Browse:Whipping (Volume 1, entries 1010–1014)
Whipping
Volume 1, entries 1010–1014. Source context: THE DOCTORS AT WORK: REPORTS FROM LAYMEN → FOLK MEDICINE → FOLK MEDICINE (1) PRINCIPLES OF HEALING. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 1010
If she get that [menstrual blood] on you, she's got you. She puts that in something you eat or drink and you can't get clear of her. I had that done to me once. There was a old lady that asked me to come over one Saturday afternoon - and I was going with her daughter and she seemed to think a great deal of me. Her daughter said she [the mother] wanted us to marry. On a Sunday morning she sent me to another daughter's and I went [there] and got her a jib bonnet - that's an old-fashioned bonnet made out of slats. So when I got ready to go home she [the mother] give me a molasses cake into [baked in] a tin plate. And her son who was a cripple fellow got on a stool and said, "Sam, give me a piece of your cake." His mother replied to him, 'No, he's [you have] had cake." He said, "Mine was cut-out cake [a slice from a large cake], not that kind." And so on going home I had to go on a road through a field of roasting-years [ears of (sweet) corn (maize) ready for roasting or boiling] - and I ete about half of it and I come to think what the old folks had told me. And I threw the rest [of the cake] off in the corn. And I had a time in getting clear of her [daughter]. I wasn't satisfied nowhere I would be except I was looking at her. There was an old man told me how to get shed of it by taking a brand-new shingle and carrying it to a sandy branch. And I drew her pitchure as near as I could. I was told, you draw the pitchure on the shingle and drive the pitchure into the sand, and I just jumped backwards and forth over the shingle - over her head, and cut her in the face with a switch. You have to do that nine times [once each] nine mornings early. And I didn't have much more trouble.
Entry 1011
If a fellah wanta cunjure yo' any way wit root work, if yo' knock blood outa him he can't do it - dey say that.
(If you draw some of his blood he can't hurt you?)
He can't hurt cha.
Entry 1012
Well, ah tell you, jes' like now if a person got a spell on you - well, you have to git next to his friends see and git his friend to pull off a job for yuh. Well, you will have to just take a knife and draw his blood see, and de minute you draw his blood, why that spell is all ovah wit.
Entry 1013
If one of these cunjures or hoodoo persons puts a spell on you, the only thing you can do is to cut a wild grapevine and make a walking cane of it and then beat them with it. By this time you beat all the cunjure out of them.
Entry 1014
What you do to break up cunjuration - you go out in the country and get a grapevine that has seven joints on it, hammer it over their head until blood comes and make a wish to the Lord [for it] to be overcome. I heard of an old fellow one time putting a spell on a man and the man heard of it and he got a stick for it, and by the time he got to whaling him over the head with the club, he told him if he let him alone he'd take that spell off. And he did take that spell off.