Weirdly twisted roots are sold by women herbalists in their flats and by drugstores in the Negro sections of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. These roots are sold under such flamboyant names as High John the Conqueror, Southern John the Conqueror, Queen Elizabeth root, Dragon’s Blood root.
Thousands of Lucky Hand roots are sold. This root bears a resemblance to the human hand, a slightly palsied human hand, and is reputed to make the person who carries it lucky in picking winning numbers in bolita or “the digits,” as the numbers lottery is known.
Most of the voodoo practiced in Harlem and other Negro communities of the North is corrupted. In many cults it is only vestigial.
There is a voodoo doctor in Harlem who uses a Hindu name, anoints his head with oils purchased from a store which also sells incense and candles to Catholic churches, “consecrates” the stick he uses in incantations with a prayer written by a minister of the Spiritual Psychic Science Church, and then goes into a mumble-jumble which ends with the sacrifice of a snake he bought in a pet store.
An anthropologist would scream if such a melange were called voodoo, but what else could you call it, except high-and-mighty nonsense?
This corrupted voodoo is carried out in Harlem under wraps. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, the voodoo capital of the United States, and in Algiers, the Cajun community across the Mississippi, the conjure doctors have elbow room in which to chant, and get drunk, and dance, and sacrifice doves and toads and frizzly roosters.
It is difficult, however, to practice unadulterated voodoo in a section so crowded as Harlem. One of the most important voodoo rites, the initiation of an apprentice conjure man, calls for the sacrifice of a black lamb in a square made by four consecrated candles. Scores of neighbors would be pounding on the door and wanting to know what was taking place, what kind of party are you having, anyhow, you bums, if a voodoo worshiper tried to sacrifice a black lamb in a railroad flat in Harlem.
Also, in what park can the Harlem conjure man dig for the strange roots he needs in his business? The stuff from which Confusion Dust is made does not grow on bushes in Central Park, and they will lock you up if you try to steal the snakes in the Reptile House in the Bronx. Where does the conjure man get the anointing oil he pours all over himself before he talks with the demons, and where does he get the smelly gums for his incense and the beeswax for his consecrated candles—the candles shaped like naked men and women?
The conjure man buys his supplies, including his snakes and his pretty little baby bats, from a supply house in Manhattan, a mail-order house in an office building on a street in the West Seventies. I talked for hours with the man who operates this establishment, but I had to promise not to use the name of the firm or the address before the man would open up. The name and address would not add anything to the story, anyway.
The man sells candles and incense to Catholic and Spiritualist churches, and he thinks his business will suffer if it is generally known that he also sells supplies to voodoo worshipers. The man is middle-aged and Jewish. He knows something about hypnotism and he used to be private secretary to a mystic, an English mystic who now has a big following out in Los Angeles. His office smells of strange, sweet chemicals. Beside his flat-topped desk there is a bookcase crammed with books on black magic, on religions, on herbs; books ranging from “The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses” to “The Ancients Book of Magic” (price $5).
“I don’t believe in a lot of this stuff,” said the proprietor, shrugging his shoulders, “but I’m not a faker. I’m tolerant. I don’t want anybody to make fun of my religion, so I don’t poke fun myself. Every man to his own taste.”
In the course of the man’s explanation of his attitude toward his business a Negro woman came into the office and ordered some incense—one can of Compelling incense, one can of Black Art, one can of High Conquering, and one can of Concentration. The order came to $2.
Each of the cans had the word “alleged” printed just before the title—that is, Alleged High Conquering Incense. A girl wrapped up the order and the woman, smiling, went toward the elevator, toting enough incense under her arms to smell up the whole of New York County. Most of the company’s business is done by mail, but a few customers insist on coming direct to the office.
“My business began with incense,” said the proprietor. “I sold the orthodox incense and candles, but then some of my spiritualist customers began asking for different herbs and powders, and I branched out. I sell to voodoo priests, to spiritualist mediums, and to students of the occult. I even sell to some Hindu disciples of certain Tibetan schools. They practice right here in New York. You’ll find them operating in old brownstone houses in the Sixties and Seventies, real learned men.
