“Just see what happens next time she visits,” said the witch doctor, tucking the hair-bone token into the patient’s hand. His recovery wasn’t instant. He tossed and mumbled, covering himself with the sheet.
By the end of the next day, he was coherent and, as he held the bone-and-hair trinket, sounded as if he was narrating a film. “Here she comes. She’s leaving her house. Now she’s down by the well. Now she’s on the road . . . crossing the bridge, the gate, the path. She’s by the apple tree. Now she’s at the door.” There was a knock.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” said the widow when the introductions were done. “I worried so much about poor Bill.”
“You’re the one!” the sick man yelled from under the blankets. “You leave me alone after this or I’ll kill you!” With apparent pity, the old woman took her leave.
That night the sufferer talked to the bony item as if spectators didn’t exist, chanting phrases and verses from a language none knew he’d ever learned. At the end, he wrapped one of his own hairs around the object and shouted, “Go back to her, and stick in her heart!” He threw it in the direction of the witch’s house. Everyone heard it tap against the wall. It vanished as if it had flown right through.
The next day the sick man’s friends went to see the old widow. Her neighbors were already gathered outside her house. They had found her dead with the bone in her chest. Those who knew the situation felt sorry about it, but not for its victim. “She had no business witching people,” said one of the sick man’s friends.
The Witch’s Daughter
(Seneca, Late Nineteenth Century)
When the Salamanca woman died, her husband and daughter went through her belongings and saw that she’d been a witch. The Christian father wanted to burn the bundles and potions, but his girl told him it might be dangerous even to touch them. But maybe she had something on her mind. Her heart was set on a handsome young Seneca who visited her father on business. One night, she dosed the lad’s drink with a love potion, snuck out as he left, and waited for him by the path. Things turned amorous. When the frolic was over, she asked, “Why don’t we get married?”
“No need in it now,” the lad said, heading home. “We’ve had our fun.”
Weeks later he was near again on business. He meant to avoid the house that had gotten him in trouble, but something pulled him to it. This time the witch’s daughter double dosed his cider and headed to the same wood. Things went as before, but this time he left singing love songs. The girl came home announcing marriage. “That’s interesting,” said her father. He knew that the lad had just married a girl from Cold Spring.
The new wife gave the lad a good long talking. He promised he’d learned his lesson, and in a few days things had cooled. He also got sick. He lost weight. He had sharp pains every night and couldn’t sleep. Soon he couldn’t work. It seemed clear that he’d been witched.
A witch doctor had a feeling about the swamp nearby and sent the sufferer to a certain spot to see for himself what was happening. Something swinging in themoonlight across a creek caught the lad’s attention; it was a bark doll dangling from a tree, and soon someone he knew came to it.
Calling the doll by his name, the witch’s daughter caressed it like a newborn, then scraped it with a knife. “When the string rots, you’ll fall and die. Till then I’ll scrape away.” The lad felt every stroke, once even crying out from his hiding place. He huddled in terror, but there was no need. The girl laughed aloud, thinking it more of her own long-range magic. “Ha! I can even hear you from here.”
The next day from his bed at home, he heard her voice. She had come to his house, bringing soup and asking about his health. “Go away,” he yelled from his bedroom. “And leave me alone. I’m sending for a crow.”
“What good’s that going to do you?” she said, leaving in a huff. She should have read the whole witchcraft manual.
“So she’s been here,” said the witch doctor on his afternoon visit. “Just as I thought. Now we can do it.” He had with him the body of a crow. The young Seneca cut the heart from the bird, held it up, and called it the name of the witch’s daughter. They hung the heart from the kettle frame and ran a splinter through it. They lighted another splinter and passed it under the heart a couple times, singeing it and giving it a gentle toasting. Then they set it aside and waited.
The next day the witch’s daughter came over crying, showing a burn mark on her breast that had blistered. “Now quit witching me,” said her victim, “or I’ll burn the heart out of you.”
No one knows what happened to the doll, but the young husband recovered, so she must have taken care of it the right way. She never witched anybody again, either, and in time became a good friend to the young family she’d offended. She even looked after their children when the couple traveled.
Sassafras Charley
Autumns are moody in Iroquois country. The one of 1929 brooded trouble on the Cattaraugus Reservation.
Recently widowed Nancy Bowen was a spry sixty-six-year-old tribal healer. Svelte, thirty-six-year-old Lila Jimerson worked at the reservation school and was known as a seer. The Cattaraugus power pair started using a Ouija board to reachBowen’s late husband, a part-Cayuga medicine man whom many white Buffalonians knew as Chief Sassafras or Sassafras Charley.
Sassafras Charley Bowen sold trinkets, herbs, wood carvings, and sassafras, the dried bark and leaves of a tree used in many a cure. He was also into the otkon, and had had many adventures
