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The obeah doctors, with their absurd concoctions and practices, were openly defying the physicians of repute, for the terrified blacks believed that the English had prayed once too often that the hurricane should be stayed, and that he sulked where none might feel his faintest breath. Therefore they cursed the white doctor as futile, and flung his physic from the windows.
She started up, and the blood rushed to her face and neck in a profusion of blushes, which are perfectly visible through the skin of these mulattos. "Carlotta," I repeated, "I had a dream last night; and who do you think came to me? It was Obeah!" She started at the name. "He told me not to drink coffee this morning, but to make the old woman drink it." At these words the beldam sprang up.
Already the girl and he should have been half-way back to the tower; yet still, inhibited by that slow, grinning, staring advance of the chief, there the engineer stood. But all at once the spell was broken. For with a cry, a hoarse and frightful yell of passion, the obeah leaped leaped like a huge and frightfully agile ape leaped the whole distance intervening.
At last she looked up and said, "Gemmen, I got a little speech to make I very sorry dat I not drink your health; but it no use dat why you see me drink; I tell plenty time you make me mad you make me drink obeah water make me kill myself. Now I ab done it I drink pison water just now. In two hour I dead woman."
It might indeed be further shown, that the latter have their temporary transformations of men into alligators, wolves, and the like, as the French have their loups-garoux, the Germans their war-wolves, wolf-men, and the rest. The negroes practising obeah are acquainted with some very powerful vegetable poisons, which they use on these occasions, and by which they acquire much extensive credit.
The 'fetish-pot' stood everywhere, filled with oil, water, and palm-wine, leaves, cowries, eggs, and all manner of filth. This stuff, stirred by the komfo diviner, answers questions and enables man to soothsay. It also corresponds with the obeah of the West Indies, the ubio of the Efik race, a charm put into the ground to hurt or kill. How hot the rich hole was!
The ringleaders and obeah doctors were either publicly executed or punished with such cruelty that the other malcontents were too cowed to plan another rebellion; and the abundant rains of the following autumn restored their faith in the white man. When Alexander was five years old, James arrived, an object of much interest to his elder brother, but a child of ordinary parts to most beholders.
"Coolies don't steal," was the terse reply, "those that are Mohammedans don't, any way. Trinidad negroes do. They're different from the Barbadian negroes, quite different. Obeah seems to be about the only thing they care about." "I ran up against some Obeah in Haiti," remarked Stuart, "though Voodoo is stronger there."
So powerful was the name of Obeah on the ear of the hag, that she dreaded it more than my brandished knife.
At this point I discovered several paragraphs underlined in pencil, and concluding that the underlining had been done by Paul Harley, I read them with particular care. They were as follows: "According to Hesketh J. Bell, the term Obeah is most probably derived from the substantive Obi, a word used on the East coast of Africa to denote witchcraft, sorcery, and fetishism in general.
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