FOLK BELIEFS OF THE SOUTHERN NEGRO BY XEW'BELL XILES?L"CKETT. Ph.D. - CHAPEL HILL THE UNTVXRSITY OF NORTH CAROLES'A PRES? LOXEX^X: HTMPHREY MILFORD 1*55

pg Copyright/ 1926,y By The University of North Carolina Press Peesses of Edwards & Broughton Company RALEIGH

TO MY WIFE ^^62f

PREFACE Overwhelmed by the frenzy of a "holy dance" a Negro minister of my acquaintance panted: "You sees me dancin', folks, but de skip's on de inside!" After twenty years or more of close association with the Negro, an honorary membership in "de Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church," and several years' experience as an amateur "hoodoo-doctor," I am convinced that "de signs an' wonders" disclosed here are but outward manifestations of a well-nigh inscrutable Negro soul. My peep behind the curtains has destroyed for me the fable that "the Southern white man thoroughly understands the Negro," and has opened my eyes to the importance of objective study as a means of establishing more cordial relationships. In a general sort of way the Southerner does understand the Negro, but this understanding is limited almost completely to the practical affairs of life, and consists chiefly in knowing how to make the Negro work. Regarding the feelings, emotions, and the spiritual life of the Negro the average white man knows little. Should some weird, archaic, Negro doctrine be brought to his attention he almost invariably considers it a "relic of African heathenism," though in four cases out of five it is a European dogma from which only centuries of patient education could wean even his own ancestors. This confusion of African and European lore only intensifies cultural differences, and for this reason I have modified this volume, originally a dissertation presented for the degree of

Vlll Preface Doctor of Philosophy in Yale University, into its present form. In essence a study of acculturation, it centers chiefly around folk-lore and superstition, because in almost all other affairs of Negro life the African element has been entirely supplanted by the European. Its aim is to present these Negro folkbeliefs, to show their origin whenever possible, and to indicate some of the general principles governing the transmission and content of folk-lore in general. My personal work among the older rural Negroes has shown me the necessity of haste in collecting this fastdisappearing lore. Several of my best informants during the year have passed on to the Great Beyond, and daily many pages of irretrievable folk-knowledge are being erased in a similar manner. While the lore presented here is but a smattering of the material existent, yet considerable pains have been taken to make it as representative as possible. Close personal field work has been supplemented by questionnaires sent out to all the Negro colleges of the South. In this way some ten thousand beliefs were gathered, most of them coming from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia — the heart of the "Black Belt" — though material was obtained from every state of the South, giving an index to the spread of each particular belief. About two-thirds of these ten thousand beliefs were duplications, and of the thirty-five hundred or so retained, almost a third were collected personally. A careful survey of the available published material indicates that almost twenty-four hundred of these beliefs have never before been published. This collection, including many citations from published sources, constitutes the basis of the present discussion.