Subject:Skippers
Entries
Entry 11281
An experience of my own self. I tell you about it. Few years ago - a few years ago, just I came to Virginia. Well, I came here with some kind of spell or something on me, and I would suffer so in a way, you know, would break out with those fine spots [bumps?] and then they would dry up and when they would dry, I could peel it. I had days at a time when it would turn right rough- like and peel it out to my fingers - both arms. And usually my hands, anywhere about my face, it would turn dark. Well, I never had been my natural color since, and I come to be all splotchy and everything like I am. But after my husband came here, there was a man told him, say, "you take her to Berkley [the hoodoo cen- ter near Norfolk] and she can get cured." Say, "There is a woman there." Her name was Jenny Bridge and she died four years ago in Ber- ley, Virginia, on Berkley Avenut. And she gave me some medicine. I seen her making something. I didn't know the odor, but I knowed the [something] cuttlebone and I knowed the [some- thing].
(What was the first part of that medicine you mentioned?)
Cuttleburr [Cocklebur]. You know in the field it's sticky, stick in you. And King of the World [this the second preceding "Something"] - it's a wood, and she had some black [surely black draft or draught, a laxative]. I knew that. And she say that would kill effect [of] the poison. And she had green [something]. And she boiled that all together and she had some kind of other powders, but she wouldn't say what that was and I didn't know what it was, but it seems some kind- like alum. It must have been alum, the way it would [feel?] on my flesh, you know, kind of sharp. And then she gave me one big old halfa gallon glass jug full of it. And it make me awfully sick when I take it, but I'd taken it because I wanted to get well, because I was just a walking skeleton. I whar in a bad fix, but she told me, she say, "Well, you take this now, but what pass from you," she say, "don't you empty your bucket or slop jar." She say, "Let your husband empty it because it be's about him." And I use it and he tell me to leave it. He was running a store you see, a grocery business, and I leave it fer him to come in. And one morning he got up, he said, "Now I will empty the slop jar before ah leave." And he opened this jar and he just cried like a baby. He say, "Oh, you, just come look." And all that, you know, was big-like, bloated. And on top of it it was like skipples [skippers]. You see skipples come out of meat? [Yes! Out of country-cured hams. Skippers in Southern U. S. A., any maggot in- festing meat. Those in ham can jump 50 times own length upward into air! Some- where in HOODOO I describe my experience with them.] It was just as full of skipples as it could be. The skipples just branching out. They coming from worrying. They come from me. And you see I ask her the next time I went for another jug of medicine, I say, "Miss Bridge, what is the trouble with me?" She say, "Why you was hurt with a blacksnake in a stale melon." She say, "That's why my body would get st........ [steaming = fever?]." You know I was terrified all the time. [Our doctor, saying patient's ailment had been caused by a black snake, may have had herpes [snake] or shingles, in mind; but surely much of the skin trouble in HOODOO came from pellagra, disease caused by deficient diet.]