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Updated: May 18, 2025
The powers of the Obeah man, and especially of the arch-magician known and dreaded by every negro as 'Bat Wing, are familiar to me. Since I was alone at the time that the shot was fired, and for some few minutes afterward, and since the Tudor garden of Cray's Folly is within easy range of the Guest House, to fail to place me under arrest would be an act of sheer stupidity."
There was a click, as of a knife thrust into its sheath, and the stranger was gone. Fernandez heard of this and drew an inference, but it did not deter him from another visit to the Obeah woman's house next evening. The old woman was away. Juanita was there alone.
He called for brandy and water, with a curse to the waiter, swore deeply between every sip, and, ultimately dispatched another messenger for Nell M'Collum. "That Obeah woman's playing on me," he exclaimed; "because my face is black, she thinks me a fool. Furies! I neither know what she is, nor who the other is. But I will know."
Obeah, a pretended sort of witchcraft, arising from a superstitious credulity, prevailing among the negroes, has ever been considered as a most dangerous practice, to suppress which, in our West India colonies, the severest laws have been enacted.
So powerful was the name of Obeah on the ear of the hag, that she dreaded it more than my brandished knife.
Nevertheless, it is a fact beyond doubt that among the negroes both of the West Indies and the United States there is a widespread belief in the powers of the Obeah man. A native who believes himself to have come under the spell of such a sorcerer will sink into a kind of decline and sometimes die."
It was a fair and quiet night, except for the queer and persistent call of some insects that seemed always to be drawing nearer to the house. Faint now came the sound of the clock in Matanzas striking twelve. As if it were a signal to the dead, shadows appeared about the house of the Obeah woman, creeping, nodding, motioning, moving toward the door.
"I never heard of much real Voodoo stuff here in the Windward Islands," the planter rejoined, "but Obeah plays a big part in negro life. And, as I was just telling you, the whites aren't above using it, sometimes." "In Haiti," responded Stuart, "Father and I once found an Obeah sign in the road. Father, who knows a lot about those things, read it as a charm to prevent any white man going that way.
We discern in the foregoing citation the exercise of a charity that is unquestionably born of fetish-worship, which, whether it be obeah generally, or restricted to a mere human skin, can be so powerful an agent in the formation and retention of beliefs.
To him and his familiars are attributed all manner of queer tales, one of which, from Jamaica, may be quoted as an illustration: Sarah Winyan, an orphan of ten, lived with her aunt, while her two brothers kept house by themselves a mile or two away. This aunt was an Obeah witch, the duppy, or devil ghost, that was her familiar, appearing as a great black dog that she called Tiger.
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