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To: nagasiva@luckymojo.com From: catherine yronwodeSubject: Salt-Curse, A Linguistic and Cultural Problem Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 18:46:30 -0800 Landa transcribed a Hyatt spell as follows ============================================== BEHIND DEPARTING PERSON - SALT THROWN WITH CURSE 9447. They say if you want a man and if a man come out your house - I don't know what they [do but] I know you can keep them from your house. You can take just as he comes out of the house and just take some pot salt, and chunk 'em after them, saying, "You son of a bitch, don't come back her no more." And he'll never come back to your house no more. (I see you throw the salt after them.) [Charleston, S. Car., (497), 539:4.] ============================================== And this discussion ensued: ----------------------------------------------- LOL..I wonder if its just the salt or the nasty attitude? This one made me laugh..Landa ----------------------------------------------- LOL I would think maybe the attitude has a lot to do with it ...... plus a chunk of salt might hurt a tad bit.....:) gypsy ----------------------------------------------- AH yes what powerful free verse incantation of warding. Donovan Steelwind ----------------------------------------------- I know right? Such a subtle and sly way to cast a spell. I wonder if the person leaving had a clue they weren't welcome back? Gee Whiz, you don't need to hit me over the head with a chunk of salt twice..LOL..too funny! Landa ----------------------------------------------- LOL ... a simple "buzz off" would work just fine for me. Leia ----------------------------------------------- Then again, if someone yelled that at you, would you WANT to come back? :0P Lyz ----------------------------------------------- While i am in awe of Landa's dedication to this project, and bask in the benefits of such faithful daily transcriptions, i sometimes feel that Landa's technique of stripping away the dialect and regional accents from Hyatt's informants in an effort to render the collected African-American spells more "readable," also takes out too much cultural context, allowing readers to forget that the subject of the Hyatt spells is -- and always will be -- practical magic. Obviously the people who laughed at spell 9447 thought to some degree that the speaker was describing how to get rid of a man who was disliked by yelling a curse while hitting him with a chunk of salt. Not so. Informant 497 was specifically telling us how to deal with a suspected witch by means of what i call "the salt-plus-curse spell" -- a well known, quite traditional form of apotropaic magic against witches. At the risk of being a pedant (hey, if that's my greatest sin, i'm going to heaven in a ground pea shell!), i have decided to examine this misunderstood and laughed-at spell in rather a bit of detail, to see if i cannot overcome your giggles by supplying enough cultural and linguistic cues that you will be able to clearly understand a rural Southern black person's speech from 1936. First, perhaps i can remove some of the spell's "laughability" quotient for this audience by defining a few regionalisms: (1) "pot salt" is cooking salt or table salt, as opposed to block salt or rock salt for use about the farm. (2) "chunk 'em" (sometimes spelled "chuck 'em") means "throw them" -- it does not refer to chunks of salt at all. Furthermore, "throwing after," "throwing behind" and "throwing for" are black slang terms that refer to deploying magical items, as will be seen below. Second, any potential difficulty in understanding this spell was compounded because Landa's transcription contained two typos in places that would lead a reader to hear the exact OPPOSITE of what the speaker was saying. Here is an interlineation of the typos: ============================================== Landa: 9447. They say if you want a man and if a man come out your house ============================================== should be "if you DONT want a man," per Hyatt's ============================================== Hyatt: 9447. Dey say if you don' want a man and if a man come out chure house ============================================== also, the word "her" -- ============================================== Landa: saying, "You son of a bitch, don't come back her no more." ============================================== -- should be "HERE," per Hyatt's ============================================== Hyatt saying, "Yo' son of a bitch, don' come back heah no mo'." ============================================== -- so informant 497 was NOT talking about making a man who was formerly "wanted" get away from an un-named "her" -- rather about making a man who was "NOT wanted" get away from "HERE," that is, the house. Now, even with the religionalisms explained and the typos fixed, there is still some ambiguity in the phrase "if you don't want a man and if a man comes out of your house" Why is the man not wanted?: Is informant 497 simply giving vent to an anti-social gesture, as some people on the list assumed, or is the speaker deliverately letting some crucial piece of information go unspoken? To a folklorist, the answer is -- fairly obviously -- the latter. In fact, the subject is witchraft. The man that "you don't want" is not a pesky neighbor or a rejected suitor or a meddlesome relative. The man that "you don't want" but cannot name is a hostile enemy witch who has gotten into your house for the purpose of putting down powders, throwing for you, laying a trick, stealing your hairs, or something of that nature. The problem that informant 497 faced was that even to SPEAK of witchcraft -- not just to accuse someone, but to mention it at all -- is unlucky and ought to be avoided. His or her solution to this problem was to carefully avoid noting that the man that "you don't want" is a witch. How can a folklorist be sure that spell 9447 really *is* about witchcraft if the informant never mentions the word "witch"? Well, Hyatt has done the job for us: he has sorted his collection of spells by type, and in this case we can get the subtext of spell 6447 from OTHER speakers in adjacent spells. Here is the previous spell: ============================================== 9446. Ah've hear'd dat if a person come tuh yuh home an' yo' figuh [figure] dat dey ar not dere fo' de right purpose, dat aftah dey leave out, chew kin take a han'ful of salt an' throw out behin' dem. An dey won't come dere agin if dey have anythin' of 'em lak witchcraft. [Waycross, Ga., (1061), 1720:5.] ============================================== Like informant 497, informant 1061 also avoids saying the word "witch." and substitutes the coded phrase, "you figure that they are not there for the right purpose." So informant 497's "man you don't want" is thus equivalent to informant 1061's "man who is not there for the right purpose." And what is the nature of this man? Luckily for us, informant 1061 was bolder than informant 497 -- or perhaps estimated correctly that not every listener would understand the coded phrase "not there for the right purpose" -- so after giving the spell (and using the regionalism "throw out" which specifically means to deploy a powdered magical agent) he or she added: "And they won't come there again if they have anything of [about] them like witchcraft." So there we have it. Informant 947's "man you don't want" is a witch. Spell 6446 can now be thematically decoded as an anti-witch spell -- and if we straighten out the speaker's typical colloqial pronoun-swapping, substitute modern urban nouns and verbs for the rural regionalisms, and render the text into standard Anglo-Saxon English speech, we get this spell: ============================================== WITCHRAFT DIVINATION BY MEANS OF SALT AND A CURSE 9447. They say if you don't want a man around your house because you suspect him of witchcraft and if you see him coming out of your house -- you are thinking, "i don't know what he is doing there," but you do know how you can keep witches from you house, so you just take some cooking salt and throw it after him, saying a simple curse, such as, "You son of a bitch, don't come back here again." And if he is a witch, he'll never come back to your house again." ============================================== That is the nature of the salt-and-curse spell in a nutshell: Problem: Someone whom you know from the local community is seen leaving your home. Question: How do you determine what the intruder's intention really was? Answer: As soon as the person leaves, you throw table salt on the path after him and curse him and IF THE PERSON IS A WITCH, he won't be able to come back. Mechanism: Thrown salt and a spoken curse are a diagnostic magical tool (and only secondarily a warding) because a witch will not be able to return along the salted path. As a spell, throwing salt and cursing after a witch (singly or in combination) is Germano-British in origin. Since slavery times it has also become a staple spell in the Arican-American community, where the salt is sometimes mixed with black pepper, which is an African belief-survival. Hyatt recorded hundreds of "salt thrown after a suspected witch" spells from all parts of the country, both in HCWR and in an earlier book called "Folk-Lore from Adams County Illinois" (FACI for short). Back in 1998 or so, i selected a few of Hyatt's HCWR spells involving salt and put them on a web page i had written about salt in African-American folk magic. The URL is http://www.luckymojo.com/salt.html About a year later, on my page about charms and spells used for magical protection, i transcribed a number of spells involving salt and cursing from FACI. Hyatt marked his sources by ethnicity in FACI, so you will see "German," "Irish," and "Negro" salt spells, cursing spells, and salt-and-cursing spells on that page. Go to the sections titled "Protective Charms Deployed About the House," "How to Prevent a Witch from Entering or Returning to Your Home," "Protective Spells to Be Spoken Upon Meeting a Wtich," and "How to Undo a Bewitchment or a Hoodoo Spell" The URL is http://www.luckymojo.com/protectionspells.html Okay, end of pedantic anthropology lesson for today. Please understand that i am not criticizing anyone for not understanding informant 497 or for laughing at the regional dialect, i just wanted to redeem the speaker from being seriously misunderstood and to demonstrate his or her value as a teacher. And thanks again, Landa, for keeping these spells coming! cat yronwode Hoodoo in Theory and Practice - http://www.luckymojo.com/hoodoo.html No personal e-mail, please; just catch me in usenet; i read it daily. This post copyright (c) 2000 catherine yronwode. All rights reserved.
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