buzzy, Dr. Buzzard’s son, another root worker. Buzzy told Victoria’s father that he had some trouble coming his way.
Dr. Buzzy’s curse was that none of Victoria’s father’s sons born within the next forty years would have a son with the surname Smalls. The only male family member to have a son was Victoria’s younger brother, who became a father at forty-four. But the curse also claimed Victoria’s son. At six foot six and 240 pounds, her son played football but also excelled in his academics. By the time he was in the tenth grade, he had scholarship offers from the University of South Carolina, Auburn, and Ohio State. But in the beginning of football season during his junior year, he tore his knee and had to get surgery less than two weeks later. Percocet and morphine plummeted him into depression. Her son was living with his father, whose gun he took to end his own life. It wasn’t until the very end of our trip that Victoria paused and realized that this happened before the forty-year curse was over. She pinpoints the curse happening around 1968 or ’69, and her deceased son was born in 1998. On his obituary, his last name is Jones, but he was born Julian Smalls.
Dr. Buzzard was known everywhere, but Saint Helena was his domain. His birth name was Stephany Robinson, and he was allegedly born with a caul, or within the amniotic sac. In African American folklore, those born with a caul are said to have psychic and healing powers. Victoria told me that native islanders would see him in a boat on Chowan Creek and a buzzard would be hovering over his body. To onlookers, it appeared as if the buzzard was moving the boat against the tide. It is believed among locals and historians that Robinson’s father was illegally smuggled into Saint Helena from West Africa and passed his rootwork on to his son, who began making a name for himself in the early 1900s. His most famous specialty was “chewing the root.” On the days of trials, Dr. Buzzard would chew a root in court in order to protect defendants from harsh sentences or guilty verdicts altogether. One of Dr. Buzzard’s descendants, Mr. Gregory, who is a third-generation root worker and still alive today, helped Roger Pinckney with this “shut-mouth” special. When Pinckney was in court fighting with his ex-wife over property, Mr. Gregory gave Pinckney some roots for him to chew while looking his ex-wife in the eye. She ended up slobbering all over herself and couldn’t testify. The cost for shut-mouth special was a little over a hundred dollars, which, according to Pinckney, was “cheaper than a lawyer.” Dr. Buzzard’s shut-mouth special was so well known that eight or nine cars at a time would be parked in Dr. Buzzard’s driveway, each with a different state’s license plate.18
One person who had had enough of Dr. Buzzard’s meddling with the law was J. E. McTeer, a Beaufort County sheriff from 1926 to 1963. At first, McTeer tried to charge Dr. Buzzard with practicing medicine without a license. The first attempt led to a witness convulsing on the stand, foreshadowing the rest of the trial. In order to align the spiritual with the spiritual, McTeer began to learn rootwork himself. When I spoke to J. E. McTeer’s grandson James, an author, he couldn’t wait to regale me with stories of other root doctors of the time, especially Dr. Bug, who gave arsenic-laced cotton balls to his patients to give them heart palpitations and so they’d be passed over for the World War II draft. But Dr. Buzzard was the biggest root doctor, his legacy unmatched to this day. J. E. McTeer, like Dr. Buzzard, was born in the Lowcountry and raised by a Gullah woman. He had already had some familiarity with rootwork and became the only person in the McTeer family to practice it.
Dr. Buzzard and J. E. McTeer’s rivalry came to a head when Dr. Buzzard’s son mysteriously died in a car accident.19 Some say that Dr. Buzzard’s son lost control of the car and drowned in a nearby body of water, but Dr. Buzzard believed that the accident was J. E. McTeer’s doing. In any case, the two men called a truce and Dr. Buzzard paid a small fine. Dr. Buzzard died of stomach cancer in 1947, and the location of his grave has been kept a secret for fear that his body would be dug up and used for magical purposes or simply desecrated altogether. After Woods Memorial Bridge was built, connecting mainland Beaufort County to the Sea Islands like Saint Helena, rootwork was pushed into the shadows as tourists came in and snapped up all the land that Gullah people couldn’t afford.20
The Woods Memorial Bridge made a connection where the water once separated. That the water served as preservative for Victoria’s people is what makes it special. I found my time with Victoria profound because she would not elaborate on her lineage and the stories attached to her family tree until she brought me to the water.
