Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [36]
And poison resembles witchcraft in another way, beyond legal practices: that of perception and fear. In the same way that people feared witches and their actions yet could rarely prove the crime with witnesses and evidence, slave owners worried about being poisoned by their enslaved workers. It was easy to confuse sickness or food poisoning—not uncommon in an era with no reliable food preservation—with a criminal and deliberate act, just as people might worry that the deaths of their crops, livestock, or loved ones were signs of a witch’s malfeasance. Poison was a crime of proximity and familiarity, just as witchcraft was, and accusations of poison likewise carried the weight of mistrust, animosity, fear, and sometimes even guilt. In this respect, poisoning scares resemble witch outbreaks: those occasions when multiple individuals were rounded up and targeted for prosecution. The four heads posted on the Alexandria courthouse chimneys echo the multiple bodies hanged in major witch outbreaks.
Yet it is difficult to make the link with certainty. Records about slave poisonings for the colonial period are most abundant for the eighteenth-century British colonies, by which time most colonists had rejected a belief in witchcraft. Moreover, British colonists did not have access to the ritual world that gave poisoning a religious meaning in Africa. Did slaves speak special words as they assembled toxic substances? Did they believe that poison only worked when transformed in certain rituals? The records are silent. All we have are criminal cases in courts, the occasional references to charms and the substances used to make them, reports from colonial newspapers, and scattered observations in the diaries and letters of travelers and colonial inhabitants.149
Poison, finally, does not appear to have been a sex-linked crime associated with women as witchcraft was in some places; while the English believed witches were likely to be women, poisoners turn out to have been men. Of 175 slaves accused of poisoning in Virginia through 1780 in twenty-two counties, 143 (82 percent) were men and 32 (18 percent) were women.150 To be sure, enslaved men outnumbered enslaved women in eighteenth-century Virginia, but by 1775 the sex ratio approached parity.151 Where witchcraft was an extraordinary crime, poisoning was frequent, with stealing the only crime more frequently punished in Virginia.152 And the English already had laws against the crime of poisoning, and these seem to have been easily adapted to the new circumstances of slavery. Documents 13–16 invite readers to come to their own conclusions about how well the crime of poisoning fits with the crime of witchcraft. When was poison witchcraft, when was it just poison, when was it a fantasy of frightened slaveholders, and will we ever know for sure?
If African witchcraft practices did not appear in colonial (and later U.S.) courtrooms, in contrast to the witch beliefs and practices of English migrants, there is ample evidence that magical practices intended both to punish and to protect endured. The parallel with German witchcraft practices in the form of powwow is pronounced; in each case magical practices survived as part of folkloric beliefs and coexisted with other religious beliefs and practices. Hoodoo might be considered the African American variant of powwow; it contains a variety of ritual practices derived from African religious systems,