“Most of the things I sell to the voodoo people are the regular supplies, roots and drugs and books and powders for conjure bags. However, I sometimes sell bats for sacrifices. I order bats from a man in Texas. He says they are vampire bats. I don’t sell snakes or doves as a regular line, but I can get them. I also sell dried sea horses and the horns of rams and holy wands. I sell wands for holy work. They are hand-carved, and they have a wooden hand at the top of the wand pointing upward. They cost $2.50.
“The horn of the ram is the same type as the Hebrews use in their ceremonies. Voodoo people use them to summon up spirits, demons and goblins. Invocators have informed us that a ram’s horn is an aid to them in invoking some demon or goblin from the beyond. They sell for $3.25. People wear the dried Chinese sea horses. They sell for a buck apiece.
“We also sell earth imported from the Mount of Olives. Many voodooists and occultists use this genuine earth for dressing a candle or a sacrifice. That is, they will scatter the earth over whatever it is they want to dress. We also sell genuine sand from the Sahara Desert for the same purpose.
“We also put up special bargain offers of voodoo goods, a whole collection in one box. There is enough in the box, which sells for $2.25, to make a very powerful conjure bag. One box contains a lodestone, some lodestone powder, a pair of Adam and Eve roots, a High John the Conqueror and a Low John the Conqueror, a waahoo bark, a devil’s shoestring, some consecration oil, an apostolic prayer for consecrating same and a piece of chamois with which the customer can make himself a bag to wear these things in after he has consecrated them.”
Every person who depends on voodoo to any degree carries a conjure bag. They are made of cloth, chamois or deerskin, and are filled with any object or collection of objects—roots, herbs, stones, powders or fetid gums—specified by the voodoo doctor. Sometimes the heart of a sacrificed animal is burned and the ashes poured into a conjure bag. They are supposed to be medicinal or protective. They are worn around the neck like asafetida bags.
Most people prefer to make their own from materials supplied at high-class prices by a voodoo doctor, but the company sells one ready-made at a dollar a throw, a “Southern style” herb pouch dressed with Van-Van oil, an oil which is reputed to be simply too, too. Crap-shooters pour a few drops of Van-Van on each hand and rub their palms together before rolling dice. It will, according to some authorities, drive away evil spirits, make hair grow, enable you to find addresses in the Bronx, help you pick the right numbers in bolita, make you walk straight when you are drunk, or help you shoot the balls into the right holes in a pin game. You never saw such oil.
The company sells a long line of powders for use in conjure bags. They include crossing and uncrossing powders. The phrase “so-called” is printed before the name of the powder on each label; one powder, for example, is sold as So-Called Uncrossing Powder. By this the company means it cannot guarantee that the powder will uncross you if you have been crossed (hexed, hoodooed or bewitched). You simply wear the so-called powder and hope for the best.
The powders are extremely smelly. The best sellers are Confusion, Supreme Master, Vision, Success, Oriental Lover’s, Protection, High John the Conqueror, Commanding, Black Art, Fast Luck, Compelling, Invocation and Lodestone. High John the Conqueror
is a peculiar, twisted root, and it is a fetish with innumerable powers and qualities.
It is sold as High John, Low John, Little John, Big John and Southern John the Conqueror. It is ground into powder for incense and conjure bags, and it is sold whole to those who want no frills. Sometimes it is ground up and put into Notre Dame Water, a water which makes peace in a home, or it may be thrown into Four Thieves vinegar, which is used for breaking up homes and for making people go crazy or away.
If, for example, you want someone to go away, a “hell of a long ways away,” you put some of this vinegar in a bottle with the name of the person and throw the bottle into a river. However, most conjure men use John the Conqueror only for “white” work, such as obtaining peace in a home. They don’t like to use it for “black” work, such as driving someone crazy. One doctor said, “I’m afraid John will turn on me if I use him for black work. It takes a long time to get straightened out if John turns on you.”
