Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [32]
The best evidence for African religious beliefs in the Americas comes from those places where Africans settled in sufficient numbers to be able to transmit and practice elements of the cultures they left behind—and where good sources, most notably Inquisition records, with their detailed depositions and close attention to religious beliefs, exist to uncover these practices. Brazil meets both requirements, and evidence from Inquisition records there from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggests what kinds of linkages might have endured. Witchcraft was not prosecuted frequently in Portugal. In Portuguese Brazil, however, it was a crime that Inquisitors pursued, that Portuguese and Africans alike feared, and that seems to have been an important meeting ground for both Africans and Europeans, as Europeans sought remedies from enslaved practitioners and accused slaves of bewitching them. In 1686, one slaveholder who believed his wife had been bewitched by one of his slaves then called on another enslaved woman to lift the curse with an herbal remedy. These beliefs proved to be long-lived. In the 1780s, for example, a Recife slaveholder called on an exorcist to release him from an inexplicable illness that had left him paralyzed for three years. The priest performed the exorcism to drive out the demons. The slaveholder expelled the requisite assortment of objects—a fish skeleton, some pieces of coal, a few cockroaches—and then looked to his human property for the culprits. Two witches were detected. One was sold at auction and the other was turned over to the Inquisition in Lisbon.134
For the British colonies, such evidence of witchcraft activity is much harder to come by. In order to discern African ideas about witchcraft in British colonies, for example, we need to have good sources, whether criminal records or other kinds of accounts provided by observers. Such evidence could have been generated by a European, but most areas of British settlement where Africans were abundant were also regions characterized by skepticism of witchcraft accusations. There is no evidence whatsoever, for example, of witchcraft trials in the places that received the majority of Africans (Barbados and Jamaica). Seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland contained small African populations, both free and enslaved, but the few records of witchcraft activity there center on Europeans. By the eighteenth century, there were virtually no witchcraft trials at all. And those Europeans who bothered to record their observations needed to be familiar with slaves’ practices, to live in proximity, to be close observers, and to understand them. We do not, for example, find sources comparable to the Inquisition records available for New Spain or other parts of the Iberian world, with detailed and personal depositions that give us access to what people believed. Indeed, historians used to wonder whether it was even possible for any African practices to survive the ordeal of the Middle Passage. The historian Jon Butler called this shattering of African religious systems a “spiritual holocaust” in 1990. Most historians, however, argue that core features of West and Central African societies were reconstituted—often in new forms—in the Western Atlantic (see figure 7).135
Africans, like Europeans, found that the familiar context in which ideas about magic and witchcraft made sense changed across the Atlantic. In some places, Africans lived in such close proximity to Europeans and their
descendants that they ended up absorbing their beliefs, or understanding them sufficiently to echo