earned extra money calling breakdowns at "frolics." At one dance, a stranger took an interest in Miss Eddie's momma and tried to follow up. She spurned him, and he vowed revenge. First, the family's house caught fire, nearly trapping one of Miss Eddie's sisters, who tried to run back in for a china doll. After that, Miss Eddie's mother took ill. Every time she walked down to the pea patch, she got faint and had to be carried home. The father called the doctor, who could find nothing wrong.
|
The illness continued. Some of the older people in the area concluded Miss Eddie's momma had been hoodooed. They reasoned that since her illness occurred when she went to the pea patch, something along the route must be responsible. Miss Eddie's daddy searched the area. Finally, looking at a log footbridge over an irrigation ditch, he found "something," possibly a small bagshe never found out what it was or what it had contained.
|
"The older people told poppa to tell momma to cross further down from then on," Miss Eddie said, rocking slightly in her chair, absorbed in memory of the old days. "And somebody told momma to wear two silver dimes around her left ankle. As long as my momma lived she wore it. She never crossed at that place no more, and she never got sick again."
|
Sometimes the hexing could backfire. Two of Miss Eddie's neighbors, one married, one not, had been locked in a triangle over the husband of the former. To save her marriage, the wife went to a root woman known to make poisonous hexes out of snake scales. The root woman gave the wife a handful of the scales and told her to crumble them into a glass of whiskey, then serve it to her husband's paramour. Something went wrong, however, and the wife accidentally drank the hoodooed potion herself. Apparently, it was effective. When the wife was found, "She had a spoon in her mouth and she'd chewed her tongue up with fits." Eventually, Miss Eddie said, a snake grew in the wrathful wife's stomach and she died.
|
|