Browse:Black Candle and Coffin (Volume 1, entries 2923–2925)
Black Candle and Coffin
Volume 1, entries 2923–2925. Source context: THE DOCTORS AT WORK: REPORTS FROM LAYMEN → SHRINES: ALTARS - CANDLES - SAINTS; NEW ORLEANS AREA → (2) CANDLES. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 2923
(How do you do that?)
Say you cut it - take a piece of brown paper or piece of paper, but if the person is colored you use brown paper and if they white you use white paper. You take an indelible pencil and you write the name across it just like you Want it, you understand. Then you set the black candle on there and burn it for nine days.
(What is that shape you cut out there, you say?)
[Informant with imaginary scissors and paper had cut out something.]
In the shape of a coffin. Then you write it all kind of ways across and so on and then you set it [candle] right in the middle of it [coffin] and burn it for nine days, the black candle, and they sure will die - they sure will.
Entry 2924
If the pitchure is on a tintype - from my experience, not no paper, on tintype - they can kill you with that. Take and bury it bottom up and [or] then they can take and set it in ink, put nine black candles around it in the shape of a coffin and burn it for nine days. The best time to burn it is at night, whilst you sleep so it gets the spirits on them.
(That's your photograph?)
Yes, on tintype.
(Now, what else do they - for what other purpose do they burn candles?)
To evil?
(Yes.)
To kill a person and put 'em on a drift, you know, have 'em sleepyfied?
(Yes, how would they do that?)
Well, you just takes a red candle.
(A red candle.)
And [or] a black candle. And they burns that candle in ink for nine days, you'll just drift, just drift away, and you don't know what - you don't feel sick or nothing, only just drowsy and sleepy all the time. See. [New Orleans, La., (822), 1187:1+5.].
Entry 2925
(She gets the photograph and what does she do then?)
She takes and she lays it out in ink.
(In ink? What do you mean in ink?)
Ink that you write with - black ink, and she lays it out in there. (You mean she puts the ink down there and then she puts the photograph on top of the ink?) She puts it in the ink.
(Oh, this saucer or something - puts it in there?)
Yes.
(All right.)
And she puts these brass tacks around it, nine brass tacks, and nine candles.
(What do you mean the brass tacks? Just lay them around there?)
No, just lay - they's real coffin tacks.
(And she just lays them around the saucer?)
No, she sticks them in the wood, what she got laying out there. See, she have a special desk [altar] for that.
(I see.)
That's when you go to somebody that do that kind of work for you, you see. They got a special desk [altar] for that, you understand. She put these nine brass tacks down [round] in there and set your picture in it, and she speak to hit, just like as if I was, "I'm going to kill you." Well, that's the way she talk to this photograph. And she light these nine [black] candles there and in nine days wheresomever you at, it'll kill you.
(The photograph has to be a tintype, I see.)
No, paper.