Obi in the Caribbean
Whitehead, Henry S.
SHORTLY before the annual Christmas horseraces on the American West Indian Island of Santa Cruz, in 1922, a young colored man named Anduze, living in Christiansted, was murdered, and the...
...The term is generic...
...A blow from a stick will turn the dog, which increases in size and fierceness with every step upward, and then the little old woman may be heard pattering away howling with the pain of the blow...
...This state is attributed to some enemy or to the papaloi (witch-doctor) himself, who will, after the obsequies, dig up the "dead" person, restore animation, and hold him in slavery for the rest of his hfe...
...Having a dead man's hand in the possession renders a thief more bold, or immune to capture, or even invisible...
...This is "wolf curiosity," and that is almost an epithet 1 All the usual characteristics of the werewolf are also present in the West Indian variety...
...The central figure of this belief takes the form of a little black woman who transforms herself into a little white dog, which bounds up steps...
...Thomas society was rid of its gadfly...
...It is a question of beliefs, "les idees fixes...
...Him go back to Trebizond...
...But after nightfall, even under the Caribbean moon, which seems twice as large and twice as near as the American moon, the evil powers come forth from their lurking dens variously to plague the children of Ham, accursed with a lingering, nameless fear—because their ancestor once dared to be so bold as to break a commandment and laugh at Noah his father...
...T'ank Gahd it drapl" A bit of food has fallen from the hand in eating...
...It is not uncommon for a qualified physician to be called in and requested to demonstrate on a cadaver by means of a bodkin thrust through the heart that the dead person actually is dead...
...It Is, rather, the literal condition under which ordinary life Is lived...
...There back of French, British and Dutch Guiana, is a little transplanted Africa, and Africa changeth not I In th^ police court at Frederiksted, Virgin Islands, in October, 1925, before the late Justice J. L. Curry, a case of slander was tried...
...Anduze's heart and liver...
...Armed with this trophy a gambler is supposed to be consistently lucky...
...The person who devoutly, unquestionably, believes that his toe can be made to sec, will usually correct automatically a propensity to stumble...
...Carthage was an African seaport I Readers of William Palgrave's Ulysses, which is a more profitable book than James Joyce's similarly entitled obscenities, will note that Queen Victoria's consulgeneral at St...
...He is a kind of demon—any kind...
...The West Indian hills are full of this magic—obi (obeah...
...Next to interior Africa, Haiti is probably the most magic-infested place in the world...
...They are tabu signs, which, if disturbed, will arouse the malicious anger of Jumbeel Of course only the black people use magic, although belief in it isi not wholly confined to the ignorant black population of those jewel-like islands which form the sweeping northern boundary of the Caribbean Sea...
...Here is a perverted application of the principle of the outward and visible being bound up with the inwardness— the "spirituality"—of affairs...
...Obi bottles hanging on fruit trees, particularly those which bear the nutritious avocado pear, are common sights in thd West Indies...
...In the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, he is "Zombi," a close philological relative...
...The fact is that Palgrave, who had published in the Cornhill magazine certain animadversions on the ways of St...
...That means "a Carthaginian," i. e., a pirate, a marauder...
...It is a part, and a very important part, of their lives...
...There had been certainty—hypnotism— "put" into that silly little song, which contains delicate ironies quite imperceptible on its surface, which penetrated Her Britannic Majesty's consul-general's head and literally drove him out, so that St...
...On Martinique and elsewhere among French-speaking Negroes, one of his varieties is the "Zomblesse...
...Probably Jumbee originated on the African west coast, in the hinterlands all the way from Dakar to the Congo Basin...
...Jumbee," so visitors may be assured, "was invented by the old planters to keep the blacks indoors after nightfall...
...Finding and salting the skin renders the discoverer immune from any subsequent injury from that particular Zomblesse...
...Many authentic cures are recorded, for obi means both good and bad magic, obeah being, strictly, the good or curative variety...
...A Zomblesse is half man (or woman) half demon, a person able, like Stevenson's Thrawn Janet, to shed his skin, hang it on a nail, and go out marauding after nightfall when the tropic dark ushers in the myrmidons of Eblis, to plague Ham's sons...
...The invisible creation of God, as the black African West Indian sees the matter, may be either good or evil—like the visible creation—and may be invoked and even compelled...
...This is "to keep out de wolf...
...He is one of the most important personages in the West Indies...
...A piece of string is often tied about a great-toe to cause the toe to "see," and so prevent stumbling...
...The horse in question, which had been "obidoctored," happened to win the race...
...There is "canicanthrophy" as well as lycanthrophy extant...