On the river, just a short drive away from the Penn Center, there was a slight breeze, and I was transfixed by the large cypress trees whose leaves swayed behind her. That breeze, along with her buttery voice, transported me to a faraway place. I wasn’t in South Carolina anymore. I was someplace else entirely, ancient and foreign and yet present and familiar. It felt like what I would imagine the coasts of Western Africa to be: unadulterated and wide. I felt ensconced in protection from a place beyond what my eyes could see. I’m a petite black woman driving around the Deep South, so naturally there were moments when I felt that my safety was in jeopardy. Yet somehow, I also felt that I was being watched over. Even writing this confession of what I sensed feels embarrassing. I can’t adequately explain feeling protected, but I was. My being here documenting all of this is proof of that.
Victoria brought me to the water to discuss roots in order for me to understand the process. In order to reach the root doctor, you would have to cross over multiple bodies of water because of its supernatural force. To Victoria, the soil and water are powerful, though she is at a loss for words to explain their strength. That power, she argues, comes from West Africa, but after African Americans were Christianized and Americanized, she says, we forgot how much memory the water and land hold. “We forget all of these wonderful powers of the forest and the land. We’ve forgotten a lot, but it sneaks out in the Gullah culture.” It sure does sneak out, I thought. Iris and my uncle Sam were testaments to this—all the way from Newtonville, New Jersey. We’re tethered to land and water—to Earth—whether we realize it or not. Yet despite this collective forgetfulness, Victoria believes that we receive reminders. The following privileged encounter was mine.
Here I saw two stories that brushed up against each other: my grandfather’s and Victoria’s. Here were two African Americans who knew about the power of the root. The former condemned it, and the latter exalted it. Their memories included blotches and omissions, but I wanted to create a bridge as strong as the one I stood upon at Chowan Creek. The truth is, in the nineteenth century, Christianity and conjuring, or rootwork, were most likely flourishing on the same soil . . . and in South Carolina at that. A folklorist named William Owens noticed that black people’s superstitions combined with the Christian faith, resulting in “horrific debasement.” Christianity and superstition, in his eyes, should be incompatible. But for black people, Christianity and conjure work were, at one point, congruent with each other. After emancipation, conjure did slip into churches, like those in Missouri and North Carolina. Dr. Buzzard financed the largest church in Saint Helena. Conjurers and black Pentecostals both practice faith healing. As Yvonne Chireau, professor of religion at Swarthmore College, puts it, “Pentecostal belief revolved around invisible forces, beings, and powers in the spiritual realm, and like Conjure practitioners, Pentecostalists viewed unusual events as signs of divine or satanic intervention in the spiritual realm.”21 When African Americans migrated to the North, many sought to change their lives not only economically, but also culturally. Some saw conjure as backward. Because of their better access to education and health care, many disavowed conjure as part of the past, an embarrassing remnant of their Southern heritage.22 Our rejection of conjure was a by-product of our movement away from the South and into the middle class and cities.
Later that evening, I went back to my hotel room and checked in my bag for the powder that Pinckney had given me, only to find tha
t the sachet had burst at the seams. “Oh, hell,” I said to myself. What should I do now? I could either get a wet rag and clean up the powdered remains at the depths of my bag or leave it. I chose the latter. Then I felt bad about it. Then I questioned why. Did I expect to be in demonic possession? Did I leave myself vulnerable to bad spirits? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I’d had a long day, I was tired, and I had been given a gift.
As I was drifting off to sleep, I did worry that I would be overwhelmed with nightmares or that I’d hear strange sounds in the middle of the night. Although Mr. Pinckney was kind enough to grant my interview request, I’d still accepted a gift from someone whom I did not intimately know. My mother would’ve been furious if I had told her. There could’ve been anything in that sachet powder, and if something were to happen to me, if I were to be hexed—a possibility that my mother and now I believe in—I wouldn’t know whom to consult to undo the spell.
Luckily, I woke up the next morning feeling just the same as when I laid my head down on the pillow the night before. I slept so deeply that I couldn’t remember my dreams. I packed my belongings and made my way to the airport, and in the days that followed, men would not leave me alone. Men approached me in random places and complimented my appearance in the South with such frequency that I thought I was back in New York. Despite that, I didn’t feel hexed. I still don’t. From that day on, I didn’t fear conjure any longer, because I had seen what it could do for others. I am now uncomfortable with calling conjure demonic, because in invoking that word, I drive a wedge between me and those in the South, like Victoria Smalls and Griffin Lotson, who educated me on both its good and bad sides.
When I returned to New York, I researched the Book of Psalms and the spells that could be cast from it. I studied how honey jars could bring sweetness into my life, how roses can invite love, and how the lighting of different colored candles can yield different results, such as white for healing and purification and purple for spiritual protection. I have not done any spells because, admittedly, I’m uncertain—though how much different are these practices from eating collard greens for money and black-eyed peas for luck?
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 7