Some of the conjure-bag powders contain ambergris and musk. They sell for 50 cents a bottle. Sometimes one person will wear three or four conjure bags at once, blending the smells of Black Art, Compelling and Fast Luck, for example, into one mighty symphonic odor fit to kill. The company also sells French Luck and Jockey Club perfumes.
One powder which is used extensively in Harlem is “landlady” or “rooming-house” powder. Technically, it is called Chinese Wash. Conjure men all over the country sell this stuff as a liquid and as a powder. A landlady has trouble renting her rooms, and she goes to the conjure man and asks for help. He engages in certain rites, jumping inside the double-circle and pounding the floor with a stick. Then he prescribes.
He tells her to go home and scrub out her house. When she has “all the evil conditions” scrubbed out she is supposed to sprinkle “rooming-house dust” all over the place. The base of the powder is a powerful deodorant.
“It works,” said the proprietor of the voodoo supplies house, “because many rooming houses get smelly to outsiders while the landlady doesn’t notice it at all, living in it all the time. The odor is so bad that people won’t rent rooms. After cleaning and deodorizing the rooms rent much better, and voodoo gets the credit.”
Powdered Human Brains
According to the latest information from the Department of Health, it is impossible to kill germs by tooting at the new moon with a ram’s horn. However, conjure doctors are not interested in the latest information from the Department of Health. Even the poorest conjure man works on the assumption that he knows twenty times more than the finest medical man in the world.
Using a prescription he says he got from one of the demons who dwell beneath the three-pronged root of the world-mountain, a conjure doctor may wrap seven lengths of fresh snakeskins around the middle of a person suffering from stomach ulcers, telling him it is a sure cure for what ails him, and the treatment, of course, will have no effect on the sufferer, except that it will make him smell rather unusual.
A journeyman voodoo doctor feels competent to treat any disease or ailment that can possibly afflict any animal—man, mule or monster. Consequently, voodoo is a serious menace to the health of a community.
Little damage would be done, perhaps, if conjure men confined their medicine making to lovesicknesses—bringing two people together, for example, or making a man look O.K. in the eyes of the object of his affections through the use of Compelling powder or conjure bags filled with Adam and Eve roots or some such mess. Quite often conjure men give advice to the lovesick as good as the run-of-the-mill advice in lovelorn columns in the newspapers.
Such work, however, does not satisfy the conjure men. They want to prescribe for and treat people suffering with everything from tuberculosis to tertiary alcoholism. And, usually, the more disastrous the affliction the screwier the remedy. They will give rat’s blood to people suffering with cancer and gooferdust to epileptics.
The voodoo doctors and their voluntary or unconscious allies—the herb and root quacks and unscrupulous druggists—have wrecked the health of thousands. The Department of Health and the American Social Hygiene Association have found scores of voodoo doctors treating diseases.
The stuff they prescribe may not actually be dangerous in itself, although it often is, but their phony, often ghastly medicines always keep patients from receiving treatment that will cure them. A member of the medical staff of the Department of Health told a harrowing story about a medicine prescribed by one quack.
“A friend of mine, a doctor, was looking up a telephone number in a dingy drugstore in Central Harlem,” said this man, “and while he was there a customer came in and asked the clerk for some powdered human brain, about $2 worth.
“Without a moment’s hesitation the clerk stepped behind a partition in the rear of the store and quickly returned with a small folded paper, the kind in which cold powders are put up. The man paid for it and walked out.
“My friend decided it would be worth $2 to find out about the stuff. He asked the clerk if he had any more for sale and said, ‘What’s it good for?’ The clerk said it was simply wonderful for nervousness and sick headaches and syphilis and other diseases of the brain.
“My friend bought some and went immediately to a chemist. An analysis showed that my friend had paid $2 for as much talcum powder as could be held on a dime. Its monetary value was infinitesimal and its curative power zero.
“People who buy this stuff are endangering their lives and menacing the health of their families and the communities in which they live. While they spend their slim earnings on such worthless hokum they are losing precious time.”