...Many varieties of West Indian obi cannot be described, and these include not the least interesting from the viewpoint of the ethnologist...
...Love-philtres, curative "simples" made from common West Indian herbs, and "charms" of every description are in common, every-day use among the blacks, as well as the practices deriving from all the usual superstitions...
...The object of this murder was to procure...
...He did...
...Thomas during part of Mr...
...It is part of the very atmosphere breathed by West Indians...
...The werewolf, especially inimical to prospective mothers, may also be kept out by placing sand on the cabin roof, since the marauder must, by the nature of his being, pause to count the grains before proceeding to tear up the roof...
...One old woman had entitled another, "to me face, Yer Honor I" a "wuthless old Cartagene...
...Seitz' Dreadful Decade has nothing to say about the Danish West Indies (now the Virgin Islands) though he gives very full accounts of his various other appointments in the British consular service...
...These obi bottles are usually effective deterrents against theft of the ripening fruit...
...This is no dry theological belief, of the sort ordinarily shelved in the minds of persons preoccupied otherwise by daily affairs, and with scant inclination to consider the matters of the spirit, whether good or evil...
...Cabin doors are carefully closed at nightfall, lest Jumbee plague the sleepers...
...There even the continental, European-educated intellectuals appear to believe in magic, and Haiti has always labored under the deadweight of these beliefs...
...Under certain ancient tamarinds and up sundry canefield ranges lurks the dread Sow with Seven Pigs...
...It is only too frequently concealed beneath the honest piety of primitive people, their genuine religious conviction and the regular practice of their religion...
...The new horse won his race against the "doctored" horse, and what gave promise of a recrudescence of black African magic on this island of Uncle Sam's newest colony, the Virgin Islands, died a natural death...
...In the minds of these simple people there is being waged always a silent, desperate battle between "Gahd" and His good angels, and the powers of darkness...
...Under the mental burden of these characteristic superstitions the blacks of the West Indies live continously...
...Touching the dog with any part of the body is certain, immediate death...
...Various other members of the human body are believed to possess magical properties...
...SHORTLY before the annual Christmas horseraces on the American West Indian Island of Santa Cruz, in 1922, a young colored man named Anduze, living in Christiansted, was murdered, and the murderer was subsequently convicted in the American district court...
...An obi-doctor had been engaged to work voodoo on one of the race-horses owned by a black man, and the heart and liver were the necessary material^ for the magicking...
...Thomas society, was literally driven out by a song made by the blacks about him during their spring "magieking" in the hills back of the town: Weelum Palgrave is a cha-cha, bal'hoo...
...Belief in him seems nearly universal through the islands...
...The black shadow of obeah and voodoo ("bad" magic, i. e., deleterious) lies, a great cloud, over the minds of the blacks, once, of course, the slave-population of these incredibly fruitful and lovely isles...
...The psychology here is simple and really practicable...
...It means that Jumbee wants that bit of food—is favoring the eater...
...Therefore he thanks God for Jumbee's favor, a characteristic anomaly...
...In them, definite phobias are invoked, more or less successfully...
...Snake-Cut" (recently described in Harper's magazine by an eye-witness) is still practised in the Guiana hinterlands, though I think it is unknown in the West India Islands proper...
...It is better to swelter through an airless night than to risk Jumbee's pranks or malice...
...On the doors of Negro cabins "in the country," i e., outside the towns, crosses may be seen, much like those the Hebrews made with the blood of the Passover lamb...
...There is something weirdly approaching the "sacramental" about the West Indian magical practices...
...He is a kind of a-half-a-Jew...
...It is a dreadful portent if these run across the path of a late-returning reveller...
...Immediately afterward one of the gentleman-planters of Santa Cruz went over to Porto Rico to purchase a first-class racehorse with which to make certain that the obi horse should be beaten at the Easter races...
...Slavery is the bugaboo of which all West Indian blacks stand in fear...
...These are ordinary bottles, ornamented weirdly with seeds, bits of string, scraps of red flannel, etc...
...In the West Indies God and Satan are fighting out the destiny of mankind hand to hand, and the strange echoes of that desperate, incessant conflict resound In the preoccupied minds of the Negroes...
...In the daytime, under the glorious, reassuring sunlight of the Antilles, God reigns, in the minds of a grave but happy and carefree people...
...A "toof from a dead" is the equivalent of the American rabbit's foot...
...The belief back of this practice is in the magic of being "near-dead...
...It was Cato the Elder who enunciated "delenda est Carthago" so insistently before his confreres in the Roman Senate, in the second century, B. C. But to this day black West Indians call each other "Carthaginians" when they desire denunciatory emphasis...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 4
