nd in the Southern States, and is believed in by the more
ignorant and foolish white people, as much as by their barbarous
slaves. Obi is used only to injure, and the way to perform it upon your
enemy is, to hire the Obi man or woman to concoct a charm, and then to
hide this, or cause it to be hidden, in some place about the person or
abode of the victim where he will find it. He is expected thereupon to
fall ill, to wither and waste away, and so to die.

Absurd as it may seem, this cursing business operates with a good deal
of certainty on the poor negroes, who fall sick instantly on finding the
ball of Obi, two or three inches in diameter, hidden in their bed, or in
the roof, or under the threshold, or in the earthen floor of their huts.
The poor wretches become dejected, lose appetite, strength, and spirits,
grow thin and ill, and really wither away and die. It is a curious fact,
however, that if under these circumstances you can cause one of them to
become converted to Christianity, or to become a Christian by
profession, he becomes at once free from the witches' dominion and
quickly recovers.

The ball of Obi--or, as it is called among the Brazilian negroes,
Mandinga--may be made of various materials, always, I believe, including
some which are disgusting or horrible. Leaves of trees and scraps of rag
may be used; ashes, usually from bones or flesh of some kind; pieces of
cats' bones and skulls, feathers, hair, earth, or clay, which ought to
be from a grave; teeth of men and of snakes, alligators or other beasts;
vegetable gum, or other sticky stuff; human blood, pieces of eggshell,
etc., etc. This mixture is curiously like that in the witches' caldron
in Macbeth, which, among other equally toothsome matters, contained
frogs' toes, bats' wool, lizards' legs, owlets' wings, wolfs' teeth,
witches' mummy, Jew's liver, tigers' bowels, and lastly, as a sort of
thickening to the gravy, baboon's blood.

A creole lady, now at the North, recently told a friend of mine that
"the negroes can put some pieces of paper, or powder, or something or
other in your shoes, that will make you sick, or make you do anything
they want!" The poor foolish woman told this with a face full of awe and
eyes wide open. Another lady known to me, long resident at the South,
tells me that the belief in this sort of devilism is often found among
the white people.

The practices called Vaudoux or Voudoux, are a sort of Obi; being, like
that, an i