Doctors and nurses from the Department of Health have found Negroes using scores of fantastic root and herb compounds for sicknesses. They have found West Indians in East Harlem treating asthma patients with a broth made by boiling lizards in milk, for instance. The remedies vary according to the sections from which the herbalists came. West Indians, for example, treat “dropsy” by bathing the sufferer in a brew of mullein leaves and salt, but Negroes from Alabama apply a poultice of castor oil and okra blossoms. The remedies are equally inefficient.
The Harlem Health Center has often had trouble in vaccinating children because their parents insisted the conjure bags they wore around their necks were better than any vaccine. Bag-wearing is not confined to Negroes, however. People of many races wear bags filled with lumps of asafetida, a fetid Persian sap, and Italians in New York wear garlic bags.
A Negro policeman at the West 135th Street station, an unusually intelligent policeman, maintains that an asafetida bag will protect the wearer against influenza. Doctors say that there may be some value in the asafetida bag—its aroma probably discourages people suffering with contagious diseases from coming near the wearer. They say also that the aroma probably discourages people who are not suffering with contagious diseases from coming near the wearer.
The use of conjure bags is widespread in every community in which voodoo has any influence. Not so widespread, of course, is the use of incantations—the orotund chanting of incoherent, mystic phrases to exorcise demons believed to be causing the pain. A conjure doctor has to be paid quite well for this service, since it involves the purchase and sacrifice of bats, snakes, goats, doves, chickens, etc. There are many women conjure workers in this line. Marie Bernard is typical. She was found guilty in Special Sessions of posing as a doctor, diagnosing diseases and prescribing remedies, and was sent to the workhouse for three months.
Marie operated in an apartment on East 109th Street. She did her work with sacred snakes, according to a policewoman who gathered evidence for Sol Ullman, the Assistant Attorney General, who prosecutes cases of illegal medical practice. The policewoman went to Marie’s apartment and told her she was ill.
“You sure are,” Marie replied, according to the policewoman. “Your body is diseased, and your head is filled up with a poison gas and your blood is bad. [The investigator was one of the healthiest policewomen in the department.] No doctor’s medicine ca
n help you, because all your sickness and crippled leg and arm is due to a curse put on you by a bad spirit in the other world. I see a woman’s spirit, and you can never get well unless I cure you.”
“How much will it cost?” asked the policewoman, shuddering.
“I will have to get a sacred snake for my treatment,” said Marie, after figuring on a sheet of paper for some time. “A big one will set you back $7, and one a little bit smaller will come to $5.50, but I can get a real small one for $4. The bigger the snake the quicker you will throw off your trouble.”
They decided on the smaller snake, and Marie figured the entire treatment would come to $7.25, which, she said, “does not include any charge for my power.” The policewoman paid $3 on account, and Marie told her she would prepare some “influence water.” On the next visit Marie was gloomy.
“After I worked with the snake the snake died,” she told the policewoman. “That shows how bad your illness is. I’ll have to get a $7 snake. This case is more serious than I had any idea.”
She gave the policewoman a milk bottle full of a liquid which she said was “influence water,” and told her to go home and sleep for two days. In the meantime she would work with the $7 snake. She told the policewoman to come back at the end of that time because “the spirits intend to cripple you like the hunchback of Notre Dame.” She refused to make the incantations or to work with the snake in the presence of the policewoman.
“It would profit you nothing to see what goes on when I am alone with the sacred snakes,” she said.
The next time the policewoman went to see Marie she put her under arrest, sacred snakes and all.
A more common form of voodoo medicine is the “laying on of hands.”
The conjure men who use this technique smear their hands with any one of a dozen types of oil mixtures—mixtures which may contain animal blood as well as herb juices—and then they go to work on the sufferer. These healers use the “laying on of hands” for luck as well as to heal. For example, if a client wants “fish-fry luck,” or success in business, the conjurer will mix up six or seven drugs and pour them on, slapping the client meanwhile with his sticky hands.
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