He was evidently afraid that as a white woman I would laugh at this, and he had only spoken out of the kindness of his heart, because the baby was in danger. But, of course, I did not laugh. Why should I laugh at faiths other than mine? And so encouraged, he told me of the spirits he had seen in broad daylight, spirits that clothed themselves as his friends, and only when he came up close did he perceive they were, as he put it, evil spirits.
Well, as a matter of fact, when he was not likely to be about we let Sam sleep on the porch, and outside he continued to sleep at night in spite of Leonie's protest, and so far as I can see neither duppy nor evil spirit ever did him the least harm, dear little man. In fact he continued to improve till he was the fine baby of the district, and I set it down to the fresh air in which he lived day and night. I am afraid I wickedly used the faith in duppies to my own advantage. Buffer hated a black man. At Montego Bay he used to sit outside the gate and kindly allow people to pass on the other side of the road, but if they came too near the territory he was guarding, he stepped out and held them up. If we heard a squeal we knew it was a woman, if a howl, a man, and flew to the rescue, but if they threw stones at him it almost took a motor car to shift him. He had a great reputation, and there was no predial larceny round my house, chickens and eggs were quite safe. But the people were afraid of him, and when I went for a walk with Buffer peacefully trotting along by my side, for he wouldn't have dreamt of touching anybody away from his own ground, I was more than once met by a line of furious women with sticks uplifted.
“Kill! kill!” they shouted, and I thought of the old days when they would have killed a white woman if they could and not only her dog. It was really awe inspiring. I was afraid they would fling their sticks at Buffer, and then somebody would be hurt. And the men too threatened, “We kill dat dog!”
I thought they would do it too, do it in some cruel and lingering fashion, so I threatened in my turn. “If you touch that dog and hurt him so that he has to die, I warn you his duppy will haunt you, and I tell you the duppy of a big white dog is a much worse thing than the dog himself, for you will not be able to get rid of that!”
And I heard afterwards they said, “Missus go put him duppy on we.” And I had a reputation as a duppy raiser, and Buffer survived till I could get him away to Kempshot Pen, where he had more range, and where his fighting qualities are much valued by his new mistress.
Still is the faith in Obeah strong in Jamaica. It is the ju-ju of the Coast, and all the historians have many tales to tell of its dread powers.
In the year 1780, the parish of Westmoreland was kept in a constant state of alarm by a runaway negro called Plato, who had established himself among the mountains and collected a troop of banditti, of which he was the chief. He robbed very often and murdered occasionally. This could not be allowed, and at last Plato was taken and condemned to death. He told the magistrates who condemned him that his death would be revenged by a storm which would lay waste the whole island that year, and when his negro jailer was binding him to the stake—he was evidently burned to death according to the ruthless custom of the time—he told him he should not live long to triumph in his death, for that he had taken good care to Obeah him before quitting prison.
It certainly did happen, strangely enough, says Matthew Lewis, that before the year was over there was the most violent storm ever known in Jamaica, and as for that jailer, “his imagination was so forcibly struck by the threats of the dying man, that although every care was taken of him, the power of medicine exhausted, and even a voyage to America undertaken in hopes that a change of scene might change the course of his ideas, still from the moment of Plato's death he gradually pined and withered away before the completion of the twelvemonth.”
Now that was written of 1780, but the very morning I wrote it, 7th March 1921 on Kempshot Pen, came a stalwart negro to see Miss Maxwell Hall, and to discuss local politics with her.
“And how is it,” asked the young lady, “Daniel Cooper is such a bad man now? He won't work and he thieves.”