• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 649 0

them back to interrogators during trials. Such was the case in Salem, where a handful of enslaved people of African descent were accused of witchcraft and testified about their witch beliefs. An enslaved woman named Candy did just that, arguing that she was not a witch but that her white mistress was. The court did not indict her (see document 21). In other instances, African beliefs and European beliefs converged. When the ex-slave William Grimes, born in Virginia in 1784, recalled an encounter in 1811 with a witch in Savannah, he gave details of a hag attack—a nocturnal ordeal in which victims feel suffocated by a weight they believe to be a witch. He also suspected that the witch could change her shape. Hag attacks were an element of West-Central African witch beliefs, but these were also beliefs that people of European descent shared: Grace Sherwood’s neighbors in Virginia made just such accusations in 1698 (see document 10).136

Elsewhere, however, there is suggestive evidence that some African witchcraft beliefs may have survived—altered in their expression, perhaps, by the challenging dynamics of living in slavery, and not as intact belief systems, but present nonetheless. Archaeological evidence points to the endurance of a range of beliefs about magical practices and powers. Objects with possible ritual significance, including glass beads, amulets, and cowrie shells, found in excavations of slave quarters, might have been charms used for magical purposes.137 The anthropologist Jerome Handler examined an excavated grave in Barbados in one effort to discern the possible tenacity of West African ideas about witchcraft. A lone burial contained in a mound in a cemetery demonstrated anomalies with other burials. She was the only prone burial, for example; all others were supine. Dating from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, the burial occurred at a time when most enslaved workers on Barbados were African born and thus likely to adhere to African practices. The features of the burial, Handler argues, are inconsistent with other burials and in fact resemble mortuary practices used by West Africans (where most Barbados slaves came from in this period) to bury witches. Dangerous people were buried apart and sometimes covered with a mound. They were buried prone, like the excavated Barbados skeleton.138

Indeed, there is evidence that witch beliefs might even have increased in the Americas, which would be entirely consistent both with African notions that equated witches with greed and the abuse of power and with the new circumstances of violence and coercion in which enslaved Africans found themselves. In North America, for example, benevolent African deities receded in favor of the more frequent practice of sorcery. In this respect, we catch a glimpse of a slave’s perception that he lived in a world of enhanced evil. The parallel with Native Americans, who found evil to have increased in their world, too, with the onslaught of deadly epidemics, is pronounced. The heightened importance of malevolent practices and powers can be seen in the shifting meanings of words in Gullah, a language that emerged in the eighteenth-century South Carolina lowcountry as Africans from different regions who spoke multiple languages created a common tongue. It was created out of several African languages. The Ewe word fufu, meaning “dust,” survived in Gullah, but it acquired a more specific connotation of malevolence, transformed from benign dust into “a fine dust used with the intention of bewitching one or causing harm.” A Mende word, gafa, meaning “spirit” or “soul,” denoted an “evil spirit or devil” in Gullah.139 These shifts in words reveal the many ways in which beliefs mingled in the American context. Africans did not have—in Africa—an idea of the Devil. Europeans certainly did, and the transformed Mende word gafa from “spirit” into “evil spirit”—or Devil—suggests the transformations that were underway as slaves absorbed aspects of Christian doctrine and confronted the horrors of enslavement.

Figure 1. English witches