![]() Well, the truth is that obeah remains a vital, if clandestine, force in West Indian life. Surely one would think this cult of the occult would have perished by this time. Of course all that happened nearly 300 years ago. It was a West Indian slave named Tituba, part Carib Indian and “very proficient in the art of black magic,” who started the witch hunt of 1692‐93 in Salem, Mass., which resulted in 19 innocent people being hanged and one SO‐year‐old man “pressed to death.” Tituba had been brought to Massachusetts from Barbados by Samuel Parris, a merchant turned Puritan minister. “Remember when Massa's son was sick? Well, I de one put somethin’ in his soup.”Ī drop of poison secreted under servant's thumbnail as he served the tea and the slave had her gruesome revenge on a cruel master. Deathbed confessions, however, were not unusual. Convictions were impossible to obtain because no one would testify against an obi‐man for fear of being hexed himself. Still, people continued to die without symptoms. When it finally dawned on a planter that he himself might be the victim of this underground resistance, he outlawed obeah, making its practice punishable by death. Someone who was spellbound believed an enemy had caught his shadow and thus had the power to bring about his death. “Shadow‐catching” was called in the 17th‐and 18th‐century plantocracy era. The planters seldom discovered the slaves who were secretly harvesting arsenic beans in their garĪ search of an obeahman's shanty would reveal only a few cats’ ears, bottles of grave dirt, dried plants and some human hair. They did not prohibit Africans from wearing amulets or packets of herbs around their necks. The planters outlawed African drums, for fear they might communicate a message of insurrection, yet they considered obeah merely quaint superstition at first. Black magic they managed to cling to, perhaps because represented revenge and hope to them. When Africans were shipped to the New World, they were forced to relinquish language, culture and religion. Whatever its sources, obeah drove the West Indian sugar magnates right up the plantation walls. Peace of mind in the West Indies is something to be worn around the neck to ward off the jumbies. Moses warned the Israelites not to recognize the demon Ob, translated in the Bible as divinator or sorcerer. The etymology has been traced to ancient Egyptian mythology in which ob (or aub) mean serpent. In the language of the Ashanti, obay'fo meant wizard, and obi in East Africa meant sorcery or fetishism. Obeah has no creed or organized service of worship. Obeah (or Obecyahism) is not to be confused with the formalized rites of Haiti's more familiar voodoo. Their powers can both heal and harm and are for hire by rich, poor, black and white. They speak in unknown tongues, which not even they themselves can always understand. Caribbean obeahmen live in seclusion in the bush, out of the eye of the law, which is forever on their trail. Since obeah is technically illegal on most islands, its believers maintain a conspiracy of silence. Obeah is a private pursuit, something just between a fellow and his fears. Brought over centuries ago by African slaves, it has thrived, enhanced by superstitions prevalent among Scotch and Irish Highlanders, interlaced with Christian ritual and aided by an expert botanical knowledge inherited from the Carib Indians. Tourists seldom realize how powerful and persistent this obeah, or necromancy, is throughout the Caribbean islands. They know they were expected to suffocate and die within nine days, like the chicken that was to have bean buried with the body. Those mourner,: who are named flee the scene in panic. With it are slips of paper bearing the names, birth dates and addresses of certain people. In Georgetown, Guyana, a live black chicken is found under the clothes of a not‐yet‐buried corpse. It is not until her husband sets down rules for his second wife concerning the upbringing of the first wife's son that the ghost vanishes. The night fishermen see her, standing there in the same white dress in which she was married and buried. Then his first wife begins showing up at the front gate. ![]() ![]() In Jamaica, a dying woman warns her husband that if he mistreats their son, she will come back to haunt him. Later the girl learns that her grandmother has died at that very moment. She recognizes the rings on the hand waving good‐by as her grandmother's, hut when she rushes outside, no one is there. On Barbados, an 18‐year‐old girl is awakened by a tapoing at her window.
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