THE SEVENTH SON
In November 1926, the Batavia Daily News made an announcement: An eleven-year-old Mohawk mystic—the seventh son of a seventh son—had come to town. Abram George (c. 1916–1948?) of the St. Regis Reservation had moved with his family from Hogansburg and taken up residence at 104 Liberty Street.
Father Mitchell George did the family talking. He declared that young Abram had been traveling the states as a part-time exorcist and full-time healer. He had chased spooks from a Memphis mansion, healed rheumatics and cripples, and found a drowning victim sixty-two feet under the surface of the St. Lawrence River. Young Abram had settled in upstate New York “ready to drive the voodoo man from the ill or solve any occult mystery.”
This, though, was only the hype. Abram’s powers were those of touch—he was a psychic masseur. He rubbed the ailing parts of his patients’ bodies with his strong hands and didn’t speak during the process.
Abram was a husky lad with a thatch of jet-black hair and big, commanding eyes. (“A bright-eyed boy of sturdy physique and shy manner,” the papers said of “the little red doctor.”) His demeanor was strangely unchildlike. More than one observer was reminded of the boy-sage Krishnamurti (1895–1986), likewise making a sensation, who had recently come to the United States from India. Both must have been old souls.
Abram never set himself up as a guru. He gave no lectures, made no prophecies, and claimed no power but healing. There was no trance act or hocus-pocus about his practice, and no black art was the source of his gifts. Being the seventh son of a seventh son, said his father, he had inherited his powers because of his birth. Whatever their source, Abram’s gifts made believers.
A Rochester boy paralyzed from infancy developed muscle and even started to walk under regular treatments from “Dr. George.” A blind Rochester man claimed to see light and shade for the first time in thirty-two years. A near-blind woman from London, England, was so improved when she left Batavia that she sent presents—toys—back across the Atlantic.
Abram’s patients didn’t snap to suddenly as if a switch had been turned on. It took regular treatments from those healing hands. (Upstate reporters seemed most impressed by the color contrast, those hands of “the true bronze skin of his race” at work on his white patients.) And Abram couldn’t help everybody. A Rochester dame crippled in a fall reported little improvement. (She had seen Abram only twice, though, and said she still had hope.)
Another thing was strange: Neither Abram nor his dad charged for the healing work. People would have been free to accept his treatment and pay nothing. In fact, Abram ministered to many who had no chance of paying. All this is consistent with a good healer.
Abram also treated the affluent, but with an agreement: If he healed a patient, the family would give him what it could afford. He must have been good. Abram’s father was able to plunk down $2,500 cash for a new truck in 1927. His family seemed on the verge of wealth and fame. But there were chinks in the armor, and folks were starting to probe.
The dad was clearly a showman, fully bent on capitalizing. The first stop of his Seneca country swing had been at the offices of the Batavia paper. Possibly hoping to keep an air of mystery about Abram, Mr. George let on that his son knew no English. (He spoke only “Indian,” according to an, alas, undereducated reporter, who spoke only “European.”) Abram endangered no detail of his dad’s ad campaign and could have been mute for all he said to whites. But his Batavia teachers were sure he knew what they were saying and that he could have spoken English had he cared to.
That bit about the “seventh son of a seventh son . . .” is worth a look, too. At least the first half of it was true for young Abram, one of eleven born to the George family. As of 1926 his six brothers and a sister were alive. The business of associating the birth-order condition with Iroquois mojo is problematic.
It was news to the Tonawanda Seneca, for instance. There is a Seneca tale predating young Abram’s life that does indeed concern a magical seventh son, but it doesn’t imply that his birth-order is the source of his powers. One Batavia reporter—possibly the one who implied that all Native Americans speak one language—conjectured that it was either a superstition specific to St. Regis or “the Iroquois tribe.” He obviously did not know that the Iroquois were a confederacy that included the local Seneca and that seven, though a sacred number to some world societies, is not known to be one to the old Iroquois. This “seventh son” stuff might even be some feature of American Southern tradition, making its way to St. Regis through contact with African Americans or even an exposure to blues music. This is quite logical. The Iroquois have always been ready adopters, of both people and supernatural customs.
These may be minor points in judging a sacred gift, but any dissembling is a trouble sign. Still, Abram was a hit and seemed on the verge of stardom. The street outside the family’s Batavia home was busy enough in 1926. Such mobs came to Abram’s Rochester office that the police were called to South Avenue to keep order.
But something was getting to young Dr. George. He had fainted at a healing in Geneva and cancelled his first big Rochester gig because of strain. This should have been foreseen. No healer finds the work easy. No mature
